Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Initial thoughts

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Some brief initial thoughts on today’s news…

  • There’s a rousing snowball fight going on in hell right now.

  • IBM just got spanked. Hard.

  • From a user-standpoint, this may not be as big of a deal as some might fear. Apple has plenty of past experience dealing with potentially difficult and disastrous transitions. Most recently, of course, the OS transition from OS 9 to the UNIX-based OS X; more applicable to this situation, however, is their earlier switch from the Motorola 680×0 processors to the IBM/whoever-else-was-involved (I’m on lunch and trying to post this quickly, so I’m not looking up all the little details) PowerPC processors.

    From my standpoint, both prior switches were handled quite well. With the number of ways that things could break, it’s amazing how much didn’t. Case in point, just this weekend I downloaded the game Crystal Crazy from the Macintosh Garden, a repository for “abandonware”. This is a game that was written for 680×0 systems, so it’s outdated by many years, one software transition, and one hardware transition…and it still works. Granted, the sound doesn’t work, and it has to be run from the disk image instead of being copied directly to the hard drive, but the fact that it works at all (680×0 code running through the PowerPC emulation inside the Classic environment on an OS X system) is a rather resounding testament to the work Apple did in ensuring backwards compatibility — and I have no doubt that they will do everything they can to continue this trend.

  • This certainly doesn’t mean that the Mac is suddenly going to turn into Windows. No matter what kind of processor is providing the underlying power, it’s OS X that is the heart and soul of the Mac “experience”, and that’s not going to change (well, not beyond future OS upgrades that is).

  • I think it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll start seeing “install anywhere” OS X boxes that will allow OS X to be installed on any random x86-based system. Much of what makes a Mac a Mac is the tight integration between the OS and known, Apple-approved system components, and I don’t see them giving that up and attempting to support the nearly-infinite possible hardware configurations of homebrew PCs. The processor may be going to Intel, but that doesn’t preclude Apple from keeping tight control of their motherboards and keeping OS X on their proprietary hardware.

    That said, I expect plenty of hackers will be doing everything possible to circumvent that. It’ll be interesting to see how successful they are, and how soon they pull it off.

  • I expect that Virtual PC will be undergoing a major shift in a couple years, possibly moving to something closer to the fabled ‘Red Box‘ of the Rhapsody years. No more emulation layer to worry about — Windows will be able to run native code on the Intel processors that it’s written for, at full speed. In theory (and this is definitely theory, as I’m no programmer), all VPC would really have to do is create an isolated virtual machine for Windows to run inside, much like the Classic layer already does for pre-OS X applications. Perhaps we could even see Windows apps running outside of the VPC window, side-by-side with OS X and Classic applications? It’d be a UI nightmare, sure, but it might not be outside the realm of possibility anymore.

  • I can’t wait until I get off work and can really dive into all the various analysis and speculation after this. I’m going to have a lot of reading to do tonight!

Any other thoughts?

Slashdot Slashdotted

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Here’s an amusing little something that I’d never seen before. I tried to take a look at a Slashdot story about the Apple/Intel switch, when…

Slashdot slashdotted

Apparently everybody was trying to get to that story, and for once, Slashdot couldn’t keep up! Pretty impressive, and an indicator of just how big this news is.

iTunes “My Dark Life” by Costello, Elvis/Eno, Brian from the album X-Files, The: Songs In the Key of X (1996, 6:20).

In Search of a Sugar Daddy

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Y’know, all I need right now is for some kind wealthy benefactor to drop about six grand in my bank account. That would essentially cover my income through the end of August, allowing me to quit my job and spend the summer working on my writing and photography, apartment hunting for the upcoming move, and investigating grants and loans for my eventual return to school.

Of course, that’s not exactly likely. Possible sure…but improbable enough that as I don’t have easy access to the Heart of Gold, I don’t expect it’ll happen.

Pity, that.

iTunes “Talk on Censorship/Letter to Tipper Gore” by Biafra, Jello from the album No More Cocoons (1987, 26:04).

The IRS is more thorough than I thought…

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Amusing bits from IRS Publication 525, Taxable and Nontaxable Income, Other Income:

Bribes. If you receive a bribe, include it in your income.

Found property. If you find and keep property that does not belong to you that has been lost or abandoned (treasure-trove), it is taxable to you at its fair market value in the first year it is your undisputed possession.

Illegal income. Illegal income, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.

Kickbacks. You must include kickbacks, side commissions, push money, or similar payments you receive in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.

Stolen property. If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless in the same year, you return it to its rightful owner.

For all those honest criminals out there. ;)

(via Jacqueline)

DJ Humor

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Two DJs were talking. One of them says “Hey, you should see this movie I saw the other day! It’s GREAT!”

