However, Apple arbitrarily decided to disable the following features on the older 3G model (which I actually own):

• Multitasking (this is the big one, most awaited feature)
• Wallpaper on home screen (why? so it keeps its “depreciated” looks?)
• Battery percentage (What? Why on earth? — Do note that I haven’t confirmed this one, I was just told it was the case by multiple sources)

This made me cringe. While collections (folders) are actually nice, I don’t need them. But on a lighter note, PwnageTool 4.0 also came out today, and deep within its bowels, if you create a custom image, you have the option of re-enabling those features right back in. So I did.

I am pretty much convinced Apple is not doing this out of concern for performance, but rather, to create an artifical demand for the newer models. Look, I don’t mind if you pump out a new hardware model every 6 months, if it is significantly better than the previous one, people will switch. In fact people will most likely buy anything with an Apple logo on it regardless of its merits. But don’t voluntarily cripple the previous models to force people to upgrade. That’s just fucking greedy. Usually one sells a new product by putting emphasis on its merits, on what it does better — not by preemptively forcing the previous models into obsolescence, even if the new products have very little merit of their own. If that is the case, simply, you know, create a better product.

However, the iPhone 4 is currently getting incredibly good reviews all around. Engadget even goes so far as to call it the cream of the crop:

We’re not going to beat around the bush — in our approximation, the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone on the market right now. The combination of gorgeous new hardware, that amazing display, upgraded cameras, and major improvements to the operating system make this an extremely formidable package.

Granted, Engadget seems to be madly in love with anything Apple, but usually, they are still fair in their reviews and visit both sides of the hyperbole equally, the awesome — and the suck. For them to be so enamored with the new hardware, it must mean it is better, no? That alone should be enough, I think.

Then again, I am probably being incredibly naive. Either way, Apple, I am through with your shanenigans.

You’re basically engaging into a form of post-purchase masturbation, where you sit in almost religious contemplation, envelopped in a smug sentiment of confidence in your purchase, and how much joy it has brought you.

You then obviously want to repeat the experience with a friend, who will confirm how right you were in your purchase, and perhaps be inspired to get one too, so you can fill countless hypothetical conversations with how much it rocks, over dinners or perhaps even funerals.

But there’s always this sceptical friend of yours who makes a weird face when you showcase the object of your affection to him, who brings his face closer to your giant cinema display as to physically show that he’s making an honest effort to understand what the fuck you’re on about. And you stand there with eyes glistering, still trying to save the day, asking a rethorical question in such a way that it would make any Philosophy major cringe and instantly able to sand down coarse wood with the goosebumps he’s getting: “Is it not more awesome?! Isn’t it the greatest thing you’ve ever seen?”

You obviously know he doesn’t share your appreciation for the chunk of hardware you just blew 600$ on, yet you still hope he’s just not seeing it yet. So you keep pointing out how things are better looking, crisper, much more fluid and polished as the previous version, but you lose conviction with every word.

Then the verdict comes down. And then you remember that any sentence prefixed with an apology invariably spells bad news for you.

“I’m sorry. I don’t see it at all, it looks just the same on my system at home.“

The emphasis is mine. You don’t feel ready to question your own first impression, write your excitement off as mere placebo effect, and return your purchase, enshrouded in its new plastic scent for proper burial and a muscled application of the “15 days satisfaction guaranteed” rule involving the explosive combination of manager, making a loud, obnoxious scene, and bystanders for witnesses.

The logic behind this is simply that the system at home the friend refers to in his verdict is a piece of shit Acer machine bought three years ago. That’s god damned aeons in IT time.

The other factor involved is the fact that he has a refurbished CRT monitor, and you use your long standing friendship as an excuse not to describe him as a fucking savage.

So you go on and assume that there’s a possibility that he’s simply jealous of your new purchase. So you keep probing a bit, until you reach the alarming conclusion that he really doesn’t see it.

When the friend realises that he has offended you in some way, he usually backs off with an excuse such as “Oh, maybe I just forgot what it looked like on my machine!”.

