macintosh flamewar in a nutshell

Grumpy points me to a glowing, happy Salon article, Hallelujah, the Mac is back. This is an interesting article that raises a number of interesting points. More entertaining, however, are the reactions to that article, as selected by Salon. These letters read like a summary of every Mac vs. PC flamewar ever, distilled down to the essence, and without the profanity. I love it. You can tell if you are a Mac lover or a hater just by reading the two pages (so far, anyway) of letters.

dns wildcard musings

There has been a rather interesting, although frustrating, discussion on namedroppers about wildcards. I woke up early this morning and thought some about them, and why folks consistently complain about DNS wildcards. It seems to me that when non-experts look at wildcards they come to one of two conclusions: Wildcards don’t match enough. Wildcards match too much. Don’t match enough My experience has generally shown that when a naive user is introduced to wildcards, they generally expect the wildcards to apply in more situations than they actually do, leading to long-standing common errors (c.

capitalism is bad mmkay

I know that there is something that I just don’t understand about the situation, but when I heard the followup to the U.S. beef industry’s woes on NPR yesterday, I experienced the same reaction when I heard the story the first time: huh? Apparently, a small meat-packer in Kansas has gone to the trouble of making it possible to test every cow for mad cow’s disease, as the Japanese now require.

pirates

I just caught the review of the new Sid Meier’s Pirates! over on Ars Technica. I played the original of the game as obsessively as I was able when I was in, er, high school. On my Apple II, um, gs. Anyway, reading the review both summoned long lost memories and made me realize that this new version is that rarest of beasts: an updated video game that really is just an update and not a “re-invention”.

a confession

My name is David and I have a problem… It is true, I have a crippling addiction to console RPGs. Ok, maybe not “crippling”. It is annoying, however. I do not consider myself a gamer, yet this one category of games (think Final Fantasy, KOTOR, etc.) has the power grip me, sucking all of my free time away. Frequently at some point in the 60+ hours it takes to complete some of these games, I start to think about how the story does not make sense, the battles are boring and repetitive, and I still can’t stop playing.