Sun Laptops?

Apparently Sun is comming out with a new laptop. Sadly no details whatsoever. Is it going to be SPARC? Will it be running Solaris? It would be cool to see some quality unixy laptops out there. I think there would be quite a few people out there who would rather have a nice stable Solaris on their laptop than flaky WinXP.

I wonder if this article means this thing here.

Heh...

Ok... This post at old fubar must be one of the silliest things I read online lately. Do any women actually think this way? I wish good luck to all the ladies that share this approach - because they are in for a series of big dissapointments. Guess what - people generally do not like to be changed, converted, domesticated or pacified. You set yourself up for an uphill battle and a world of hurt to say the least.

In other news, I just saw Lewis Black make fun of Tom Cruises' crackpot remarks on psychiatry [interview transcript here]. It went something like this:

Tom Cruise: "Psychiatry is a pseudoscience..."
Cut to Lewis Black: "Of course... Unlike the Scientology... I mean, you have Science right in the name there"

Yeah!

What is with Tom Cruise and his scientology bulshit lately anyway? Ya, we know you are a fucking nutcase Tom! Either keep your religion to yourself, or go out and say what you really think. You know - all the stuff about alien souls infesting human bodies and stuff... Sigh...

Holy poop on a stick!

They made zombie dogs! This is wild!

When I was reading about replacing the dogs' blood with a saline solution I instantly had this flashback to Chronicles of Riddick. You know what I'm talking about - all these scenes in which they attach themselves into these hibernation machines which pumps their blood and replaces it with the blue goo. Heh...

All must bow to the corporate overlords...

I wonder how much does it take to buy yourself a decision in supreme court. It appears that it's not enough, because SC ruled against Gorkster today. So it's official now. Supreme court judges are either ignorant idiots or sellable whores. I'm not sure which one is worse.

Fortunately people like Bram Cohen are still immune (for now) as they are not corporate entities and they do not advertise their product as a music/movie sharing application. So most of the non-profit open source development in this area might still be unaffected. New development model must be - open protocol, open server, open clients. That is of course until RIAA/MPAA figures out how to outlaw protocols (which seems impossible - after all http can be used to share movies too - but not completely improbable after today).

Meanwhile everyone who was making money on p2p will burn in the oncoming barrage of lawsuits. Goodbye Kazaa - we will miss you least of all. :P

Sigh... This country is heading toward dark age of technology at astonishing pace. As of today there will be very little (if any) corporate research going into P2P. Tomorrow, we will have the broadcast flag. Then M$ will roll out Trusted Computing and we will all be fucked. How long till they take away our blogs because they compete with the news media?

Ladies and gentlemen - what you see right now, is the beginning of the end of the information age.

Ebook Reader

So I've been using my PocketPC to read books lately, and since I was able to get it in Microsoft lit format I decided to give that Microsoft Reader thing a try. And I have to say that it greatly improves the experience of reading a digital book on a tiny screen! I love the ability to bookmark pages, highlight passages and make notes! It's great, but...

Well, it's Microsoft application and it was not designed to make your life easier. It's quite opposite - the lit file format was created in order to introduce nasty DRM controls into the world of ebooks. Of course Doctorow's book does not include DRM, but just the idea of this thing being used that way gives me the creeps. And the saddest part is that I haven't seen any good alternative out there. Sure - there are ebook readers for open formats out there, but none of them allows you to easily mark up pages, insert bookmarks and notes.

How hard could it be? I think all it would take is to store a small datafile along with your plaintext file which somehow annotates user bookmarks and comments... I don't know - store relative position from the beginning of the file in bytes? Store it by line number? Ideally I would love to be able to share my bookmarks and notes with others - perhaps store this info in an XML format?

Major drawback here is that if you want sharable notes, everyone using them has to use the same copy of the book. If they got their plaintext version from another source they might have it formated differently and hence your bookmarks will be off target. This is an interesting idea. I smell a little summer project for myself :) Er... Besides my research that is...

I got nothing...

I'm seriously out of things to write here... I'm finally getting a hang off sourcejammer which was kindoff imposed on me. I'm not sure what is it's major advantage over cvs, other than it is java based and it kinda integrates with eclipse.

