September 2009
39 posts
Another "Pet Peeve" - Dell Documentation
While I generally abide by the George Carlin School of Pet Peeves, if you know what I mean, this is one of many of mine that I was just reminded of today. I wanted to consult the docs for one of my Dell servers to see the proper orientation for the processor’s heat sink (since I took it off to vacuum the dust out of it), but of course, all the documentation Dell posted was packaged as...
Ars Technica: RISC vs. CISC →
This is ancient (ten years old), and I only came across it when I saw this article, but it was a great read/refresher on a very old debate. There aren’t many web sites I’d even consider paying for access to, but Ars Technica may well be one of them.
PocketNester Rules →
Being able to play NES games on my phone makes me happy. Super Mario Brothers (the original) and Super Mario Brothers 3 are really hard to beat, in terms of how fun they are to play, even after all these years.
Rocky Mountain Bank: We Hired Forrest Gump →
So, to recap this article:
1. A bank employee—who likely has an IQ somewhere in the range of 60—e-mails in unencrypted fashion details about 1,325 customers, including Social Security numbers to the wrong address.
2. Said idiot/employee sends a follow-up e-mail to the wrong address requesting that they delete the previous e-mail without looking at the attachment.
3. Idiot employee receives no...
Cash For Clunkers: Why??? →
From its very inception, I thought this was an incredibly flawed program. It was billed as a taxpayer-sponsored method of initiating the sale of automobiles (helping to boost the economy), while increasing the fuel economy of vehicles on the road at the same time. But what purpose did excluding vehicles older than twenty-five years serve? And while fuel economy is important, what about the...
People seem to think that not reforming healthcare...
cyn1cal:
I beg to differ.
Doing it wrong is much worse than doing nothing at all.
I couldn’t possibly agree more. Especially if the costs of doing it wrong somehow get rolled up in debt that will eventually have to be paid back by a generation that won’t benefit from it.
Leopard Terminal/X Coolness
I don’t run X applications much, and when I do, I normally run them remotely. Prior to Leopard’s release, you’d have to start X11.app, start Terminal, run “export DISPLAY=localhost:0,” and then do a “ssh -X remote.hostname.” With Leopard—and presumably Snow Leopard—the system takes care of all of that for you, when it detects something trying to make a...
Denver's "Pit Bull Row" →
My brother owns a pit bull that looks almost identical to the fourth picture in the article. I wasn’t much of a dog person before he got that dog, but since then, I’ve grown to love the animal—and I’ve met quite a few dogs that never grew on me the way this one has.
It’s ridiculous to say one breed of dog is so much worse than any other. I’ve seen little pocket dogs...
SGI's New "Personal Supercomputer"? →
It’s powerful, it’s very expandable, but it’s no SGI. Calling it an “Octane III” is an insult to the MIPS-powered IRIX workstations the real Silicon Graphics used to make. Tons of people call Intel’s Itanium a failure, but I don’t believe that’s the case. Itanium almost single-handedly killed Alpha, MIPS (well, MIPS in workstations, anyway), and...
marco:
More on the Windows 7 launch party campaign, first from Cabel Sasser:
Are there people who can relate to — let alone enjoy — this video? And has there even been a more vibrant and tangible demonstration of the difference between Apple and Microsoft?
And Valhalla Island:
The concept is insane. I love OS X and there is no way I would ever host a “launch party” for a new release, no...
I don't call myself a republican... and now I...
cyn1cal:
Blocking net neutrality? You just made me absolutely sure that I’m an independent.
It seems that I dislike many things on both sides, Democrat and Republican.
Most of the counter-arguments provided here don’t stand up to the need for new regulations.
I don’t think this means that traffic can’t be shaped, but it does depend on how the regulations are implemented.
The argument that...
5 tags
Did Tech/Geek Movies Really Peak In The 80s?
I was going through my DVD collection the other day, and I came across two great cult-classics from the 80s (Real Genius and WarGames), which got me thinking about more recent “geeky” films. Hackers (circa 1995) has been on HBO and Cinemax a lot lately, and my abundance of unemployment has given me the opportunity to watch it many times, outside of my normal Dice/Monster time, of...
