Someone else out there decides to have a rant about pennies being a useless part of the US currency. While I travel through USA I inevitably end up with loads of pennies as they had the intelligent idea that you shouldn’t know how much tax to pay until you hit the counter, ending up with some bizarre non-5 or 0 cent count. It’s really hard to get the right number of pennies out when there’s about 5 people behind you urging you to get a move on.
In my view, they should:
1) Declare the price up front. None of this calculated tax nonsense when you get to the counter. You can anticipate and get the right change out before you hit the counter.
2) Switch to a minimum 5 cent denomination. Maybe even 10 cents.
3) Ditch $1 notes in favour of coins and bring in $2 coins or more widely circulate $2 notes like in Australia. No more grubby “I found it in a toilet” $1 notes!
Anyhow, usually what I do in USA is find one of those penny squashing machines that turns them into a surfboard or something, that’s about all they’re good for.
The new game Guitar Rising by GameTank apparently takes the Guitar Hero phenomenon to the next level by using real guitars instead of those guitar shaped controllers. By using a USB microphone you play the guitar to play the music (who’d have thought of it!) to pass levels, check it out here from Gizmodo.
Read about it from Engadget here. Pretty good reproduction of the iPhone called the HiPhone. Don’t think it’ll last long what with Apple getting onto them… Can’t China make its own decent products that don’t rip some other company off?
Linus once again has decided to put his foot in his mouth with sweeping comments about how great his kernel is. I remember the last time I commented about something like this, he was whining about how EFI was crap since it reminded (yes, merely reminded) him about ACPI which he claimed was crap as well and that real men toss the BIOS aside the second they get the chance when booting up.
Anyhow, here’s the comment from SMH, read the full interview here:
Q. Do you have a favourite between Leopard and Vista?
A. I don’t think they’re equally flawed. I think Leopard is a much better system. On the other hand, (I’ve found) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary. I think OS X is nicer than Windows in many ways, but neither can hold a candle to my own (Linux). It’s a race to second place!
Well, given that the usability of the Linux kernel on its own is “crap” and that Linus owes a lot to GNU for providing all those tools that the kernel uses, I think he hasn’t got much of a leg to stand on. Given he also didn’t write ext2 or ext3, I don’t think he’s qualified to make statements about other file systems at this point in time in such sweeping generalisations.
I decided to check out the new release of Vexille since I was interested to see how CG is progressing since AppleSeed was released a few years ago. A full review is on TwitchFilm.net here, but the basic outline is agent Vexille is sent in by the US to check out what’s going on with Japan since it isolated itself 10 years ago and suspected to have engaged in forbidden development of android technology. The rest of the movie involves Vexille meeting Maria (a Japanese scientist with a link to the past) and taking out the evil Daiwa corporation after a botched infiltration mission leaves her stranded in Japan on her own.
Visually it’s great and head and shoulders above AppleSeed, here’s a few images of the main heroines:
Vexille, the main character, voiced by Kuroki Meisa. She’s not Japanese however, but could be if she didn’t have blue eyes.
Maria, the Japanese scientist who appears to be leading a resistance group against Daiwa, voiced by Matsuyuki Yasuko. Interestingly enough, her character looks pretty close to what Meisa looks like in real life:
TV talk show host Montel Williams lost his job after voicing his disgust at the excessive video coverage of Heath Ledger’s death when he claims we should be respectful of the 28 US citizens who died in Iraq since the start of the year defending US interests.
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