Up Side Down

Xbox 360: Not All “Revolutions” Are Good

It seems like pretty much all of the buzz in the gaming world (that would be the world that mostly consists of dark basements and B.O.-infested LAN parties, or a combination thereof) around the time of this year’s E3 is focused on one thing: Xbox 360. This is, of course, the follow-up to that flop of a console that might as well have been called “hey, at least we have Halo.” Don’t get me wrong, the Xbox was graphically superior to PS2 and Gamecube, and Halo wasn’t its only worthwhile title, although it was the only one that truly gave the Xbox a little unique grounding in the console scene, but when you have a console that is basically a bunch of computer parts thrown into a big, heavy box made by a company that doesn’t know the first thing about customer satisfaction, it’s not exactly a recipe for success. PS2 was still the king after Xbox’s release, selling on the strength of game series’ like Grand Theft Auto and Final Fantasy, and Nintendo’s Gamecube was of course able to hold its own because they acquired the rights to some of the famous Sega game franchises, which padded Nintendo’s already astounding roster of classic games they have milked and milked and will continue to milk for as long as they can. Xbox may have sold a nice number of units, but when you’re losing money on each unit you sell, that statistic becomes rather worthless, especially when people are only buying your system to play Halo and Halo 2.

So, it would have made sense for the Xbox to go the way of all of the other unsuccessful attempts to enter the console world by tech companies: Panasonic’s 3DO and Nokia’s N-Gage come to mind (give it time, it will be remembered as a flop). But it didn’t. Unlike the other one-and-done ventures that bombed and then drifted off into console history, the Xbox has one very important thing going for it: Microsoft. Quite frankly, this is why I loathed the idea of a Microsoft gaming console; not because I was worried they would use a fresh perspective on console gaming to stir up good economic competition involving the creation of great games, but because I knew that Microsoft would not stop until they gained control of the market through the use of their bottomless pit of money.

It was clear from the start that Microsoft was not interested in actually giving consumers what they wanted, but were focused instead on eliminating the other console options by muscling them out financially. Watching all of the buzz surrounding Xbox 360 just makes this painfully clear. The ridiculous paid-programming spots Microsoft bought on stations like MTV and their buckets-of-money deal to get SquareEnix developing for 360 have me feeling very thankful that my interest in gaming has dwindled significantly over the past year. I just hope that Sony and Nintendo show Microsoft that they will survive, because when it comes down to the bottom line in gaming, it’s all about the game itself.

Oh, and both of those companies also have lots and lots of money, so that should help as well.

You're Fucking Fired, Asshole!

The most powerful man in the world. That's what people call the person who holds the office of President of the United States.

I disagree.

I'm obviously more powerful than him. If not, then how do you explain me just firing his ass? Now we're just waiting to see if the majority of the nation agrees with me.

A Plea to Web Designers

I know I am not one of the normal web design wizards that has a daily blog about the latest tips and tricks to get things done in design, but will make my plea anyway.

We need to band together and decide that enough is enough with IE, and say to hell with it, we're coding according to W3C standards. I have had enough of the hassles and extra time spent trying to invoke quirks and workarounds for any version of IE and many older versions of browsers.

Yeah I know that most of the world uses IE, which forces us into this predicament in the first place. So we in turn code our sites to accomodate such discrepencies in the browsers, so our sites will display correctly. This only prolongs the use of IE as the "default" world browser, as the lay person sees no problem with using IE, since we screw up the stuff behind the scenes so they can see it with no problem. If we begin coding strictly to standards, then IE will either be forced to become compliant, or people will begin abandoning it in droves.

We all need to do this together, as if only a small fraction of us proceed, it will look those that do, don't know what they are doing, as the sites will display funky, but if we all do it, or most do it, then it can happen.

What do you say?

It's time for the old soapbox

Just a little humor to further get my point across about the unneeded and unwanted forwarding of emails, as referenced in a previous entry of mine. Better be careful or you may end up having to pay to send that crap in the future, at least I hope so anyway.

On the soapbox

Macromedia Flash Player is required to view the link.

