Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

Gratification¶

444 words

Read this on books and this on various things after following the links.
FruitMenu for X.3 is out. I had tried some previous version ages ago and thought it wasn't worth the money. But as I frequently find myself thinking 'Well, this should be in the Apple menu', I cracked now and bought a copy. It comes with an included – and very ugly – application for instant online registration. Apart from its looks it's very nice: instant gratification and no need to enter a serial number (although I got a copy by mail just in case). Sadly, no German version yet.
Yeah, so I am an idiot who first spends €100 on an operating system and then spends another €10 to have a completely trivial feature that should have been in said operating system in the first place. I feel like Apple owe me €10.
... it's not that I can't afford that money or am not willing to sort everything out cleanly and legally. But being cheated and ripped off feels much worse than dealing with the distant and blurred entity known as 'the law' nonchalantly. This looks similar to the dilemma with the music industry. While I love having new records and supporting bands I like, the very fact that every act of doing so will mean a some of my good money will go into the coffers of a moronic industry that is eager to insult and sue their customers. If 'helping honest people to stay honest' is one of your aims, you may want to make the honest way of doing things attractive.
You won't believe it, but after winning a CD and a DVD recently, I won again. This time people at a club were giving away what looks like spare/old CD singles, in part promo stuff. Meaning I've got quite a few of those now. Some by bands I know (Whyte Seeds, Pinkostar, Apocalyptica, Feeder and a Mogwai DVD), some by bands I don't (Murderdolls, Mustasch, The Blood Brothers, Project Pitchfork, The Break, Let it Burn, Clipper), a sampler, two CD release posters and a set of Sigur Rós stencils.
The night out wasn't great though, as there was a bunch of guys who were very aggressive towards everybody else.
The Register on BOINC distributed computing:
Users will be able to set say 20 percent of their spare CPU power to work on global warming...
This just begged to be taken out of context because it illustrates the in my opinion important issue that many of those 'spare' cycles aren't actually 'spare' as processors can use a lot more energy when running on a full load.