I found this a long time ago. It's an amusing read, especially since it really rings true in many aspects. Watch out for the popups - there are 3 scripts and an iframe on the page you might need to addblock. I actually got a popup there with firefox just now, but after I adblocked all the scripts it loaded fine. Why am I bringing this up? Because recently I keep noticing how being a loud obnoxious, moronic fucktard somehow registers differently in female brains. I think everyone has that one friend who is a complete dick and you know it (you knew it the moment you met him) and yet you kinda don't mind him cause he cracks you up. Somehow women manage to register the total opposite of that. Somehow for them he gives off this extremely positive vibe. Then they are very surprised when they finally figure out that this guy does not give a flying fsck about anything and anyone. At times like that I remember this stupid website and I go - ah, right - the ladder theory :P

Finally (I don't know if I blogged about this yet - and I'm to lazy to check) I found a real railgun! You know - the big bad weapons that the Tau use to piss of other players. I just find the fact that there is a real scientific project attempting to produce that kind of weapon extremely cool!

Wierdest book ever...

As I mentioned earlier I started reading Cory Doctorow's "Someone comes to town, someone leaves town". I must admit that this is one of the wierdest books I have ever read in my life.

The initial part of the book is preaty much a description of a grand home improvement project. It was kindoff reminiscent of Huysmans description of the excentric home in "Against Nature". Of course this project is less decadent, but similarly excentric and strange. Alan - the main character completely renovates an old house, and fills it with thousands of books in custom made, lightproof, dustproof, bookshelves that cover every single wall. Why? Because he decided that he should write a novel... And apparently the first thing one should do before writing a novel is to buy and renovate a house to ensure propper writing environment. Next thing of course is to invite oneself into the neighbor's house and sound proofing their walls.

Oh and yeah - Alan's father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine and his neighbor has wings.

The book has this strange Kafkaesque quality - odd, off beat things simply happen with not much reason and logic to them and yet the plot is clear and consistent. He uses similar strange literal symbolism. You can never be sure if Doctorow is trying to hint at something deaper in that odd passage, or is he just playing with words.

Strange book...

Microsoft and RSS

Argh! Microsoft plans to extend RSS!!! Remember how they "extended" java? Well next target is RSS. Embrace and extend - this is classic.

Last time I checked we had standards in order to ensure broad compatibility. Extending a standard is the most retarded thing I have ever seen in my life! When you extend a standard it stops being a standard anymore. You might as well roll out your own implementation! You extend it - you break it! Even a child can see it!

So obviously they are doing this on purpose - just like before. They want to break a popular standard, then reinvent it and market it as their own. They tried that with java, but it didn't work. So hopefully it wont work this time either.

+5 Insightful

Heh... I got a +5 insightful on slashdot for saying where is the torrent \:-.

It seems that mentioning torrent and creative commons in the same post in a vaguely on-topic way is a sure recepee for +5 something score :P

Movies I want to see...

War of the Worlds

War of the Worlds is coming out and it seems quite interesting. At least the special effects look cool. This is one of these movies that has a potential to either be really good or total crap.

I'm planning to go and see it sometime soon but I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep a straight face throughout the movie. I mean come on. Tom Cruise and alien invaders!? Must not make cheesy Xenu jokes... Must not...

Hey Tom! Watch out - the Martians are coming and they want their Thethans back!

Seriously - whoever goes with me will have to listen to this type of crap throughout the whole movie, and then some more on the way back hehe :P


Fantastic Four

I just know that Fantastic Four will suck immensely just like any other movie based on a comic book. With exception of Hellboy (which I never read in the comic book form) I hated all of them with passion. So I have zero expectations for this one. But this time I know I should be able to enjoy this movie even if it's horrible. Two words: Jessica Alba! Yummm! If she has a reasonable amount of screen time (as she should) then I might not even notice the crappiness of the movie.

But then again, who knows. Maybe by some freak accident this might actually be a watchable movie (ogling JA notwithstanding).

Batman Begins

I should really get of my ass and go watch Batman Begins. If nothing else just to see how they mess this one up. Or to find out answer to that age-old question. Is it possible to make another batman movie that is not totally gay?

I keep hearing good things about this one but somehow I don't really believe the reviews anymore. People were saying good things when Revenge of the Shith came out - and look what happened. Crappy crappy crap crap!

