If they’re still on GitHub tomorrow, then GitHub will be sending the message far and wide that its users are permitted to break the law and basic common sense.

The reaction to this will make or break my opinion of GitHub.

In the meantime, please do not do business with PagodaBox.  Not only is their offering pointless and silly, but they’re spammers when it suits them, and you know what that means they’ll do when their interests and yours collide.

This is all bullshit.

The problem is simple, and it’s the same thing that has crippled many, many platforms in the past. It’s what’s killing Win7 phone today.

There are no desirable software packages for the platform. I’ve had one since launch day, and I still haven’t bought any games other than the one I bought on launch day, because they’re all the same garbage that’s been being sold for ten years, and none of them do anything interesting with the new hardware.

Nintendo needs to wake the fuck up and change its software production availability to small producers, or *that* will sink the company. The platform has been out for six months and there are barely 40 games (for comparison, the DS launched with nearly double that, and people screamed at the sky for the limited game catalog.)

The iPhone gets about that many games released PER HOUR.

I hate playing games on my iPhone, but at least my iPhone has games I want to play.

Wake up, Redmond; Japan isn’t going to fix this.

For shame, fat man.

THIS SHALL NOT STAND.

Also I need to vent, because after three months of being dicked around, this clown still hasn’t named a price, while moaning about how he’s a serious seller and I’m obviously not a serious buyer, and his psychic prowess allows him to see that I’m not ready to pay whatever price he’s deluded himself into believing is appropriate.

Short version?

“Fuck you, Barry.”

Fourteen years he’s been holding these three domains, with no plan, no vision. He claims he wants to support open source, but when it comes time, the only question he has is “what’s your offer?”  He claims he wants to help the internationalization community, but the only thing he wants to help is himself to other people’s work.  Has his email right on the front page, asking for offers, yet when offered, complains about the unsolicited offers.

I spent three months making offers. He never named a price.  Eight times I asked him for a price.  Every time he had some excuse: “I don’t think you’re ready to pay it (how will we know),” or “in my judgment you’re not a serious buyer (I’m holding out my credit card with a what price sticker, and he won’t answer, and I’m not serious),” or he wants to know my business structure and what percentage of my company he’ll get, or after ten years of silence, just two days after I spoke up, multiple mysterious other parties offered money and he wants to pool our cash – meaning he’s only looking for a couple thousand bucks – but when I offer him ten suddenly it’s worth way more.  Or there was the time that he wanted to talk about how I was going to support open source and the community, because he pretends that’s where his interests are, but when the answer was “they get it for free and tons of resources for free,” his only answer is “how does that make me money?”

Delusional old troll seriously thinks that squatting a couple domains means he gets to dick someone around for three months then demand hundreds of thousands of dollars *and* a percentage of a company in exchange for two domains?

And he wants to tell me my lawyer *and* my CPA are wrong about how businesses should be structured, and he imagines I should just summon a silicon valley regular with, I don’t know, maybe the power of my will, because obviously if I have access to someone like that I’d be talking to this douchewater myself, instead of siccing a salesperson on him who knows how to fellate this moron’s need for adulation for a bunch of technical claims that, when asked about, got nonsense answers?

Wants me to get an independant valuation of the domain so that I won’t under-estimate its value, but when I use the world’s primary vendors for such things – Sedo, Network Solutions and GoDaddy, and they all say I actually over-valued the price by a factor of three – suddenly getting independant valuations is not to be trusted.

Says “perhaps you can get your independant business advisors to calculate the price from my point of view” – verbatim quote – as a reason not to tell me what the price is, from his point of view.

I closed the door in his face two weeks ago. He immediately started mailing me much more seriously, trying to convince me I had one last chance.

Today he took away that one last chance, two weeks after I told him I’d moved on.  He wanted me to know, after I told him I was done, that his judgement was that the man saying “I will take out a bank loan if I have to, just tell me what the price is” would not pay the price, and that as such, he should not tell me what the price is (ostensibly on the grounds of not wanting to risk finding out that he was wrong … and could make the sale.)

Wanted me to know that he was serious as a seller, but that my asking him what the price was showed that I was not serious as a buyer, which meant he wouldn’t give me the price.

