Shameless Words from Shameless Geeks

Last night, Groklaw posted the final judgment in the SCO case. At long last, SCO’s attempt to bleed the open source community is at an end. It looks like the $600 fee that they tried to extort from every copy of Linux will never happen.

I wish I could say something about how great the judgment is, but about all I can think of is “it’s about time this ended". This whole thing has been going on for so long that I hardly remember when it started. It’s funny how the only ones who got rich were the lawyers.

Speaking of lawyers… I wonder how many are going to work with RIAA? The concept of the litigation is pretty much the same… be a cash leech.

El Reg has an article about the passing of a legend. Gus, the current reigning champion of canine ugliness, is dead at the age of nine. Gus overcame a lot to reach the pinnacle of his career as a putrid-looking pooch. He was missing an eye, short one leg, had no fur, and was covered in blotches. Actually, I think I may have been set up with his twin sister on a blind date once. Yecch!

Was the infamous Duke Nukem vaporware actually released today? Can the granddaddy of all gaming jokes be at an end?

Naaaah. We can relax. It’s only a re-hash of the old Duke Nukem 3D title for XBox Live Arcade. They almost had me believing that Duke Nukem Forever was actually released. I suppose that I should have known better. The universe still exists, and hell is… well… still hell. Please go back to fragging.

OK… so maybe it’s just another study that relies on “expert” opinion to derive it’s numbers. In order to avoid being a hypocrite, I have to say that I don’t believe the results any more than I believe the studies that tell me how bad video games are for development.

That being said, it’s nice that psychologists “opinions” are beginning to balance out. Someday, I’d like to see the end of opinion based studies. Until that magical day comes, I’ll settle for a world where the “opinions” balance out to a no-op.

I just saw a /. post entitled PCMark Memory Benchmark Favors GenuineIntel. I’m a little concerned about how quickly the crowd went straight into “Intel paid them to cheat” before thinking about other possibilities. I’m not trying to say that Chipzilla is virtuous in this matter, but lets be fair about it.

First of all, how many of the libraries that they use are written by Intel for promotional purposes? I can remember (many moons ago) writing some DSP and graphics code for DirectX. At the time, the best code for the job was the Performance Library Suite that was available for free. Naturally, it was used in a lot of places. The problem was that it was written by Intel for the purposes of pushing their own chips. Each level of the Pentium (yeah, it was a while ago) ran it’s own pre-compiled library. Anything not identified as a Pentium defaulted to software emulation of some of the SSE features. This, of course, led to a skewed result when using the libraries for comparison.

Secondly, it is ultimately the responsibility of a vendor to make sure that their code doesn’t skew results. If their code doesn’t work properly on some CPU’s, they should clearly indicate so. I haven’t used PCMark2005, so the software may already have some kind of indication built in. A feature like this would have warned the user not to trust the results of the test.

Lastly, VIA should take an active role in making sure that they don’t get shortchanged on tests. How about a library that takes advantage of the chip’s strengths? Maybe even partnering with the spec vendors? It seems to me that they would be foolish to trust that a secondary chip vendor would get equal treatment without having someone help things along.

Honestly… the whole big-business-is-cheating conspiracy theory thing is getting old. It really doesn’t sound good when I hear it coming from fellow geeks.

A recent study by the University of Wolverhampton has traced the oldest known joke back to 1900AD. It seems that the ancients liked off-color jokes as much as the rest of us.

The article mentions who originally commissioned the study, but I have my own thoughts on the matter. I think it was Jay Leno looking for new material.

Hmmm… This Ars Technica article about recent shifts at the USPTO seems to be pointing out a bright spot in the patent landscape. It points out that the USPTO has recently taken a more hostile direction when dealing with software patents.

Software patents have always been a sticky subject. Despite the fact that there are probably a few scattered incidents where patents were awarded to deserving software, the vast majority have done nothing more than enrich patent trolls. IMHO, it’s probably for the best if they are abolished.

How about this for an idea for a patent:
A System for Acquiring Patents for Prior Art.
That way, maybe I could go back and get a little revenge on the patent trolls

I’ve added a new category for RC helicopters. Besides home brewing, this is one of the most frequent areas for me to waste time and money. Now if only I could justify a category for homemade Buffalo Wings…

I have added a new category for home brewing and all things related to it. This is all part of my renovation of the site. Eventually, I intend to change things to reflect the changes in my tastes and hobbies over the past couple of years.

I heard about the world’s first Commodore 64 LAN party the other day. I guess it was a cool thing to dredge up the old equipment and do it just for the sake of saying it can be done. However, forgive me if I don’t attend… I have config files that take up more memory that the whole C64 has.

One thing to note: Retro is supposed to be a huge trend today, but I found very little about the event online. Most posts just referred to the /. entry, or it’s constituent parts. I guess the whole retro thing is more hype than market.

Here’s a nice little tidbit for gamers out there. It seems that it matters what color you are when you play online. No… I don’t meant your race or ethnicity… I mean it matters whether you are on the red team or the blue team.

