What a bunch of assmasters the people in Redmond are. According to David Kirkpatrick's article, Jim Allchin, some cheesehead at Microsoft, says Longhorn will be much better than previous versions of windows. At the start of the article, he (Kirkaptrick) writes "Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for platforms, looked at my Apple PowerBook and smugly pointed out that the number of copies of Windows sold this year will be more than all the Macintosh computers used worldwide." And he's proud of that fact!

So what? So what if your company is so big it can cram its product down the throats of millions of unaware customers. So fucking what? All the things Longhorn supposedly will do (like automatically reconfigure its network settings when you move from office to home), Mac OS X (even with its sucky-assness compared to OS 9) has been able to do for years. "If you put in a DVD, the volume will automatically adjust and the video will just start playing full screen"? This is a feature? With its armies of engineers (and a year and a half to go), this is the best fucky Microsoft could come up with after decades of stealing other's ideas? Losers.

"Longhorn will automatically clean up, or defragment, your hard drive, if it is required." Whoopdie-fuckin' do. Mac OS X's filesystem rarely requires defragmenting. But my old housemates shitty home theater PC choked on its own excrement if he did defragment daily.

Longhorn will show me the first page of a document instead of an icon? BFD. Been there, done that. I can put the same file in multiple places on my drive? Been there, done that.

"Microsofts research shows that the average corporate employee spends about 20% of her time on the PC simply looking for items." That's because Microsoft has never encouraged any sense of consistency among its legions of third-party developers, and because Windows' window management is piss poor, at best. No wonder people have a hard time finding things on windows. It's a direct result of the design of the UI. (More like LI…"loser interface").

Allchin talked about an upcoming 64-bit release of Windoze. Kirkpatrick writes, "For Allchin, this is a very big deal for businesses and individuals. The reasons are technical, but the bottom line is that 64-bit computers will be much faster. They should also be more secure." Is this what Allchin is spouting? Sorry, wrong and wrong. Not even the 64-bit Tiger will make your computer faster or more secure. Application developers will have to re-build their apps, and even then, most of what you'll get is the ability to address more memory. Which will probably mean that developers will create even more resource-hungry apps, creating additional burden on our already-overtaxed I/O subsystems.

And, I should point out, that the G5 is already a 64-bit processor, and Tiger ships this weekend, as opposed to "the end of the year" in Allchin's predictions.

Windows "Just Works"? Give me a break. Windows seems to go out of its way to prevent the user from getting work done. What a joke. And to those blind cattle who use windows: you suck, too. It's your fault Windows is as wide-spread as it is, and it's your fault computers suck as much as they do. Windows even pulls down the Mac (which, despite being utterly superior to Windoze, sucks too). Sure, lots of people use Windoze. Lots of people believe in a god, too, and look where that's getting us.

And Kirkpatrick, as a Mac user, you're way to upbeat and positive in your story. Afraid you'll lose future interviews?

Figures.

CS184's assignment due a few hours ago was a simple ray tracer. So far, the most work, but also the most fun. I implemented a ray tracer that supports ellipsoids and triangles, point lights and directional lights (oops, forgot to mention that to the reader…hope (s)he picks up on that from the images), subsample antialiasing (jittered). It also renders to the screen and outputs jpeg directly, and uses an ANTLR-generated parser to read in scene files. Here are the images I submitted along with my assignment.

Some represent mistakes, but they're interesting anyway. I thought my images were cool, but Sarah Beth's snow globe takes the cake. Creative and refractive. How cool is that?

But not I'm not so confident of the assessment. Sure, they've got some wacky cultural surprises (Japscat? Eeesh), but generally the Japanese employ wisdom and elegance in their endeavors. So, why would they jump on the same wasteful space exploration initiative as the U.S.? Why take two decades to go to the moon, when they could go straight to Mars in half that time?

Our political leaders need to recognize the merits of a human Mars exploration program, and they need to set the goal of accomplishing serious scientific research on Mars.

I'm not sure how to use it yet, but I'll give it a try. Hopefully it will play nicely with SmartyPants.

This is some indented text. Dunno if it's really block-quoted, or what. Hmm, no, not block-quoted, which means Ecto might restrict the HTML structure I can impose on my entries.

Now, let's see what the iTunes button does: Let Go from the album "Details" by Frou Frou. Cool. It inserts the currently-playing song. Not sure why that needs to be a button right here in the app, but I guess we're all likely to have lots of need to make emergency references to songs...

Wonderful movie. Funny and inspiring.
And it contains a great quote: "Failure is never quite so frightening as regret."