So I’m sitting here thinking up weird shit to play for my “YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” sound (because it never seems to get old to have “Where’d you graduate from? The University of DUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHH?” suddenly play when you’re trying to have a converation with someone) and suddenly I want to download Ike’s quote from South Park: BLU. So I do a few searches and don’t find anything, and finally I give in and type “Donkey raping shit eater” wav into google.
Once again, it can’t be stressed enough that one should never type shit like that into an Internet search engine. I wouldn’t have, but it appears more and more that I never actually learn anything, I just repeat the same asinine mistakes over and over.
The first hit is the wav file I wanted. The next two are people using that quote to try and sell sex somethingoranother - I don’t know what, precisely, because I wasn’t sick or tired enough to go look. As fucked up as I am, it just never hit me that the phrase “Donkey-raping shit eater” would occur anywhere other than in South Park BLU or in a fanpage devoted to same.
Seriously, though, I’m really starting to get tired of the Internet.
The whole Movable Type debate rages on, and as per usual, the entire debating body seems to have seperated into two camps:
Camp A: knee-jerk allies of Six Apart who refuse to accept that by charging for software and eliminating the free component for all but the most menial tasks basically destroys the “free, use it anywhere” appeal of MT. Think people who aren’t in Camp B are cheap bastards who didn’t add any value to MT in the first place.
Camp B: Vehemently opposed to any pay-for-play options at all. Believe that Six Apart has treated their users like shit and that they don’t deserve anything other than a kick in the ass. Think the people in Camp A are idiotic assholes who can’t see the forest for the trees.
The truth:
Continue reading “Nobody seems to get it”
So I know “being pissed at 6A” isn’t exactly news right now, but I’m posting this anyway for those of you who aren’t geeky and didn’t catch this.
Six Apart (the up-until-now fucking amazing Ben and Mena Trott, developers of Movable Type, the program used to generate the site you’re staring at now) released the details of their new pricing scheme for version 3. Instead of releasing some sort of completely free alternative, as in the 2.x series, they decided to limit the free version’s number of blogs to 1, thus making it completely useless on badstuff.net. (That is, short of an anonymous benefactor dropping from the sky with wads of cash, and even then, with the way 6A has treated their beta testers, I don’t think I would want to buy their product EVER.)
“Nominal fee” for a business and “nominal fee” for a home user aren’t even in the same fucking ballpark, folks. I call a nominal fee “anything under ten bucks.” If it’s more expensive than that, I have to think about it, folks. Not everybody has a good job. I run this site for my college-student friends and I’m not gonna fucking deal with their horseshit pricing structure. I don’t need world-class support, I don’t need to be listed on their shitty blogs-updated page, I just need software that works when I tell it to work because I’m sick to death of Windows-style software that does what it wants to do on its own time. And I am certainly not going to put up with dealing with the hassle of registering my goddamn blogging software.
Fucking hell, $70 a year is more than I pay to host this site.
Since all the BSN blogs have been running their fucking ads since day one, I’m a little pissed. They aren’t even acknowledging the fact that most of their users are using their software to run little free blogs all over the whole Net. They don’t seem to care. And in return, I don’t care if I run their software ever again, for anything. If you have suggestions for any good CMS that I can use to replace MT, let me know. Two stipulations: no WordPress, unless you can tell me how to make it run more than one blog from a single installation. No non-free software, I’m not gonna do this again.
It’s Sunday night, and that means I can’t sleep, so I’m going to throw back a couple shots of Maker’s and while I’m waiting for it to kick in I’m going to try and write down some of the things I’ve been thinking for the last hour.
Recently, one of my favorite programs (Proteus, a Mac IM client) added product activation. I hate, hate, hate product activation. Actually, I hate copy protection/authentication/antipiracy measures in general, so let’s run with that.
I’ve copied a lot of damn software in my lifetime. I’ve done a lot of horrible things that I could’ve probably gone to jail for. And as I sit here, staring at this tiny screen, typing notes into this piece of software, I feel like waxing philosophical. Big shock. So let’s tackle the computer industry version of pro-life v. pro-choice again.
Continue reading “Of piracy, product activation and delusion”
