With Windows Vista requiring a computer more powerful than the majority of computer users have, many have touted Linux as the savior of these PCs. Do not throw away your PC because you must upgrade to Vista. Get all the graphical goodness and latest software with Linux. It has modest hardware requirements and will even ressurrect Windows 98 PCs. Then they talk about Compiz/Beryl, the 3D desktop. All of this is true, but I think it’s a bit of a half-truth.

Andrew’s post on Imus and his firing prompted a response from me. I decided that since I hold a dim view that other sites may exist in the future, that I will post select bits from his post and my full response. By clicking on that link you can see his whole post and my response.

…Sharpton and Jackson were both like piranhas when Imus made his offensive statement. But Imus’ comments were outright tame compared to what the average top 40 rap song has in it. Why aren’t they going after rappers more vehemently? Because they’re black, or are they afraid 50 cent’s homies are going to cap them for it?

Today I was looking back through my original blog, It’s A Binary World (now 1.0), and it was interesting to see what I was writing about. I found some really fun posts. Here are links to the posts and some highlights.

When I started up this server and blog(of course it was on an old Fedora Core 1 machine back then):

Why does technology excite me so? I think because my knowledge of technology frees me from the slavery of others. I can run my own server with as much space as I want on it. I can post any content I want (as long as the goverment doesn’t shut me down q;o) and I can be free of paying for software that doesn’t work right out of the box -> by switching to Open Source alternative. Also…I’m a bit of a geek. q;o)

Most of you tech readers have heard of The Jargon File in which esr maintains the best of geek jargon and the lore behind their etymologies. What most people didn’t know is that esr also maintains a science fiction jargon file. It’s not as funny as The Jargon File or as comprehensive, but it’s pretty neat and a fun read. Perhaps if enough people read it, he will elevate it to the level of The Jargon File - so go read it!

It’s not Paul Wolfowitz’s fault that he used nepotism to give his girlfriend a job at the state department paying $200k a year. No, no…. You see, he told use yesterday why he did it - He was new to the bank and didn’t know that it was wrong. Of course! The World Bank obviously operated under different rules than the rest of the US Government where he worked for 24 years. But then again, he was one of the nut jobs that said invading Iraq was a good idea, so perhaps his judgment isn’t working so well.

In " Things that Shouldn’t Make Me Happy", Scott Adams hits on one of the most poignant things I’ve read in a while. For a humorist, he has been making some amazing points recently.

If you think about it, wars are generally fought because of a false sense of certainty. Usually some leader thinks he is a God, or talks to God, or descended from the Gods, or thinks God gave his people some particular piece of real estate. The leader’s opinion is the most certain in the land. People flock to certainty and adopt the certainty as their own. The next thing you know, stuff is blowing up.

Sorry about yesterday. Apparently my dynamic DNS hostname decided not to be dynamic. So, after about 30-40 minutes of checking and rebooting my machine (which had 65 days of uptime! - I think a power outage occurred two weeks ago), I realized the problem. If you can read this, it has propagated to your DNS server.

Oracle decided, a few months ago, to exercise a right they have under the GPL: they have taken Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and copied everything about it, rebranded it and called it their own. This is not unique to Oracle. On a basic level, this is what Ubuntu, Linspire, Mint, Xandros, CentOS, and others do - they build on another distro and package it out. Some may have different packaging or have different ideas of which kinds of software they can include. However, there is a huge difference, at least in my mind. With Ubuntu, Xandros, etc they do not exist to compete with Debian (on which they are based). Rather, they celebrate the fact that they came from Debian and make a point of contributing back to it. They also cater to certain markets that may not find Debian easy to use.

First of all, Debian has finally turned 4.0! It’s been YEARS in the making and they are 4 months late, but better late than never! Believe it or not, this is a huge improvement over the prior release cycle! With Ubuntu and Fedora releasing every sixth months now, it’s up to Debian to find a good compromise between releasing often and undoing their reputation as a nice stable distro to base other distros off of and not moving at glacial speed so that distros like Linspire/Freespire move to being based on Ubuntu.