Category: Uncategorized

Alejandro writes: “First, you “Americans” kill palestinians using the Israeli Army. That land first belong to them, not to the people who is living now there (not all of them, I mean). Yes, probably they killed many US Citizens (you know, America is a continet, so when you say Americans, i think in Brazilians, Cubans,Canadians, Mexicans, US people, Argentinians, etc).”

Strike one – We Americans have the United States Marine Corps. We don’t need Jews, or anyone else, to do our deadly work for us. Did you miss the small matter of the successful invasion of two countries in the last two years? Invading Gaza would take about ten minutes, judging by the speed of the assault on Iraq.

Strike two – The majority of Palestinians moved to Israel AFTER European Jews made their long-prophesied return and made the land economically viable. Even their great leader, Arafat, is an Egyptian. Then many of them, the “refugees”, moved out of their own accord in order to make way for the expected triumph of the Egyptian and Jordanian armies. Unlike refugees in almost every other country, these “refugees” have not been permitted to settle in the lands of their Arab brothers, who profess to care so much about them.

Strike three – What a load of horse merde! I am so tired of the faux worldly pretending that Americans are globally ignorant and that national terminology is founded solely in geography. I’m sure that when Arab or European demonstrators are waving Hate America signs that they’re probably referring to Brazilians and Argentinians, right? Canadians call themselves Canadians, not Americans, and they call us Americans. The same is true for Brazilians, Cubans, Mexicans and Argentinians. I don’t know what people are trying to prove by pretending to misunderstand something they obviously understood – and one doesn’t exactly make a strong case for one’s scholarly superiority by demonstrating that one is unaware that “continent” is spelled with three Ns.

Three sentences, three strikes. Impressive stuff, Alejandro. And, you’re out.

Nine people have written to tell me that they decided to start their own Linux migrations after reading Breaking Up with Bill, and one dealer informed me that he’s going to start encouraging his customers to make the move. I think that’s great, since the growth from 1 percent to 2 percent is always harder than going from 10 percent to 20 percent. Even more people told me that they’d like to make the move, but just weren’t ready yet.

I don’t know if we’re on the verge of another OS shift or not, but it’s fun to think that we might be. I talked to a friend of mine who is an executive at a computer game company, and he’s open to the notion of Linux ports. Once the game makers do that, the floodgates will open. It’s really games that drives technology these days, and that’s been the little-known case for twelve years now.

By the way, Samba is shaking her thang on my local network now. The instructions were a little more detailed and encyclopedic and a little less how-to than I would have liked, though. And one thing I didn’t realize earlier is that the NTFS partition instructions actually caused Redhat to provide a icon link to my newly accessible hard drive – that’s pretty handy.

Next step – get WINE working

I read with interest your commentary on television and your friends viewing habits. I am quite convinced that the “one friend” that you refer to is me. I’ll have you know that contrary to your assertions about all men, I enjoy both homosexuality and feminism. The only thing I enjoy more than homosexuals and feminists are homosexual feminists, which is why Camille Paglia will be my third child’s name regardless of that child’s gender. When you press that brown shirt of yours, make sure to accent it with a bold colored scarf or kerchief.

Yeah, so how is life with Everybody Loves Sex in the City with Queer Joe Bachelor Guy? And anyhow, you know perfectly well that I’m not an Autumn.

Always working towards interoperability, Microsoft has refused to release information on working with NTFS partitions – which is basically what NT, 2000 and XP drives are. And, as usual, the Open Source community has made significant headway despite this. Anyhow, it is possible to mount a NTFS drive under Linux, although Redhat users must patch the kernel first. Another point for Mandrake there, I suppose. Fortunately, it is really easy and the NTFS how-to is one of the best I’ve yet encounted. Total no-brainer.

Next step: get Samba going to access in-house network.

