MrZaius.com

It’s official – Via’s not going to come to market anytime soon. Considering the raging success of Intel’s Atom, it’s hard to imagine how (even in this economy), Via can’t get the only viable competitor to market.

I’ve previously written (maybe not here, but *eh*) about my desire to pick up a Via Isaiah/Nano/C-Vapor processor-powered HTPC, to do the job of running my storage, media player, and firewall apps on a single box, isolated from my main desktop. Unfortunately, however, Tom’s Hardware reports that the dual-core version is still more than a year out (More details). Combine this with the simple fact that Via claimed to “ship” the product almost a year ago, but it’s still not available on the open market.

This sucks. The Atom is hardly as inspiring, lacking any real muscle but also lacking any sort of functional GPU component. Boxed into the crappy Intel graphic chipsets, and without any sort of hardware-level extensions for media decoding, encryption, or compression, it is an incredibly lackluster component in comparison. Yes, it may benchmark pretty well against the shipping-but-missing Nano, but noone buys a netbook to run Quake – People buy netbooks to run software that can be very, very heavily optimized for the right kind of processor. Tying in the gzip decompression of Firefox, full-disk encryption requirements for laptops, and hardware-assisted decoding of digital media with a processor designed to take the load would result in a much better product.

That said, though, I’ve reached the point where I’m willing to buy an Atom based mini-PC rather than wait 13-14 months for Via to finally make their parts available. An Eee w/HDMI would fit 2/3 of the needs outlined above and, in this particular case, have an incredibly compelling design. With integrated UPS, HDMI support with sound (thanks to a discrete AMD GPU), and a stylish design, this box is one of the most compelling devices I’ve seen in a long time. Now if only it was had the hardware-level instructions necessary to also run my VPN on this boring little processor.

*le sigh*

Complete review here.

I’m 60 hours in to the 80 hour game, and I’ve already hit the level cap. While fan patches exist (http://www.fileplanet.com/194463/190000/fileinfo/Fallout-3—Skill-Level-Cap-100-Mod) they aren’t the right approach:
What the creators should do is:
1: Slow the development of all experience by 10-25% or drop the benefits from leveling by a similar amount.
2: Raise the level cap by two
3: Clearly warn the user when they’re hitting the level cap.

This last is extremely important, as the user currently isn’t warned anywhere about the impending level cap, but there are compelling multiple traits that can only be added at the final level-up. Warn the user and let them make an informed choice with their final choice.

The level cap is a valuable thing, keeping you reasonably in line with the rest of the world but at a high enough level that the game is quite a bit easier. If this can’t be done in a mod like the one linked above, it should be done by the developers. As it is, the game is out of balance, and far more so than….. say…. StarCraft or Company of Heroes, when they shipped and then got multiple patches that rewrote the stats of substantial numbers of character classes.

I personally abstained in the Cox vs Johnson race, as per my previous post, and voted Lib/Green in the Presidential Senatorial races, as per my previous post. Turns out that my predictions about the complete irrelevance of my vote in those races were confirmed. Each of the three races seems likely to end with a 20+ point margin between the candidates. Timothy Johnson will be sticking around – Here’s hoping he manages to actually do something for us this time around.

On a related note, Virginia’s 9th didn’t even have a race – Rick Boucher gets two more years, winning unopposed.

The Washington Post recently put out a piece about the declining health of Cheney. This raises a question that I’ve always wondered about. Maybe someone knows the answer:

What happens when a lame duck president or veep kicks the bucket? In those cases where the Presidency is staying in the party or, even simpler, going straight to the current veep, it’s pretty obvious what you do. You appoint the President-elect VP to ensure a simpler succession in the event of a double whammy and to give ‘em even more OJT than they’d have gotten otherwise or, if he/she’s already movin’ on up, you appoint the VP-elect VP.

What happens, though, if the party in control of the oval office is scheduled to change? Do you just get the least controversial waste of space possible to fill the gap? Do you try to pick out a new hopeful for 4 years hence and cost him/her their current gig? Do you man up and appoint the President-elect VP anyway, hoping to effect a smoother transition in January?

