fak3r

Dik needs no support from u.

Since its introduction, my beef with the iPhone has been obvious; buying it ties you to AT&T, a company that violated the law, and the rights of its customers, by allowing and assisting with the illegal wiretapping and data-mining for the NSA.  Keep in mind, there were other phone companies asked … but AT&T is the one that said yes.  So if you want to put your money where your mouth is, be like me and consider Credo Mobile.  Their recent promo postcard (seen to the right) has a permanent place on my refrigerator, so I’ll wait until they sell Android based phones, or support an Openmoko phone (drool) to get rid of my ancient (aka- 1 year old) cell phone.  The copy on the flip side of the postcard tells it like it is; if you’re paying AT&T for anything, you’re contributing to the current administration.

“Sorry to say, but the political action committee at AT&T contributed the maximum amount allowable by law to the Bush/Cheney campaign — twice. So, go ahead, check out your mobile phone company. And then check out the mobile phone alternative you can trust. It’s called CREDO Mobile, and it’s mobile phone service that stands up for your values, brought to you by Working Assets.

On the other hand, if you’re happy with your mobile service just the way it is, accept this photograph as your gift from a real, ahem, Richard.

To get your phone in line with your values, click here.”

Never forget

What’s wrong with this picture? Can you say debt? Good, how about recession?  Notice the gray areas, those are recession periods, we’ll wait for ours to appear here.  Who thought it could get this bad this quickly?  Here’s the graph at the Federal Reserve for you to research.  Enjoy

NOTE: As a St. Louis native, I was asked to comment on the sale of local St. Louis brewer Anheuser-Busch to European beverage conglomerate InBev. The following are my comments from the thread.

A couple of things here, AB has been a big STL employer for years sure, but just because they’re big doesn’t mean they’re good. Look at other big employers here; Boeing, AG Edwards and now AB - while they’re headquartered here, they’re not much more than bragging rights for St Louisans - just because they’re based here, they’re far from ‘local’. They’re all multi-national corporations which means the money is a) not staying here and b) is fluid, ready to be munched up by the next corporation up the chain, which leaves the employees as a line item - so much for loyalty. So why should a local market worry about a corporation that doesn’t care about them? (more…)

It looks like the ultra conservative news site, OneNewsNow, brought to you by our friends over at the American Family Ass (remember them?), aren’t very hip with those new web technologies.  Oh sure, they block plenty of news that doesn’t meet their views so they can present the user with a tainted view of the world in order to support their viewpoints, but they also *fail* hard when they do a blind ‘find and replace’ of the word ‘gay’ to ‘homosexual’.  A fun example is the image above, where runner Tyson Gay’s accomplishments were introduced with the line “Gay eases into 100 final at Olympics” becomes the much more interesting headline, “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympics”.  Other times when runner Tyson Gay’s name is ‘re-spelt’ to conform to the sensibilities of the more conservative set:

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To understand how importance net neutrality is you need to watch the following video.  Think about the freedom that the Internet allows you, now think about how you are limited to certain ‘packages’ when you pay for cable or satellite access to watch TV. This is exactly how the corporate behemoths want to make your choices for the Internet. It makes sense, they’re not stupid, they see the opportunity to make money, and making your freedom into the proverbial carrot and stick makes perfect sense…for them.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2XPiqhN_Ns]

Their title for the video is 2012: The Year The Internet Ends.  Learn more, and how you can spread the word, at I Power.  Thanks.

We’ve got to find a way to take the conservative symbolic message of faith talk out of American politics.  First let me state what I believe in as far as religion; I believe religion is a very personal thing, and I feel it should be that way for everyone. This goes a long way in understanding my disdain for so called ‘faith-based politics’, examples of which have been in abundance this campaign season. Now, before you jump on me, I am talking about ‘both’ (anyone find a viable 3rd party candidate that can raise 100 bazillion dollars to go the dance? I wish we could…but that’s another post ;)) parties, Democrats and Republicans. When you hear any of them kowtowing to the evangelicals (who have been the sweet target these past few months), you know they’re deliberately targeting those people, and those people only. The fact that so many have been called out to ‘prove’ their conviction is the true one, and in line with the vote heavy evangelicals, is a sad commentary on how people vote.
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Today at work someone running Windows on a Mac was having an issue communicating through the third party firewall software. The response from the third party was that they don’t support Mac, but my contention is that Mac has nothing to do with someone running Windows, after installing it via Boot Camp. I want to know the answer to this, so I’m posting it here, feel free to educate me if I’m missing something. (Note: names have been changed to protect the (non) supporting party).  So, it is my understanding that Boot Camp only installs Windows on a Mac machine (does the partitioning, installs some drivers for the hardware and guides you through installing Windows from an existing CD) after that when you boot the system you can choose Mac’s OS X or Windows, and that after choosing Windows it’s running ‘natively’ on the hardware and not under any kind of virtualization. From Apple’s site:

