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My music of choice is invariably some kind of "serious" or art music. Most of it is classical. I like smatterings of jazz and I listen to some composers whose work is primarily in the form of soundtrack composition or scoring. I'm a big fan of the Holy Minimalists, romantics, impressionists and...

I don't know how much people know about the game universe or setting so... The current game reality is 3048 or 3049. That's after the the fourth succession war of classic Battletech, after the recovery of the Star League memory core by the Grey Death Legion but substantially before the Clan...

The game doesn't launch until the second week in August so you've got some time.

That is the Iraqi Information Minister from just before the second Gulf War.

The state of the world is such that in 2012, there is Apple-people reality and factual reality and now there are all kinds of people who can't tell the difference.

The forums say an average match is 10 - 15 minutes. That seems about right to me. The other interesting thing is that the nature of play lends itself to individual instances rather than a huge shared world. The way it appears to work is that you're dropped on some random world-in-conflict...

No no no. It will specifically be ipads because the Androids don't do anything right. Apple said so and that means it must be true.

I've been slowly reading the developer stuff and it sounds like they've got a good idea on how to combine typical MMO progression (Skill and technology trees) with traditional Battletech. They make a big deal out of player skill being a factor, but most MMOs are all about gear, gear, gear. Even...

I'm only slightly bothered by the mandatory update deal. I think that's functionality that a lot of people would expect to be present. After all, it's more or less what their computers and phones do already. Knowing that they work that way, I wouldn't buy one for myself, but I'm not sure I would...

They have to respond that way for their enterprise customers and investors. Otherwise they're not being good stewards of the good ship RIM and their asses will get canned. Which, granted, probably beats going down with the ship.

No, ipads. Try to keep up. ;)

I can't decide if I should buy in to Mechwarrior Online. I want to play a Battletech game. I don't know anyone else who would.

I think I could do a lot with 48TB of extra disk space if I actually trusted it to be reliable, or if I didn't care about reliability. I can't afford to add that much to my backups. I guess I could mirror my existing NAS, were there a way to make sure the drives operated well enough as an array...

Also, I am now considering the ramifications of what RAID111 would be. I'm thinking It would be a duplex (two controllers) copy of a mirror set on two different physical machines. Which, for WD hardware. sounds like about what I'd need.

I am sitting here thinking that I have two completely empty Norco 20-bay chassis sitting in a closet at home. The drives don't work in RAID but maybe I can set them up in FreeNAS each as an individual zPool or something. Or I could do something with WHS, where I know they'll behave well enough...

I see you have grasped the nature of my conundrum.

The definition of conflicted: One of my students just gave me 24 WD20EADS 2TB Caviar Green drives. They were made in late 2010 but they've never been used. They were classed by his employer as scrap because they work so poorly in RAID arrays.

I suspect that unless sales numbers are absolutely stellar, the market will declare it a failure and furthermore we'll get a whole bunch of "the age of the PC is over" nonsense out of the tech press. I don't think Windows 8 is going to be particularly well received, but this could be the start...

I have no idea. My students say the places in Hammond tend to be priced higher. Personally I think letting off Fireworks anywhere near other people should be grounds for summary execution. But whatever. There are definitely two giant warehouse stores at Burns Harbor.

Practice things like this. You'll have to work on looking innocent and sincere when you say them, though. "It tripped." "No, I don't know how that dent got there." "That server made me do that to it." "Sometimes you have to hit one to keep the rest in line."

Well SD, you're pretty much driving right by my apartment and my office. There's a giant red barn-thing that's just off the US20 Burns Harbor exit on 80-94 that is by far the biggest fireworks store in our little corner of Indiana. The places by the state line are actually priced a little higher...

To be honest, computer stuff is kind of boring right now. Hardware is at this ridiculous science fiction point where even the cheap stuff is generally pretty awesome, and the high end is simultaneously vast overkill and and legitimately affordable. We're really just left to be annoyed about...

This is one of those weeks when absolutely nothing is going to happen at work. If a national holiday falls on a Wednesday, they might as well call the whole week off. I have three classes scheduled this week and at the moment only one person has told me that they are coming to each of them.

No, the ones from Ireland have pots o' gold and shamrocks on them and are called Leprechauns. time doesn't have any shamrocks or pots o' gold. Iceland, on the other hand, is pretty well known for the fact that its citizens are about as likely to believe in elfs as they are in Jesus.

Where are we with this "Hairy Polite Mexican" issue?

