9-inch bitmapped glory
Here’s a website that brings back some old Mac gaming memories.
Warning: you might need an emulator to run some of thse titles. Even a newer Mac may need to emulate an older one.
Monday POEE e-supplement
Officials discuss postponing Election Day, fearing terrorism: would this not be another case of handing terrorists the very victory they ask for, that of disrupting our society and political process? Assuming an attack was planned, would not competent terrorists be able to adjust their plans for a postponement? Do we really want to give our government the power to delay elections as long as they feel necessary? When I was younger, I read the Reader’s Digest version of The R Document; a tale of a government conspiracy to declare martial law in the US and suspend the Bill of Rights indefinitely. Of course, I enjoyed it as a fantasy tale that “can’t happen here”.
Speaking of reading, I finished Perdido Street Station this weekend. I picked up the book after hearing much hype about this winner of multiple awards and runner-up for others. Book review
Hacking, pretend and real
Played the new MegaMan card game today (yesterday was official release). Guess who won? If you guessed the other player, you’re right 🙂 Of course, he’d played it many times during development, and this was my first. Decent game – I don’t follow the MegaMan console games or cartoon, but the play of the game was fast-paced, and slightly less complex than ./Hack. Another quick time-killer. Interestingly, your draw deck = your hit points, so every time you take a hit, your combat possibilities diminish. Conversely, you lose a trickle of hit points every turn whether you attack or not.
The staff at LiveJournal has posted in the lj_maintenance community that the terrible recent slowdown has two causes: LJ overgrowing its network, and a Denial of Service attack. Firstly, I’ve never understood the psychology of trying to take down a journal site. The Pentagon, or Bank of America, maybe. But LiveJournal? You gain that much hacker cred from preventing people from commenting about their day?
Secondly, they mention that a significant chunk of the attacks come from innocent people with infected Windows machines. Aside from a wry suggestion of changing OSes, they suggest firewall, anti-spyware, and anti-virus software, or at least changing web browsers to one that doesn’t have a direct pipeline into your OS. The response? “I don’t have time to bother with that!” “I’m not computer-savvy enough to install a new browser!” Or, in other words, “Yes, officer, I realize that my brakes are failing and my steering doesn’t work right, but it’s a real inconvenience to fix it. Perhaps you could make the other drivers just stay out of my way.”
Argh. People.
