Digital Wanderer

We live as long as we fly

It's there

And also my Soulseek finally started working and the FTP isn't dropping. Apparently, it wasn't working due to the Checksum Offload bug on nVidia network cards described on the Soulseek forum. Down with the incompetent hardware makers!
Ooh, we're gonna do some downloading now!!! 
FOR all those months that that I was deprived of this and only downloaded damn porn sci-fi shows!

Read more →

Andromeda

Babylon 5 is over, and now I’m watching the sci-fi series "Andromeda". Its creator is the same man who made the famous Star Trek. The series is about the huge, ultra-modern and ultra-sophisticated spaceship "Andromeda". Thanks to a treacherous attack by the followers of Friedrich Nietzsche (Nietzscheans), this spaceship became trapped in a black hole and therefore missed the most interesting part—the collapse of a vast civilization known as the Systems Commonwealth ("the common good"?), which encompassed more than a million worlds.
Before becoming trapped in the singularity, the entire crew except the captain was evacuated, and so 300 years later, when some antiquities hunters  pulled the little ship out of the hole, they spent a long time figuring out who would get the prize.
In the end, the immensely talented captain persuaded the criminal element to become the vessel’s crew in order to revive the Commonwealth's former glory and restore civilization from the ruins into which it had been driven by the Nietzscheans and  the Magog—an evil alien race.
What can I say about it: the show is colorful and American, everyone runs around, fusses about, and makes a show of being busy. The special effects are up to scratch, and the picture is simply brilliant, since I downloaded it from www.thepiratebay.org as an HDTV/DVD rip. The music is quite decent in places, and there’s even some atmosphere here and there.
On the downside, there are plot and technological blunders, as well as a general vagueness and lack of thought. All in all, it’s watchable, if only for the colorful characters: the ship’s computer in the form of a pretty mulatto girl, a buff black Nietzschean with braids and savage muscles in the role of the "tough guy", and a short dude  with a crooked grin—an engineering genius named Zelazny.

Read more →

Wikipedia

An interesting discussion has unfolded at avva's about Wikipedia.
https://avva.livejournal.com/1539534.html
I personally think Wikipedia is a great thing.
What I have to say on the matter:

  1. Technical and reference ("natural science") data, which is only of interest to specialists, is often written by specialists, and nobody is going to mess it up. Its reliability there is quite sufficient to get an idea about the subject. Whether it's the fruit Lychee, Hamming codes or my hometown of Daugavpils (these being the first articles that came to mind)
    2)As the number of editing participants grows, the law of quantity transitioning into quality will kick in. In the presence of blatantly incorrect data, any remotely popular article will be immediately fixed. And articles where a lot depends on the point of view are never going to be perfect anywhere or at any time anyway.

Read more →

Holy crap

While searching for some tricky things, I ventured deep into the Internet and found this project.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060507204848/https://www.ourmedia.org/
It lets anyone upload any of their own creations (music, photos, videos) for permanent storage and distribution under a license of your choice.
Hosting for all these countless petabytes of information is provided by the famous organization that archives the Internet — the Internet Archive.
It's still in alpha, but it already looks pretty sophisticated. I ought to explore it further.

Read more →