The last time I played a computer game was in 95, and after that, I lost passion for games. That was called, fairly enough, Virtual World. It's a game where you sit in a cage modeled like a car, and you drove it in the mining tunnel on Mars. Obviously, the car is not really moving, but it had enough hydraulic system to simulate certain action to give some realism, like a flight simulator. It was expensive to play, $15 per 15 minutes. It's a multi-player game in which you tried to shoot each other while racing. If you got shot, you heard a bang on your back, and the car shook so hard it gave you dizziness. If you sit with your back on the seat back, it could hurt pretty bad.

I spent a lot money playing that game, and after, I had no passions for other non-realistic games anymore. I always say to my other gamer friends that the game they play are for pimps :)

The chief reason I have SPF records for my domains is so that the big boys like hotmail.com and GMail don't reject my emails.

I set up SPF records properly, hoping that mails from our domain are not blocked or bounced. It works a little bit, but my frustration has not reduced that much. Now, I don't care any more, the SPF records are still there, but that's all.

The big boys are actually quite nice, and they do care about that. I got in touch with their admins, they did a verification (quite fast, I must say), and made sure mails from our domain went through. The problem is with cocky admins from small IT shops and ISPs who probably know jack about it, and who just chose to block the IP range of a whole continent. Yes, we are in China, but note that not all email servers in China are open relays, just like not all email servers in America or Europe are open relays.

So, no, I don't care about SPF any more. It does not work as it is meant to.

Why isn't IBM jumping first, and take the lead to move the whole IBM to Linux desktop? You know, the do-what-you-are-preaching concept? Last week, 5 IBM people came to our office to pitch for a 3 million contract, and I saw every single person (technical and sales) is running Windows Vista, with the latest MS Office. The only thing I recognized as IBM-made is Lotus Notes, which we also use here.

About 8 years ago, it was the same thing with Sun. We had a bunch of Sun people came to our office (another company), and they kept bitching about MS Windows and MS Office, while at the same time preaching Linux and Star Office. And guess what they were running? Yeah, you got it. At one point, I had enough of their bitching, I told them with a straight face: "Why don't you guys install Linux and Star Office, and send me that fucking slide in open format?" They looked at me as if I was from Mars, then I turned on my laptop, and it was running Linux.

One suggestion to the big guys: don't preach, do it. Then everyone will follow, you have enough clout to take the lead.

Well, if Microsoft's new OS can handle multi-core, multi-processor transparently for the applications, and if all the developers need to do is to recompile their apps on the new system, and voila, everything is transparently distributed across the cores/processors, then I'll be the first one to welcome it.

Multi-core/processor programming is hard. The thing I found quite elegant in Erlang is that it makes it so transparent that you don't even think about it. Imagine an OS with a "normal-looking" set of library that can handle all the hard works transparently. I'd say, bully to them.

Not everyone is lazy. I have intervertebral disc problem, and sometimes, it could be pretty nasty, I can't even stand up straight. If I stand or walk over an hour or two, I would have difficulty standing straight, and the lower back all the way to my calf are painful.

And no, I'm not a couch potato, I exercise twice to three times a week, mainly jogging (go slowly and gradually speeding up, up to 8km in 50 minutes) and swimming (2 to 3km in 1.5 hour) and stretching. And I'm not overweight either (had never been), I weigh 75kg, at 1.78cm tall. So that's pretty ok. If I don't exercise, my problems get worse.

So this exoskeleton could be a nice thing for me. I just wish it's not that expensive, and not so "borgy" (not that I mind that much). I would love to have one to help me sometimes, which would make life less miserable when the problem arise.

I know that Microsoft is to be evil, and Google is to be the good guy, and /.ers mostly side with Google, yada yada yada...

All that asides, I'd like to say that, from my personal experiences, Bing is pretty good. I've been using it on and off since its launch, before its ad campaign. Note that I still use Google on an everyday basis, but Bing has been doing better and better.

I spent a bored Saturday afternoon, comparing the two, with different methods that I use everyday for searching:

• keywords or phrases
• keywords, with + sign, AND, OR etc
• Chinese keywords + English keywords
• Natural questions (e.g. Where do I find xxx?), in English and Chinese
• Proper names, product names, location names, etc
• Some others non-pattern searches

In over half of what I put in, Bing came up with results that made more sense to me, and which are closer to what I'm searching for. I found that Google is more and more rigged with "hidden" ads, which is quite annoying at times. Maybe it's just that Google is better known, and all the so-called SEO experts work on it more, but it's still annoying.

That's just personal experience, and it's by no means scientific. YMMV. I, for one, welcome good search engine, even from the evil empire.

This may sound funny, but I recently had the same experience. I took over the position of CTO of an electronic payment company, and after one week, I figured a lot of critical systems are missing root password, including Linux, AIX, HP/UX and SCO Unixware. No one knows the password, it's been changing hands so many times, and the people who were responsible for those machines have left, without leaving the passwords behind.

Those are critical systems that must run 24x7. We had to rebuild the system on new machines, re-route transactions to the new machines, and shutdown the old ones to recover (single user mode).