The USSR's Doomsday Machine →
Anything related to the Cold War has a tendency to fascinate me, especially things on the Soviet side, for some odd reason. I find the Cold War to be surrounded by far more mystery than either World War, and this mystery is made all the more interesting to me personally because of the great technological progress made during the era.
Like it or not, technological progress enabled this Perimeter...
French Deputies Want Labels On Photo-Altered... →
caseyliss:
This is to fight anorexia by clearly stating that the unnaturally thin woman on the magazine really is unnaturally thin.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, but even the most confident women I know have huge problems with their bodies. When some of my extremely skinny female friends start whining about how fat they are, I can’t help but wonder how they can possibly think...
College Football Is Awesome, But The Analysts... →
It was a great weekend of college football, with tons of surprising (and some not-so-surprising) games, but there was also plenty of analysis that was quite flawed, in my book. It doesn’t help that…
Ars Technica: Haiku Review →
I can remember trying BeOS Personal Edition 5 on a Pentium II at 450 MHz with 128 MB of RAM, and it was absolutely amazing, in terms of responsiveness. I tried Haiku myself, and it brought me back to the BeOS days, aside from the web browser, which you could tell simply wasn’t on the same level as the rest of the OS. It’s relevance is likely to be very limited, but if they...
marco:
We’ve had affordable, mainstream, consumer-class 64-bit CPUs since 2004.
I don’t think anyone in 2004 would have predicted that we’d just now be going through most of the 64-bit transition in our operating systems and mainstream applications.
Well, the 386 came out in 1985, and it was 1995 before we had a popular version of Windows that was mostly 32-bit, so we’ve managed to...
Different Approaches
caseyliss:
Most applications in Snow Leopard run in 64-bit mode. Occasionally, some, such as System Preferences, start in 64-bit and have to restart in 32-bit for compatibility. Apple has clearly positioned 64-bit as the new norm, and 32-bit as a legacy implementation.
On Windows, 64-bit applications are labeled as such. For example, the icon for Internet Explorer is labeled Internet...
3 tags
What About Bill?
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both get a lot of credit for being de-facto news reporters for a younger, generally cynical generation (myself included), and rightfully so, despite being the “fake news.” Yet, Bill Maher seems to be forgotten most of the time. Yes, his political beliefs are a little further out there than Stewart’s and Colbert’s, and his accessibility is...
“[Snow Leopard] is an operating system that is — and, going back to its roots at...”
– John Gruber (via caseyliss)
What a great read, especially the brief discussion and link to the anchored vs. unanchored UI model. I thought I might be the only Mac user who preferred the anchored model, and I had no idea Apple had changed it, even though I’m running Leopard. Must be the lack...
Gmail email FAIL: why Gmail went down →
I don’t particularly care for GMail, and I don’t use it much either, but there’s a bit of humor to be found when it goes down. Providing anything with more than three nines of uptime (99.9%) takes a lot of effort and money, especially when a system is as large, and presumably as complex, as Google’s. The expense of designing a system that is guaranteed to be up 100% of the...
“It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about you.”
– The New York Times: Facebook Exodus (via Katie Schenk) (via marco)
GE / Nuclear Power / Saving the world... →
cyn1cal:
jayparkinsonmd:
I was privileged enough to meet Eric Loewen. He works for GE’s nuclear energy division. They’ve invented something called a PRISM reactor. It uses nuclear waste for power.
The US uses 3 terawatts of energy every year. The nuclear waste already buried across America can produce 300 terawatts of energy using a GE PRISM reactor, thus powering the US for 100 years with no...
Commitment Issues (Or A Lack Thereof) →
I’ve used various Macs throughout my life, dating back to the Macintosh SE, but it wasn’t until I got a PowerBook G4 in 2004 that my main computer became a Mac. At the time, OS X was years ahead of…
2 tags
"Idiocracy" Was Not Funny →
…because of things like this. As Mel Brooks might write, what in the wide, wide world of sports does evolution have to do with remaining “neutral” in religious matters??? It sure seems those who protest the teaching of evolution do their very best to make sure it remains just a theory, and, given enough time, lunacy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get me some Brawndo...