Caltrops - Rants





	[quote name="Senor Barborito"][quote name="Fussbett"][quote name="Senor Barborito"]Have fun. This is the best part of computers. It's like getting a chance to put the perfect woman together, piece by sensuous piece. Mmmmmmm. Oh I KNOW you like it when I nmap you there, baby. Now play with those packets for daddy . . . . yeah, just like THAT.[/quote] This is the only time in my life I've wished we were best friends. I'd call^H^H^H^Hmessage you in AIM and tell you that I'd like you to come over and check out my new computer. Oh, and bring your tools. When you get here, you'd see that the computer is in fact, just cardboard boxed components -- but each with a pretty red bow on top. "To Barbie, IT man of my heart, love 'Bette." Then I'd play Burnout2 on the Xbox while you (sensuously) rebuilt my computer. I'd have to forcibly remove you right before you installed Morrowind or Planetscape, of course, but until then it would be the perfect summer afternoon.[/quote] As long as I know you've played Planescape and Thief all the way through, there's no reason to ruin a perfectly good virginal installation with such trappings. Me, I don't think everyone should be as addicted to them as I am - just that they've tried it once. Morrowind is nice, but if you've played GTA3 you've already seen a slicker presentation of the same point - which is the one Will Wright is trying to make <a href="http://www.edventure.com/pcforum/wright.cfm">here</a>, but without the big words. Fresh installations should remain as innocent and untouched as possible for as long as possible. I format every three months so I can maintain my gaming habit but still feel a relative purity is present in what I'm using. I hate cruft. I hate buildup. It's one of the huge reasons I like OpenBSD's 'nothing included, all the 'programs' are in the ports tree' approach (though I always compile manually from source rather than use ports) - everything that I do not need immediately is a very real and deadly serious <i>threat</i> to me and everything I do, and should be removed. I don't install things because I 'might need them later', and I don't keep CDs full of music I'm not going to actually listen to later, or movies I'm not going to watch several times later (Fight Club is the only DVD I've ever payed for - all the others are presents I wish had been cash). They all constitute threats to me just by being on my system - they might be a vector for a virus, or something worse. I also make lists of every file on my OpenBSD installations both before and after installation, and then diff them so that I know everything that was installed by that program. Everything unnecessary on your system is actively trying to kill you, to call back to whomever and report on your every activity and let them do hideous things to your machines in your sleep. So, no, as long as you've actually played both games through once, I wouldn't tell you to install them - the worst I'd do is try to get you to install BSD on one of your older machines. As for being your 'best friend', hell, I'll build machines for complete strangers if they can open their mouths without pissing me off. --SB [/quote]