Boot Camp simplifies Windows installation on an Intel-based Mac by providing a simple graphical step-by-step assistant application to dynamically create a second partition on the hard drive for Windows, to burn a CD with all the necessary Windows drivers, and to install Windows from a Windows XP installation CD. After installation is complete, users can choose to run either Mac OS X or Windows when they restart their computer.

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As a IT contractor I’m enjoying giving my opinion when asked, and sometimes even when I’m not asked; I have the confidence to be open and honest with everyone and want them to know that. Because of this I’ve been getting to do things I otherwise would not have since they would not have known I was interested or experienced in such things. One of the things I was hired for was to setup Apache on Linux to work with their web instances. It’s been fun, and while I’ve used Apache for over 10 years, there’s always new things to learn. Recently they asked for my opinion on ’support’ options for Apache. Keeping in mind, they already have support for the hardware and support for the Linux distribution, they still think they need another support channel for Apache. To me this a big waste of money and have somewhat made my case to them. While I understand their position that this support is a way to cover themselves if Apache ‘breaks’, the fact that this software is Open Source has to change the way they have traditionally considered support.

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UPDATE: Hold the phone here, before going too gaga over the new iPods, it’s been revealed that they’ve been ‘re-engineered’ to lock out folks trying to sync their iPods using 3rd party apps, or (gasp) Linux! That’s right, they want you to use ONLY Windows or OSX and iTunes…this is ridiculous. See my post on our sister site Left to chance to learn more. This is what we talk about when we say Digital Rights, we can’t give them up now and expect to have them in the future!

If you didn’t see, hear, or read the announcement on the new iPods, go to Apple now and check them out. While refreshing the entire line, they made the (useless in my opinion) shuffle different colors, the Nano shorter and fatter (to allow for video), re-branded the traditional looking iPods to iPod classic, and revealed the hotly anticipated iPod Touch, basically an iPhone without a phone, but with Wifi and Safari. All in all, very cool, but the Touch is just silly, it seems far more the novelty/status symbol, with the real sweet spot for me being the iPod classic. They did away with the shinny plastic (that only serves to collect scratches) of the old iPods for brushed metal, and it looks very cool in the silver (white?), but for me, it’s Black FTW! Damn that’s nice, and here I am listening to the latest release from The Shins (name dropped because it’s such a great CD) on my old 20G click wheel! I have tons of music at home, so larger capacity would be nice, but damn, with that much space I could slap vids of unreleased live shows I’m gathering via bitorrent, and even shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Yeah, that has me written all over it (no, I would not get my name engraved on the back, still trying to think of something witty I would put on there though…’you don’t have to kick it’ would be nice!)

Microsoft is set to phase out Windows XP by the end of this year, even though the majority of businesses have no reason or desire to update to Vista, since most of those updates would require new hardware. It’s just another example of Microsoft not listening to their customers, just to their shareholders. “Computer makers have been told they’ll no longer be able to get Windows XP OEM by the end of this year, despite consumer resistance to Vista and its compatibility problems. By early 2008, Microsoft’s contracts with computer makers will require companies to only sell Vista-loaded machines. “The OEM version of XP Professional goes next January,” said Frank Luburic, senior ThinkPad product manager for Lenovo. “At that point, they’ll have no choice.” Sure, I can throw in my “let’s hope for a major Linux migration”, but I won’t. It won’t happen on the scale it should, but still, some companies are going to start waking up; it has to happen. Hell, if I have to get a job at some small company where I’m tasked with supporting a network of Linux workstations and servers, I’ll do it. It can be done, companies will save money; it’s just a matter of hiring a competent employee that really knows his stuff. (paper MCSE admins, I’m looking at you)