Richtig said Fred!

I have just decided to try buying an album from the Amazon MP3 store, the purchasing process is rather simple, allmost like Amazon’s purchasing process. During the purchase they have only listed my US address, none of my Canadian addresses so I suspect they won’t sell you any MP3 if you are a Canadian. That’s free trade MPAA style. Then I proceed to install the Amazon downloader program, so with a few clicks it should make my purchases simpler, I WAS WRONG… During the first song download the program crashed, ok well they say it is in beta, I was expecting this since I am on Firefox on Windows Vista, which is not the most common configuration. But to add insult to injury, when I have tried to redownload the MP3 album it told me everything was allready downloaded. Ok but what about the fact I have paid for it and got zero songs?

The solution was overly simple once you know that just restarting the Amazon MP3 Downloader will actually just resume downloading from the last place it crashed. That’s a good feature and in the end after several searches on Amazon’s support, I wish they would have written that fact in their FAQs.

I wanted to share this with everyone interested in Games. We have just launched a new version of our game critics site. It is unfortunately availlable in french only. Maybe one day we’ll have enough spare time to translate everything and make it bilingual. We have been writing these game critics weekly for over 1 year for the “La Presse” newspaper in Montreal with Chantal from Divetheweb.com.

Weekly Game Critics (in French)

Watch the new Microsoft Zune Phone-i Ad

Here’s a transcript of a chat session today I have had with Shane from Palm Support, as you will notice, if you own a Palm 600 you better not upgrade to Windows Vista because you will be in a sea of trouble until Palm reverses its policy of not supporting its customers with older Treos:

LiveAssist Transcript

Problem : Cannot configure a Treo 600 with ANY HOTSYNC on Vista

Shane > Hello Frederic, Thank you for contacting Palm Technical Support. My name is Shane. How may I help you?

Shane > Hello.

Frederic > I have just upgraded my laptop to vista and cannot do any hotsync

Shane > I understand that you want to Sync the device with Vista.

Shane > Let me know the make and model of the device.

Frederic > Treo 600

Shane > I would like to inform you that the Treo 600 is not compatible with vista.

Frederic >
The newer beta version 6.2 recognizes my palm but I cannot see any data on the destop even though it says it synchronized

Shane > Let us cross check it.

Shane > Click on the HotSync manager in the system tray and select settings.

Frederic > ok

Shane > Click the summary and check the logs there.

Frederic > Although i tried reinstalling palm desktop 4.14 as administrator on vista but now the palm desktop constantly crashes whenever i open it

Shane > Okay.

Frederic > I get no problems at all performing hotsyncs

Shane > The treo 600 is not compatible with Vista OS.

Frederic > All my files get backed up both with hotsync 4.1.4 and 6.2

Shane > Thats the reason why it is not working and the data is not transfering.

Frederic > Err palm is not windows based, how come it works on linux and all previous versions on windows and that the desktop both 4.1.4 and 6.2 can synchronize

Shane > I will explain to you.

Frederic > The problems lies with the desktop and palm’s willingness to supports its older devices not with the device itself i think…

Shane > The treo 600 was not a proper device and it was having many issues.

Shane > So it was decided that it will not be supported on the new operating Systems.

Shane > Thats the reason why it is not being able to work on Vista OS.

Frederic > it still works properly for me and my wife and we don’t have any issues with it and we have been through 10 years of palms starting with the palm pro and THIS IS A FIRST

Shane > Okay.

Shane > This model wasnt a successful model for many of the users.

Shane > Thats why it was decided not to support it with latest OS.

Shane > Thats the reason why this device is not intended to work with Vista OS.

Frederic > Is this palm’s official statement that it doesn’t supports its “older” users at all???

Shane > No. We always like to assist our customers.

Shane > Its just that the device will not be working on Vista OS.

Frederic > still the treo 650 also came before vista and yet it is supported

Shane > If you have any issue with the device on XP or others, we are here to assist you.

Shane > Treo 600 is older that treo 650.So it works with vista bit not treo 600.

Frederic > Ok then I will post this on my blog and try to get leverage in order to get palm to change its decision.

