Author: azrifleman

Big News Forthcomimg

Assuming we don’t get scooped in the next week or two, it looks like the small group I do Astro research with has made a cool discovery.
More details after we publish. No sense in counting our chickens before they hatch. I’m just excited though.

On The End Of The Wirkd

I’ve been playing some Fallout 3 recently, and if the end of the world ever happens, I’d like to think that life in such a world would be similar to certain aspects of the game.
Specifically, that people would be generally decent folk, and continue to help advance human understanding, even in hostile environments.
That said, I suspect that in reality, things would be a bit more like the bands of raiders and other predatory groups in the game. Oh well.
Update: I obviously meant “world”, not “wirkd”. Stupid iPod keyboard. I’m going to leave it unchanged for maximum hilarity.

Sorry

Sorry for not posting more about shooty-related stuff. Things have been rather busy on my end, and I simply haven’t had time to go to the range recently.
That said, I am ogling a Swiss K31 rifle quite mightily, and once my C&R comes back with my updated address, I suspect that it may be in my future.

“Proprietary” as a positive selling point?

Why is it that companies use the word “proprietary” as a selling point?
For example, a big shipping company has a partnership with the US Postal Service to provide various package-management and expedited-delivery services (( Mostly by moving the package through their own network to the post office closest to the recipient, then handing it over to the post office for last-mile delivery. Why this is better than sending something entirely by UPS/FedEx or entirely through the post office, I don’t know. )) and, as part of the list of things they claim make their service better, they mention “proprietary software”.
Other companies mention proprietary formulas, methods, etc.
Do people usually think of this as a positive thing? Maybe it’s my background in science (essentially all discoveries go through peer review and are published for all to see) and being a bit of a free software geek, but I don’t see proprietary things as a good thing.

“Enterprise-class”, my ass

The university has licensed a particular brand of anti-virus software for all students, faculty, staff, etc. The department I do IT work for (my day job) has a central console that allows administrators to monitor the status of the anti-virus software on all the computers on the network.
I know it well, as I was the one who set it up.
Unfortunately, it’s a piece of crap and is two major versions out of date (the university only got the newer versions a short while ago). It’s also not going to be supported soon, so we had to upgrade it.
Most end-user software seems to handle in-place updates really well. Mozilla Firefox, Windows, even Acrobat Reader update really easily. Certain other software, like Apache, MySQL, and other such things also update reasonably smoothly.
This anti-virus console is not one of those things.
I honestly couldn’t think of something that’s more of a pain in the ass to upgrade.
It turned out to be faster and easier to simply install the newer console on a different server, configure it by hand, and then manually re-install the client software on the 200 or so desktop systems (again, by hand) than it was to try to upgrade the existing console.
The new one’s quite a bit better than the old one, but there’s still no built-in “upgrade in-place” feature, so in a few years someone’s (hopefully I’ll be in grad school by then) going to have upgrade to the next version. That’ll suck; a lot of the configuration is stored in some unknown way, and not accessible to the GUI or the configuration files. If even the tiniest thing gets out of whack (which happens on occasion), diagnosing the problem (not to mention fixing it) is a massive pain in the ass.
Compare that to Windows Server Update Services — a simple Group Policy change on the clients (( We don’t have an Active Directory, so we can’t push it from a central system, but have to do the changes by hand. There’s a lot of inertia and legacy systems here. Oh well. )) and the clients get all their Windows Updates from the WSUS server, which can manage which updates are to be deployed to clients. Quick, simple, and scalable, all through an intuitive GUI.
Say what you will about Microsoft, but they have enterprise-class management down pat. This anti-virus company, though…not so much…

Yum

I’m a big fan of scotch whisky.
Evidently the Japanese went to Scotland a while back and learned quite a few tricks from them. I bought a bottle of exceedingly tasty Yamazaki 12-year-old whisky. Nom indeed, particularly for the price ($35/bottle). Takes like fine scotch.
Highly recommended.

*jawdrop*

As mentioned not too long ago, I purchased a case of Prvi Partizan M855. I haven’t taken it out to the range yet, but their M193 is outstanding, and I suspect the M855 will be excellent as well. Having all my AR mags filled and still have about half a case in the closet is a good feeling. Still, I think I may have misplaced a few mags in the move, so there might be more that need filling.
It’s good to see that some ammo prices are coming down and availability is going up…but the price differential between 9mm and .45 ACP is still absurd. As an apples-to-apples comparison, I picked the same brand and common bullet weight in each caliber: 115gr 9mm and 230gr .45 ACP, both with FMJ bullets, both by Magtech.
9mm: $199/1000
.45 ACP: $420/1000
I realize that .45 ACP does require a bit more resources (the bullets are twice as massive and the cases are a bit bigger) to manufacture, so I expect the .45 to cost a bit more, but they’re still both exceedingly popular (at least in the US; I don’t know about the global demand for .45) and you’d think that economies of scale could bring the difference in price down a bit.