But it’s too late. It’s nice of him to try to patch things up, but operation mutual masturbation has failed miserably.

The reason why I’m bringing this up is because, more to the point, most of my friends don’t see the difference between SDTV and HDTV. And that infuriates me.

See, I have a 1080p HDTV set. I have a BluRay player. I also have a shitty sound system but I don’t really care about that. So when I play Apocalypto, on BD, don’t tell me you don’t see the difference with normal TV. It’s not like you’re watching a movie, it’s more akin to looking outside the window, only to find Maya people in your backyard.

When I change channels to Discovery HD on the Illico HD PVR, don’t tell me it’s the same. It’s so crisp and clear, you feel like you’ve been blind for the past few years (and it’s only 720p!).

Whenever I watch the hockey game on RDS HD (which Montreal won 5 to 0 against Boston yesterday, by the way. Pftblbl!), I can see the scars skates have inflicted upon the ice ring, I can see the fucking razor burn on Claude Julien’s face.

I always use Apocalypto to showcase BluRay and HD in general, crank the output to 1080p, fire up the movie, and let the first few minutes roll. Then I jump to the temple scenes, where colors are vibrant, and the image is so crisp you get to see every single detail on the Mayan ladies with jade teeth, and then you have no choice but to actually believe in it. It’s a really nice, immersive experience.

So I did just that the other day, hoping to disprove the myth that HD is just some kind of gimmick once and for all, for the lady.

Once the temple sequence was done, I looked up at her expectantly, my arms outstretched towards the LCD television, grinning like a madman. She just squinted for a while. Then her head swayed from left to right, reminiscent of a bobblehead figure. The verdict came down.

“Yeah… I guess It’s sort of better. But I don’t have my glasses.”

My Cisco PIX 501 for instance, was easy to patch for DST.

azrael(config)# sh clock
12:30:25.078 EST Tue Mar 13 2007
azrael(config)# clock summer-time EST recurring 2 Sun Mar 2:00 1 Sun Nov 2:00
azrael(config)# sh clock
13:30:26.999 EST Tue Mar 13 2007
azrael(config)# wr m
Building configuration...
Cryptochecksum: 7898776d bee63c89 5f3ab01b 9064f51c
[OK]

I’ve had the pleasure of patching production servers running Oracle 9i and UC4 Global. Doing the Oracle jazz helped me fully grasp the deadly truth that is, I am not a DBA. With reason. I have spent a day just to determine the consequences of the DST changes. Turns out none of the systems used TZDATA columns, whatever that means. So I have pushed the patch into the next maintenance window.

Since everything java is affected, I had to run around upgrading every single jvm and jdk running on servers. The problem is now apparent with a Macromedia/Adobe Jrun instance we have. Log entries are off by one hour for two weeks, and I hope none of the transactional code is actually fucking up. I couldn’t patch the jdk on the production server because of a nasty bug with anything above 1.5.0_05, where the Java compiler outputs notices no matter what, and Jrun interprets these as errors, thus rendering your web application non functional in some cases.

I think it is time they get rid of Jrun. It has brought nothing but misery. So, all of this just so it can be dark outside when I get up to go to work, and “save costs” while spending thousands trying to get everything patched up? (A giant bitchslap to companies who provided their patches last tuesday before the change). Just so that we can all spend the two weeks adjusting to the change and living with jet lag-esque effects? Sometimes I wonder who the fuck decides these things…

And now, it turns out uncle Jobs came out with a total boner killer.

No third party applications on the iPhone.

Jobs said:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

He also said:

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

Of course, the third-party applications on my Treo are such a goddamned liability. Meh.

This probably made a few thousand hackers (myself included) cringe. I was eager to hack around on the device and saw infinite potential. I already saw myself running a terminal on it, and ssh’ing around from my 600$ USD iPhone.

