unhandledexception.net

This semester I got access to the CDA computer labs for COMP 471. They have somekind of totally insane internet connection – 7738 KB/sec

At that speed, a 700 MB CD image of Kubuntu barely took a minute to download! With this, IPTV and other high-bandwidth applications become a reality! I want this at home!!!

In 2004, came digg.com, a neat web site that presented tech news using a revolutionnary approach. Digg.com allows users submit news stories on their site, and other users will vote on the story, by “digging” it. This will cause the story to appear predominantly on the site. This concept allowed fast broadcasting of science and technology news on the internet, way before it would appear on traditionnal news sites such as slashdot! Anything from breaking research news to new product announcements were comming in as it was happening. Digg.com formed a passionate community of science and technology enthousiasts (read, geeks).

But obviously, every good thing has an end right? First, pseudo-geeks, and now trolls started posting stupid articles about politicians’ daily fartings, stupit mainstream television, music and movie news, as well as filling comment forms with random unresearched bickering and politicking. You have stupid american teeny brats bashing arabs and licking on the jews because it seems to be the fashionnable thing to do in america these days.

I would not blame digg.com for that though as douchebags most often come uninvited. I would actually commend them on their efforts to keep up the site’s quality by fighting spam and other internet annoyances. But on the other hand, it seems these trolls are there to stay on that site. It’s so sad to see another effort go down the drain like this.

It’s just like the internet really, back in 1995, it was a gold mine of information. Today, it’s a gold mine of information, burried under an ass load of junk. Statistics say that 50% of the infrastructure is affected to routing spam and other spurious traffic. I don’t want to sound too elitistic, but democracy doesn’t work in these cases, because it involves giving power to people that will misuse it to further their own dubious agendas. In 1995, the internet was managed by a task force composed of the finest experts in the field. Today, any dumbass with a little money and some connections can have a say in what goes on.

Well, I might keep the site in my RSS list until it truly degenerates, but I won’t even look at the comments.

It always strikes me when business people and politicians try to talk about technology. They always end up saying horribly dumb things. It’s like, they believe and act as if they know it all, but somehow they always end up missing a huge chunk of the story. Some of these utter stupidities they spew out give us IT people a good laugh at their faces.

This one comes from an article on BBC news that I found on my RSS ticker, where eMusic announces its debut in Europe:

“We are not against DRM,” said Steve McCauley, European president of eMusic. “But we are against technology that prevents customers doing what they want with their music.”

Right. isn’t DRM just that, “technology that prevents customers from doing what they want”?

Well, it’s that time of the year again! Plerhaps it’s the last time, unless I go for Master’s and/or Ph/D. Most probably I’ll end up looking for a job I think I’ll miss my school days very much Anyway, I started school last week, which got my enthousiasm pumped up a bit, as I have some interesting classes, unlike last semeser Well, last year I thought they would be interesting, but they turned out a bloody disaster.

I took three classes this semester, combined with the software engineering capstone project (which I still am not officially registered in)

• COMP 471 – Computer graphics: The course sounds really interesting. I was a little hesitant at first, as it was announced that the course would change from its standard OpenGL format, but given the reputation of the prof, I think it will bea real great class. Didn’t regret that at all, as the class was filled with chics (something extremely rare in COMP courses), and the T.A. was hot
• COMP 472 – Artificial Intelligence: I was hesitating between this and COMP 474 – Expert systems. I was told that expert systems was an easy class, but not too rewarding, and the class was scheduled on a friday night, which is not really primetime for learning. So I chose 472 instead.
• GEOL 206 – Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Plate Techtonics: That’s one of two “basic science courses” I need to take. I’d rate it mildly on the interesting scale, and definately easy on the easiness scale: it’s just memorization.

With that, I should have an interesting semester. I got my laptop back into gear, after sending it back to replace the keyboard and hard disk. I installed Windows XP and Ubuntu, and I’m content with it. It should last me another couple of years.