Monthly Archives: April 2006

News Bits

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SciFi announced a spin-off to Battlestar Galactica?! (gateworld.net) What?! Isn’t it already a spin-off? :P Apparently they’re wanting to do a prequel… bleh. The special effects of the old one might not be so hot, but it’s still definately better overall than what SciFi’s remaking. Ugh. Now they’re going to pull an Enterprise and make a prequel and screw up the current timeline. Brilliant.

It also appears that Apple has patents that could bring about a camera monitor… (newscientist.com) How nice. I remember hearing about how this could be possible several years ago, but I rather dismissed it as too crazy. Now I’m not so sure. Lots of Slashdot comments seem to think it’s not crazy… I don’t think it’s crazy anymore. As long as you can keep the thing shut off at your command, like… really at your command. A hardwired switched to just simply cut power to it. I don’t think it’d be so bad if they did that. But, eh… I don’t think it’ll stop there, once one’s been created and sold to consumers.

…and I’m glad we have McAfee around to tell us that 97% of computer users don’t know what spyware is when they see it. What can you expect from a company that makes money clearing computers of spyware and viruses, though, eh? (Yes, Viruses. Computer Viruses. Not Virii.) Blah… do we really have so many silly people using the internet? Can they seriously not comprehend that you don’t click on things to download that you didn’t specifically ask for? I mean… these days… even with IE, you have to ALLOW most spyware to install, and the programs rely on dorky users who go ‘ooh! internet accelerator! must have!’ or ‘zomg an XXX toolbar? *droooool*’

Oh, and I saved the best for last!

So there’s this kid at school. We don’t know what he did, since the article is (not so) strangely biased toward the impressionable brat, but apparently… he was slapped. By a teacher. Oh my, the humaaaaaaanity! Kid gets mad. Kid calls dad. Dad gets mad. Dad wants teacher fired for slapping his kid. Apparently, the kid sent a text message to his parents that said “Come to the school right now my teacher just slapped me.”

Hahahaha… so crazily funny. Some spoiled teen with an equally spoiled father get so hopping mad that a teacher smacked him. “She’s promoting violence! ZOMG MAKE HER STOP! Her job is supposed to resolve problems WITHOUT VIOLENCE. She’s showing kids how to hit people!”

Wow… just wow. Whatever happened to discipline? Parents don’t do it, for fear of marring the inner-mind of their child, and teachers can’t do it anymore because… I don’t know why. But they’re not supposed to anymore.

Yeah, the article is biased. They make it sound like the teacher randomly waltzed up behind the kid at lunch and gave him such a mighty whallop that chips flew out of his mouth. Mmhm. Sure. Who reported this? Probably the kids at the table. They wouldn’t exaggerate, now, would they?

Oh, no… not attention starved teenagers at risk of being smacked for doing something wrong.

AT&T/SBC goes BANG!

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Welp… maybe Blizzard’s accusations that AT&T is the fault of all their connectivity problems (that everyone’s going ballistic over) are accurately placed. (*gasp* Blizzard wasn’t dodging blame? ZOMG!! Oh wait… I knew that already. *ahem*)

At about 12 noon, AT&T reportedly upgraded about 22 core switches and BAM!!! 300,000 DSL lines (whatever a line is, since this seems to be very widespread) were suddenly disconnected… and some still are almost 8 hours later. Namely me! I’m writing this on Juno Dialup, ugh…

But yeah… apparently Indianapolis (aka, most of Indiana) is currently without DSL access, though Chicago was restored a few hours earlier, as well as some places in Ohio and Illinois. I read on DSLReports.com that Wisconsin was online, so I’m not sure exactly how far this outage went.

Way to go, AT&T… way to go.

Anyway, I hope they get this fixed… some people run BUSINESSES THAT NEED INTERNET! Namely me… Luckily I’ve only got about three eBay emails today. They can wait until tomorrow to be answered, but if it lasts much longer… I’m going to have to go to someone else’s house to get broadband do to my work, blah.