There’s a war on, and Buy.com won’t accept orders placed directly by our service men and women abroad and folk attached to diplomatic missions. Read on for details, but the short story is “Use Paypal checkout or have someone in the states place your order for you if you want any hope of ever receiving your item via pouch.”

Buy.com canceled a recent order I placed and sent me a form letter saying that it because:

Hello XXXXX,

We regret to inform you that your order #XXXXXXX has been cancelled for your protection for one of the following reasons:

* * * * Please scroll down to the payment method you selected on this order and read the instructions * * * *

PayPal Orders (Including Orders through PayPal Express Checkout)

Please contact PayPal directly regarding any questions that you may have regarding the cancellation of this order.  When you use PayPal or PayPal Express Checkout, only a very limited amount of information regarding you and/or your order is provided to us by PayPal.   Your order may have been cancelled for a variety of reasons, most of which we will not be able to determine or help you fix.  For example, your billing information may be incorrect and you may need to work with PayPal and your credit card company to determine and fix this.  For these reasons, we ask that you contact PayPal directly regarding the cancellation of this order, and sincerely hope that you are able to rectify any inaccurate information and place additional orders through Buy.com.

Google Checkout Orders

To ensure a safe shopping experience, Google and Buy.com rely on a variety of systems to evaluate the risk levels associated with transactions. It appears that your order may have failed one of our initial credit card checks and will require you to update your billing information. Please update the billing information in your Google Checkout account so that it matches the address on file with your credit card company.  Upon completing this, please visit Buy.com to place your order again.
Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused for you.

Orders Through Buy.com Checkout without use of PayPal or Google Checkout

If your method of payment was a credit card you will not be billed for any unshipped items.  If your method of payment was something else such as a check or money order, please allow a few days for your refund to be processed.  If you have questions regarding a cancelled order through Buy.com’s Checkout without the use of PayPal, please contact us at www.buy.com/support and select “other comments or questions” from the drop down menu.

For information on loosening your spam filter, please visit our help section here:

https://secure.buy.com/corp/support/email/default.asp?what=anytimehelp

We regret having to cancel your order and we look forward to future business with you.

Sincerely,

Customer Support Team

Please do not reply to this message. It was sent from a notification-only address that cannot accept incoming email. Instead, please contact us via our webform at www.buy.com/support

Ie, they didn’t tell me why at all. Contacted customer service and requested a human-written message or, at the very least, an accurate form letter. Here’s what I got in return:

Thank you for contacting Buy.com regarding order number XXXXXXX.

We would like to inform you that we are no longer accepting orders placed outside the United States. Our record shows that you have placed your order in Kathmandu, this is the reason why your order has been cancelled. Please be advice to place your order using a computer within the United States location.

Our Sales Department is available via telephone 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Our toll-free phone number is 1-800-800-0800 (Option 1).

The company still ships to zip 20189 and to APO addresses, but it apparently refuses to take orders that are placed over a scary unamerican IP address. Now how much sense does that make? There does seem to be a simple workaround, though: I was apparently succesful in placing the same order via Paypal, and might have been succesful using Google Checkout. Just don’t use Buy.com’s own checkout as they are:

A: Too incompetent to refuse your order during checkout/before prompting you for credit card information on an IP address that they don’t trust.

B: Too uncaring to have a human tell you why.

and C: Too incompetent to automatically generate a form letter that tells you why, forcing you to waste even more of their resources by engaging in two way communications with their customer service reps.

I’d hate to have to stop using these people, but this will certainly make me think twice.

PS: From their site – Apparently they’re even less forgiving of our men and women in uniform: Why don’t you ship to APO/FPO mailboxes? There are certain restrictions on exporting certain kinds of technology outside of the United States. These restrictions complicate or prevent our suppliers from shipping products to APO/FPO mailboxes. We are working on finding ways to solve this fulfillment inconvenience and in the meantime we apologize and hope you understand.

