ptalk > February 2010

Register NOT com

Register.com: As close as they can get to unethical.

A friend wants to consolidate his domain registrations. Not technical, so they ask me to help. What seems like the right approach? Let’s log in to your account at Register.com and make me the Admin contact, so I can help you out. Simple enough. Hum. Your domain is set to auto-renew, be locked, and have safe-auto-renew protection. Guess we’ll have to turn all those off to be able to transfer. Okay, I suppose they should tell you that by turning all that off you might lose your domain if you don’t know what you are doing, but we do. But, you can’t turn off auto-renew, because you have “mail” and “hosting” bundled with this domain. Ok, how do we unbundle those? Turns out you haven’t been using these features anyways, since your webmaster is hosting your site and email accounts on their server. Maybe if we just turn off auto-renew on those… That seems to do the trick.

Now, we need to request the transfer. We’ll log in to the registrar you want to consolidate to, and ask them to initiate a transfer. That’s working, I got an email (as admin) and they just need me to enter an “auth code” to proceed.

Back to Register.com. How do we get an “auth code”? Burrow down about 5 levels… aha, there’s the “request auth code” button. WARNING! Turn back, you surely don’t know what you are doing. Yes I do. Okay, but don’t say we didn’t warn you. BTW, did we mention that this is a bad idea? Yes, but I want to do it. Okay, but you know you could LOSE YOUR MANHOOD by hitting this ok button! Are you really sure?? YES! Just one final question, since you are trying to leave us, we’ll offer you a nifty renewal package at 10% off. I don’t want that. Are you sure? Yes. Ok. We will send you an auth code IN 4-5 DAYS, after our “security staff” have had a chance to evaluate your request.

What do you think of the iPad?

It’s close to what I was hoping for, as I alluded in here. It’s basically an iPhone with a bigger screen and real (optional) keyboard. (I think it even permits an external display, although I don’t know if you can do keyboard and display simultaneously).

I think it has the potential to be the ideal computer for 90% of the people in the world who really only use a computer to read email and surf the web. The one catch: it seems (as far as I can tell), you still need an “iTunes base station”, albeit only occasionally. I understand that there are people who have iPhones that have never connected them to their PC, so, perhaps the iPad can also run stand-alone (once activated)?

I am angling to get my company to buy one (because I think we can make some hay on Steve’s anti-Flash stance and OpenLaszlo’s ability to deliver to Flash and HTML from the same source). If they won’t, I will surely buy one myself, rabid fanboy that I am.

If “grampa” were not such a technophobe, I would say it would be the perfect computer for him, because it should be simple enough to operate that even he could read email. Even if he never replied, at least he could see email, see pictures his children and grandchildren send him, etc.

For the student (for any casual user who mostly takes notes, looks things up on the web, and maybe has a few job-specific applications) I can see it replacing the laptop they carry now. Modulo the concern above that you need an “iTunes base station”. Maybe the Mac mini will be repurposed to be that?

For the geek household, I see it as replacing the hand-me-down laptop that you keep rather than sell, just so you have one you can browse with from the breakfast nook, or loan to visitors so they don’t accidentally peek at your bank statement that is open on your machine in your office. I don’t see it replacing my laptop. Although I wonder how long it will take for someone to package Emacs as an app?