Why I won't be buying a Kindle

If you were to go to the Amazon US site today, you would see an announcement regarding the new Kindle models, including the phrase:

There are two types of companies: those that work hard to charge customers more, and those that work hard to charge customers less. Both approaches can work. We are firmly in the second camp.

and

We are excited to announce four new products: the all-new Kindle for only $79, two new touch Kindles – Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G – for $99 and $149, and a new class of Kindle – Kindle Fire – a beautiful full color Kindle for movies, TV shows, music, books, magazines, apps, games, web browsing and more, for only $199.

In summary, they are dedicated to charging customers less, and the new basic Kindle model is $79. All fair and good. However, if you were to go to the Amazon UK site, you would see:

Today, we are excited to introduce our all-new Kindle for only £89.

Wait... what?

Let's do the maths here... US price is $79, which is equivalent to £50 and some change. UK price is £89, which is equivalent to slightly under $139. We have a difference of £39 or $60. Now, I don't have a Kindle currently, but my girlfriend's one has served her quite nicely and I've been considering it on and off for a while, so at £50 I would have bought the new model with barely a thought. At almost double the price though... I don't think I'll be doing that.

I do have to congratulate Amazon on one thing though: they've released the new model at a lower price point than the old one, and still managed to make me feel ripped off. That takes skill.

Amazon App Store Ripping Off Developers?

A few links follow regarding the Amazon app store potentially being really bad for developers. There are a load of posts that reference each other without adding a huge amount of information, so I've tried to pick a few independent ones. Enjoy.

• Amazon.com and my Indie Software Company (Irrlicht3d.org)
• Amazon App Store: Rotten To The Core (Shifty Jelly's blog of mystery)
• Apparatus will be pulled from Amazon Appstore (bithack)

Removing the Ubuntu 11.04 launcher bar

In Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal):

• Click the far top-left button to bring up the search dialog.
• Type "login" without the quotes and click on "Login Screen".
• Change "Select Ubuntu as default session" to "Select Ubuntu Classic as default session".
• Log out and back in.

Congratulation, you have removed the abomination. Prepare for 11.10 where they will no doubt remove Ubuntu Classic as an option.

New iPhone features

The new iPhone OS upgrade is coming, let's take a look and compare the features against my own (over a year old) phone.

Multitasking
I have it, the iPhone will receive a crippled version of it.

Organise icons into folders
I have it. My even older phone had it.

SMS character count
Telling you how many characters you're using is a feature these days? My first ever mobile phone did that.

SMS search
I have the ability to search in a couple of ways, nothing fancy. The API existed from the start though and there are a load of (free) apps to give much more fancy SMS inbox features.

Digital camera zoom
No reason for this to have been excluded in the initial release. It's a basic feature of a camera. Please tell me they already have optical zoom, otherwise this is just pathetic.

Customisable wallpapers
I can't remember having a phone that has a background that wasn't customisable.

So really. These features are what everyone's getting so rabidly excited about? They're finally catching up with several year old technology. Though I suppose if you buy something as restricted as the iPhone you probably haven't looked at alternatives in any real detail.

Google Buzz Fails

Wholeheartedly agreed.

TV Licensing Fail

Today I received a letter from the TV Licensing people (the BBC basically). Let's break this letter down and see how much they fail.

THIS ADDRESS IS UNLICENSED

Yes, yes it is. Thank you for reminding me in block capitals.

YOUR DETAILS ARE BEING PASSED TO OUR ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS

Again with the block capitals. I assume by "enforcement officers" they mean some guy in a van who'll serve me a court notice if they tell him to. What have I done to deserve this I wonder? Let's read on.

We have contacted you before. However, there is still no TV Licence for this address.

Yep, because I don't need one. Remember how TV isn't mandatory? Means a TV licence isn't either. No TV == no TV licence. I like how the tone implies that it is mandatory though. I assume this line (along with the block capitals previously) are trying to make the receiver of the letter worried. They might be able to make a sale to someone who doesn't need a licence.

It may be that you have just moved in. In this case, you should get in touch to let us know. If you have a TV License for your old address, we can transfer it to your new home. Or you may need to buy a new licence.

Note that not needing a licence still hasn't been presented as an option yet.

If you watch or record TV programmes as they're being broadcast without a valid licence, you are breaking the law. If you're found doing so, you could be taken to court and fined up to £1,000.

