Some tidbits I’ve gleaned and where to get more in depth info:

KDE3.5 has been released! Hopefully this means that it will make its way into the Fedora Core 5, due out in Feb 2006. Or, if they’ve completely moved KDE to the extras packages, maybe it will be available even earlier! Lots of info here and screenshots here!

Speaking of Fedore Core 5, there is a review of the latest devel freeze to be found at this O’Reilly site.

With all of the job cuts being announced right before the holidays, I was wondering if it might be time for a new capitalism. Here’s a rhetorical question, what if the board lowered their salaries and the CEO’s salary instead of firing people? A typical CEO for these big companies like Delta makes a few million. He or she doesn’t need millions - no one does! Somewhere around $50k can allow someone to survive in the US. $100k is very comfortable depending on the housing market. Certainly, $500k could be enough to live VERY well, even in New York. Let’s say they are firing white collar workers who each make $50k. If the CEO were to lower his salary by just $500k, he could save 100 jobs! If we’re talking about people who make less money, even more jobs could be saved! So why can’t they do this? Well, obviously, no one would ever lower their own salary. But why isn’t there much of a public outcry? People are losing their jobs right before Christmas and these CEOs are flying around in private jets. I know we have even more ridiculous things like basketball players making millions, but I would assume that people would say stuff. For the first time today, I heard them say something on CNN this morning. Of course, it was 6 AM and no one was listening - it wasn’t repeated all day like their typical stories. I know it’s a bunch of BS, but I had to get this off my chest - it’s really been bothering me.

I’m a couple of days late, but - the patch is out! Click on advanced -> check for updates.

Civfantics.com has the details of the patch.

“Indeed, it has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” - Winston Churchhill

There has been a lot of talk recently concerning the CIA and their interrogation techniques with Terrorism suspects. Specifically, the talk has centered around “secret prisons” in Europe and the fact that the UN can’t go and investigate the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. However, I suggest that the debate is centering around the wrong tennants. Most of the debate has centered around whether we have been torturing prisoners. I don’t want to minimize the evils of torture. We obviously don’t want to use torture because it undermines our message to dictatorships and it increases the chance that Americans will be tortured when they are captured.

Life seems to be a series of waves that I ride until they crash on shore. Then I wait for the next one and have another go at it. I’m not talking about life fundamentals - those are on a much slower evolution and change much less often, but I’m talking instead about the fun things I do in my life.

Take, for example, my recent fascination with haikus. I don’t even have an event I could pinpoint as the cause. I just saw the snow and remembered how I always loved seeing it fall at night at Cornell. Then, for some reason, I thought the best way to express myself would be a haiku. Now, it seems they are coming to me for all sorts of reasons. And so it will be for a while, until they suddenly stop.

Apparently, MS’s new $400 console is having a lot of problems. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be happy if I plunked down enough money to buy a cheap computer and my video game console didn’t work correctly. However, the real problem for Microsoft is touched upon in this blog.

In the past, such a faux pas would have taken weeks to get attention. One person would have a broken box and think maybe it was just them. After a few weeks of reports, someone at a store like EB would leak the problem to the press and THEN it would be a big deal. That’s how things used to work. Unfortunately for MS, that’s not how they work anymore.

As I spoke with my in-laws last weekend about viruses and anti-virus software makers, they voiced a thought everyone has had at one time or another- perhaps the viruses from Norton and McAfee. After all, why would you spend $40 a year to keep your computer safe if there weren’t any viruses? As I explained to them that, actually, most viruses nowadays come from Organized Crime in an attempt to steal identities, I thought about the fiasco it would be for such a thing to occur. It would be like Microsoft purposely creating a virus for Linux.

Photographic You; Previously avoided; Now in so many!

First winter’s snowfall; Flakes falling from a dark sky; Morning: All is white.

The timing of this holiday is perfect. Coming near the end of the year, there are basically 11 months upon which to look back on. As my wife reminded me last weekend, a lot have happened this year. As a matter of fact, I think this has been the most eventful year of my life. Here are the things I have to be thankful for this year:

May: We both graduated from Cornell with excellent grades; I had two job offers and selected one in the last week of school.