Web publications suck

Many of my weekly computing magazines are converting over to a web-based format, published in PDFs, to save on publishing costs and to "go green". I personally don't have a problem with those reasons, but I'm not a fan of the format. It's tedious to read and slow to download.

HOWEVER, I AM a hater of publications who move to this format, but don't upgrade their servers to handle the load. I've got three different magazines on this format, and I can rarely download the damn things at work, because they're so slow, or throw 500 errors, etc. I can usually read them at night at home, because the entire US business world isn't beating them into the ground at 11 pm.

Please people, beef up the servers if you're going to publish this way.

Obama Administration cancels Constellation

The news is out, and the Obama administration has officially requested that NASA cancel the Constellation moon program, and replace it with partnerships with private industry and international partners.

Well, here's my read: NASA is dead. Our leadership in space is dead. We will no longer do anything that may be classified as risky, cannot be fostered off on an international partner, or won't turn a profit.

You think NASA has been risk-averse the last 20 years? Wait until private industry is responsible for the vehicles. You won't see any human doing ANYTHING that might cause a lawsuit. Visits to Hubble or anything similar will never happen again.

My bet is we'll be watching the Chinese take over real exploration, while we hide under our blankets on Earth. Hell, the Russians will be kicking our loser butts in 10 years. Maybe we'll still be present in low earth orbit. Maybe. The Russians will probably pay us off the ISS with their oil money and kick us out of there too.

Oh, I should also probably mention: a TON of smart engineers and high-tech workers are about to lose their jobs. I wonder if they'll let complex 39, the LCC and the VAB rot away like so much of the Cape?

Celebrity Press

After the whole Brittany Murphy death thing, it's amazing how many times I've heard these stupid celebrity press assholes gossiping about how she must have died from something since you never die at that age unless it's drugs. Talking about how she was fired from x or y. And then, at the end of the story, there's "Our thoughts are with her family at this tragic time".

Okay, why even do that? Why waste your breath? If her family watched that, would the feel comforted that your thinking of them? Please. You're looking for more ratings based on better dirt.

Just stop with the fake sympathy. We all know you don't give two shits unless it boosts your ratings.

Yes, you NEED Antivirus

I just spent the last 4 days wrestling with some of the most awful malware imaginable. The PC in question was regularly updated with Windows patches, and had anti-malware software on it as well. The only failure I found was out-of-date anti-virus software.

With the viciousness of the malware coming out, you've got a couple options to avoid getting some nasty on YOUR PC someday:

• You MUST run a firewall. A hardware-based one on a router/switch is best.
• Switch to 64-bit Windows (not perfect, but it makes it HARDER for them)
• Switch to Linux or Mac OS. Neither of these will last forever, but it's better than the alternative. While I haven't switched yet, I'm avidly watching Linux as my desktop of choice for the future.
• Keep your anti-virus UP TO DATE.
  

I really wish the people who wrote this stuff would write some code that was useful to humanity. It would be incredible stuff.

I Hate Sitcoms

For years, I have never been able to watch sitcoms. I have always said that if I can see it coming, I can't stand watching it. Today, I figured out why I hate sitcoms. It's not really because I can see what's coming next. It's that usually, the funny is coming from someone getting hurt. And I can't stand watching that.

Odd that it's taken me ten years to figure that out.

Pale Blue Dot

Was reading a post on Schlock Mercenary this morning, which led me to the Wikipedia article on "The Pale Blue Dot". This was a title Carl Sagan gave to a picture taken by Voyager 1 of the Earth from far out in the Solar System. In 1995, Carl gave a commencement speech where he spoke about this image, and the words struck me as some of the most wonderful I have read in a long time:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Carl was quite a philosopher.

Bailout Bullshit

I've been reading all the articles on the current and future financial market bailout plans, and I really wish someone would realize that feeding money into these cesspool companies is not going to save America's economy. Corrupt companies will remain corrupt companies unless you remove the corruption from them, and some companies may be too far gone to save.

Personally, I really wish someone would adopt a plan to start investing in American manufacturing. Especially the space program. The best thing we could do would be to plow these huge sums of cash into American companies who MAKE things. Shifting money from pile A to pile B is not making anything. It's not growing anything.

If we took these billions of dollars and used them to make the greatest space program in the world once again, we could be employing all the people who BUILD things again, and as a bonus put engineering back on the map as an American speciality.

We would have to change some plans at NASA, especially the one that limits the manufacturing run for the new launch vehicles, and make sure we build a space program that plans to serious launch missions as often as needed to get real things done in space. Russia has never planned for the obsolescence of the Soyuz system. They've been basically using the same launch capsule and platform for 30 years. It's fantastically stable, and they pay $20 million per launch. We spend over a billion on each shuttle launch. That's just dumb.