When we finally replaced our ancient Dell desktop in August we bought a box that came installed with Vista Home Premium and the promise of a free copy of Windows 7 OS when it came out in October.

Last night I ordered the version compatible with my system, and I'm expecting Windows 7 in the mail sometime next week. Online reviews I've read have mostly been encouraging, but I was wondering if any of you have installed Windows 7 over Vista and what your experiences were.

If you've made the upgrade tell us what you thought of it in the comments.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:26 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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The only thing that can be said about this level of ineptitude is that it takes a committee to screw things up to this level, so there should be plenty of blame to pass around.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:18 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Interesting, of course, but abductees say they feel like being probed again a half hour later.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:21 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Today marks the start of Project Valor- IT, a yearly effort to raise funds to buy Voice-Activated Laptops for OUR Injured Troops (VALOUR- IT).

Any interested bloggers can join the effort on the team of your choice, and anyone interested in learning more about the project can read all about it.

And if you're ready to donate... we've got that covered here, as well. Click the widget, and chip in!

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:24 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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big m t 4 u 2 c

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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At social networking news aggregator Digg, someone posted the code to hack encrypted HD-DVDs.

Digg removed the links to the original hack, only to see hundreds of other Diggers repost the hack. Negative reaction by the Digg community eventually crashed the site.

Bryan Preston expressed sympathy for Rose's delimma at Hot Air:

My sympathies lie with Kevin on this. HeÂ’s being accused of censorship, a charge that really only ought to be leveled at the government and only when censorship is actually occurring, when all heÂ’s doing is abiding by intellectual property law. The HD-DVD encryption code is a piece of property. Rose couldnÂ’t let Digg become the place where the HD-DVD code got out. Doing so might destroy him and the site he founded and thereby the community thatÂ’s rioting against him now.

Later in the day, bowing to community pressure, Digg founder Kevin Rose gave in:

...now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, youÂ’ve made it clear. YouÂ’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we wonÂ’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

I feel a certain degree of sympathy for Rose as well, but find his decision to allow his company to be run by the will of an angry mob to be more than little disconcerting.

That approach didn't work too well in Salem several centuries ago, or for Radika Singh last week.

Kevin Rose may have just set himself up to be burned.

(For those that missed the duck reference in the title, click here and scroll)

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:33 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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My wife got a Sandisk M240 MP3 player for Christmas. Though a blogger I be, a technophile I am decidedly not. We're trying to decide between different music subscription services, and CNET offered reviews of MTV's Urge, Rhapsody To Go, Yahoo! Music Unlimited and Napster To Go.

Do you guys have any recommendations?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:11 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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I was looking through Amazon.com last night and ran across of interesting tools they've developed to help sell merchandise through associated web sites and blogs that seem interesting.

One is the concept of a easily configurable, associate-built e-store that Amazon, being Amazon, had to call an aStore. I put together a quick but functioning aStore; test it out, and let me know what you think about the functionality. As a techie with web usability experience, I find this stuff interesting.

The other concoction is a new "smart" ad-serving software program called Omakase, which is Japanese for "leave it up to us."

I'm not about to start dumping ads in my content, but thought it might be interesting to see what kind of ads that Omakase might dig up for Confederate Yankee.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:31 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Day by Day is now available on your cell phone.

It's the perfect way to spend your time until the cops arrive.

Well that, or hiding the bodies.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 05:53 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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While cruising alGore's internet this past weekend to find an analogy for something as finely tuned as President Bush's various border policies, I just happened to come across the Wikipedia entry for the Yugo.

For those of you who might have forgotten (and those of you still trying to forget), the Yugo is to compact automobiles what the English are to fine dining, the French are to bathing, and radical Muslims are to satire whether the understand the word, or not.

Currently the Wikipedia entry for the Yugo is a bit sparse:

To meet Wikipedia's quality standards and appeal to a wider international audience, this article may require cleanup.

The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view.

Do tell.

Luckily, I managed to obtain a screen capture before the offending content was brought down, so you don't have to guess what "may not represent a worldwide view."

A larger, more legible (but no more coherent) capture is here.

Apparently, the writer is miffed that U.S. precision bombing isn't as accurate as he thinks it should be, as a U.S. air strike hit the automobile assembly line and not the weapons production lines on the underground floors below the automobile assembly line, or because—drumroll please—the United States was targeting the car assembly line on purpose all along.

