I was wanting to swing by on Saturday and check things out.
Unfortunately…
I need four tires and a brake rotor. I will soon need a good rackmount server (more on that at a later date). We need some stuff done around the house. April’s latest motor vehicle citation looms. A student loan needs payed. And on and on it goes.
In short, a couple hundred dollars and 24 hours would be better utilized elsewhere.
*grumble*
Maybe next year.
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A plus -No analysis whatsoever. Those games have been analyzed to death. This is about the personalities and cold-war politics involved. Good read. |
Next on my reading agenda
Yes, I actually enjoy stuff like this. |
Now for the bad news.
I could easily see this keyboard in the garbage can within five minutes.
If you really want to impress me, Apple…
Take the above - A substantial buckling spring keyboard with unparalleled tactile response. Trick it out with your “elegant anodized aluminum”. Yes, your limp-wristed, Starbucks sipping, Greenpeace contributing, liberal arts degree holding client el might find such a thing barbaric and none too forward thinking. However, some of us have been waiting since the late 1980s for someone to step up to the plate and make real keyboards again.
I’d gladly pay an extra 200.00 for one.
Just something to think about.
Watch as NBC DateLine Associate Producer, Michelle Madigan discovers what hackers world-wide already know - Security Through Obscurity does not work.
What possessed NBC news to leave the relative ease of outing sexual predators to take on masters of human engineering? Who knows. Will they attempt something that stupid again? Probably.
The next time Miss Madigan violates a person’s privacy and dignity with a microphone and camera, will she remember her humiliation and fear? Doubtful.
Hats off to the attendees of DefCon for dishing out some well-deserved comeuppance.
On the other hand…
This must be what coming out of the closet is like.
I have accumulated so much baggage that I cannot overcome inertia and change direction.
I think that is my present problem in a nutshell.
I need me some airbrakes or a nice, sturdy brick wall in my path.
I am typically not a bells and whistles fan.
However, I am very impressed. If this doesn’t put the “Linux is clunky” nonsense to rest, I don’t know what will.
I installed Ubuntu and Beryl on a spare partition shortly after seeing this and can attest it is as slick as the video portrays. Once I had the NVidia accelerated driver installed, it just plain worked.
Impressive still is that the machine is not really capable of running Vista with Aero yet Beryl screams on it.
The visible selling point of a five year development effort by the largest software company in the world has effectively been nullified. The “Wow”, as they term it, is a yawn.
I seriously think this is a bell-weather moment.
In 1992, I was working as a corrections officer for the Muskogee County Sheriff’s Department - Muskogee, Oklahoma. Night shifts for anyone working dispatch were long and boring. We had an old IBM-XT compatible system in the dispatch office what’s sole purpose was to connect to the National Crime Information Computer. It’s what your license and registration get run through every time you are pulled over for speeding. If you have a warrant, the nice officer soon knows. If you did something especially nasty, alarms and such go off all over the place and interested parties from all over the country know as well.
An aside: Our 911 teletype was a serial dot matrix printer attached to a modem. Nothing more. Thunderstorms were interesting, to say the least.
What we needed to break the monotony was a game of some sort that would not interfere with the Terminate-Stay-Resident utilities the old NCIC software had loaded and that would actually be playable on an 8 Mhz dinosaur with a CGA adapter. It also had to be designed around the fact that it would have to be quickly exited from at a moment’s notice.
917 lines of Turbo Pascal code later, I had the game written. It was a cheesy text-mode arcade game. You were a diamond thief that had to steal diamonds and avoid guards. It could be suspended with a single keystroke and resumed at leisure. It had a high score table and Sound Blaster / Adlib support (The 286 I wrote it on had a Sound Blaster..It had to be done)
Through the miracle of DosBox, I am playing this game for the first time in 15 years - Having a blast.
I need to go through this old source code directory and see what else I find.
The first irritation with FreeBSD set in after I installed firefox. The ports tree has firefox and a firefox15. With this knowledge…
# pkg_add -r firefoxImagine my surprise when I got firefox 1.5.
# pkg_add -r firefox2That did the trick.
In the over-all scheme of things, that little inconsistency was minor. No big thing. What followed was a little more irritating.
The default OpenOffice install is 1.5. That simply would not do. There was, to be found, and openoffice-2-devel package out there that gave me what I wanted but it was compiled without cups support. I can’t have that. So, I go to build what I want from ports and get this…
===> Applying FreeBSD patches for openoffice.org-2.3.20070428
Ignoring previously applied (or reversed) patch.
1 out of 1 hunks ignored--saving rejects to sd/source/ui/inc/tools/ConfigurationAccess.hxx.rej
=> Patch patch-i76320 failed to apply cleanly.
=> Patch(es) patch-i65462 patch-i65514 patch-i66667 patch-i67904 patch-i69418 patch-i69994 patch-i73157 patch-i73217 patch-i75708 patch-i76115 patch-i76141 applied cleanly.
*** Error code 1Looks like I have my work cut out for me there.
On the brighter side of things, the streamer was successfully built and I did a small blues set on unreal with it.
Decided to install FreeBSD 6.2 on a spare hard drive I had lying about.
After doing a minimal 200MB install and building the system up via pkg_add and ports, I am slowly becoming a zealot.
I tried to bring it to its’ knees, load-wise, by running gnome, kde, fluxbox, xfce and xfce4 desktops simultaneously (Each running multiple apps and compiling code). Also had every media player running at the same time. Not one audio skip. Not one mouse falter. No ill effects whatsoever. Linux would be jerking like crazy and skipping audio.
On the down-side, there is no native flashplayer nor is there my beloved VMware (without a lot of mucking about with a Linux compatibility layer). Another is that the FreeBSD version of NVidia’s driver does not perform nearly as well as the Linux version. These are minor problems though when you consider how rock solid stable this install has been thus far.
I find myself gravitating towrds this install for everyday usage now - Especially since I got OpenOffice 2.0 up and running and the printer sharing going.
This stuff rocks.
Wow