Since I couldn’t post this yesterday from home, as my home internet connection is down, I’m posting this quick from work.

When any movie is released "straight to video", it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that the movie is garbage. I can’t think of a single movie that was released "straight to video" that I have ever watched. In fact, I can only name one such movie: the fourth American Pie movie. I’m sure it was absolute trash.

While on a recent trip, I was enjoying watching the television show "Arrested Development" on DVD. "Arrested Development" was a critically acclaimed show that for some reason was never able to find an audience on air. It’s a great show, and during it’s two and one half season run, it was probably the best comedy out there. Alas, it’s now off the air.

Is it financially possible for a television series to be released straight to DVD, say ten episodes, promote it like a movie, and make money? Could the show be picked up by a network later? How much does it cost to film ten episodes? Would this open comedies to be more creative? Could low budget homemade series be possible.

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but I would like to know. I think if the economics were right, we could see a lot of good tv again.

I don’t mean the biological process of change that is backed up by mounds and mounds of evidence. I am talking about the program Evolution. Since version 2, it has been a total disaster of a program. I’m an advanced user of Linux, but I also don’t want to spend a lot of time futzing with the basic software components I use. In no particular order, these are my gripes:

1. IMAP support is slow. My whole box would often be pinned trying to deal with 9 IMAP accounts. Thunderbird has no such issues.
2. More than one instance of Evolution can’t work from the same IMAP server without conflicts. Thunderbird has no such issues.
3. Everytime I start Evolution 2.2 up on my Fedora Core 4 laptop, it crashes when trying to access my exchange account.
4. Trying to compile Evolution 2.4 is more trouble than it should be, and there exists no documentation that outlines a surefire way to compile it.
5. The shared/public folder handling is retarded. It used to be in pre-2.x versions, that shared/public were just browsed like normal mail folders. In the new versions, there exists this retarded method of making shared/public folders your “favorites”. Guess what? It doesn’t handle sub-folders. Idiotic.

I’ve tried compiling, I’ve tried reinstalling components, and clearing my settings, all to no avail. Evolution is now a piece of garbage software, buggier than Outlook and way, way less stable than Thunderbird. Thunderbird has been my choice of mail program for the last year, because of its stability, clean features, and overall speed. Never say never, but I don’t forsee going back to Evolution. It’s grown old and bloated.

I’m sure some die hard Evolution fans could try to convince me that “this new version fixes this and that” but who cares. I’m tired of struggling with it. You want Evolution to become a top email client? Fix the bugs, and have the interface make sense.

My last post was a slight departure from the normal posts that I have been writing. My fiancee Kelly pointed me to the “GOD or NOT” blog carnival, and after my recent experience at TAM4, I felt obliged to write something. Religion and the most recent attempts to put religion into our schools at the expense of science have been on my mind a lot lately. As a strong athiest and a die hard believer in the scientific process, it hurts my brain to see our country getting dumber and dumber about science, while China and India are stocking up on brainpower.

Right now, the focus of religious zealots seems to be the American biology class. However, as Phil Plait pointed out in his TAM4 presentation, it won’t be too long before the godiots start attacking other sciences. As his blog as pointed out, it’s perhaps already started.

My particular expertise in science is with computers and internet technology. I’m not sure I can imagine a way religious nuts could interfere with that, but perhaps I’m not being imaginative enough. If they do try to interfere, I’m afraid myself and other hackers will be at a big disadvantage. Not because they would be right, but because of the politically apathetic nature of hackers. When it comes to politics, most hackers get bored and move on. They’re not involved in the process, and they are very cynical about the whole thing.

When it comes time to lobby for legislation or policy, will there be the hacker point of view in the mix? Who represents us? Is there a PAC or 529 that represents hackers? Doubtful. Most technology is represented in Washington by billion dollar companies, who are only trying to protect their turf. Read Robert Cringely’s latest column to look at a current example. Think back about how many large companies want to outlaw reverse engineering, and then think how well armed the hacker side is.

Sure we have the EFF to a point, and a few other small groups who focus on free speech on the Internet. I’m just not sure they will be much use when Congress is trying to debate issues such as QOS TCP packet preference laws. We know how clueless Congress is. They’re a big joke. But hackers are going to have to get involved in the process or technology issues will be decided by the lawyer infestation in Washington who get their information from large corporations. The time is not to be so cynical as to not vote. It’s time to get informed, vote, and write your congressman.

I caught this on Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog. Utah is moving its state even farther back into the dark ages, with a clumsy attempt to bring religion into the science classroom.

Here is Phil’s post, and here is the original article.
We’re becoming a nation of ignorant, channel surfing, couch potatos, so ignorant of science that we treat scientific theories like “That’s, like, just your opinion man!”. We’re going to be passed by another country, probably China, before I die, and it’s depressing to be watching the death spiral.

I’m going to the Amaz!ng Meeting this weekend in Vegas, where I’ll be surrounded by intelligent people and my brother. Maybe that’s what I need to get back the “faith”.