Never Be An Internet Dupe

In order to not get taken in like The Dude you have to be careful. While the the internet isn't exactly Deadwood there are charlatans skulking about. One of the latest is a variation of evil spam viruses. Rather than causing mayhem on your pc these folks go for identity theft. Recent emails have circulated spoofing well used sites like paypal and citibank. I recently recieved the citibank one, and while I don't use citibank I could easily see less internet savvy citibank customers falling for this. The email is worded quite well, seemingly from the customer service department asking the user to follow a link to confirm theier email address. Seems all good, the link even looks like it goes to citi.com. If you were taken in by the tone of the email and clicked, you then end up at what looks to be citi.com. (Though the encoded URL may look a bit odd to you) you end up at a form which has your email address already filled in. (Wow that citi, they sure are on the ball...) The form then asks for a few minor account details to "confirm identity" and happily confirms that your email address is now verified. As you likely guessed by now this confirmation is simply information harvesting done for the express purpose of making you the next human identity theft commercial.

The easiest way to not get taken? Never login to a financial through an email link. EVER. Type the URL directly into your browser. If you can't get there from the site's homepage and you're sure the email came from them, pick up the phone.

And get popfile dude.

The fight against spam

This is somewhat a continuation of one of my previous entries regarding the creativeness of virus spreading, but this one is geared entirely to junk email. Spam is just part of using the internet. If you spend more than a miniscule amount of time on the internet, you are eventually going to get spam. Perhaps you have a garbage email address that you use when completing online forms, so that you never see the spam, but I am sure that you are getting spam somewhere. I have never liked spam, but it has never really bothered me too much, I just delete it and don't worry about it. It has just gotten extremely out of hand lately. I am getting about 100 messages a day on one of my accounts, and about 50 on another. Most of it is the typical type spam, which you may or may not have seen, stuff like "earn money on ebay", "Viagra now available by mail", "Make your member grow 3 inches in a week" type crap. Now, I can see a possible market for these type of services, who doesn't want to make a little extra money. But when I began receiving spam about dealing with menopause, that really began to get on my nerves. I am a male in my mid 20's, what the hell do I care about dealing with menopause? It is when I began receiving these emails is when I began to start thinking how the idea proposed by Microsoft and Yahoo to require postage for emails was a good idea. Frankly, I love this idea, although it would need to be tailored a bit more. I don't feel that home users and even real businesses should be paying postage for every email they send. I actually don't feel they should have to pay for most of their emails. For example; You want to send an email to your friends Mary and Joe, you send it and the mail servers send it on through like nothing had changed, no postage required. Now notice that I said "most" emails, I personally believe that chain letters should be included in the postage requirements. Sending jokes along is one thing, but sending the same crappy, "if you are a true friend, you'll send this back" emails that you forwarded 3 months ago, just because it made the rounds again is rediculous. I may be a good friend to you, but I'll be damned if I send it back to you and perpetuate the thing. I am doing my part to stop the chain, if only more people would do the same, as in this case, 1 person doesn't make that much of a difference. The same thing goes for "virus warnings", do you really think Microsoft is going to send out an email warning about a virus? Do you think Microsoft actually cares about a virus going around, other than enough to try and patch Windows, I don't. Most of these are just merely hoaxes that are created to do the same thing as chain letters, which is clog up the internet and scare users. Do us all a favor, before you forward that warning that if we open that email our tv will stop working if we use cable internet or whatever the damn thing says, check it out to see if it is a hoax first. I am sure it is probably a hoax that has been circulating the net in various forms for at least a couple years, if not more. I know that we cannot impose our postage requirement on the rest of the world, and I don't feel we need to, they can adopt the same policies if they wish.

Here's how I see this working:

Any email that is of the commercial nature, and I mean trying to sell you something, this is much different than Joe from Company A sending a business related email to Frank at Company B. I am referring to the emails that are trying to sell you those prescription drugs, or that CD to learn to sell on Ebay. The absolute garbage emails. If that email does not have the required postage (I would suggest 2-3 cents each), then the mail server deletes the message. The servers can scan the messages looking for series of keywords which are in most spam messages. I know 2-3 cents does not sound like much, and it really isn't, but when the spammers are sending out thousands or millions of messages to anybody that they can get an address for, then their postage bill will begin to get large. It would at least make it so that they will actually have to think about who they are sending them to and actually target their audiences appropriately. I just cannot consider these spam originators as a legitimate business, as a legitimate business does not have to send their product through multiple sources to mask the origin.

