May you live to be 468!

So today was the last day of Sun Microsystems as an independent company ( Read more... )

When a program has some action that causes data loss or some other major irreversible effect, its designers need to take into account ways that it could be performed by accident, and come up with some manner of naturally discouraging it from happening by accident.  That might mean a dialog box asking "Are you sure?" but sometimes there are better ( Read more... )

...was a well-spent 65 hours of my life.  It neither succeeds nor attempts at being the continuation of Fallout 1 & 2, but it is definitely of high enough caliber to be a worthy entry to the Fallout series, and perhaps more worthy than several other games in the series. It is also definitely Bethesda's best game, and improves on almost every ( Read more... )

So it seems EA decided to raise the number of installs allowed for Spore from 3 to 5.  While one could consider it good that EA is in some capacity listening to customers, it seems pretty clear to me that they're just throwing a bone.

The issue wasn't never seriously that "I want to install the game five times, not three!" The issue was that they' ( Read more... )

Dammit, now I have to buy a DS.

So most of us have probably heard about the new method of electrolysis just announced by MIT.  What I can't figure out is that every single reference to it is implying it's all about solar.  It seems to me that it has much larger ramifications for both wind and hydrogen-powered vehicles than for solar. Yet the MIT site itself is talking about a " ( Read more... )

After replacing a hard drive with another hard drive with the same data on it:


( Read more... )

So I'm taking a second crack at putting to use all of my storage, after my first failure months ago. Now I'm in Ubuntu 8.04 dd'ing my boot partition onto one of the new drives, and enjoying the Ubuntu LiveCD in the process.

I have to say I'm pretty impressed with Ubuntu 8.04.  I've been kinda disappointed in GNOME recent years: it seems to have ( Read more... )

So for the past couple weeks, I've been tossing around the idea that somebody (maybe me, if I had more time) should start a site based on the discussion of environmentalism based on science, economics, and engineering. The rationale behind this is that while I consider environmental issues to be extremely important, there are a huge number of ( Read more... )