The process apparently started when Joe Torre turned down Steinbrenner’s offer of a one-year contract. On the flight home, Torre called Epstein on a lark to tell him he was available.

While the call was initally met with a barrage of expletives, Epstein came to realize that this was perhaps the chance Red Sox fans have been waiting for.

“Every goddamn year the Yankees try to poach our best players,” said Epstein, “every damn year. Well now the cleat is on the other foot.”

After signing a deal for an undisclosed amount, Epstein informed Terry Francona that he would be made assitant coach to Torre. Players report that the announcement was made in the locker room shortly after last night’s win over the Indians.

What happened next was, in Epstein’s words, a display of uncontrolled rage and violence unlike anything he had seen.

Francona reportedly didn’t say a word, but went over to a row of lockers and punched a hole through the metal door of one of them. He then picked up a bat and beat Coco Crisp to death with it — something which, gruesomeness aside, many fans felt needed to be done anyway.

“He just ain’t done that much good lately,” said David Ortiz, who had previously tried to crush Crisp with a giant bear hug.

Francona stormed out of the lockerroom and called the Yankees front office and offered to coach for 5 years for $8.50 an hour.

“Please just let me get revenge on these bastards,” an unnamed source quoted Francona as saying.

Steinbrenner immediately accepted the offer.

When Yankees players heard of the deal, they immediately started calling their agents, trying to get traded to Boston.

“I’m bringing A-Rod, Jeter, and maybe a couple other guys,” Torre announced.

Ortiz, Veritek, Mike Lowell, and Daisuke Matsuzaka all followed Francona to New York, although speculation is that Daisuke Matsuzaka may have no idea what is going on but simply followed Veritek around asking what was happening. Unfortunately the only English Dice-K knows is “fastball, curve, slider, sinker, changeup” and what Veritek calls “Whatever the hell that other thing he throws is.” Veritek confirmed reports that the only Japanese he speaks is “Get your [expletive deleted] head in the [expletive deleted] game, we paid a [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] fortune to bring you here!”

Johnny Damon apparently expressed interest in going back to Boston. “Hey, I helped them win the World Series, remember?” he pleaded. Torre and Francona met over triple-Scotches to discuss the issue. In the end it was determined that Damon would stay in New York but would be required to re-grow his hair out.

“I’ve got 50 boxes of those damn ‘Damon is my homeboy’ shirts in my basement,” Francona said, “I took a [expletive deleted] bath on those [expletive deleted] things. Now it’s payday.”

Reached for comment late today, Manny Ramirez was quoted as saying “Huh? What?” and then mumbled something completely incoherent before tripping over his own feet and being knocked unconscious.

Most details of the deal appear to be settled. One of the few remaining is what to do about Jonathan Papelbon.

“Frankly, he scares the crap out of all of us,” Francona explained. “None of the guys want to end up facing him after the dust settles. We’ll probably let him do whatever he wants in exchange for a contract stipulation against physical violence. At least against management levels. He can do whatever he wants to the players” Torre was seen nodding in agreement.

Papelbon was seen snacking on the not-quite-cold corpse of Coco Crisp and looking damn scary.

Before closing the press conference, both coaches were asked if they had heard from Roger Clemens. Earlier reports indicated he had been speed dialing both teams hoping to ignite a bidding war.

“Who?” they replied together before standing up, exchanging uniforms, and leaving by opposite doors of the conference room.

“See you in hell,” Francona called to Torre.

“Turn left at the Bronx,” Torre said without looking back.

So Microsoft is going to charge $1.50 (USD) for Office beta downloads. Here’s what CNet had to report on the new item.

Consumers who download the 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2 will be charged $1.50 per download, beginning next Wednesday at 6 p.m. PDT, a Microsoft representative said.

“Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than 3 million times…That’s 500 percent more than what was expected,” the representative said. “The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers.”

Although Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Management Group decided to initiate a fee for new users of Beta 2, the “technical refresh,” or update, for current users of the software will remain free, the representative said.

In related news, the rest of the world’s population asked, “Wait, is the world’s richest man asking me to help pay his bandwidth bill??”

