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. This article does repeat the Mac-is-inherently-safer meme, which one of the haters takes issue with. I like to think that he missed the point.

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:

1. Wildcards don’t match enough.
2. 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.f. RFC 1034, section 4.3.3). The classic wildcard MX:

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. The rest of the beef industry turns around and says, “No way!”. You see, this much testing is bad for the industry, because, well, because the rest of the industry would have to actually…compete. At least for re-entry into the Japanese market. Since when did capitalism become such a bad thing for the beef industry? I had the same reaction when I noticed that there was an article describing how Craigslist “costs” newspapers $50 to $65 million a year. OMG! Competition! Horrible! To be fair, that actually isn’t precisely the tone of the article (more of an announcement for a $250 report, really), but this sort of thinking does pervade certain industries.

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”. The game itself sounds almost exactly like the the Pirates! of old, and that, my friends, is awesome. The only thing from the old game that I remember sucking was the sword fighting. At that point, the old Pirates! firmly reminded you that it was not a fighting game. I barely remember any major quests. I do remember the treasure hunting, the courting of governor’s daughters, the storming of towns, and the general piracy. It is enough to make me want to build a Windows gaming machine. A task made harder today when I had to raid my erstwhile Windows box for its power supply.

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. I must wring every last drop out of the game. Fortunately, the game is eventually won, and, irrevocably, all interest in the game is gone. My recent experience was with [Shadow Hearts: Covenant], a game that is so similar graphically and mechanically to Final Fantasy X, sometimes I swore that the same music was used. This game was clearly not as interesting as Final Fantasy X, yet it gripped just as hard. At least it is over. Well, until I pick up the next one. Perhaps Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, or maybe I will hold out until KOTOR 2. Oh, Shadow Hearts: Covenant had some pretty odd stuff going on in it.

Kirkville - The Mac OS X Drawer: A Badly Designed User Interface Element: ""

The bit that really drives me batty is the behavior where the drawer opens on whichever side has the most room. My solution for preventing this is to never close the drawer, which largely defeats the purpose of the drawer.