Category: Modern problems

I’ve been getting a kick out the recent Blackberry tablet ad. You know the one, It opens with a view of the Blackberry Playbook and the sound track is the thumping base line from Queens song Flash.

Can you see where this is going?

By now the world knows that Steve Jobs is not a fan of Flash… Well Neither am I.

I think having to use flash to VIEW a web page annoying as hell.  I miss the old “Non Flash Version” link. I don’t need to see dancing dildos or whatever when I want to get to a manual for my DVD player.

I’m REALLY annoyed by the chronic “There’s an update to Flash” dialog boxes taking up 1/3 of my screen. This is especially annoying when the update is triggered by an AD somewhere on a web page that I’m not interested in. Usually I’m just trying to READ a news article.

I read a lot, so I often have my iPad close at hand. AND THERES another problem.

I’m encountering more and more web pages that I CANNOT DISPLAY on my iPad.

The message ” You don’t have the latest version of Flash click here for a free download” has become all too familiar to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I like my iPad OK but more and more I can’t use it to look at web pages. (Don’t even talk to me about trying to print, or move files between my iPad and other devices.)

If I need to look something up on the Web,  I’ll grab one of the laptops or my Android phone. Yep you read that right… my phone surfs the web with less annoyance and interruption than my 1000.00 iPad. And I might add better than my iPhone EVER did.

For that matter my 250.00 netbook works flawlessly surfing the web.

So what does this say?

Well, I’m a long time Apple fan, and I’m buying products that don’t have the Apple logo on them. I guess that means that even among the hard core fans, Apple is loosing market share.

I can’t envision myself buying another iPhone, or iPad.

I’m spending my money on products and services that offer value, convenience, and usability.
Don’t get me wrong, If the Apple product serves the purpose and is competitively priced then I’ll buy Apple otherwise I’ll choose the other guy.

Mr. Jobs is entitled to his opinion. As are we all.

Unlike Mr. Jobs I realize that continuing to swim against the tide of ubiquity is a losing proposition. Since usability is most important to me, I’ll keep upgrading fucking flash (I don’t have to like it). And my future product purchases will be devices that include flash capability.

Perhaps it’s time for Apple to step away from Mr. Jobs famous reality distortion field and have a strong dose of wake the hell up.

Well I figured it out.

I’d been having trouble with WiFi and Windows 7 accessing my NAS server.

I finally figured it out this afternoon while I was trying to set up something entirely different.

It’s bloody simple really.

Windows says that firewall are either on or off but there are levels to it’s being on and off. As it turns out, there is a concept of Domain firewalling that is not obvious. The default appears to be blocking on Domains.

Turn that off, and bingo everything works as expected.

You know it would have been nice to have seen that in the main firewall window. Instead I stumbled on it completely by accident.

However it’s sorted out now and I also figured out how to open the firewall on my DSL modem to allow access to my NAS server over the internet.