In other related news, some anonymous “representative” was later reamed out for causing even more people to download the beta, install it, and think “Huh, weird” and then never both to launch it again.

The article went on to say:

Those who want to test drive Beta 2 to see how it works can access the software for free, but if they want to test it against their internal systems, a download or the CD is required.

If that sentence (ahem) left you bumfuzzled, what the author meant to say is: “If you want to check out how Office works when running inside Internet Explorer on Windows 98, 2000, or XP, you can checkout the online test drive of Office 2007 but if you want to be able to use it offline or without loading up an overly bloated software suite on an overly bloated browser, you’ll be wanting the download vesion.”

Finally, said Microsoft Lackey:

The fee marks the first time Microsoft has charged for a download version of an Office beta, the representative said, noting that customers have long had to pay the shipping and handling costs for CD versions of betas.

Well golly gee Captain Non Sequitor, could that be because you were actually sticking a real live CD into a real live envelope and putting it in the real live mail?

So Microsoft is suffering from the success of a huge download, eh? Gee it’s too bad no one has invented some sort of a distributed system for downloading large files so no one person gets socked with the bandwidth charges . And gee, wouldn’t it be great if, oh I don’t know, maybe some browser supported said “hypothetical” protocol so you could download this enormous just like any other?

Well, maybe someday, until then we can only dream.

UPDATE 2006-09-18: Gee, maybe the reason that their bandwidth charges are so high is that they don’t allow restarting of transfers! I was trying to download Vista RC1 last night and it stopped after 2307866624 bytes of 2709782528 bytes (2.2GB out of 2.6GB). I was downloading it from their webpage http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/en/download.htm which I provide for you to verify what I am about to tell you.

On that page you are offered the choice of downloading the 32-bit version of Vista either via “Your Browser” or via this:

Microsoft has partnered with Akamai Technologies to provide a Download Manager to help you get the ISO file for Windows Vista RC1. This Akamai Download Manager lets you pause, resume, and stop the download of the file. It will also automatically restart the download if the process is temporarily interrupted. Due to the size of the download we strongly recommend you use the Akamai Download Manager.

You may be prompted to accept a signed ActiveX control or Java™ applet in your browser. These have been signed by “Akamai Technologies, Inc.” and verified by VeriSign, Inc. Please accept to install the Download Manager. (Additional details are included below.)

Ok, so as any Mac user will tell you, we don’t do ActiveX. So anyone downloading this on a Mac is probably going to choose the “Use Your Browser” links.

I assumed (incorrectly) that the Akamai Technologies Download Manager “Now with ActiveX!” would be some special link, and therefore did not try it.

When my “Use Your Download” version failed, I tried to restart it using my browser, but the option was not available. I tried wget (a commandline tool to download files which has a -c flag which lets you “continue” your download). I included the proper “referer” field (yes I can spell, see below) . It did not work.

In desperation not to have to download 2+GB if I don’t have to, I went back and looked at the “Akamai Technologies Download Manager” version.

Here’s what I learned: The “Download Manager” version is a slightly different path to the same file. “How slightly?” you ask. Go ahead, ask… 3 characters!

Here is the original URL that I had tried (NOTE: I replaced each / with a new line break for readability):
http://download.windowsvista.com
dl
preview
rc1
en
x86
iso
vista_5600.16384.060829-2230_x86fre_client-lr1cfre_en_dvd.iso

Here is the special “Download Manager” url, formatted the same way:
http://download.windowsvista.com
preview
rc1
en
x86
iso
vista_5600.16384.060829-2230_x86fre_client-lr1cfre_en_dvd.iso

You could be forgiven for missing the difference between the two, which is that first line after the http:// where the “Download with your browser” link has “dl”. Other than that, the two paths are identical.

With one technical difference in implementation.

If you, with your browser, download from the “regular” link, and the download fails, you will not be able to continue that download.

However, if you, with your browser download from “special” link, and the download fails, you will be able to continue that download.

“Well wait” you protest… Go ahead, protest… “Microsoft TOLD YOU to use the “Special” link if you wanted to be able to pause and restart! They are just doing what they said they would!”

