1FPS|by David Chartier

Prompted by Jamie Phelps’ post about Adobe Reader’s aggravating hijack of PDF viewing in browsers, I finally got inspired to track down Adobe’s feedback page and left them this:

Installing Acrobat Professional CS3 apparently hijacks Mac OS X’s default PDF viewer in my browser, Safari. Now your fat, bloated Acrobat/PDF plug-in starts up whenever I need to read a PDF from a website, and I’ve looked high and low for a way to turn this behavior off.

This is wrong.

Unequivocally, inarguably wrong. Stop it.

I don’t want a reply from you. I don’t want some excuse that you’ve done studies that show your users prefer this. I don’t want some ridiculous marketing barf about providing better service for your users. This is a problem that you need to fix. Now. You’re hijacking our computers and altering behavior without so much as asking our permission or even letting us know you’re doing it. Fucking stop.

Fix this problem and issue an update. At the very least, give us the ability to change this behavior back to Mac OS X’s default.

If you’re upset about this insulting and time-wasting behavior, I urge you to let Adobe know. The form allows you to chose between filing this issue as a feature request or a bug report. Considering the fact that this behavior shouldn’t happen in the first place, I chose bug report.

It isn’t about sharing or consumer’s supposed thirst for wild new business models. The problem boils down to the fact that, given the chance, most people‚Äîor in this case specifically, more than 80 percent of them‚Äîsimply will take what they want without paying for it. Reznor charged nothing more than five fucking dollars‚Äîfive‚Äîfor this album, and just 18 percent of the people who downloaded it could be bothered to pay for it. Says Reznor:

“I’m not sure what I was expecting, but that percentage‚Äîprimarily from fans‚Äîseems disheartening.” [From Ars Technica: Will fans pay? Reznor opens books on ‚ÄòNet music experiment]

The innovative new stuff that some artists like Radiohead are trying is wonderful and all, but these incredibly unique situations don’t mean shit to real world applications or trying to make money‚Äîlet alone a living‚Äîas a musician. Sure, Radiohead was able to make “more money than every other Radiohead album combined” from its In Rainbows experiment, but I dare any indie band who has even 1/100th the popularity of Radiohead to try the same experiment and come out with enough revenue to even pay for the food eaten during their time in the studio. Never mind money to pay for studio time (whether it’s a real studio or something home-brewed), instruments, rent, clothing… y’know, even just basic necessities.

For better or worse, Radiohead was only able to make a lot of money due to the popularity they’ve garnered after all the marketing and promotion that the labels did for them. Let’s also not forget all the free press they got from simply embarking on the experiment in the first place. How much press will the next mainstream band to do the same thing get? The one after that? Will the news vans show up when Billy’s Little Band from Nowhere, NE tries the smae thing?

The fact that Radiohead isn’t speaking about its numbers only leaves us with the statistics from Trent Reznor’s similar experiment, and I’ll bet real money Radiohead’s numbers were more or less the same. At least in the same ballpark.

People are jackasses, and they just want stuff for free. Piracy isn’t about some wild new business model or revolutionary social frontier. It’s about people who don’t give a shit and don’t want to pay for anything.

Period.

I would genuinely love to see what would happen if these same people’s paychecks were to start getting pirated. Hell, most of these people are probably the same ones to get their panties in a bunch when they see how much their government takes out for taxes.

Reznor’s right; this is a genuinely saddening problem, and one that isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon. Not while people are able to steal anonymously and continue not giving a shit without any repercussions.

General Specialist: Censorship at CreativeCow.net

Holy crap. I’ve heard rumors about this, but I’m amazed to see a record of some real experience with the issue:

It seems that they have IP-filtered out our entire IP range, so now they have effectively blocked 2,500 people in the broadcasting business from participating in their forums. Guess who’s loosing on that deal…

Really, really bad idea, Creative Cow. I actually like and click on web ads, being an online writer who makes a living from them. But after reading this, you just lost another user.

