Morph3ous’s Weblog

Note to the American people, the words liberal and conservative are useless. These words are thrown around instead of intelligently debating the issues at hand. We need to express exactly what actions a government official has taken that we feel are clearly wrong, or what a news personality said that we feel distorts the facts. Why do I feel it is so important that we have more intelligent discourse and stop bickering using words that are too general to be of use?
(more…)

You may have noticed that certain words on this site have a double-underline. These are ads from Kontera. The company has developed a javascript application to choose words and phrases for which they may have a useful advertisement. If you wish to see what they have to offer, you can mouse over the link. If you are uninterested in any offers, simply do not roll your mouse over the double-underlined words and you will not be bothered.
(more…)

Microsoft has recently released its Zune DAP. One exciting feature is the ability to share all of your songs via wireless to your friends. There is a problem.
(more…)

Treehugger reports on the power use of the latest chips from Intel and AMD. It looks as if both companies are making enormous strides in the performance-per-watt arena.

If you are planning on buying a new computer, take a look at the results. It’s getting easier to have the ultimate in computing power while being a bit more friendly to the earth.

Steve Irwin was known as being a bit on the wild side. He took lots of chances while taping his shows. This was a display of how connected he felt with nature. Irwin had set up Australia Zoo, a wildlife park. The site is unfortunately down at the moment.
(more…)

I had come to the conclusion that pirating software was not at all in my best interests quite some time ago. I just found Vixenk.net’s post
Why Should I Use Free Software as Opposed to Pirating Non-free Software. The author lays down the argument against pirating software far more eloquently than I could have. She also provides a list to some free programs that are very useful.

Found this from:Hugg / The American Voting System: HACKED

Watch this video, and I think that you too will be convinced that we need to have a paper trail in our elections. Not even just a paper trail that is printed out at the end of the day at each polling station. We need to have each voting machine print our vote in front of our very own eyes. We then need to be able to confirm that the information is indeed correct, and then place it in a locked ballot box.

I remember the first time that I used one of those machines I remarked to one of my friends how I did not trust them. This is coming from someone who has been working in IT all my life. Now my friend knows that I was not just being paranoid!

The GPLv3 license is in the works. One of the provisions is to restrict software from using DRM. This, argues Linus Torvalds, is not the job of a license. He is against these new provisions. The article below goes on to defend the license.

I have been deeply against DRM for some time. Linus Torvald’s objection to the license really makes me think. He is the one who got the linux operating system going. I respect his point of view, and am not sure on which side of the fence I stand about the license itself. I am still against DRM.
(more…)

The wisdom of the crowd is definitely a powerful force.

TheStar.com - Wikipedia handles Colbert:

…Colbert stated, if enough people alter the page on Wikipedia, it’s fact.

It should have been the biggest threat to the institution of Wikipedia to date. It was a condemnation of the site’s credibility. And it didn’t come from the Times, or from some retired political refugee from the Kennedy era.

It came from someone cool. Colbert, after all, has some serious credibility among the crowd who use and contribute to Wikipedia.

Within a day, Colbert’s report had hit some of the Net’s geek nerve centres, Slashdot.org and Fark.com. Wikipedia’s protection log was recording ongoing attempts at vandalism.

There was just one problem with the prank: Colbert was ultimately proven wrong.

Although the servers were tested, soon after Colbert began ranting about wikiality on his show, the encyclopedia had locked down the page on elephants and Colbert’s biography.

The state of healthcare in our nation has been in bad shape for quite a while. I will elaborate more on that in a future post. Free Software Magazine brought a new issue to my attention.

The debate between proprietary vs non-proprietary software has been raging on for as long as I can remember. In this article the debate enters the healthcare arena.

Your data or your life | Free Software Magazine:

Intracare is the publisher of a popular practice management system called Dr. Notes. When some doctors balked at a drastic increase in their annual software lease, they were cut off from accessing their own patients’ information.

(more…)