GuildCom

Today, GuildCom turns two years old.  Wow, it’s kinda hard to believe.  And recently, Bishop coughed up the needed wampum out of the barren Guild coffers to keep us going another year. 

Here’s to two years running, and hopefully many more to come! 

2.25 MB/s! Peak speed was 2.35 MB/s (not pictured). And that’s megabytes per second, not megabits. I pulled down 117 megabytes in 52 seconds. I don’t care who you are, that’s pretty damn good!

Needless to say, I’m pretty happy with my recent Internet speed upgrade, especially given that it generally goes twice as fast as it’s supposed to. I’m equally happy that I finally found a server that utilizes all of that bandwidth.

I’m sick of this stupid holy war. You know there’s a problem when Microsoft supporters are apt to be the most reasonable of the combatants in any sort of conflict. Holy carpal tunnel…

Here’s the thing, ladies and gentlemen: IE 8 works. Firefox and Chrome, for all their panache, do not.

You can blame it on Shockwave or Adobe Flash or whatever you want, but on the modern web you have to play nice with the 800 pound gorilla or you get smashed. When I open up Meebo to bring up my AIM, Yahoo, And MSN accounts and shoot the shit with people, I expect it to work. Which it does. But only if you’re using Internet explorer. In either Chrome or Firefox, I’m subjected to constant crashes due to Adobe Flash and Shockwave. This is unacceptable.

…and it’s apparent everywhere on the internet, too. So why the snobbery? Stop acting like Internet Explorer is causing all your problems and understand that, sometimes, your precious, open-source, unfuckable software is broken, too.

Jeesh.

Reactions across the web have been mixed at the news that id Software has been purchased by Zenimax, the privately-held company that owns Bethesda Softworks.

Read more…

ISV Wight
0225 11.01.3026
Dunne Sea, Roberts Leyline

She breathed in the darkness.

Silken sheets caressed her bare skin as her chest rose and fell, and she shivered. Though her eyes were open, there was nothing to see. This was her quiet time. Perhaps she was only gathering her thoughts, or preparing herself for the unknown. But she would never have confessed what she really thought she was doing. In moments like this she would lie there, naked, and feel.

A scram interrupt. She checked her watch. And it’s four in the morning back at CenCom. I’ll be late getting home again.

Captain TK Rook stretched beneath the sheets and at last slipped out of her bed, rising lithely in the darkness. The soft red glow of her handset revealed only her contours, silhouetted against shadows. She stood there, letting the air touch her for a few more breaths, a few more heartbeats, before—still blind in the dark—pulling a shirt on over her head and slipping into her pants. She made up her mind not to cite herself for a breach of dress code at nearly three o’clock in the morning. Her handset beeped, a soft tone accompanied by a flash of green light.

She thumbed the button onscreen. “Yes?”

“Sorry to wake you, captain; there’s been a—” The officer hesitated for a moment, a little confusion in her voice as she realized that she had not, in fact, awakened the captain. “We’ve just had a Scram 2 Interrupt. Reversion in 1:15. Should I patch any communications through to your quarters?”

“No,” said Rook, straightening her hair as she brought up the lights in her room. “If there’s a call, I’ll take it in the conference room.”

“Yes, captain.”

Email me for the new number. Don’t try the old one, cuz you’re liBle to wind up talking to my mom instead of me.

P.S. I’m typing this from my iPhone. The enemy apparently haz her claws deep in me now.

When you bring in a bunch of amateurs to determine the outcome in a case, ok–that’s kind of fair. When you let them determine the punishment, though, with a range from $750 to $80,000 a pop? It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s stupid.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/jammie-thomas-retrial-verdict.ars

The jury in the Jammie Thomas retrial just awarded the RIAA 1.92 million dollars in damages. Yeah, “In this world, the bad guys can win!” Impressive, isn’t it? Or just ludicrous. Microsoft isn’t asking that much in its suit against a company that defrauded Microsoft and company of 1.5 million in actual damages (whereas there is debate about whether or not p2p sharing even involves fiscal “damages”).

Given the judicial system’s recent track record when it comes to exasperated commentary online (you know–the repeated attempts to find out who anonymous posters are and then try them for some criminal offense or other as a result of their comments on forums and blogs), I suppose I should be more careful, lest someone with no spine and no sense of humor mistake what I’m about to say for an actual physical threat…

But that jury can go fuck itself. They should be dragged into the streat and beaten, then pilloried for a day while they think about the fact that 1.92 million dollars is more than they’ll make in their entire, miserable lives, unless they actually come up with a for-profit piracy scheme. It’s too bad they can’t take a hint from Thomas in that case; she didn’t make a dime.

Personnel at Guild headquarters in CenCom were recently offered a chance to do a little computer maintenance work on the side. Paid work. It was an interesting proposition, but was eventually turned down.

They asked for my card, after all. I don’t have a card.

It was an interesting idea, but I don’t think anything could have come of it. Most people have this understanding that fixing computers is easy. You don’t sweat. You don’t bleed. There are, nominally, no tears involved. Therefore this is a task of no great difficulty, and technicians must not expect very much compensation. In the mind of the average consumer, there is no concept of paying for volumes of arcane knowledge. Realistically speaking, a technician with a perfectly reasonable solution is simply babbling to increase his fee–at least as far as the average cynic can tell.

I had a guy once offer me $6/hr to work as a computer tech. Minimum wage at the time was a buck fifty more than that. He was later sued by Microsoft. I hope they own the shirt off his back now.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about how to actually get involved in a business opportunity like that. Maybe House Call Tech Support or some crap like that; I dunno. It could be good money, I think, if you could go into it with an understanding between both parties that money will be paid–and in substantial quantities.

In other news, Chrome finally got its act together and fixed the shift+ctrl right-to-left-and-left-to-right toggle for text entry fields.

Also, it stormed like hell here last night.

Also, I’m researching just exactly how one becomes a  Special Agent in the FBI. I don’t really know why I’m still interested after all these years, but I can confirm that the money is pretty damn good. Not that I have any skills they’re just really interested in…