blog.bookmach.com

In my college days I yearned to hook multiplayer Doom up to a network app that would send my opponents the Ping of Death when they were hit. Now it seems some whippersnapper has taken the same idea, along with the open sourciness of Doom 1, and is killing *nix processes with it instead of twitchy adolescents. Well played, sir.

Click here to read all about it.

This clip shows how vastly different the values of privacy, safety and legality can be in other countries…

Reading this felt much like reading Joyce’s Ulysses, only (a lot) shorter. Perhaps this is the Odyssey for a morally ambiguous age?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikistory

I’ve recently experimented with the links on Bookmach result pages; the excerpt for each link that used to be a pop-up is now underneath it as a short paragraph… let me know if you like or dislike the change.

I recently added a bunch of mp3 blogs to Bookmach.com’s search index, and it was interesting to note how many mp3s were available on those sites “for a short time only, please don’t sue me!”

With all the attention showered on how content-owning corporations are being cost money by piracy, it seems they are ignoring their own history and possibly missing a huge opportunity to promote their own product. With the boundaries between content and commercials growing ever blurrier, why shouldn’t a corporation love the fact that people are advertising minuscule chunks of their product for free?

Most of these mp3 blogs had quite in-depth reviews along with a couple songs, basically the same thing a corporation pays thousands of dollars for when they bombard media critics with demo CDs. Just think of the synergy that could be harnessed by a corporation plastering a few billboards with their most popular bloggers.

Here’s a fresh find while I was perusing these sites: a music contest where you can win a couple CDs if you come up with the sexiest playlist!

This IBM article is written as a migration how-to from MySQL or PostgreSQL to IBM’s DB2 Express, but also has an excellent comparison of feature sets and architecture between recent (as of this writing) versions of all three databases. Worth a browse if you have any technical interaction with these products.

Click for article

Bill Gates steps down to do charity work. Why not start out by giving the software world the greatest gift of all, without spending a dime?

IBM makes a development & server operating system. So does Sun. Oracle may as well be doing so. And all three of them also develop and serve on another OS: Linux. Apple does the same with NetBSD. There’s a reason for this: *nix operating systems are super fast, ultra stable stable and very secure.

These features are exactly what Microsoft is missing. The ONLY claim to legitimacy MS has is a widely known interface and a large backwards compatibility factor. And these have both been eroded with Vista and it’s recent top-down rewrite. So why not do what Apple did, and gain all the base advantages of a *nix core?

If Microsoft started planning a next generation OS based on *nix now, they could solve all of these problems by the time it shipped, with an operating system that could be viable for ten years (double that of today’s windows install). Backwards compatibility with your beloved MS Office & Quake 4 could be handled with a WINE layer, and all those old windows programs will run quickly on your average 2010 clockcycling monster of a desktop (or thin client to your server).

And best of all, the UI could become Microsoft’s prime resource focus, so they could devote even more vast resources to improving human / computer interaction.

MS will probably never agree to the Linux GPL model, but what’s wrong with a nice, free BSD license? It basically enforces the freedom to do what you want, just as Apple does. Not that you would want to ever copy from Apple.

Bill, I know you still pull some water up in Redmond. Why don’t you make your first charitable contribution to the industry that made you rich, and have them toss a few million into Minix 2010?

Tags: microsoft, billgates, windowsvista