In order to require postage on the pesonal emails, that are classified as chain letters, should be quite simple to perform. A postage rate must be set, and since most people only send them to a handful of individuals, 2-3 cents each would not be much of a deterrent, so the rate might have to be a bit higher, like 5 cents each. This is the same philosophy as the USPS and bulk rate postage. It would still not break the bank for most individuals to send the chain letter out, only $1 per 20 people, but might just deter them enough to to prevent them from indiscriminantly forwarding them to everyone in their address book. The fact that the user would also have to purchase the postage, might prove to be enough of a hassle to help prevent constant forwarding of the same message. Although it may be a bit difficult to identify the chain letters that are sent by individuals, but a good start would be any emails that contain the text "send to at least 5 of your friends" is a good place to start. As people begin to eliminate those words from the message, the system could be updated to include phrases that are included in the ones that are circulating the net as defined by the council that oversees the spam postage, paid for by the spam postage.

You may think to yourself, why do you care so much, if you tell your friends not to send you the chain letters, then it shouldn't matter to you? Well, it does, these messages go across the same internet that I use, and go through the same mail servers that everybody else is using. This garbage is clogging up the net and slowing down the servers and pipelines that we are all trying to get real information from, and it is only getting worse. We can all get email filtering programs, tht will clean up the messages as we download them from the mail server, but they are still clogging up the internet in general. Even further to this, a number of spammers have begun using a few techniques to get by these programs, for example, leaving the sender and subject lines blank. It is very difficult to create a message rule for a message that "has no sender or subject". Many spammers have also been using replacement characters for parts of words, so that a computer which is looking for the term Viagra, will overlook the term V1agra or even V!agra. It's simple for a human to see that and figure it as spam, but a computer does not contain our sense of visualization, so it will think it is a legitimate email, unless you were to build a filter that contained every word that is being modified in such a manner. I use POPFile, which is a great self learning and it currently has over 8,000 unique words in the spam bucket alone, are you willing to create a rule with a word count of 8,000 words?

I know many of you will probably think I am completely off my rocker in my thinking that email postage is a good idea, or for just agreeing with Microsoft in general, but I am open to read and listen to any comments, critisism, or possible changes you might have in mind.

Virus spreading is getting creative.

Well, you can't say that those that distribute viruses aren't a creative group. Through the years of me being an active user of the internet and computers in general, I have seen so many viruses; Trojans, worms, and just generally malicious programs circulate the internet. Although they are still quite easy to identify, at least for someone who spends a fair amount of time surfing the web, it seems that those who intentionally circulate these files, are getting a bit more creative with the way they try and get you to open the attachment to the email. I am using email as the example, as that is the most common way to spread the virus, as well as mask the sender. This morning while receiving my email from the server, mixed in with all the other spam, there was an email with the subject "Billing Notice from pocketbike.com". Well, being as I know the owner of Pocketbike.com personally, I thought it would be more than a bit odd that he would send me an email saying he was going to start billing me for the use of the email address. What I found more hilarious was that the email was from "Yee". Now what billing department would ever set there from display to say Yee? So, knowing that this was not a real billing notice, and that the attachment was merely a virus of some type, I couldn't resist checking out the message. I know it is not good to open the messages, so I used the tools built into many email clients that will allow you to view the message source without actually opening the email. This is where it started to get a bit funny. Viewing the message contents, I saw a warning message that said that I was being billed for my use of Pocketbike.com and that I should view the attached "Billing Notice" and send payment or my internet service would be cut off. This makes me wonder how many people would actually fall for this. I know there are quite a few people out there that know so very little about computers and the internet, other than the big button turns it on, and the big triangle connects them to AOL, so they can surf the web (if that's what you want to call AOL). I, of course, could not possibly fall for this one for the following reasons.