“BLIZRD SUX LOL OOPS I MEEN BLIZZARD”

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The following is a rant… it doesn’t have to make sense to you, or even really be accurate, but this is how I feel about the situation, and if you don’t, well… I don’t care!

So everyone thinks they can run Blizzard’s World of Warcraft servers better than Blizzard, eh? They think it’s down all the time? Authentication errors since beginning of subscription service? These morons are all spoiled brats…

They all say “well THIS MMO doesn’t have problems” and “well THAT MMO is running just fine”… yeah. They also only have about 10,000 paying users. City of Heroes? EVE Online? I’ve heard WoW compared to them… WoW has, can you remember? If you’re a whiny-butt troll, you probably conveniently forgot… WoW has 6 million users. 6 MILLION. Let’s see how your servers hold up under 6 MILLION connections. Over and over again.

They say how realms keep going down unexpectedly for hours and hour… funny how I never see this happen. I play WoW, too, people, and I hardly ever see a “Urgent News” bulletin on the login screen unless it’s Maintenence Day. Hey… scheduled Maintenence Day. Do you realize how lucky you are to have a scheduled downtime you can plan around? Most other MMOs will just go POOF!! until they’re suddenly back up… and that evening of gaming you had planned was suddenly ruined.

Naturally, there will be unforseen problems that crop up in any computer system. That’s all part of the universe we live in, unfortunately. Things decay over time. Nothing keeps running in the same perfect state. Servers crash… some more often than others. That’s what happens when you build a computer using hundreds of different parts from different manufacturers. One flaw in one part will cause the whole thing some serious instability.

Lately, authentication problems have been cropping up, too. You provide your username and password and it kinda sits there saying “authenticating”. I’ve only noticed this happening in the last 3 months or so… That’s also when they were saying that they were well on their way to 6 million users. Of course, not all 6 million people are logging in at the same time, but potentially hundreds of thousands ARE. So yes, I think they need to replace that… but, oh hey, guess what? They have been!

One thing users tend to forget when things are going wrong… fixing things takes time. Yes, it also takes money, and you guys don’t seem to forget that. “Blizzard has 15×6,000,000 dollars every month! This should be fixed!” Hahaha… no. It takes time, people… and it always takes more time than everyone thinks it should. You can’t just rip out a server and replace it with a faster one in a couple hours and go “tada! All better!”

Remember that Blizzard is new to this, relatively speaking. They’ve made some mistakes, yep… they’ve fixed some mistakes, yep. They make new one, too. But ya’know what? I’ve noticed that… well… everyone does. If it’s seriously bothering you so much, just pull your subscription and take it to your uber-popular little single-shard MMO that’s always up.

But I’m going to go out on a limb and say… they can’t stop. They’re addicted to WoW and can’t stop even if they wanted to… and they’re resorting to ripping Blizzard over these “realm issues”… ouy.

Three words for you people.

STAR… WARS… GALAXIES…

People who’ve played it know what I’m talking about… I’ve seen other SW:G’ers say how awful it was compared to Blizzard’s problems, so I’m not the only one who’s noticed. People who whine about Blizzard have obviously never experienced a TRUE monstrocity.

Here, I’m going to log in right now, and I’m pretty sure I’ll get through Authentication like a hot knife through butter…

…tada! 10 seconds. No lag. On, GASP!!! Maintenence Day!!! You mean to tell me that the realms are up at 12:22PM EDT?!! ZOMG!!! Er… ahem. But you see what I mean? Some days are understandably worse than others. Some days are so awesome that there’s no complaining… but see, people take that for granted. So when the system is flawless, Blizzard gets no praise.

BTW, Maintenence Day doesn’t mean… Maintenence DAY. It’s only for about 6 hours. In the extreme early morning for Blizzard… when nobody’s on. Sometimes they’ll hit problems in a patch and it’ll be extended an hour or two. Patch 1.10 was especially difficult for them, and the Maintenence lasted all day.