The study makes me wonder about the accuracy of their data. There are many ways that this can come out wrong without fudging the data. It’s possible that players just prefer to join the red team. Unbalanced games would throw things way off. Even if the game is auto-balanced you have to wonder if red is the default team for the extra player.

In the end, I guess I’ll just have to play on the red team. That will even the statistics eventually

In one of his trademarked moves, our favorite less-than-completely-sane lawyer Jack Thompson walked out on his own disbarment hearing, leaving a 4500 word rant for the record. It doesn’t look like the rant is going to get him out of an “enhanced disbarment", meaning that he is not only disbarred, he is unable to apply for his license for at least ten years.

I’m sure that Senators Clinton and Obama will be surprised that they are in step with his beliefs (according to him). I don’t think that the endorsement of a raving lunatic is the kind of thing they had in mind. Honestly, McCain should consider himself lucky that his name didn’t come up.

The irony of this story is that Jack devoted himself to eradicating Grand Theft Auto. In the end, it appears that the game outlasted him. You could even say that the game eradicated his law career.

Yup… thats right… Somebody in New England lost a whole lighthouse. I’d like to say something witty and funny here, but I can’t come up with anything better than somebody in New England lost a whole lighthouse. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? I’d hate to use these people as babysitters.

It has just come to my attention that a man from New Zealand has been arrested for lobbing a hedgehog at a young boy. Not to worry folks. I have it on good authority that this was NOT our beloved Spiny Norman, only a distant relative of his. Please continue purchasing the Spiny Norman for President tee shirt advertised in the left column.

You are bound to lose weight if you restrict yourself to eating from a tiny noodle bowl developed by Japanese scientists. At 1/25,000 on an inch, it’s the ultimate in portion control. Word is that the Ramen noodle in the bowl is inedible. That’s OK… my sources say that ramen is bad for you anyway. I guess that’s why I eat so much of it.

Just when you thought it was safe to SCO into the water, Along comes a Singapore company trying squeeze free money out of the internet. If you check out their web site, you’ll see that they actually seem to believe their claims.

From what I can see, the patent is a useless combination of prior art containing nothing worthy of exclusive rights. Nearly all of it refers to things that have been in use since the early nineties. There is some tiny little chance that they may get away with patenting the idea of returning search engine results in the form of images on a “conveyer belt slide show", but the rest of the claims will blow the whole thing out of the water.

The odd thing is that the company has sent out invoices in an attempt to charge people for using an image link. It’s more than a little bit silly to claim rights to something that was part of a specification long before you filed your patent. It’s about as intelligent as trying to collect usage fees from every automobile driver in the country because you designed a car.

SCO for it boys!

It looks like the old Russian communist party is a little upset about the new Indiana Jones film. I especially like the part where they say “It’s rubbish … In 1957 the communists did not run with crystal skulls throughout the U.S. Why should we agree to that sort of lie and let the West trick our youth?”

Well, I have news for them… in 1957 Harrison Ford wasn’t running around with crystal skulls either. It’s called entertainment. Obviously, it’s a difficult concept for commies. I doubt that your youth are tricked by it. They aren’t as laughably stupid as you are.

It’s funny to hear this kind of thing from a group that once advocated that America and Americans must be portrayed as evil in any form of entertainment. Their opinion carried the force of law at the time. Hey comrade… Can dish it out but can’t take it?

Having seen the movie, I can tell you a couple of things..

1. It’s a lot of fun, but far from historically accurate. Anyone who uses this as a source of historical information is probably too dumb to spell Soviet anyway.
2. Nothing is even close to realistic. (The fridge thing? C’Mon) The fact that everything in this movie was over-the-top should have been obvious to anyone watching.
3. They made the US govt. in 1957 look just as bad as the Soviet Govt. in 1957. It’s even quite obvious that this was an afterthought and an attempt to be politically correct.

This time, things look bad for our old buddy Jack. He’s headed for a sanctions hearing and it looks like he’s going to be found guilty. Considering some of the things he’s accused of, I doubt that he’ll ever be taken seriously in a court of law again.

I actually hope that he doesn’t disappear completely from the spotlight. I realize that I’ve been known to rant about his views in the past, but I seriously hope he stays around. It’s really easy to make a point when the guy countering it has a question mark in the sanity column.

Well, now you can play games while you whiz! Thanks to a couple of ingenious Belgians, You can
Kill aliens or go skiing while you relieve yourself. There really isn’t much more to say about this… except that the rest of us are pissed that we didn’t think of it first. It really beats the heck out of those little plastic spinners that were once popular in the bottom of urinals.

I bumped up against this link about Engineers making good terrorists because the traits that make a good engineer also make a good terrorist. Hmmm… Don’t those same traits make a good doctor, lawyer, athlete, businessman, etc?

The next problem: Engineers are over-represented in the leadership of that mean old terrorist organization. The article also mentions that scientists, chemists, and medical degrees are desirable. Basically, they are looking for smart people. Fascinating! What a concept! Look for smart people to run your affairs! This is going to revolutionize all of society!

Since we are all goint to be terrorists, lets pick a leader. I nominate Bob Dobbs, the SubGenius. He will lead us from the fires of … something, toward the ultimate utopia of … something else. Whatever.