8 Morons Buy $1000 iPhone App
Posted by Stretch | Filed under Apple, Gadgets, Peripherals, Software
You just spent $200 to get a new 3G iPhone, and you spend another $100 a month so you can use it. What is your next stop? How about the iPhone/iPod Touch store? As you are browsing the store, you see an app that costs $999.
Now, the average smart person would see this and ask who in their right mind would buy such an app. It doesn’t do anything, and it costs 5 times what you just paid for the phone. But, as the story goes, not all people are averagely smart. Some are just plain stupid, there is nothing else to describe them.
Now that the phone is affordable enough for a wider audience, a new status symbol has emerged: a seemingly useless application called I Am Rich.
Its function is exactly what the name implies: to alert people that you have money in the bank. I Am Rich was available for purchase from the phone’s App Store for, get this, $999.99 — the highest amount a developer can charge through the digital retailer, said Armin Heinrich, the program’s developer.
Once downloaded, it doesn’t do much — a red icon sits on the iPhone home screen like any other application, with the subtext “I Am Rich.” Once activated, the user is treated to a large, glowing gem. That’s about it. For a thousand dollars.
As the saying goes “A fool and his money are soon parted,” I think this fits in very well.
One of the eight morons that bought the app has posted a video on youtube of the entire app:
The “secret” manta that only buyers can see: “I am rich I deserv it I am good, healthy & successful”
In reality it should read: “I am a complete moron with more money than I can be responsible for.”
Kubuntu 8.04 w/ KDE 4
Posted by Stretch | Filed under Other OSes, Personal
After using Kubuntu 8.04 for a while, I decided to try out Fedora 9. It was nice, at least the stuff that worked was, but it still needs more. I installed it on a laptop, and the trackpad settings were not to be found in the “out of box” installation.
I tried numerous different tutorials I found on the web, trying to get some sort of GUI for the trackpad settings. None of them worked. Using a trackpad without tap is like running with your shoes tied together. So I scraped it, and now I’m downloading Kubuntu with KDE 4. I’ll see how this goes. Hopefully much better than Fedora.
The Invasion Of Web Ads
Posted by Stretch | Filed under Internet, Rants
We knew it was coming, advertising companies weren’t gonna ignore this one. With millions of people on the internet, there is much income for someone to make via ads. But there are good ads and bad ads.
Good ad:
These two ads are what I would consider to be good ads. They are off to the side, and you can still read the content on the webpage without them distracting you. But unfortunately not all ads are like this.
Bad ad:
Bad ads are invasive, stuck in the middle of the content you are reading, or are extremely distracting. The worse case I can think of is one for a free iPod Nano, and as soon as the page loads, its will start an audio ad saying that you’ve won a free iPod Nano, the only way to stop it is to find the ad, and hit the stop button on it. Pop-ups, and pop-unders also fall in the bad ad category.
Due to the chance of running into bad ads, I have an ad blocker installed on my browser. Now, it seems that some companies think this should be illegal since they are expecting to get paid every time someone visits their site.
Responding to the complaints that they are hurting people who put content on the Web — while expecting to get paid in advertising — Palant and Rick are adamant.
“People accuse me of destroying the Internet,” Palant said.
The two suggested that the advertisers and publishers deserve ad blockers because they have imposed so many annoying ads on users.
I have to agree, if ads were only small, and not in your face, I wouldn’t be so ticked at them. But with many internet providers talking about limiting internet access by bandwith, I don’t want ads using up all my bandwidth, especially with these huge gifs that are so annoying.
Via Reddit
Pirating TV Shows
Posted by Stretch | Filed under Internet, Technology
People love their TV shows. But there aren’t too many good ones left. And for those of use that have jobs while those TV shows are on, we have 1 “legal” option. Buy a DVR. So now I have to speed $40 a month to get my cable, and another $150+ to be able to watch my favorite TV shows. This means I am not a happy camper. I want to be able to watch Scrubs at 1:30 in the morning, when I can’t sleep. Or watch Family Guy at 2 in the afternoon when I’m on my lunch break.
But TV networks are dictating that I can’t, and if I want to watch Family Guy, I have to do it at 8:00 at night. If I miss a show, I have to hope they do a rerun, or wait another 12-18 months for it to come out on DVD. This is where torrents come in. You can watch your favorite TV shows whenever you want to.
People are getting used to on-demand content. They simply want to watch their favorite shows whenever they want, wherever they want. To give some more insight into this growing phenomenon, and because Nielsen is not counting BitTorrent downloads, we decided to start a weekly report of the most downloaded TV shows on BitTorrent.
The data is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites. The timing is a bit unfortunate, since popular shows like Desperate Housewives, House and Greys Anatomy just had their season finale last week, but we are aiming to publish an updated list every week from now on.
Hopefully sometime in the near future today’s media companies will understand the basic user. We want to be able to dictate what we watch, when we watch it, and where we watch it. The TV isn’t all that any more. With portable media players and laptops, and with people always on the go, we, the users, should be getting the choice of “what’s on TV tonight?” We have already proven it isn’t up to the network execs anymore, now they just need to accept it, and give us what we want.
Via Digg
Ubuntu Audio
Posted by Stretch | Filed under Other OSes
I’ve finally gotten audio to work on my laptop. It took several hours of searching the internet, and trying many different things. The command that finally got it to work?
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-generic
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
then add the following line to the bottom of the alsa-base
options snd-hda-intel model=hp
Its nice to have audio working again, and thanks to the Ubuntu forums I finally found my answer.
