Hell Yeah Bitch! .com

The crew over at the site MEMAP.ORG were inspired by a recent MacMerc article about home, cheap, movie studios and decided to improve it. What they came up with was a nice list of cheap (read: free) software that can do amazing things.

Cinepaint, Blender, and Jahshska are all amazing free programs that one could use to turn a “home office” into a “home-office / movie post-production house”.

Of course, when they mention its all free to set this up, they are factoring out the cost of a high-end PC or Mac to get all this going smoothly to begin with, not to mention tons of HD space, oh and don’t forget the camera!…but other than that its free.

Link: The Poor Person’s Production Suite

Microsoft drops the ball, and not only do you have to pick it up yourself, but you might have to pay for it as well! According to several sources, Microsoft will drop its own Spyware and Anti-Virus software, possibly as soon as this week. There are even rumors that point to Microsoft bundling them both together as a subscription service code-named “A-1″.

Sounds good right? Sounds like steps of improvement for Microsoft right? Maybe. But what it really sounds like to me is yet another screw job perpetrated by the executives at Redmond that must walk funny because their balls are so big.

Microsoft focused on market share and beating competitors to the store shelves and in the process created an operating system that has gaping holes that allow virii and every type of spyware into your system by just simply opening a website or even doing nothing other than going on the internet. Thats one problem. But now it seems to be getting worse. Because with the buy-outs of spyware and anti-virus software makers, Microsoft could atone for these serious issues and give this software out. Hell, put it on Windows Update, if they so choose…but instead they are apparently readying a commercial release for a problem they, in a way, created to begin with!

Now, I realize that Microsoft is not out there making these virii that are attacking their customer base. But what I mean by “creating the problem” of virii and spyware attacks on their operating system is that they did not do enough to prevent it. No operating system can be perfect, but Windows, even XP, the best version of Windows thus far, is far from it. This is evident from the amazing amount of infections the world saw this year and by other reports, such as the recently reported 45 seconds it took for a Windows computer took to be infected by just being connected to the internet. However, by contrast, OS X (made by Apple) and any version of Linux were clean and un-infected while being attached to the same network. And yes, I realize that there are more virii being created for Windows because they are the biggest, but that is beside the point. Despite the number of virii in the wild, Windows is not even close to being as secure as Linux and OS X, and, in reality is barely secure enough to even run in this day and age of countless spyware. There is no reason anyone should have to run 2 or 3 other programs to keep your computer from becoming so slow and bloated by things you didn’t install, just to keep it in a workable state.

But yet here is Microsoft, trying to look better in the public’s eyes by offering Anti-virus and Spyware software in the new year. But by putting a price next to their offering, they are just adding insult to injury and sticking it to the customer one more time.

It just keeps getting worse…
Let me get some things out of the way first. The love that people have for Lance Armstrong is a bit irrational and scary. (check Livestrong, die now! if you don’t know what I’m referring too) Forgive me, but I just don’t understand it. And well folks, it just keeps getting worse.

I love the St. Louis Cardinals. I have always loved them, even when they suck. But sometimes they do some stupid things. Like letting fans get 12 playoff tickets per game, thus squeezing people like me out of playoff tickets! But that is another post. Another lapse into a retarded state of mind happened for the Cardinals brass this year when they decided to release these:

“The Cardinals Rally Bands”

This is beyond stupid. The only thing worse than a idea that has been exploited and ruined, is the next idea that sees the exploitation and crappiness and decides to go forward with the copying anyway.

Oh but there is more! Do you watch American Chopper? This show used to be just awesome. I watched it religiously for months, and I don’t even like motorcycles! But then, like shows of this nature, they started to run out of ideas. I mean how many different ways can you make the same basic motorcycle look different? However, if this show hasn’t “Jumped the Shark” already, they did tonight with the…I bet you can guess what it is going to be already…”Lance Armstrong Bike”. Welcome to a whole new low! I caught the tail end of the show because my brother told me about it. Of course, Lance was there, with Sheryl laughing and clapping behind him like she always does. (Didn’t she used to be a singer?) and he drove the bike wearing that same back sport coat with his shirt halfway unbuttoned, which is apparently his uinform when not in the biking gear (i.e. those lame Subaru commericals).

Why is it that everyone believes that Barry Bonds (who sucks too by the way) MUST do steriods because that is the rumors going around. But there have been rumors going around forever that Armstrong dopes up too, yet everyone assumes that is bull. Can someone explain that too me? They both fit the profile: Older guys dominating their sport, but neither one have any proof or tests, or any thing at all that says “yes, they have done steriods” yet Bonds we think is full of shit and Armstrong “would never do such a thing!” Really I don’t get it.

