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User Journal

Journal Journal: 9-11 Survivor: Social Commentary or Horrid Affront? 1

"9-11 Survivor is a game mod based on the Unreal Game engine. It is a game project that examines the role of media in our culture, and the influence that continuous, hyper exposure has on our overall perception of the distinctions between reality and media mediation. This project raises questions regarding how and why popular media forms, such as games and movies, deal with tragedy, conflict and violence." (Thanks, jwz.)

Did Garage Games see this one coming?

User Journal

Journal Journal: "Goodbyte", the Digital Goodbye - Are You Alive to Read It? 2

Great. I just finished speaking with a friend of mine, and I'm now convinced that there's a good chance I'll die tonight. I live close to D.C., and Saddam's just fucked up enough that he might try to hit it with something big.

I have no bomb shelter into which to retreat. My car isn't reliable enough to take somewhere safer. And the crux of it all is that I'm just too much of a coward to run away. If I run away, and I'm wrong, I look foolish. I can't have that. Hell, I walked by three of my coworkers on my way up here to write this, and, while I was prepared to ask one of them for a hug or a comforting word, I gave up when I saw all three. I'm too much of a coward to show myself vulnerable in front of more than one person.

If I knew for sure that the world was ending, I'd want to spend my time with Mandie, my girlfriend. But I'm too much of a coward to go over there on a schoolnight and demand that she spend the night with me because I'm concerned the sky will fall. I'd look like a little boy asking for a nightlight. I'd look like a fool.

So, basically, any hope I had of enjoying this day, if it is to be my last day on earth, has been dashed by my fear of what will happen if it is not, and tomorrow comes. That seems like a pretty good way to convince yourself that you need a personality transplant, doncha think?

Oh well. Perhaps I can head Saddam off at the pass. I'll stop by Burger King on my way home; hopefully, the cholesterol will kill me before the Middle Eastern dictator will.

I don't know how people who lived through the cold war managed it. I would be frozen to the spot, forever afraid to move.

--J

Slashdot.org

Journal Journal: SlashBug 2

I'm curious to see how long this takes to propogate to levels where it will be fixed:

http://slashdot.org/~|<amikaze/. Befriend him, and check out your "friends" list. Odd!

Jouster

(Update 20030418: Most people have their friends show up on their "friends" list, not their "fans" list. At least in the short term, that is. Doh!)

Hardware

Journal Journal: The Next Big Thing in Portable Mass Storage!

First came CD-ROMs.

Next came DVD-ROMs.

The question begs asking--what's next?

Only a good, scientific answer will do.  Here's mine.

--

Start with CD-ROMs.  "CD" and "DVD" seem very similar.  What is the pattern?

CD
DVD

Simple!  You take the first letter, "add one letter" to it to get D, and put that first.  Then, you take the last letter, put it at the end.  Since each step up in technological complexity requires an additional letter to contain all the program code, we need another letter in the middle.  The middle letter is formed by adding eighteen letters to the letter directly above it.

Armed with this knowledge, we're ready to predict the next big thing!

First, we take the D, and add one letter to it:

E

Next, we take the last letter, and put it at the end.  Remember, to prevent too much program code from being in just a few letters, we need to add another letter on to "DVD", so this will be four letters long:

E _ _ D

Now, what to put in the middle?  Easy!  We add eighteen letters to V to get the second letter, and eighteen to D to get the third:

ENVD

And last but not least, we need to add the ending.  Here it is, the technology of the future:

ENVD-ROM

...

Thank you, thank you.  I accept donations in the form of bagels, PayPal, and small, independent island countries.

--J
Hardware

Journal Journal: Building a DEAD SILENT PC 1

The folks over at HardCoreWare.net have finally lost it. They built a PC that's well over twenty times quieter than their comparison PC (40 dB versus 65). And it's no sluggard, either: P4 2.80 GHz, 7200 RPM hard drive and--get this!--an overclocked to the max GeForce4 Ti 4200! The only fans in the entire system are in the PSU.

Microsoft

Journal Journal: Microsoft Releases XP SP1 [Redhat-Annotated Version]

Or, check out the Redhat-annotated version of this story:

Microsoft has released the long-awaited Windows XP Service Pack 1 [kind of like a minor version number increment]. Check out the Main Download Page [the page that doesn't exist on Redhat's site that actually brings together disparate information on a given update], the distressingly-long List of Fixes [the ChangeLog for the kernel and any other RPM's you're updating, that you need to go to individual maintainers' pages to get], or just automagically get the patch from Windows Update [up2date on a DAMN good day].

News

Journal Journal: The Cyberspace Rules of Engagement?

An article over at MSNBC talks about the steps the U.S. Government is requesting be taken by ISPs, particularly broadband ISPs, to protect their customers from malicious hackers, worms, and virii (and in turn prevent DDoS and other attacks against government targets). It gets most interesting, however, when it starts discussing rules being formulated on exactly how far the government can go in engaging in electronic warfare against military targets.
I'm very interested to hear how far-reaching the powers that /.ers would advocate would be. Is a SMURF attack against Iraq too much? How about making Cisco put a backdoor password in routers shipped to Iraq? And so on....

Security

Journal Journal: Hotmail Needs a Lock on its Cookie Jar 1

Wired is running this story on a frightening vulnerability in Hotmail: apparently, Hotmail cookies amount to little more than boolean "has access" variables. Once you have someone's Hotmail cookie(s), you can log on repeatedly, even if they change their password.
Programming

Journal Journal: The Next Direction

I was speaking with a friend last night, and we got to discussing Java. I pointed out that Java's object oriented structure is a big leap from procedural languages. He's an old-line programmer from the C and Fortran days, and he said something that surprised me. He said that back when he was in school, they could see the OOP ship on the horizon--they didn't know what it would look like, but they knew it was coming. He asked me what I saw coming down the pipe, but nothing came to mind. So my question is: what's on the horizon now? Is it something we're using now, or something truly blue-sky?

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