I decided to host the AOL user data
It is a pretty scary view inside of the mindset of people that think they are alone with their computers.
About 2.1GB that need to be processed, so it might take a while.
Microsoft likes more people to develop games for their consoles. In their press release it sounds like a Windows XP machine is all you will need to develop games for their consoles.
The range of impact goes from ‘flash in the pan’ to ‘Sony is finished’. It all depends on the details of the implementation and capabilities. Nobody has ever opened game consoles to a wider development community. It might or might not take off. Trying it is a bold and innovative move.
Microsoft is a funny companies these days: Some of their divisions do all the right things, while others are as stupid as the Ottoman empire in 1907.
Trolltech makes a phone now. Trolltech got big with a toolkit for graphical user interfaces called “Qt”. I used it years ago, and it is not bad. Now they make a phone that runs embedded linux, and their user interface on top of it. In other words it is an open source phone.
From the pure aspect of technology these developments had to happen. The very interesting question is, what will come out of it. Content is a very tricky thing to predict. Hollywood survived despite constant failures in this area. As long the movie industry existed they tried to mechanize and control creativity and content creation, so that they can churn out products like a nuts and bolts manufacturer. And it never worked.
One the other side of the argument one could see Microsoft and Trolltech shipping typewriters to a million monkeys.
And, of course reality will fall somewhere in between. And once the revolution happened, it will be so clear why it did. Same in the other outcome.
Games could really use some injection of innovation. Roaming the show floor of what was the last E3 of it’s kind I was pretty surprised how alike most games looked. I don’t play. But I care about the technology and business side of this industry. There are racing games and first person shooters. Lot’s of those.
With production costs high new content development is tricky. That’s why I liked Rockstar’s Table Tennis.
Tetris was written by a russian programer when there was still a country called “Soviet Union”.
The situation with phones is similar. They don’t suck, but I never saw a phone that made just sense. Of course all Apple fan boys hope that Steve Jobs will come down Moses like with a phone on his arm. They hope so, since phones are ok, but definetely not as useful as we want them to be. And as they could be. If open software can fix this is to be seen.
the BBC writes about greenland
Reading it, you would think that Greenlands Ice is about to be gone.
Only using numbers from this article (6.5 meters rise of sea level if ice melts completely, 0.5 millimeters rise a year) it will take 13,000 years till Greenlands ice cap is gone.
I am not saying that global warming is not real. I am just surprised how somebody can write an article that contradicts itself in such simple ways.
I moved Method Software to a new server. Licenses always could be generated automatically and sent by email.
It was seven years ago that I did set up the original host. Things have changed. So nothing worked. Thanks to all that spam it is a bit trickier to set up a mail server in the internet in 2006 than it was 1999.
First thing to get right is to have reverse DNS set up right. Otherwise you get something like:
SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection:
host actual.name.removed.com [1.2.3.4]: 5actual.name.removed.com You Must have reverse DNS setup in order to relay mail.
In other words: The ip address you are sending from must resolve to something. With
whois ip-address
you should get a domain. This is something that your hosting provider can set up for you. They have the authority over the IP range that they gave you one from. Took only an hour with my hosting provider. Another sign that they are decent.
Even after this fix the return-path was set to something stupid like ‘www-data@hostname-I-gave-the-machine’
I took a bit of googling and a couple of pointless detours to /etc/hosts and dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config before I found this blog entry that pointed to /etc/email-addresses which indeed did the trick.
california consumes allot of power
assuming a population of 36 Million inhabitants it comes down to 1253 Watts for every person right now.
Mircrosoft and Nortel want to do things together
Billion dollar companies flow and merge, yet, the winner is already the tiny little Asterisk. I never used it, but I can imagine how it runs circles around those dinosaurs. If you get your phones hooked up the Microsoft-Nortel way you can easily pay a thousand times more for less features compared to Asterisk. What get’s me excited about Asterisk is, that, since it is open source, you can add your own features if you would care to do so.
Having coded interfaces for Nortel systems I can not wait for them to go out of business. It’s beyond horrible.
Well, since it does not cost that much for Apple to try this, I doubt that it is a failure.
The press however will make a big ‘bruhar’ around this. They just love those simple “take one big thing, and add another big thing” stories. They always look like these sure winners. Like the extension of the cinematic experience by the sense of smell.