Feeding The Machine » Hilarity

Now that’s a good deal!

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:26:00 +0000

I got a promotional email from Lenovo today, and being the unashamed Thinkpad lover I am I went to their site to check out the deals. After poking around a bit, I found this:

That’s right, according to this they will pay me $111.00 to take a SL500 off their hands. Woohoo!

Upon further digging it became clear that someone just botched the config for that system and got it listed with no components at all. Every category said “NA” and had no specs at all. The price quickly jumped up to normal levels once you started customizing and added, you know, actual parts to the machine. Too bad, I was gonna order a baker’s dozen…

+1 Insightful

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:42:00 +0000

Wow, so it’s been a long time since I put anything up here… Well, here’s a good little nugget for you, a great essay from Bruce Schneier on “The War on the Unexpected” as it appeared on wired.com: http://tinyurl.com/yqvoy6 . Everyone, especially policy makers, needs to take the lessons outlined there to heart.

We were inverted

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:47:00 +0000

This somewhat tongue in cheek look at “making the switch” from *nix to Windows is good for a laugh. Mostly because his sentiments largely echo my own.

I’m having a bad Windows day. It seems like everything I try to do is getting hindered by some stupid Windows quirk. It’s like the damn thing is just an accumulation of work-arounds for poor design choices that were made 15 years ago. Nobody in the Windows world ever seems to really fix problems at their root, it’s always some sort of hackish lame-ass dodge that invariably introduces some obnoxious unintended consequence. I have to believe this is due to sales / marketing induced time-line / legacy pressure. The alternative, that they aren’t smart enough to realize what they are doing is lame, would just do too much damage to my already shaky faith in humanity.

Summary: Our Scheduler Bites

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:49:00 +0000

The long line of Vista issues includes the now infamous “Listening to music kills my network” bug. Robert Love has a nice post here talking about some technical internals about why this happens. Wow guys. Just… Wow. I have only a rudimentary knowledge of low-level kernel internals and even I can see that this work around was a stupid idea. If Vista and Longhorn are as closely related as MS claims, it really makes you wonder what sort of crap ideas businesses are going to be hanging their hats on in the relatively near future. Who knows though, maybe all this Vista hilarity will make people more reluctant to adopt Longhorn?

Speaking of Vista hilarity, this eWeek slideshow underscores a lot of the issues it has. The fixes they propose are nearly as laughable as the scheduling workaround that the multimedia team at MS came up with for their scheduling issue.