Good collection of Open-Source downloads.

link

Hat tip to John Murrell.

link

If at first you don’t succeed; call it version 1.0

I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

A Life? Cool! Where can I download one of those?

link

Those jolly little elves at Microsoft and AMD handed out to a number of bloggers (but not this one, alas!) as Xmas presents for review purposes brand new Acer Ferrari notebook computers, retailing for $2,299.

But, predictably enough, jealous grinches (who obviously didn’t get theirs) started accusing the elves of Redmond of bribing bloggers, forsooth.

APC

Slashdot

So, inevitably, the elves got nervous and upset, decided it was safer to turn Indian-giver, and send the fortunate bloggers the following request:

Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding of our intentions I’m going to ask that you either give the pc away or send it back when you no longer need it for product reviews.

Hat tip to Techmeme.

Large federal bureaucracies are often technologically reactionary or simply wrong-headed. One thinks of the famous how-many-billions? uncompleted FBI project to create the bureau’s very own operating system and other software.

But the Washington Post indicates that John Negroponte and Michael Wertheimer have actually already created an Intel Wiki which has been in operation since last April.

Imagine if, in August 2001, the U.S. intelligence agencies had dumped all of their information into one secure, online resource where it was searchable and accessible to anyone who had the proper clearance.

Who knows if the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 could have been averted? But one thing is clear in the documentation and reporting that has come out in the past five years: Intelligence agencies then were not talking to each other enough, owing to divisional rivalries, lack of trust and the bunkering of intel operations in their own “silos.”

Now the intelligence agencies are trying to remedy those problems with something they call Intellipedia, a model based on the popular online, user-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia.

U.S. intelligence czar John D. Negroponte discussed the database in Washington last week, saying it would allow analysts to collaborate, adding and editing intelligence to create a resource for all 16 U.S. agencies that have access to the top-secret version of Intellipedia.

Since its introduction in April, the classified version of Intellipedia has grown to 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users, the government said. There are other versions of the database for “secret” and “sensitive but unclassified” intelligence.

Now here’s a game that is a practical training simulator applicable to real life.

Hat tip to Seneca the Younger.

Build the ultimate potato cannon.

Instruction file

Caution: large .pdf file.

Kate, better known for her Electric Venom blog, is attracting lots of hits today at her more domestically-oriented second blog for her amusing rendition of the only too familiar complaint of the wife who finds she can’t compete with her husband’s favorite

video game that pushes the player to spend more, More, MORE time being better, bigger, badder, more brilliant than they were just a few minutes ago, a few days ago… better than anyone else ever has been. For some, there is something insidiously sexy about outdoing one’s self as well as any other lesser beings… and these games pander precisely to that weak spot. It is a frightening, yet oh-so-modern thing to sacrifice a dream for one’s real future to the reality of something that is not and never will be truly real. I will not have another baby by the time I’m 40 because a computer game eats up those precious hours that real, live ova wait in my body for a man who is not there.

I’ve lost count of the nights I’ve lain upstairs waiting because he said he’d “be right up.” At first I was grateful: I like to read a bit before bed, and this guaranteed me the chance to do it. But over and over that “right up” turned into one, two, three hours. Sometimes he’d wake me up as he climbed into bed and, rolling over, I’d see dawn’s light seeping through our windows, light as weak and watery and ineffective as the tears I’d ceased to shed.

Before you ask: it was never another woman. I’ve always known that. If you could see the way my husband’s face lights up when he looks at me, the way he dotes on me when there’s no computer nearby, the way his voice sinks into a velvet-chocolate register when he speaks my name or talks of me, well, then you’d know as I do that there is no other woman. I am it for him, as he is for me. Forever and ever, amen.

Except for that video game. And, damn, she is a harsh mistress. In reality, I am his and I have no question that he is, and always will be, mine. But these games tread on the thin edges of reality, and in that realm I have no power. I have no identity within that realm, I am without reference, without meaning. There, within his game, there is only him and, the truth be told, there is no us.

Hat tip to Memeorandum.

Archaologists puzzle and debate over how the ancient Britons managed to move, and erect, the enormous stones used to construct the megalithic monument at Stonehenge.

Wally Wallington can show them how.

video

Simple, isn’t it?

Wallington also has a web-site, TheForgottenTechnology.com, where he sells a one hour movie via download, or on DVD.

Militant muslims planned a coordinated hacking attack last week on the Pope’s web-site, as yet another expression of Islamic indignation at the Pope’s recent speech arguing that religious faith cannot be legitimately coerced.

