No duh! If you can play it, you can copy it.

Newest Audio CD DRM Proves Ineffective [Slashdot]
9:51:47 PM     comment []

A rather interesting day here - took a lunch break to go get my mom's cat from the vet and take her home to momma. On the road, Kris calls and asks if I could pick up a couple of thirty amp screw base fuses.

We're re-doing our mud porch, and it seems her dad, in his haste , neglected to turn off a fuse panel before attempting to move it out flush with the new wall. To quote the old Batman show: "Zap! Pow! Zowie!"

So of course they assumed they blew out the fuse. I picked up a couple on my way home, but when I went to replace them I noticed that the originals weren't blown. In fact, power was still up at the house, but very strangely. The battery backups were going off like crazy - Kris had downed all the system except the router (we have ISDN as our primary phone source). If you turned on the dining room light, the kitchen light dimmed. Power saws would not spin up to speed. We were 'browned out'. But why?

I quickly came to the conclusion that the little short had backed up the line, probably shorting out the transformer. I called REMC, a tech was dispatched, and he concurred. Unfortunately he was not in a line truck, so another team was dispatched.

And the transformer was fine.

Many hours and much noodling later, it turns out that there was a faulty connection on the break out to our security light, which basically left half of our incoming circuit hanging - at best it was intermittent, at worst it was just gone. Very, very strange, and stranger still was the tech's assurance that it was nothing that my father in law had done to cause it: it was 'just a coincidence'.
9:35:30 PM     comment []

Who'd of thunk it? Coding fashions ...

I guess after you've done something for 25+ years, you just kinda get jaded to the comings and goings of fads. I would only add one item to their list of fads, and that's C#. Anyhting that's vendor specific will be fashionable only so long as that vender is in business and chooses to support/advance it. Of course it helps that the vendor in this case is Microsoft, dominant monoply. But the 'sharp' will lose it's edge someday, right along with VB.Net (or anything 'dot Net').

Software Fashion [Slashdot]
9:25:54 PM     comment []

OK, I'm starting to get a burr up my ass abou this shit - I've been one whose always tried to look at the "macroeconomic" picture, but I'm slowly starting to see that the "macro" fattening of certain wallets, notably those of large, international corporations and.

The natural progression we've seen in the manufacturing and farming industries, among others, will be seen in the IT industry as well: The loss of lower-paying jobs gives way to the creation of newer, higher-paying jobs. It's never an overnight process, but it does happen, eventually.

The "natural progression" I see involves the rust belt and the destruction of the family farm. And now, apparently they want to ship the the IT industry outta here, too, leaving us with with a landscape dotted by empty tech centers in addtion to the abandoned factories and farms.

An argument for outsourcing. E5 Systems CEO Gordon Brooks says that while limits on outsourcing may protect some jobs in the short term, bans would end up doing more harm than good. [CNET News.com - Front Door]
8:53:18 AM     comment []