Category Archives: Completely clueless

apparently some EU telecoms are just as greedy and stupid as their US counterparts

Posted on April 13, 2010 by ward

It seems Telefónica, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom all think that somehow, they should get paid twice for the internet bandwidth they provide to their end-user customers. An article in the Financial Times quotes leadership from those three companies saying … Continue reading →

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facebook: stop the language nonsense (part 3)

Posted on February 17, 2009 by ward

If you thought Facebook’s language incompetence could not get worse, you’re wrong. I received a couple Facebook notifications today in French, from people who live in Flanders. Facebook, this is the 21st century. It’s really not that hard to see … Continue reading →

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Facebook: please hire programmers that speak languages other than just English (part 2)

Posted on February 5, 2009 by ward

Facebook is apparently still sending out notifications in the preferred language of the sender instead of the recipient. The problem is worse than just that though. I received a notification in German that said: … hat dich als FreundIn auf … Continue reading →

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Dear facebook – please fix your languages

Posted on February 2, 2009 by ward

Facebook is now sending out notifications *in the preferred language of originator*, instead of the recipient. Someone accepted your friend request but uses Facebook in Spanish? You’ll get the notification e-mail in Spanish. That is of couse silly. This evening … Continue reading →

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from an alternate universe

Posted on January 22, 2009 by ward

Microsoft has launched a mobile music service, crippled with DRM. In 2009. While almost all music is available for digital download without DRM, legally, from the likes of Amazon or iTunes. There are some baffling quotes in this article. It’s … Continue reading →

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Windows + warships == asking for trouble

Posted on January 16, 2009 by ward

The British Royal Navy is outfitting its warships with Windows. This is of course a fantastic, forward-thinking idea. It’s not like these warships could then become infected with viruses or anything…

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the idiocy of region encoding

Posted on January 11, 2009 by ward

I don’t own many DVDs, but at least some of the Flemish ones that I do have are not region encoded. But somewhere, someone decided that it would be a good idea to put region encoding (zone 2, Europe) on … Continue reading →

Posted in Completely clueless, DRM | 1 Comment

hotmail’s smtp welcome message

Posted on October 25, 2008 by ward

I came across this rather nonsensical message from one of Hotmail’s MX servers: $ telnet mx1.hotmail.com 25 Trying 65.54.245.8… Connected to mx1.hotmail.com. Escape character is ‘^]’. 220 bay0-mc9-f11.bay0.hotmail.com Sending unsolicited commercial or bulk e-mail to Microsoft’s computer network is prohibited. … Continue reading →

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43% == 50% according to Metro

Posted on October 16, 2008 by ward

From today’s Metro, Boston edition: I’m thinking someone at the Metro needs a crash course in elementary math.

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the PDF from hell

Posted on April 7, 2008 by ward

I came across a nice PDF today. It caused an HP 4100 to just hang ‘processing job’; a Xerox 4500 printed it but overlayed the page with a lovely postscript error, and an Imagistics im2520f (a rebadged Minolta, really) just … Continue reading →

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