Two more West Virginia miners have died due to another accident in a coal mine. Since 1999, 234 people have died because of coal mining accidents, according to USA Today. In addition, there are no definitive studies describing the number of people who die from mining related diseases, but the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health estimates that 1 million have a risk for Black Lung disease, 100,000 that are high risk, and 59,000 that are expected to have adverse effects. If coal mining hadn’t been around for as long as it has, would we still be doing it?

Enter nuclear power. Wired magazine has done a couple articles on nuclear power in the past year, and how advanced it has become. However, it’s been over thirty years since a nuclear power plant came online in the United States. In Europe, nuclear power plants are common, and there haven’t been any accidents. Events like Cherynobl are unlikley to happen here in this country because of the reactor design, and forget Three Mile Island. That will never happen again here.

As for spent fuel rods, Jimmy Carter made it against regulations to reuse spent fuel rods, even though they retain most of their energy. It was a clumsy attempt to discourage nuclear weapons proliferation. Nuclear waste would still be an issue, however, it’s only a problem for probably a hundred years or so. Right now, we can’t do much with it, but surely technology in the future will.

Don’t believe the “store it for 10,000 years” crowd. We will solve the nuclear waste problem at some point. Right now, we have people dieing from coal mining, we’re dependent on oil from a bunch of corrupt OPEC nation, and we pollute every time we burn coal or oil. I can’t see one logical reason anymore for not having nuclear. It’s time to kick up the research, ignore NIMBY complaints, and get some self-sufficiency.

This week the “people in the know” were all outraged to learn that the “podfather” (a pretentious name if I ever heard one) Adam Curry was caught editing the history of podcasting on Wikipedia. Curry tried to blow off the incident as his own ignorance of the Wiki editing system. Um, the so-called inventor of podcasting can’t figure out how to edit with Wiki? Yeah, right. In any case, Curry ended up taking a lot of heat from the blog and podcasting community. Dave Winer also added his two cents, I’ve seen Kevin Mark’s side of it from #joiito. So what do I think?

I think Curry has become obsessed with the title of “podfather” and sees this as a way to get back into the national spotlight. Really, before podcasting Curry was just the big-haired VJ from MTV who as long past his prime. Yeah, I know he did some “cool” internet things with On-Ramp and THINK, Inc, however, he was no celebrity then. Now, he’s back in wired, he’s on Sirius, and a million people are reading blogs about him. Ego gone amuck.

I don’t know if we’ll ever really know who started podcasting. Maddox surely has his own opinion, and a video of Kevin Marks showing of podcasting a full nine months before Curry’s ipodder script is now available. If I had to guess, I would say a lot of people talked about it, played with it, and by a stroke of luck, Curry became the podfather. No one should denigrate what he’s done to push podcasting, but someone needs to give him a kick in the nuts so he can get back to pushing podcasting again, and not just himself.

Does comment spam work? Does anyone have any evidence it works? Ever hear of a success story with something like “We were doing nothing, until the comment spam campaigns began.” ? Surely, with the amount of comment spam my old blog site www.jxie.com received, it must be gaining critical mass. That old site gets lousy traffic, no one reads it anymore, but it gets 5-10 pieces of comment spam a day.

The spam is always centered around poker and drugs. Drugs doesn’t surprise me; poker does a little . I know it’s hugely popular, but I didn’t think companies needed to stoop that low. Of course, I don’t know if any real company does comment spam. Does any one know?

This post will not be covering anything particularly new, but I wanted to post about why I use open source software.

I have been a Linux user for years now. For a while I slipped into an Windows only environment I admit, but that was during a time when I thought the application support for Linux wasn’t up to the task of fufilling my needs.

However, I then came across an article written by a gentleman who was afraid that if he remained married to the Windows platform, sometime in the future Microsoft would basically force him to pay to access his own data because the file formats were closed. A light bulb went off in my head. I was using Outlook for my mail, Office for my documents, and, ugh, Internet Explorer because Netscape 4.7 was horrid. I immediately started moving my work, my information, my stuff, over to linux. I stopped using Outlook and started using Evolution. I bought a copy of Staroffice to deal with documents and such. And I started using Netscape on linux again. All my data was moved over into formats I could be sure would be open years in the future.

Now, years later, my Windows box is relegated to being a mixer for all my computer’s sound output and hosting the occasional Civilization III game. I use Firefox for browsing, Thunderbird for email, Gaim for instant messaging, and OpenOffice.org for my documents and such. It all works beautifully, and I know I’m using safe formats. Since OpenOffice 2.0 came out, I’ve moved everything over to the OpenDocument format, which means my documents now conform to an emerging ISO standard.

My setup would also work perfectly fine on a Windows box too. All the applications I listed are available for Windows.

To me, this has been the power and value of Open Source. There is great, free, and open software out there for people to use, and there is no longer any need to use anything from Microsoft for 90% of computer tasks. Does any student in highschool really need a copy of Word or Works? What about the parents who do their budgeting on a spreadsheet? Wouldn’t OpenOffice.org Calc work just fine? Of course it would. Open Source software creates all sorts of oppurtunities for people to really put computers to work. I will always be a big fan of the value Open Source has brought us.

I don’t now how I missed this podcast…

http://www.twit.tv

It’s just how I would want to do a podcast if I had time…