Journal Journal: Flying Visit 4
Yep,
-MT.
Yep,
-MT.
Since last I journalled here, I have survived another bout with cancer (this time osteosarcoma, see my homepage in the cancer section for the long story). This time I come away permanently disabled (my ulna nerve in the left arm is pretty much useless leaving me with absolutely no sensation in my left pinky, half my left ring finger, the top of my forearm, most of the top of my hand and a portion of my palm) with a metal plate (titanium or surgical steel, I forget right now and am too lazy to look at the surgical report right now) and 8 screws holding my upper arm together.
I'm a licensed electrician, a handyman, and licensed business owner with a pick-up truck (redneck style, too). No kids, am highly active on Facebook and Twitter, kind of active on Google+, and occasionally still messing around with
Not much else to say that you can't find on my homepage.
So I haven't written a journal entry for a while (9 years) so I thought I'd update it.
I'm currently looking forward to the 7DRL event in March. I wanted to enter the 2012 one but my programming skills had become rusty. I therefore spent the last year getting back up to full strength in preparation for this year's event. A year of fun, spent on #rgrd on quakenet, programming roguelikes and other experiments in ruby, scheme, c++, SDL, irrlicht, libtcod, gosu...
I haven't managed to actually write anything that you could call "finished" or even really "playable" in the last year, but my skills are as good as they used to be I think. I hope. Sometimes I worry about the ageing brain. I'm often lying on my bed with a pen and paper, getting confused about how to implement something. I know I used to do this in my "prime" too but maybe the problems were harder. I'm 43 now. How long before I can't program any more, or before what I'm capable of programming is too boring to be worthwhile? There are programmers of myth and legend who are still programming in their sixties and seventies, but they were amazing programmers before. Maybe they too have lost their edge and are programming at a reduced skill level.
Pangolins for ever! Through Space and Time!
Well hello there Slashdot Journal, long time no see!
Somewhat surprisingly, given the nature of Internet forums, I don't encounter too many people of this
The chain of posts starts here. It's actually fairly reasonable, allowing some license for what appears to be a decided lack of foresight. That is, until you get to the end. As a result of my disagreeing that a GPU can perform all operations available to the newer ARM processors (specifically access-controlled states and the use of specific cryptographic instructions), I "don't get it." As a result, I am worthy of nothing but the derision of a "lolbro you dumb."
The irony of that statement made me chuckle a bit. Sometimes, you just have to laugh...
Coined this today. Sounds like a winner - an award for the coolest application of technology. Doesn't have to be useful, just very, very cool.
Although I stopped posting stuff here ages ago, I've had the My Amigos feed in Google Reader, and have occasionally wandered in to have a look.
But now I've decided to cut my ties here permanently. So as soon as I've posted this, I'm unsubscribing My Amigos. I've already updated my User Info with how to contact me.
To those few of you who still post here, thanks for the fun times. It's nothing personal, I just need to cut down the amount of time I spend on social networks generally.
-MT. signing off.
All the usual hype is flowing about Vista 8. This mostly means that Vista 7 was a failure, but I decided to log it for laughs. Vista 7 did not sell as well as Vista did and Vista 8 won't sell any better than Vista 7. Vista failure has really killed Microsoft. The upgrade inevitability myth is six feet underground, traditional desktops are becoming a thing of the past and everyone looks to Google, Apple even IBM for cool and reliable computing. Despite that, Microsoft brings out the same old lines and strategies.
2009
As the Linux Foundation wins new friends and influences people, sharp reporters at PCWorld notice that Windows sales as a fraction of PCs shipped are in a steep and accelerating decline. Woody Leonhard of Infoworld does the math on Microsoft's numbers,
Between launch and June 30, 2010 -- a period of 251 days -- Microsoft sold 0.78 Windows 7 licenses for each PC sold. Between July 1, 2010, and April 22, 2011 -- a period of 275 days -- Microsoft sold 0.67 Windows 7 licenses for each PC sold: 175 million Windows 7 licenses, and 260 million new PCs. To turn the numbers the other way around, in the past nine months, more than one-third of all new PCs sold didn't have Windows 7.
... it's entirely possible that 40 percent of all new PCs in the past nine months shipped without Windows 7. Maybe more.
So, the Windows 7 PC sales "refresh" is over. Business adoption rates are still under 10%. Kanthryn Noyles of Computer World interprets that as a Win for gnu/linux
I think it's fair to assume that a good number of them are running Linux instead. Preloaded options, after all, are increasingly common, and the reasons to switch are more compelling with each passing Patch Tuesday.
Android/Linux, is another reason for the decline. Why sit around mom's basement with a big, noisy PC when you can drop the net in your pocket? PCs are less important and Windows is downright archaic.
Microsoft's bottom line sags with its cash cow. There was good evidence in 2010 and January of this year that Windows 7 was not driving sales. Roughly Drafted now looks at Microsoft's quarterly report and shows that Windows profits are down since 2008 back when they were trying to sell Vista which many people dumped in less than six months.
Florian Mueller has thrust himself into the news a lot over the last couple of years, mostly to the detriment of Microsoft competitors, and has been particularly successful at getting Slashdot to copy his message. Roy Schestowitz, of Techrights, noticed him early because Boycott Novell was on Florian's journalist mass mailing list. So was Groklaw. Both rejected Florian's message and both are now smeared by him. Techrights has this index and PJ has this about bad behavior in 2005, this, this and more. Florian waged a Twitter/Social Media FUD campaign against both "Groklie" and Techrights in retaliation. Even Slashdot submitters have called Florian a "gadfly" and noticed he's behind anti-Google FUD. All of Florian's media manipulation has earned him special mention by actual lawyers who advise those threatened by lawsuits to ignore him and people like him.
