Anyway, some of what I’m running across in said surfing.. Oh My Weirdness.

Below is the advertisement that introduced the world to the original Apple computer, in 1984.

This ad pays homage to the sci-fi novel 1984, and the film adaptation of it, in which Big Brother, mythical/quasi-real figurehead of the totalitarian state Oceania, is betimes represented on giant, uh.. telescreens. Obviously, this represents Apple shattering all that Big Brother.. whoever he is/was in real life.. embodies. Then, presumably IBM; later Microsoft.

(Other reading today: Google as Big Brother. Scroll down to the list. After a read-through, I think one must admit it is at least a bit scary, or else one must be declared, possibly, slightly careless. Maybe I don’t care. But I probably do. I am at least delighted and entertained, conceptually, by many of the things posted at google-watch.org.)

My take: anywhere that technology does things against your will, or affects you in ways you might not choose, without informing you, it’s Poorly Conceived technology, and is probably working in some ways Against You. Combine this with attempts by those who produce the technology to have the means of creating or delivering the technology entirely closed and proprietary, forever, insofar as they can assure.. and you have Technological Oligarchy.

This model still holds the day [citation needed], and perhaps it will, in its scope, forever.

I’m not really a fan of the model, but I think going toward an open-standards, open-source, free-everything approach can tend to an opposite extreme. I’m not sure where information-technology democracy is embodied or idealized, or even if it can or should be, and I’d offer snarky or ranting comments for or against this or that, uh, technological thingie, but mostly, I think.. I’m getting by.. I never really attended any of the screeds for or against this or that technology at this or that Hate Week in this or that Oligarchy. But if any of these pretentiously conceived technological oligarchies causes me duress, I may, uh.. let you know..

I’m setting up a 3D render farm at home for hobby work, and installing Windows 7 on new hardware as a base for farm nodes.

As part of installing Windows 7 on these “nodes”, I’ve examined remastering tools, like RTSe7enLite, that allow you to (theoretically) drastically reduce the installed size (and therefore make more efficient the loading and running) of Windows 7. (I’ve had mixed results with RTSe7enLite, and I’ve mostly given up on it for now.) This has led me to discover that a certain folder in Windows 7, \winSxS (for “Windows Side by Side”) takes up almost half of the installed operating system (Windows 7 lands on your hard drive at a whopping ~10 Gigabytes; this is an operating system? No, it’s a cow that ate the whole pasture and is ready to die and/or explode!), all for the sake of managing compatibility with applications and operating system components I will most likely never use on a render farm.

(More interested in Linux now. Linux can be very, very lean and mean..)

There are mixed reports that you can harmlessly remove or drastically reduce the size of the winSxS folder, so I’m looking into that. This led me to a web page which directly quotes from two different Windows technical developers:

• Windows Server Core Team Developer #1:

All of the components in the operating system are found in the WinSxS folder – in fact we call this location the component store.. The WinSxS folder is the only location that the component is found on the system.. Let me repeat that last point – there is only one instance (or full data copy) of each version of each file in the OS, and that instance is located in the WinSxS folder.

• Windows Server Core Team Developer #2:

In practice, nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a “hard link” to.. files elsewhere on the system—meaning that the files are not actually in this directory. For instance in the WinSxS there might be a file called advapi32.dll.. however what’s being reported is.. the actual file that lives in the Windows\System32..

They’re talking about slightly different things: the former, Windows Vista, and the latter, Windows 7, but these two operating systems have largely (or entirely?) the same architecture.

So are you still with me? Are we still speaking the same language or did your brain fill up with mud? Technical Developer #1 is emphatic that all “components” in the system reside in WinSxS; says he:

“Let me repeat that last point – there is only one instance.. of each.. file.. and that instance is.. in the WinSxS folder.”

.. while Technical Developer #2 explains how WinSxS points to files in many different places:

..nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a “hard link” to.. files elsewhere.. the files are not actually in this directory.

Which is it? Are the files in the folder, or not? Says Developer #2:

The fact that we make it tricky for you to know how much space is actually consumed in a directory is definitely a fair point!

It’s sounding like users aren’t the only ones for whom it is tricky to determine what is actually used and where..

