Rant

I Smell A …Religion Forming

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When I heard about President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, I raised and eye brow and thought “what did he win that for?” I thought about it… I remembered the SNL skit from a couple of weeks ago, about how he hasn’t really done most of what he promised. Did he win, simply for becoming President? I shrugged it off. Throughout the course of the day I saw many comments online about it. Some people were upset about it – “he doesn’t deserve shit!” and “did he win for destroying the US?!” – which I also shrugged off because that’s nothing but crap. I found that most people asked same thing I did: “what did he win for?” And a few other people praised our leader for it…

It’s that last group that this Rant comes from. It’s been knocking around my mind for a couple of days now, but since last night it’s in the foreground. While I was going to leave it alone… well, that just wouldn’t be me.

You see, the liberal and free-thinking Democrats are quickly becoming just as single-minded and blinded by a saviour as any other religious group (i.e. Republicans) are and they just don’t know it.
Continue reading I Smell A …Religion Forming →


digital pity

Are People In Hell Sipping Iced Cold Kool-Aid?

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WSJ: In recent years, I, like many other reviewers, have argued that Apple’s Mac OS X operating system is much better than Windows. That’s no longer true. I still give the Mac OS a slight edge because it has a much easier and cheaper upgrade path; more built-in software programs; and far less vulnerability to viruses and other malicious software, which are overwhelmingly built to run on Windows.

While on one hand, I bristle at giving OSX an “edge” for these reasons. Just because Snow Leopard shipped at $29, if you add up the MSRP of 10.1 to 10.6 and compare it to the XP-Vista-7 upgrade path, Windows is cheaper… Apple has been gouging wallets for OSX dot upgrades for years, but no one ever calls them on it. As for more built-in software, does Walt not know about the EU and South Korea? While Apple never gets sued for their included software (Safari, iTunes, iChat, QuickTime, Mail, etc.) Microsoft does – ask the foreign governments why there’s less built in software included because it is their idea.

But on the other hand, for Walt to break out the first part of the comment… job well done, Seven.

(and the title is just about Hell freezing over rather than anything else)

GeekStuff, Windows

Props to the Windows Team

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I’ll go on record with this comment: Wow… that actually just worked.

Retiring my last Vista box didn’t go as smoothly as I thought it did. Windows 7 installed fine: every device I had in the thing was auto-supported… the machine was built in 2007 with all brand name parts, but even so… there’s usually a rogue driver that’s required on a repave. No, the reason I was up until 2:30 this morning was caused by something completely non-OS related…

One single password.
Continue reading Props to the Windows Team →

GeekStuff, Windows

Windows 7: Allowing Access to C$

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After recently installing Windows 7, I found that I was unable to access the “default admin shares” for my local drives, namely \\ME\C$. I was able to see the machine on my local network, so I know that the firewall wasn’t the problem. If I shared out something explicitly, I could see that from other machines as well: File Sharing was turned on. On other networks, I know that I’ve been able to access the C$ share from other machines, so the functionality was still there, but likely just turned off.

From HowToGeek.com, I found a registry setting that would allow this. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System, add a new DWORD called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and set its value to 1 and reboot. Want to revert? Delete the key or set it 0.

I must have done this for Vista as well, but I don’t remember doing it… either way, it works. And this was the “last” box. All of my machines are Windows 7 64-bit including VM’s and Bootcamp partitions. My Lenovo S10 had to settle for the 32-bit version of Windows 7 because Atom didn’t like the x64 version. The only other OS I see daily is from a couple of servers which are Windows 2008 (and awaiting an R2 installation).

And so Vista slips away …as XP, 2000, NT, 98, 95, and 3.11 did before it.

digital pity

iPod Touch But No See?

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Engadget: Steve Jobs says iPod touch didn’t get a camera because “it’s a great game machine”

Uh… so it’s a great game machine… OK, fine – the guy had a liver transplant recently so he might have missed meetings, but I’ll give him that: the iPhone and iPod touch have some fun casual games. But so does the Nintendo DSi. As well as the Xbox 360. And just for completeness, the PS3 and Wii… all four of which have cameras.