As Obi-Wan said “That was true…from a certain point of view.” # . Actually what they said was that if I wanted to use the download manager I’d need ActiveX, which I don’t. And there is no technical reason why the “Download with your Browser” can’t offer the “Restart” function.

Hrm. Unless the site is running Microsoft’s IIS and it can’t handle it? Who knows.

Anyway, I was able to continue my download which I started from the “regular” link by using the “special” link and wget. The details follow for the wget virgins among us:

wget -c http://download.windowsvista.com/ preview/ rc1/ en /x86 /iso / vista_5600.16384.060829-2230_x86fre_client-lr1cfre_en_dvd.iso —referer=http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/en/download.htm

NOTE: The spaces after the / in the previous paragraph were inserted for readability.

What does it say? Well, it says that “Using wget I want to continue (-c) to download the file at (insert really long Microsoft URL here, or use http://tinyurl.com/odwvn instead) and you should tell the server that I am coming from the page http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/en/download.htm”

Here’s the really ironic part. When I used “wget” it told me that the file had been moved (HTTP response 302 Moved Temporarily) to…. the other URL which doesn’t support restarting downloads. (See wget’s output for details).

So all they have done, somehow, is made it impossible to continue downloading file “X” unless you use their special link, for no particular reason that I can understand. All I can say is that my attempts at doing the same wget command failed repeatedly when I tried the “regular” link.

Do note that if your browser obfuscates the downloaded filename before it is completed, you should have used Opera. It downloads the file in place (no random temporary file stuffed somewhere else on your filesystem). I was able to continue my Opera-initiated download using ‘wget’ and only had to download 383MB instead of 2.5GB.

Restarting http transfers has been around for how many years? Oh Microsoft, you continue to innovate new ways to baffle me. Can it be that perhaps your own browser doesn’t support restarting downloads and that is why you claim to need this special ActiveX functionality?

Now I realize the original part of this article was about Microsoft charging people to download Office not Vista, but the reasoning given was that the downloads had been taxing their servers (and presumably bandwidth). One cannot help but wonder how many failed downloads contributed to that bill.

Footnotes:

1. Note that I corrected the grammar of the sentence for you, Constant Reader, because I love you so…and also because it annoys me when people break up sentences when they don’t have to. Or shouldn’t. ↩
2. Yes that was intentional.
3. Footnote: Yes “referer” is a misspelling of “referrer” and no I was not wrong to spell it that way. See Wikipedia on Referer for the geeky boring reason why. ↩
4. Yes I succumbed to the Dark Side of George Lucas’s need to squeeze every last dime from Star Wars fans and bought the new DVDs with the “old” (read: original) version of the Star Wars trilogy (read: “The Original Trilogy… You know, the one that didn’t suck”?). Having watched the originals, you know what I learned? They didn’t need changing. Sure add your special sound effects and graphics to the explosions if you will, but the dialog did not need to be changed, the extra scenes did not need to be added, and history did not need to be revised. Han shot Greedo. Why is that bad? Greedo had a gun pointed at him and was trying to extort him. (Note: Speaking of the Dark Side… Wal-Mart has special edition comic books that come free with the DVDs. I figured as long as I was giving over my soul and my money to George Lucas, I might as well give a little to the new evil empire that is Wal-Mart too.) ↩

Wondering what’s new? Changelog for Opera 9.01.

I can’t say that I’ve been personally effected by any of these issues, but the x.01 release generally means that any particularly hairy bugs have been worked out.

Download Opera at the usual place.

Give up?

Answer: The most recent catalog from Dell.

Some background… I bought my first Dell in 2000. It was an Inspiron (laptop) 5000 running Windows 98SE. Windows 2000 had just come out but they were still pushing Win98 for “Regular Users.” I sent it back in a few days for an Inspiron 7500 with Windows 2000. That machine is still functioning, running Windows XP SP2, maxed out on 512MB of RAM. It has some quirks, for sure, but it’s almost 6 years old and was considered a “medium” (i.e. not high end) computer in its day. I think that’s pretty good.