Ok, thats all for now! Now the decision comes…now that there is 2 posts knocking on our beloved Lance, do I want comments from people flipping out on me on both stories or just one? I think we should concentrate our efforts on one. So the comments will be turned off on this post, but feel free to post on the other one. (link to follow)

If you want to comment, do so at the first post:
Livestrong, die now!

Lance Armstrong…enough!

Enough with the damn yellow bracelets that are now everywhere! I’m tired of them, they have just gotten out of hand. In the beginning they were fine. They were for a good cause and the Tour de France was still going on. However these stupid little $1 bracelets have taken off because people are stupid and all it takes is a semi popular star (Sheryl Crow, Justin Timberlake) and the mindless masses jump on whatever crap-train happens to be driving by at the time. This time? That crap-train was these damn yellow bracelets.

So what is the problem? Well the organization initially was fine, but people have made this retarded. i.e. earlier today, I was sad to find out one of my co-workers has been mystified by this stupid fad and decided he wanted one. However he couldn’t find any. The only place where he could get one was this pompous idiot at my workplace that bought a ton of the things and has been hording them. When asked if someone could by one from him, he stated that he has plans to sell them to certain chosen people. How retarded is that? See, this guy doesn’t give a shit about cancer! He just wants him, and his equally lame family and friends to have these things for the status they currently hold in our society. Its time to end this fad of the livestrong bracelets!

I’d be happy too, if I had just won the Tour de France and have an army of stupid people blindly following me for misguided reasons.

And another thing… I really don’t understand why everyone is up Lance Armstrong’s ass so much anyway. Yes, he is probably the greatest athlete his sport has ever seen, but Barry Bonds could be considered that too, and everyone hates him, so that reason for liking Armstrong must be tossed. Why else should we like him? Because he had cancer and came back to win?! Well a lot of other people have had some horrible cases of cancer and have come back to have wonderful lives, maybe they aren’t doing it in the public lives, and they aren’t dating Sheryl Crow, but no one is kissing their asses. Andres Galarraga, a talented major league baseball player has come back from cancer twice! He’s an athlete on a professional level…where is his national kudos? Also, just because you have cancer does not make you a great guy. You could be a complete douche bag and have cancer…that doesn’t make you any less of a douche bag. Lance Armstrong is a douche bag. He has also turned into a complete corporate whore, doing every commercial that comes his way. They aren’t even cool commercials

Now why is this guy so cool again?

If you want to help cancer research, donate the dollar…but tell them to keep their crappy bracelet.

Be sure to check out Livestrong, die now! II

With the amounts of GMail inivations flying around the internet in the last few days, it looks as though that Google’s GMail is about to go public. Of course, noone seems to realize this, and with the rash of GMail invites comes a sort of minor geek hysteria echoing around the internet. Don’t believe me? Check out this blog post on Kevin Rose (of Screensavers fame) where he gave out a few invites and urged others to do the same. He just recently cleared off most of the comments, but it was over 2,000 last time I checked.

Is that not enough proof of the needless insanity on the internet about a glorified Hotmail account? Well then you need to check out The GMail Machine. Where idiots that have way too much time on their hands refresh this page over and over again waiting to the number that has been now forever locked to wanna-be computer hackers: 1337. When you see that number on your screen (it looks to be run by a basic php random number script) then you get one of the GMail invites that this team of people have collected. The site has been refreshed 107,789,351 times, and has transfered over 501.93 GB of bandwidth. Even more sad is that if any of these people would bother to read the news they post on the site they would see this:

Basically all those people drooling over a GMail account are wasting their time even more so, becuase they guy running this can’t send the GMail codes out anyway.

Now its not that I don’t have a urge to check out GMail’s services. I do. I have been in fact looking for a reliable secondary e-mail account. (Spymac, didn’t really work out as I had hoped.) However, even though I would take an invite if someone offered it to me, I would not pay money, or trade anything of any sort of value or even waste my time reloading a site in the hopes that I will get an invite and get to use a web-based e-mail account for one or two days before it goes public.

Give me a break.

When I watched Steve Jobs launch iChat (and iChat AV later on) everyone’s “buddy icon” was a picture of their face. What a great idea! There are many people that I talk to over the internet that A) I never have seen in real life or B) I know them in real life, but they never come out of their Mom’s basement enough, so I forgot what they look like. Yet, only few people really do this (I do by the way).

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