burn the sorbonne http://www.burnthesorbonne.com/stuff/index.php More reasons to be sad about America http://www.burnthesorbonne.com/stuff/index.php?entry=entry080625-131417
Anyway, once in a while the legislature tries to do stuff that's worthwhile, like prevent school districts from blowing tons of money on teachers' salaries and other illegitimate stuff. Unfortunately, none of the good laws ever come to fruition, since the New York State United Teachers lobby, the AIPAC of state politics, would never tolerate a law that might cut into teachers' salaries.

Public school teachers need to get over themselves and realize that they're already getting way more than they deserve. Teachers whine all the time about how hard they work for such little pay. In reality, teaching is one of the only professions in the country that offers absolute job security once you get tenure, steady annual pay increases, a six-hour workday and half of the year off. If teachers got what they deserved, they would have to worry like everyone else about losing their jobs or not getting raises and would actually work forty hours a week all year. Even French people almost work harder than teachers in this country, which is sad.

Moreover, teachers like to talk about how they deserve their gravy train because their role in society is so crucial for bringing up the next generation of skilled Americans, which makes everyone happy by keeping our corporations profitable, et cetera. When I was in high school, however, most of my teachers were pretty incompetent. With the exception of the one teacher in the school who taught introductory calculus, my math teachers knew little more than the algebra and geometry that they taught. I had history teachers who couldn't come up with a grammatically valid sentence no matter how long they tried. I was once told that the Second World War ended in the 1960s and that the Magna Carta was signed by Bolsheviks in 1932. My economics class taught me a lot about playing monopoly, but I still don't understand basic economic concepts. A handful of my teachers did know stuff and worked pretty hard, but they were few and far between. If teachers want to be taken seriously, they should take the time to learn stuff before telling us how American education will fail if we don't preserve the current system.

Anyway, the bill to stop teachers from being ridiculous is dead, and the state legislature is back on vacation, so I don't think it's worth pretending that things will ever change.]]> Surprise: Cornell doesn't know how to run a mail server http://www.burnthesorbonne.com/stuff/index.php?entry=entry080617-184441
I've always had my doubts about the competence of Cornell Information Technologies, but I never thought it would get this bad. In the past, the worst things that CIT has done were making a convoluted website that was apparently designed by three-year-olds and steadfastly refusing to support Linux, or think about supporting Linux, or admit that Linux even exists. But it's brought its incompetence to a whole new level with this mail fiasco.

There are plenty of fourteen-year-olds on the Ubuntu forums who know how to run a mail server. I don't understand how all of CIT's professionally managed servers could go down for so long, and how Cornell could apparently not have a contingency plan for dealing with this event. Maybe CIT should hire more fourteen-year-olds who how to use Linux, and fewer fifty-year-olds who think that Microsoft is the messiah.

Actually it's not fair to blame Microsoft, because apparently the mail servers were all Sun machines. Even though Sun is one of the largest corporate backers of a lot of the most important Linux-related projects, it's still ridiculous. Sun thinks it matters, so it threatens Microsoft and friends all the time, and all that comes out of it is a loss of more of Sun's dignity. Also, I tried to install Solaris, Sun's operating system, in a virtual machine once and it was a big disaster, even after all the nonsense I went through to register and be allowed to download the ten gigabytes' worth of DVD images. So that's another reason to dislike Sun and wonder why Cornell felt compelled to run its servers on Solaris when it could have used a perfectly free, open-source operating system like Linux or a BSD (answer: because Cornell is sickened by things that are free and openly available to everyone).

Anyway, I guess this is a good time to start migrating to a new mail account that's not likely to break for extended periods of time with no warning.]]> "Macs are Better": an unbiased review http://www.burnthesorbonne.com/stuff/index.php?entry=entry080611-113136 here. Titled "Macs are Better," the essay focuses specifically on why Macs are so superior to Windows and everything else for "graphic designers." Unfortunately, the author of the essay is an incompetent fascist. So I thought it be useful to point out some of his errors and bigotries below, by responding to specific extracts from his paper:

Unlike competing graphics production platforms on the market today (platforms based on Windows, Windows NT, or Unix), Macintosh is the only desktop platform specifically designed for graphics production.


