dark cave

United States of America, a place in which live and assemble freely

At least, this is what we’re used to listen to. Give a look to this short clip filmed by a Polish guy living in America from some time, instead.

Add comment March 27th, 2007

Linked List Patented in 2006

From now on, every teacher (or in general every programmer) using a Linked List must remember that he’s talking about a patented idea. If you do not believe to me, check out for yourself here or here.

Source: Slashdot

Add comment March 24th, 2007

The difference between science and faith

Plenty of philosophers have tried to justify the differences between science and faith. Last-hour research has brought to this simple explanation (click to magnify):

link posted by doctorzoidberg on the #wins channel of irc.autistici.org

2 comments February 18th, 2007

CDs cost way too much… RIAA doesn’t think so

Everyone knows that, during the last years, the market price of Audio CDs has grown steadly and constantly. Among other reasons (such as the diffusion of broadband connections), this lead to a significant increase in illegal (as in “not welcomed by music industries“) sharing of MP3 files, etc, etc… We all know the history.

Guess what our friends at the RIAA think about it?

Clearly there are many costs associated with producing a CD, and despite these costs the price of recorded music to consumers has fallen dramatically

or…

CD prices are low compared to other forms of entertainment

Read the full story here: http://www.riaa.com/news/marketingdata/cost.asp

Source: Slashdot

Add comment February 13th, 2007

Bruno Longhi becomes a teacher

Guess what caught my attention while I was checking my mail (the one that burns, not the electronic one) in the hall of my apartment? This simple but ultimately funny advertisement was attached to the wall:

For those who can’t read Italian, or that don’t know who Bruno Longhi is: as mentioned on this page of the Italian Wikipedia, he is a TV journalist that often writes articles about the italian soccer championship. The ad promotes a self-defined course about sport journalism on TV and Bruno Longhi is its main referer.

Obviously, everyone (at least, everyone that dares to admit it) knows that he could not even be able to teach in a course: figure yourself if he can be the “didactic supervisor” (more or less, the translation for the italian “direttore didattico“) of this organization!

In the end, this is my first post in the Italian category of this blog

Add comment January 23rd, 2007

Vista limited edition

OMFG… it’s true.

At the first look, I kept staring at it for minutes. I didn’t believe that the story was true, or that someone could even think of buying that crap. What am I talking about, you say? Give a look here, for example.

And, yes, I could write posts more often, if only exams gave me a break, and someone stopped bugging me every ten seconds .

Add comment January 22nd, 2007

The difference between life and death

Sometimes, the difference between life and death is so narrow…

You stupid moron, you shouldn’t joke about that…

Add comment January 17th, 2007

Crappy programmers, untrustworthy Customer Care and laggy hardware

Yeah, sure, right now that I have the time to sit in front of my PC, I can conclude that today has been a (relatively) bad one. Damn it.

Oh, sorry, I didn’t notice you… you’re back. Howdy?

If you are wondering about what the terms in the title exactly refer to, keep reading. If, today, you are frustrated too, like a kid vainly defending his sand castle from the irreverent waves of a peaceless sea, who tries to wash away the fully-armored knights, the court ladies, the almighty king and even the infraposed, worried and almost crying obstacle, go on. Otherwise, I wish you a very good day.

• First of all, my connection. My ISP, FastWeb, sells 10 Mbit cable connections and is well known for the quickness and ability of its call center. I’m joking. Well, maybe its customer care is a lot better than those of many other Italian ISPs, that’s true, but nevertheless I waited 3 days more than expected to see my router’s LEDs turn on again. Thanks God.
• The authors of the theme of this blog are, simply, stupid. When I first downloaded it, I chose it because of its name (guess it :P) and its color combination (and I would still choose it). First, I played a bit with the CSS file and such… there were some corrections to be done, IMO, but none of them was substantial. Nevermind, no one is perfect. Sure, they aren’t, I realized in the afternoon. After inspecting the full code, I can only define them as crappy programmers: I’ve wasted hours adjusting sizes and dimensions, before realizing that the error was in a poorly designed PHP page. Shame on you. I could change the theme, that’s true, but now the matter is personal, this is between me and them.
• When arrived home, I decided to install Neverwinter Nights (the first episode, not the sequel) on my Gentoo box, having in mind the wonderful hours spent playing it on Windows, on the same machine. Couldn’t be easier:
  

  nano -w /etc/portage/package.use

  ### add/edit the lines:

  # games-rpg/nwn hou sou
  # games-rpg/nwn-data hou nowin sou

  emerge ––sync

  emerge nwn

  ### mount CDs when requested
  ### (better, mount && export the path, before)

  nwn

  I’ve played many not-so-new games on this laptop, both on windows and on Gentoo, almost always with satisfactory frame rate. No more true with NWN. Running on Gentoo, Neverwinter Nights was laggy as hell, while some benchmark programs (like glxgears) or some other games with relatively heavy load on the graphic card (like ppracer) run quite smoothly. Damn lag. Yes, I know that my video card is just a…

  Display controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device

  (as lspci promptly reports) but, until now, I felt satisfied.

Well, if you need me, I’m reading Sigmund Freud’s work The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (or Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, if you prefer). Just gimme a call.

See you around.

Add comment January 16th, 2007