And that's a platform handling over 400 billion in transaction per year. Scary. But that's the easiest problem I have inherited, mind you.

Ah, I had more fond memory of doing optimization. I'll chip in my story.

I just graduated in the early 90s, and started working the next day after my last exam, at a small telecom equipments company. The system was running on QNX 2, with every software components developed in house, except the OS and some of the drivers.

The company was built by hardware engineers, and I was the first guy from a CS background. There were 6 people in the engineering group. The "database system" was actually a small engine of simple linked list, and must load all data into memory to do anything. Insertion, modification, deletion, etc, were slow, database-related work is so slow, but everyone was used to it. Especially on a 386SX with 1MB of memory, and QNX had no virtual memory, the physical memory was precious.

After I started working, I saw this and said: "What the fuck?" Being good at data structure and algorithms, I decided to do something. Not to interfere with my day job, I spent a couple of evenings and one weekend, writing a memory-mapped B-tree engine, with some quite primitive transaction and rollback features, while trying to keep the same API as the original linked list engine. The memory-map part was so that I wouldn't have to load all data into memory to do the work.

After testing for 5 or 6 hours on the Sunday afternoon and evening, I plugged it in, replacing the old engine. I "checked in" the code. We didn't even have CVS, we just mount to the manager's machine, and put the codes there (basically, replacing what was there). I made the mistake of not informing the manager.

I went home the evening, it was raining hard, got wet, and had a fever. The next day, I called in sick.

At noon, the manager did a new build for testing. People where shocked that database-related operations just returned back right away. This normally would be an error situation. A few panicked, as there was no CVS to track who checked in what, and the db engine was there for almost 2 years already, and considered the most stable component. So no one looked there. But everything seemed to work just fine.

While I was sick, I also wrote a design document about the new engine, how to call the API, etc. On the 3rd day, I came in. After my first cup of coffee, I heard the news from my neighboring coworker. So I went to see the manager, told him about what I did, and handed him the design document. This was the first "real" design document, BTW.

The manager was relieved and excited, and finally, called in the CEO of the company too, and said: "Dude, you scared the shit out of me, but this is great work. Next time, tell me first before putting in the code, ok? I'm too old for that. BTW, do you see other areas that we can improve?" The CEO said: "I'd like to hear that too." With that kind of encouragement, I gave a list of areas that should be reworked, but with very low risk, and some areas that might need extra works.

The CEO said: "I want you to work on those items".

So, for the next 6 months, I was working more or less on every component of the system, including the UI framework that we developed (no, QNX Photon was still many years away), to do optimization and in quite a few cases, re-code them.

And I also downloaded CVS at home with my oh-so-slow modem (the company has no internet connection yet, only the CEO and VP had dialup), brought the floppy to the company, compiled the CVS source on QNX, asked and got a new machine to build a CVS server, so that we can track the codes better.

At the end of the year, I got a big bonus, with 2 extra days off for the Christmas holiday. It was fun.

Ok, since you are asking, I'll give you my side of the story.

We are a consulting, IT services and software development company. Not a big name, and we are very small. I'm the founder of the company. We have 30 something people. The economic problems affect us too. Projects in the pipeline dried up, as customers cancel or postpone indefinitely. Quite a bit of receivables suddenly become bad debts.

We could have slashed half of the workforce, but I'm putting in my life savings, and borrow money to pay for the monthly expenses and salary, trying to ride the storm. We don't even cut any benefits, we even gave everyone a small bonus at the end of year (yeah, in cash, not a Gphone like Google did), and also paid for the annual health checkup (as we have done every year), when every other company has cut all these.

Now, can I get the good publicity now? Can we be called a good corporate? Can we get more clients (eventually) because we are good to our employees? In fact, I'm not even sure that, once the economic slump is over, our employees would even be grateful and stay a bit longer with us.

When the economy is good, we see employees jump ship for a 100$ raise all the time, and being so cynical at the same time. During a bad economy, when a company is trying to be nice, no one notice. As a matter of fact, a lot of people called us stupid too, because employees are ungrateful by nature. Sometimes, I just think being nice does not pay. But I'm just trying to do what I think is the right thing, and hopefully, more people or more employees recognize that, and have the solidarity that would allow us to get past this time. But telling the truth, I don't have high expectation for this, as I think it would be same old, same old, as the last recesssion in the early decade. We did the same thing at that time too, but that didn't prevent employees to be so cynical. Go figure. Some day, I'll have to learn to be "evil" too.

And I sure hope that someone, Noam Chomsky or someone else, will write a book that explains to the public what the two Bushes have done during all these years, as eloquently as in The Culture of Terrorism.

Now, if you are going to try Bush and company, then I'd say that almost every single American president of the 20th century must be dragged into court as well, except the newly elected Obama (but we'll see).

Disclosure: I was the survivor of a country that was devastated as a result of the terrorist foreign policies of the USA. Our extended, very well-off family of 60 persons were reduced to less than 7 after four years of war, famine, epidemic outbreak, torture, mass killing, ... Talking about silkworm in an earlier article, you'd be lucky if you had that to eat. I have eaten all those things that would make the majority of ./ers scream of horror by just mentioning them.