Every so often I visit Pricewatch to take a look around at prices. Mostly I've been looking at laptop, desktop, and server prices, with occasional visits past the CPU+Motherboard combo page. One day I stumbled across an ad from Hyper Microsystems for an IBM eServer 325. This was a dual-Opteron 240 1U server with 1GB DDR333 ECC memory and a 120MB ATA disk - for $189. This sounded too good to be true, so I did a little research.
SimCity is one of the most popular and well-known video games of all time. This game was ported to Unix in the 1990s and the source code has since been released under the GPL version 3. Micropolis is the resulting program (as well as the original working title of the game.) Making this game work correctly is easy enough once you know the recipe.
Let me follow up my inflammatory title with all due respect for CVS and what it has brought us, besides a thousand years of pain. Who knows how many man-hours were saved by CVS? Of course, there is always the argument about how many man-hours have been lost due to it as well, but then again we all know the importance of proper backups... especially when dealing with source code control systems. While CVS is one of the oldest, its legacy of suggesting it will do one thing and will do another is probably its most-emulated feature, so it is by no means unique in that regard.
One of the things we love to talk about on Slashdot is, of course, Bill Gates. Here's a little something I tossed off in response to a slashdot comment I found particularly repulsive, defending some of the less defendable actions of the Gates foundation. (See Dark Cloud over Good Works of Gates Foundation.) I mirror it here as an essential polemic on evil :p
Another one of my old high-dollar Memorex CDs has failed and lost me some data. Mental note: never purchase Memorex optical media.
I'm trying to download a file from rapidshare and they're making me solve a CAPTCHA. That's okay, but check out the CAPTCHA they gave me:
I've been using Linux for a long time, and I learned to use it by installing it and using it as my primary operating system — as far as I'm concerned, the year of the Linux desktop was in 1994 or so. Since then I've actually bounced around to a variety of operating systems and even single-booted my primary machine into Windows XP by choice, using Cygwin as a crutch. I've been running Linux solidly since Ubuntu Dapper, using Windows only on inferior (and seldom-activated) computers or in virtual machines to close corner cases like my mobile phone. Throughout that time, I have basically never been satisfied with the default appearance of the system.
This is a pretty simple one: Printing on Linux sucks. Adobe knows more about printing than anybody. Printing PDFs on Linux with Adobe Reader is wonderful. Conclusion: See title. For further discussion, see below.
Today, I tried to buy some DVD+R DL media from Newegg. It's not like it's a major sale, but it was lost because I couldn't use their site. I enabled javascript for newegg.com, but there was no shopping cart button, and when I backed up to the shopping cart page, the cart didn't work. Even the FAQ is Javascript-based and doesn't work here; I was unable to read the FAQ. Because they're on the west coast, I'd have to wait two hours to place a phone order, and I don't want to wait.
I recently visited a garage sale and purchased an old clip art/stock image collection from "Hemera" called The Big Box of Art. While the (windows) software itself provides an index and a browser, I was only interested in using the images and none of the software. Unfortunately, the image files were in a passel of zip files and included two formats I was not sure how to handle; Windows Metafile (*.wmf) and "HPI" files.