As I mentioned in my post Micro-blogging:  One Month Later, I hadn’t really used Pownce much at all.  Even now, 4 months later, I haven’t touched it.  In fact, ever since that post in August, I only used it once to transfer a file to my brother.  I thought there wasn’t much room on the net for so many micro-blogging services.  Most people, including CNN’s Rick Sanchez, use Twitter.  And if you’re hard-core into libre software, there’s Identica.  So I didn’t see why anyone would use Pownce.  On top of that, Pownce was supposed to make money by getting people to pay for extra services.  I just didn’t see any value in what they were charging for.  So, I wasn’t too surprised when I got an email last Monday that Pownce was going to close shop.

This week was my last week with cable television.  I’ve had it since I was around 12 years old or so.  Now I’ve been on my own for a few years now and I noticed two things.  One, I don’t watch much cable television.  Just a few programs here and there.  Two, it’s pretty expensive!  It was $50 per month for just a few programs here and there.  And now, it’s no longer necessary.

Windows Antivirus product Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 is blocking access to Google.com.  What’s so insidious about google?  Do they know something we don’t?  I discovered this problem when my wife wanted to get on Google.  I then spent the next 15 or so minutes trying to figure out what was going on.  Found someone in Britain with a similar problem, but no solutions yet.  Hopefully this is fixed very soon or they’ll have a ton of angry former customers.

Today’s distro has been described as the Ubuntu of the BSD world. PC-BSD is an easy to use version of FreeBSD. FreeBSD is the behemoth in the BSD world and would probably have a much larger desktop presence if the BSDs hadn’t run into copyright and other proprietary problems right around when most of the GNU toolset was complete and Linus was releasing the Linux kernel. At least, that’s what most people claim. However, given the animosity (although that’s almost too strong a word) between the Free Software Foundation and the supporters of the BSD license.

Linux Format Magazine already has a review.

And here’s the release announcement:

DATELINE: 2008-11-25

KEY FINGERPRINT: 61A8 ABE0 91FF 9FBB F4B0 7709 BF22 6FCC 4EBF C273

LOCATION: GEOSYNC ORBIT, FEDORA SPACE STATION VIA GLOBAL IRC NETWORK

BROADCASTING: FREEDOM FRIENDS FEATURES FIRST

(Cue J. Strauss' "Blue Danube.")

THIS IS FEDORA SPACE OPERATIONS ANNOUNCING with great pleasure the
successful launch of the new ship, Fedora 10: "Cambridge."

Strapped into the pilot seats are the latest GNOME (2.24) and KDE (4.1),
accompanied on their amazing journey by an all star crew of glitch free
audio, better printing and webcam support, and a new faster graphical
startup.

Also on this ride are wireless connection sharing and the next evolution
in PackageKit, hooking through your multimedia applications to help
install supporting software (codecs).

For developers and system administrators on this mission, we have built
in appliance tools, Eclipse 3.4, NetBeans IDE, improved virtualization
management with remote installation and storage capabilities, RPM 4.6,
and new security auditing toolsets.

Please remember to polarize viewports to properly enjoy Cambridge's
brand new graphics theme, "Solar," shining on the desktop. Also on this
flight is a new lightweight desktop environment, LXDE, joining the more
recent desktop envionment crew member, Sugar (from the starship OLPC
XO), and the venerable GNOME, KDE, and XFCE.

We are now leaving drydock for a 13-month mission of innovation and
exploration. Crew members and guests are invited to the forward lounge
to use, study, modify, and redistribute.

Get your copy of Fedora 10 today:

http://get.fedoraproject.org/

Join the many thousands of Fedora particpants and contributors:

http://join.fedoraproject.org/

If you missed the official launch, attend a Fedora 10 Launch Party near
you:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/ReleaseParty

People often groan when they hear of someone making another game of Tetris, Window Manager, or audio program.  After all, people ask, “Do we really need another?  Why can’t you just contribute to fixing annoying bug X in gTetris/KDE/xmms?”  I’ve always been on the side of the argument that said - “So what!  They’re doing it for free.  Not only that, but they’re not getting paid for this.  It’s their hobby.  So you can’t tell them what to make.  If they don’t WANT to help Amarok, then leave them alone.  Don’t download their program and they will eventually lose interest.”  I’ve never been one for telling people what they should do in their spare time.  (Not in any serious sense, anyway)

Somewhere along the line I got into my head that Slackware was a distro that involved having to compile everything. From what I can gather from Wikipedia, The Slackware Website, and some comments to my Gentoo post, I was wrong. Slackware apparently uses packages, just like every other modern distro. The difference is that dependency resolution (at least with the default first-party tools) is up to the user. This clears up so much for me because I always wondered why someone would want to make a distribution based off of Slackware if the point of Slackware was to compile from source and be super hardcore. After all, Slackware doesn’t baby you and give you all these little GUIs to configure your system. You need to get down and dirty with Emacs (or even dirties with Vi) and edit those config files. Here’s what the Slackware site gives as the reason to use Slackware:

From 25 to 50 views:

From 50 to 75 Views:

From 75 to 100 views:

This has also aways bothered me.  As usual, Randall, at xkcd, has put in a comic what was in my head.  Recently, I was thinking of making a post about how old concepts from the 1400s and 1500s still influence our terminology and words today.  One of the most prominent ones you often hear on the news is the reference of Europe as The West and China, et al as the East.  That never made sense to me growing up.  But if you consider that all of our history and culture is Eurocentric, it all makes sense.  Europe “discovered” the world.  And from Europe’s point of view, Asia and everywhere else in the world was The East.  That’s why people weren’t sure that if Columbus sailed West that he would get to the East before he ran out of supplies.

I’ve always been one of those guys that believe you should try everything you want to do.  Just throw it at the wall and see what sticks.  That’s how I got into blogging back in 2003.  (Holy cow, almost exactly 5 years to the day)  It’s also how I got into computer animation.  And photography.  But it’s also how I figured out that I am not into chemistry, weather phenomenon, Macintoshes, etc