Some of you may know that a company called Global Gaming Factory (GGF) announced it worked out a deal to buy the popular torrent site, The Pirate Bay. The initial report said the price would be $7.8 million. Long story short, that may not be so, but it should still be several million dollars. What’s incredulous is that they plan to make Pirate Bay into a pay site where members have to pay to download and content is authorized by copyright holders. They plan on working with the entertainment industry to work this out. This is just a bad, bad idea and shows the people behind GGF just don’t get it. I feel bad for the investors being duped into thinking this is a good idea.
Year: 2009
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Tennis Season Back in Motion
All the top players, most notably Federer and Nadal, are back in action this week at the Rogers Cup in Montreal. This is part of the US Open Series that leads up to the US Open. Federer’s coming off a hot streak, winning Madrid, the French Open, and Wimbledon; regaining no.1 ranking; and having twin girls. Nadal’s coming back from his knee injury.
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Firefox 3.5 Is Faster
10/19/2009 UPDATE
Well a few months later and I just wanted to come back and update this post. I take back the “Faster Start and Close” claim and want to reinforce that Firefox is a memory hog. Firefox 3.5 is just as slow, if not slower, to start up and slow to close down than Firefox 3.0. Firefox 3.5 gobbles up memory so damn fast that I often hit 1 GB memory usage where it pretty much tops out and starts lagging like crazy because I only have 2 GB of RAM (ya know, 2 GB seemed like so much 2 years ago). And the firefox.exe process sometimes takes forever to terminate. Sometimes it even gets stuck and I have to end the process manually.Now, I know it could just be (or probably is) the plugins I’m running hogging memory and generally slowing down Firefox startup/close. But I’m using the same plugins as I used with Firefox 3.0 and it wasn’t nearly this bad with the memory usage. I’m not sure how you’d go about getting 3rd party plugin developers to optimize their code, but it’s an issue. A browser should not eat up this much memory.
Yes, bookmarks are greatly improved and I like how they break down History by time period. I keep a 90-day history so it used to load my entire history on one screen – very slow, very bad – but not anymore. And yes the History and Bookmarks drop-down menus are much faster. But the “awesome bar” is slow as hell, presumably because it searching through my huge history and bookmarks collection. A lot of times it slows me down because I just want to enter in a URL quickly and I typically punch it very quickly. But it lags as it tries to autocomplete what I’m typing and actually slows me down.
I still feel the sticking point is how slow Firefox starts/closes and how much memory it uses. I periodically have to restart Firefox just to clear up memory. I don’t know how Chrome would fare when loaded with plugins, but if it were half as fast as Firefox is now, I’d probably switch. Unfortunately there really aren’t many plugins for Chrome. The bare-bones version of Chrome lightning fast though.
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So I finally upgraded to Firefox 3.5 after the 3.5.2 update was released. I generally like to wait for additional point releases that fix bugs with the initial release. Anyway, 3.5 is definitely a lot faster than 3.0 performance-wise. Yes, the new/updated TraceMonkey and Gecko engines makes Javascript and page-loading faster (which is to be expected, otherwise why update), but I’m talking about general application performance.
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Bgears b-Enspirer Sound Card Has Poor Reliability
Well, the sound card in my system died over the weekend very suddenly. I have a Bgears b-Enspirer sound card in my system. It just stopped outputting sound and from I’ve read it seems the amp on the card has died. Even when I turn my speaker volume to max, the sound is barely audible and distorted. I actually thought it was my speakers first, but after connecting them to my onboard sound (Realtek HD Audio integrated with motherboard), the sound came out fine. So the Bgears b-Enspirer lasted a measly year and 10 months. And the warranty is only 1 year so I’m sh*t out of luck.
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NPD’s Statistics About Apple are BS
I keep seeing tech articles talking about NPD’s recent numbers saying Apple has 91% of the market for $1,000+ computers. And people are saying wow, they’re so dominant.
Well they’re are all ignoring the fact that the report only covers computers sold in RETAIL STORES. The largest PC sellers like Dell and HP primarily sell online and Apple’s main sales channel is retail, so that stat is not surprising. With enough spin, any statistic can look favorable. Also note retail stores like Best Buy that actually sell PC’s usually sell the cheapo ones. I’d like to see Apple’s share of ALL $1,000+ computer sales – it’s probably more like 5%.
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Federer Wins Record 15th Major, 6th Wimbledon
TMF now has the most grand slam victories in history. Wow, that was an unbelievable match. Another Wimby EPIC.
Federer d. Roddick
5-7 7-6 7-6 3-6 16-14Check out this amazing ATP tribute:
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Andy vs. Andy
Andy Roddick and Andy Murray are playing their 3rd set tiebreak in their semi right now. Crowd’s crazy for Murray. I’m rooting for Roddick. Murray is annoying – yelling and fist-pumping after every single point, like he just won the set or something.
UPDATE: Yesterday I voted on tennis.com that the final would be Federer vs Roddick. Well, Roddick has just won in 4 sets over Murray. TMF vs Andy Roddick for the Wimby final! Yes, The Mighty Fed is definitely back. Andy’s playing better but it’s still a tough matchup for him. Fed’s just always had his number. 18-2 record doesn’t lie. But you never know. I’m hoping Fed gets #15 on Sunday.
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Karlovic Can Only Serve
Tennis fans already know this about Dr. Ivo but if Karlovic didn’t have that powerful serve, I’m pretty sure Federer could have bageled him 3 times. Breaking Karlovic in each of the first 2 sets was impressive, especially the way Federer was returning in the games he broke. Karlovic volleyed poorly but I think that has more to do with how Roger hits/returns the ball and his ability to come up with amazing passing shots.
P.S. Once again, NBC proves they are incompetent, stupid, ignorant, or all of the above. They are airing a tape delay of this match later in the day. NBC apparently has the rights to this match so it wasn’t on ESPN360.com either. I ended up watching another live stream online that was actually good quality and had decent commentary (not sure if it was BBC or what, but Boris Becker was commentating). So suck it NBC, I ain’t watching your tape delay. The ESPN2 commentator even said “we can’t tell you the score for the Federer/Karlovic match because NBC will air it later today.” Well, screw that. Is NBC not aware of something called the Internet? No wonder they’re in last place among the networks – NBC is just plain dumb.
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VoIP Incoming Call Routing
I use a company called Viatalk and since it’s a VoIP, it comes with a lot of free features that either aren’t available with landlines or you have to pay extra for. I especially love the Incoming Call Routing feature that Viatalk has. It gives you a lot of flexibility in handling incoming calls from specific numbers. It’s really helpful for blocking telemarketers or other unwanted callers. For example, you can make calls go straight to voicemail, give a busy signal, or play a handful of different messages. You can play a “disconnected” message that plays the recording you get from the phone company when you call an invalid number. You can even play a “blacklisted” message that literally tells the caller they’ve been blocked and to “go away”!
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Bing
Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, ain’t too bad. The results are pretty good and I can find what I want easily. I’ve actually switched to Bing as my default search engine to test it out. I like the interface too, it’s feels clean and refreshing – a nice bit of style without being too complex or too simple. I also think the 12px Arial looks so much better than the 11px Verdana Microsoft always uses on their sites.