Johnson’s stats from the current Congress:

• Number of sponsored bills: 8
• Number of co-sponsored bills 161
• Number of sponsored bills passed: 0
• Number of co-sponsored bills passed: 9

Our remarkably unsuccessful four-term Congressman in the fifteenth Congressional District in Illinois seems shockingly… well, unsuccessful this time around. If this fellow was a lawyer in any of our private employ he’d have found his ass on the street long ago. The man has done one redeeming act – Opposing the expansion of already adequate warrantless wiretapping programs and telecom immunity.

Nevertheless, he has still repeatedly voted against the interests of the people of his district on certain issues in which he does not specialize. Moving directly along with his party leadership, he has repeatedly supported bills like the PRO-IP act that would spend millions of taxpayer dollars doing the job of the MPAA and RIAA and undermining the independence criminal focus of the Department of Justice. To add insult to injury, he also backed it when it would have spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars having the Department of Justice sue private individuals on behalf of the aforementioned trade groups, before the Senate struck that obligation prior to passage of the bill. Despite the lack of any sort of copyright-heavy industry in and around his district, the Congressman inexplicably backed the movie industry over consumers both in this instance and others, despite the lack of any of the former and an abundance of the latter in his district.

To put all this in perspective, the supposedly immoral acts that the PRO-IP Act dramatically raises penalties for and pushes for Federal enforcement of include:

1. Ripping a legally purchased an encrypted DVD to your iPod or home computer for portability and backup purposes
2. Ripping a segment of an encryped DVD to seamlessly embed the easily copied content within a student or teacher’s presentation
3. Bypassing digital rights management software embedded in a legally purchased video game when it breaks your system or prevents you from running it under emulation on an open source operating system
4. Distributing and developing open source media players (ala VLC, Media Player Classic, mplayer, xine, etc) that are capable of playing DRM protected media, even if they lack the capability of performing any sort of duplication or media storage

By voting for the PRO-IP act the Congressman directly worked against the best interests of essentially everyone in his district, including every Linux user and everyone that ever exercised their Fair Use rights with a video source medium in the past. Considering the nigh-universal level VCR adoption prior to the DVD era, this is likely not an inconsiderable number of voters.

This registered Republican doesn’t honestly believe that Steve Cox would be any better, given the incredible lack of effort and resources that the fellow seems to have put into developing his website, inability to garner any substantial press, and the lack of any clear policy statements that address consumer rights, privacy, and intellectual property concerns aside from echoing the same FISA concerns shared by Congressman Johnson. It’s a shame this Warfel kid didn’t make a bid for the job – He’d have apparently had energy and foresight enough to make for an interesting race.

Damn, but I wish my ballot had an Abstain option under “Congressional.”

*Update* Went ahead and did just that – Had it on good authority that leaving the question blank was equivalent to an abstention. I’d highly advise anyone trying to do the same thing to ask their local voting place staff.

PS: On a related note, check out the classy fella that Lawrenceville’s trying to get rid of by sending to Springfield against Jones.

Being registered in Illinois where Obama won the Senate race by a 30-point margin (and lost in my home county by the same), there seems to be next to zero chance that the state will vote Republican for the first time since Reagan. As such, I’d be throwing my vote away if I vote for a Democrat or a Republican. The only goal I can hope to reach with my senatorial and presidential votes is to help ensure future ballot access for a third party or two. Disregarding certain joke candidates and the rather scary Socialists and Constitution types, should I be voting for crazy tree huggers or crazy capitalists?

The old hippy lady runnin’ on the Green ticket for the Senate seems a little, well, odd. Is the party dead in Illinois? Is the Libertarian party any more or less likely to lose ballot access than the Greens in the near future? Should I split the vote and go for a lib Presidential candidate and a Green in the Senate?

Please keep in mind that I don’t give the slightest bit of a hoot about any of the following when formulating a response:

• Abortion
• Gun ownership

And I do care rather a lot (obviously) about consumer, privacy, and fair use rights. I’d love to see the borders opened up to substantially higher numbers of immigrants, and I wish to see barriers to international trade continue to be chopped away. I’d like to see poverty abated in the third world, and feel that the problem in the United States is miniscule in comparison. Obviously neither the Greens nor the Libs are a good fit, but neither are the (D)s and (R)s. Any thoughts?