Shocking. They finally admit there are cases where you don't need a licence. I assume they're required to do this by law to avoid charges of harrasment or somesuch. Either way, they managed to wrap it as much as possible in more text designed to worry you and make you think you've absolutely positively got to have a licence.

I'll stop there as it's just more of the same. There is one classic line though:

Every day we catch around 1,000 TV Licence evaders - you could be next.

No, no I couldn't. Also, that must be an inflated figure. That's 365,000 people a year, meaning that given how long they've been running, a sizeable portion of the UK must not be buying a licence.

For those of you wondering - yes it's true, I don't need a licence. I don't watch (or record) any live TV. It's honestly not worth £143 a year for 5 channels which have maybe one good show a week between them. During peak season. Plus, the BBC is the only channel which sees any of the money anyway, but that's a whole failure in itself which I won't go into here.


Edit:
From the comments: http://tv-licensing.blogspot.com/

Live Messenger Fail

Congratulations Microsoft. Seriously, you finally managed it. After years of using your MSN Messenger and Live Messenger clients in favour of any other (on Windows at least), you've shown me the error of my ways. I could have converted to Trillian or Pidgin and prevented myself from being stuck with ads in an interface which defies even your own GUI standards and best practices documents (not to mention interfacing with the rest of the system in a cock-handed way). Instead I stuck with it. It's the official client, that must mean something surely? Apparently not. I avoided this latest upgrade because I didn't much like the changes that had been made (every big release seems to expand the interface, soon you'll need an array of nine panels just to show the menu bar).

Eventually though you pushed the big red button and I wasn't allowed to log in unless I upgraded. Not because you wanted to force me over of course. No, this was for my protection. So sweet that you think about me. So I dutifully clicked the upgrade button and braced myself for what was to appear.... It didn't. Any attempt to log in now crashes the thing. Apparently I'm not the only one, and (being an average end-user for once) I really can't be bothered trying to apply the fixes on the off-chance they might give me another half a year before it breaks again. So now I'm using Pidgin as my sole client across Ubuntu and Windows. Something I should have done long ago.

Silverlight FAQ Fail

I won't do a detailed post here, just an amusing aside. The Silverlight FAQ (MS's new Flash clone) doesn't seem to like any browser I have available. In summary...

IE6:
Renders completely wrong but functions as it should

Firefox 2:
Renders perfectly but doesn't work right

Who exactly were they targetting? (Yes, IE7, I know, but how hard is it to get an FAQ to render properly?)

XP Fail

My XP install is effectively hosed. Complete failure to boot (fixed with some knowledge and a *lot* of luck), all copies of UPP considered viruses (including archived and untouched copies), failure of windows update, not to mention several long-running issues involving mysterious cpu/disk usage (not virus related afaict) and random crashes (graphics related but not app or driver version specific).

I read from the Book of Ripley: "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Water Supply Fail

It's a classic scenario really. It's morning, 2.5 hours until my presentation (a mere 15 minute walk away luckily). I head for the shower, turn it on, nothing. Kemp gets slightly worried at this point. Try some taps, still nothing. Kemp gets very worried. Phone's the water company, it can take them up to 4 hours to find the problem and up to 24 hours to fix it. Kemp gives up.

I have 1.25 hours left until the presentation, let's see how this one plays out...


Update:
The water company (who don't so much charge me as anally violate me) phoned back and effectively said "it's not our problem". Did I say "effectively"? They pretty much said those exact words. Anywho, we've all been bitching at management and apparently they have someone working on it now and it might (*might*) be back up tonight. It has taken them about 12 hours to figure out the pump is broken. I could have told them that this morning, mostly due to my amazing ability to see the blatantly obvious...

Also, I did my presentation, I rocked. Thank you.


Update 2:
It's the next morning (3 minutes til afternoon in fact), still not on. What do we even pay these guys for? It's now between 30 and 36 hours since the problem occurred. The water company may suck at a lot of things, but at least they check it out within 4 hours (not 12) and quote 24 hours for the usual repair time (not the 48 that this is starting to look like). [Insert more rant here]


Update 3:
Well we've had two more excuses since my last update. The first was that they didn't have the key for the closet/room/whatever with the pump in, so they had to call a locksmith out (just how incompetent *is* the management?). The second was that they can't find anyone who can replace that particular pump. How about the guys who put it in in the first place? It's only a couple of years or so old. Surely the high-tech exciting world of water pumps can't move that fast?

OpenOffice Updates

OpenOffice updates: a renamed splash graphic and a library moved from one package to another.

