General

I've been using the pre-paid phone service "Virgin Mobile" for around 5 years now. I've had a lot of issues with them in the past, partially because of service issues but mostly the huge cluster of customer service.

No one keeps track of issues. No one communicates. No one can be held accountable when something goes wrong. They pass issues around and promise to call you back when its fixed - which is never. Seriously, I had an issue opened in November 2006, and as of February 2008, it still was not resolved.
The only fix for any service issue is to close your account and get a new phone. That has been the only un-official solution I've received from people working for the company. They admit they can't fix things and recommend just starting over.

One of the services they offer is called Studio V.

It is a site where users can submit their own wallpapers and ringtones. Companies don't make a lot of money off people making phone calls, but they make a TON of money off wallpapers and ringtones.
Studio V lets you submit your own work, and you actually get a bit of money each time someone downloads your work.

I created a few images with Paint.NET for the site. I drew some colored lines, applied some images filters, swirled things around a bit, and posted an image called "Purple Vortex."
It was immediately downloaded by a lot of people. It even showed up on their "most popular" page for a while.

I then submitted another version of the image that was a slightly different color. People started downloading that even faster than the original version.
I watched my cash balance slowly increase over the next few days instead of decreasing.

Today I log in and see my balance has hardly moved over the past several days. I then see that my wallpapers have been BLOCKED from being shared any more.
I clicked them to find out why.

There is a note on them:
"Your content was denied for sharing with others because:
Copyright issue
Your wallpaper was not approved because we believe the image, or photo used in your wallpaper is owned by someone else. Please make sure to upload only photos, or images that you created and own."

What? Seriously?

*I* make an image from scratch, post it, it's reviewed and approved by someone, gets shared, downloaded a lot, and then pulled because they believe it is owned by someone else? What??

What can I do? Seriously? There is no help. No technical support. No one to talk to.

My most popular images have been removed, so you can't help out by getting them.

"Shareaza" is a popular p2p program that supports multiple networks such as the gnutella network.

A few weeks ago, an "imposter" company ("Discordia") took over the Shareaza website and put up their own site, complete with fake software. They call the software "Shareaza v4" and even use the Shareaza logo.

Some fans of the real Shareaza wanted to try to take down the hijacked site - but then someone from the imposter Shareaza site actually threatened legal action against the real Shareaza team because of that.

I just read now that the people behind the fake Shareaza site are now trying to register the "Shareaza" trademark for themselves to prevent others from using it.

This page has links to multiple news sites reporting on the Shareaza hijacking:
http://www.shareazasecurity.be/forum/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=411

Here is the forum with many more posts regarding the Shareaza takeover:
http://www.shareazasecurity.be/forum/viewforum.php?f=46

Here is the official Shareaza site. The real Shareaza:
http://shareaza.sourceforge.net/

I just came across a really nice video for the Nintendo DS version of Final Fantasy IV.

When I first played the game when I was young, I felt pulled into the story more than any book, movie, or other video game ever made me feel.

While the original game certainly looks dated compared to what is out now, and the American version I played was slightly watered down compared to the original Japanese version, the Nintendo DS remake should take care of all that. It will make the game come alive like never before.

Spoken dialog, music with lyrics, full motion video, and a greatly expanded story will surely make this a treat.

The video is on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHl2lrj_6GQ

After getting my HDTV card, I've been messing with various MPEG2 decoders. HDTV broadcasts are MPEG2 streams.

Watching normal, low-resolution television on my computer has always used a lot of processing power. Software de-interlacers, software decoders, software filters, etc.

Many video cards support decoding an MPEG2 steam (used in digital TV) entirely in hardware, greatly reducing the workload on the system CPU. So the TV image is decoded quickly and de-interlaced perfectly without any impact on system performance. The image is better than regular TV and uses less resources than viewing regular TV.

The first MPEG2 decoder I used that offset the video decoding load to hardware was NVidia's PureVideo decoder. The cheapest version they offer is $20. I was able to download it and test it out - but found it would not work under Vista. At least, it wouldn't use my video hardware. It was entirely CPU based, which defeated the purpose of it. It seemed to work great under XP.

I read about CyberLink's PowerDVD having a hardware-accelerated decoder.
I downloaded and tried it out, and noticed it did install hardware accelerated decoders under Vista and XP. Not only that, it used even less system resources than NVidia's PureVideo decoder.

CyberLink offers "PowerDVD SE", a decoder-only release of PowerDVD. Since I didn't want the player, just the decoder, I thought this would be a good idea. Not only that, they charge just $15 for it, $5 less than what NVidia offers.

However, when I went to purchase the decoder, CyberLink mentioned a few strange things:

- SE for Vista *and* SE for XP. Listed as two separate products, each $15.
- Lists that it is only for Windows Media Player.

If the filters from the normal player install in XP or Vista, why are there two separate programs for just the filters? If I pay for the Vista one, will it just not work under XP?
Why would they only work under Windows Media Player? I don't even use WMP so that is useless to me.

Of course, until I find out what the deal is with their software, I will probably end up using the full PowerDVD Deluxe from my favorite torrent site.

CyberLink's own confusing wording and possibly mis-leading and/or incorrect information has prevented a sale of some of their software.