nl.lunar-linux.org

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!
I mean, seriously, I've seen a lot of commercial breaks. I've seen loads. Thousands. Prolly even more. But SEEEEERIOUSLY ABC .. a break after each and every presenter or show sniplet? I've been watching for roughly 1 1/2 hours now .. and I think I caught my twelfth or so commercial break. Please, for fucks sake, keep it down. >:-(

Now, almost none of you guys know what I did two weeks ago: I bought a new machine for daily use. And while I pondered the opportunities back and forth, in the end the decision was pretty easy actually. I bought a MacBook.

When I was young and started to grow up I immediately was afraid of the possibility to become .. well, the usual type of person I shared my daily routine or personal life with. Like, say .. I started studying computer science when I finished high school just to quit after a year since I became more and more afraid of being a dull, self-centered, moronic prick .. which most of my fellow students were, actually (and no, I'm not exaggerating). If you were to describe what I thought my future would look like back in those days .. '40 year old virgin' comes to mind ^_~

Anyway, a couple of you reading my blog (or shall I say the few of the few) know: I've been working in Spain the past couple of years. Throughout the summer. Its been fun. And its also given me the opportunity to explore the means I can work in and work with. Essentially its been an experiment to find myself. Which, in the end and for most parts, didn't go very well. But thats another story. What I gathered though was a quite good understanding about who I am .. and what I wanted in life. Sounds rather philosophical, right? I guess its the typical 20'ish to 23'ish experience every grown up has to go through.

However, with the experience I gathered from my work in Spain, put together with the experience coming from acting studies (which I kind of quit .. I didn't put enough effort into it in the end .. thats something I really need to work on) I realized lately: Its not your environment that shapes you. Its not your friends. Its not the clothes you wear, the car you drive, the school you go to. Its not your parents either, or your girlfriend. Or your job.

It is you. And what you make of it.

And while that sounds awfully simple (and pathetic of sorts) .. believe me, its not. Even if I hadn't quit studying computer science .. I sure as hell would not have become the same prick I had to sit with in computer-math. Or any other class. I might have been influenced .. but only in a positive way, believe me (meaning: away from being a prick since I had so many of them around me). All my life I've been worrying about how to adapt to certain situations, friends, other random people .. company policies .. so much that I largely forgot about who I actually am and how I define myself. Luckily, I caught the right train and ended up knowing what I know now: I know who I am. Yet, it took a painful 24 years to finally catch that. But I guess thats what people mean when they're talking about growing up. However, now I can finally focus on living the life I want to live instead of trying to fit in. And thats about the most refreshing and meaningful experience I've had since .. well, 24 years.

Cheers, Moritz

PS: No, I'm not Auke Kok .. but Auke Kok is on vacation and http://bar.foo-projects.org doesn't know about me unless he tells it to.

Hey, I know I haven't been exactly busy blogging lately. But since Auke lost all my previous postings (:-P) I figured it would be a good time for a fresh start. Right now, there's tons of stuff I could probably talk about. I'm not much of blogger I guess. But recently I "discovered" a couple of amazingly good tracks I'm listening to frequently lately...

I read the news about apple & AT&T dropping the iPhone price by 200$. Of course at first I laughed at the suckers who fell for the obvious trap, but it poses a more interesting dilemma for "early adopters".

Today AT&T also announced that they sold the first 1 million iPhones. Given the fact that they can now comfortably sell them at 200$ below the original price, they will at least have already made 200 million. It's much more likely that the 100 million that they will give back in the form of store vouchers was a deal between AT&T and Apple so that AT&T can fund Apple's development cost in a very interesting tax-evading method. This borders the lines of money-laundering and very sleazy money schemes if you ask me.

Not to mention that those same suckers won't be able to buy $100 worth of stuff in the Apple store without at least spending 50$ more on something else, feeding the everlasting loop of greed of Apple, sucking stupid rich people into it's vile trap. I'm just kidding, it's all business as usual, right?

So, in the end the early adopters on average are going to spend the base amount of the phone, plus 100$ (since they're not getting the full 200$ divergence back, only half), and end up spending on average 10-25% more than that in the Apple store when they redeem their credit. The end score: on average, Joe Sucker still only gets back 75$, which is becoming quite marginal.

Here's what Apple should have done: sold the first 1 million phones under the 400$ price point. Apple would have probably made enough money to cover the basics, and they would have sold the units within a month, instead of 6 months. Advertising would freak out, people would instantly get one (now!) instead of postponing and waiting out, and the fact that for e.g. other hi-tech products this works quite good (think of hi-quality game betas being handed out for free), would be a win-win situation for both Apple and the consumer.

In the end, Apple and AT&T decided to bill the early adopters completely unfairly, and gets more press and more revenue by doing this flip-somersault that will end up just increasing their revenue anyway, and in a dubious legal way if I may say so.

I lost the latest version of this list recently, so here's an update. I intend to report this list once in a while and keep it updated, so feel free to post new numbers for this page to me!

*please note* that the testing application (nbench) only uses a single core. Subsequent total system performance is therefore (number of cpu's) * (total score) theoretical total performance.

name        CPU name                        rating   MHz        mem      int      float       score
thor        Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU Q6850  3.00GHz  3000MHz    29.329   25.637   40.970      31.348  

Feel like sometimes I come from a distant planet....

***hugs dilbert***

All blogs were lost, the entire upgrade of drupal just didn't accept any of the old db's. bah.

I've attempted to see if it's possible to *import* data easily from drupal into a newer drupal, and forget about it. very unflexible. this sucks. major negative points for drupal here.