Let the chest-thumping begin

posted by jack at 03:33 CET in / politics

Just read a pretty convincing article arguing that the reason that people like dubya win elections is largely through assuming an "alpha male" pose; that above anything else, people will vote for the guy who's best at hollering, pounding his chest, and behaving like the top gorilla.

gotchur web teevee on d'innurnet

posted by jack at 08:46 CET in / compute

Stumbled across the DTV project, which promises to provide independent internet TV. Pay attention to two key features:

• Anyone can publish video content with the Broadcast Machine PHP script.
• The published file apparently doesn't have to be hosted on a webserver, you can share it as a bittorrent from your desktop machine. The DTV client software implements the bittorrent protocol for downloading content, and presumably sharing content as well, so as soon as your video is "out in the wild", the clients that have downloaded it will help keep your own bandwidth usage down

Currently only for Mac, but a Windows client is apparently on the way.

25 years too late: the Microsoft Shell

posted by jack at 07:33 CET in / compute

One bit of technology that Microsoft has recently started talking to developers about is the Microsoft Shell. This is something that may or may not be a part of the upcoming Microsoft VISTA OS. Basically, someone at Microsoft finally decided that DOS/Windows' horrid built-in scripting language, as exemplified in millions of nasty BAT files around the world, needed to be more like a UNIX command-line.

Kind of ironic, since that old DOS pidgin scripting language was never anything more than a really feature-poor, painfully bad imitation of 1979-era UNIX.

This is where Microsoft Shell steps in, bringing things such as reasonable syntax and (hopefully) complete command i/o redirection and piping, just like UNIX has had since the dawn of time.

UNIX advocates have long argued the advantages of a command-line interface, mainly that it enables us to use our innate language abilities to interface with a machine, instead of just dragging a mouse around (which evolution hasn't really built us for). So it's great that Windows is finally stepping forward towards UNIX in this regard. Welcome to the 80's, Microsoft!