People were irate. “This always happens! FIX IT, STUPID BLIZZARD!” Good heavens, you ignorant whiners… a Maintenence Day has NEVER been so bad… and everyone’s ready to yank their subscriptions. Welp… so long to you dorks. It’ll be that much more pleasant without you going ballistic whenever there’s an accident. Dangit, we were even given an extra day on our subscriptions. Were people grateful? Heck no… “Good, now if they’d only done this all along.” or “Well, they needed to do this anyway.”

Okay, I think I’m done… Since I wanna go do something else now, though I could probably go on and on and on. But you know, I think you all get the picture. I know I have:

The human race is, pretty much as a whole, an ungrateful bunch of people who expect to get the best when they want it, and take it for granted when they do, thinking they’ve deserved it all along.

(Ick… good thing I’m a dog… yey! Woof…)

The World’s Deepest Dinosaur

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From the Slashdot article:

FiReaNGeL writes to tell us BiologyNews.net is reporting that Norway has uncovered their first set of dinosaur remains. The catch? They found it 2,256 meters below the ocean floor. From the article: “It is merely a coincidence that the remains of the old dinosaur now see the light of day again, or more precisely, parts of the dinosaur. The fossil is in fact just a crushed knucklebone in a drilling core – a long cylinder of rock drilled out from an exploration well at the Snorre offshore field.”

“How did it get there?!” The comments ask.
It’s simple! The Great Flood, as documented in the Book of Genesis.

Ever seen what happens to dirt after it’s been covered with water for several months? It kinda gets all slimey and icky and… nasty. Like the bottom of ponds and lakes that don’t have sand down there. It’s super sparse mud. You step in it and it’s just……. SQUIIIISH.

Anyway, you get the idea. Now imagine that the entire planet is covered with water for weeks and weeks and weeks. Things would end up looking like the bottom of a lake. With the good ol’ moon that orbits this fair planet, there’d be some craaaaazy tides going on without land to keep the water at bay. You’d get super currents all over the place, flowing around and carrying this slime all over the place… and, along with the mud slime, you’d have people, buildings, animals… dinosaurs!

Then when the planet’s surface buckled and caved into what we now see as oceans (and consequently, what went down also forced things up… thus mountains!) and the water all flowed in to fill this great big hole (as water usually does)… it carried tons of mud with it. This mud… had dinosaurs. (Among other things, of course.)

This is also how our oil fields were formed, by the way. You know scientists have been able to create oil by processing garbage, right? Well, that’s what happened. Swirling whirlpools of water brought together bunches of dead things into clusters (you’ve seen that happen, right? Even the little whirly-things you make in pools will swirl around and collect all the dirt into the center of it) and then buried it in mud, which, over time, in some places, hardened into rock… but the dead things inside the rock decomposed and did whatever dead things do… and eventually formed oil.

Oil is essentially uber ancient dead things…

Anyway, I got kinda distracted.
But that’s how dinosaurs were buried under over 2000 meters of ocean.

…and that, class, is your daily dose of Christian history. Except… if you were really a class, and I was really a teacher in a school, I’d probably be fired right about now, because I was teaching this explanation instead of the way that benefits the theory of evolution.

“ZOMG, think of the children and their poor minds! Shame on you for warping them!”

The Anvil? God’s Word.

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The Anvil? God’s Word.

Last eve I passed beside a blacksmith’s door
And heard the anvil ring the vesper chime:
Then looking in, I saw upon the floor
Old hammers, worn with beating years of time.

“How many anvils have you had,” said I,
“To wear and batter all these hammers so?”
“Just one,” said he, and then, with twinkling eye,
“The anvil wears the hammers out, you know.”

And so, thought I, the anvil of God’s word,
For ages skeptic blows have beat upon;
Yet though the noise of falling blows was heard,
The anvil is unharmed . . . the hammer’s gone.

Author unknown