First of all, if OS X was designed "specifically...for graphics production," then it's presumably not ideal for anything besides graphics production. Yet you could find a thousand idiots, especially on a college campus, who will tell you that they bought a Mac because it's "just better for word processing," "it's just better for listening to music," "it's just better for browsing the Internet safely (even though in reality Safari is a sieve when it comes to security)," "it's just better for blowing tons of money on stuff I don't need," et cetera. If Macs were designed specifically for graphics production, how can they also be so ideal for these other tasks? The idea that a Mac is somehow magically more suited to graphics production is a figment of Steve Jobs' imagination, and nothing more.

Second, anyone who knows anything can tell you that OS X is in fact a Unix-based operating system, which the author cites explicitly as an inferior graphics-production platform. After Apple fired him in the 1980s, Steve Jobs, instead of doing work himself, ripped off the computer scientists at Berkeley by jacking their Unix kernel to build an operating system that, when Apple finally took Steve Jobs back, became OS X. All of these Mac-touting idiots should do a little reading on Wikipedia and realize that their operating system is not very special; it's just a BSD with a lot of useless proprietary overhead. When Apple says, "Think Different," what it really means is, "Think about how to steal an open-source operating system produced by academia and, through clever marketing, sell it to people for way more than it's worth."

The Macintosh G3 and G4 platforms run significantly faster than the fastest Pentium systems, a critical issue when working with multi-megabyte Adobe Photoshop files.


Indeed, the G3 and G4 run so fast that Apple abandoned them in favor of Intel chips a couple years after this garbage was written.

Adobe Photoshop, which our graphic designers use for the majority of their work, runs more smoothly on the Macintosh platform than on Windows platforms, and "appears to be visibly slowed down by Windows memory management."[4] Memory management is better and more customizable on the Macintosh, allowing the user to easily and quickly allocate more memory to an application for memory-intensive graphics tasks.


I wasn't aware that graphic designers were also experts in low-level operating system functions. Apparently knowing how to point and click your way around Photoshop qualifies you to analyze the performance of memory registers under kernels whose source code has never been seen by anyone outside of Microsoft and Apple. Moreover, the whole point of a Mac is that virtually nothing, and least of all "memory management," is customizable, because Steve Jobs thinks that he knows better than you what you want. The only way to control how memory management is done is to use an open-source kernel like Linux, which this fascist probably never heard of.

Macintosh systems allow printing directly to any available printer, a trait that will free the graphics department from its dependency on the often unreliable LAN print server.


Newsflash: this is no longer 1982. Any operating system can print to whichever printer it feels like. You don't need to sell out to Steve Jobs to be able to use printers other than the "often unreliable LAN print server." This is another example of the subversion of reality by Apple's marketing campaigns.

Better graphics design tools available than on Windows


Where do people dream up garbage like this? OS X and Windows run the SAME EXACT GRAPHIC-DESIGN APPLICATIONS. Just because Steve Jobs has tried to delude you into thinking that only a $3,000 Mac is capable of editing a photo doesn't make it true. Steve Jobs lies.

More responsive mouse tracking—a critical factor for graphic productivity


Yeah, because every thousandth of a second that you have to wait for the cursor to be redrawn really cuts into productivity, even though no normal person can tell the difference.

Improved productivity in real-world graphics and publishing applications (Windows NT is almost 30% slower, and Windows 98 is almost 50% slower than the Macintosh platform).


What an idiot. Sure, Windows will run graphics applications and anything else a lot slower than a Mac if Windows is running on old hardware and the Mac is brand new. Vista on a quad-core processor will probably almost run faster than my Xubuntu on a ten-year-old Pentium III, too, but that doesn't make Vista faster than Linux. You can't make comparisons unless the hardware is exactly the same--which was impossible when this was written, since it wasn't yet possible to install Windows on a Mac (and Steve Jobs has spent his lifetime making sure, through legal and technical means, that no one can run OS X on anything besides the overpriced, unstable hardware sold by Apple).
Increased software proficiency, resulting in better quality and more creative work

If the Mac and the Windows machine are running the same exact productivity applications, how is the software of the Mac going to be more "proficient" than that of the Windows computer? Why can't these fascists get it through their heads that Adobe Photoshop is Adobe Photoshop, whether you run it on OS X, Windows or wine?

