If you ever get an error message in Windows Mail, (not Windows Live Mail, mind you; Windows Mail. Which comes with Vista.) that looks something like this: “Cannot spell check, this language file has been removed from the spell check module” I have a temporary fix for it. (I discovered this while helping a client the other day.)

Start Windows Mail.

Click on tools.

Click on options.

Navigate to the Spelling tab.

At the bottom, change your language from English (or whatever) to French, (or some other setting.)

Click Apply.

Change the language back.

Click Apply.

Click Okay.

Spell Check the document.

Looks awesome as hell.

There’re quite a few videos up about it on YouTube; I suggest taking a look at them.

Also, Blizzard knows how to build a fuckin’ site, man. Their Diablo 3 site is kick ass. So, by the way, is the video-demo they did of the game. Compared to the former Diablo games, this is an obvious improvement.

Blizzard seems to be cranking out yet another fantastic game.

It seems that, according to a “confidential” source inside Google, the search engine giant will quit running, or at least paying for ads on domains if they’re less than five days old. This, when it goes into effect, could make a lot of the random domain name registering known as “tasting” stop, or more likely slow down a bit.

The reason is simple. The “Add Grace Period” is a small buffer of time that a registrar can remove a domain they’d registered, at no cost to themselves. It just happens to be five days – the same limit as the leaked policy. The thing is, since a domain name is essentially free for the first five days, quite a few rather unscrupulous people have taken to making a business out of registering hundreds, thousands, or even more domains, dropping Google AdSense on them, and then canceling the domains when their freebie time is up. Perhaps unexpectedly, the parked domains can actually garner a LOT of hits – and therefore a lot of advertising money, even after Google’s cut. Basically, it boils down to “Free money” if you automate domain creation/cancellation. This really isn’t fair to legit site owners or, to some degree, the advertisers.

Now, you’re probably wondering why I list the advertisers here. They are, after all, paying for their ads to be shown, and they are, right? Well, yes. But to be honest, would you, as a possible customer, be more likely to click on and show interest in a product related to the page you’re reading than something piled in the middle of a page that is simply ALL advertisement? Especially if you got to said page by accident, likely a typo. There will always be those who see something and click it randomly – like those who try to buy “male enhancement” drugs through spam offers – but the great majority probably won’t.

In any case, although it’s rather interesting that Google (who makes out quite well from their cut of these ad sites) has taken this stand, it makes sense from a legal standpoint. Remember the recent and semi-recent lawsuits about “click fraud” and the like for advertising charges. This may be looked at as another safe move for them. One way or another, if other online advertising companies follow suit, maybe the web will be less polluted with random advert-only websites, as there will be less incentive to create random names to serve ads for the grace period. One can hope, but ad-only probably never completely go away, though. If there’s money in it, SOMEONE will give it a try.

This is just my take on the issue, your opinion may differ. Feel free to comment about it!

Reference, Jay Westerdal: http://blog.domaintools.com/2008/01/google-to-kill-domain-tasting/

They need about 23k a day in 2008 to meet sales expectations of 10million. I doubt they’ll get that. That’s an increase of (roughly) 3k units a day.

There are a few reasons I don’t see that happening. A.) They think that they’ll get 1% of the overall market. That’s pretty nuts in and of itself for a single phone to do.

Secondly, they want to nab up about 50% of the smartphone market. That’s incredibly insane; the fact that they have 20% is already pushing it. Their company just got record numbers and they’re saying that they won’t be able to match anything near that in the next quarter.

So a decline in sales.

Instead of a surge of sales.

And they’re expecting to meet quota.

Does anyone else see how that logic fails?

I mentioned this days before Macworld happened to my friends as we were talking about various different things. (Including some D&D content I’ll be releasing later.)

The thing is, part of this can be blamed on the economy. But only part. Most of this needs to be shouldered by the people who put so much into Macworld.

They made unreasonable expectations, and then Apple said, “Oh, yeah, we’re going mediocre this year.” and they did just that.

The iPhone was cool. The Macbook wasn’t s’much. (Still sleek lookin’, though.)

To be honest, I’m glad, but that’s just me.

Not necessarily. Being the sofware giant that is Microsoft comes with a few pitfalls. One of those is that everyone wants to haxxorz your software and fuck with the people who use it.

When you get good news, though sometimes you just have to hype it, and this is a pretty good example of that. Fewer security risks than any other OS around in the first year.

And people were all saying how much safer they were with OSX. Tee Hee.

I could have told you that. But this guy decided to break it down into ten points for you.

Really, I can sum it up in a number of much finer points:

Overpriced and underpowered. You get very little, and you pay out the ass for it. Sure, it’s sleek, it looks nice, but that’s not saying it’s a good piece of machinery. Paying $2,000 for this thing would be silly. An extra two pounds won’t matter to anyone when you’re looking at a regular sized laptop.

Which is what you’re looking at It’s only marginally smaller than other laptops of roughly the same specs, and for ultra portables, it’s much, much larger.

Not to mention you won’t get any work done if you have to lug around a bunch of accessories. I know for a fact that if someone with an Air came up to me and asked me if they could use my CD Drive on my laptop I’d laugh in their faces and tell them to get their own.

Honestly. Using someone else’s CD Drive? What kind of crap is that?

But in a good way. IE8 looks like it could be a kick-ass browser. Now if they change the look and design layout, I’ll be happier with it than I am right now. (Go Go Firefox.)

You can find more info on IE8 here if you’re interested. It basically just tells you all about how IE8 will have a new tag in it that will tell IE which browser rendering layer to use.

Which is good. They’re thinking about the future possibilities of backwards compatibility.

I didn’t like the idea when AOL was doing it.

I don’t like it now.

If this is what their company wants to do, though, that’s their business.

I honestly think it’ll lose them a lot of customers, but that’s just me. (Both Apple and Time Warner.)

All the guys on DIGG were shouting up a storm about it, though. Some of them were even blaming Comcast for their issues in defense of their favourite ISP’s. I wonder if any of these guys understands that rampant fanboi actions make them appear like morons?

Oh, right. They’re fanbois. They -are- morons. My bad!