Archive for the ‘ 2001 ’ Category

Geocities Sucks

Author: JoshMiller

Oct 7

Not to bite the hand that feeds me, or so the saying goes, but sometimes I wonder why I continue to use Geocities. I mean, way back when (like 3 years ago or so) when I created my first webpage, It wasn’t so bad. Sure there were pop up ads, but hey, everyone has those. Actually Geocities was great. it IS great. What is bad is Yahoo/Geocities. You see back in 1999 (about the time that Pokémon webpage stopped being updated) Yahoo bought out Geocities. This created my first complaint, though it’s probably my fault.

It fucked up my passwords. You see now you had to merge your Geocites account into a Yahoo account. Part of the end result was I lost the password to my Pokémon webpage, although this was really a welcome thing in the end as I was getting tired or working on it and wanted an excuse to no longer have to make up Pikachu replies. Though I’m still somewhat disappointed because just as it was really starting to take off it was forced to be killed. I had such great ideas for it, I had done a lot of that really nice walkthrough. Then again, I probably would have given up when Gold and silver came out, since it would mean twice as much walkthrough and 100 more monsters to create tidbits about. also when I registered the site with Anipike it was like the third Pokémon site listed that wasn’t just an article about Porygon’s CHILD SEIZURE ATTACK.

Another annoyance came from the little Java garbage pop ups they installed. Chances are there is one right now in the upper right hand corner. These aren’t so bad though because at least it’s not another window and they can be closed just as easily. Also there was that whole Boycott Yahoo For Stealing Other People’s Work crusade. I think I used the whole even as an excuse to not update for a while.

And so the latest problem comes from an apparently recent event. File transfer limits. While I’m sure they used to have some sort of limit in effect before, it has become evident that they must have greatly lowered the amount of data one website can send before being closed temporarily. I’ve never seen anything official about this myself, but then again all those helpful notices Geocities sends me are directed to a hotmail account I never check that has most likely been shutdown by now. Anyway, lately it seems like every time I try to access a site located on Geocities that has any sort of substantial content, I get messages about file transfer limits. These messages suggest returning in an hour, and after returning several times during several hours and days later and still never finding a hole I have to say that this limit is way to strict. People loose visitors, people leave. Unless the site is like this one and takes up a grand total of about 100k, it’ll be down forever. I suppose there are good reasons for this, such as preventing people from hosting warez or MP3s within Geocities, but personally those lame blocks Angelfire and Tripod use are somewhat less annoying because then you can actually still actually get to the site if you need to. Plus this limit works rather badly against site with real content like say a SIMS skin site. I mean fuck I’ve been trying to access this place for a week now I think. Perhaps it’s time to make up my own anti-Yahoo page, though I’m not exactly hosting 15 megs of shit here.  

Comments Off
Filed under: 2001, Blogging and Social Media | Tagged as: , , ,

Linux Users

Author: JoshMiller

Sep 15

In a recent article we discussed the crapiness that is Linux. Now there is a second aspect that we wish to discuss, Linux users. You see it’s a general stereotype that people who use Linux are paranoid, condescending, un-accepting of "lesser people’ and generally a bunch of asses. You see, these people use a "superior OS" which means they are "1337" and "more intelligent". Recent studies show that at least some of these stereotypes are true. Really though since a trait is a stereotype, it stands to reason that it gained this title through some sort of tried and true ritual, and that it is generally, true anyway. We have a few examples…

Consider THIS, from a poster appropriately called "Linux_User". Not only has he "dumbed down" the goals of the "average" computer user, aka a Windows user, but he makes a claim that "Linux is the hardcore power users OS, In Linux you have absolute control over your hardware." Which of course when asked what he DOES with said absolute control we get no response. The thread just dies a few posts later. Ironically (like rain on a rainy day – Alanis), the thread is ABOUT the fact that Linux users will often make brash claims with out providing any support. Like it’s super magical, all you have to do is mention the very word Linux and super fairies will pop up and dance around your computer increasing it’s performance ten fold.