Not altogether surprisingly, in this technological battle between a reactionary Western institution embodying the outlook of the Scholastic Middle Ages and adherents of the backward cult clingng to the moral and cultural values of the Middle Eastern Dark Ages, the former won. As at Tours in 732, as at Jerusalem in 1099, as at Lepanto in 1571 and Vienna in 1683, the green crescent flag went down in confusion and defeat before the Cross.

Daily Mail

Kevin D. Denee, of the Restored Church of God, lays down the law… on that church’s blog.

So what have we learned? Recall that a blog provider stated, with blogs “there are no rules.” This is obviously not true with God. He does have rules and guidelines, but not everything is spelled out in the Bible. We must take principles and consider the overall big picture.

Should teenagers and others in the Church express themselves to the world through blogs? Because of the obvious dangers; the clear biblical principles that apply; the fact that it gives one a voice; that it is almost always idle words; that teens often do not think before they do; that it is acting out of boredom; and it is filled with appearances of evil—blogging is simply not to be done in the Church. It should be clear that it is unnecessary and in fact dangerous on many levels.

Let me emphasize that no one—including adults—should have a blog or personal website (unless it is for legitimate business purposes)…

Blogging has become a socially accepted practice—just as are dating seriously too young, underage drinking and general misbehaving. But just because someone else “jumps off the cliff” does not mean you should do the same.

Yes, that’s the kind of religion we all know and detest, alright.

Hat tip to fellow scoffer and mocker Mark Frauenfelder.

In an article in Popular Mechanics by Waldemar Kaempffert, Science Editor of The New York Times, resurrected for our anusement by ModernMechanix:

Some predictions:

$5000 houses, built to last 25 years. (Hmmm. He got that one half right.)

No dishwashers.

Dishes are thrown away after they have been used once, or rather put into a sink where they are dissolved by superheated water. Two dozen soluble plastic plates cost a dollar. They dissolve at about 250 degrees Fahrenheit, so that boiling-hot soup and stews can be served in them without inviting a catastrophe. The plastics are derived from such inexpensive raw materials as cottonseed hulls, oat hulls, Jerusalem artichokes, fruit pits, soy beans, bagasse, straw and wood pulp.

(They really believed in the attraction of new materials back then. That’s why so many people had plastic-covered sofas in Middle America.)

You clean your home with a garden hose. (Please!)

You will have a television set.

But it is connected with the telephones as well as with the radio receiver, so that when Joe Dobson and a friend in a distant city talk over the telephone they also see each other. Businessmen have television conferences. Each man is surrounded by half a dozen television screens on which he sees those taking part in the discussion. Documents are held up for examination; samples of goods are displayed. In fact, Jane Dobson does much of her shopping by television. Department stores obligingly hold up for her inspection bolts of fabric or show her new styles of clothing.

(He deserves about a 90% score on that one.)

We control the weather, and can change the path of hurricanes at will. (Oh, well!)

(But he is much better on predicting population dispersion, suburban sprawl, and the impact of cheaper transportation generally. We just never got those commuting helicopters, and his crystal ball missed railroads’ revived use in carrier traffic.)

Corporation presidents, bankers, ambassadors and rich people in a hurry use the 1000-mile-an-hour rocket planes and think nothing of paying a fare of $5000 between Chicago and Paris. (Ordinary people) take the cheaper jet planes.

This extension of aerial transportation has had the effect of distributing the population. People find it more satisfactory to live in a suburb like Tottenville, if suburb it can be called, than in a metropolis like New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. Cities have grown into regions, and it is sometimes hard to tell where one city ends and another begins. Instead of driving from Tottenville to California in their car—teardrop in shape and driven from the rear by a high-compression engine that burns cheap denatured alcohol—the (normal family uses) the family helicopter, which is kept on the roof. The car is used chiefly for shopping and for journeys of not more than 20 miles. The railways are just as necessary in 2000 as they are in 1950. They haul chiefly freight too heavy or too bulky for air cargo carriers. Passenger travel by rail is a mere trickle. Even commuters go to the city, a hundred miles away, in huge aerial busses that hold 200 passengers. Hundreds of thousands make such journeys twice a day in their own helicopters.

Americans came a long way technologically and economically, very rapidly in the first half of the last century. Indoor plumbing, electricity, the telephone, radio and television, the automobile and a revolutionary array of home appliances became part of the lives of ordinary people so rapidly that there was a natural belief in the continuation of the progress of science, technology, and the American economy, all of which were customarily regarded as unalloyed goods.

The divisions of American society created in the 1960s, today’s characteristic fear and suspicion of technology, our chemical and environmental phobias, the superstitious savage’s belief that Nature will punish mankind’s hubris in invention with environmental catastrophe and climate change were not the kind of things optimistic Americans in 1950 would have predicted.

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Hat tip to John Murrell.