Unflushed Buffers

This phracking sux, and has for a long time. Because the URL of this page (and my other Scriptforge pages) have ‘.scr’ in the domain (www.SCRriptforge) Microsoft feels I am dangerous and silently drops my message. This makes it incredibly hard for me to share my URLs with friends.

Now it seems that the bastards are also blocking YouTube links because they have started a competing service.

FUCK YOU MICROSOFT.

In a week I’m turning off my MSN account, since I have moved most of my contacts to other IM services (Google Talk / Skype). I’m sorry if this means I’ll be missing out on talking to one or two people, but MS is retarded, and by extension anyone who keeps using it is also.

OK apparently we have an issue on a lot of *nix systems like Linux and BSD that use the time_t structure which is like 32 bits to count time since 1970. Similar to Y2K, except when 2038 comes around it’s going to be cool 1970 again rather than a crappy 1901 desparation we faced back in 2000.

However, time will run out before 2038. Apparently there’s this bloody huge rock called Apophis that’s due to do a very close flyby of the earth in 2029. Probably won’t hit us, but the gravitational shift of flying that close will slingshot it back around and NASA estimated a 1 in 45000 chance it will hit in 2036. Woop di do you say, we’ll still have to fix this Y2K38 unix problem.

Nuh uh! Some 13 year old German kid doing a school project took a look at NASA’s numbers, and decided that if one of the satellites orbiting earth struck Apophis during it’s 2029 flyby, even though a smaller object, but travelling at 3km/s would cause the big rock to change trajectory. He concluded the brains at NASA got it wrong and there’s really a 1 in 450 chance we need a new planet. Woah!

So forget about the time_t issue, we need to put Bruce Willis on ice now so we can blow this space pebble up in time to then fix a possible time warp to the ’70s.

Why not start it all off with a little rant while I get the server in order. TEST POST warning.

Sometimes I Digg.. for the articles of course. Today there was the usual post that crops up every month or so, trying to spread the good word of Linux and open source. This one was whinging about being unable to convince said colleague to give Linux a try because the nub party had bought into the whole FUD that ‘the man’ had put out there against a fine community of users and products. Moral of the story. Computers aren’t for everyone. Neither is Linux.

My response as follows, and I did post this comment as Serial Port: