Alpha Datea Rapea (sorry, 808)

alternateorg on April 30, 2001

From Erasing:


I’d gotten complacent in my post-graduation life and had been feeling entirely too fond of Charlottesville and the University of Virginia and had sort of glossed over the fact that I do live in The South and that the student body of my alma mater is very heavily populated with ignorant, bigoted, homophobic, slow-witted, upper-class, identically-dressed, thick-necked, barrel-chested, cleft-chinned, ruddy-faced, party-hearty pack-hunting preppie redneck alpha-male Aryan fratboy assholes who were born with not just silver spoons but entire dinette sets in their collective sagging mouths, whose political affiliations lie somewhere to the right of Attila The Hun except when it comes to laws regarding weed and rohypnol, and whose chest-thumping machismo and obnoxiousness and bigotry and homophobia and misogyny will be rewarded in what passes for their adulthood with high-paying jobs and trophy wives and lives of privilege and pleasure and a lifelong freedom from ever having to comprehend the concepts of not being able to afford something or of not getting their way.

Hrm…. Sounds a lot like Littleton to me. Note: Absolutely ZERO relation to Columbine High School in Littleton, CO was made. I’m speaking more directly of Arapahoe High School and its surrounding neighborhoods.

Adblowme

alternateorg on April 26, 2001

From Adobe’s website:


Adobe has no plans at present to create a version of ATM Deluxe that runs on Mac OS X.

I think we can all join in for a heartfelt ‘Fuck you’ to Adobe on this. I mean, what could they possibly have as a reason for not carbonizing or cocoa-ing Type Manager? That’s ridiculous.

I'd better be careful, they might sue me next

alternateorg on April 24, 2001

from Salon:


The families of several victims in the Columbine massacre have filed a lawsuit against companies that create violent video games and sex-oriented Web sites, claiming their products influenced the gunmen.

“Absent the combination of extremely violent video games and these boys’ incredibly deep involvement, use of and addiction to these games and the boys’ basic personalities, these murders and this massacre would not have occurred,” said the lawsuit filed Thursday, a day before the two-year anniversary of the shootings.

Fucking bullshit. Mother-fucking ass-fucking holes. Jesus God-damned Christ in a fucking handbag. GAH.

The entertainment industry is NOT to fucking blame for something like this… especially for something that happened over 2 years ago… and the game they’re blaming (Doom) was created 6 years before THAT. This is a prime example of stupid people looking for someone to sue. It’s not about the victims anymore, it’s about the need to bleed the system dry, and get as many pennies as you fucking can. This is utter, complete bullshit. The only people to blame are the fucking victims themselves. If they left enough alone, those 2 kids would have had no reason to fucking shoot up the damn place. Do you honestly think that playing Doom or Quake and going to ‘sex-related’ websites had ANYTHING to do with the fact that these kids were verbally tortured day-in and day-out for nothing other than they didn’t play sports or look like the rest of the fucking kids in that school? I’m not defending the gunmen in the least, it was a despicable and ugly, horrible thing to do, but let’s face the facts here, they didn’t do it ’cause Sarge told ’em to.

Now, I’m jumping out on a limb here, but I’ve lived in Littleton, and I know what those people are like. These parents I can almost guarantee are suburban Republicans with giant houses and gas-guzzling Expeditions. They LOVE their capitalist way of life that affords them these great items. This ‘free market’ of ours has done wonders for their bank accounts and stock portfolios. But when the video game market determines that violent video games are what sells, they freak out because, well, violent video games are the reason why their kids are dead or injured. Why can’t these people see the way the world fucking works? Why can’t they wake up from their suburban sub-reality and see that they’re simply WRONG? It’s okay they’re pissed, but why can’t they truly search inside themselves for what THEY might have done wrong? When money, complacency and lack of compassion take the place of love in your hearts, peope die. Rage Against the Machine said it best..”Cellular phones, sounding a death toll.”

Check out the second post down in this Plastic.com discussion about it.

Some thoughts on the 'criminal' act of software piracy

alternateorg on April 23, 2001

Something I posted earlier as a comment on SVN

I am 22 years old. When I was around 14, computers became more than something we used in school to do book reports and HyperCard presentations… they became a source of entertainment, a way of connecting to my friends and the world.

Now, when you’re 14 years old, you don’t have much money, and even less morals as far as ‘free’ items go. I was the at the right (or wrong) age at precicely the same moment in time when applications and software and games could be copied and traded with relative ease… If one of my friends’ parents bought them ‘X-Wing,’ for example… what was the harm in simply making a copy of all (17) installation disks for me? Theft? We were just 14-year olds with no money trading some software, we weren’t criminals.

We strived to belong to the ‘3l33t3’ (elite) BBSs, so that we could get software (over a blazing fast 14.4 connection) that no one we knew in person had purchased. Again, we didn’t see ourselves as pirates, we saw the act of acquiring bootlegged software as just as much fun (if not more) than actually using the software itself… Using arcane keyboard commands… knowing passwords… getting the right number to dial.

So, all the way up through high school and college, I simply continued this practice, again due to the lack of money. I didn’t use software for ‘commercial’ purposes… I just wanted some decent software experience before I got to college, so I took Photoshop 3 from my high school. When I got to college, I still wasn’t making money, and having software at home was more convenient than always using (virus-infected and slow) school computers. So I went from not spending $50 for games to not spending $600 for professional software packages; from scanning WWIV BBSs to scanning Hotline. Music? Hell yeah, once that came around as downloadable, instead of copying CDs to tape, I just Napstered up a few tunes.

Victimless crime? Not exactly, but as victimless as you can get, perhaps… Oh, poor multi-billion dollar Adobe didn’t get the $600 for the version of Photoshop I’m running at home. Aw, too bad. Now, I did buy MacOS X 10.0, because I happen to feel that the mass success of that software will determine Apple’s future and longevity, a company I probably care a little too much about… The only companies hurt by software piracy are companies like Panic, who independently create useful, wonderful software that no one else has the balls to make. After using a ‘distributed’ Audion serial number for a while, when version 2.0 came out, I bought my own copy of it. Did I ‘distribute’ that serial number to a few friends of mine? Sure I did. Did I feel bad about it? Not really. It was mine to give, at that point, or at least that’s the way it felt.

Maybe I’m wrong. I probably am. But to someone like me who’s been doing this for a long time and seen no consequences, it’s hard to prove to me that piracy and Napster are all that big a deal.

I'm getting a little weak in the knees…

alternateorg on April 21, 2001

Quoted directoly from BareBones:


Bare Bones Software today announced the immediate availability of version 6.1 of BBEdit™, the company’s award-winning HTML and text editor. This update marks the first version of BBEdit that runs natively on Mac OS X, Apple’s next generation operating system.

Fucking awesome. One of the two press releases I’ve been waiting for… now if Adobe would get their shit together. Go fucking get it.

New section

alternateorg on April 21, 2001

You might have noticed the new menu item in the nav bar that says ‘Mac OS X Tips.’ What is this strange new feature, you ask? Well, if you couldn’t tell by the name, it’s a permanent link to 808’s brilliant OS X tips & tricks post. It will be updated regularly, so if you need help with something, check there, but probably last.

X PHP

alternateorg on April 21, 2001

I just found this WebMonkey article on how to correctly configure and install PHP as a DSO for OS X’s built-in Apache installation (which requires an update). PHP actually works for me now (yay! on a Mac!), but my previous MySQL install was a little screwy. Still working on getting PHP + Apache + MySQL to work together flawlessly, but now I’m much closer. The article also lists a place to get real OS X 10.0 (not PB or Rhapsody) packages for PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL and others.