I’ve owned $30 routers from Netgear, I’ve owned $80 routers from Linksys. Sometimes I set them up with WEP and WAP security, sometimes I felt like leaving them open because I had nice neighbors. Sometimes I customized the crap out of them by locking down the network, hiding the SSID, using a password even a computer couldn’t remember, specifying a specific broadcast channel and doing a rain dance in the room I kept those routers. Sometimes I didn’t.

Never, with any of those routers, did I have 1/100th of the trouble, frustration or hair-tearing moments that I’ve had with your AirPort Express and new AirPort Extreme (802.11n) routers. Never.

Your routers frequently flip out, drop connections, seize up Mac OS X (on both a MacBook Pro and iMac G5) and generally make me want to bulldoze your company headquarters to the ground. Whether I’m running 802.11n only, n/g mixed or b/g on the AirPort Extreme, using password security or leaving the networks open, your routers are by and far the absolute worst, most unreliable and frustrating products you make, and inarguably the worst routers in the industry. No no, I mean: inarguably.

If a $30 router from one of your well known competitors or even a no-name brand that might not exist next week can work more reliably than yours, something is seriously fucking broken. Fix it. You have some cute features like AirTunes that no one else does, but if you can’t allow your users to maintain a basic connection to the internet, you are doing something wrong.

Please, for the love of all things wonderful in this world, give me a reason to not regret spending $280 on your networking products when something for a fraction of the price puts them to absolute, inarguable shame. Your computers are great, your OS is second to none, the iPod is cute - but your routers are a pathetic shame. Fix them.

Love and hugs
- David

iPhone bill unboxed by Justine.tv - Engadget Mobile

I’m sorry, but I need to say this: iJustine is so darn bubbly that I wouldn’t be the least surprised to hear that she was born in a silver wrapper and packing baseball cards.

That said, this video is pretty funny. She got her first iPhone bill from AT&T - in a box. Like I said before: this is ridiculous, and it should have been handled differently. Apple took all the time to build an incredible iPhone setup and registration process with iTunes - they could have fit one more damn ‘Yes, I understand that AT&T would like to save a few billion sheets of paper each month by making the entire contents of my epic bill that you aren’t going to read in the first place online’ to avoid this silliness.

Home - Windows Live Spaces

otherwise known as:

http://home.services.spaces.live.com/
Five separate elements are needed to let you know where you are:

home - services - spaces - live - com

How well does that actually go over in conversation? “Sure you can check out my site - it’s at david dot spaces dot li…

wait, where you going?”

Companies that have a much harder fight up the mindshare ladder aren’t condemning their URLs into useless obscurity; why is Windows Live?

Why yes, yes they are.

That said, I still don’t agree that comments should be eliminated entirely. That solution is using a sledgehammer to silence what I believe to still be a minority of off-balance jerks who were never taught - and never bothered to learn for themselves - the meanings of such wonderful colloquialisms as ’self-restraint’ and ‘being civil instead of a jackass.’

Of course, there could be a discussion surrounding how useful it could be to truly use a sledgehammer to quiet said jerks, but that’s a chat for another time.

Photoshop Of Horrors: Here’s Our Winner! ‘Redbook’ Shatters Our ‘Faith’ In Well, Not Publishing, But Maybe God - Jezebel

I am constantly amazed (but not in the good way) when I see these juxtapositions of what the original photograph of a model looks like in contrast to the finished and finely Photoshopped print version. Disgusting.

[tags]Photoshop, models[/tags]

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: So when Apple goes after bloggers, we’re evil. But when Valleywag does it, it’s entertainment.
Like Mike just said: stop trying to sniff out who Fake Steve Jobs is. Just leave it alone - the whole point of him being Fake Steve Jobs is that no one knows who’s writing the blog. On top of that, trying to track down who he is when he wants his ID to remain private is nothing more than a jackass’s mission. Valleywag - I’m looking partially in your direction, though that admittedly isn’t anything new: I hate you to begin with. You’re the scum of the tech web, thriving on any scum you can find.

No one likes a jackass.

Hey, I didn’t write it - whoever designed and approved this image for Microsoft.com did.