I share with you the FAA's vision of "Normal Aviation Activity". These trails were laid by large aircraft. My sinuses are going nuts today. I make no other claims.

I'm looking at you, Widelands. What makes you think that a crapload of tiny icons is going to be a good interface?

I just want to thank FreeCiv for having an interface that's actually better than the game it rips off, even though the AI blows ass.

http://us.test.giga-byte.com

their site has been down for days...

Unsatisfied with compiz on Maverick I tried the compiz packagers PPA to find out they're not very good at it; it broke compositing entirely. Decided to try natty on a flash drive since I have a fairly fast one (not so much for writes, but reads are typically better than 20MB/sec.) Right now I am running on my Gateway GT5475E (makes it easy to find specs) with nVidia 8600 (k8) and if it seems worth it I will also try on my Phenom II X3 720 with GT240. I installed from debootstrap so this is not a test of the installer. debootstrappin' and installing grub worked fine. Bootsplash did not, I got graphics corruption with DVI to HDMI. Installing nVidia driver now... GDM didn't start by default after installing ubuntu-desktop, which is puzzling.

While playing a classic strategy game this morning I became annoyed at the AI's cheating. On low levels it's a pushover; on higher levels it cheats to win. The Wikipedia on Cheating in Video Games says absolutely nothing about games which cheat. Is there somewhere a list of which strategy games have an AI that doesn't have to have advantages above and beyond those which come to computers inherently?

If I cannot use your site without enabling all scripts your site is not worth using. If you cannot figure out how to make your site degrade gracefully then you are an asshole who should stop trying. Thanks.

I have some fairly slow storage attached to a Linux system that I would like to be able to speed up with a flash cache ala Windows' ReadyBoost. A sort of ideal solution would be DM-Cache, a "Generic Block-level Disk Cache" which "is built upon the Linux device-mapper"... but which does not appear to be in development any longer. There is also mcachefs, a FUSE-based file (not block) level cache, but this is not precisely what I am looking for. Mirroring in Linux md writes to volumes round-robin, relating the speed of a mirror to the slowest member. Are there any options which I'm missing?

If you were wondering why you're seeing less stuff on your wall lately (yes, I use facebook; no, I am not interested in privacy whinging at this time) it's because Facebook fucked up the interface again. Go to the bottom of your wall and "edit options" and then select to see everything again if you would like to see status updates from people you don't interact with on a regular basis.

Apparently facebook is willing to drop messages from people with whom you do not connect often off of your wall, why could this be? I paranoidly assume that they ran the numbers and found that most of the messages they don't want replicated lie within a certain subset which they could categorize away in an attempt to hide the traffic from the people who only bother to visit facebook and post about how they're leaving for diaspora or how facebook recently changed some privacy setting that will bleed all your personal information to advertisers.

I found today that after running a GL program and coming back to a black screen with only pointers I can kill compiz and then run it again and pick up with my life.

If you visit a halo.xbox.com page you're prompted to install Silverlight all over the top of whatever you're looking at, even on platforms where it doesn't run.

Looks like Reach is the last Halo title I'm buying. Between weekly challenges you can't complete without live Gold and bullshit like this Microsoft has shown me that they don't want me playing their game.

Looks like Nintendo is the last console maker in the running for my dollars... their competition is life. I guess I have to hand in my hardcore gamer card.

P.S. The bill gates borg icon looks like he's looking at a microscope now. If there was any doubt about whether slashdot is sucking microsoft cock it has now vanished.

This generation of consoles really bites my ass. I got my replacement optical drive for my 360 and now I'm waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for some chinese eBayers to send me the components to build the key probe. I think I could have actually gotten them from my local radio shack, but it still would have cost more than buying 5x the parts I needed via mail order.

The last Xbox you could replace the drive with impunity, hell you could even put in a normal drive (which admittedly wouldn't run Xbox originals) with a BIOS patch. Those days are gone now.

I almost hope they finally cram DRM into our CPUs so that PC gaming can have working DRM so that we can have PC games again. God, it's beaten gamer syndrome. Forget I ever said that.

GOG once had RSS and then redesigned their site, now it is gone. I love to use RSS, but it seems to be less and less popular among the sites I wish to keep up with. Thankfully, Slashdot still has it. And in other update news, I found something which the new interface does better than the old interface... I don't have to race the journals interface any more.

OSS has lousy hardware support. Stop recommending it as the answer to Linux audio problems. Thanks!

This is the content of a comment which I should have made earlier. Here it is for posterior.

Apple's app store policies require that you hold copyright and their submission process states that they will check your software to see if it conforms to their policies. Since they already passed the valid app through from another distributor and the license was provided in the original submission they clearly had the knowledge and the opportunity to recognize that one of the submissions, either the original or the subsequent one, was invalid. This is proof that they are not performing any such test; they have not done their due diligence specifically because they have in their possession every piece of data to know that they were subsequently publishing copyrighted material in violation of copyright. Since they claim that their review process exists to catch violations of their terms, and any half-competent idiot with their resources and information would have caught this if they spent any effort on it at all, Apple is potentially in breach of contract with anyone who has accepted the terms of their app store; they have promised to subject applications to review which would have prevented them from carrying out this act. Further, since they are knowingly and willfully distributing this material in violation of copyright (they have both been informed, and allegedly have verified that the "author" of the app they approved owned the copyright on the material in question) then they are clearly aiding and abetting criminal copyright infringement.

This is precisely the type of logic that Apple lawyers would apply to anyone else who was willfully redistributing Apple's copyrighted content after it was submitted to someone else's App store. Why, pray tell, should we not apply it to them? They have made a public promise in a legal document to verify that applications will be checked to ensure that they meet Apple's requirements. They would like us to be bound by every shrink-Wrap EULA that crosses our path. They have put forward a contract to which developers must agree before they may submit software for inclusion in the app store. A contract is not valid under US law unless it grants something to all involved parties. Why is Apple not liable for violation of this contract? Why is Apple, who clearly has the resources to meet the terms of this contract and to verify copyright not to be held accountable for willfully aiding and abetting criminal copyright infringement? Corporations would like to have the rights of people; why should we expect them to meet the same responsibilities, such as meeting the terms of contracts into which they have knowingly entered?

I now cannot delete my old messages from the sidebar. Worked yesterday, no changes here.