Number of packages affected: 21
Total update size: 75MB

Modular my ass =P

Windows XP Startup Items

Well my XP login time has got ridiculous, not to mention something killing the tray ("notification area" if you're being strict on terminology) the first time I log in which means I have to log out and back in again for things to work. Anywho, let's see what has sneaked into my startup list since the last time I cleaned it out... Sorry about the size of this post btw.

IMJPMIG: This is "used to simplify the input of Asian characters in the Microsoft Office suite". I don't input Asian characters, nor do I use MS Office. Goodbye to that then.
TINTSETP (x2): Again an IME related thing, but apparently a bit more important. I'll keep it until I find out it's irrelevant to me.
asrunhelp: Something ASUS related. Seems to be under review at various process description sites. It can stay for now.
NvCpl: If you're not using an nVidia card beware, a virus uses this name. My own copy here is a legit service (unneeded though and will come back every time you install new drivers). This one can go I think.
nwiz: As above, this can go too.
Acrotray: Acrobat nonsense. Never found it useful, never will. Go away and stop re-adding yourself.
[no name]: No command being run either. This can go.
Center: Great name guys... Anywho, this is used for ASUS WLan cards. Not necessary then and I don't even have one anymore, so definitely not needed here. It goes.
qttask: A good reason not to use Quicktime, just keeps coming back. Not needed, kinda pointless, it goes.
DragDiag: ADSL modem utility. I use an ADSL router at the moment, so this can go (I actually manually close it every time I log in, so this'll be a nice change =P ).
InCD: I don't use InCD stuff, so this can go. I've never trusted on-the-fly writing of CDs/DVDs.
NvMcTray: Something from nVidia. I don't really care about it, so it can go.
W: Erm.... gone.
MSMSGS: Go away, stop coming back. I renamed your directory so you can't run anyway.
ctfmon: Language bar and alternative text input for MS Office. I use none of the things in that sentence. Goodbye.
Adobe Acrobat Speed Launcher: Speed my ass. Gone.
Adobe Gamma: See above.

That looks to be all. I've skipped over the ones important to the applications I use. What starts up with Ubuntu for me you ask? Well there's... erm... there's gotta be one thing at least hasn't there? The network manager applet? A few agents to help me out? GDM?! It's all hideously outweighed by the hundreds of services and processes that my Windows sessions spawn. Ah well, it gives my HDD and RAM a workout I guess...

Wubi Dangers

So yesterday I had a rather tense time trying to help Overlord fix his laptop. He covered the story in his blog but I figured I'd blog the solution we came up with here too for everyone's benefit.

He had installed Wubi (warning: read this first and remember it is an unofficial beta product) on his new laptop and it was all working fine. That is until the next morning when he switched his machine on to find it stuck in a loop running the POST, searching for an OS, failing to find it, and rebooting to start the process again.

The first thing to do was obviously a Google search, which resulted in several hits. The first hit gave us a vital clue: partition boot sector corruption was occurring. After some fiddling this eventually triggered a memory of a similar experience I had once with Wubi causing partition table corruption after a lockup and unsafe reboot. That time I had used a tool to manually recreate my partition table (luckily I didn't have a complex setup) and write a functioning boot sector to the relevant location. That wasn't an option this time as the tool wasn't immediately available, so I suggested my old backup option. This involved using the XP install disc to fix the corrupted boot sector via the Recovery Console. I only had an XP Pro install disc and the installation on the laptop was XP Home, but luckily that isn't an issue for this type of operation. The first thing we tried was chkdsk to find any obvious filesystem errors, but this did nothing. Running map showed why: the filesystem type could not be detected (a previous data gathering mission [not mentioned above] with an Ubuntu Live CD was able to extract the filesystem type strangely). Knowing that the most likely cause of the troubles was the partition boot sector being corrupted, the next program to run was fixboot, which confirmed the corruption, detected the filesystem as NTFS, and wrote out a new (supposedly working) copy of the boot sector. With fingers crossed we rebooted and waited... only for it to continue happening. Suppressing some combination of cursing and tears we booted once again into the Recovery Console for another try. Again the first thing to be run was chkdsk and this time it actually did something and mentioned fixing some errors, though it didn't say what they were. At this point I was silently praying it knew what it was doing because if it had picked up the wrong filesystem type it could be happily trashing the files on it. map was then run again and still no filesystem type being shown for that partition ("I have a bad feeling about this", praying again I wasn't right about chkdsk being bad). As a last ditch we ran fixboot again (again, seriously, fixing this was enough to induce OCD in someone) and then map and... WOOT! The filesystem was shown as NTFS. Crossing our fingers again for the reboot we waited for the POST stuff to happen and then... Windows. Lovely lovely Windows. I never thought I'd say that. Overlord understandably purged all trace of Wubi from his system and vowed never to use it again.

I think the magic combination was the fixboot-chkdsk-fixboot, though I can't be sure. I certainly don't want to have to do this again.

I should note that I am using Wubi on my machine here (not only that, but running Ubuntu Gutsy beta under it) and I have only had the problem resulting from the lockup-reboot, but I may very well have just been lucky. Basically, an OS with reverse-engineered drivers for a badly documented filesystem with no journalling/transactions available running under a beta installer/loader isn't the best thing to have on your machine. You have been warned.

Bouncers Fail

There is a popular drinking establishment near to me. I won't say which one, but it has an attached Weatherspoons and is a mere few minutes from my place, you should be able to guess. Actually, I say "popular" but to be honest it's not all that good and has been getting rather dead. It has come to my attention that towards the end of the night when it's a bit quieter (and presumably easier to get people individually) at least one of the bouncers has been hanging around outside the female toilets and not allowing girls in unless they do certain things. My sources include an actual near-victim. Now you can write this off as typical bouncer behaviour all you want, but this place isn't a night club (where people seem to accept this sort of behaviour for no good reason). As far as I'm concerned, this is sexual harassment at best and potential rape charges at worst. Needless to say I will not by spending any of my money there in future. And no, I won't be revealing my sources, nor are they probably anyone you could easily guess. I encourage anyone who receives this type of behaviour to speak out and make a fuss, don't let them get away with it quietly.

So as the number of places I am willing to spend money continues to shrink, Whitefriars wins and will always win. Give them all your money =P

Vista Zip Support

Taken from here and based on Vista's support for creating a zip file with your choice of contents, I assume XP might be a bit worse (after all, they've had many years to fix it up).

I captured a Process Monitor trace of the compression of a single file and counted the associated operations. Just for this simple case, Explorer opened the target ZIP file 14 times, 12 of those before it had actually created the file and therefore with NOT FOUND results, and performed directory look ups of the target 19 times. It was also redundant with the source file, opening it 28 times and querying the file’s basic properties 17 times.

[...]

Zipfldr.dll, the Explorer file compression DLL, was in most of the stack traces, meaning that the compression engine itself was ultimately responsible for the waste. Further, the number of repetitious operations explodes when you compress multiple files.

Optimisation needed much?

Sales Calls

The other day I got the sort of sales call I like (if I have to put up with any at all). It went something like:

Caller: Hi, I'm calling on behalf of BT. How do you access the internet at the moment?
Me: I have ADSL
Caller: Are you happy with your service, or would you be interested in switching?
Me: I'm fine with it at the moment thanks.
Caller: Ok, have a nice day.

Nice, short and to the point, let's see more of this please.


On a more annoying front, it's the turn of Windows again. Sometime overnight my machine in the lab grabbed some updates off Windows Update. I didn't know the automatic service was running, I'll sort that out soon. Once it had done this it decided that the computer needed a restart. Of course, in the view of the update client it can't wait or things might explode, so it happily just restarted the machine. Thanks, but what about the webpages and documents I had open, any work I was doing (luckily I do save obsessively) and just random things I had open to leave notes for myself or for amusement? Did they really need to be sacrificed on the altar of the updates that required a restart so desperately they couldn't even wait for me to come and confirm it?

Scan Fail

I've been holding back a rant about Scan for a while, mainly because I was hoping they could redeem themselves... but it appears they may have missed that chance. Let's break down the things wrong with how they operate shall we?

• Estimated Delivery Dates: They let you pick a date for the items to be delivered (though this has to be at least a certain distance into the future, see below). This is good. They don't deliver on that date. This is bad. I had one parcel over a month late and not delivered with no emails from them (again, see below), whereas one they actually sent to me came nearly a week early. I deliberately chose a date a bit further in the future than the first possible one and that was for a reason. If the delivery dates are chosen by them at random, why allow the customer the illusion of choice?