[A Mac environment will] attract the most productive and talented employees, because the best designers use the Mac platform


This is an archetypal example of the absurd egoism of people who buy Macs. Owning a Mac isn't your ticket to graphic-design excellence; learning how to be a good graphic designer is. In Macland, talent might correlate with the amount of money that you spend on grossly overpriced computers and software catered to the four-year-old mind. In reality, talent is not actually tied to consumerist activities, despite what so many marketing departments would like you to believe.]]> Life http://www.burnthesorbonne.com/stuff/index.php?entry=entry080603-194046
Fortunately, I left Cornell forever last week. I will probably miss the handful of people there who are not pretentious fascists, but I hope I never see anyone else from Cornell in my life, at least until they've learned to get over themselves. Graduating from Cornell does not make you a super-mega genius, no matter how many times you tell yourself that it does. It just makes you someone who paid too much for his education and/or comes from an illegitimately wealthy family of Cornell legacies. Instead of congratulating themselves all day long for being so smart, Cornell graduates should spend time doing something worthwhile. Then they could legitimately talk about being smart. Law school and investment banking do not generally constitute something worthwhile. Graduate school in history is probably also not worthwhile, but I'm not worried about becoming a super-mega genius.

Anyway, now that I graduated, I'm unemployed and have nothing productive to do all day until I go to graduate school in August. I thought about going back to work for the fascists at Price Chopper, but no one deserves that. Instead, I figured that I could spend all summer learning more about Linux and doing other computer-nerd stuff, since I'm going to have to revert to being a history nerd soon enough. My list of anticipated projects includes building a server to host this website, so that I can be done with the incompetent fascists who currently host it on their unresponsive server. I also plan on playing with bash scripting. Hopefully these things will sustain me till August.]]> Mai soixante-huit http://www.burnthesorbonne.com/stuff/index.php?entry=entry080513-215759
In May 1968, a lot of kids in France decided that it was lame to be obsessed with buying stuff and respecting illegitimate authorities, so they occupied Nanterre and the Sorbonne. Then more French people became upset as well, which caused a lot of problems for a lot of illegitimate authorities. The French kids built barricades all over the Latin Quarter, a third of the country went on strike, De Gaulle ran away to Baden-Baden (which is where a great grandmother of mine was born, incidentally) and more fun things happened. Unfortunately, De Gaulle eventually came back and things calmed down, and French people apparently expended so much energy in 1968 that they're still recovering now, judging by how un-hardcore they are and how little they work today. Nonetheless, although modern French people are pathetic, and although we've reverted to a world where almost everyone believes all this garbage about "liberal democracy" and spends all day buying useless consumerist nonsense, the actions of the French in 1968 are very inspiring.

Indeed, for those of you who are still in the dark, May 1968 is the inspiration for my domain name. The name was also informed by the fact that I bought it just before I left to go deal with Sorbonne myself, which is considerably less hardcore than it was forty years ago. When I was at the Sorbonne, ninety-nine percent of the French youths whom I saw spent most of their time smoking, not building barricades, which is very disappointing. One day, in the week after Sarkozy got elected, the French kids had an assembly in the sogennante cour d'honneur of the Sorbonne, during which they threatened to occupy one of the amphitheatres, but they lost the nerve to pull even that off. The Sorbonne is also filled with police these days, so it would be hard to occupy anyway, although it would be a relatively defensible structure once you take it over, I imagine. It only has a few entrances and not too many windows low enough to permit entry. But this is off-topic.

Anyway, if you want to be inspired, you could go read some May 1968 graffiti (or in English if you are not hardcore/you studied a language that an appreciable number of relevant people actually speak). Better, you could go check Les murs ont la parole out of the library. Cornell has two copies of it, which is saying a lot for Cornell.]]> 8 May http://www.burnthesorbonne.com/stuff/index.php?entry=entry080508-195157
To commemorate, I thought it would be appropriate to cite Kurt Vonnegut's description of 8 May 1945:

Old Soldier's Anecdote Number Three: "One evening in May," I said, "we were marched out of our camp and into the countryside. We were halted at about three in the morning, and told to sleep under the stars as best we could.

"When we awoke at sunrise, the guards were gone, and we found that we were on the rim of a valley near the ruins of an ancient stone watchtower. Below us, in that innocent farmland, were thousands upon thousands of people like us, who had been brought there by their guards, had been dumped. These weren't only prisoners of war. They were people who had been marched out of concentration camps and factories where they had been slaves, and out of regular prisons for criminals, and out of lunatic asylums. The idea was to turn us loose as far as possible from the cities, where we might raise hell.

"And there were civilians there, too, who had run and run from the Russian front or the American and British front. The fronts had actually met to the north and south of us

"And there were hundreds in German uniforms, with their weapons still in working order, but docile now, waiting for whomever they were expected to surrender to."

"The Peaceable Kingdom," said Marilee.

Actually, this passage describes a fictional character's experience of 8 May 1945, but I think we can agree that it's close enough to real life.

Anyway, although dealing with Cornell is not comparable to surviving the Second World War, which probably required considerably greater hardcoreness, I like to think of 8 May 2008 as a moment of personal liberation akin in some sense to the end of the fighting in Europe. In other words, dealing with Cornell successfully was like defeating the Third Reich [note to JDL: this is hyperbole].

In general, Cornell was not that bad. Academically, it wasn't that hard; I don't know how all these kids who carry on about how difficult Cornell is can take themselves seriously, although I'm pretty sure that most of them just want to be pretentious and don't care about seriousness. It's been frustrating dealing with all of the ridiculous people, however. I'm sure that there are ridiculous people most places, but they seem to congregate at Cornell, where they can be illegitimately rich and pretentious all day, which defines their existence.

Lately Cornell hasn't been that bad, despite all of the obnoxious people. I haven't had to work hard at all; instead, I've spent most of my time playing with Linux and reading fiction, which is refreshing. Unfortunately, this will all end relatively soon.]]> Ubuntu 8.04: An Objective Review http://www.burnthesorbonne.com/stuff/index.php?entry=entry080429-094233
Perhaps the first thing to notice about 8.04 is that it ships with Firefox 3, which has still not had a stable release. Despite this fact, it seems to work pretty well; indeed, it works way better than Firefox 2, which liked to play jokes on me and crash at inopportune times for no perceivable reason. Firefox 3 also "feels" lighter and faster, as they say, which is nice. Moreover, the Ubuntu system theme has been integrated into the browser. If Apple or Microsoft did this (actually I guess they do do this with Safari and Internet Explorer), it would be a plain case of fascist corporate branding. But since the Ubuntu theme is free and can be changed to whatever I want, I think it's nice to have greater consistency.

Another nice feature is a file-indexing application that actually works. Ubuntu 7.10 came with a utility called "Tracker," which was supposed to index the system and allow for fast searching. It was fast, but unfortunately, it missed a lot of files during its indexing and was consequently not a reliable means of finding stuff. In 8.04, Tracker appears to work all the time and does a nice job of locating stuff really fast.



Also useful is a plugin for Totem, the default video player, that makes it possible to search for videos on YouTube and watch them without having to use a web browser. This is great not only because it saves my time and bandwidth, but, more importantly, allows me to watch videos without being exposed to YouTube's advertisement-infested site or the comments of its users, who are so dumb that they make me sick, literally. Unfortunately, the plugin only works for YouTube, but it's a python script, so hopefully someone who knows about python can get around to subverting the protocols of other sites that host videos so that their content, as well, can be viewed free of the idiots and marketing in which it is invariably embedded.




