Today, for the first time ever (and I've been driving for a lot of years) I saw something I'd never seen before: a BMW stopping to let another car into traffic. I'm suspecting he/she/it did so only because they still had the opportunity to delay the vehicle behind them instead (and my front-row view of the situation was of course due entirely to ( Read more... )

Most folk complaining about "bloat" as a software issue are talking about programs getting larger and more complicated and not getting any faster as Moore's Law puts faster hardware under the software, but few have contemplated the real issue facing the Linux community.

I really have a problem with software that starts becoming self-aware, because there's no useful way to buy each other a beer and come to a peaceful relationship with it.
PF, it seems, can tell that I'm trying to SSH home from a Linux conference, and is feeling jilted.
(Footnote: issue seems to be an issue involving PF tripping over MTUs, and yes I ( Read more... )

I guess I'm supposed to kick in a journal entry myself now and again. Perhaps yesterday's 18th anniversary is a good occasion for that. We're still together, quite happily tolerating each other, and we barbecued steak and opened a bottle of wine together.

So with the Conservatives sporting Support-Our-Troops red, and the Liberals coming out with a line of "Green Shift" t-shirts and hats for their environmental initiative, I'm wondering how soon the Green Party is going to come up with a reason to start wearing blue, or whether the NDP and the BQ are going to be involved in this game of musical party ( Read more... )

Remember the good old days when former Toronto mayor Mel Lastman summoned the military to help shovel snow after a particularly heavy snowfall?
Well, his successor wants to enact a law against private gun ownership, symbolically shutting down the last two firing ranges in city limits, with provisions that only the police and the military be allowed ( Read more... )

I was recently holding a tool that I've owned for quite a lot of years, and thinking that they don't make quality like that anymore, and that led to a line of thought that the design lifetime of stuff may be dropping fast enough that we can predict the date of the Singularity or End Of The World As We Know It by projecting when all of our stuff ( Read more... )

There's a news story presently about a Member of Parliament being embarrassed by a 1991 videotape surfacing, in which he made some over-the-top homophobic remarks. The usual cycle of accusation and apology is playing out, but a couple of thoughts occur to me:

• Attitudes have changed a lot since back then, and quickly enough that people who were ( Read more... )

Daylight savings time. Gah.

According to El Reg, Microsoft failed to implement this year's Leap Day correctly, contrary to the rules set down by Pope Gregory XIII. Unlike the usual run of RFCs, which rarely set any penalty for implementation failures, Paragraph XVII says Redmond is now in line for the indignation of Omnipotent God.