Just two regular season weeks left!
Green Bay vs. Minnesota Oakland vs. Kansas City Denver vs. Tennessee NY Giants vs. Cincinnati Chicago vs. Detroit San Diego vs. Indianapolis Houston vs. Jacksonville Atlanta vs. New Orleans Baltimore vs. Pittsburgh New England vs. NY Jets Buffalo vs. San Francisco Carolina vs. Tampa Bay Washington vs. Dallas Arizona vs. Seattle Cleveland vs. Miami Philadelphia vs. St. Louis
I’ve been fighting comment spam for a long time now. The majority of those sites are selling prescription drugs to fight erectile disfunction and poker sites. I long for the days when spam was ads for pornography. At least I could get some use out of that. But I digress.
These spamming sites have been mostly no name, fly-by-night outfits that don’t have a reputation to maintain. They don’t care that the public at large hates them. They make some quick profit and then die as a company.
I’m indecisive about my browser on my Macs (the choice is easy for PCs, Firefox all the way). Pre Safari and Firefox, the choice was easy. Camino (formerly Chimera) was the end all for Mac browsers. Now my choice switches between Firefox and Safari. Firefox is fast most of the time, but after some use seems to slow down. Safari is fairly fast, but tends to have pregnant pauses when connecting to servers (or at least this is what the status bar tells me).
To follow up on my old post, Brad Oliver has posted a new beta build of the Knights of the Old Republic game. Of particular note is that even in its current rough form, users with Radeon 8500, 9000 or 9200 cards will see double framerates. However, in some cases, this is doubling 2-3 frames per second to 6-7 FPS. I’ll probably just keep playing with my Powerbook, although the initial problems have left such a bad taste in my mouth that I haven’t returned to the game since discovering that fact.
Two Saturday games. Yay!
Pittsburgh vs. N.Y. Giants Washington vs. San Fransisco Carolina vs. Atlanta Buffalo vs. Cincinnati Dallas vs. Philadelphia Denver vs. Kansas City Houston vs. Chicago Minnesota vs. Detroit San Diego vs. Cleveland Seattle vs. N.Y. Jets New Orleans vs. Tampa Bay St. Louis vs. Arizona Jacksonville vs. Green Bay Tennessee vs. Oakland Baltimore vs. Indianapolis New England vs. Miami
Fire up software update or download the delta or combo installers. The enhancements, straight from Apple are:
Applications # Allows TextEdit to open certain RTF documents that previously wouldn’t open, resulting in a “TextEdit Open Failed. Couldn’t open file” alert. Resolves an issue in which Safari, Mail, and other networking applications that use DNS lookups could experience intermittent connectivity issues with Security Update 2004-09-30 and Mac OS X 10.3.5 or later installed. Addresses an issue with Blizzard World of Warcraft in which the game’s frame rate could drop considerably when in “Ghost mode,” if the computer uses an nVidia graphics card. Resolves an issue in which enabling Vertex Shaders in World of Warcraft could lead to unexpected graphics issues when using an nVidia graphics card. Addresses an issue with World of Warcraft in which incorrect colors or unexpectedly flashing objects could appear when using an ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card, making gameplay difficult. Improves compatibility for Pacific Tech’s Graphing Calculator 3.5—some 3D surfaces might not render in Mac OS X 10.3.6. Other # Addresses an issue in which a brief “flash of lines” may appear on the screen when waking the computer from sleep after the “Flurry” Screen Saver has run, if the computer uses an ATI Radeon 8500, 9000, 9200, 9600, or M9 graphics chip. Improves compatibility for FireWire-based audio interfaces, including the Edirol FA-101 FireWire audio interface. Enables E*TRADE PDF account statements to be viewed in Preview. An Apple Cinema 22″ ADC display, when connected to certain PowerBook computers, no longer shows random “stuttering” or other graphics anomalies in the Finder and DVD Player. Addresses an issue in which shadowed text in a PDF file may print differently than it appears on the screen when printing to a raster printer. Filenames longer than 31 characters are no longer shortened when the file is saved on a server via Apple File Sharing. Resolves an issue with Mac OS X 10.3.6 in which some FireWire hard drives would not appear (“mount”) on the desktop. Addresses an issue with Mac OS X 10.3.6 in which DVD Player might not open on some Power Mac G4 computers that use an ATI Radeon 9800 AGP video card. Resolves an issue that prevented printing to some Windows-based print servers.
Following my post about Netflix, a new story about Blockbuster came to my attention. Blockbuster has announced that it will no longer charge late fees, or at least that’s how everyone is reporting the policy change. Putting it this way is a little misleading.
They are using this necessary change to their business model as a way to promote their own business. The growing popularity of Netflix (and even their own similar service) has demonstrated a strong consumer interest in being able to retain videos for an extended amount of time. Getting burnt by late fees once or twice is enough to drive any consumer to another system. Additionally, the way in which late fees were assessed made little sense. My roommate in college rented a movie and didn’t return it for three weeks. When he finally went to return it, they charged him in excess of $20. This is obviously more than the video cost to begin with and he didn’t even get to keep it. The fees weren’t based upon what it would cost to replace the copy of that movie, but instead based upon the amount of profit lost due to being unable to rent it to another member. Obviously, this was a broken system.
There was quite a stir when Real announced that they would make songs for their new online music service available for use on iPods. What made this so provocative was that their music service uses Digital Rights Management (DRM) to prevent copying, exactly as Apple does with FairPlay and Microsoft does with their own scheme. However, Apple didn’t license FairPlay to Real.
That was the rub. Real was maintaining DRM without a license to use FairPlay. In order to accomplish this feat, they reverse engineered FairPlay. They got to use software that Apple supplied without paying for it in some way. The fact that Apple didn’t want to license at any price is a moot point. They are the legal owners and it is their decision whether to sell licenses or not. Just because I’m not willing to sell my car to you doesn’t give you the right to jack it.
I was sorry to read about his loss. What happens following a tragedy can make things even worse. My best wishes to him and his family. I (and his other readers I trust) can wait while he takes the time he needs.
I’m sure you’ve all heard of Netflix, the online movie rental service. In case you haven’t, I’ll explain how it works. You pick a number of movies that you’d like to see. Netflix sends you 3 of those movies at a time (this is the default plan). They mail them to you along with return envelopes (with prepaid postage). You send those movies back whenever you feel like it (no late fees) and when they receive one of your movies back, they send another from your list (queue). To top it off, it costs only $17.99 per month regardless how many movies you get.