Technology Rant
I am going to try and stay on focus and get all my recent wanting to rant about technology out there in big post. Now that does not mean I am not going to talk about technology for the rest of the month, as I do plan on that. It just means I am hoping to get all the negative things that have been bugging me for the last little bit out there. Hopefully in the next couple of days I am going to have converse post of all the things that have been making me feel good of late (and there are several of those). But this is frustrations and includes twitter tools on blogs, rude and perhaps dumb tech support people, tech so-called reporters, and last the Attorney General of New York.
First up is the one that really has been in my crawl the last couple of days. So I have this tool on my blogs called twitter tools. And that tool lets me include tweets in the sidebar here and conversely push out tweets about new post I make. That all seems reasonable, except I do not want the tweets about the blogs to go out. First they shorten the URL to something you can read and I don’t think that is required as I have very mobile readers that actually come to the site and those that do manage otherwise. Beyond that though, I already have automatic feed pull for most social networks and this just adds one more stinking post to the same group of my friends that I get. At current time the option is set to be off, but yet, it still pulls it and pushes it out. I am still trying to think of work around, but I am seriously considering a different feed for tweets to the site and dropping the twitter tool because of this – otherwise I see a possible two twitter accounts. Of course some social networks let certain tweet be blocked based on criteria, maybe I should look at that end too.
Next and probably even more of a pain in my behind is tech support with a vendor. This particular vendor had me on hold at the tech support line for something close to 2.5 hours today. This was after just shutting something down that was probably legitimately done, but without any warning and not something that was really costing them. After some very nice complaining and pursuit to see what could be done, was basically told “NO!” I really have my doubts to this person understanding just how much is spent with his company, but what is more the lack of response and comments on the ticket system make that seem even worse. Lastly the guy on the phone had to check everything with someone else before he can answer me when I asked a deeper question, further keeping me tied to the phone instead of doing anything beyond that.
Granted it could have happened to anyone’s operating system, but in this particular case it was Ubuntu. Just happens to be, in my opinion, the easiest Linux distro and likely contender for going beyond the uber geeks like me and landing on a desktop near you. Anyway, some so-called reporter, announcing the release last week of the new version, used a RC (Release Candidate) for his review instead of the golden actual release. He scooped everyone by an hour or two of the actual release with his blurb, but he reported somethings as not working that did indeed function in the actual full release. Everyone, and especially reporter types, should keep in mind an RC is just that and not necessarily very reflective of the final release, even if just days ahead of date – especially given the rapid distribution systems that are available today.
I am going to finish with a complaint about the Attorney General of New York. This guy has some guts and is going after Intel with an anti-trust case. Claims that they squeezed and did not play fair with AMD, even forcing major vendors like HP, Dell, and IBM to use Intel chips over AMD. Maybe some of that did go on, but I am not sure it is really a fair argument. Back a few years when AMD was beating Intel in performance they were really catching on and becoming a major player. Add to that they were often beating Intel in the price for same performance and AMD had a really winning combination – and folks like me and millions others were paying attention. Somewhere along the way though Intel started to gain back performance and especially with a number of innovations that have since become standards. So now, to some extent AMD is back really being an also ran and they are not, for the record, the price leader in very places anymore either. Now I will say, that Intel did some of the things they need a bit of a hand slap, but then I think about all the things coming out Wall Street in the last couple of years and how much false and misleading and even just crappy reporting from especially financial companies and the semi shell game that was played by them with consumers and investors alike and I really think this Attorney General should be more then busy in his own proverbial back yard.
