Published on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 .
PC Magazine Special Report: Inside Windows Vista, Build 5308
Looks like Microsoft is calling the newest Community Technical Preview (CTP) of Vista "feature complete", which means they have all the features set that they’re going to include in the OS and thus are just going to spend the rest of the time refining them to the point where they actually work correctly (let’s hope). Looking at the screenshots it looks really nice and seems to have quite a bit of promise. I’ll be curious to see how it compares to the latest version of Mac OSX, which is quite possibly the most well thought-out OS I’ve ever laid my hands on. Should be interesting to see how Vista turns out. Perhaps it might actually be worth paying for? That’d be a first for a MS operating system! 
Published on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 .
Stupid fucking kids… I swear… A 16 year old kid takes pics of himself with guns (handguns, rifles, etc) and rather disturbing captions and POSTS THEM ON MYSPACE. Newsflash! Everyone and their goddamn grandmothers has myspace and somebody is going to see that shit. So apparently a bunch of his classmates get freaked out by the pictures and tell their parents who then call the school board and voice concerns. So the principal suspends the kid and calls the cops. I don’t blame him. The kid’s stupid enough to actually take pics like that and post them for the world to see, no telling what other kind of stupid shit he might pull. Now, I have nothing against the ownership of firearms for the general public but I’m totally against KIDS having guns. When you’re an adult, fine… but as a kid? No way is anybody that young even remotely mature enough to carry a gun and not end up blowing someone else’s brains out over something stupid. The fact that the kid was able to take such pics makes me wonder where he got them. Where were the parents in this? Did they let him have the guns? Did they even know that he had them? Did they know he had them and not do anything about it? In any case, that’s horrible parenting. That’s fine and dandy that they’re holding the kid in custody but it’s not like the parents are without fault here. That’s completely irresponsible and the fact that they may very well not even be punished (nothing is said in the article) is just complete bullshit. I dunno about the rest of you out there but if I was in the judge’s place when the kid goes to court, I’d seriously be sending the parents to some sort of parenting class at the very least. The article is pretty vague and doesn’t include anything about the parents at all and whether or not anyone questioned them in the matter and what they have to say about the whole situation. Either way, I can’t say I’ve noticed parenting getting any better over the past 10 yrs. Kids getting pregnant at 13, smoking weed, doing drugs, skipping school, getting drunk… all before the age of 18. What’s the point in getting drunk, fucked and fucked up so young? To seem more like an adult? You’re a kid, act like one… You’re only a kid once, enjoy it while you can, ya know? Shit, you never get those years back so why spend them trying to be a full-blown adult? I don’t quite get that. Being an adult isn’t all it’s cracked up to be! There are plenty of times I wish I was still a kid and didn’t have all these fucking bills and responsibilities. Oh, well.. enough ranting for now.
Published on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 .
I’ve decided to take the time to try out Flock, which is a browser based on Firefox but adds a few new features that aren’t currently available in Firefox (though can probably be added via extensions). Basically it’s a version of Firefox tuned towards the more community aspects of the web in general. It integrates with your weblog (works fine with Wordpress, seeing as how I’m typing this post in the blog editor in Flock), del.icio.us social bookmarking service and flickr photo sharing service. Basically if you see a page you like, you can bookmark it to del.icio.us, which allows all your friends and other people who are members @ del.icio.us to see your bookmarks… you can also upload photos to flickr and make blog posts all without actually having to go to the given sites, login and post. It even has a blog editor right in the browser itself that you can open in another tab, all without actually having to visit your blog. Pretty neat stuff so far. I’ll have to play with it some more and report back on how well it actually works in practice. The only thing I don’t like is that it’s limited to flickr so uploading pics for me will still require logging into my gallery and uploading them manually instead of just dragging them over the flickr icon in the browser. I have plenty of pics in my gallery so I can’t be arsed to bother signing up with Flickr just to be able to use that feature. Either way, the browser looks pretty promising and it’s only at version 0.5.11!