Tag Archives: stupid

Oracle says Java API requires a license

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Okay, I know nothing except what I’ve read over at Ars about this. So if you know whats going on please correct me if I’m wrong, but this trial looks lose/lose for Oracle to me.

If Oracle loses the case then it gets nothing but another reason to not use it’s products because of it’s penchant to sue people that use it’s products.

And if they win? Is Oracle really trying to say that the Java API is copyright-able, and therefore a license is required to use Java, so Google owes them truckloads of cash? Because if they win that argument, I know almost EVERYONE that writes software will NEVER use Java again. Why use any proprietary language if it’s creator/API creator can randomly shake you down anytime they want?

WTF Oracle?

Before I post about PAX

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I just want to show everyone something.

My friend Rachel works for Turbine and she was working during PAX. She was handing out foam chainsaws for ‘Lollipop Chainsaw’. That game isn’t made by Turbine but is being produced by Warner Brothers so Turbine employees got called in to help, because they are located in Boston. What I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention is this fact:

The line for playing the demo to this game was always at least 2 hours long!

Believe it, Or NOT!

I give you a promo video of Lollipop Chainsaw:

 

Also the actress playing the part of ‘the cheerleader’ was asked to leave on the second day because her costume was too racy. You decide.

Careful What You Wish For

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OK, so I got a bit obsessed with getting Team Fortress 2 working on my home PC. I admit it, but I absolutely hate it when something doesn’t work correctly on my computers and will mess with it till I get it working right.

This story starts about the time Valve offered Team Fortress 2 for free, through their Steam service. I’ve had TF2 for ages, having bought ‘The Orange Box’ back in the day. I’ve played TF2 from time to time, but mostly I’ve fallen out of FPS games. When TF2 went free to play I noticed that the Steam service wanted to update the game but wouldn’t. It hung, and nothing I did would make the download continue. So in my usual fashion, I deleted all local content and tried re-installing it. This didn’t work, and the process would hang,  never even getting to 0%. I messed with the Steam client a bit, and eventually got the very helpful error message that their servers were too busy to do the deed. I figured they were getting hammered, so I let it go for a couple days.

A couple days turned into 2 weeks, when I noticed that the Steam client, STILL,was stuck at ‘downloading’ though no download was actually happening. I tested the whole thing on my laptop while at work. It downloaded just fine from there, so the problem is with either my computer or my router at home. I had NO problems downloading other games and was able to install TF2beta and Half-Life 2 without problems; so the router wasn’t the problem and neither was any firewall. Now it’s on! I go through every search I can think of to figure this out, and find NOTHING! Nothing newer than a year ago. Steam/Valve REALLY needs to get their customer support to be easier to use. I like that they let me easily look shit up, but when I actually need to just open a support ticket, it was nothing but hoops and dead ends for me.

I finally find on one of their forums, a discussion about ‘the game is too big for FAT’, so I check my drive. Nope, it’s NTFS like I thought and I have over 90GB free. I clear out the ClientRegistry.blob file  from the “C:\program files\steam” directory to make the Steam client reset itself, but that didn’t do anything for TF2. I changed my location in Steam, thinking maybe it was a problem with being from ‘US – Dallas’, nope that didn’t work. Even set it to China and same problem.(I’m now located at US-Atlanta though I think Houston would be just as good.)  Frustrated beyond belief, because I’d been working on this problem for over an hour, for a game I don’t even play very often, I decided to just clean up my hard drive and got rid of some cruft, plus uninstalling HL2 and TF2Beta that I had installed previously during testing. I also got rid of Left for Dead 2 at this point, because I had played it exactly once. (Fun game, none of my friends play though, so bye-bye!) I now had over 100GB free on my hard drive and on the next Steam client restart the damn thing started downloading TF2. The game needs a lot of space, I’ll grant you, but it doesn’t need 100 FUCKING Gigabytes people! I think something is screwed up with the Steam client and it thinks TF2 needs an order of magnitude more space than it really needs.

I did a bunch of shit trying to get that damn game to download, and what seems to have been the answer was having 100+GB free on the hard drive. That is a shitty requirement Valve and your error messages don’t help at all. Maybe that wasn’t the actual problem, and I ‘fixed’ it through some combo of all the other stuff I did, but that was the last thing I did before the download started actually working. NOT HAPPY WITH YOU RIGHT NOW VALVE!

