Why the Tigers slow start is not alarming

The Detroit Tigers were supposed to be the best. They were supposed to score thousands of runs. They were supposed to be unbeatable.

They are currently 0-6.

Granted the six losses are pretty ugly. Losing three to the Royals is disgraceful at best, but the White Sox are competitive.

They're playing like the Tigers that lost 119 games just a handful of years ago.

Fear not Tigers fans. It's only a rough patch. The wonderful thing about baseball is that it will all work itself out.

Take last year for example. The Tigers exploded onto the scene in the first half of the year just to falter in the second half. This year it's going to be the opposite.

By the second half of the year we should get relievers Fernando Rodney and Joel Zumaya back. Voila, the relief pitching is shored up.

As the weather gets warmer the bats will warm up. Problem solved.

I'll be honest. This first week has been rough. But I'm not worried.

Major tech companies out of touch with consumers

It is unfortunate how often the consumer gets the short end of the stick with technology companies. For example, Apple restricting the iPhone to AT&T's network only. Or companies that provide no Linux support whatsoever.

Add another to the list: Creative screws over smart customer who fixes terrible Vista drivers.

Apparently, it is okay that Creative disables advertised functions in their own sound cards. Heck, they even acknowledge that it's their right:

"If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make." -Phil O'Shaughnessy, Creative VP of Corporate Communications

From what I'm reading these functions should have been working in Vista even before Daniel_K started writing his own driver packages. What he was doing was simply providing the functions that they sound cards should have had out of the box.

Creative is claiming that he was taking money for unlocking functions that shouldn't have been unlocked. Daniel_K claims he was taking the donations to buy more hardware so he could write more drivers. Personally, I believe him.

The major problem with Creative and other large technology companies is that they think they have a right to do whatever they want and totally forget about the consumer. Creative wants you to buy a cheap sound card with limited features and then make you upgrade and spend more of your hard earned cash later.

That's just wrong. Good job Daniel_K, keep it up. I wish I was savvy enough to understand how to do stuff like you do.

On the other hand, Creative better learn that they're alienating their consumer base. If there's one awesome thing about the Internet, it is that it takes almost no time for a mini-uprising to happen. I can guarantee that I'm not the only frustrated blogger today.

Web standards and browsers

I'm a freelance web designer in my spare time so I was ecstatic that one of the assignments for my Computer Science class was to create a Web site. In a matter of hours I had the general layout and a day or so later the site was what I would call finished.

Well, or at least I thought it was.

I tested it in several different browsers. And by several different browsers I mean a ton. Firefox, Opera, Flock, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 Beta, Maxthon, Safari, and even Swiftweasel. Frankly, the site looked terrific in all of them.

Unfortunately, I still had to consider Internet Explorer 6. For some odd reason GVSU has chosen to not upgrade the lab computers to IE7.

IE6 simply tears the site apart. PNG transparency support is flawed, and for some reason I cannot seem to get the site to center itself.

The Internet is the exact same no matter which computer you access it from. On modern hardware there should be no reason for web designers to have to code around browsers. It is ridiculous how much grief designers go through trying to get pages to look the same across browsers and platforms.

Thankfully today's newest browsers are about the same. Microsoft finally decide to wise up and fix Internet Explorer.

What makes no sense is that GVSU has not upgraded to IE7. And I believe the main reason is because of the BlackBoard software that the campus uses. We should get with the program and upgrade -- BlackBoard's terribly coded software should not stop us.