Month: October 2009

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Apple/Mac “Loyalty”? Notsomuch

Apple computers are reputed to inspire fierce loyalty among users, but that may be due more to a highly vocal, rabid fringe of fanboiz than anything else.

More than 12 per cent of US homes have at least one Mac, according to NPD’s latest Household Penetration study – a rise from nine per cent the research company polled in 2008. But of those Mac owners, nearly 85 per cent have at least one Windows-based PC.

So the die hard Mac loyalists are… about 15% of Mac users. Since Mac comprised well less than 10% of PC sales, that yields a core of Mac loyalists that is a minuscule and very nearly irrelevant class of computer users. Just sayin’.

*heh*

(Just think, though: with high-end Intel-compatible hardware and PC-BSD, current Mac users could have their [possibly] preferred GUI, or something very like it–and the security of the base Unix OS they want and lower cost, too. Of course, they could always install a VM in the PC-BSD machine and plop Windows in there, too.. :-))

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The Dimming of America

Even though the amazingly insensitive-to-meaning vocalizations of the narrator grate on my ears, this short, fluffy 2-minute piece still manages to retain the power of a truth: the price of the Anthropogenic Global Warming Myth is too high.

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Take Back Your Government

What would you pay to get the tools to take back our government and save our country?

From the author’s preface to Take Back Your Government:

HOW TO SAVE YOUR COUNTRY

This is intended to be a practical manual of instruction for the American layman who has taken no regular part in politics, has no personal political ambitions, and no desire to make money out of politics, but who, nevertheless, would like to do something to make his or her chosen form of government work better. If you have a gnawing, uneasy feeling that you should be doing something to preserve our freedoms and to protect and improve our way of life but have been held back by lack of time, lack of money, or the helpless feeling that you individually could not do enough to make the effort worthwhile, then this book was written for you.

Take Back Your Government (Click for larger image)

The book is currently being sold by Baen Books in a bundle with Taxpayer’s Tea Party by Sharon Cooper and Chuck Asay. The cost for both books bundled together in any of a wide range of eBook formats is just $8. I’m currently reading my copy of Take Back Your Government in my web browser in the html version.

Taxpayer's Tea Party Manual

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Browsing the Interwebs

*heh* I’ve wanted to use the term “interwebs” for a while but just didn’t have a good place to drop it in…

This is just a drive-by hit on my least favorite browser. On the Win7 “side” of this computer, my IE8 title bar reads, “M$ Internet Explorer–not quite as sucky as earlier versions, but still, do you REALLY want to use this pig?”

The answer, of course, is “No, and I only do so when someone has a question about what to do as a result of their lazy, poorly-considered decision to use Internet Exploder.”

😉

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ISP Woes… Again (Still) *sigh*

Again, Warning: May Bore You To Tears Compgeeky Gripe ahead. See further down the page for other posts. 🙂

What’s with these folks? I can’t even get a SpeedTest.net page to fully load without (many) multiple reloads, and though I can get PingTest.net to load after a few tries, it returns:

PingTest-01

This after nearly a week of “not too bad” on the interruption of service front. Yep. Once again my ISP says they’ve fixed their problem… and haven’t.

Oh. Well.

(BTW, it took a couple of hours to post this, with autosave unable to even save a draft or uploading of the image you see here working until after about eight attempts (with complete system/network reboots and all the other things I could do to attempt to wake up the ISP’s servers.)

Micro-mini-update: 4 days later. Worse today. Two calls to phone support. One, the gal wouldn’t take the ice pick out of her ear and kept saying she couldn’t hear me (riiiiiight; she responded when she wanted to). The next, the guy didn’t try that ploy, but, although he could see drops on my line, he could do nothing, as usual, but schedule a tech to come by and waste both my time and the tech’s to simply tell me–AGAIN–that there’s no problem in my equipment and that the problem’s still on their end… *sigh*

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The Witch Doctor

Well, The 0!’s song and dance still looks and sounds swell to the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind, but the IOC is “a bunch of racists” and have given his song and dance the hook offstage. Looks like he now has to find other ways to slip his payback to the Daley machine and its cronies.

Oh, like this is all that surprising. When The 0! isn’t using TOTUS, his best sounds like

Ooo eee, ooo ah ah ting tang
Walla walla, bing bang
Ooo eee, ooo ah ah ting tang
Walla walla bing bang…
Ooo eee, ooo ah ah ting tang
Walla walla ,bing bang
Ooo eee, ooo ah ah ting tang
Walla walla bing bang

All sound and fury, signifying nothing. And that’s on one of his good days!

As Jerry Pournelle said just today,

“I am not impressed with the competence of this administration’s diplomacy.”

Hmm, seems like he’s not the only one, eh?

Continue reading “The Witch Doctor”

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About That Feddle Gummint “War on Drugs” Thingy

More and more my thinking on that quagmire, the so-called “War on Drugs,” gravitates in the direction articulated by Jerry Pournelle recently,

I am still looking for which Article [or] Amendment gives Congress this authority, or indeed the authority to outlaw any drug whatever. We know they can’t outlaw liquor, because they had to get the Eighteenth Amendment passed in order to implement the Volstead Act and implement Prohibition, and that Amendment was repealed. I once asked Speaker Gingrich which Article let them outlaw marijuana (federal prohibition; no one doubts that the States have that power). He couldn’t tell me, but “It’s all different now.”

Yeh, “It’s all different now,” meaning, “We don’t need no stinking Constitution”?

There’s an interesting post over at LinknZona that I’ll need a fresh infusion of my own drug of choice (coffee) to re-read, but I don’t recall anywhere in it seeing the fundamental legality of federal drug regulations entering into the discussion. It seems to me that Pournelle’s right: if we needed an amendment (since done away with) to declare ONE drug outlawed, where in the Constitution is the authority to outlaw a large number of different drugs?

Meanwhile, when are the feebies going to articulate an exit strategy from the War on Drugs?