By now, both UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee have received letters from the RIAA and not forwarded them to the students. I got this tingling feeling when I was reading the latest article
about this - not all hope is lost. This is not about harbouring those that engage in copyright infringement at any rate, but by following due process when it comes to law. Which is something the RIAA has been permitted to more or less afford thus far because many people got scared when they were bullied.

I think the worst approach, however, is taken by those students that decide to go ahead and settle with the RIAA - this gives the multi-corporate an incentive to continue with their extortion of random individuals. Luckily, more and more people begin to understand what is going on and countering with their own offensive [check out my del.icio.us feed for a recent example.] Maybe soon enough somebody will really drag them through court and get this fixed once and for all. Then, maybe, some of those that have been bullied - have they not been forced to sign a waiver stating otherwise - can engage in a class action lawsuit against the RIAA and drill them back of at least twice the amount they’ve racketeered so far.

Or, sure, somebody could handle it differently…

Long live some people’s complete lack of appropriateness. No, of course I don’t mind if we’re on public transit and you shove your dirty feet in my face so that I may fully enjoy the aesthetic excellence that your protruding nails and dirty toes represent. The smell is not a problem either because I am the quintessential masochist when it comes to lack of hygiene, especially in females.

Really, please, don’t take your feet down for anybody else that may need to sit down in this crowded train. We’d all love to stare at these columns of beauty that your feet represent, we’d all be so sad were you to get a fucking clue that what you’re doing is embarrassing for those around you far more than you’d care to acknowledge. And far more than it is to you.

Mmm how I love it when you’re flailing those toes! Fresh breeze, smells like mornings. I need a bullet to the brain so that I may die happy.

we kill we cheat we develop and we perfect and we market death we do it in the name of something we don’t know but believe in because we’re scared we lie to one another we sell ourselves we sell our love we destroy hope we learn to lie before we learn to listen we need nothings we have nothings we feel nothing we’re afraid of everything we miss the things that make up life

we care about insignificant things that decay faster  than a shooting star lights up the sky.  we gossip and worry and theorize about things that do not make up any blip of life or Life but we do it because we cannot handle life and Life.

in all of this, we’ve become so fucked up that we’ve just passed the point of no return. please fasten your seat belts. there is no emergency brake.

Truly, my “Software Engineering Project” course is teaching us a lot of things about how things really go on in the tech world.

Part one deals with how those that pretend to be working hard are doing almost nothing. But they do report a lot of hours for that alleged work and get vocal about replacing their work.

[This was part originally of the previous post.]

A big reason for why Microsoft is still ‘playing catch’ stems from the fact that Windows is so very used in corporate environments. My opinion is that Microsoft should fork off the versions of their OS into Business and User components. So far they’ve been trying to nail two birds with the same stone - despite the relative differences between Home, Pro and Corp. editions of XP, for example. Sure, they’ve made their market research and know better what many companies want. This is me talking.

Average corporate users have little need for multimedia, eye-candy and all of that. They want familiar user interfaces, stability and teamwork-ready applications - and support. No crippleware, no services opened for things that don’t belong in their corporate environments in the first place but that cost them large amounts of money when a cracker gets through.

The end-user wants a machine that does everything around the house. House. Multimedia, IM, socializing. And something that looks good doing it without requiring a machine stolen out of NCERT to run the OS.

For those people that want more control over their machine there can always be the Ultimate, Super-Mega, Meta edition. Although there doesn’t need to be one.

If the entire system would be more modular, the components can be thrown together easier to make the generic technology behind the OS-es relatively the same but the special ingredients present. Corporate users would benefit from a stable UI and a core that’s being constantly improved on in terms of security with new features thrown in gradually [this can even be a good source of profit for Microsoft with a Custom Solutions division where low-level modifications to the OS can be made and sold for a nice development and support taxation.] The User edition, however, could explore more cutting-edge features and a more aggressive take on innovating. Even the target demographic can vary — bring Microsoft Bob back for the retired ladies please!. Most importantly, backwards compatibility can be thrown out of the consumer editions because most users don’t need to run old things and would be much happier with better response times or a smaller install size.

Just a thought.

Everybody’s touting Vista nowadays. That it’s better than XP [I know some who will disagree] and better than Mac OS X, tried and true Windows technology. That it now looks good and macheads should cry in shame looking at their own system. It’s finally beautiful inside and out.

Bullshit.