Here’s what someone should build (Tom – Are you listening?):

It seems patently obvious that there would be a market for an entirely self-contained, easy to use SOHO inventory management device. Call it “Library in a Pocket” or something like that, but all you need is a cheap little ARM based Linux handheld with a barcode and RFID scanner. There are people who have cludged together similar systems for PalmOS and Linux, but most commit a number of common sins:

A: Expect some other backend to be used alongside the handheld package.
B: Build it around add-ons to existing PDAs and PC hardware.
C: Lack of polished, focused design targeting the real potential users of these products.

When you eliminate any notion that another device or computer is a relevant part of this system and make it so obvious that no training is necessary to bring in and check out an item from the device itself (picture IN & OUT buttons that are as easy to use as the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons on a Tivo), you create something simple enough that pack rats, small rental firms, small shops, etc. can reliably keep their entire inventory on that single, portable, easy-to-manage device. Add a numeric keypad to allow manual entry of barcode numbers and invoice numbers for associated POS systems, and you find yourself stripped of any need to maintain a seperate scanning device for it.

Obviously the user needs the ability to generate certain reports based on this data, but there’s no reason that can’t be done in the device: A little 200mhz ARM would be far more powerful than necessary to generate CSV data for manipulation in common database and spreadsheet applications and to turn it into one or two basic ODF or PDF reports.

/End of rant

I fired off the below after reading Corey Doctorow’s recent news post about Wal-Mart’s about face on DRM. It occurred to me shortly afterwards that there may be enough consumers affected by the Yahoo, MSN, and Wal-Mart server shut-downs that we might be able to make noise enough to get a new DMCA exemption for those law-abiding music purchasers. Here’s the text of my letter. Kindly write your own Representative and push for the same sort of change. The bill has already been passed by the Senate, but there’s still a window for opportunity to enact reform that benefits the consumer along with its massive gifts to industry.

———————————————————————–

The 1996 Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed a few years before you came into office, did a great deal of damage to the Fair Use rights of consumers in your district. I firmly believe that, as we play host to neither Nashville nor New York City nor Los Angeles, that it did far more harm to your constituents than good. It rendered it a criminal act to bypass the easily-bypassed encryption used in intellectual property management schemes known as “Digital Rights Management” or DRM. This is something that has caused me considerable trouble, given my interest in academic pursuits based around open source development.

More recently, though, the problems that the technical community predicted at the bills passage have come to fruition and begun to affect many voters in your district, including many people without a strong technical background. Yahoo, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart previously “sold” DRM-protected music through their online stores for several years prior to 2008. In 2008, however, they and stores like Amie Street and Amazon.com have led the way in hammering out licensing deals to allow the sale of DRM-free MP3 files with the music of major labels. Competing against the unrestrictive competition from the above, Yahoo and Wal-Mart have switched to selling DRM-free media as well. Microsoft has taken a different tact, ending sales of its older standard, PlaysForSure, through MSN.com in favor of selling a new format to owners of Microsoft-licensed Zune media players.

Unfortunately, but predictably, all three of the vendors listed above have either shut down or announced plans to shut down the servers that end user computers use to authenticate the media purchased from them. This ultimately strips the user of the ability to transfer the media to a new computer, new media player, etc, and leaves the consumer without any meaningful recourse, due largely to the aforementioned 1996 Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Very, very soon the bipartisan Pro-IP bill will come up for a vote in the House. I would like to ask you to add a simple amendment granting an exemption to the DMCA to consumers affected by these issues, allowing them the legal right to remove the DRM protections from their legally purchased media files. This has happened before, with CircuitCity’s DivX program, and it could very well happen again (should Blu-Ray be superseded or otherwise begin to collapse). A broad exemption allowing those who legally purchase this media to legally unlock it would be greatly welcome. The precedent created would not only help consumers: Media producers would also benefit, insofar as this exemption would add another level of disincentive to piracy, eliminating one (of many) common complaints about DRM.

<s>Personal contact information that doesn’t need to be as open as the letter proper</s> The morning business hours in DC and our mutual home coincide with my evening, when I would be happy to speak with you or your staff. Please call me with any questions you may have about the common-sense proposal above.