Sorry – I have no rational explanation for leaving a camera out of the iPod touch when you’ve taken the time to re-tool the iPod nano to add a camera.

digital pity

Uhhh…

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SeattlePI: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has granted Microsoft’s motion to stay an injunction that would prohibit the software giant from selling Word. Microsoft filed the motion Aug. 18 while preparing to appeal a Texas judge’s ruling that the company willfully infringed a patent held by a small Canadian firm on a method for processing custom XML.

Uhhh… did someone forget to tell the patent office that all XML is custom by definition? I’ve had to educate many an executive as XML ascended to “buzzword of the year” in the early 2000’s… they would hear “oh, it’s XML, so it’s the same as [this other XML thing]” and I would have to explain the fundamentals of XML (and why it’s not a one size fits all thing.)

XML has three basic rules: 1) all data is tagged with < and > based tags. 2) all tags must be closed. 3) all tags are case sensitive. That’s it. That’s XML in a nutshell. Everything else about XML documents is defined by schemas that can be used to do anything. Consider two XML documents. One describes a boarding pass receipt; the other is an entry from a library catalog. What do they have in common? The three rules – everything else is custom to data that is being described.

I can’t believe this case is getting traction in any way, shape, or form.

Rant

RAGE: People Are Messing With My Coffee!

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Our restaurant sales tax is now an even 10% – this includes coffee purchases even if you don’t drink it there…

Anyone feel like sneaking into Elliott Bay and tossing cases of Starbucks beans into the harbor? It’s worked before… maybe it will work again. Either that or a nice public outing of everyone in Olympia or King County that worked to get this passed and then start a paper trail to see where the money is going. I bet you anything that it’s going to fund some park project in Seattle or Renton… because nothing helps a recession more than adding a 10% surcharge to western Washington’s most often purchased and already overpriced items and laying down new sod.

By far and wide: this is unconscionable.

Rant

Teddy Love-in

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I know he just died today, but enough already with the Ted Kennedy love-fest. The man has been marinated in alcohol since before Nixon was President and has spent about 12 years too many in the Senate, clinging to the family name of a dynasty that lost its relevancy even before the Germanies reunited. Senators are not supposed to have tenure for life – that’s reserved for Justices and professors.

The people of Massachusetts should be grateful that there’s now an open seat in the Senate for a candidate born after the launch of Sputnik.

SharpMT

Sharp MT 3.3.1

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After three years, I’ve finally had to make a change to SharpMT… I could have made the changes to the version at Codeplex but I decided to do it on my own local code base (and share the bits) because 3.x includes spell checking and the 4.x on Codeplex does not due to licensing issuess. Click-through to see the changes, but there are only a few.

SharpMT 3.3.1: Install MSI | FAQ and Product Info
Continue reading Sharp MT 3.3.1 →

GeekStuff

Xbox LIVE NXE Update

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The update has been available to the world for the last six hours. I missed the actually releasing of the bits because I was home, dreaming in colored code.

As most people know, I have been working on Avatar Marketplace for a while.  There was some rumblings about it, when E3 was going on, and as I was testing out the feature, my Avatar picked up some never before seen swag. This morning I woke up to and popped online, to see how things were in the Store and, well, holy shit.  There’s a lot more stuff up there than I knew about!  Gears of War 2 armor.  Halo 3: ODST armor.  The helmets from Big Daddy’s in Bioshock 2.  Basketballs, pom-poms, and soccer balls.  Even a light saber from The Clone Wars.  The that made me go “oh” though was Big Daddy Doll Prop that you can carry around the blades with you.

r0xx0rs.

GeekStuff, Windows

Windows 7: How To Prepare A Thumb Drive

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This is mostly for me, so that I don’t have to keep looking up the long winded discussion about why this works – I just need to remember the steps.

    Prep a USB thumb drive for booting

  1. list disk – look for the thumb drive
  2. select disk # – use the # of the thumb drive
  3. clean – wipe all disk information
  4. create partition primary – create a new partition
  5. active – set the partition active
  6. format fs=fat32 quick – quick format for FAT32
  7. assign – give it a drive letter

If you’re looking for the long winded discussions, use the search icon next to the title.


Randy No Arms' ongoing commentary on life, gaming, and the rest of the world