Other useful new features include a convenient graphical interface to configure user permissions at a very granular level, as well as a nice utility for managing not only local passwords but also encryption keys for email, remote access and so on. Unless you're so ridiculous and paranoid that you're afraid to send email without an encrypted key, lest someone steal your identity, you probably have no need for most of this, but at least it's there if you want it.

Beyond these exciting new additions to Ubuntu, what made me happiest about the install was that every single thing just worked, as Steve Jobs likes to say. For the first time ever, I didn't have to fight with any wireless or video drivers to get things set up properly, and even the flash plugin for Firefox installed and works as it's supposed to. This is a huge improvement over earlier versions of Ubuntu.

In conclusion: Ubuntu 8.04 has lots of fun new features and is the most user-friendly Linux-based operating system ever. If you are using any other version of Linux, you should switch immediately unless you have a really good reason not to. Moreover, anyone using a proprietary operating system, without plans to install Hardy in the immediate future, should be incarcerated/not allowed to use a computer ever again.]]> European wars http://www.burnthesorbonne.com/stuff/index.php?entry=entry080425-193706
I think that my poor record is due to the fact that the way people play online now is apparently very different than it was in my day. When I was a teenager, there were no rules, partly because we were more hardcore, and partly because older versions of the game didn't allow you to enforce any gameplay regulations, so it was all on the honor system, and everyone knows how that goes. Now, almost every game is constrained by a long list of rules that sometimes make it a little fairer, but which mostly render everything more monotonous. For instance, hardly anyone allows you to use artillery anymore. How are you supposed to pretend you're fighting the War of the Spanish Succession if cannons are forbidden? Similarly, everyone throws a fit if you try to sit on the top of hills with your little army. There are some sketchy things that can be done from the top of hills that make the game unfair, but hills, when used appropriately, are an integral part of the game. Fighting on flat land all the time is not healthy for anyone.

Another serious problem is that no one gathers resources the way they were meant to be gathered anymore. When some guys in Ukraine wrote the game, they intended for gold, iron and coal to be accumulated by building mines and digging it up, even though I don't think this really happened that much in the seventeenth century, but who knows. It turns out, however, that it's a lot more efficient to instead collect huge amounts of stone, which is more abundant, and then sell it for other resources. The people online have discovered this fact, and consequently, gold, iron and coal mines have very little value after the first ten minutes of the game, which skews the gameplay tremendously. Instead of having to worry about defending mines and controlling a lot of mineral-rich territory, everyone can rely on stone, which exists all over the map, and not have to think strategically. This is really sad.

Finally, no one uses formations anymore. The whole selling-point of Cossacks back in 2001 was that it allowed you to arrange your little soldiers in real formations. These days, you just put everyone in a big group and march them towards the adversarial big group. For instance, here are some pictures of contemporary Cossacks battles:




As you can see, there are no formations, which is sad. Admittedly, there are a lot of problems with formations. For instance, most kinds of units capable of ranged attack will not fire while they're in formation; instead, they use bayonets, which are dumb in a lot of situations. I think this is some kind of bug, but it's still regrettable that no one wants to use formations anymore, because they look much more impressive than the scattered groups depicted above.

So to conclude, multiplayer Cossacks these days means no hills, no artillery, no strategically important mines and no formations. In other words, there's virtually no thinking anymore; whoever mines stone the fastest ends up winning. This is no way to treat early modern Europe.

In happier news, I was reading the other day about some game called "0 A.D." which, if it ever gets released, will probably change my life, and the lives of many other Linux-using history enthusiasts, forever. It's the first serious strategy game that I know of to be developed using OpenGL instead of Microsoft's nonsense APIs, which means that it will work natively and flawlessly on Linux. It's also going to be completely free and mostly open-source (the explanations for why it can't be entirely open-source, because of "security concerns," sound sketchy, but I guess you have to take what you can get when it comes to Linux games), as well as historically accurate, or so they say. Unfortunately, they apparently promised to release it almost a year ago, but in reality they still don't even have a playable alpha version. They do at least have pictures, so hopefully the whole project isn't just a joke. Let us hope.]]> /etc http://www.burnthesorbonne.com/stuff/index.php?entry=entry080420-201935 thesis. If I had to pick a noun to characterize the experience of writing a thesis in the Cornell history department, it would be 'pretension.' I'm sick of even saying 'thesis,' because it makes you sound like you think you're more important than everyone else just because you wrote sixty pages about stuff that's marginally relevant to real life and that virtually no one cares about except you. So you tell your friends that you can't go out on Tuesday night because you have to work on your thesis, and you make away messages that say 'thesising,' which makes me sick, literally. I guess I need to get used to this kind of pretentious nonsense if I plan to become a successful academic, but it's still obnoxious.