Seriously - all these comic-book based super productions are guaranteed to be blockbuster hits - so obviously no one actually cares about the quality. As long as there are couple of big names to put on the poster, lots of effective cgi and quirky ad campaign - the story might as well be non existent... Sigh...

Cory Doctorow is the Man

I just discovered Cory Doctorow and I'm impressed! All his books have been released under the Creative Commons license! Here are download links:

• "Eastern Standard Tribe"
  
• "Down and Out in Magic Kingdom"
  
• "Someone Comes to Town, Someon Leaves Town"

This guy totally gets it! Finally, an author who understands that sky won't fall if you make your book avaliable for download online.

There are plenty of works that have been in public domain for ages now - and yet I still see them in the bookstores. And now Doctorow is a living proof that you can release a book under cc today, and still make heaps of money selling books!

I just downloaded his books, and will check them out. If he is any good, I sware I will make a point of buying paperback copies to support this guy! We need more writers like this!

Besides - it is a pain to read off the screen. Sometimes I like to read in the craper - I could use a PDA in there but a paper novel is so much more convinient. Not to mention that a $5 paperback novel is cheeper than the $30 ink cartrige which I will have to buy after printing a whole book.

del.icio.us

I have been telling people about del.icio.us for quite some time now, and all I get are blank stares. I can't be the only person who thinks that community bookmarking is a great idea - other people use it too. And yet everyone I show it to just shrugs and moves on...

Of course these are the same people who don't even bother to install the adblock extension for their FireFox... Which I freaking installed on their machines because they would never get it otherwise. Sigh...

My biggest anoyance lately - people who INSIST on doing things the retarded way. I mean who the hell opens tabs using the right-click context menu while having a scroll-wheel mouse? You middle click the link! Geez! How hard can it be? Why don't you save yourself one click? Aaaagh!

Same with people who do this: they pull down the file menu, choose New Tab, click in the search bar and then type the keywords. What the hell is wrong with you??? It's CTRL+T, CTRL+K!!! It's understandable that you might not know the shortcuts - but if I tell you how to do it every single time you want to show me some webpage - AT LEAST FREAKIN TRY IT! There is nothing more anoying than watching you do your mouse dance just after I told you the shortcut!

So anyways - I think del.icio.us is awesome. One thing though - write meaningfull comments people. I love checking out the user comments, but most people just leave these blank. Being able to read these comments is half the fun :)

I hate fucking LIZARDMEN!

Yes, this is true. I hate Lizardmen with passion! Why you ask? I don't know... Maybe because they fucking don't fit with the rest of the universe at all? I really don't think that the Aztec theme they have meshes with the otherwise dark-fantasy theme of the game. Especially since they are so disjointed from all the other races - they simply sit on their own continent and fight off invaders. That's it? I own two Dark Elf army books (from two consecutive editions) and they have no word of fluff related to the lizards - despite living on relatively the same land mass as them.

Can't we just all agree that this army was a huge mistake and let it fade into obscurity? You know - the same way it happened to Chaos Dwarfs. GW does not give a flying fuck about CD's who really are a fun and climatic army. Huge hats, big cannons, tons of greenskins and bull-centaurs - come on, you gotta love them! So why are they push Lizards down our throats recently?

I open the new White Dwarf and 90% of the WFB section is a freakin Lustria campaign crap. There is no way in hell I will be playing a Lustria game ever! Screw that! Can't wait till this crap is over. Because of this stupid campaign half of the WD is bassically unreadable to me...

There is hope though - Wood Elves are comming out! So next WD should be all woody and elf like - which I don't mind. :)

Katie Holmes got Inducted into a spaceman cult!

I did not know that Tom Cuise was a scientologist! Ack!

When I heard that I instantly lost all respect for this guy. Not that I had that much respect for him anyway. But in most of his movies was always playing these all-American hero types. Turns out he is a religious nutcase... BTW, for those who didn't know, scientology is a scary, creepy spaceman cult!

And now he "converted" Katie Holmes. It's not that I particularly like her, but it's sad to see a nice young actress getting sucked into a cult :( Here is an advice for you girls out there - if a guy tells you he is a scientologist you tell him to suck on his body thethans, burn his phone number and RUN AWAY! If you want to marry a guy who truly believes in a galactic confederations and the like get yourself a Star Trek geek for god's sake!