Author: Portfolioso

Might not be the case…

January 14, 2010

Useless Update

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Thanks for the infographic, Keith:

CRTs Suck

January 12, 2010

Computer/ Tech Related, Rants

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There needs to be a law where all CRTs are instantly banned. It’s 2010 and they have become completly useless. There’s absolutely no reason why any kind of display needs to have a huge ass bulky tube that shoots electrons onto a piece of phosphorous coating… It’s madness, and it’s been around since the 1940s.

I went to my living room to watch some TV, turn it on and hear the loudest, most annoying high frequency tone in my life. It drives me mad and it’s so loud I can’t even watch it. You don’t get that with LCD and OLED displays. It enraged me, because everyone else in this house is old and can’t hear it. Plus the pixels are huge. Awful.. Just awful.

No More Registrations

January 9, 2010

Website Related

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I just disallowed user registrations on this site. There is no point, since anyone can already comment on any post. It’s not like I have multiple people writing for me who need accounts. I keep getting email notices saying that some new person has registered. Well good for you for registering an account, but there is absolutely no point in having one, especially since less than 5 people read this blog. If you know me and need an account because you comment a lot and don’t want anyone else using your name, I’ll make you one. If you don’t know me, you’re SOL. Sorry.

Cablevision at it again

January 2, 2010

Movies/Television

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Good job morons. You just don’t get it. At the rate you guys drop networks, you won’t be carrying anything soon. Food Network and HGTV were dropped because Cablevision refused to pay a slightly increased per-subscriber fee to Scripps Networks Interactive (the parent company). I mean, not that I care or watch these channels, but the point is that this stupid cheap ass company always loves to piss off subscribers. It goes way back to 2002 with the YES Network.

I mean seriously – get FiOS already (if available) – it’s far superior. FiOS gives you something like 200 more channels. Those channels are completely uncompressed and look stunning. Their guide actually works snappily and doesn’t take 2 minutes to load. Cablevision likes to compress the signal because their tubes can’t hold as much bandwidth – meaning that their digital picture looks blocky. Even their HD looks gross. Don’t even get me started on internets. FiOS gives you faster upload speeds than Optimum Online and matching (or better) download speeds. Oh and it sucks if you live in Fairfield County Connecticut, because Cablevision is the best available carrier. AT&T and U-Verse are garbage.

Get with the times Mozilla, You’re so… 2000s

January 1, 2010

Computer/ Tech Related

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At the start of the new decade, Google Chrome is currently winning the browser war. Don’t get me wrong Firefox is solid, and I still love it to death, but there are three things that Google does much better:

  • Simplicity Google Chrome is very clean, has minimal toolbars and has no clutter. Firefox has an antique, confusing menu structure, a bookmarks toolbar and a huge set of navigation buttons. The mockups for Firefox 4 themes mimic Chrome and look sweet, but Firefox 4 won’t be out for a while. 3.6 will be released soon, which implements more HTML5 properties that Chrome and WebKit lack. However, developers need to code sites for multiple browsers, so this is not very important right now since these fancy new features will not be implemented for a while. Drag and drop file uploads are cool Mozilla, but it’s not practical yet. I want to see a UI overhaul. Since it’s such a major change, they are waiting for Firefox 4 – and we’ll probably have to wait well into 2011 for that.
  • Private Browsing This is my biggest pet peeve with Firefox. Ah yes, Mozilla rushed this one out of their asses. That’s because IE8 had a feature called InPrivate and Chrome has its incognito mode, both of which were released before Firefox 3.5. Once again, lets put aside the joke ass IE browser and get to Chrome. They implemented private browsing perfectly. It opens in a new window with a cool looking detective dude on it. At the same time, you can still access your other webpages that are not in private browsing mode. And this is my absolute pet peeve about Firefox – if you turn on private browsing, it hides your current windows and tabs, disconnects you from AJAX-ish sites, stutters, lags, calculates pi and then finally opens. It almost looks like it closes out of one window and opens the next. Pathetic. Suppose I need to open a private page, but still want another window with my GMail open. Not happening on Firefox. But you can with Chrome. When you exit Firefox’s private browsing mode, it then restores your windows, and is again clunky.
  • Speed Before I get to the JavaScript benchmarks, Google Chrome hands down starts faster than Firefox. With that being said, let’s move on to JavaScript and get a little technical to explain some terms. Lots of modern webpages use a lot of JavaScript. A browser has a JavaScript interpreter which interprets the code and as a result, the page behaves accordingly. Javascript is not written in machine language, so it is slower. Mozilla got smart and created a new JavaScript rendering engine called TraceMonkey, which was added to Firefox 3.5. TraceMonkey compiled the code so it runs at machine level, which is ultimately faster. Sweet. Two seconds after this happens, Google decides to break balls and release its new JavaScript engine in Chrome, called V8. This engine is the fastest thing ever (except on Mac OSX – Safari is faster, sorry Google). Anyway – my point: If you have to take one thing away from this whole rambling paragraph, Firefox is significantly slower than Safari and Google Chrome on JavaScript benchmarks. (And forget IE, it’s 40 times worse than Firefox. But no one should have taken IE seriously after 2003, so shut up.)

There are a lot of other things Chrome does really well (syncs bookmarks, looks cooler, does the dishes, etc.) but I am too lazy to go looking for them. I still use Firefox as my main browser, but Chrome is technically better and I use it interchangeably when I need to log into a site without wanting to log out in Firefox and mash around cookies. Mmmmm cookies.

Portfolioso’s orders: Grab a copy of Chrome and try it out. It’s neat. If not, use Firefox. And NEVER use IE. Only morons use that.