Alt-This.com - your technology podcast

Yeah yeah, that's a lot of G's, that was the point..

I woke up this morning and entered something into Google and got back a weird bunch of results so I decided to Google "Google" to see if it would be the same. It was. This is what happens when Google glitches!

Hey, I thought it was funny anyway. Google telling you every site for every search result may harm your computer. I knew the Internet was a dangerous place, but is it THAT dangerous??!

Cheers!

It's been a busy few weeks for Comcast as they've finally come out and put a cap on users accounts and also announced plans to start throttling the bandwidth hogs. Beyond that today I was trying to send some e-mail through my own web server and realized I could no longer reach it at port 25, so yes, now Comcast has started blocking 25 in my area as well.

If you listen to show #22 you'll know why this post is called unsubstantiated. It's because I couldn't say that word. At least not within a proper time period not to look either totally drunk or totally stupid. I wasn't totally drunk, or even a little drunk at the time and you can make your own decisions on the other one.

The point I am making here is what you get with Alt-This is the show as it would have been if you were sitting around with us live and recording it. We don't edit out our blunders, unless they happen to be huge and unentertaining. We believe the live and off the cuff feel of the show makes for the best show. We hope you agree.

Unsubstantiated.. it's easier to type, trust me.

Every time a new version of Ubuntu or any other flavor of Linux comes out I think this could be the one that's usable. And every release comes and goes and it just isn't ready for prime time for one reason or another.

My main gripe? The way web pages render in Firefox under Ubuntu. I'm a baseball fanatic, anyone that knows me knows I spend more time on mlb.com than I do on just about any other site. When I try to view mlb.com using Firefox in Ubuntu it just doesn't work right. The drop down menus end up going behind the Flash box, making the site navigation pretty much useless.

I thought this has to be something I'm doing wrong so I did the usual, I made sure I was running the latest and greatest version of the OS, in this case Ubuntu 7.04. I made sure I have the latest Firefox and the latest Flash. No luck, same problem. I swore up and down this had to be something I was doing wrong because the last version of Firefox / Ubuntu / Flash did the exact same thing 6 months or so ago when I tried it.

Then I started doing more and more research and I found that I wasn't alone. This was a widespread issue, yet nobody seems to want to own up to just why the hell this kind of simple thing doesn't work right. I finally came across this thread on a message board:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=437525

Check out the screen shots. Then check out the answer given by someone claiming to be a Senior Support Engineer with Adobe.

Engineering is investigating this. The root of the problem is that no linux browsers support WMODE transparency. So other possibilities are being looked at but no firm solutions or timeframes yet.

So maybe I'm just picky, or maybe I just can't overlook such a pain in the ass glaringly annoying problem like this and soldier on pretending to love the whole Ubuntu / Linux experience. To me, if Firefox can't render pages correctly under Ubuntu / Linux then I'm sticking with Windows. Hell, at this point I'd rather try Apple's OS X than attempt to go through the hassle of spending the time to set up Ubuntu only to have simple things just not work.

If someone at Firefox or Adobe or even a member of the Ubuntu crew can come up with a fix to this problem then maybe I'll be able to rid myself of the daily Microsoft fix. Until then, I don't care about all the things Ubuntu does right. When it comes to using it on a daily basis to do simple things like web browsing it's no contest, Ubuntu is a useless pile of crap to me.

UPDATE: I've tried other browsers under Ubuntu as well. Someone over on Digg.com suggested that Opera worked fine with mlb.com. I installed Opera and it's the same problem, the drop down menus are coming down behind the Flash box. Also, the text of the menu bars are cramped and overlapping. The site just overall looks wrong and jumbled.

Tried Konqueror and the menus came down over the Flash box on the left but came down behind the video Flash box on the right. And, as with Opera the text on the menu bars was distorted and the site overall just looked wrong.

I stand behind my initial assessment that Ubuntu Linux isn't ready for prime time if you want to surf the web and hit any sites that mix Flash with drop down menus in the vicinity.

