Category: Uncategorized

Much is made lately of the problems at NASA. While some of that criticism is well-deserved (the shuttle program in particular), NASA often gets the shaft when it comes to the projects they got very, very right.

Projects such as the Hubble telescope. Yesterday was the Hubble’s 15th anniversary, the projected end of its service life. Even with current budget problems, the project could feasibly continue operating for an additional 3 to 6 years. With the shuttle’s functional and budget problems, there certainly won’t be a de-orbit mission for quite some time.

Mars rovers, NASA has had two very long-running programs that have made front page news that then faded onto page G15. It should be news on the order of the Apollo programs. The constant bean-counting and administrative BS only undermines the true purpose of projects like this. Exploration is tough, and it costs money. While the idea human space flight is sexy and, in some respects, a necessary component of space exploration, it’s not very efficient. The benefits to all of us is tangible. The intangibles are even greater.

Pictures like these are more than just striking images: they are the hard science we need to have. This is the kind of thing that inspires a new generation to become engineers, scientists, and pioneers. It’s money well spent.

Tons of cool toys and tools for whatever color hat you wear. Use a good browser since some of the sites linked have nasty pop-ups (some got around Firefox).

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I’m a basic computer user who happened to have grown up in a technology-rich world. Computers were everywhere for me beginning about 2nd grade. The kids of the ’90s, those who are now starting college, are steeped in technology in a way that I can’t even imagine. To have never seen a record player (pre-clubbin’), to have had a computer from the moment your fingers were dexterous enough to use a keyboard, to eschew email as inefficient and old–these are concepts that an 18 year old lives in. I understand some, but can’t fathom others.

But is this the way it’s supposed to be? Everything I know from school and experience tells me that, deep down and generally, people do not want to think. Thinking requires sacrifice and effort, two things most of us are unwilling to give. Technology is the ultimate “needer”. It needs you to keep up, to be current, to understand ever more concepts in order to function at the top of the heap.

This is what Linux advocates miss time and again. I’ve played with Linux (I’m downloading the Suse Live DVD right now). I understand the benefits, I understand the philosophy, I understand the sense of community. But when I see a list like this of the literal hundreds of Linux Live distros, it cracks me up. The whole point of a Live DVD (or CD) is to give Windows users the experience of a Linux environment without having to actually install and learn Linux. Except, the average Windows user can’t. Hell, I’ve never heard of 3/4 of the distros on that list. Unless you’re a part of the aforementioned community, how could you?

The bigger problem is, how can that community reasonably expect anyone other than a community member or fringe lurker to ever choose one of these distos, much less use it or, blue-sky world, switch to Linux? They can’t, and defending that position is laughable. Read Slashdot for around three hours and you’ll get a sense of the cognitive dissonance that isn’t setting in with the Linux community. You can’t have Windows users who are so stupid as to not install updates (and decry the fact that updates exist in the first place), and then build so many distros that someone with a reasonable amount of knowledge is still unable to effectively compare what, to the non-initiated, is suddenly a virtually endless parade of options. You can’t “know” the user you’re trying to convert, and then not use that knowledge to make your product fit the user.

As much as I understand the need for a solid competitor on the desktop, Linux won’t be it. The community will always hold it back. The very essence of the open-source community is its own fatal flaw. People, as a group, cannot makes important decisions. Design by committee doesn’t work. The Linux community gets a taste of this every once in a while when someone cuts off a code branch or makes a unilateral decision. OSS people laugh and fork the code, but miss the point. That fork isn’t just doomed to obscurity itself, it dooms all connected projects to obscurity. Joe User doesn’t understand, or need to understand, the religious wars that cause a list 236 Live CDs/DVDs. Try explaining that concept to someone who didn’t use a computer until they were 40.

Legal objections and dirty business aside, the reason Windows always won was Microsoft understood their user. Windows does many things pretty well. Linux does a few things perfectly. To a user, the difference is obvious and the winner clear. People will adapt their behavior to the path of least resistance. If that means I have reboot once a day to have my camera just plug in and work, so be it. At least I didn’t have to go hunt down a driver on the 20th page of Google results.

I don’t see myself switching to Linux anytime soon. It’s a cute toy to play with occasionally, but it doesn’t give me the experience I want. I also can’t game on it (and no Wine-ing). My business apps don’t work on Linux, and likely won’t for a long time. I wish I had the fix, because I’d love to see my own cognitive dissonance set in.

This is more rant than anything, but I’ve been working all day so I need to decompress.