Of course we were.

Fear the country that fears your Yugo.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:22 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 Boy, the big three really dodged a bullet when the Yugo factory got hit! I think Yugo had upwards of 50% of the US market share prior to that. Good one

Posted by: Kevin at February 21, 2006 07:24 AM (o/IMK)

2 I remember watching Yugo try to make it up the hill on Interstate 15 going out of Bakersville. It couldn't get up to like more that 20mph at top end....too funny. An Autobahn type of car, no?

Posted by: Specter at February 21, 2006 11:01 AM (ybfXM)

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"Yeah, tech support? Medal of Honor: Rising Sun keeps crashing my HMMWV..."

Somehow, I don't think that is what they have in mind:

IBM, the world's largest maker of business computers, on Wednesday introduced new computing systems that it said extend the processing power of video-game microchips to corporate data centers.

The systems will open up new capabilities for businesses in the medical and military sectors, for example, as companies seek ways to use increasingly demanding and graphics-intensive computer applications, IBM said.

Driving the systems is the so-called Cell processor, developed by IBM, Toshiba Corp. and Sony Corp. for gaming consoles including Sony's PlayStation 3, scheduled for release later this year. IBM is now installing the Cell in its "BladeCenter" computer servers, a compact way of building large data centers that run corporate networks.

[snip]

"We see a commercial application for that Cell processor" in corporate data centers, Balog told Reuters. "Several customers approached us to take advantage of this highly graphics-intensive engine, which can render whole cities and landscapes on the fly."

The Cell chip already has found some uses beyond gaming, but the technology being introduced on Wednesday is meant to broaden the potential applications and customers, Balog said. IBM in June agreed to license the Cell processor to military equipment maker Mercury Computer Systems Inc.

With some military companies either currently able or close to being able to monitor real-time battles conditions via layers of GPS, airborne, ground-based and satellite video feeds, layered thermal, chemical scans, and constantly updating individual GPS data currently being tested, a live action, video-game surveillance view for commanders may be exactly what is around the corner in future battle management.

Now if they can just figure out how to add bonus lives...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:17 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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My first "web" job back in '96 or '97 as a "search engine marketing specialist" was for a group of small businessmen that realized that they couldn't find their own companies on a simple web search. In the early days of "search engine optimization services" (SEOs) my job was to determine how search engines ranked pages, and "tweak" web page code accordingly so that my clients would show up accurately in search results for their products.

For example, one South Carolina-based client manufactured and repaired machine tools. I optimized their site to score well for the services they offered. As a result, their services were easily found, and in some cases, they appeared to clients searching online to be only machine tool company capable of doing certain kinds of work, because their real-world competitors were lost in the search results "clutter" several pages back. This is how search engine optimization was supposed to work and indeed, is how it was often marketed.

But this optimization knowledge wasn't always used for accuracy. It was, in fact, often used to purposefully distort search engine results in favor of clients.

This led to a cat-and-mouse game between the search engines of the day and SEO companies. The search engines had to produce and maintain relevant results to survive. Most search engines were unable to keep ahead of SEO companies, and their increasingly irrelevant results led to their downfall. They couldn't keep out the trash, became less relevant, and were abandoned by users.

There is a reason why "to search" on the web today is "to Google." Google was able to filter out the trash.

Today, blog trackback parties are a continuation of the same kind of gaming the system that occurred during the heyday of the abuse of search engine optimization, adapted to work off of the idiosyncrasies of the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem instead of search engines.

Trackback parties "game" the system, and have been used to artificially adjust individual Ecosystem rankings. That N.Z. Bear noticed and corrected an abuse of a system he created is morally defensible. He has to, or otherwise it becomes meaningless, and the Ecosystem becomes meaningless and dies. It's survival of the fittest, and N.Z. Bear is well within his rights to assert his dominance in the food chain to assure his own survival.

Those who intended to game the Ecosystem will be among the loudest critics of this move, and those who are sincere about providing links to create true communities won't care. I guess we'll see which is which soon enough.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:31 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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( h/t Michelle Malkin)

Okay, so he isn't pretty by the standards of those of us who reside on this side of the triple barbed-wire fences, but the slightly-built, pouty-lipped Jeremy Hammond will probably be quite popular inside the cell block after lights-out.

I hope he doesn't bruise easy. more...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:45 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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