First off, a professional disclaimer: I recognize - after speaking with a few MS employees and just paying attention to most of the tech world - that most of these decisions are up to management to make. That when implementing a new system, the architects would do things in their own way rather than copy something that’s already out there - it’s a Geek Thing™. Especially when you’re starting up with something fresh, why not? This and all my other rants are directed towards some of those people that make these decisions and, unfortunately, give Microsoft its image.

Imitation is flattery. Everybody in tech has taken things from everybody else and put out their own version with some changes. There are too many examples in tech history to go over at this point. The problem with most of what Microsoft has tried to copy is that they haven’t managed to quite make the mark - and rarely [if even, I can't think of an example] exceed it. They’ve been playing catch because of their complacency as a big company - stability over innovation.

How did they miss the mark this time around?

Vista needs you to buy a supercomputer. That would be fine if it was doing something remarkably shocking.

• UI? I’m doing everything that Vista does on a 1.33 GHz G4 PPC on 32 MB VRAM and 1.5 GB RAM. It’s going quite fine, thank you [to note that the RAM is needed for me keeping open about a dozen apps at any given time; UI can be pulled in just as well on the default 512].
• Multimedia? Well, provided you manage to play any video content on Vista at all, it shouldn’t be that demanding: HD is handled quite spectacularly by any mactel [I'm doing fine with H.264, haven't played with anything above that.] On Vista, though, you need a big CPU to handle all that intensive polling that the DRM system is doing 30 times a second to make sure you’re not trying to - e.g. - splice into the video signal.
• Games? Some BSoD-ing is in order, just to keep in check [MS should change their logo and tag line to "General Protection Fault: You were trying to use the computer"] I assume this is another one of the exciting features [excitement is one way to describe your state post-BSoD].

Photos… Gadgets…

That age old discussion on internal vs. external beauty. How the former should outshine the latter and take precedence in love and life - choosing partners or friends.

Briefly, I acknowledge the importance of internal beauty. Without such a connection to that person, any kind of relationship is not likely to go very far. Maybe that’s part of why some people [think they] fall in love over the Internet - they get to show who they are and not how they look.

It is foolish, though, to disregard external - perceived - beauty entirely. Not only is it the first contact [in many cases] with another person and as such may impact the continuation of the relationship, but personal aesthetics are a major force in our day-to-day activities and our general feeling of accomplishment. How, you might wonder? Most of what motivates us to push forward is pleasure. We derive it in our own ways - work, art, sex. On some idealist plane of thought, all of these should be fields where we can express ourselves compromise-free; in reality, love/sexuality is the one area where we can most readily exercise this freedom. So being in the company of someone that’s aesthetically pleasing to the self is definitely a first step towards romantic happiness. Yes, as the beauty fades or one becomes more used to it in their S.O. the things beyond a pretty face start being more obvious. That should actually happen before beauty expires. Regardless, the shell begins decomposing and it’s the ghost inside one must learn to hold on to. It’s the ghost inside, indeed, that gives and receives love and the only part that vibrates to it.

Two disjoint, technology-revolving rants:

Part A: If you tell somebody that has to use your computer that Firefox will save their session, restore it when you start it up again and show you what they’ve done… and you did instruct them to use IE7 [for the one or two sites they visit anyway]… and they still insist on doing it… should you feel awkward if they don’t do that?

I know not everybody has to like or play well with technology. I’ve made my peace with that [but hey, they won't be part of no army of mine.] But you design a simple system for them to follow. You do your best to accommodate them without changing too many things for yourself [granted, my Firefox is significantly modified to suit my habits - it has no buttons and only the address toolbar and tab view.] In vain.

And to think they make basic computing skills a prerequisite for most jobs.

Part B: If you’re useless to a project, please don’t try to push yourself in front. We’ll carry your weight - since we have to - but please don’t make us loathe ourselves for it. Go hunt a comma misplacement in a phile and shut up.

Bear with me while I’m messing around with my new theme, please. I promise I’ll try to make it short and worth it - feel free to make suggestions, even.

=)

update: this is only about stage one… I know the blog is fairly unreadable at the moment but don’t despair: it shall be resolved soon!

It’s nice to see the DoD has the same IPs as back when the ARPAnet was a big thing [I was skimming over the March, 1984 edition of 2600 Magazine.] There’s some interesting things surrounding these IPs, too

Exhibit A: Map of the Internet @ xkcd, the 26.0.0.0/8 IP range is owned by DISA

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