Saturday, October 13, 2001

Broadband Is Dead? -- 11:56 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

So says Cringely. With Excite@Home scrambling to survive, I'm not feeling so secure about my nice fast cable modem. Are the good times almost over? I hope not, but Cringely makes some good points.

A.T. Hun comments: There has to be sanity at some point. Selling (theoretically) near-T1 access for less than $50/month is not a sustainable business model. Cable subscribers should expect to see their bandwidth throttled back to 512K or even 256K. This is not entirely A Bad Thing. Cable access is flaky at best due to systems being overtaxed. If the lowered speeds enable companies to survive and make access less flaky, it sounds like A Good Thing in my book. I'd be interested to know what the folks at EZ-Net think . . .

The Master comments: All I ask of cable companies, is they deliver the service they promise in their ads. I get to watch all these wonder-ads from TW about how awesome their service is compared to other ISPs, and all I can say about their service is they make phone companies look customer-oriented, user friendly, and immediately responsive. They make politicians look unbiased. They make . . . I won't go on.

Bleh -- 6:51 pm CST, Update by The Master

Was surfing around checking the news today, and I saw a picture over on Yahoo! News of a woman protesting the bombing of Afghanistan. She was carrying a sign that read "Fund Schools of Education, not Weapons of Destruction" -- and behind her is a man carrying a "Peace Now" sign.

This kind of peace, love, understanding attitude really bothers me considering the situation. The terrorists that extinguished 5,000+ lives are not worthy of America to fight? Come ON people. These people would change their tune as soon as some airplane carrying their children augering into a building-it wouldn't be the people in the building they'd give two s$!ts about, however. Just their own narrow self-interest.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight: nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety: is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions and blood of better men than himself.

-- John Stuart Mill

A.T. Hun comments: Some people's complete and willful ignorance of the world around them never fails to astound me. The scary thing is that they actually believe we would do nothing and offer bin Laden a great big hug, everything would be all better. They have the freedom of speech in our country to say whatever they would like. I'm thankful for that. But I also have the freedom to point out that they are idiots.

Mozilla 0.9.5 Released -- 9:36 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Version 0.9.5 of the Mozilla open source, cross platform, web browsing suite has been released. Read the release notes for all the fine print. Almost to 1.0! If you haven't checked out Mozilla yet, what are you waiting for?

UPDATE! I haven't had a whole lot of time to fiddle with the new Mozilla today (I'm way behind in my work) but from what I've seen it seems faster and loads some "problem" pages better than before. Definitely worth the download. I'm going to check out the mail and news stuff later and see if the speed has improved at all.

Friday, October 12, 2001

Pool of Radiance Demo -- 7:57 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

UbiSoft has released a demo of Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor on Gigex (blech). It is an 89M download. Now you can download and see if this game is all it was cracked up to be. J.t. and I can see if it lives up to the original PoR which we remember quite fondly. For more information, see the official Pool of Radiance website.

Pondering the Imponderable -- 11:37 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Oh no, the al-Queda is threatening jihad against the United States. And I hear I thought that the World Trade Center attacks were a little love-tap. Even funnier was the Taliban's vow of "victory or death." The smart money is not on the former.

I'm also a little upset at the American media (surprise, surprise). It seems like they are trying to make us afraid of everything, listing every possible attack terrorists might try against the U.S. Thanks for nothing, guys!

J.t.Qbe comments: According to most Islamic authorities, neither al-Qaeda nor bin Laden have the authority to declare jihad, or really any religious authority at all. They're just running scared. I laughed at the Taliban's "victory or death" statement too. Uh, ok.

The "news" media is borderline worthless, in my book. Their sole interest seems to be sensationalism and scaring the public into dependence on the news media. Their critical and even sarcastic attitudes toward our leaders is getting pretty tiring and offensive too. This is the time for pulling together, guys.

ThreeWave Follow-Up -- 11:21 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I played around with the new ThreeWave CTF mod (story) yesterday and today. All I can say is, "Wow!" The maps are all amazing. There isn't one that made me think, "Blech, no point in this one!" The team's tender loving care is obvious throughout. I'll have to wake up my clan and get some serious CTF action going. My only regret is that this mod wasn't out earlier!

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