Wonderfully to-the-point article in the Guardian (of all places):

Pay attention, civilians. Actor Charlie Sheen has been focusing his mind on the official explanation for 9/11. And you know what? He’s not buying it. “It just didn’t look like any commercial jetliner I’ve flown on any time in my life,” the Hotshots Part Deux star told a US radio station this week, “and then when the buildings came down later on that day, I said to my brother ‘call me insane’, but did it sorta look like those buildings came down in a controlled demolition?"

You’re insane. Next.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:37 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:43 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Well, of course it was, but that's not the conspiracy that Fisk and a small army of other deeply confused individuals are thinking of. No; planes full of jet fuel could not do it; it had to be controlled demolition involving explosive charges

Never mind that this is completely impossible for a thousand reasons, such as, for example, the fact that there weren't any such charges. Logic and fact mean nothing to these people; if you explain all the reasons why explosives could not have been put in place without it becoming open knowledge, they will suggest (this is a real example) that the explosives were mixed in with the concrete when the towers were first built.

...

What we are dealing with here is people who are blindingly stupid and wilfully ignorant, to the point where they are in effect functionally insane. That is, they are unable to apprehend or deal with the world as it is, and instead attempt to deal with the world as the imagine it to be. I mean, we knew that already; Fisk's conspiracy ramblings are really just a case of running an orange highlighter over a significant paragraph.

Given that Robert Fisk is quite obviously crazy, his broad popularity with the left is yet another indication of the deep and growing separation from reality on that side of the divide. I have no particular insight on what to do about this. Making fun of them seems to offer the best return on one's effort, though it is of course lost on the targets themselves. I'm open to suggestions.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:34 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:14 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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This seemed terribly significant at 4 am.

* Actually Cold & Flu + Cough capsules. Two diseases and a symptom all for one low low price!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:57 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Some people criticised the benchmarks, but they have been redone independently, and while not especially painstaking or comprehensive, they do seem to be showing a real and very significant performance jump.

So how has Intel managed to suddenly leapfrog AMD with what is, basically, a souped-up Pentium Pro?

Easy.

For some time, both Intel and AMD have supported 128-bit short-vector instructions, performing two 64-bit or four 32-bit floating point operations at once. Except that neither one actually had a 128-bit FPU; both required two passes through a 64-bit unit.

So Intel fixed that, and as a result they are ahead of AMD. For as long as it takes AMD to double the width of their FPU, something that they were already working on anyway.

Lots of geeky details here.

* New as in not available for another six months.
** Traditionally as in for the past two or three years.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:44 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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go2url.be have now sent us more trackbacks than we have posts. And we have a lot of posts.

How's that spam thing working out for you, guys? Improved your Google ranking much?

Heh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:54 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Pause.

Hey, there's no codeine in these things! I wuz robbed!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:17 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Well, most of the time.

But when someone calls up and offers you compensation on something that you had written off as a loss years ago - and we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars here - it can really brighten an otherwise poopy day.

It would certainly pay for that Xbox 360.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:55 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:02 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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(You need to scroll down a little to get to the good stuff.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:59 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It's Python, so it's good, but it's Microsoft, so it's evil. I haven't determined the exact good/evil balance as yet but given that it's a one meg download, you can't go too far wrong.

Update: So, I can embed IronPython in my VB.NET application, which is great. But can I then access SQL databases from IronPython via the Python DB-API? Because then I can do... Uh, something that I would really like to do. I can do ADO.NET calls from IronPython, but that would mean I'd have to either write two versions of all the database queries or write a wrapper myself.

Okay, here's what I'm trying to achieve. Everyone knows I'm developing a blog/forum/wiki/portal/community application called Minx. What I haven't said much about - because I haven't gotten anywhere with it - is a client side application called Miko, which is supposed to let you easily manage your Minx sites. To do this properly, I need to embed parts of the Minx server engine. I hadn't found an easy way to do that previously short of writing the whole thing in Python, and I didn't want to do that because then there are problems with distributing the thing.

But if I can write it in VB and embed IronPython to handle the parts I've stolen from Minx, then I'm half-way there. But the Minx template system has SQL calls right inside it; it was designed to work with pretty much any SQL database but it doesn't have a separate storage API. And IronPython doesn't seem to have any way of using the Python DB-API. Still, writing a layer that translates to ADO.NET calls is probably a better way to spend my time than rewriting the template system in VB. (I'll just bundle it with SQLite for people who don't already have MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, SQL Server and DB2 installed.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:03 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Great. Now piss off.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:54 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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But for desktop apps, and for developing desktop apps, it's not too sucky. Still sucky, yes, but at a level one can deal with while retaining some shreds of sanity and self-respect.

Except for the virtual memory system, which as far as I can tell has survived unchanged since the release of NT 3.1. Back then you were likely running with 16MB of memory; these days if you're doing anything remotely serious you have at least a gigabyte, even in a notebook. A virtual memory system tuned to work well with 16MB of memory is a festering pile of crap when you have a hundred times that amount.

There are two things that need to be fixed in Windows. One is the networking, which I thought they swiped from BSD, but doesn't act like it. Windows has the most thoroughly screwed up network behaviour of any operating system on the planet. Look, Bill, just go back to BSD and swipe their TCP stack again. Easy enough, surely.

The other thing they need to do is steal /proc/sys/vm/swappiness from the Linux 2.6 kernel, so I can set it to 0. Every time I copy a large file you swap my applications out. Stop it, you morons!

Two little things, guys. Then no-one will care if it takes a decade to push Vista out the door.

* Aero Glass

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:18 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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