Now for the ‘Post Title” tie in. After spending all that time getting TF2 to download; I immediately decided to play WoW for a couple hours, while TF2 downloaded in the background. Around 11:30PM I get done with WoW, and am ready to head to bed. I was going to let TF2 continue downloading overnight but; HUZZAH! It had already finished. Still not trusting it, I started Team Fortress 2, to make damn sure the thing actually worked. It did! And HERE’S the tie in. I made the mistake of ‘playing’ the training to just ‘check it quickly’. Yeah…I get out of the game around 1:15AM and dammit I am TIRED this morning. Those bots they included in the game are actually fun to play around with.

So I got it to work only 15 minutes late, but now I’m hurting. NEED.SLEEP! (Or more coffee!)

(I’m getting to old for this shit.)

First World Problems

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This morning,

I figured out, I bought beans instead of grinds (again) so no coffee at home.

The thermostat in the car decided that even though it’s muggy as hell, I don’t need AC because it’s only 78 degrees.

I got hot coffee spilled on my hand as I bought some Seattle Drip.

The cleaning crew has moved my garbage can (again) and I threw some junk mail on the floor.

Annoying morning and being hot makes me grumpy, but DAMN its nice to only have this kinda stuff as ‘problems’.

 

What are some things that annoy the hell outta you but when you think about it you realize how good you really have it?

Nothing new

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Not much happening with me lately. Super Bowl was kinda ‘meh’. The commercials were ‘meh’ as well. I’ll just never be the kind of guy that gets into basketball or baseball, unless I’m playing, and it’s a long time till college football is back on TV. Guess it’s time to get caught up on all the TV I don’t watch, by getting full seasons of older shows on Netflix.

So far, I’m getting old West Wing and Big Bang Theory. Anything else out there I ‘need’ to be getting? I’m wanting new Venture Brothers but I have no idea when that’s actually gonna happen.

Well at least it looks like Snowmageddon 3: “The five deadly flakes” will be over with by tomorrow. Mississippi sure doesn’t seem to know how to handle even the lightest coating of snow.

Honest question about airport security procedures

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Ok, what exactly are all these invasive security procedures and devices supposed to be doing?

The biggest risk in an airplane isn’t it being blown up, but the aircraft being hijacked and used as a manned missile. They put locked doors on the cockpit to prevent that. So no more twin towers repeat performances.

Cockpit Doors: Good idea actually deters hijackings.

The metal detectors and luggage x-ray machines (that they’ve used for years) prevent guns getting aboard an airplane. They were used to prevent gun toting hijackings and have done an excellent job. 9/11 wasn’t done with guns but with box cutters, and cockpit doors in addition to the metal detectors prevent hijackings using guns or crowbars or other tools that could be used to break down a door.

Metal detectors: Good idea prevents guns from being used to hijack a plane.

So cockpit doors and metal detectors/luggage x-ray detectors have been good ideas, aren’t all that intrusive, and don’t slow down air travelers all that much. Good ideas both. But now we get to the latest offerings.

The only reason I can see for the nude back scatter x-ray devices and groping intensive pat-downs is to prevent explosives from getting on board an aircraft. I’m not sure but I think bomb smelling dogs would be more effective at this than these two ideas. But even if they are better at detecting bombs is a bomb going off on an airplane REALLY something we should we worrying about this much?

A bomb going off on an airplane would be bad. I give you that. But it’s not like it’s all that much worse than a bomb going off in a crowd, anywhere else. A bomb the size of something a terrorist could smuggle aboard an aircraft through the metal detectors and x-ray devices is how big? Is it big enough to guarantee the plane will crash? Wouldn’t a terrorist get more ‘bang for the buck’ from a suicide vest (which wouldn’t make it onto a plane with pre-9/11 security) in Times Square or a Harry Potter opening or even a security line at an airport?

If all those crowds of people are at risk from a terrorist attack are crowds of people in an airplane that much more important? What is with the fetishization of air travel? Would the traveling public put up with a groping or nudie pictures for any other form of travel or any other reason to gather?  And if we’re to believe that protecting crowds of people is so important how long until you have the same procedures to be in a crowd of people anywhere in the US? Do you really want these procedures or what ever else  they come up with in the future that will be even worse, just to get on a bus or see a movie or run a marathon or see a concert or go to church or….(add in any important or entertaining or trivial thing in your life which involves more than 50 people gathering in one location, here).

I honestly just don’t see how these new procedures and devices in anyway ‘protect’ the country in a way that is worth the violation of our rights as citizens. I can only see their usage as a way that leads to even more loss of individual liberty. In this case ‘loss of liberty’ means my right to not have bad grainy nude pictures of myself and my family shown to federal employees or having federal employees groping me and my family. How much more invasive do things have to get before something is declared ‘enough’?