Adam's Blog

Mark McGwire, home run king, who single handedly rescued a much ailing baseball in 1998, was denied access by a large margin to the Baseball Hall of Fame yesterday. McGwire is an alleged cheater, in that he supposedly took supplements -- supplements that were legal according to baseball rules at the time. McGwire is a legend, he was a driving force behind the reinvigoration of baseball in the late 90's, after the pathetic downstride post 1994 strike. Read on for more.

Worst basketball fall EVER! Ouch! Luke Whitehead, I do NOT want to be you. How much would it take for you to kill a puppy with your bare hands? I'm sad to say, for some it's less than you'd think. For others, it's more. Either way, it's WEIRD to watch people process the question. Fuck the Shit! The sad part is that I can't get this song out of my head. Nicccccccce! I've been saying this for weeks. ...And pissing my wife off. Trigger Happy TV EVERY TIME I hear this ring, I think of this. THAT'S quality.

I'm sorry to report that Steve Jobs' MacWorld keynote was a bust for me. The entire keynote focused on two new big products: AppleTV and the Apple iPhone. While both look neat, and I may well end up with an Apple TV in the not too distant future, this is supposed to be Macworld, not Appleworld. And Macs were barely touched on. There wasn't a squeak about Leopard, which doomsayers will suggest indicates it's not on schedule. There was nary a peep about quad core Mac Pros, no word of slim MBPs that everyone was expecting, no new iMacs, no iLife '07 and no iWork '07. No "Numbers" or "Charts" and no completely revamped Keynote 4. All iPhone and AppleTV. Apple also changed their name officially from Apple Computer, Inc to Apple, Inc. This signifies the first step away from being a computer company and towards being a generalist technology company. It scares me a little because I would really like them to continue to push computing forward, but it appears the drive is to cash in on media serving, which is now their bread and butter. With over 2 billion tracks sold, it's hard to argue it. Anyway, here's...

I'm kind of disappointed in OSNews readers right now. We have an article running right now called "Gates Wants a Server in Every Home." It discusses the upcoming "Windows Home Server." Now, as anyone who reads my blog knows, I am very into Mac hardware and software these days, but this product has me legitmately excited. It's great, and I see TONS of need for something like this. You see, as computers become more like TVs in that families begin to routinely have more than one in the house, it becomes necessary to have a central storage hub and a decent redundancy system. No one has anything like this today, pretty much you have (1) burn to DVD, (2) external hard drives, (3) iPods, which some people use this for backing up music, and (4) actual server OSes, which is generally limited to techies. So, read the comments on OSNews and you'll find a general anti-Microsoft vibe. If Apple announced this, people would be going bat shit for Mac Home Server. Seriously, imagine if you could buy some sort of $299 Mac device and set up .mac on your computer to sync to it. People would go absolutely bonkers to...

This goes to show how worthless digg.com comments can be. Nearly every comment is dugg down. C'mon, are these the kinds of comments that people feel they should take the time to type and submit. Do they think other people will get joy from reading them? Read this comments on this inane, embarassing mess. Folks, this is proof that user generated content is not necessarily anything more than just volume. So is this, by the way. Sites like Slashdot and OSNews are mostly valuable because their users contribute so much quality in the comments. Slashdot has been better since I moved my threshold to +3. OSNews is pretty good at 0. But most sites that make it too easy to participate are complete crap.

Dear Apple, the first 30 years were only the beginning, or so you say. You're poised to make HUGE inroads this year, with some sources saying you're going to claim up to 20% of laptop sales on college campuses. You're also going to sell a ridiculous number of iPods again, an obscene number of tracks on iTunes, and very likely a substantial number of iPhones and iTVs if, in fact, they show up soon. Let me tell you what you really ought to do then, and quickly: port Safari to Windows. Read on, I'll tell you why.

This is much more like it. I'm three days into my experiment. After 9.5 hours running today, this is what Opera 9.1 looks like. I am currently downloading three SHN files all greater than 30MB. Click picture for a larger view

Could this be the best digg.com comment ever? I think it is. It's clear, concise, and well worded. It's not moronic, it doesn't rely on AOL-speak or l33t. It doesn't play off the same techie cliches. It's just good, old fashioned quality content. It makes a point and it makes a point well. The quality of comments on digg.com are generally low, but every now and again you find a diamond in the rough.

"First Lieutenant Ehren Watada still refuses Iraq deployment orders, calling the war illegal. A six-year prison term could result. Preliminary hearings are set for Thursday." To those who think that Lieutenant Watada is a traitor or a deserter, let me remind you of a time when a government scared its fearful citizens into segregating themselves. A time when disloyalty to the army was disloyalty to the nation. When opposing the government (which, by the way, is an American core value, protected by the Bill of Rights itself) made you unpatriotic. That time was Nazi Germany, and although it may *feel* like a hyperbolic analogy, I think it's apt. And look how we remember it. The government HAS decieved us and America is less safe today than a few years ago. BRAVO for a soldier whose allegiance is to the constitution and not a corrupt, criminal administration. Lt. Watada is a hero. When he took his oath, he took it to uphold the American Constitution, not to blindly support a Commander in Chief. And when the Commander in Chief orders something illegal, should it be opposed? After all, wasn't "I was just following orders" the defense used in Nuremburg? One we,...

I was playing with an outlines of OSNews version 4 today. I have started sketching out some ideas that I intend to implement geared at making the site more consistent, easier to use, less complex, and less heavy from a code standpoint. One of the major areas to improve is commenting. I am going to change the way threading works almost entirely. First off, comments below your threshold will not disappear anymore. They will simply be collapsed and greyed out. Yes, this is a bit digg-ish, but we had to implement a lot of complex code in order to compensate for parent comments that were below threshold. So unless a comment is administratively hidden, they will show and be un-collapsable via Javascript (I don't know if it will be AJAX or just Javascript div swapping). I think this is a better solution than we have today. Secondly, moderation will definitely be AJAX-based. Thirdly, I haven't "cleared" this with David, but I think flat comments will be hard coded to view all in one page. It's so much easier on the database to use a single, easy light query than to force several page loads and hit the db over and...