Great Deals On Software Every Day

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There is a website out there that I ran across a while back, and I just have to share it with you. Now, I am sure that some of you folks know about this site already, but just in case someone stops by that hasn’t seen this before, you really ought to check it out. It’s a website called ‘Bits du Jour’ which means ‘Bit of the Day’ to the rest of us. What this really means or represents to the visitors of this site is daily deals and discounts of software products. Each day they post a sale or maybe better called a deal on a particular software package for 24 hours, and let me tell you, some of these deals are quite good. It’s not uncommon to see 50% off or more on some really nice software. I know that I have picked up several things that either I didn’t know about or probably wouldn’t have shelled out for until I saw them on this site and at a nice discounted price. You ought to check it out, and do so quite often so you don’t miss anything. One nice feature that they have is that they have a list of what is coming in the future, so you can see if there is anything that you want to look out for. In addition, you can mark items that you want to be notified about when they come up for sale so you can make sure you don’t miss any. That’s pretty cool. OK, enough banter from me, go check out the site now!

*Note: No compensation or consideration of any kind was received by Solarum for this post/review.

Links referenced in this article:

http://www.bitsdujour.com/

Acer Aspire Battery Not Charging

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Greetings all, I’d like to share with you an interesting tidbit of information that I ran across recently.  I have several customers that have purchased and been very happy with the Acer Aspire series of Netbooks.  I liked them so much I even got one for myself, and I too am very pleased with this little dynamo.  I’ll post a review later maybe, it really is a great machine. Especially considering the price, but now I will get back to the topic at hand.

One of these customers suddenly had a problem with the battery not charging.  In fact, the battery was non-existant, it wouldn’t charge or give an error light or really … anything.  Now, the little netbook ran fine when plugged into the AC adapter, so that ruled that out as being bad.  The logical assumption of course was that this customer simply had a dud for a battery.  You know, a bad cell, and open connection, whatever it is it rendered the battery useless much quicker than it should have.

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NO! I don’t want the stupid Yahoo toolbar

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I know times are tough, I got it.  And I know that folks have to make a living pretty much any way they can (I do mean legally of course).  So, it shouldn’t and doesn’t really surprise me when I see some insipid phrase telling me how I really in fact do want to install that Yahoo toolbar piggy backed onto whatever the real application is that I am installing.  I mean really, are you software authors getting that much out of it that it’s OK to piss off your users?  Every time I turn around some application or installer or updater is trying to slip that damn Yahoo toolbar into my computer.  I feel like I should get dinner and a drink first at least.

Now, I have used the Yahoo toolbar in the past, long time ago it snuck in on me.  As far as I am concerned it’s malware, cause you can’t get the damn thing fully un-installed.  To be fair, it’s gotten better over the years. The un-install part that is.  I remember way back I would uninstall it, and on the next reboot it would be back.  I’d uninstall it and then delete all of the files, registry entries, everything.  And it would come back when I booted up next.  It was like that creepy guy at work that always wants to watch what you are doing over your shoulder, it wouldn’t go away.  Still, why the hell do people bundle it all over the place?  Unless something has changed it only works in Internet Exploder … er, Explorer anyway, and I don’t use IE.  Neither do more and more people as we see the browser stats shift from IE to Firefox and Chrome.  Besides, what does it really get you?  Aside from hijacking your browser which is good for Yahoo I guess, but I don’t see any benefit to the end user.  I think it’s one of those Microsoft strategies, take a crappy product, put it EVERYwhere in front of people and hope that if you tell them that they need or want it enough times, they will be stupid enough to believe it.  Or at least incompetent enough to not know how to get rid of the damn thing.

Here’s to you Yahoo, making the Internet suck just a little more each day.  Thanks.

Solaris patchadd Return Codes

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I just posted some new goodness for all of the Solaris admins out there.  I have compiled a list of return codes from the patchadd command for both Solaris 9 and Solaris 10, and it has come in very handy over the ages.  So, I thought I would share.  Take a look at it here, and don’t forget to check out the entire library with all sorts of information in it here.  Enjoy!

HP gets tone on 3Com

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I don’t know about any of you, but more than network cards, I cut my networking teeth on 3Com gear.  Routers, switches, hubs and more, in fact, I still have a 10baseT FMSII hub around here somewhere.  I know, I know, stop laughing, it’s a keepsake more than anything.  I start this pedantic rant down memory lane because it appears that HP (Hewlett-Packard) is going to snap up 3Com in a deal worth almost $3 billion.  Wow, that’s a lot of coins in the couch cushions!  I hope they don’t destroy 3Com like they did Compaq after Compaq destroyed DEC (Digital Equipment Corp).  I am still a fan of 3Com gear, especially when they kept U.S. Robotics (who made the best modem in the world as far as I can tell) mostly whole after the two merged.  I thought this was an interesting tidbit, so I wanted to share it with everyone.

Check out HP’s press release at www.hp.com …

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Facebook for iPhone developer quits project

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This is an interested tidbit of information, at least it is to me.  I read the article linked below that talks about the developer that brought you the Facebook app for the iPhone, Joe Hewitt, deciding to hang it up after he had basically had it with Apple and their tyrannical approval processes for their iPhone app store.  It’s an interesting read, check it out.  It kind of surprised me though, since Apple seems to (me anyway) present this image of being the cool, somewhat aloof non-company company, whereas here it seems like they are acting just like Microsoft or something.  I guess big companies are still big companies, and most of them just can’t get away from whatever it is that makes them a**holes.  Maybe I should start a list of companies that I have dealt with that are good folk to work with, that care and help a guy out, and then those that are jerks.  Hmmmm.

See the whole story at www.techcrunch.com …

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