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Saturday, June 27, 2009

more cell phone HATE

There is no way to sync my ancient Blackberry 8703e to my MacBook Pro. There is no app except a $6 per month web service, and who knows what shit-ass security they have.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Oracle buying Sun

Yeah it's old news, I know.

I can't help thinking that this buy-out by Oracle is just another example of why using a FOSS OS is the only way to go. We can expect Oracle to make Sun's technical support go from bad to abysmal now. We should start planning now for the imminent demise of Solaris. Why did Oracle buy Sun? Perhaps so they can turn Solaris into an purely Oracle-optimized OS? Nah. For Sun's customers. I predict they will soon kill off the Sparc processor and then Solaris. OpenSolaris may survive as a hobby OS.

MacBook Pro issue

Last night I left my MacBook Pro running on battery power and went to bed. This morning I could not boot the thing. I kept hitting the power button and nothing happened. After having been plugged into its power supply for several minutes, it finally booted. I guess there is no way for this thing to use AC power directly. The battery needs some charge before it can start. This is not true of my old R40 Thinkpad or my G4 iBook.

That was scary. I was sure I had a dead Mac.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Star Trek movie

5 of 10 dongs. This movie was made for kids eight through 14 years old. I prefer scifi for adults, like BSG and Firefly. Another disappointing Trek movie.

The actor playing Kirk was not a good choice. There needs to be a flash of devlish genius (or at least intelligence) in Kirk's eyes and with this actor there was nothing but blankness. He has a squeaky voice too. Compare it to Shatner's voice. He did not embody Kirk just as some actors who have played Bond fail to become Bond.

Overall the story was weak, with little character development. The time travel theme has been done to death and the writers didn't add any new wrinkle.

I like the idea that the crew was struggling to master new technologies and dreaming up new uses of these technologies. There is a trial and error aspect to technology that many people (in real life) are not willing to accept. They feel entitled to results but are unwilling to learn how to use the tools required to gain those results . . . unless it's a cell phone.

I'm less sympathetic to the he "cheating = hacking" theme. I'm sure this attempt to blur the difference between hacking and cheating will be a huge hit with the 8-14 audience but that doesn't make it right. Sure the Kobayashi Maru test is impossible to defeat but cracking the test's server did not prove anything except to demonstrate Kirk's cracking skills. The object of the test is to reveal the subject's character; to show what he might do in a seemingly hopeless situation. Not every test has a right or wrong answer and cheating is not the answer.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Pulseaudio is for fappists

Why the FUCK is there another audio subsystem in Fedora now? Fuck you, you fucking fucks. ALSA is fine. Leave it the fuck alone. I need TWO audio softwares on my box? Again I say, fuck you you fucking fucks and the fuckdog you rode in on.