Reminiscent of my own reason for switching away from Fedora Linux, the forced separation of packages into repositories for different “versions” of the distribution is causing all sorts of havoc (or rather, preventing us from fixing this havoc) on our server at the lab.

Because I can’t use the official Redhat repositories to get the newest versions of packages, I’m forced to browse sites like rpmforge looking for them (or compile them myself from source). And forget about it if the package has dependencies!

A model like Gentoo’s is really much better, in the sense that there are no versions, just a continuous upgrade cycle which is always capable of supporting the newest packages.

I told them so: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/30/0213214

But they’re only doing it in Canada, which is somewhat strange. They really don’t seem to see the problem with the privacy implications of street view.

I’m not usually one to copy links from Digg, but this is a deeply disturbing failure of democracy:

Even worse than multiple voting is the fact that most of those seats are empty to begin with. Making the law is a very important job. The least politicians can do is show up to work.

Society in general disgusts me, but the elite is the worst by far. It’s as if being scum is a prerequisite to gaining power.

To see how tradition can defy logic, one need not look further than a calendar. We’re nearing the end of September, to be followed by October, then November, and finally December. Perfectly logical, right? 7, 8, 9, 10?

No: 9, 10, 11, 12 🙂

I do wonder sometimes how particular social issues become mainstream. Obviously they require a spokesperson, but why some and not others of equal caliber? I suppose this is where Memetic Engineering comes in.

EVGA, a company that sells graphics cards based on various NVidia chipsets, is launching free game servers for several popular games. This is actually an ingenious marketing strategy, as it will:

a. Encourage people to buy the games (thus benefiting the publishers, who probably have deals with EVGA)
b. Encourage people to buy graphics cards that can run the games well.
c. Encourage people to buy those cards from EVGA (general goodwill + brand awareness).

It will be interesting to see what happens to these servers as the games age, however. Will they constantly swap them for the latest games to encourage continuing game and card purchases? Only time will tell.

In response to the following Time article, I have only one word:

An enthusiastic “Yes!”

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1653653,00.html