Tag Archives: computers

toasters to politics

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Kenji passed on a juicy little tidbit today that I had totally missed. Apparently the founders of MoveOn, a lefty political action committee (PAC for the lingo-savvy), were the founders of Berkeley Entertainment Systems, creators of After Dark, with it’s famous flying toaster screen saver. I was always fond of Satori, myself. Pre-After Dark we had Moire-cdev. Ah, back in the day, when you needed ResEdit to change the icon appareance on the desktop.

If you want a fancy schmancy flying toaster, you can get it for OSX.

tokenizing

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I posted a while back about how Cover and Thomas’s book was posted online now, but it turns out that the license for online access uses “tokens.” Once Berkeley has run out of “tokens,” access is denied to the book. This is one of the stupidest decisions I have ever heard of, akin to the music industry’s head-in-the-sand approach to digital music. The way in which online book resources are used is different from print medium, and to force the library to buy more tokens is akin to selling someone a book which they can read only a certain number of times. I’m not saying that they should not charge at all for the book, or that they should charge less than for a library-bound hard copy, but this token system displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how books are used. I wonder if the person who designed this system has ever had to use a book other than “How To Stick Your Head Up Your Ass for Dummies.”

Yes, I’m angry.

Haskell

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I took one of them Internet quizzes on “what programming language are you?” and was told that I am Haskell, a polymorphicly typed, lazy, purely functional language. Looking at the site makes me think it’s pretty cool — I had never heard of it, which is unsurprising. I know the amazingly cool Manu is a programming language h4xx0r, but just reading up their propaganda on why they are so cool was pretty interesting. Since the most complicated coding I really need to do is in MATLAB, I don’t know what I would do with Haskell, but I actually considered making it a project to learn it. Hooray learning! Of course, I have no time, so bollocks to that idea.

blue screens of death

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Another day, another battle with IRQD_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL. I’m really curious as to why windows machines are just so much less stable than Unix or MacOS. I mean, getting Unix machines to work at all in the first place is difficult, and getting MacOS to run things you want it to run is difficult, but once you’re going, you’re going, and there’s none of this worthless “somehow we corrupted your NFS driver thingie, we have no idea. So you should just reinstall the operating system.” This is a worthwhile consumer product? Maybe I will hang myself if my laptop stops working.

I saw The Bicycle Thief yesterday — quite good, and quite depressing. Whenever I see an old movie that won an Oscar, I’m curious as to what the competition was. Perhaps I should just arrange my own private Academy screenings, a la Tarantino. Only he just screens action flicks, from what I’ve heard.

KALX rocks, most of the time. Sometimes it kind of sucks, but not most of the time I’m listening. That is all.

Now I know what they’re talking about

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I used to be one of those people who hated Windows because it was the cool thing to do — everybody hated it, and for reasons that seemed good on paper, but I had never personally been screwed over by it or experienced difficulty in reinstalling the operating system, or what have you.

All that has changed.

I’m now willing to venture that the current pain I am experiencing installing XP is far, far worse than the time I tried to install LinuxPPC on my Mac without any directions. It is worse even than trying to sysadmin a DECstation running Ultrix, possibly the most head-up-its-ass flavor of Unix ever to grace a desktop microcomputer.

I hate you, Bill Gates, and all your demon monkeys. May penguins assault you with razor sharp beaks in the deepest circles of Hell.

Of course, if there were penguins in hell, wouldn’t it mean that it had frozen over? Or maybe they are evil Lava Penguins. Wow. That sounds like a monster from Diablo or something.