Thursday, August 17, 2006

Launchy: The Open Source Keystroke Launcher for Windows

I am going to install this on every Windows machine I have access to. Hit [ALT]+[SPACE] and start typing the first few letters of a filename, program, shortcut, web favorite, etc, and see it magically appear in a list and hit enter.


I'm about to delete all of my quick launch icons and desktop shortcuts because I don't need them anymore. Probably the most useful productivity enhancement software I've seen in 10 years, and it's free (although I'll donate a few bucks in appreciation...it's just too cool).


It's only a matter of time before this becomes a bundled app with every OS you might encounter.

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Telecom tax imposed in 1898 finally ends | CNET News.com

...speaking of the Federal Excise Tax (read my last entry for reference), it looks like action is finally being taken to end the tax that's been supporting the Spanish-American war for 100 years ;)


Evidently, there's still part of it in place (leaves you wondering why they didn't decide to repeal all of it together, eh?), but it looks like it's finally going to go away. One less thing to complain about on my phone bill.

Why Net Neutrality matters...

The issue that the article above discusses is not often cited in discussions on net neutrality...it's kind of a huge secret of sorts.


Look at your phone bill (cell, land, whatever), and find the line that says "FUSF Fee" or "Federal Service Cost Recovery Fee" or some other trivial deviation from those two, and you will see exactly where the money you are (still) paying to the telcos for *real* broadband access comes from.


Everyone pays this fee...it's optional, and the telcos don't have to charge it (they don't pay it back to the government, it's not a tax, although we could discuss the Federal Excise Tax, as well). Imagine how much money that is over the space of the past 14 years.


So, not only are you getting charged for noexistent 40MBps internet connectivity that should be mostly rollede-out right now, and not only are you already paying for your connection to the internet, and not only are the operators of the websites that you visit paying for *their* connections to the internet, the telcos want to charge us all one more time for the data that moves across these already paid-for connections.


Getting angry yet? I sure hope so...