nerdgod.com

So Vista has had fewer security flaws in its first year than XP had in its first year. Because of UAC and IE Protected mode.

…Which is of course an almost meaningless statistic. I’d like to see a comparison of Vista with UAC and XP with LUA, both with IE7. On my computers, I run as a Limited User, in XP. And honestly, I prefer this to running with UAC, since it’s more useful to me to be able to switch to my Admin user, install things, log out, then switch back (with “fast user switching”) to my limited account. Honestly the install procedures with UAC sometimes don’t seem to operate entirely in the Administrator context, and I’ve had permissions end up wonky, and DX10 programs refuse to run.

I’d like to see another option: You get an RDP window to a limited-functionality (yet fully logged in) administrator session, with a wizard like W2k3’s “management wizard”. You pass it the file you want executed, and the wizard sets ownership, installs it, then says “thanks” and logs itself out.

Now, this may be functionally equivalent to what’s going on now, but in my experience, it’s not: There seems to be a distinction between ‘run as administrator’ and even XP’s ‘run as -> [administrative user]‘. (Which may be caused by using a Samba NT4-style domain login…)

1. ‘php-pear’ is secretly an alias for ‘php5-pear’ which, to quote Darth Vader: DO NOT WANT!
   especially since this will remove your entire php4 install
2. your install scripts in apt-get (and dpkg, I assume) expect an ‘exec’-able /tmp. FOOLS!
   real men mount /tmp ‘noexec,nosuid’

The Center of the World is a remake of 1984, except instead of Totalitarianism and class warfare, it’s about relationships and identity. Instead of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, there’s nudity. And playing the role of Big Brother is “Loneliness and Alienation”. In the end, there’s a scene showing the characters having come to love Big Brother, just like 1984….

***nerdguy notices that the paper in the printer is upside-down
nerdguy: stupid paper… having _sides_
ct: I prefer one-sided paper
ct: just be careful how you lay it down or it could disappear

Like a lot of people, I’ve always been fascinated by forgotten places and abandoned things. Reading the National Geographic article, I’m reminded of the abandoned houses near where I used to live. There were a couple between my house and Springfield, back from the road, behind the fields. There was another near my friend’s house in Donnellsville, on Route 40 (there it is again). Out by Yellow Springs there were several abandoned farmhouses, and an abandoned covered bridge, cut off from the world when the farms consolidated, and the highway left it behind.

Stories sprang up about the houses–that they were haunted; left doomed by foulplay; cursed. And I think these fantastic stories grew out of our fascination, our need to create a narrative to explain things. Our fear of death. I think that this interest comes from exactly that place, from the question “What happens when things die?” Because we’re so tied to stories, our homes and towns and ships and cars end up having their own story (how many of us bargain with our cars? Think of them as Agents with a history and animus?)  But they’re different from people: when people die, they go away, and live on only in memory. Houses and shipwrecks linger. Their story doesn’t end, and whatever glory it may have had is overpowered by their new melancholy. And so we’re drawn to them, and their ghost stories.