The best way to understand what Florian has been doing is to make a list of it. Here then, is a list of what he's been telling Slashdot readers over the last year or so, with context and links to refutations as time allows.
Android/Google Spin.
Red Hat FUD
IBM FUD
Novell's Patent Hoard.
Reframes Microsoft's attempt to tax Motorola's use of GNU/Linux and Android.
This issue should not be separated from general anti-Google FUD but Florian does this.
That's 16 articles in less than a year and each represents dozens of Microsoft press echos. All of it says something bad about Google, Red Hat, IBM and other free software users. When he's not busy smearing Microsoft competitors, he's telling us that they Love Microsoft and are working with them towards some noble goal.
People speculate that Muelller is fed inside information as part of Microsoft's coordinated campaigns against free software and Microsoft competitors. PJ of Groklaw thinks that Microsoft hoped that a community of deluded coders would form around Florian, but only Novell employees and Mono boosters pal around, while the larger free software community ignores him. His recent praise of the SCO Gang and smears of PJ places him among the most disgusting of Microsoft company.
Who wants post caffeine withdrawals? Not me. So I drink watered down coffee. It only takes a small amount of caffeine to kick-start someone, anything after that is wasted and makes coming down off it that much more regrettable. I also like to sleep at night, not twitch and throw all my covers on the floor.
I'm tired. Bone tired. Caffeine can't do anything about that. Need to hit the hay earlier. Stop eating junk, too.
Gonna be a challenge though. Got an Android tablet today. Want to try all sorts of fun stuff. Install Apache and PHP on it. See if I can make it wireless server. That'd be killer fun.
Ah. But need sleep.
Decisions. Decisions.
As of 12 March 2011, I am a married man. (:
The first month's posts for Audio Verse of the Day are being tracked over at Legit Torrents. You can go right to the torrent page by clicking here.
Update, they can no longer be found at LegitTorrents. The tracker sucks. They can now be found on Demonoid. I'm looking for other trackers, too.
That seems to the common theme when an article showing even the hint of giving ancient peoples credit for knowing something was helping and were possibly able to track it down to a source that was providing a benefit.
Apparently only modern American humans are capable seeing that something has a beneficial aspect and tracking it down at the very least to a certain substance made in a certain way. Apparently we invented the scientific method, science, medicine, and everything else that represents the ability to comprehend it as something other than "magic". I'm rather sick of this crud. It smacks of cultural elitism when there is no evidence that such is not warranted. If this is the prevailing attitudes of the so-called elite, you can bet this will happen 2,000 years from now when they dig up our bones and discover the chemical cocktails that we ingest every single freakin' day from rBGH (meat, dairy products), (over)vaccinations, excessive use of anti-bacterial products and antibiotics.
God forbid we accept that a bunch of Nubians from nearly 2,000 years ago might have been on to something when they found that drinking their beer made from "moldy" grain had healing properties. I mean, it's not like they had brains and could work out a method for empirical testing. After all, they were only desert-dwelling Nubians.
You people make me sick.
First, I'd like to thank TheRealGrogan for this comment. Without it I'd still not have a fully updated and patched system. Stupid Windows.
So life in 2010 is going pretty good. On September 1st I start classes at TTCM in their industrial electricity program. Some people (here on
Why is any trade looked upon with derision (aside from the criminal trades and prostitution), though? Especially here, where one would think that continuing education -- no matter where that leads -- would be looked upon as a good thing.
Life is good in 2010 so far, let's see how the rest of the year pans out.
I simply can't believe how awful Windows is, and (unfortunately) how gullible I am. [my laptop] came loaded with Vista Business, and a "fallback" DVD for XP Professional. I tried running Vista on it. I really tried, I really wanted it to work, and I said exactly that in my blog here. But it didn't. Every time I tried it, things started out looking promising, and after a month or two it would go belly-up. Three or four times I reloaded Vista from scratch and tried again, hoping that the latest Microsoft Updates would fix it. Eventually I gave up, reloaded one last time with XP Professional, and ran that with no problem for two years.
A month or so ago, through my own carelessness, I wiped the disk on this laptop. I had to reload everything from scratch, so (like a fool) I thought well, Vista SP2 is out, everyone says that it is "all fixed up now and works great, and reliably", so I'll try that again. I loaded Vista from scratch, added all the updates to SP2 and beyond, and I've been running it that way since. Until today.
... Windows is unreliable garbage, it always has been, it always will be, and if you use it you should be willing to accept that risk. I am no longer willing to accept that risk, even part-time as a secondary operating system on this laptop. Windows is gone, it has puked all over its disk for the last time here, and I will not reload it. I am in the process of transferring the data to one of the Linux partitions - yes, Linux is quite happy to read the partition that Windows says is hopelessly corrupted. Please, PLEASE, unless you want to hear a very long string of words that I learned during my military service, do NOT tell me that the "solution" to this problem is to give Microsoft even more money and "upgrade" to Windows 7.
... if Vista is not stable, or reliable, then Microsoft should withdraw it and either offer a free "upgrade" to Windows 7 or offer a refund of the purchase cost. ... I absolutely don't believe the Windows 7 is any better, any more stable or any more reliable than Vista. They come from Microsoft, they are utter garbage...
This is a sign of things to come for Windows. Windows 7 was predictably just as bad as Vista was. People no longer are falling for Microsoft's promises of "this version fixes everything."
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce