I agree… sort of… with the fucking president.
As I said… yesterday?… I don’t think subsidies should exist. However, I don’t care for the tone this speech, and the articles covering it, are taking. It feels like a ploy to get people angry at farmer’s… for some reason. I’m guessing ineptitude and greed.
The RIAA can suck it.
I wouldn’t choose to use a Microsoft product to manage my toaster, let alone something important.
This sort of thing shouldn’t be this hard. I think the default action should be to assume a species is endangered, then step back from that position as studies are made.
See, this is one of the many reasons to not trust the judgement or capability of Microsoft. Seriously, they’re a company of mostly assholes.
We, as a species, are incapable of not shooting ourselves in the foot. Prove me wrong kids, prove me wrong.
Speaking of. A “tax holiday”? What the hell is wrong with everyone?
Here’s what I’d do, with the free hand of a what-if I had godlike control over governmental structure. Subsidies, gone. Farmers and airlines can rise and fall like any other industry. Aid from time to time…. maybe. No more deals, no more half assery. Governmental studies would be reviewed by a panel of normal people, including scientists from an appropriate field, and dismissed if found to be useless or pointless. Disband the IRS, introduce incredibly high sales tax. Everyone pays, less paperwork, far less bullshit in a year. Yes, this would mean you’d have to tax cross-state purchases, since it would be a federal tax. Disband the DEA, let them get real jobs. Seriously, the “war on drugs” is almost as wasteful a pursuit as the RIAA’s spazzy jihad. Streamline the shit out of all branches of the government. Those people have way too much time on their hands. Pull our armed forces out of Iraq, allowing it to collapse into whatever form it’s going to take on anyway. The same is likely true of Afghanistan, you know, that country we stomped all over then forgot about? Also, need to take a really close look at what’s what with defense spending. What? Gasoline? Oh. Well, much as I hate to say it, tax the living crap out of it. Get it to $6 a gallon or so. Mercilessly pursue oil companies for environmental controls and fees. Do the same for all fuels. It’s the only brake available, the only way to slow usage. Otherwise it’s assholes in “dualie” pickups and H(insert number)’s forever.
Of course, this is all still bandaids. The world needs to have less people. A lot less. We either need a frontier, such as space, a lot of deaths, a lot less births, or some mix of the three.
I should really not stay up so late.
Yes. These two. If gnome starts highlighting installed programs, I’ll spazz out.
Seriously though, it’s whiny as shit. If you sit most Windows users, like the chick in the article, down at a clean install of Windows, know what you get? Blank stares.
Here’s what his review by proxy overlooks.
This was a more or less fresh install of Ubuntu, yet she had all of these applications at her fingertips, and many more available via Synaptic. Oh noes, it doesn’t spell out what it’s doing? Golly, that sure doesn’t happen in Windows, where everything is neatly categorized… wait… no.. that’s linux. Sure, apps can have funny names, but who cares? Are LimeWire and Outlook descriptive names? No. A better test for usability would have been to sit her down with a default install of Windows, and a default install of Ubuntu.
Also, Google bitch, you retarded feces monkey, and this complaint about linux not being competitive until an average user can do things without help is bullshit. People always need help, and this guy’s time would have been better served helping this woman out instead of making her jump through hoops for no reason. 10 minutes of instruction and she would have been off to the races, but no, this douche had a point to make, some crap agenda to carry out.
For some reason I can’t get directions for any routes within Mexico. That strikes me as bizarre. I wonder if I spoofed a Mexican IP, or DNS signature, if it would be different.
First, it’s all pretty much gone to shit at this point. Moving on.
Fuck you Lars, the last two or three Metallica albums are crap, and so is the attitude. Die. Under a bus.
Jesus, I kind of hope they go forward with this just so we can make every mistake possible.
Bad news Microsoft, if a SQL attack only hits your platform, one historically riddled with holes anyway, it’s likely your problem.
If I were a teacher, I’d stab students in the eyes.
And I’m spent.
So, I decided to upgrade to 8.04, from 7.10, and to also move to 64bit. Went with a clean install, mostly to eradicate all the weird things I had done with my previous profile.
Anyway, thus far it’s great. Firefox 3 Beta 5 is the default browser, and it mostly works very well. Fonts look a lot nicer in it. I didn’t even realize how crapulent they really were before until seeing the new renderer. I like the unlock mechanism for control panels, even if it did take me a few minutes to notice what was going on. The idea of Gnome VFS is nice, but we’ll see.
There are some issues I’ve had. One is that while copying things my open apps would hang in time rather frequently. I can only imagine that’s because of something in the VFS system. I’m hoping it was a fluke, due to some indexing going on, or will be patched soon. Moving files, however, is lightning fast, even compared to regular linux cases. This says quite a bit, since linux just changes pointers on the filesystem when a “move” is made, making the normal operation rather fast already. Skype is still a bunch of slackers, with not 64 bit version to show. Undoubtedly we’ll have to wait through 6 revisions of the Windows client before another update worth a damn shows up. From a straight architecture point of view, memory intense apps, like Virtualbox virtual machines, run a lot faster than before. I’m not sure why this is, since I only have 2GB of RAM, plus whatever is on my video card, but it’s nice.
So, thus far, thumbs up.
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.
-Nathaniel Borenstein
That took some real doing. If you have the option, just use PECL extensions. If you don’t, prepare to sit around and try a bunch of things out.
I found several scripts that claimed to be the solution to this issue, but none of them wanted to work. Finally I pieced together something like this-
$commandline = “gpg –homedir /var/www/vhosts/host/httpdocs/gpgtests/gnupg –keyring /var/www/vhosts/host/httpdocs/gpgtests/gnupg/keyring1 -a –always-trust –batch –no-secmem-warning -e -r ‘Fargo Holiday’ -o $outfile $infile”;
system($commandline, $result);
Which still didn’t seem to work, because the line, cribbed from one of the scripts, to check the result before emailing wasn’t firing. It was looking for a $result of 0, and I was getting 2. Turns out, for this case anyway, 2 works just fine.
Also, PGP is awesome, and I feel bad for having mostly ignored it until now.
The first Vampire The Too Long Title game for the PC didn’t sit well with me. I’m sure it had something going for it, but it wasn’t anything going for me. So, this game went past me totally unnoticed. Lately I’ve seen some forum posts reminiscing about it, and thought, what the heck, let’s try it out.
The game is about 4 years old now, and is based on the Source Engine, the same engine behind Half Life 2. While HL2 looks amazing, this game… well… doesn’t. The models all look pretty good, and thanks to the engine the facial expressions are great, but the textures are all rather bad. The artists put a lot of work into the faces, probably because they had to, but generally every other texture in the game makes it feel more like Deus Ex or Half Life. This isn’t a deal breaker, but knowing what the engine can do, and knowing that White Wolf could afford more/better artists, it’s a little sad. I’m sure it’s a release time issue, especially considering the game is unstable as hell. Everyone has awful hair.
The voice acting is surprisingly good. You don’t get a voice, despite interacting with dialog, which is distracting but sort of par for the course. Options to seduce, intimidate, and… whatever… are denoted by a color and style scheme. It looks goofy, but it’s useful for knowing, at a glance, how that option is going to play. Still, if a player can’t tell the difference between seduction and intimidation, fire a writer.
You build your character very much as you do in the pen and paper game, though with a lot fewer points. Except for Disciplines, your powers, which you get an extra point for. It’s pretty flexible, and, to me at least, easy to grasp. So far the game gives you a lot of ways to solve problems, and plenty of opportunities to flex your array of skills. I’ve even intimidated passerby into giving me money, which was fun.
There’s two limiting factors to how brutal you can get. Humanity, and The Masquerade. You start with 7 points of Humanity. As that lowers, your character might freak out and randomly attack people on the street, leading us to The Masquerade. There are laws to vampire society to prevent you from causing human-kind to become too interested or knowledgeable about vampires, aka- The Masquerade. You start with 5 Masquerade points, and if you lose them all, it’s game over. Humanity can be gained by doing charitable things, such as saving a person, which is nice because you can then game the system to kill that bum, because you have some padding.
Combat isn’t super, but it’s not bad at all. All of my powers feel useful, even the stupid ones, and the combat pace is just right, so far, to let you manage them pretty easily. It could definitely benefit by lifting more ideas from Deus Ex, in that a paused screen for selecting active powers and equipment would be real handy, but so far it’s not an issue.
Anyway. I’m pleasantly surprised, and we’ll see if it keeps giving.
Thanks to Aaron feeling weighed down by cash, I’ve inherited his “old” computer, which is about 3 light years ahead of my old one. Booted up, rebooted and my new NIC was working, enabled the new video card drivers (inline-script: piss off ATI), and rebooted once more.
Everything, thus far, is flawless. So yeah, suck it Windows.