Editors note:  Pilky originally published this on his personal blog on February 26th.  He agreed to republish it here at our request.  We have edited it to a minimal degree for formatting and minor changes like capitalization and punctuation.

If you pay any attention to the web hosting world you will have noticed there has been a bit of a stir over DreamHost this past week. One of the data centres they use had to completely power down, resulting in a few hours of downtime. Unfortunately, this meant M Cubed and this blog were both down for several hours Sunday morning. This has prompted me look at other hosts. I moved to DreamHost enticed by their amazing package for an amazingly low price. After years of preaching to PC users that you get what you pay for when it comes to quality on the Mac, I seem to have fallen into the trap of buying the “just good enough” of web hosting.

All credit to DreamHost though. They do offer a great package; it gives me everything I need: multiple websites, PHP, MySQL, Subversion, Ruby on Rails and near infinite bandwidth and storage space. And you can’t fault the price: $9.95 a month with no set up fee if you pay for the full year. Unfortunately this doesn’t give you speed or reliability, hence my looking for other hosting. So what are my options?

Web Hosting Buzz

Reason: Until last September I’d been on Web Hosting Buzz for nearly 3 years.…
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As some of you may know, in addition to my work here on Deep Thought, I also contribute to TheMacMind. Even though I am officially editor-in-chief there too, I am a good deal more involved in the operations of Deep Thought than TheMacMind, so much so that I am probably more of a contributions writer there than a full fledged editor (just look at the number of articles I’ve written for DT compared to TMM).

TheMacMind received some rather harsh criticism over a review that Anthony Cole wrote recently. The meat of the criticism is that Anthony’s review was little more than an attempt to scam software developers in order to get free software.

Anthony took over TheMacMind late last year after it had sat idle, proclaiming, “A new look coming soon” for over a year. Anthony is 16 years old. When I was 16, I certainly wasn’t running a web site. (Now that I think of it, when I was 16, it was last century. Yikes!) Anthony is still very green at this; TheMacMind relaunched just under three months ago. It represents his first real attempt at journalistic work. He is very much learning on the job.

As I tell some of the younger writers on staff here at Deep Thought, if you make mistakes and write a poor article, or an article that isn’t well received, you take that criticism into account and try to improve upon your writing so you don’t make the same mistake over and over…
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Okay, it’s the middle of February. Macworld Expo and CES are long over. Windows Vista has been out for more than two weeks. Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Music has been discussed so much that it’s been beaten to a bloody pulp. That’s right, it’s the tech doldrums right now. What’s a techie to do?

Why, write an article about what irks him, of course! A good number of the coolest geek toys out there involve Web 2.0. Not surprisingly, elements of Web 2.0 come up on this list quite a lot! Let’s get started. Here are some of the most worn out, most obnoxious trends in the tech universe.

Beta, beta everywhere...

It seems like no site or product churned out these days can be considered hip unless it has a “beta” tag somewhere on the page. Flickr is a great example, and has actually gone above and beyond “beta” and is now “Gamma”! Whoa! I don’t know what Flickr is trying to accomplish with “gamma,” as the site seems pretty polished to me. Maybe they are parodying the “Beta” tags everywhere?

Speaking of Flickr…

Stp drppng vowls frm wrds

Okay, I’ll admit, RAZR was a cool name at first. Flickr was OK, even. These days, though, we have to contend with dropped vowels everywhere. I can pronounce ROKR. SLVR was a little difficult; where should the vowels go? And what vowels should be used? Is it supposed to be “Slover”? When multi-billion dollar corporations start dropping vowels in their product…
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As many longtime readers know, I am no big fan of Windows. It’s a solid OS, and I know that there are many people that like it; that’s great, but Windows just isn’t for me. The way I work is more suited for the Mac environment. It’s strictly a personal preference issue. As for Microsoft itself, I really only have one big problem with the company. No, it’s not that they have a stranglehold on the operating system market. No, it’s not that they are Microsoft, so therefore everything they do obviously sucks. My biggest problem with Microsoft is that they try to go in every direction at once and make things more convoluted for their customers than they should be. I’m not talking about the operating system itself, either. This all comes down to marketing.

Fuzzy Math

“Lies!” you say? Well, let’s look at some examples. First, let’s look at Microsoft’s endeavors in the digital music business. In the past two or three years, Microsoft has launched three music services: MSN Music, URGE (in conjunction with MTV), and Zune Marketplace. The first two use Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM scheme (Note: MSN Music no longer serves as a music store; instead it links to Zune Marketplace and Real Rhapsody). The other uses whatever DRM the Zune uses (I don’t think the marketing gurus in Redmond have yet come up with a name for it). Now why in the name of cinnamon sticky buns does Microsoft see it necessary to support two DRM…
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As everyone reading this surely knows by now, Steve Jobs strode onto the stage at Macworld ‘07 and announced a product he proclaimed would change the world.  It’s hyperbole, sure, but if Jobs has his way it won’t be too far from the truth.  Most everyone who heard the announcement - from keynote attendees to reporters to Internet tech fans - was intrigued and impressed to at least some degree by what was presented.  Many of them rushed online to their favorite message board to discuss what they’d seen, where of course they encountered that most charming of Internet personalities, somebody I like to call Guy Who Was Not Impressed.  I’m certain you’ve met, probably on more than one occasion.

You see, no matter what products are announced at any given Stevenote, there are always a group of people who find no use whatsoever for any of them.  They believe that their needs are the only ones that matter.  They act like these new products will be foisted upon them, as though perhaps Steve Jobs will break into their homes and Superglue iPhones to their hands.¹ “I don’t care about all that other stuff,” they say, “I just want to use my phone to make phone calls.” Apparently that’s all any of us should ever want as well, not to mention how the iPhone will make all other cellular devices vanish immediately from existence.  I often wonder why these people bother owning computers when they could just write stuff down on…
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