Among the 3 million people this census variation is being (apparently) sort of tested on (hey, will they put up with this?), any one of them could be fined $5,000 for failing to answer questions like the following (I summarize):

How many people live in your home? Are any of them Hispanic? Are they citizens? How big is your home? What is your education level? Do you have difficulty making decisions or climbing stairs? Are you able to bathe, dress, or shop alone? How much do you pay for your sewage system? Are you married? What industry do you work in? What is your precise job description? What’s your rent or mortgage payment? Do you own an automobile? Are you covered by health insurance? What type? Are you on food stamps? How much money do you make?

I am not making this up. (Could I? I am not Ray Bradbury, and our world is not yet a Fahrenheit 451 world.) Here is a direct link to the publicly available .pdf form for the questionnaire, which is available from the Census web site here.

Apparently the Census Bureau “rarely” seeks fines for failing to answer. So what? What on earth caused any government official to think it is okay to compel everyday citizens to disclose such excess of private information? In regards to an everyday citizen, so much private information is not the Government’s business. (The puzzled administrative personnel respond: what is private? What exactly do you mean by this term?) Unless your government has evolved much closer to Communism than you may realize. So maybe I’ll make that statement more accurate. Evidently, as things are, precisely such information of everyday citizens is the government’s business – but it should not be.

“..the Web browser has become one of the most critical and trusted relationships of our modern lives – with nearly perfect knowledge of everything we do.”

Um, no.

.. And I’m thankful for the Mozilla Foundation, and search engine optimization, and my search engine ranking, and Firefox plugins.. and please bless that Google will stop nagging me to opt-in to Google Wave..”

The ‘net is great (even arguably crucial), but this sounds like.. actual worship. Wrong god. Idol Fail.

(I actually am thankful for the Mozilla Foundation, though.)

You may find this useful as the days get warmer. Click the image for a much larger version. Here is the original Photoshop format file for you to mess with, and here’s a .pdf version for easier printing, too.

Clearly the term “Gay Mechanics” in the article’s subject is a typographical error; Same Gender Attracted professional mechanics are never mentioned in the article, neither the assortment of alternately male-ended or female ended shafts any mechanic may often find himself, uh, handling, neither indeed the assortment of gruff, bear-like fellows they may find themselves among.

I know at least several gay mechanics, and I’ve learned to stop worrying and start loving them.

But oh, by dag nab, dontcha wish I’d gotten my hands on those domains now?

[If the subject in the linked article reads not "gay" but "game", it is because the poster of the article corrected the error.]

We face two possible states of the world. One is a world in which our economic problems are largely solved, profits are on the mend, and things will soon be back to normal, except for a lot of unemployed people whose fate is, let’s face it, of no concern to Wall Street. The other is a world that has enjoyed a brief intermission prior to a terrific second act in which an even larger share of credit losses will be taken, and in which the range of policy choices will be more restricted because we’ve already issued more government liabilities than a banana republic, and will steeply debase our currency if we do it again. It is not at all clear that the recent data have removed any uncertainty as to which world we are in..

Andrew Smithers, one of the few other analysts who foresaw the credit implosion and remains a credible voice now, concurred last week in an interview with my friend Kate Welling.. “The good news so far is that the stock market got down to pretty much fair value or even, possibly, a tickle below it, at its March bottom. But now it has gone up… we probably have a market which is, roughly, 40% overpriced. In order to assess value, it is necessary [to speak financial Vulcan about two different stock market valuation methodologies].. The validity of both of these approaches can be tested and is robust under testing – and they produce results that agree. Currently, both q and CAPE are saying that the U.S. stock market is about 40% overvalued.”..

One of the fascinating aspects of the past few months is the lack of equilibrium thinking with respect to what happened to the trillions of dollars in government money that has been spent to defend the bondholders of mismanaged financial companies. Almost by definition, money given to corporations will show up most quickly as improvements in corporate earnings, and then slightly later, as executive compensation. A few pieces came across my desk last week, hailing the ability of the corporate sector to bounce back from the recent economic downturn even though revenues have continued to suffer and employment has been steeply cut. Why is this a surprise? Where else could the money have gone? Labor compensation? It is truly mind-numbing that a moment after a temporary surge of trillions of dollars, borrowed and tossed out of a helicopter (though to specific corporations and private beneficiaries), analysts would hail a subsequent improvement in corporate results as evidence of “resilience.”

Since early 2008, beginning with the provision of non-recourse funding in the Bear Stearns debacle, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have repeatedly allocated or implicitly obligated public funds to defend the bondholders of mismanaged financial companies. This has included the outright and non-recourse purchase of nearly a trillion dollars in mortgage securities that have no explicit guarantee by the U.S. government. By purchasing these securities outright (rather than through a well-defined repurchase agreement), the Fed is effectively obligating the U.S. government to either guarantee them or to absorb any future losses.