1. Pocketbike.com is not an Internet Service Provider (ISP), it is merely a web site devoted entirely to selling/riding these miniature racing motorcycles.

2. The From field display is a dead giveaway to be fake, since it supposedly from a billing department.

3. I know the owner personally.

I know, not everybody can know the owner personally, but I wonder how many people don't know what an ISP really is, and would open the attachment to see the bill, in fear of losing their connection to the internet. I am sure quite a few people have probably fallen for this one.

Although I found this one to be a bit funny, it does not compare to the creativeness of this next one, which has been circulating the net quite heavily in recent weeks.

Almost everybody that ever sends email has eventually gotten a delivery failure notice back from a server down the line, whether it is due to a typo in the email address, or perhaps the user's account no longer exists. While many of these are legitimate failure notifications, virus distributors have begun using this format of email to spread the virus. Since most people want to know what mail it was that was kicked back and why, they will read the message and try to figure out who, what, and why. I think this is a very creative way for these ruthless people to spread the harmful files. Here's a bit of advise in dealing with these emails, so that you can still see legitimate kickbacks, and yet not infect your computer and further spread the virus. The preview pane (available in most email clients) can be useful for these. It will allow you to see the body of the email without viewing the attachment. Since the virus is in the attachment, you will not be infected as long as you don't open the attachment. Most true failure notices don't attach a file. They give you a brief description of the email that failed to be delivered, the address or addresses in which it failed to be delivered, as well as a reason for failure. Most of the email body will contain server information, which is not really important, but there is generally a simplified message either near the top or the bottom describing what happened. The failure indications are always in the body of the email, not in the attachments. There are some servers that deliver failure notices with attachments, but the only ones I have ever seen with an attachment, the attachment is the original mail that is being returned. There is no reason to open that file anyway, you are the sender, and you know what it is already. This is very similar to the spread of viruses using a faked email address of [email protected] telling people to apply this security patch immediately to protect their computer. Believe me, Microsoft is not going to be sending out unsolicited support information. They don't want to do any more than they have to. All their security patches are set up on the Windows Update site, and the user must take it upon their self to update their machine.

I am sure there are many people that have been infected by this means of virus transportation, I hope people that read this will now know enough to avoid these emails, and hopefully help to at least slow down the spread of viruses.

Along the same thought lines as slowing down the spread of viruses, chain letters, while many find them fun to read and forward to their 5-10 (or entire address book) friends. Well, the chain letters are almost no better than viruses, although they don't infect your computer, if each person sends to their friends, and their friends send to their friends, the chain reaction does nothing more than spread garbage emails in mass, that clog up mail servers globally. Most of these chain letters are bogus anyway. There is no email tracking that will notify the original sender when the 1,000th person has signed this email. Applebees will not give you a gift certificate for sending the email to 5 friends (they would go out of business if they did). Bill Gates will not give you $1000 and free software for forwarding the email. Bill Gates is a rich man, he didn't get that way by giving away free stuff to anybody that can hit the Forward button in his or her email client. Before sending that "IMPORTANT, VIRUS ALERT, THIS IS NOT FAKE" virus warning, check it out, see if it really isn't fake. Before forwarding that "My name is Billy, and I need a new heart, but they won't give me a new heart until 5,000 people sign this email" email, chances are it is just another hoax created to proliferate through the net, Internet Cleanup Day has to be my all time favorite chain letter, clogging up mail servers along the way and annoying most of the people that have to filter through it as spam (which can be done with use of POPFile, the best email filtering program I have found yet), check to make sure it is a hoax before giving it new life. If we all team together, we can begin to eliminate this garbage, but if we keep it going, it will grow, and reappear in another 6 months as a slight variation, or even the same thing. Then it will return again next year, and the year after.

OK, I have gone on long enough, time for you to go install a spam filter, run a virus scan, and delete those pesky chain letters hoaxes from your inbox.

Just say it!

