… well, the revolution died. Yup… there is no more Revolution. Those who welcomed the revolution now must say goodbye to it… well, not entirely. The Revolution may now be over, but it has been replaced with Wii. Yes…. Wii. (pronounced “we”). Nintendo claims that the name was ditched because of it’s difficulty around the world. Also, the two i’s are representative of the 2 controllers. Also, “We” signifies everyone. I remember another group that referred to themselves as “we.” and they weren’t too friendly. I wonder if Nintendo plans to assimilate?

On a side note… (unrelated - sort of -> see Revolution Controller), ThinkGeek now has Darth Maul’s lightsaber!

Okay, Dell has just risen a few more points in my “computer companies that seem cool” rating system.   They are rumoured to be releasing a linux-based laptop in Europe.   If it has a fully supported card reader … where do I order it from?

People post all sorts of cool stuff on digg (it is like Slashdot, only complete anarchy).  Anyway, they had a story on EA creating a whole division to handle Revolution Games (since”porting to the Revolution will “yield inferior software”).  Near the top, there is a comment thread that I have to share.

“Nintendo are betting it all on the controller, which I think will be tiring after about 20 minutes of play”
- pegisys

“I think that would be a pretty major problem that Nintendo would have addressed in the creation of the system if it were such a large problem. Heck, after playing for a few months, you’ll have a bulging forearm…that is, if you don’t already have one from other wrist activities.”
- LycoLoco

Heh, a controller to help Delg with his “cross-training”

as a lightsaber. Check it out:

Mirror

Big and Bad: How the SUV Ran Over Automotive Safety is a well-written aritcle on safety in the modern driving world. It’s full of great quotes too, like “The only time those SUVs are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 am,” said by a senior Ford marketing executive. The gist is that the SUV only provides the illusion of safety, rather than actual safety, and is overall probably more dangerous.

So what do you think? Would you feel safer in a more nimble and manoeuvrable vehicle, or in a larger and heavier vehicle?

This is one of the greatest quotes ever:

“The Sony rootkit case made it quite clear why DRM is not accepted by consumers and why there is no successful business case for DRM. Apple iTunes allows people to burn their tracks on regular CDs, which can then be re-encoded and file-shared easily—so is better described as ‘digital inconvenience management’ only. eMusic.com offers clean audio tracks without any restrictions. No DRM platform comes close to either of these in popularity. So fortunately, it is up to the consumer to decide what the consumer market wants. And its answer is clear: It does not want DRM! The sooner we bury the foolish notion of putting each and every use of a computer under control of the media industry, the sooner we can start looking for real alternatives.”

So DRM (Digital Rights Management) is really DIM (Digital Inconvenience Management).  LOL.  Great quote.

I still haven’t receivied my free USB stick from Microsoft, but I found out that VW is providing a free 32MB USB stick with information on their Audi A3. Since it is a car I’m actually interested in, I figured it was a win/win scenario. If you are interested, click here.

We hereby announce our second annual contest to write innocent-looking C code implementing malicious behavior. In many ways this is the exact opposite of the Obfuscated C Code Contest: in this contest you must write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should do something subtly evil.

The Underhanded C Contest

Someone at Samsung should be killed. I’m thinking like the way that Willow killed Warren, but with some method which keeps the person alive and conscious for 24 hours or so.

Last night, I purchased a SCX-4521F. I spent about six hours trying to get it working under linux. For a normal printer/scanner/fax machine, this would be acceptable (would even be acceptable to fail to work). However, most Multi-function devices don’t advertise SANE/CUPS support for Linux via USB, then proceed to do so in the most horrible way imaginable.

First off, proprietary kernel modules suck. Luckily they are only for parallel support. Unluckily, the sane driver needs them to function. WTF. Worse, their install instructions didn’t match the contents of the disc and none of the screens matched their actual intstaller. On top of this, the graphic installer locked up at 95% complete, oh and they replaced LPR with SLPR which makes this really ugly QT based window-ish print screen for people to print with. Oh, talking about QT, it also installs an archaic version of QT into the lib directory which happens to load before your real QT drivers and mess up things like KDE. After removing most of the crap, I was able to successfully print using just CUPS itself and the PPD (or is that PDD) file from the install. Scanning was another issue all together. It literally refused to function without the Parallel drivers. IT WAS RUNNING OVER USB!

While others had found ways around this with other Samsung models, I wasn’t willing to invest any more time into a $300 printer. I have returned it as defective.

Fuck you Samsung. If I could, I’d send you a bill for my time.

Hermione sure has changed over the summer.  Click it out on SpikedHumor.