I have another Dell, a desktop, which I bought basically to handle several large hard drives I bought. It works well too. I have bought and recommended Dells for family members (always recommending they get the service contract for as long as possible…although this routinely dismays them as they had hoped to get a computer for $300.) I have purchased about a dozen computers for use in places where I have worked. If I added it up, I would assume that I have directly contributed to the purchase of at least $30,000 worth of Dell hardware.

This is the important thing to note: I haven’t been particularly disappointed with any of it. I have had, overall, a very positive experience with Dell, even when it has taken awhile to get problems taken care of… I don’t think my experiences have been all that much different than they would have been with any other vendor. There is no ideal vendor, not Dell, not Gateway, not Apple. Here’s one example: after my Inspiron 7500 was well out of warranty, the hinges wore out. I called up Dell tech support to find out how much it would cost to get it fixed and determined that it wasn’t worth it. Within an hour after hanging up, I got a call back from Dell telling me that I was eligible for a one-time free replacement of the hinges on my laptop. They even paid for the shipping both ways.

All of this has given me a more than passing curiosity about Dell’s offerings. In fact just last year I purchased a 21" monitor for home, I use it as a TV and external monitor for my laptop. It’s lovely.

So hopefully it is clear that I have been a customer, and a pleased customer, and a repeat customer, with Dell for 6 years.

Why then, did their latest offering spend only seconds on my fingertips from mail pile to trash pile?

Simple. It can’t run Mac OS X.

Now don’t dismiss me as an Apple freak just yet.

I know what I am doing when it comes to maintaining Windows XP. I can avoid spyware and viruses, so that was never my concern. It’s harder to describe than that. It’s the number of “little things” that were hard to do, or harder than they should have been.

I made the switch to Mac OS X two years ago, and have never looked back. Was it the “Switch” campaign? Not really. Yes, first I had an iPod. Yes I’m a halo effect. But in all that time there has been one program which I have not been able to replace: ACT. There used to be a Mac version, but it has been discontinued. No other program (on Mac or Windows) that I’ve found will let me do the things that ACT can do. I’ve been using it for a long time, and it has a version for Palm OS.

Now there are problems with Mac OS X, and some stupid things. I agree with one reviewer who said it criminally stupid to charge extra for QuickTime Pro. But overall, the things that are wrong and annoying with OS X are not nearly as bad as what’s wrong and annoying with Win XP.

More importantly, the things that are right with OS X are very compelling.

Michael Dell doesn’t see Apple as competition. For all my good experiences with Dell (much more extensive than the average person, I’m willing to guess), a Mac running Parallels ($80 software that lets me run Windows inside of Mac OS X on an Intel-based Mac) has completely obliterated my interest in Dell’s catalog. What used to get thrown in my bag to be read the next chance I got now goes in the trash.

Either Michael Dell is very arrogant, very stupid, or pretending not to care.

Of course you knew that already.

And Microsoft is not buying Opera. Opera ASA has said that.

Mac fixes were, I believe, mostly minor unless you are using Java on Japanese systems (see MacOpera 8.51 Changelog)

Tonight I changed it to http://operalover.tntluoma.com/

Why?

Well, because there’s a lot of stuff here that probably won’t change to much in the future. it’s not tied to a particular version of Opera. (In fact I’ve been looking back at some of the material from the Opera6 and Opera7 Lover series and realize there’s a lot of stuff there which is still valid for Opera8).

So, I’ve changed it.

Now I would have liked to have set it up with mod_rewrite so that anyone who came to /8/some_path_here would automatically get sent to /some_path_here instead, but mod_rewrite hurts my head, makes my eyes bleed, and causes grey stuff to seep from my ears (the good news is that the grey stuff tastes yummy on a cracker).

If anyone knows mod_rewrite and would be willing to help, please let me know. All of the examples I found seemed to revolve around adding something to the URL, not taking it away. It looks to be especially tricky to redirect /8/ to / without screwing up /8/foo_bar to /foo_bar

I suspect several responses to this news:

1. “Awesome! I’ve always liked Opera but never thought I should have to spend money for a browser.
2. Who cares? Firefox is free and open-source and it has extensions!
3. Aw man, I (just) bought license for Opera, what a rip-off!

