Slashdot | Anonym.OS a Boon for Privacy Geeks?

Got to program my first Cisco today…a PIX 501. Probably not the most amazing piece of hardware out there, but I’ve really only ever dealt with the low-end home user broadband routers… The kind with the web-based GUI and the simplified setup wizard. I’ve never had to configure anything through a command line… Never had to set up individual routes/interfaces on a router…

It was a bit intimidating at first… Plugging into a console connection with a serial cable… Getting an uninformative little command prompt with a blinking cursor… No big button that says Press Me, no simple GUI to guide me through it… But the on-line documentation was quite helpful, and the commands were all fairly self-explanatory. And, in the end, I’ve got a working Cisco router.

I can’t wait to install the thing next week and see how it works on-site.

Optimus keyboard

We rented The Thing Below over the weekend… Didn’t really look all that promising, even just from the cover, but it looked like it had all my favorite components of a Horror movie… So we rented it anyway. Well, we were right, it was not good.

The basic story is about some researchers on a remote drilling platform out in the ocean, who stumble across an alien lifeform that’s been burried underground for millions of years. This alien is grumpy, hungry, and deadly – it quickly kills just about everything that moves. To make things interesting, this creature has some kind of psychic ability to make you see things that aren’t there – like frighteningly large-breasted strippers. The whole thing seems almost like a lame attempt at retelling Who Goes There?, the story that inspired The Thing.

As I’ve already said, it was not a good movie. The first and most obvious flaw was with the dialogue. It almost seems like the writers intentionally tried to cram in every clicheed movie phrase they’d ever heard… The actors didn’t help matters much either, they all could have used quite a bit of help. The special effects were very poorly done as well… All very bad looking computer generated effects.

In the end, I was quite disappointed – especially bad considering how low my expectations were to start with. This movie just failed to deliver anything I’d call entertainment.

Slashdot | Share Your Most Dangerous Idea

My most dangerous idea involves an army of nuclear powered robot monkies, an orbiting laser platform, my wife, and a cloning machine… But if I shared it that’d ruin my scheme for World Domination as well as my plans for Friday Night.

Slashdot | Windows, Linux 25 Year Old “Clunkers”?

I really have to wonder if this guy’s got any clue what he’s talking about… He suggests that our current operating systems are outdated and won’t be able to handle the coming of “video internet”. What the hell is video internet?

We’ve had video on the Internet for years now. You’ve been able to watch videos on web pages for ages, download them off P2P clients and newsgroups. Multiplayer games have been creating visual Internet gameplay for ages. We’ve had 3DML and VRML. We’ve done video on the Internet… It’s there… It’s nothing new… And the current operating systems handle it just fine.

And if this “video internet” does actually appear as something new, why wouldn’t my OS be able to handle it? An OS just provides a go-between for the user and software. It communicates with the hardware so you don’t have to. If some new hardware technology develops, the OS would have to support it… But if a new application develops that’s simply up the the application programmers to code… And there’s no reason why any new application couldn’t run on a modern OS.

Slashdot | Coffin Hotels Opening Near You
CNN.com | Goodbye mini bar, hello mini room
Capsule Hotel Fontaine Akasaka

Alright… As far as actually spending time in one of these rooms as part of a vacation, they suck. There’s no way I’d want to check my family into something like this during a vacation to Florida or wherever. However, for someone who’s just stuck without a place to sleep at night, they sound pretty decent… All the assorted business travelers who spend no more time in their rooms than they need to. Folks traveling back home for the holidays, who simply need someplace to sleep at night.

I made a couple 2 – 3 day trips from Minnesota to New York back in 1996, and frankly the hotels I stayed at were wasted on me. I drove until I was too tired to drive, checked in, went to sleep, woke up the next morning, and drove some more. Something like one of these (if priced lower to adjust for reduced amenities) would have been terrific.