600$ USD is around 705$ CAD. That price would have seemed right if I was allowed to do whatever I damn please with it. Now it is just another overpriced toy which I doubt I’ll ever buy…

Oh well. My bank account is probably happy. As far as I’m concerned now, Steve just announced a very expensive brick.

Opera in the morning is too much, especially when you have an ear infection, and are trying to do some work.

It now stopped but then he proceeds to watch shitty videos, again, with the sound at full blast, like he has been doing for the past two months. When he’s gone, I’ll disconnect the internal speaker of his desktop machine. Watch me.

That’s a metric fuckton. Well, I guess the enterprise can justify it, else, they should have gone with the SOHO stuff. I use cheap hong kong made knock off flash SIMMs in my personal 2611 router. 20$ for 64 megabytes on e-bay. Don’t do that if you’re using your router seriously, though, unless you like words like “void warranty” and “obscure failures”.

On another note, their new logo looks like two raised middle fingers. Appropriate, for the price tag.

for /F "usebackq tokens=2,*" %i in (`net use | find "..."`)... 
| was unexpected

I really wanted to like writing cmd scripts. But the parser is way too obnoxious when parsing brackets. For instance, you can’t set an environement variable in one branch of a conditional statement.

if "text" EQU "othertext" ( 
    set VAR=value 
) else ( 
    echo Not Working. 
)

This will fail silently or with unexpected results. Can’t wait until PowerShell becomes mainstream enough for me to use.

I have no idea why, but Courier, which is the mail server suite I use, in conjunction with DJ Bernstein’s qmail and vpopmail, all this lovely stuff keeps breaking all the time on Gentoo. I’ve had courier hand mask’ed since they kept screwing up.

Now, the lastest baselayout prevents authdaemond from starting, and leaves no evidence in the logs. The Gentoo bugzilla is confusing, they say it’s Courier’s fault, and that they need maintainers, and that uh.. I don’t know, I’m not sure. They sound like they expect the problem to fix itself, or that it will magically occur at some time.

Gentoo is definitely not something you should run on a production server, sometimes.

Update: Well, updating to the lastest courier and removing /etc/init.d/authdaemond seems to have fixed it. The ones who are having problems are actually those who are running the “unstable” courier, with ~x86 flags. I wish you guys luck.

Then, the conversation drifted onwards (Drifted onwards? Isn’t that some kind of paradox?) to things that call home, that send information to companies without your consent. I believe that, while at a minor cost and with very minor impact, the WGA tool does just that. (Indeed, if you have been following the news, it turns out that the Windows Genuine Advantage tools calls home once a day to the mothership, “to ask if it should shut itself down”, they say). It talks to a server somewhere in redmond that I did not aprove of. Nowhere in the EULA does it says it does, too. I never agreed for that communication to happen. It’s a matter of principle.

My friend retorted with something like “Well, I don’t care about the information on Google, even if as you say, this very Google Talk log is being stored on their servers, since I have absolutely nothing to hide”.

I tried making an analogy, picture someone going in your house and looking through all of your stuff, and all of your drawers. You have nothing to hide, but that person still searches through just in the event that you might. He said he would not really care if someone did, because he has nothing to hide, but I could sense that this second answer was vaguely softer, more unsure. That uneasy feeling was there.

Well, this is the exact same thing. It pisses me off that in the IT world, you are considered guilty until proven innocent, software companies overrule every single right to privacy you have, and they get away with it.

This is my machine. My computer. I paid for it, assembled it myself, and gave it much love. This alone should enable me to have complete and utter control over what the hell happens on it.

More broadly now, this is my network. I own all the machines. I pay for the commercial DSL line. I own every single piece of hardware connected to it. I should be able to have complete and utter control over what traffic goes through it, right?

It just amazes me how people can quickly disregard their god given right to privacy, their freedom and security just to please a big company that doesn’t like them, nor even care about them in the slightest regard. The only thing they care about is your money.

It’s a matter of principle. Benjamin Franklin said:

“They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security”.

And damn he was right.

Fuck you.