I mean seriously, I’ve seen Monty Python skits that make more sense.

“As it stands now, your offer won’t even repair the dent on the bumper of my car, and frankly, the domains are worth more that a few hours of body repair shop time and some parts.”

This, as a reason to not tell me what the price is.  I had no particular interest in the offer.  I just wanted to know what his price was, so I could say yes.  I was ready to shell out five, ten thousand dollars if I had to, but this dumb cunt can’t see past that a thousand dollars is more than enough money to repair a dent in a Bentley’s bumper (obviously has no clue what a dollar is worth) to focus on that the guy is saying “I will pay you more than a thousand, just tell me how much you want.”

He never actually told me what price he wanted.  Eight fucking times I asked him, and it’s always my fault he won’t give a god damned price.

Then he bitches and moans about my negotiating tactics – apparently asking for a price is a negotiating tactic now – and gets confused that my initial offer of $3000 is apparently somehow now 5% of the $20,000 I said I might have been able to get up to (because apparently math is hard, and the last offer after someone gave up and bought a different resource is the only offer that needs to be paid attention to.)

He’s actually chastizing me for saying “I’m no longer interested at the original offer price because I’ve spent thousands of dollars ssomewhere else, but I might still be interested in paying this amount” and pretending that that means that’s the low-ball to entry I originally made.

Also, apparently offering a thousand dollars is now an unacceptable low-ball on a domain that GoDaddy and Sedo both think are worth less than four hundred dollars.

Fuck you, Barry. Fuck you and your head games and your desperation to pretend to yourself that you’re something other than a parasite.

At least a real domain squatter would have quoted me a price the same day, so that I could have made a decision and moved on.

This dumb fuck just threw away thousands of dollars on a domain GoDaddy thinks is worth less than $300, because after three months of trying to talk my price up, he’s talked himself into believing it’s worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The worst part?

I blame the domain monopoly system, but I can’t think of a way to fix it.  For all the bullshit Barry can pull in his single vendor king of piss-pot mountain crap, where because he spent ten dollars ten years ago now he thinks he’s owed hundreds of thousands for sitting on his ass and filling out a web form for a resource that nobody with any credibility thinks is worth within three orders of magnitude of the price he’s hinting that he maybe might think it’s worth?

The worst part is I know he’s the problem, but I can’t think of a way to fix him that wouldn’t cause much more serious abuse.

Fuck you, Barry.

Fuck you and everything your kind do to the internet.

Squatters I can deal with.  At least they’re honest, rapid, and up front.  Three months to *not* get a price?

You embarrass everyone whose work you claim is your own.

You are a hinderance to the work you pretend to support, the industry you pretend to be a member of, to basic commerce, and to businessmen’s ability to do business.

Barry, you should be ashamed of yourself.

This kind of garbengineering has never, ever gone well.  No wonder there’s a post every month or two about how they changed a one-liner and got a 30-40% speed boost: these idiots don’t know what they’re doing.

WHICH MEANS IT’S TIME FOR PDFS FULL OF FUCKING CHARTS, YO.

Time to dust off one of my old unused domains. 

However, if you hit F12, pull Document Mode down and hit IE9 Standards, suddenly they nearly all work. To fix this permanently, all the Protovis team needs to do is add a doctype (preferably HTML 4.01 strict) to their pages.

Currently, streamgraph, bubble charts, force directed layout, dymaxion maps, conway’s life, belousov-zhabotinsky, n-body and automaton explorer are broken. Everything else works flawlessly, and the rotated tiny text is *gorgeous*.  The animated and live graphs are lightning fast, and sparklines are perfectly positioned.

Nope.  Put in the old serial, the new serial, put in Adobe’s version of a mouse Konami code, get a challenge code to give to the phone guy, give a magic number back, bang, CS5 installs.

A-fucking-plus, guys.  That was awesome.

Powerpoint jabs every 20 minutes or so.  Don’t user test – Jonathan Ives doesn’t, and Microsoft does.  Repeated appeals to buy his mother’s book.  Let’s turn to page X and spend five minutes silently appreciating this graph, then move on with no expounding at all.

For that price, I had expected at least some content other than what’s in the books.  I didn’t think I was paying almost $400 to have the author read his book to me.

I expected better.