Shane > Okay.I apologize for the inconvenience.

Frederic > i understand you cannot make this work all by yourself, but palm should address this.

Frederic > Thanks for your time.

Shane > It will look at it.

Shane > You are welcome.

Frederic > Will blackberries work with vista ?

Shane > We try our best to satisfy the users.

I just wanted to mention, my first game review was published in a Montreal french newspaper named La Presse. It should be published every two weeks in the Arts section, the other week e-Chantal from Divetheweb.com will be writing the review.

September 20th Update: You can now read my game review on cyberpresse.ca (in french).

This is the last image he had posted with “Ready for Action” as a description:

His Nickname was fatality666 on vampirefreaks.com, you can check his photo gallery on vampirefreaks.com.

September 17th 2006 Update: Vampirefreaks.com did the right thing and took down Kimveer Gill’s profile page and photo gallery.

Today it seems that liviving in Montreal does not seem any safer than any other place after all. The Montreal Shooter wounded several persons, this is a sad day for Montreal. I think Stephen Harper should think twice before going ahead and limiting our gun control law like he was planning to. Shame on you Mr. Harper, this is not the first shootout in Montreal, 16 years ago the Polytechnique massacre should have made it clear to everyone that pro gun lobbies are just merchants of death.

Read about the Dawson College shooting on wikipedia.
Read about Valery Fabrikant and the Concordia shooting in 1992 on wikipedia.
Read about the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989 on wikipedia.

Ok, I am writing this post from my new Vista installation on a Athlon 64 Laptop. The installation is now fully graphical, although the first part when all those 3.3 Gigabytes of files are being copied is fairly long and you don’t get any details other than a percentage completed… You get to know also that on my computer Vista is taking 6667 Megabytes…. That looks like a joke since the movie The Omen came out 3 days ago on the 06-06-06… We all tought that Bill Gates was the devil, but it seems Vista is its evil spawn

The installation went well, all hardware was recognized on my laptop except for the sound card and 2 other devices which were loaded once I tried a Windows Update. The wireless works well, the sound too. I will try it for a couple days then try my hand at Vista 64 Bit, I hope the 64 bit experience is better on Vista than on Windows XP because the hardware support was completely non-existant on XP (complete lack of Wireless, Video and Audio 64 bit drivers). I went ahead and installed the ATI drivers for Vista and they work without a hitch (haven’t tried a game yet), I also installed Netstumbler to test the wireless networking of Vista, and I can report that all is well (so far). You can see from my picture that Vista is currently being certified with Easy Mac.

I have just downloaded Windows Vista Beta 2 since it is now availlable to the public. Having to use a proprietary download manager was not without pain since there are already several methods like Bittorrent that could perform the work and make distributing it much easier than having to press retry in a browser for 8 hours straight. So my first Vista experience was pretty painful so far. I suggest using a fat internet pipe since 3.3 gigabytes takes a while to download. I was wondering if they forgot to remove a memory dump from the DVD image because it is so large compared to even Windows 2003 R2 which stands at less than 900 megs.

If you want to try out Windows Vista Beta 2 visit Microsoft.com.
If you want a faster alternative (and it’s free too), then try Open SUSE 10.1.
If you want a popular alternative, try Fedora Core 5.

Seagate has just announced a hybrid hard drive that will have 256 megabytes of flash memory, so that files which are used often (such as the files required to boot windows) or files that are saved could be stored on the flash memory instead of having to restart the hard drive. This is especially good for laptop users since it could mean extended battery life. Now imagine the performance boost if these drive could find their way into desktops too, they would let PCs perform write operations using a much larger cache than those 8 megabytes typically found in today’s IDE or SATA hard disks. I’m already planning my future desktops with 1 GIG cache SATA drives at 10K RPM. It would be good if the drive controller on the HDD was smart enough as to perform defered writes when i’m not doing anything on the disk. As allways a hardware solution is not as flexible as say an operating system doing caching, but writing to a disk even when the OS handles it allways consumes system ressources no matter how you look at it. Hardware just performs better, allways.

Check out the PCMag.com article about Hybrid Drives.