I haven’t heard it on the radio yet, but iTMS has Vertigo, U2’s new single already available for download. I still say that 30 second clips suck, but this one has a good sounding 30 seconds.
In honor of this week’s long-awaited Star Wars DVD release, there has been no shortage of SW related articles. Like this one: CNN.com - Naked Wookiees and broken R2-D2s - Sep 21, 2004. Some fun bits of trivia there.
You know, Lucas didn’t write or direct Empire Strikes Back, which is often considered the best of the series. That should’ve been a hint.
Annoyed that OpenOffice requires X? Check out NeoOffice/J which gives a Java-based front end to OO.
Earthlink R&D has released SIPshare: SIP-based P2P Content Sharing Prototype. It’s written in Java and released under a BSD-style license. Apparently, the Earthlink folks think that SIP is good for more than just phone calls and wanted to prove it with code. Neato.
Here’s a detailed explanation of how to do Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Rsync. It takes only a little more than twice the size of what you’re backing up, but you can recover from different points in time.
With quotes like this, reality might be giving The Onion a run for its money. Reuters AlertNet - Bush: OB-GYNs kept from ‘practicing their love’. When talking about wanting to place limits on medical liability:
“Too many OB-GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across this country.”
Scary, but logical: Political Victory: From Here to Maternity
In states where Bush won a popular majority in 2000, the average woman bears 2.11 children in her lifetime — which is enough to replace the population. In states where Gore won a majority of votes in 2000, the average woman bears 1.89 children, which is not enough to avoid population decline.
It makes sense. If religious fundamentalists have more kids than everyone else, after a while there will be more religious fundamentalists than anyone else. With the human population already over 6 billion, starting a population growth war seems like a bad idea (read: recipe for extinction, or at least mass famine). That’s a big-picture problem, and one that is not easily dealt with.
Steve Pavina, founder of game maker Dexterity Software, has written an interesting series of articles about indie software development. This is a guy who knows time management (a four-year degree in three semesters!), and he also knows business. The Motley Fool constantly bombards you with the message Cash Is King, and Steve raises that point more than once as well. No cash, no business.
I got to Steve via Eric Sink (who really belongs on my blogroll) and Eric’s latest MSDN article about Micro-ISVs. Eric’s articles on MSDN have been very interesting, and this one is no exception. He was so intrigued by the concept of software development in the small that he started his own business around a one-trick Solitaire game.
So slashdot had a posting about MultiTheftAuto : blue - The revolutionary new multiplayer core that talked about the “new core” without actually saying what MultiTheftAuto was. A couple clicks and I see that it’s a multiplayer extension to Grand Theft Auto Vice City. Since I play GTA on a PS2, I’m SOL unless I get Vice City for the PC. That might have interested me previously, but I have very little time for games, and I think all of that time will be consumed by San Andreas. I discovered a handy news site for San Andreas, as well as some really amazing screenshots. San Andreas looks like it’s going to be a big, fun step up.
I’d be curious to see a contrary version of this: Bush by the numbers. Can anyone come up with any real, ratonal numbers that look good for Bush?
