DarkLordofthePenguins

I've found that the best way to learn a mathematical or theoretical subject is to work things out in your head. Think about the material you're learning and come up with your own theorems, corollaries, proofs, etc. That's what I've been doing with the computer science subjects I'm studying. In a display of self-importance I've decided to call these DarkLord's Laws. Though to be fair, these have probably been worked out by countless people before me, and they're not the kind of thing I would ...

It seems Microsoft's marketing strategies have been going steadily downhill. Here are some things I've noticed.

1. They can't put attractive people in their ads.
If you look at a banner ad for an iPhone or Android, you'll probably see a hot girl holding a phone. Ads for Microsoft products tend to show homely people and/or people in business suits. This has the effect of 1) not attracting people's eyes, and 2) once again associating MS with office work.

2. ...

I've found quite a lot of pages on skills that geeks should have in order to ascend to the rank of geekdom. A lot of them, of course, are written by people who have no idea what geekhood is all about (pseudo-geeks I call them). Take this page for example. This is just one of the many posts on the Geek Dad blog on Wired. Granted, these posts are not really serious, and this is Wired after all, so you have to expect this sort of thing, but still this page succeeded in pushing my Geek Elitist buttons. ...

Lately it has become increasingly apparent that the US government really is controlled by corporations. America is a command economy, a dictatorship, except the American dictatorship is ruled by CEOs rather than by a monarch. This is shown by the fact that the US government is willing to commit acts that will do far-reaching damage to everyone for the benefit of big businesses. This can be seen in SOPA and PIPA as well as the takedown of MegaUpload and a lot of other recent behavior.
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Hello again. I'm making this post from Lynx, per my decision to move to the command-line (detailed in my last blog post). I've never posted an entire blog in Lynx, and I'm still trying to get the hang of it, so the formatting might come out kind of funny.

I've started doing more with TeX and troff, the two primary text formatters for Unix. For those of you who don't know, troff is the typesetting system that came before TeX. It has the advantage of being simpler and (through the ...

I have recently made the decision to move as much of my computer life as possible to the terminal. This means finding CLI alternatives to GUI apps that I use, and possibly learning to better utilize the command-line apps I can use now. Mind you, I'm already a command-line junkie and use the terminal every day. But now I'm taking it a step further; I plan to start using the CLI almost exclusively, only using the GUI for things that are inherently graphical.

Now why would one want ...

I'm not going to bother writing to Steve Ballmer directly as I know he doesn't have the time to read all his emails, so I just thought I'd put this on CodeCall for the world to see:

Dear Steve,

I understand that your job carries great responsibility and it must be a challenge to live up to Bill Gates, so you must feel a lot of pressure to dominate the market. However, there are a few things I still don't understand:

1. Why do you hate Google? You haven't ...