My only real question at this point really is why this isn't a bigger issue as there are PLENTY of sites that use this combination. Are all the Linux users just SO anti-Microsoft and SO in love with Tux that they can just ignore things like this? If you're a Linux user that thinks this is no big deal then I'd like to hear from you. I've heard for years why Microsoft was bad because they didn't follow web standards within IE to make pages look right. Well, to me this is Linux being unable to render a page correctly in multiple browsers. Where's the uproar?

Sorry on the delay in getting the show edited and posted, it's been a busy weekend on this end. I'll have it up sometime tomorrow afternoon!

Thanks!

Hey everyone, I've made it back safe and sound from two weeks in the beautiful Florida sun. I watched a lot of baseball and had my fair share of good Amish food. I don't know much about the Amish way of life, but they seem to have superior knowledge on the secrets of baking the best pies in the world.

Episode #12 is in the can as they say, so I need to edit it up and get it posted sometime this evening. It was recorded on Thursday night, which was my travel day, so Jeff and I are both in rare form. Nothing like kicking back with some Tullamore Dew after traveling 1200 miles and talking a little tech!

Just wanted to let you know it's coming.. soon.. I promise!

-Darren

I was reading the Comcast forums over at broadbandreports.com and came across this article. I've read a lot about Comcast and their magical bandwidth limits for users in the past, but something surprised me in the comments to this post. A few of the people responding were bashing the original poster for his "abuse" of Comcast because he was using approximately 200GB a month in bandwidth.

Yeah, as most of you have probably already heard Gmail is now FINALLY out of beta. I'm sure that surprised a lot of people who like to joke that Google NEVER takes things out of beta...

Well, in this case maybe those people were right. Ever since the boys (and girls) at Google opened up the doors for any Tom, Dick and Harry to snatch up a Gmail account the service has sucked. Most of the times I try to log in I get an error message. Or, if I'm lucky my mailbox will actually load but then when I try to open a message I get an error message.

Come on Google, this is our freakin' e-mail you're messing with here!! Maybe all of these new accounts should have been on new servers or something because I NEVER had a problem with getting my mail before. For a company that can seemingly download and store the whole internet daily I'm surprised they can't handle this.

Get it together, or I'll have to switch over to Yahoo! Mail where I can play with their new Ajax interface.. and where I can even actually log in and actually read my messages without dealing with error codes!

ADDITION: Ok, I am an idiot! I guess Google isn't saying it's out of Beta and I guess I was incorrect in believing that it was open to signups now. I know I read multiple stories on Digg recently that said Gmail was now open. I stand corrected on those items. Gmail HAS been quirky over the last day or so for me though, giving me a lot of error messages and for some reason at one point wouldn't load in Firefox when it would in IE. I'll keep an eye on the problems, hopefully was just something strange.

I can't believe the folks over at digg.com gave this article over 3800 diggs! It makes me wonder what all these techies REALLY know about tech!

The fact of the matter is that while changing from black to white may save some energy on CRT displays, it might actually cause LCD displays to use slightly more energy. The article claims that about 25% of the monitors in use are CRTs, which may or may not be true. Assuming it is though, that means that a change to black would save 25% of the machines some power and could actually cost more for 75% of the machines!!

LCD displays use a constant back lighting to provide light to the panel. When a LCD monitor shows pure black, that's actually the point at which the monitor is working the hardest, closing all of those little doors to block the light from coming through. I'm sure that some tests could be done to show this, even if the power to keep all the little doors closed was minimal the best case scenario is that Google changing to a black background would have ZERO effect on the 75% of the world that uses LCD displays and might actually cost a little MORE energy for them.

The teacher was convicted in what has to be a huge miscarriage of justice and now faces up to 40 years in prison.

Unfortunately, an expert the defense team hired was unable to testify in court. He did publish his report on-line here. It's sad that this kind of crap can happen to people.

Check out this blog for more info and some good links!