Geek Drivel

As I’m not an MS geek, I couldn’t refute the headline any better than the article does.

I thought the whole point to science was questioning assumptions to find the truth?

I hate to be classed as a Global Warming denialist (there seems to be some decent evidence that it’s happening), but there’s a distinctly over-ripe odor around the subject.

It seems that the replacement motherboard that I got last month, for my Dell XPS m1210 laptop, had some problems… the system just died tonight, and Dell’s support line says that it looks like the motherboard again, with a different problem. I was an electronics technician for the USPS for many years before I turned professional software developer, and I’ve seen a number of replacement electronic parts that failed within minutes of installing them, so I’m not too surprised or upset by this — it lasted nearly six weeks, after all.

Fortunately, I’d finished the major troubleshooting on the new Project Badger code a few hours before it threw in the towel, because the only other system I have set up right now is Mini-mEee, and it doesn’t really have the horsepower to run Windows XP in VMware. It’ll be Wednesday before they can get the part (and the technician to install it) out here, because it was after 5pm when I called.

Oh well, I guess I’ll get a chance to do some other things for a bit. Maybe even mow the lawn, like my wife has been nagging me to do for a couple weeks now.

Two of my favorite targets in a single (and pretty good) article — bonus!

GoddessJ and I have been watching, with a mixture of horror and incredulity, a web dustup between an outspoken atheist and a large religious group recently. Read the link if you want the gory details, but the upshot of it is that the more zealous people on the religious side are threatening to do physical harm against those who don’t agree with them.

It’s no wonder that violent and intolerant religions took over the world for several centuries. Irrational people have a definite advantage in a physical confrontation. Fortunately, the Internet puts potential combatants out of immediate physical reach of one another, and tempers irrationality by forcing people to think a little before doing something physically violent — they have to make plans to get to the object of their ire, and that gives them time for emotions to cool, and for them to consider what following through on it would cost them.

If for nothing else, that makes the Internet a wonderful thing.

The collective tech sphere (which has been holding its breath wondering what lawsuit-happy Apple was waiting for) can now breathe again.

The article says that this “pretty much spells the end for Psystar.” He’s probably right, because it’s not likely Psystar can afford to defend itself… but if it can take this all the way to a trial, there’s a very good chance that it would win. And if that happens, Apple can bend over and kiss its huge computer profit margins goodbye.

But, as I’m sure Apple’s management is counting on, there isn’t much chance of that.

Yes Chris, it probably is. But you’ve got to admit, it does look neat.

If you run your own website, you might have been following the brouhaha over the new LinkScanner feature of GriSoft’s AVG virus scanner.

I can’t find this text on the GriSoft website, but it was quoted in a comment on another blog I was reading today:

Following is AVG’s official response to LinkScanner concerns:

We’d like to thank our web community for bringing these challenges to our attention, as building community trust and protecting all of our users is critical to us. We have modified the Search-Shield component of LinkScanner to only notify users of malicious sites; this modified version will be rolled out on July 9th 2008. As of this date. Search-Shield will no longer scan each search result online for new exploits, which was causing the spikes that webmasters addressed with us. However, it is important to note that AVG still offers full protection against potential exploits through the Active Surf-Shield component of our product, which checks every page for malicious content as it is visited but before it is opened.

Hopefully that’s really from GriSoft, and it’s the last thing we’ll hear about the problem.

A lesson in Bad Science from NASA (predictably on Global Warming again): if the facts get in the way of your favorite theory, ignore the facts.

Want a good cell phone/organizer, but don’t want to pay through the nose for a proprietary and closed-source system that limits you in all sorts of ways? Looks like there’s an alternative coming Real Soon Now.