opinion

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Albury

April 25, 2013 in Soapbox | Permalink

Greg and myself are in Albury today, talking about his channelpace system, this time I drive down from home and Greg caught the local VicRail .. apart from me probably getting a speeding ticket from one of those cars that park on the side of the road, you know the ones that book you when everyone else has overtaken you it was just a long drive … naturally missing the roo’s when I left at 0530 was an issue.

 

I got to book the rooms this time, I did it via last minute and after I did the booking I asked for a map, so I printed that, got to Albury, Greg was late (he blamed the train) and we drove to the hotel, I went into the one it said on the map and presented my booking, they didn’t know me I said but I printed the booking and the map and handed it to the receptionist, she took it into the office, after a few minutes she came back and told me that we were in the wrong motel … d’oh oh my did Greg give it to me … I will get even fer sher!

 

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Apple, oranges, no Apples

February 1, 2013 in Soapbox | 1 comment

Well if you have read my previous posts I have never been an apple fan. From TRS-80 I went to IBM-PC clones mainly self built. I have cobbled together some pretty epic systems (when running Prophet BBS) that had untold of storage capacity for those days … something like 36 CD’s online, terabyte storage with a Novel server 12 lines really hot stuff.

Again you will know that I chucked in RBR and JLogica to help Greg with his project Channelpace which went live as an invite system last week. He started me off with a macbook-pro to do the stuff I need, after fart arsing around with won doze for all these years it was a real eye opener, all of those things that I used to need to do to keep my system running … GONE, want an application if it is in the Apple AppStore click and it is there ready to use. All this stuff about the new Windoze well .. geez .. where have all you people been?

I am in the process of totally removing everything windoze based, Helen has an iMac now and she loves it too .. bye bye fugging around half the day making the poota do what yah want, sure an Apple costs more to buy, no doubt about the Apple Tax! but once you have it running Windoze looks like a nightmare! All within a Unix wrapper WOW!

Yes WOW!

 

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Moving to the Dark Side of the Force

December 13, 2012 in Soapbox | Permalink

RBR was about the only thing that kept me running a WinDoze box. The history is a bit of fun, if you are a tech head like me, my first personal computer was a TRS-80 Model I (16k) it was a nice piece of kit for the day, when the Apple came out and later the IBM-PC there was no way known I would move from my trusty, then, TRS-80 Model IV. Eventually though my BBS needed more lines, more grunt and so on and I swapped over to custom made (ie by me) machines. Had a huge Novel server, a home brew multi-stacker CD system that had about 24 disks available. When the Mac’s came out it was no way I am paying that much for a second rate computer.

Well there is no doubt that Apple are still expensive, but they have one huge thing going for them. They just work, ChannelPace just bought me a Macbook Pro I plugged it in entered about two bits of information told it to import my iMac stuff and that was it all done in about a minute. Compare that to having a new Windoze box arrive it takes more than a minute for them to boot usually.

I still have a swag of stuff that only runs on WinDoze but I am sure that now I am totally converted to the dark side I will find comparable utilities and eventually the MS stuff will be shut down. Oh of course should I mention that generally any application is also so simple to install? The other thing that really makes things easy is that all of the machines, like the iPad, share contacts and other information without me needing to worry about it … do you think I might start talking like Darth Vader!

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Trainz, Auran, N3V Games and the why

December 10, 2012 in Soapbox | Permalink

Background

RBR made Murchison County 2 keys available at a discounted rate to Crew, with the shut down I asked the MC2 author whether he would be able to refund me for the unsold (ie unissued, virgin, clean) keys. He responded that he would have to ‘ask Auran’ the response from Graham Edelsten was …

These guys have no conception of business or “risk” that goes hand in hand with being in business. You have paid out on those keys … you have made a loss if you refund him. I suggest at least that you tell him that you will take them back and refund him when you sell them.

Reality

On 13 December 2007, Auran Development, the company behind Fury, went into voluntary administration. The majority of staff was laid off. Auran Games (the developer of the Trainz series) continued to operate, with a development team of just three individuals. Auran Games later became a subsidiary of N3V Games (previously known as N3VRF41L), founded by Graham Edelsten and Tony Hilliam in 2005.

Source Wikipedia

Future

I think we can assume that the decision that RBR using TS12 was a waste of time is confirmed. It would also seem that the attempt to get TRS2004/Driver keys will also be a total lack of conception of business.

 

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Death of JLogica

December 5, 2012 in Soapbox | 11 comments

Now much has been written apparently over on the Invision site, I do not have the passwords to login any longer and I have no interest really in what people say about me now. It is unfortunate that the vociferous few plus some unthinking comments by Lindy at IPS caused this but as was sort of pointed out to me you reap what you sow!

Now firstly I took over a number of applications, I also bought Links (for money) my plan was to do the following with all of them;

  1. Freshen the applications to clean up the dross
  2. Work my way through the Tracker items and clear as many issues as possible
  3. Add features requested by users
  4. Make enough to pay the costs

[pullquote]Not one person lost the ‘free’ version of SB, it was always in the Marketplace download area[/pullquote]

What I decided to do with Awards, Shoutbox & Links was get Marcher Technologies to go through all three applications and do job #1, he started with Links, I started working on Shoutbox. We release two updates to Shoutbox and one major update to Links. Bob then did a spring clean of SB and fixed a number of long standing really painful issues I also added a bunch of functionality. At that point I encoded SB ‘free’ the old SB both the one that I picked up from Michael and the last version with a slew of bug fixes v1.3.7 was still there for people, if the enhanced stuff was desired it was a paid version. Not one person lost the ‘free’ version of SB, two major updates were made to the ‘free’ version of SB no one lost anything! Those that wanted the extra functionality were asked to pay towards development.

As a result of this I was accused by a number of people of stealing and other unsavoury remarks, all that I asked Lindy to do was stop off-topic posts in the support topic which was over 140 pages already. I did not ask for him to muzzle peoples opinions I asked that the support topic be reserved for support. Surely this was not an unreasonable request. But what really got up my nose was that he intimated that somehow I stole from Invision. Shoutbox was never an Invision product, it was a community sponsored one, Michael had taken it over and I think he will tell you it was a right royal PITA. So let’s get some things straight.

  1. The ‘income’ gained from my paid products went back to development I am effectively still in the RED for the ‘paid’ applications
  2. There is money left in my developer account that IPS can refund as they see fit, I can’t login I trashed my passwords and JLogica is gone I have no access
  3. I have abandoned all of my licenses, not going to use Invision products ever again
  4. People who had issues wouldn’t pay $4.95 for me to go and fix their site on a basis of no fix you get a refund. Even one who had a version of IP.Links and something called MUDD that was screwing him up and $5 was too much to pay to have it fixed, well guys you may think that’s reasonable I simply see it as totally bad form

I have never asked for people to not have an opinion. All I ever asked was that;

  1. Support topics be for support
  2. Posts containing personal attacks be removed

Apparently this is seen as something other than what it is, which in my opinion is unsatisfactory, your opinion may differ that’s fine. But I am entitled to my opinion and I have stated it here without once relying on calling people names or being offensive, perhaps some of you need to consider that when pushing the keys on your computer.

 

 

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