Of course you’ll never have any sort of decent software support without Emulating Windows, but hey, you’re using the better OS here people! On another note, Linux users will refuse to a) accept that Linux is actually emulating Windows with programs such as Wine and b) will refuse to provide straight answers when asked to support the reasoning that one OS acting like another OS isn’t emulation. It makes them feel more special if they refuse to accept that they still need Windows based software to actually be able to DO anything on their computer.

And yes Rob, propaganda certainly does drive Linux. The same sort of propaganda that Linux users say drives Windows. You’ll never get a Linux user to accept that they do this though. Intellectuals such as themselves are above such petty small minded ideals.

Not all Linux users are evil, Mike here is pretty decent, but still, this shows that some Linux users are at least trying to fight the stereotype. Anyway for more information, and first hand experience, we suggest starting with these threads.  

Comments Off
Filed under: 2001, Linux & Open Source | Tagged as: , , ,

The World of Linux

Author: JoshMiller

Aug 26

Welcome to the world of the "1337". A world full of confusing completely useless "How To FAQS" and almost worthless Operating Systems. We have decided that being 1337 is not nearly worth the trouble it takes to install such a cumbersome piece of shit system. Especially when said system won’t be able to run Diablo 2 or Half Life, or SIMS, or pretty much ANYTHING should we manage to get it installed. Anything I really want to do in Linux I can already do with Windows anyways. I can get free compilers for any language for Windows, hell I went out recently and got a free C/C++ compiler fairly easily. Or maybe I want to customize the look of my desktop. Or perhaps your preference is in a new interface.

Ok, I suppose you are already saying "but that’s not free!" Well fuck you leech, if you’re going to insist on it being free then I’m sure there is a crack out there for it. Trust me, navigating through pop ups and warez pages is about a thousand times easier than trying to figure out what options you need to install to get your hardware configured properly or what the 5 million text input commands for Linux do.

The ultimate problem is of course it’s not "user friendly". It’s perpetuated that way because those that use and promote Linux like to feel "special" because they can do it and you can’t. Sure you can do more with your computer than they can, but hey, why go for easy use and functionality when you can have an elitist attitude. Sure Linux users argue that they can do anything a Windows user can, but when you get right down to it, the OS requires so much customizing only a handful of those people can ACTUALLY make good on their threats. This being because they have spent all their waking time making minor tweaks and fixes.

Why this sudden hatred? Well I only lost a hard drive to the thing. Almost lost the whole computer. Luckily I can feel good knowing I know enough about DOS and Windows that I could keep the computer from dying completely. I mean sure Windows crashes from time to time but it’s never talked a whole fucking drive with it. And generally I’ll get frequent crashes in Windows and then after a bit of fairly easy tweaking and reconfiguring I can go for months without a crash. Give me minor regular maintenance over full time daily overhauling anyway.

I’d like to end here by not turning into the "Devil’s Advocate" so to speak and bashing Windows. I’ve found that generally overall it has a few glitches but then so does everything. Generally the bugs go away. Plus it comes free with pretty much any computer you buy from a store. So hey, if you want easy to use, with lots of power, and minor glitches, go for Windows. If you want hard to install, confusing to understand, cryptic to work with, go for Linux. Just make sure you don’t use your main computer as the test machine, chances are you’ll fuck it up.  

Comments Off
Filed under: 2001, Linux & Open Source | Tagged as: , , ,

Web Scripting

Author: JoshMiller

Aug 10

For today’s topic of discussion, we will concern ourselves with THIS site. It’s nothing really personal with this particular site, it’s just a convenient example of what we are discussing here. Let’s say you are browsing this site, searching through their selection of Counter Strike models (which were decent and numerous from what I saw), and you decide to download one of these models. Now chances are if you download models, or anything in general, you want to save a lot of the zip files you download. I mean it’s good to keep the zips of all the models you download for in the future you may wish to use them again, and if you have the file on your hard drive or on a
CD somewhere then you don’t have to go out searching for the model again in hopes that the site you found it on is still in existence.

