These are my links for September 26th:

• Robert Reich’s website -
• Big Ideas -
• Nine Months of WoW UI Modding -
• WUU - WoW UI Updater -
• http://www.techcrunch.com/ -

Just the other day a friend of mine made a comment in an email about how his computer was not running all that well under Windows Vista, to which I replied:

“Windows Vista is the spawn of the devil!”

He responded by asking me what I had “against” Vista.  He had only had a few minor problems with it (italics mine), such as several items of software not working, including video drivers I would imagine.  He is a keen audiophile, and mentioned that for him the most annoying thing was the time when iTunes would not function.

Here is my reply to his question (which I believe he had already answered in part):

I don’t like Vista because it is built on the premise that everyone who uses it is a potential thief (whether they are or not). There are parts of Vista that the person who has bought the computer hardware, and has also bought the computer software (including Vista), has no control over - Microsoft does.

In the future you, and everyone else using Vista, may find yourself locked out of your own computer because Microsoft find something you are doing objectionable (most likely because you haven’t paid them enough to do it, on a repeating basis).  Or another scenario is that the overzealous and oversensitive “protection” system ( e.g., “tilt bits”) produces a false positive and shuts you down even though you are doing something totally legitimate.

For an interesting (and controversial) analysis of this see the article referred to in my April blog post - http://turbott.net/blog/2007/04/22/the-longest-corporate-suicide-note-in-history/ .

Copy protection doesn’t work - it merely makes things harder and more cumbersome for the average honest user.  Pirates have been able to hack past every single copy protection system yet devised, including that for BluRay, HDDVD, and the protection on the iPhone.  The average time that passes between a piece of (DRM protected) music appearing on iTunes, and the same piece of music appearing stripped of copy protection on some peer to peer site is around five minutes.  Once an item has been hacked, anyone with access to the internet and a search engine is able to find a copy (hassle free, that will run on any computer system with ease - except Vista) by entering “{item x} torrent” into the search engine…

I will never deliberately purchase Windows Vista until such time as I have no choice.  This will only be when the majority of games I am interested in playing will not run on anything else.  Even then, I will probably keep a seperate games’ machine, tainted with Vista.  The rest of my network will continue using operating systems that I have legitimately purchased, and therefore can expect to retain control over, instead of Microsoft or any other third party…

Here endeth the rant!

These are my links for September 25th:

• The Internet Book Database of Fiction :: Home -
• The Internet Speculative Fiction Database -
• Royal Jewellery Studio - Home -

Epitiro, a UK-based international internet measurement company, has recently surveyed the broadband speed of the five foremost ISPs in New Zealand.  What doesn’t surprise me very much is that the state telco ISP (NZ Telecom’s Xtra) is not first second, or third.  It is interesting that British Telecom repeatedly comes number one in the same survey carried out in the UK.

Epitiro press release here.

NZ responses here and here.

I have not been able to yet find a response from Xtra…

Someone to Love

Stacey’s Mom

These are my links for September 23rd:

• SpywareInfo :· Spyware and hijackware Removal Specialists -
• Home - The home of Spybot-S&D! -
• Sunbelt Software - Anti-Spyware, Anti-Malware, PC Security, Email Security Software -
• The Spykiller - Index -
• CastleCops® -
• gHacks technology news -
• Outrageous Fortune - The official site -
• Food Standards Australia New Zealand -

Outrageous Fortune

These are my links for September 18th:

• MMO-Champion - World of Warcraft Guides and Raid Strategies -
• Geekzone: technology news, blogs, forums -

These are my links for September 17th:

• Auckland Traffic Website -
• Yahoo! Widgets - 1,000s of Widgets for your Mac or Windows Desktop -
• Workers Online : Issue No. 356, 21 December 2006 -

These are my links for September 15th:

• Main Page - Sopranopedia - The Sopranos Encyclopedia -
• Personality & Psychological Profiling Instruments -
• Instapundit.com -
• IEEE Spectrum: In This Issue -

An amusing excerpt from something I was listening to while walking to work this morning:

One of the earliest and most aggressive exponents of this economic imperialism was Gary Becker, the Chicago economist par excellence, who in an article published in one of the profession’s most prestigious journals applied the principles of microeconomics and consumer behaviour to what he called the market for marriage. Becker defined marriage as an arrangement to secure the mutual benefit of exchange between two agents of different endowments. In other words, people marry in order more efficiently to produce ‘household commodities’, including ‘the quality of meals, the quality and quantity of children, prestige, recreation, companionship, love, and health status’. The rational person will base any marriage decision on quantifiable costs and benefits. The gain from marriage has to be balanced against the losses - including legal fees and the costs of searching for a mate - to determine whether marriage is worthwhile.

Becker went on to analyse the effect of ‘love and caring’ on the nature of the ‘equilibrium in the marriage market’. To do so he defined love as ‘a non-marketable household commodity’, noting that more love between potential partners increases the amount of caring and that this in turn reduces the costs of ‘policing’ the marriage. Policing, of course, is needed ‘in any partnership or corporation’ because it ‘reduces the probability that a mate shirks duties or appropriates more output than is mandated by the equilibrium in the marriage market’. There’s no need to put a padlock on the fridge if your partner loves you. After pages of differential calculus, Becker reaches a triumphant conclusion: since love produces more efficient marriages, ‘love and caring between two persons increase their chances of being married to each other’.

What Becker’s wife thought about this analysis is not recorded, but in 1992 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was sufficiently impressed to award him the Nobel Prize for Economics for this and related work.

These are my links for September 12th:

• RPG Outfitter | Equipping Your Toon. -
• Simple Tagging Plugin — Software Guide -
• LOL: The Life of Leo - Leo Laporte’s Blog on Vox -
• Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus -
• http://lorelle.wordpress.com/ -

These are my links for September 9th:

• Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End -
• Urban Legends Reference Pages: Captain Pugwash Double Meanings -

These are my links for September 7th:

• Shovelware -
• The Wertzone -

These are my links for September 3rd:

• Comodoâ„¢ Free Firewall Software Download -
• Matousec - Transparent security: security software analyses, research and reviews -
• Firewall Leak Tester -