For some reason I was contemplating the software I would immediately re-install if I had a catastrophic failure. From there, I thought about the quality of that software. Then I started looking at some basic stuff, like how resource-intensive these programs were. And then I got annoyed, mostly at iTunes, but others are guilty as well.

Why does Apple get a pass when they make crappy software? (Sit down, zealots.) I have an iPod, so I pretty much have to use this software. It’s a pain to go back and forth from one player to another, so I just made my default player. The management/UI/experience part of iTunes is top-notch. Really, I like using iTunes. What drives me crazy is that the application itself sucks up way too many resources.

For example, I have iTunes running right now with my iPod docked. iTunes runs three (visible) processes on my machine: iTunes.exe, iTunesHelper.exe, and iPodService.exe. Three processes for one application. Ok, I can live with that; PGP takes two on its own. But, the amount of resources required is a little high:

• iPodService.exe – 5,384K
• iTunes.exe – 52,584K
• iTunesHelper.exe – 4,316

That’s over 60K (or 60 megabytes) of memory to support the functionality of one applications whose sole function (at the moment) is to play music. To put this in perspective, Winamp takes 13,184K, or less than 1/4 the resources. Even taking away the iPodService and iTunesHelper (Helper?? what the hell is it helping? and why can’t it be part of the main process?), Winamp is still using less than 1/3 the resources needed by iTunes.

Put another way, all iTunes processes use about the same amount of resources as Outlook. Microsoft gets crapped on all the time for Office apps being resource hogs (which they are), but I just don’t get the free pass given to Apple for a good UI. Why can’t the application give back the memory it doesn’t need now that it’s not synching with the iPod? Depending on what the helper is doing, why can’t I turn that off if I don’t need it (similar to Winamp agent)?

I said others are guilty as well. All those little niggling applications that hide in svchost.exe processes need to ‘fess up. Maybe I’m being fussy, but just because I can put a gig of RAM in this box doesn’t mean developers should require it.

However, on religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D.’ Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.’

More on Barry

[via The Political Puzzle v2.0]

Like I need to cram more stuff in what has to be an already over-heated box, but this 20-in-1 panel fits into a standard 5.25″ drive bay. All the I/O you could want.

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[via Boing Boing]

Then don’t vote for Rick Santorum. This idiot introduced a bill that’s just vague enough that the National Weather Service (you know, the one that’s tax-funded) might have to take itself offline. I’m not going to quote the article because you need to read the whole thing. The quotes from Barry Myers, Executive Vice President at AccuWeather, are so ludicrous, I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

Don’t visit AccuWeather. In fact, if they’re so opposed to public services, let them get their own data. How do we legislate that? I’m sure we could find some headline-seeking Senator to sponsor it.

Link [via Geek News Central]

Ok, this post is a little of me bragging, which I’m a little worried about doing. But, I have a greater point, so you’ll have to bear with the bragging.

I got a phone call today from someone at MadCap software Now that that’s out of the way, I can get on with the point. This person just wanted to talk. I’m not some super-elite figure in any field. I talked about their product and they wanted to follow up on that.

Excuse me while I put my professional hat on my knee for a second.

That is so off-the-wall, freakin’ cool, it makes you jealous for the people that work there. How many employers have you worked for that would allow, much less encourage, you to call someone who just randomly talked about your product on their website? I know I haven’t worked for one. In fact, I worked for a company that, if I called a customer without a salesman, a marketing guy, and someone from legal in the room–well, I’d have been out on my butt.

I have this feeling that if you could graph “amount of communication with customers” against “size of company”, it would look like a foreslash (“\”). That’s really a shame because customers are constantly trying to communicate with the companies from which they buy products. When you hear stories of website email forms that are just ignored, it makes you shake your head.

I’m going to sound like Scoble here, but MadCap, start a blog. I know corporate blogging is touchy, but maybe Mike Hamilton or some people from the development team could blog and open the discussion up to the whole community. We’re blogging about you; seems only fair that you get to talk back.

Since someone in this household is playing the crap out of this game right now, I thought this might be interesting reading.

The New York Times has a very interesting piece on the invented language of Tho Fan for Jade Empire. The 2,500-word language was created in four months for about $2,000 by University of Alberta linguist Wolf Wikeley. The Ph.D. candidate even created a history for the language and then tested it out by translating the first chapter of John’s Gospel into it. It’s a great read, make sure you check it out.

Jade Empire for Xbox Speaks Language All Its Own [NYT]

[Via Kotaku]

Enter the CD info and this page generates a PDF to make a paper CD case. There’s even a search function so you don’t have to enter them yourself.

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