The other one replies, “Oh, I don’t know…Who’s the projectionist?”

(via underbunny and wirehead)

Kumquat Mania

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‘Kumquat’ has long been one of my favorite words. It’s rather silly, fun to say, and sounds like it might be something slightly perverse, but it’s nothing more than a little orange fruit.

I just stumbled across this Fark Photoshop competition:

Theme: Replace a word in a song or movie title with the word “kumquat” and photoshop the result

I generally skip most of Fark’s photoshop threads, as they’re generally only of fair-to-middling quality, and the level of humor is often lower than I generally get a kick out of. This one I had to check out though…and I’m glad I did.

As it turned out, there were lots of good gags. As images posted to Fark tend to be transitory, I’ve snagged the best of them here. One to start with, then the rest behind the cut (it’ll be a bit image-heavy, modem users beware)…

Dark Side of the Kumquat

Read more

March of the Penguins

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This is rather horrendously teen-girl-Livejournal-y, but for once, I’m actually tempted to let lose with an “EEEEEEEEEE! PENGUINS!”

Penguins

(ahem)

Now that my inner thirteen-year-old (who’s apparently female…but we won’t discuss that) has had her say, I’m just going to have to find a way to see this. Apparently it has two shows in Seattle next weekend, out at the Harvard Exit: Saturday the 11th at 6:30pm, and Sunday the 12th at 11:30am.

Penguins

Must be seen.

They’re so cute!!!!

Penguins

(ahem)

Okay, I think I’m done now.

(Thanks to Julie for this!)

Virtual Moving

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I’ve been getting word from a few people recently that my website is responding unusually slowly as of late. I generally don’t notice this much myself (as when I’m at home everything goes over the local network), but I have been noticing that the traffic indicator light on my DSL modem has been very active lately.

There’s a few things that could account for that amount of activity and the speed issues, but my guess is that it’s simply that while my DSL line and aging webserver were fine for my needs a while ago, I’m outgrowing them.

Right now, I’ve got a 1.5 Mb/sec incoming, 768 kbps/sec outgoing DSL line, and an old 350Mhz G3 as webserver. I’ve set my server up to host two domains for myself (djwudi.com, which is currently essentially unused, and michaelhanscom.com), one for my dad (hanscomfamily.com), two for friends (Kirsten at geekmuffin.com and Phil at interalia.org), and I found out a while ago that Phil has set someone else up on my server as well (patreesha.com).

A few months ago, none of those site were getting enough traffic for that to be a major issue. As the sites grow, though, and as Google finds more and more pages to send people to, I’ve simply run out of server horsepower and bandwidth.

So, I think it’s time for me to pare things down a little bit and look into external hosting options. Mike‘s given his hosting provider, LivingDot, a good recommendation, and their packages look better than both Laughing Squid (BoingBoing‘s host) and Logjamming (Wil Wheaton‘s host), but I’m open to suggestions if anyone else might have any.

This won’t be an “overnight” thing, so there’s no danger of me suddenly pulling the plug on any of the sites I host. I already knew that I’d have to be disconnecting my server for an as yet unspecified amount of time when I move in with Prairie in a few months, so the end of August is something of a “drop dead” date for me to get all of this taken care of. My sites may move over before then, depending on affordability and how much of a PROJECT the transition becomes, but I’m not about to just drop my friends’ sites into the great bit bucket in the sky. :)

It’s a bit of a bummer, as I’ve enjoyed having the ability to host things on my own, without having to worry about storage space (I’ve got around 100Gb of drive space on my server) or bandwidth caps (as long as I pay my bills, Speakeasy doesn’t care how much data I pump in or out over my DSL line, or limit what I can or cannot do with my server)…but after a while, even I have to succumb to the reality of the situation.

iTunes “Under the Milky Way” by Church, The from the album Never Mind the Mainstream (1988, 5:00).

Blade: Trinity

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I just got finished watching Blade: Trinity. While I’m certainly not going to make any claims about it being a good movie, it ended up being far more entertaining than I expected it to be (and probably more than it had any real right to be).

I can chalk this up to two simple things:

  1. Parker Posey as a vampire. Parker’s long been one of my favorite actresses, inevitably taking oddball roles in quirky movies and absolutely going to town with them. She’s always a joy to watch, and this was certainly no exception.

    Parker Posey

  2. ‘Pac-Man’, the vampire pomeranian. Hands-down, one of the most bizarrely funny things I’d seen in a long time.

    Vampire Pomeranian

From here on out, I think every movie should have a vampire pom in it. I don’t really care if it makes sense, or fits into the film at all. I just want more vampire pomeranians in my movies.