• Dead Time: After you place the order it just sits there in the system for 4-5 days before they look at it. You get the "Order Accepted" and "Payment Received" emails on the day of ordering and then the "Items Picked" and "Delivery Shipped" emails 4-5 days later with no activity at all in the middle. Why make the customer wait through artificial delays? Is charging for faster delivery so important? As a side-effect, this has an unfortunate habit of stopping you getting things. Say you place an order and everything's in stock. Everything is still in stock 4 days later. At the end of the 4th day an item goes out of stock just before they get to packing your stuff. Your things don't get sent and they don't bother telling you (see below).


• Money Handling: Payment is taken from your account as soon as you place the order, unlike Amazon who take the money only when they ship the items. If you need a refund on the other hand, that can take substantially longer. I'm still waiting going into my 5th day after being assured "the refund will be processed as soon as possible". How hard can it possibly be?


• Lack of Communication: If items go out of stock before they ship the order then they don't tell you about this. If you want to know if the shipment will make it to you around the date you chose then you have to go to the site and check every item yourself, there's not even links from the Previous Orders page, you have to manually search for the items. Even worse is they have a service where they send you a text when they ship something so you know to be ready for it. Pity this gets sent the next day, 5 hours after it arrives at your house.

Overall my level of service from them has sucked. So far I have receieved 1 out of the 3 orders I have placed. I have yet to receive the refund for one of the undelivered ones (which wasn't an inconsequential amount) and the other is floating in the void somewhere between "we've forgotten about it" and "we just don't care".


Edit:
I should note that since I made this post, Scan have extensively overhauled their ordering process. Check them out, their prices are still some of the best.

Please Stop

Dear Microsoft,
Please stop undermining what tiny amount of confidence I have left in you. I didn't authorise this program to do sh*t, especially not automatically for something I didn't even know was running.

Yours,
Kemp

Annoying Software

Just a couple of points about annoying software recently. First one is the Ringo screensaver do-hickey that downloads your network's pictures so the screensaver can rotate between them. I never actually use it so I disabled it from running at startup (via the option in the program) - problem solved you'd think. Oh no, that would be too easy. Turns out it still runs anyway, it just hides itself. I found this out when out of nowhere it started updating itself. It didn't even tell me, no sign it was running, no sign it was updating itself, the only reason I knew was because my firewall tells me when programs are launching each other and it caught this happening. I make that two offenses in one: running hidden from the user after being told not to run, and auto-updating behind the user's back.

Second would be Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. This is not an expansion, I'll say that again, not an expansion. It is a complete game in itself which I don't have too much of a problem with as it is pretty good. What I do have a problem with, however, is the 4GB it makes you waste for no reason. You see, it has all the data for all 7 races including the 4 from the first game and the one from the (real) expansion Winter War. The problem is it requires you to have those games installed in order to use those races, even though it has all the data itself. That's copy protection gone mad, a sequel that requires you to have the original installed. I'm going to uninstall the original and hope that when the readme said

if you have Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War or both Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Winter Assault installed, you will unlock more multiplayer features in Dark Crusade

it actually meant

if you supply the CD key for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War or both Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Winter Assault installed, you will unlock more multiplayer features in Dark Crusade

(it does ask you for the appropriate key). Why it requires it for multiplayer and not single player is beyond me, they are roughly equivalent and need the same data.

Sony = Ultimate Lose

Sony have sued Lik-Sang out of existence, I guess that's about where I stop buying anything Sony. My only planned purchases were some PSP bits and a PS2 which I doubt would make any impact on their profits, but still, the principle is there and they're plummeting anyway, which is probably why they felt the need to be this retarded. Info.

According to Sony they are "trying to protect consumers from being sold hardware that does not conform to strict EU or UK consumer safety standards, due to voltage supply differences et cetera". That would be the hardware that includes genuine Sony power adapters with the appropriate safety markings for various countries would it?

Lik-Sang is a huge loss, not only to people who regularly import, but also apparently to Sony employees:

Sony Europe's very own top directors repeatedly got their Sony PSP hard or software imports in nicely packed Lik-Sang parcels with free Lik-Sang Mugs or Lik-Sang Badge Holders, starting just two days after Japan's official release, as early as 14th of December 2004 (more than nine months earlier than the legal action). The list of PSP related Sony Europe orders reads like the who's who of the videogames industry, and includes Ray Maguire (Managing Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Alan Duncan (UK Marketing Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Chris Sorrell (Creative Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Rob Parkin (Development Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited), just to name a few.

I can only hope that Lik-Sang come back under a different name, or that the courts see that Sony are only doing this to desperately grab money and prevent themselves from going under due to their own dumbass decisions.