What makes the Cornell history thesis process especially pretentious is that the department gives out different levels of 'honors' to reflect how celebrated each thesis is by the three people who, because it's their job, actually read it. So for the past thirty weeks, I've had to waste my time attending my history 'honors seminar' to listen to people ask questions that they already know the answers to just so that they can make the professor talk about the different levels of honors. I have better things to do with my time, like attend the classes in which I am enrolled that conflict with my history seminar, than listen to this nonsense. Is your life really going to be that much more meaningful to you because you 'get high honors' and are allowed to wear some special-color ribbon at graduation (another manifestation of pretension that I will address in due time)?

Anyway, that's all the negative stuff I have time to write tonight, because I need to start thinking about my 'dissertation.']]> Paris was hardcore http://www.burnthesorbonne.com/stuff/index.php?entry=entry080411-170714
For instance, I long to relive the days when survival meant eating generic-brand Nesquik, which has a high caloric content and costs very little money. It also tastes good and, in principle, provides some vitamins or something. For a few cents, you can have a whole meal, thanks to generic Nesquik. I also used to enjoy raw carrots and peanuts, which provide substance and possibly keep scurvy at bay. I don't have an excuse to eat like this anymore, because I now have jobs and make enough money to buy real food.

I also miss being hardcore and stealing people's Internet in order to avoid paying for my own. At the height of my WEP-cracking career in Paris, I used to be able to crack three or four networks an hour, which is a big adrenaline rush if you think like I do. These days, the poor old laptop that I used for attacking networks barely even turns on, and I've already cracked everything within range of my desktop computer, so I'm out of targets. Even worse, what used to be the great art of running aircrack to attack WEP-encrypted networks has now become pretty quotidian, thanks to scripts that allow any idiot with a Linux CD to crack networks just by selecting targets from a menu. Sometimes, you can even crack on Windows now if you have the right kind of wireless card, which is very scandalous indeed--you should at least be required to use Linux.

Speaking of my Paris laptop, I am nostalgic for Fedora Core 6. I think they're on Fedora 8 now, or maybe even 9, and in any case it doesn't matter because I switched to Ubuntu in the summer, along with 95% of everyone else who runs Linux. Ubuntu is a lot prettier and easier to use, but there is something to be said for Fedora Core 6 and the skills it took to keep it running, especially when I was all alone in Paris and couldn't depend on other people to help me when stuff broke.

Navigating the bureaucratic disaster of French libraries was really obnoxious at the time, but these days, I miss the sense of accomplishment that I used to get from successfully checking a book out of the library. At Cornell, you just walk in and charge it out. In Paris, you had to prove your identity with three dozen different cards just to get into the library, and if you even got that far, you'd still only have about a 10% chance of actually finding the book you wanted, getting someone to bring it down for you (since French librarians are too pretentious to let patrons take books off the shelves themselves) and manage to check it out, which most French libraries don't allow anyway.

Anyway, I think the conclusion is that in Paris I was hardcore and relied on myself. At Cornell, everything is already laid out for you; you just pay your $46,000 and don't have to think. It is nice that I can go to class here and not have to worry about everybody being on strike to protest the strenuous 35-hour work week, but I'm not sure this is worth the price of being self-reliant. Fortunately, I'll probably have to go back to France for a while at some point during my graduate-student career, so I can be a little hardcore again, although it won't be the same because I'll probably have more money and will be judged more harshly by others when I eat Nesquik or steal WEP keys as part of my scheme to be cheap and greedy.]]>