angels and humanity, i mean humility

angels: good or evil - a history of angels (2003)

this wonderful documentary was on the history channel. (note: i'm the kind of person that would rather watch the movie than read the book.) they didn't just talked about how angels came to be and where and when they were conceived - but also how some angels were present across some of the most prevalent religions of the world and proceeded to explain how they all pretty much came from one; from Judaism to Christianity and Mohammedanism. it was the link with the heavenly and demonic angels that got me thinking.

Luis Royo - Angel Holding Demon

first, just a few things from the show that i never knew before. eve (from adam and eve) was the second women created (after lilith/adamah) to be more submissive for man? the old testament was written in a period of over 800 years? angels were influenced from egyptian and greek mythology that made it's way over to scriptures found in the 3 religions above (with near identical sounding names as well). very interesting stuff.

then, the most amazing thing i got out of the show was where a lot of angels originated from. many were first written when the "old testament" was being put together, but were "cut" from the "final edit" of the hebrew bible. and then someone decided to put them together in a book called the Apocrypha - a.k.a. the "Secret Books". to which i LOL when i thought to myself about the age old question of "why do people still fight wars in the name of the LORD" - was it because "my stories are better than yours?"

w-w-wait, bear with me on this. let's take, for example, the mythos of star wars or the tolken universe and find people who want to believe in those so much that they want to eat, sleep and breath the life.

Force strong for new Jedi church
bbc.co.uk - 21 January 2008

Darkon - A LARP Documentary

"Star Trek" Fan Documentary "TREKKIES"

it is nothing short of amazing how far people will go defending their "way of life" loosing sight of the some of the basic principles of living harmoniously many of these "universes" are trying to teach.

i mean, let's take another example, this time from south park's episode: Christian Rock Hard

Replace Darling & Baby with Jesus

All right, guys, this is gonna be so easy. All we have to do to make Christian songs is take regular old songs and add Jesus stuff to them. See? All we have to do is cross out words like "baby" and "Darling" and replace them with Jesus.
spscriptorium.com

and now as an exercise, let's see how many parallelism can be drawn from the seven sins if you replaced LORD with a pronoun, a person's name or even a demon. let's use cartman now, shall we?

"For great is cartman and most worthy of praise; he is to be feared above all gods"
"Praise be to cartman."

hmm... not very friendly is he? is cartman's ego so fragile and in need of constant attention to boost his level of self awareness he requires daily offerings, daily prayers or else incur the wrath of cartman? i count at least 5 here. i guess he really doesn't want to be forgotten if anything. the LORD is nowhere and everywhere within the Matrix. oops, different article.

so, how about we bring this back to the nerds because you're still reading this.

Star Wars Vs. Star Trek - DMP Edition HQ
via gizmodo.com

Spock At The Star Wars Attack Of The Clones Line

happy holidays!

microsoft, the dying patient

a few months ago i wrote why Microsoft needed to kill OLPC and touched on how add-on perks gave the perception of what's a better value. it seems now, that they have succumbed to the near unlimited developer resources in the open source communities and have begun to accept them.

Microsoft: We're all 'mixed source' companies
cnet.com - October 17, 2008

Microsoft starts distributing open-source Drupal
cnet.com - October 16, 2008

i guess the nerds at redmond figured out how easy it is to become a package distributer, repository pointer or what ever you want to call it; even though there already was one for the windows platform. cygwin is one of the most important must haves on a windows box. it basically gives me all of the tools, utilities, apps -- everything including the kitchen sink that i have always had on my *nix box.

and really, providing any of the many wonderful projects out there is probably one of the most easiest thing they could have done to enhance their existing product line. the kids on the mac platform already does this too. fink seems to be the favor of choice. (dunno what happen to the whole open darwin project though.)

but it is interesting to see how long microsoft has come since their first tirade when the whole open source software movement became a huge thorn on their side. at first:

Microsoft denies Linux threat
original denial: 03.11.98

followed by a long line of dissemination of FUD statements and money funneling scheme to take ownership of the *nix kernel via patent suits through their SCO cronies.

Halloween_Documents - wiki
December 1998 - June 2004

but they will acknowledge linux during 1999 when the DOJ started looking into their monopoly in the software market and then go right back to attacking the viability of these alternative OS with the virtual limitless amount of add-on software packages.

Microsoft rooting for Linux?
12 Mar 1999

next, the interoperability initiative is launched to lure developers back to the windows platform. as well as deals made in lieu of disclosing what patents were supposedly violated.

Microsoft makes Linux pact with Novell
November 2, 2006

and now, it seems they went and skipped the depression stage and right into acceptance by freely distributing software that was once shunned

and called too complex not but a few months earlier:

Microsoft: Open source is too complex
August 07, 2006

anyways, these behaviors show nearly all five stages in the psychology of a dying patient to the tee:

• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Acceptance

does this mean they are dying? well, if another one of my past article, never gonna buy Microsoft hardware again, is any indication, far from it. they have a gazillion dollars to ride this out.

when i say i the command line interface, i really mean all of the tools, utilities, applications, scripts and executables that many, if not all, had their start from the important initiatives of the GNU project.