Aside from the fraction of bailout funding that was specifically allocated by Congress through legislation, these actions represent an unconstitutional breach into enumerated spending powers that are the domain of the elected members of Congress alone. The issue here is not whether the Fed should be independent from political influence. The issue is the constitutionality of the Fed’s actions. The discretion that it has exerted over the past two years crosses the line into prerogatives reserved for Congress. That line needs to be clarified sooner rather than later.

Emphatically, the trillions of dollars spent over the past year were not in the interest of protecting bank depositors or the general public. They went to protect bank bondholders. Instead of taking appropriate losses on those bonds (which financed reckless mortgage lending), those bonds are happily priced near their face value, for the benefit of private individuals, thanks to an equivalent issuance of U.S. Treasury debt. But that’s not enough. Outside of a very narrow set of institutions that are subject to compensation limits, just watch how much of the public’s money – which benefitted several major investment banks following a very direct route – gets allocated to Wall Street bonuses in the next few weeks.

I find this simply scary.

The past few days, the Philadelphia Bank Index (which allegedly “leads” the markets) has been dramatically declining in comparison to the S&P 500 stock index, which has been making defiant yet pathetic attempts at remaining bullish. At the same time, volume is declining sharply – big money is selling out of large positions (and buying up hedges, and loading up on option puts, which profit from declines). Banks decline, prices expand, volume contracts – the whole picture is undecided – or maybe decidedly tearing apart in several directions. Something has to give – and today the S&P finally started to drop fairly quickly at closing.

I have speculations in the market turning down (even sharply). And I still think it will. Watch the TZA ticker, which goes the opposite of the S&P, times 3 (meaning UP three times as much, I’m hoping). I’m banking on it taking an upswing or spiking, to above 13.35, by Dec 19th.

This short YouTube video from a series the organization assembles is a fine example of some of their hilarious findings.

This is their page about the broadcast today, linking to the NPR listing of local carrier schedules of the broadcast and Science Friday’s web broadcast page.

For my area I’m tuning into KUER-FM 90.1 from noon to 2 for the broadcast.

This one’s got a thicker weave, but it’s softer, it’s easier on your buns. You get six in a package for four dollars, and it’ll last you longer.

Ya gotta shop when the right folks are around to help you out.

Book Of Time 3D Screensaver – This screen saver is a philosophic approach to the process of time. The book, which has next moment on each of its pages. On the one page it has the past on the next the future comes. Where is the present then? Maybe somewhere between these two ones. This screen saver makes it possible to behold the enigma while the time is turning over on the shabby old book’s pages. Do you want to look through the book till the end?

Sorry, but my $14.95 can get me better passage of my time.  Thanks for the chuckles though, Chucky!

Also:

Skull and Bones 3D Screensaver – Guard your desktop with this awesome screen saver. Bet you have never seen such lovely skull on your screen. You will see rotating skull and crossbones – the symbol of real threat. Molten metal effects and cool sunglasses combine perfectly with sinister background. Impressive 3D graphics along with tense urban sound effects will really amaze you. Download this screen saver now – it not only saves your screen, but also the entire computer.

Ar!  But can it save me from Engrish?  Never mind.  I need the laughs.

Subj: OPPOSED to H.R. 5889 The Orphan Works Act of 2008

Dear President Bush,

I am very alarmed by the so-called “Orphan Works Act” of 2008, which has twice very recently been “hotlined” by Senators and has now passed in the Senate.  It is a basic philosophical reversal of copyright law and could spell economic doom – not an overstatement – to the enterprises of countless artists.  If the bill also passes in the house, I ask you simply to veto the bill.  I suggest that your best source of opposition to the bill may be found in the ample resources and rhetoric of the Illustrators Partnership of America.

Sincerely,

Alex Hall

[My street address]

[My phone number]

Wow.  Bizarre twists on meaning become dominant and obliterate everything else.

(Except for one brilliant article pointed it out, and I’m posting about it, and you’re reading it.  Maybe it is always free or bound to be free.)

“The truth will make us strong.”

I’m waiting for more.  Please.  Feed me another verse.  I’ll start compiling it into a Windows Bible.  Not that there isn’t at least one already.

Warning: PG-13. Perfectly shames the source material without losing much for the dignity of the characters made to sing it.

LOVE IN THIS CLUB from ( *_* ) on Vimeo.