Has the complete overuse of internet shorthand and emoticons taken away from their usefulness? I most certainly think so. In this world, where chatting over the internet is almost as common as chatting with your friend over the phone itself. You do still know what a phone is right? Of course you do, you probably have a cell phone yourself. Well anyways, let's get back on topic. Throughout the relatively short life of chatting over the internet, people have become so lazy, that they don't even type the words anymore. It has turned into a world of acronyms and other abbreviations. Sure, I use shorthand during some of my conversations with buddies and family over the internet, but I like to keep to the simple ones, that everybody knows. I also like to keep my use of them to a minimum, as I believe it just promotes laziness and idiocy further. Perhaps many of these people would rather use internet shorthand because they don't know how to spell.

Here is a brief part of a conversation I watched in a brief conversation between a couple of people regarding the educational system and their children on Club Pogo.

"my kids arnt special ed but i have enrolled them in an afternoon tutor class to help them with what teachers arnt"

Now, just for the record, I had to retype that 3 times, because I kept adding capitalization, punctuation, and spelling corrections. I wonder if this lady has ever thought of enrolling herself into an afternoon study class to work on some of the basics of language. How can someone that has successfully completed elementary school not know how to spell the word "aren't". I would have chalked one of these up to a typo, they happen, but I cannot excuse the same incorrect spelling of the same word twice in a single statement. I cannot, for my own sanity, call that a sentence, since sentences contain capitals and punctuation. During this same conversation, while exchanging statements between each other, they proceeded to put "lol" at the end of everything they said. More accurately they were putting "lolol" or "lolololo" or some variation of that. Is that really an abbreviation for anything, does it even make sense? I cannot decide if it should mean laughing out loud out loud out loud out, or laughing out laughing out laughing out laughing out. Other than the fact that it makes absolutely no sense at all, using these shorthand comments and emoticons so frequently, seems to take away from the true meaning of them completely. Let's face it, text has absolutely no tone or inflection, so you must take things at face value. Now with the overuse of the emoticons, people have just begun to think that every comment made (of course this is a slight exaggeration) is of the joking nature. Hell, I could call someone an idiot (or worse), but so long as I put a little ;) at the end, all is good.

Please don't get me wrong, I am not completely against internet shorthand, I just think that those who use it should use it more sparingly, and let's cut the list down to a few of the more common phrases. The list is just way too long, and when someone uses one of these longer ones, they spend more time explaining what it means than they saved. Now is it really worth it to say something in shorthand, just to have to type the whole thing out so that people will know what you're trying to say. After all, you haven't saved any keystrokes at all now have you? You have actually typed more than you would have to begin with.

I think we should all go out and when you see people chatting and using way too many of these abbreviations and whatnot, let's give them a new one. WUPKIOALTSPA (Would You People Knock It Off And Learn To Speak Properly Already)

TFRMLR, IHUERIAMAIEVAI

Oooops, sorry about that...

Thanks for reading my little rant, I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed venting about it. ;)

DragonSpeak Sings The Hits # 1

The following is the Beatles hit "Let It Be" covered by Nick Cave and then transcribed by Dragonspeak...

Enjoy.

Find myself in time to juggling many young to me speaking my assemblies them in the name and that the key is standing night in fund may scheme my assemblies them and that it be in the head a MBA and headed a speaking my assemblies them that had been hammering the brokenhearted payphone living in downloading community and Delavan and set in a fee and they made a brokenhearted as a chance for abandoning scene in Delavan and then that the in that it a space and warrants of them that the and that a paying in that the day gain space in a answer was them and had been down and its clout a test that shines on many shining sale of mono and that the wake up to the sound uneasy among them many towns to me's 18 February to place an unleaded die and headed AAA and that it a's a King wrote soon and headed a and set a bad thing in that it a subpoena for some was them a

Amazon Is Retarded

At the same time I ordered the book designing with web standards from Amazon I also ordered a 128mb memory stick for my digicam. While it would be nice to think they'd send both items in a single box Amazon instead sent two separate shipments. OK... they were from different warehouses perhaps, but was this really the proper size box for a product the size of a stick of gum? (Even with packaging the product was approximately the size of a floppy disk)

What a waste.