Archive for May, 2004

Lunch Time Rant…

Wednesday, May 12th, 2004
begin rant

Articles such as this one piss me off to no end. Classic piece of FUD produced by some undereducated marketing drones for a near do well company. Pathetic!

Anyone can easily spot that this was neither written by a developer, nor designed for one to read. As usual, FUD is targetted at the clueless management dopes who are ignorant enough to swallow it. Hence, the article makes use of some nice looking percentages, statistics, and picturesque rethoric. People without brain like preaty numbers – especially ones with the % char appended to them. Of course if you actually do have a working brain, you probably already know that any embeded statistical information is useless if taken out of context.

Andas usual, the author does not even bother to try see the case from a developers point of view. Having stuff in public domain is good! IP and patents just do not make any sense in the Software world. Its just grounds for frivolous lawsuits, corporate powerplay. If you are a developer, more often than not you want to share your ideas with others, exchange knowledge and etc…

Information should be free – we should sell products not ideas. This way more attention can be put into creating satisfying end-product rather than a crafty EULA and activation scheme.

Developers benefit from the free exchange of ideas, public benefits because of the avaliability of cheep alternative solutions. Companies benefit because they can cut down on stupid licensing costs and actually invest in producing something usefull…

The only person that does not benefit from free software is some sad prick who has a buggy, sucky, never-updated, overpriced product who claims to holds IP for the if statement or something even more ridiculus…

God, how could we be so blind. All this time we were thinking that IT industry has trouble lately because of the economy crisis, the aftermath of .com boom, and the resulting oversaturation of the IT job market. We were thinking this was just a bad knee-jerk reaction of corporate world to massive budget cuts caused by the recession.

Nope – apparently all of it can be traced to the academic community, and open source enthusiasts who like to share their ideas.

If we only had known earlier that all this trouble was actually caused by free software!

Nasty, stupid FUD! Give me a break…

end rant

Summer Plans

Tuesday, May 11th, 2004

Now that my finals are over, and I’m about to graduate and get my BS (for those unfamiliar with academic degrees BS stands for Bull Shit which still wont get you a job in IT) I can have more time to waste. And unlike other wastful summers, this time I actually have a game plan:

First I need to install Linux – i think it’s about time to dual boot my main machine at home. Considering the unhealthy amounts of time I spend working on SPARC machines, and fidling with the live distros, I think I should just get it over with. Right now I’m leaning toward Mandrake 9.2 because that’s the only distro I have on CDs right now.

I’m considering Fedora as well… If it turns out that my CD is one of those that Mandrake tends to fry on spot then I’ll definitely go with Fedora. Both are based on redhat anyway, and both are supposed to have relatively painless, reliable installer…

First I have to do a major backup of all my data in case I get a crap out during partitioning or install. I’ll admit – this will be the first time I will be attempting to set up a dual boot linux system all on my own. So, better safe than sorry…

Other things to do this summer – I’m planning to actually make my eZ Dock project operational, and tweek FEMTO editor some more. I hope to actually turn it into a usable notepad replacement…

And now for something compleately different:

Woha! This thing can hold a pentabyte! Or is that penbibyte?

Personally I do not really like the new prefixes for binary multiples! I think mibibyte and gibibyte sounds really retarded when pronouced out loud. Sure, it’s kinda cool to type MiB or GiB but try to say it out loud without feeling at least a wee bit silly…

On the other hand though, I guess it is the right thing to do – because we geeks were single handedly breaking the SI system…

“No sir, Mega means 1024 not 1000…”

Since memory units are scaled in multiples of 2 (not 10 like everything else in SI) it is kindoff breaking the convention. So I guess new prefixes are a good idea… Still…

Mebibyte??? Come on – try saying it! Me-bi-byte! Sounds ridiculus!

Sigh… Still, that pentabyte machine is preaty awesome!

Apparently feds now track virtual vilans in addition to the real ones!

Monday, May 10th, 2004

I’m not sure if this is from reliable source but it seems that the feds just went into red alert mode because of terrorist threats of Don Emillo Fulci – a video game character from Headhunter!

How are we supposed to feel safe if these idiots cannot distinguish between a fictional terrorist and a real one? This is just ridiculus…