Derek Bodner’s Blog

Just disturbing news the last day or two.
Man pushes wife off balcony

Government spends $998,798 to ship two washers.

Just saw an article in PC World about Microsoft releasing a new “version” of Windows XP because they’ve run out of licenses. No new features, this is purely a license release. This just goes to show how much innovation has been stifled when a 6 year old OS is still in demand like this. The true test that Microsoft has won? People don’t even care that they’re running a 6 year old OS.

Not that I blame most consumers. Vista still has a lot of problems to fix, and at this point is an unnecessary upgrade. Linux is not quite ready for mass adoption (I’ll post on that later). What other options do they have? And that’s the entirety of the problem.

756*

It’s not even that Bonds cheated by taking steroids, although that’s part of it. It’s not even that for the vast majority (RE: all) of his majority league career he’s given the indication he’s a creep, although that’s part of it. The problem isn’t that he broke the most revered record in all of sports, although that makes it worse. Last night Barry Bonds hit his 756th home run, passing Hank Aaron on the all time home run list, and forever completely closing the age of innocence on professional sports. This day has been coming for a long time. From the strike of ‘93, the home run renaissance of the late 90’s, the Michael Vick dog fighting investigation, to the NBA referee scandal this past month. I’m not sure whether it’s sports athletes becoming less trustworthy or the non-stop coverage of sports revealing more about who they are, or both, that has increased in the last two decades, but it seems sport has become less and less about what occurs on the field. Last night was evidence of this. Last night should have been a night all baseball fans would remember for the rest of their lives. The actual achievement of hitting 756 home runs over the course of a career is a surreal feat. In the end, the focus was not on actions that happened on the field. That’s not something that you could say 20 years ago, and it’s a shame, regardless of the cause.

The big news so far during this NBA offseason has been the trade by the Celtics to acquire Kevin Garnett, in what turned out to be a 7-for-1 deal (when draft picks are included). I think this was a tremendous development for the Celtics, and does in fact put them in contention, not only for a chance to go to the finals, but a chance to win within the next few years.

Critics of the trade have mainly argued four things. 1) Trading 5 current players for Garnett leaves the Celtics with little depth. 2) There is only one basketball on the court, and satisfying three former #1 options is going to be impossible. 3) All three of the “big 3″ are getting up there in age, and could begin to decline in productivity/health. 4) The salary of Garnett/Pierce/Allen will cripple the Celtics front office moves, and thus make problem #1 (depth) even harder to overcome.
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Gmail’s great. It’s free. Massive amounts of storage. Great spam catching. Taggable. There’s a lot that works very well.

But there’s just a few things holding me back.
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I don’t have a problem with special interest groups. Well, I wouldn’t have a problem with them, if they weren’t all hypocritical douche bags, at least. Whether it’s Al Sharpton condemning Imus when he himself called someone a “beanie-wearing little Jew boy”, or whether it’s the NAACP crying out against the court of public opinion condemning Michael Vick, while they themselves published a “Report of Known Facts” during the Duke Lacrosse scandal that turned out to be entirely untrue, these groups end up doing an incredible amount of harm to truly getting to a point where race doesn’t matter. These are not groups that are looking for justice and equality, they are groups that are looking out for THEIR OWN “PEOPLE”. They promote differences in race. Sticking up for a minority is not all that’s needed in the pursuit of equality. If you yourself do not treat people equally, how can you expect those who look up to you to? If you promote differences based on race, how does that help us reach equality?

It’s organizations like these that make me think we’re not any closer to stamping out racism. Sure, there may not be laws promoting it anymore, or at least they aren’t as prevalent. Getting rid of the mindset, on both sides, has proven to be more difficult. And when special interest groups act the way that they do here, they just push the two sides farther apart. What I would love to see is the NAACP or Al Sharpton back the rights of a non-colored person. THAT’S when we start making progress. Until then, the pendulum may swing back and forth, but we’ll never find that middle.

*EDIT*
Tying in perfectly with the above post, I found this today:
Intel apologizes for racist advertisement
You can view the ad here:
View Ad

In this add, there’s one sprinter, multiplied 6 times, around a boss. The sprinter to show the speed of the CPU, and having 6 replica copies to show the dual core nature of the chip. processing multiple jobs simultaneously. It had to be the same person in order to make sense, so naturally it’s going to be the same ethnicity. Some people apparently found this offensive, as they saw this as 6 black men bowing down to the white boss.

THEY’RE NOT BOWING DOWN. Holy jeez, take 5 seconds to actually look at the position they’re in, and get past the skin color, and it becomes quite evident what’s going on in this picture. Since the 6 people have to be a clone in order for the ad to make sense, does that mean we can’t cast an African American in the role of a sprinter because it would be stereotyping? Or should we just get over this absurd PR non-sense?

The only people that would find that to be offensive are those that are looking for it. People with an agenda.

*EDIT* Classic comeback.
AMD spoofed counter-ad

I95 was backed up today on the way to work, extending my commute at least 45 minutes. Not that in and of itself is rare, in fact it hardly is. But the reason today was because of an injured red-tailed hawk. When you drove by, the bird was on the shoulder of the road, with two police cars surround it, waiting until the game commission could pick it up. It wasn’t affecting northbound, but everybody slowed down to take a gander anyway, so we were crawling as well. Luckily the bird’s alright.

This is old news, but it just made the rounds to osnews/slashdot, so I just saw it for the first time. MaxOSX 10.5 has been approved by the Open Group, placing it with Sun, IBM and HP as the only OS’s obtaining UNIX 03 certification. Quite shocked to see OSX get in, as the entrance seems to be System V-heavy. Could this possibly lead to more BSD’s getting certified? Most likely not, as there is some pretty steep certification costs. Probably has more effect on Apple trying to get more of a share in the Workstation/Server markets where app portability is a bigger concern, but interesting nonetheless.

As asked by pzs on /.:

Does this mean that turtle neck wearing goatie bearded design weenies will start calling themselves Unix geeks?

Does this mean that XNU now stands for X is now UNIX?