Day: October 31, 2001

A Prime Example of Military Intelligence

This really belongs on Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. The United States has been airdropping food over Afghanistan. The food comes in a plastic-wrapped square yellow container. Guess what else comes in yellow? That’s right, unexploded cluster bombs. So now, the United States is broadcasting warnings over radio trying to teach illiterate Afghanis the difference between a yellow can-shaped cluster bomb and a yellow square-shaped food parcel with the warning to “Please, please exercise caution when approaching unidentified yellow objects in areas that have been recently bombed.”

Makes about as much sense as the Pentagon’s repeated claims that they are not at war with the Afghanistan people. Okay, fine, then why the hell are they dropping cluster bombs, which kill indiscriminately by design?

Source:

U.S. Warns Afghans of Yellow Cluster Bomblets. Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters, October 29, 2001.

Gamespot Reviews Civ III

Gamespot has a detailed review of Civilization III. I was really hyped about the game until I got to this part,

Also, as the game neared completion, Firaxis decided not to ship with multiplayer support. It has suggested that multiplayer features might be added later, but if you’re looking for a multiplayer grand-strategy game, then Civilization III isn’t the place to look for the time being.

Ugh. I can’t believe they shipped this game without multiplayer, especially after Firaxis’ Jeff Briggs had told Gamespy, “Don’t worry, there will be multiplayer capability over a LAN and Internet.”

I’ll stick with Civ2 until they get that bug worked out.

Do People at Microsoft Actually Use The Company’s Software?

ZDNET has a story about Amazon.Com’s use of Linux which the companys says saves it a lot of money. If you read the fine print, though, the main reason it saves them money is because the OS is free in dollar terms — they claim it costs them about as much to administer as Windows or Unix, but the low cost of the OS and the fact it will run on low-end beige boxes produces a large cost saving.

Rather than point that out, however, Microsoft’s Doug Miller steps in it big time, saying that when companies deploy Linux they,

end up being in the operating systems business, managing software updates and security patches while making sure the multitude of software packages don’t conflict with each other. That’s the job of a software vendor like Microsoft.

Has Miller ever actually used any of Microsoft’s products in a real world environment? The nightmare of having to deal with a litany of software and security patches alogn with conflicts between software packages is practically a textbook definition of Windows.