Real mobile platforms don't require all web browsers to be reskins of Webkit.

time, as a little green elf-person, is clearly a native of Iceland.

I'm not sure why, but Google Music appears to drain batteries faster than Winamp for Android. I'm guessing it's about a 15% difference, or maybe an extra 45 minutes of battery life from a full charge. I've been experimenting with it using the Evo in my car and it definitely plays longer if I'm...

If the company keeps it, then they have to manage its retention and make it available on request for legal matters. If they say "It's our policy to delete email", then they don't have to deal with the expense and probable damage associated with discovery of pertinent information contained therein.

My thinking is that Facebook has been rumored to want its own handset for a while, and RIM has its goofy messaging network with mega-millions of users.O Other than that, HP has WebOS already, Lenovo already does Android. Dell just exited the handheld market. Microsoft owns a chunk of Nokia and...

Facebook seems to be run and owned by morons with a lot of money.

This article seems to suggest that handset manufacturing is about as useful and productive as large-scale buggy whip assembly lines; RIM's massive downturn is just the tip of the iceberg for everyone who isn't Apple or Samsung. Granted that's a media-driven narrative but I do believe there's...

I hereby announce my support for re-titling SF's "Hairy Aussies" as "Hairy Polite Mexicans."

Doing the NAS/quasi-NAS thing kind with a zillion drives of sucks because once you have that giant pool of direct-access disk space the temptation will be to fill it. And then you'll need more drives or a second set of them to create redundancy. And it's hot and (usually) loud. And there's the...

This is basic functionality we're talking about. Maybe not on the same level as, say, not supporting DHCP, but that crap is standard for everybody else for a really, really good reason.

My definition of fun has been vindicated. Suckass WWII FPSes and console ports don't get ORA books written about them.

It's an inert, solid-state device with no moving parts. Obviously the cells are going to wear out eventually, but in theory electronics like that shouldn't wear out just for being powered on or off, right? I popped an SSD in a database server for the first time last night. Going by event logs...

DroidSeer will send commands to HomeSeer, if you have a copy of that. HomeSeer is kind of a be-all, end-all home automation tool. As far as tablets and their uses, there's amazing utility in just having an extra screen sometimes. My desktop right now has three large screens and I'm doing crap...

You can get an LTO drive for around $1000. Tapes hold hundreds and cost under $20. This kind of backup will scale well to your near-term growth. For around $1000 you could also get three 4TB drives and assemble some kind of RAID or NAS setup, but then you've just got another problem in two years...

For the most part, people just plug the stupid things in and assume they're working but have none of you ever had to deal with a DSL connection that required a PPP login before it would start? That's not really uncommon.

I think I really don't care why they didn't do it. At the very least it should be an option. What the hell are you supposed to do if you have a non-Apple product and no functional connection to the internet to download their client? To me this is just another clear example of Apple doing things...

Yup. And after you install it, you get prompted to install all of Apple's other software when the Apple updater gets invoked. Granted that's only a minor annoyance, but when I configure a Netgear box it doesn't try to install 500MB of crap on my PC, either.

Yes. That totally helps everything for everyone who has to configure an Airport. TOTALLY. All we need is a $600 phone or a $300 mp3 player! We won't mention the habit of Apple's software updater trying to inflict Quicktime and Safari and itunes onto otherwise decent computers.

The things I don't like about the Airport Extreme are that it needs a goofy Apple setup program to be configured and their range really isn't all that great. But, yay, you get Airplay (which is, I don't know, something that means things to icap people) and time capsule support, which is kind of...

802.11ac is coming real soon now. Which could be something like 802.11n, where the standardization process took years and years. But it's the next big thing, with 80MHz channels and support for eight antenna configurations.

Found this on Boing Boing. A few of these I had never seen before.

I wind up using both Winamp for Android of better format support, and Google Music, because it supports playback control on the lock screen and for times when I don't want to disturb my Winamp playlist just to listen to some music.

Ars Technica just posted this long piece on the history of WinAmp. It's a surprisingly good read.

The specs on the next-generation Nexus tablet are interesting: A 7" 1280x800 tablet with a quad-core 1.3GHz CPU and a $199 price tag and no lameass custom UI that has to be removed. That's a very nice combination of price and form factor, but I suspect it will be crushed by the weight of the...

Come visit Chicago. I'll take you on a tour of places that smell like moist ass. I don't even care which Apple store you start with, because they're all like that.