Rant: Apple, our saviour!!!

I just found this link http://tinyurl.com/lwy2fb – before, I describe things in it, go read it. Go on.

Now, lets see, where shall I start? The title…”Apple Saves Twitter Universe From Twitpocalypse”. Sorry, no, they didn’t. They fixed 1 app. That is all. They didn’t save the “Twitter Universe” at all. Twitter worked perfectly fine, so did twitterfox, and loads of other apps.

Reports warned that Twitter would allegedly stop working once the number of tweets surpassed 2,147,483,647

Not quite…Twitter worked fine. It is some twitter apps that stopped working, because of the number of bits they used to count the tweets.

Apple rose to the occasion in epic fashion to push through approval of the crucial Twitterrific update in record time.

I’m sorry, but it is not record time. If i remember correctly, the flaw was recognised a few weeks ago, and was steadily getting bigger and bigger as it got nearer to the time. There are plenty of twitter apps that pushed updates to fix twitpocalypse BEFORE it happened. Not 17 hours afterwards.

Meanwhile, the rest of the anxious Twitterverse tweeted news of the impending 2.0.2 update submission over and over again ad nauseum, with hundreds of Twits repeating the exact same text launched as the only glimmer of hope during the Twitpocalypse blackout that struck Twitterrific.

O trust me, I know. I was fed up of people posting that stupid tweet. If people cared about the twitterrific update, they would be following twitterrific. I don’t care about twitterrific. ReTweeting was clearly abused in this case, where thousands of people retweeted the same annoying tweet that told tens of thousands of people that don’t care about it.

Basically, this blog post is saying how apple is amazing because they pushed through the twitterrific update through the app store in 17 hours. However, I am saying that the update should have been created at least a week before hand, when we already knew about it (and if they don’t know about it, they clearly don’t listen to their users, because there were loads of people talking about it for WEEKS).

Apple can’t be congratulated for doing what they should have been doing. It shouldn’t take that long to push an update through the app store. This clearly just highlights Apple’s app store ideas.

I am just annoyed that twitterrific and Apple are being congratulated for this, when loads of apps that I use never stopped working. Twitterfox, gwibber, s60twitter. I’m sorry, but when you hear that this is going to happen, you change the 2 lines of code that changes the number of bits in the code. Simple.

RANT: Pulseaudio? Why can’t we get it right?

Ok, I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 and, yet again, my audio set up really just doesn’t work. The first program that uses my sound, steals it. I’ve not figured out a way around this yet, but I will sometime.

I know, however, that this is not pulseaudio’s fault. It is Ubuntu. If I can direct you to http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/09/fedora_11_review/ where they talk about Fedora and it’s pulseaudio implementation, which has just got better. They even have a cool application to turn specific application’s volumes up and down.

I have found very few people that have been complaining about sound in Fedora 10 or 11. But yet, we still can’t get pulseaudio even working in Ubuntu, never mind getting fancy features into it, like Fedora.

What is it that causes all these problems with pulseaudio in Ubuntu? I would love to know.

RANT: Madonna…trying to adopt a child in Malawi, while in New York.

I have been trying not to blog about this for a few days now, but I’ve given in when I heard something else today about this. Let’s get the background first…

Madonna adopted a child from Malawi a few years ago. Illegally might I add. The Malawian law says that one has to have lived in Malawi for 18 months before one can adopt a Malawian child. Madonna, however, managed to get this child even though she had never lived in Malawi.

Now, Madonna wants to adopt another Malawian child, and when she tried first of all, the judge (rightfully) said no, not until she has lived there for 18 months. Adhering to the law. Now, however, she has gone and decided to appeal the decision. Her lawyer is saying that “The best interests of the child should be put first.” Which I agree with, which means that Madonna should not be allowed to adopt her.

Today, I heard that last night Madonna was at some art festival. So far, the length of the appeal, Madonna hasn’t even been in Malawi.

I am sorry, but, first of all – the law is the law. Madonna shouldn’t be allowed to circumvent the law. Second of all – why the heck should she be allowed the child if she won’t even go to the country herself. She would rather spend her time at an art festival. I’m sorry, but if Madonna ever gets this child, then I feel sorry for the child. It deserves better than a Mother who would rather go to an Art Festival than try and get her child.

RANT: The Sims 3: We have a contract with hardware manufacturers.

Disclaimer: My title is not a quote from EA, nor have they said anything.
I do not work for EA, and my opinions expressed here are my own,
and there is no fact in whether EA have contracts with any hardware
or software manufacturers, or anyone else in that case.

Now that I’ve done the legal stuff…on with the rant.

I bought my girlfriend a pre-order of the Sims 3 for Christmas, as she really likes Sims 3. It was meant to come out on Feb 26th. Which we thought was an OK time to wait. Then, however, they decided to delay the release till June. Now, obviously this is something that couldn’t be avoided, and this is not what the rant is about.

What the rant is about, is the system requirements for The Sims 3. I shall quote from http://www.thesims3.ea.com/view/pages/feature6.jsp:

The Sims 3 requires at least the following:

FOR WINDOWS XP
* 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
* 1 GB RAM
* A 128 MB Video Card with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
* The latest version of DirectX 9.0c
* Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2
* At least 6.1 GB of hard drive space with at least 1 GB of additional space for custom content and saved games

FOR WINDOWS VISTA
* 2.4 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
* 1.5 GB RAM
* A 128 MB Video Card with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
* Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1
* At least 6.1 GB of hard drive space with at least 1 GB
of additional space for custom content and saved games

For computers using built-in graphics chipsets under Windows,
the game requires at least:
* Intel Integrated Chipset, GMA 3-Series or above
* 2.6 GHz Pentium D CPU, or 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent
* 0.5 GB additional RAM

Now…I’m sorry. But a 2.4Ghz processor? 1.5 Gb of RAM? 6.1 GB OF DISK SPACE WITH AT LEAST ANOTHER 1 GB FOR SAVES?

What do they expect people have? Not everyone has a supercomputer. My computer could run it…but my girlfriend’s laptop (which is the computer SHE has, so it needs to run on that) has nowhere near that spec. Whether the RAM is total RAM for Windows as well…I’m not sure. But even still, her laptop only has 1GB in it.

I just have a feeling that EA has a contract with hardware manufacturers to bulk it up so people have to buy new hardware to run the Sims 3.

I mean…come on. The Sims 3 needs more system resources than Crisis for goodness sake.

RANT: Government pays £12.5M for some porn.

Yep, thats right. £50M for a piece of porn. Wanna see?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7863635.st

Now, I’m off to bed, I’m not in the mood to rant too much about it, I’ll do that tomorrow. Just thought I’d make sure I remember about it.

——-The next morning——–

Ok, so you probably won’t care about the fact that I am writing the rest of this the morning after, but I thought it would explain the change in writing style.

So, what I would like to know is, where did the credit crunch go? I thought we were in recession. No? We have that amount of money to spend on a bit of canvas with some naked ladies on it? Ok…fair enough.

What makes this painting worth that stupid amount of money anyway? What makes ANYTHING worth £50M?

And…more…they are looking to raise another £50M of our money to spend on a picture that is pretty much the same, just with a few less naked ladies.

RANT: PAT Testing!!!

What do these have in common:

• RAM Memory
• RAID Disks
• PIN Number
• DNS Server

The answer is…they are all wrong

• Random Access Memory Memory
• Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks Disks
• Personal Identification Number Number
• Domain Name Server Server

These really annoy me these things. There are plenty more, but I came across another one today… PAT Testing!!! PAT – portable appliance testing. So why call it Portable Appliance Testing Testing?