For the first group, look no further than http://opera.com/download/. Go get Opera for Windows, Mac, Linux (16 distros and various subflavors, plus a generic .tar.gz), FreeBSD, or Solaris.

Regarding the second: yes, that’s true. Of course Opera has seen a surge in usage even while being for-pay, which indicates to me that there are a lot of folks out there who are looking for something besides what Firefox has to offer.

To the third group: no regrets! First of all, you supported innovation in a long-standing company that has been around for a long time. So there’s that. But also, being a registered customer will still entitle you to email support (see https://support.opera.com/bin/customer/). So it certainly wasn’t a waste of money.

I could hardly believe the news when I read it. Like many people, I’ve hoped for this day for a long time. When I first used Opera (back around Opera4) they had a 30 day trial - and their 30 day trial wasn’t limited to 30 consecutive days (sorta like the 30 days series here :-) it was 30 days of usage. Well, I was hooked and registered before the trial was over, and I’ve never looked back.

Since Opera5 had a free, ad-sponsored version, the 30-day demo was eliminated. I’ve often argued for it to be brought back, because I sincerely believe that if you spend a month with Opera, you’ll be hooked like I was.

Of course a lot has changed since Opera5 days. I’m sure there are some people who have switched to Firefox and are happy with their choice. I’m sure there are some who desperately need this or that extension for some feature that isn’t available in Opera. I understand that too.

But for the vast majority of people, Opera is going to be a really compelling choice. Some of it has to do with the integration of several apps into one: email, RSS/Atom, Usenet, and IRC (unfortunately, BitTorrent, which had been available in a few betas, did not make it into Opera 8.5). Part of it is the fact that they get all that in one easy to install package rather than having to install extensions to get the features they want.

Lars Kleinschmidt has an interesting page at http://opera-fansite.de/wiki/Download+alte+Versionen which gives you the release versions of Opera back to Opera 2.

• Opera2: 3 versions (1 was a demo)
• Opera3: 9 versions
• Opera4: 3 versions
• Opera5: 6 versions
• Opera6: 7 versions (all point releases)
• Opera7: 18 versions!!!!
• Opera8: 4 versions thus far (5 if you count 8.10 with BitTorrent, which was only released on the my.opera.com forums)

(Note: I omitted some versions if they were simply differed by a build number or language supported. 7.02 Bork still rates as the funniest browser release ever.)

Wow. I mean I never realized until I looked. Opera7 was around for a really long time. Then I started to think back, and I checked, and sure enough, Opera7 was the last time you’ve had to pay for an upgrade. Opera8 was a free upgrade. People who bought Opera7 when it was first released back in January of 2003 received 2.5 years of upgrades for free, and not just a few features, but a lot of improvements.

Of course there will be some who just registered Opera. Well the great news is that many of us (myself included) have bought software only to have it dumped and never see another version. Your money wasn’t wasted, and this extremely aggressive move by Opera tells me that they plan to be around for a long, long time. And just think: if you registered Opera, you qualify for email support. Not a bad deal, all in all.

What’s next? Well, Opera 9 of course. With the exception of 3.6x, Opera hasn’t released anything higher than .5, so it seems safe to assume that this might be near the end of Opera8’s development cycle. Rumors are already starting about what will come next.

All of which is to say, I guess I need to kickstart the Opera8 Lover series before it is obsolete!

See also: Why we made it free (Opera.com) and The Official Opera is free press release .

To celebrate, they’re giving away, for free, Opera registration codes.

See http://my.opera.com/community/party/reg.dml.

I love the form. Rather than ask a zillion questions for the marketing weasels, they have TWO things they ask:

1) What’s your email address? (so they can email you the code)

2) Would you like to be on the mailing list? (and they default to NO! Who gives away a free registration code AND gives you an OPT-IN? Most everyone else would try to sneak that one by you, try to get you on their mailing list in exchange for a free code. But Opera respects you too much to treat you that way.

What are you still doing here? Go get yourself a free code!

Already bought Opera? Get one anyway and give it to someone else!

(UPDATE: Well all good things come to an end, and so did this. Hope you got yours.)