Phil Huang

Blog

  • The WTA Tour Sucks

    Seriously, women’s tennis is in a poor state right now. Everyone’s pretty much on an even keel. On any given day, anyone can win. That’s why you got retired players coming back or thinking about coming back. And you have teens like Melanie Oudin taking out top seeds. And geezus, don’t get me started on Ivanonic. Girl went out 1st round, worst than last year’s 2nd round exit. She was ranked #1 before! And the other day, the current #1 seed (without a slam), Dinara Safina, was competing with her no name opponent to see who could suck more, who could hit more errors. It’s ridiculous. And when the women play, breaking serve is a normal, frequent occurence.

    You know, it’s a shame Sharapova had to have surgery on her shoulder because I think she would’ve dominated during the time she was out, even with the Williams sisters playing. The Williams simply took advantage of a weak field. Sharapova can hold her own against both.

  • If There’s No Public Plan…

    Then the supposed healthcare “reform” has already failed. Obama’s healthcare reform is about 2 things – cutting both short and long term costs and expanding coverage to those who don’t have health insurance.

    Cutting costs should be a normal thing, it shouldn’t be called reform when you try to make things more efficient and operate on less money. Never mind the fact that Medicare and Medicaid (along with Social Security) costs are going to skyrocket over the next few decades to unsustainable levels, regardless of the current/projected budget deficit and national debt. So doing something about that is absolutely necessary, not reform.

    The key component is significantly expanded coverage, or universal coverage. This is true healthcare reform. There’s so much disinformation out there and ignorant idiots across America are eating it up like cake. And this is creating a significant political problem for Obama, who’s already backing away from a public health insurance plan. If so, this supposed reform has already failed.

  • Federer Wins Cincy, Destroys Young Guns

    Roger Federer won the Masters 1000 tournament in Cincinnati on Sunday, beating Novak Djokovic in convincing fashion, 6-1 and 7-5. A day before, he also beat Andy Murray in straight sets, 6-2 and 7-6. These are 2 of the top 4 whose best surface is hard courts and many expected them to beat Roger. In fact, the odds-makers pegged Murray for the win in the semifinal. But what we saw was vintage Federer or TMF, The Mighty Fed, back in action. He dominated the young guns, the very people contending for his US Open title in a week.

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  • xkcd: Tech Support Cheat Sheet

    xkcd: Tech Support Cheat Sheet

    Awesome.

  • Federer Chokes Against Tsonga in Montreal

    I can’t believe Fed blew a double-break (5-1) lead in the 3rd set to lose the match against Tsonga in Montreal. I’m almost beginning to think he lost on purpose, just to pace himself before the US Open. Because right now Tsonga looks like he’s about to lose to a frickin qualifier in the 2nd round at Cincy. How could Fed lose to Tsonga?!

  • GGF Pirate Bay Plan is a Bad Idea

    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.

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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.

    ———-

    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%.