So what is the problem The files start downloading themselves. There is no chance to pick to save this file because it will automatically start opening itself. Now
usually on pages with Autodownload Scripts there will be a place that says Click here if the file does not start downloading. But often these buttons don’t work properly if Save target as is used. And file catchers such as Getright don’t understand the scripting being done here. So in the end you get a set of files in some directory somewhere without a quick easy way of backing up said files without zipping them yourself. Unless of course you dig through the internet cache. Which is a bit of a hassle but not too difficult. But really it could all be saved if the page would just link straight to the file in question instead of using all this annoying script ID passing.

Actually slightly more annoying than the autodownload is the anti-right click script. This is the one that when you right click to save a file or a picture, instead you get this big ugly SORRY CAN’T DO THAT type message box. Once again, these can be circumvented sometimes by opening the file in an HTML editor (like NOTEPAD), and finding the URLs of the image files yourself and downloading them with getright, but this is a lot of work. also for pictures it’s easy enough to simply press print screen them past into paintbrush, crop, save, then there is your image. Once again, too much work.

And lastly we have the ever annoying instability of Java and other web scripts used for special fancy menus and interactions. Let’ go back to the Counter Strike site mentioned earlier. While navigating this site, due to the scripts being used, my web browser crashed. Not only did the browser crash, the whole fucking PC crashed causing me to have to reset. Not just so you know guys, creating a webpage with shitty buggy Java isn’t a good way to gain repeat visitors.

Comments Off
Filed under: 2001, Internet and the Cloud | Tagged as: , , ,

Search Engines

Author: JoshMiller

Aug 1

Since I’m sure you know what an internet search engine is I don’t think I really need to go into too much detail on the subject (though I don’t expect you to actually KNOW how one works. These little babies are almost or the backbone of the internet than the HTML language. I mean sure, without HTML there wouldn’t be any webpages to view. Well there would but then, Java is lame and so are pretty much all the other ‘flashy’ languages that eat up bandwidth for no real reason other than to be annoying.

Anyway, without the search Engine how would you ever find any of those webpages? Sure there is word of mouth (or text maybe) but chances are you’d just get stuck in some small circle of pages liked by you and your friends.

And thus the idea of a searchable archive of webpage categories came to be. Think of it as the card catalogue of the internet. But of course unlike your local library (probably) the internet is vastly commercialized, and it is becoming more so day by day. Back in "the day" you could search for any subject and get lots of generally useless information on any number of personal webpages devoted to that topic. People had webpages about Noozles and Giant African Land Snails all over. It was pretty nice because while generally these pages were clones of each other in every aspect, once in a while you could find a halfway decent original page. But then comes big bad Mr. Capitalist with his need to market.

So now search engines are (most likely paid to be) quite biased to "dot com" results. Search for any general topic, and instead of getting a bunch of nice personal webpages on the subject full of "real world" opinions, you’ll get a dozen links to dot com opinion pages, that are paid to think everything is great. Try finding information on your favorite Mega Man game and instead of a link to a fan site fill of pictures and art and game tips from people who played the game for more then ten minutes, you’ll more likely get a dozen links to IG(ay)N or Gamespot.com with their nearly identical reviews and or several online retailers trying to sell you a Mega Man game (your results may vary).

I suppose maybe the whole great concept of "having your own webpage" is just starting to die off. I mean suppose you do get 100 links to nice websites with little goodies on them, chances are these websites will have been dead for a year or more. No one seems to want to keep with what they started. Or maybe they realize they aren’t going to get rich off the ‘ten cents a click’ ad they put on the webpage with their personal photo album. Or possibly there is just a very large glut of webpages now, who wants to search through 500 results for the good stuff? Then there are other subjects one could search for I suppose besides games. Like say pornography. That may be a rather lengthy subject though for it’s own article. But I’ll say this, if you have to pay for the AVS password then your website is still not "FREE".  

Comments Off
Filed under: 2001, Internet and the Cloud | Tagged as: , , ,
View more posts »