Thank you for your time,
Sean Crago
Kathmandu, Nepal

———————————————————————–

Update: Went ahead and sent the below off to Rick Boucher of Virginia, too, as a result of this old Ars Technica article. Anyone else want to help?

———————————————————————–

My name is Sean Crago. I’m a member of the EFF and a longtime admirer of your work. <s>Personal job and contact information not intended for the blog</s>, and am unable to fight as strongly as I should to support you as a result. Please accept my apologies.

I’m writing to urge you to step up pressure to append some positive changes to the PRO-IP Act prior to its passage. If you can’t get the entire FAIR USE Act tacked on, would you please try to use the recent outrage over Wal-Mart’s plans to shut down their DRM authentication servers? This will prevent many legal purchases from being retained by their owners, encouraging piracy over DRM when those are the only available options. It would be very much in the best interests of consumers and media producers alike to have a DMCA exemption that allows for users to bypass DRM on files purchased from the now defunct DRM music services at Yahoo, Wal-Mart, and MSN Music rather than lose their purchases when they buy their next computer.

This low-lying fruit should, I hope, provide an easier target for you to hit.

I’ve written to my parents’ Congressman as well on this same subject, for lack of one I can truly call my own:
http://mrzaius.com/blog/?p=108

Thank you for your time,
Sean Crago
Kathmandu

PS: I’d love to answer any questions you may have, but please do not call after 1PM Washington DC time, due to the time difference between there and Nepal.

Click for the wiki article

It’s always (ie for the last 18 months [when I discovered these]) bugged the living hell out of me that there were no tablet netbooks on the market, though it could plainly be done. End user accessible kits even exist for the purpose. ASUS et al hadn’t announced a tablet and noone had shipped one, or an Atom-based machine, before I left the United States for Nepal. As such, I went ahead and bought the ASUS Eee PC900 with Xandros Linux. I’ve got a couple of gripes about the Linux setup, including the lack of adequate and properly protected security updates and a clunky wifi manager, but all in all it works quite well. Amazingly light and easy to use (for my wife as well) and with absolutely incredible boot times, it is hands down the coolest laptop I’ve ever owned. That said, though, the simple addition of a rotating tablet screen or even the OLPC’s cheap but marvelous display would make it far more useful, allowing it to replace my PDA as an ebook reader and do a number of other handy things.

Now, however, it seems to be possible to get a tablet for a netbook’s price through Gigabyte. It seems to lack the software that drives most tablets when you buy it with Windows, but there are promises of a Linux version which, though it would probably be far less useful, would scratch a certain itch of mine – I’ve always been utterly fascinated by projects like Dasher. (Check out their web-based implementation for a demo.) The biggest thing holding me back, of course, is the fact that the Linux build hasn’t shipped and the American retailer Dynamism wants damned near $800 for the Windows version.

The second biggest concern, though, is the incredibly murky picture surrounding its SDHC support, or lack thereof. Its official spec sheet only claims MMC and SD support and, when queried on the subject, their technical support responded that “it does not support SDHC.” Dynamism, however, ran a test for me with some random 16GB card, and it seemed to work just fine:

“I just tried the M912 we have in the office with a Patriot 16GB SDHC card we have (the same ones we offer for the Eee PC’s), and the system did recognize the card and was able to read the full formatted capacity. It very may well be able to read SDHC, but not support some of the faster transfer speeds that the format affords, and it could also depend on the brand as well. With the large number SD/SDHC cards out there it would be difficult to test each and every one available, but it could be possible that the system reads most available ones on the market.”   Dynamism sales support

This seems to be reflected in the drivers offered for the device as well – It ships with drivers for precisely the same series of SD controller that the MSI Wind (which does claim SDHC compatibility) ships with. Weird situation – Can any owners give a little more information on this subject, like an lsusb and lspci output and the boot log in Linux?

*Update http://www.dynamism.com/#Product=gigabyte_m912 - Dynamism’s knocked the price down to $700 for the HDD-laden Windows version, if pre-ordered prior to Oct 1. Still, though, there are some other tradeoffs for not waiting for the Linux build. See the Wikipedia link above.