After that: get Alphasmart hotsync working under WINE

John Chamless of the Dallas Morning News writes:

When a government starts trying to hide war casualties, you know its worried about people turning against a war. I have a very personal reminder of such sleight of hand at home. It is a prisoner-of-war bracelet for a friend of mine who was listed as “missing” in Vietnam. He went “missing” from the skids of a helicopter a hundred feet or so above a jungle battle. His parents were told the truth, but the nation was lied to by his inclusion as “missing.” The military, or its civilian ledership, created a real problem by hiding all of those dead soldiers. Decades later, it had problems explaining that there really weren’t all of these “prisoners” wasting away in Vietnam.

I have to admit, I never understood why North Vietnam would supposedly hold onto so many prisoners after the war while they were busily slaughtering their southern compatriots. Nor why we should have had so much trouble finding our lost men, if they were alive or even executed en masse. This shows, once more, that if something doesn’t make sense somehow, it probably isn’t true.

… who gradually got Balmer and Balmer. As in Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer, who appears to be intent on sabotaging any reputation for sanity, much less credibility, by insisting that Windows is more secure than Linux. Um, Steve, did no one send you any email this past summer? Now, I understand that marketing occasionally demands an arms-length relationship with the truth, but the Big Lie doesn’t tend to work very well unless you have the benefit of iron-fisted control over the media. Which, for all Microsoft’s influence, they simply do not have. Yet.

Somehow, I can’t imagine that I’ll be asked to write for Slate or MSNBC anytime soon.

Dear Hitler Youth

[long rant on Rush Limbaugh’s hypocrisy deleted, as well as subsequent exchange of email on how “if you need to present all the Orwellian Hilter was Liberal/Democrat/Whatever BS, we both know it just the rhetoric of Reactionaries trying to distance themselves from the Ultimate Reactionary.”]

Do have yourself a wonderful day, Vox. Now that Limbaugh’s power is decimated, I know that I will!

Keep that Brownshirt pressed,

J. Fontaine

Like most on the left, Mr. Fontaine is utterly ignorant of the left-wing nature of the German National Socialist Worker’s Party. After asking for some clarification from him, I was able to break down his argument as follows:

1) The central fact of Hitler’s Nazi ideology is Jew hatred.

2) Hitler was right-wing because he was opposed to Communism.

3) Vox Day is right-wing (It’s true, but we don’t actually know why Mr. Fontaine believes this since he doesn’t understand the spectrum.)

4) Therefore Vox Day is a brownshirt-wearing Hitler Youth Nazi.

Mr. Fontaine subsequently admitted that he was puzzled by my defense of Jews, which, of course, explodes his entire argument with regards to me. Unfortunately, he was not able to admit that the reason his logic fails with regards to me is that it is entirely absurd in the first place. Many other socialists besides the national socialists were opposed to the Marxist variant, just as Mensheviks opposed Bolsheviks and Marx opposed the syndicalists and other socialists himself – the truth is that points 1, 2 and 4 above are simply incorrect. Here, by contrast, is the breakdown of my case for the left-wing Nazi:

1) The central fact of Hitler’s Nazi ideology was government control of society.

2) There were a number of social policy actions which the Nazi party wished to and did enact.

3) Most of those policy actions were very similar to those supported by the Communist party and the Democratic party.

4) These policy actions, as well as the fundamental left-wing notion of a collective right to control society, are antithetical to everything for which I, and the libertarian party, stand. I am a right-wing extremist opposed to every plank of the Munich manifesto as well as the entire Communist manifesto. The Democratic party is not only not opposed to either, but in fact explicitely supports the majority of the specific goals of both.

5) Therefore, Nazi ideology belongs to the Left and is an overt enemy of my right-wing libertarian ideology.

Looks like the brownshirt actually fits Mr. Fontaine rather nicely. With a name like that, perhaps Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National might suit his style.

I don’t care about baseball. I actively dislike ESPN – though not enough to give up The Sports Guy. But there’s something a little bit poignant in the emotions being expressed by these Red Sox fans. Sports is not important, but perhaps because they are not important we are able to express ourselves freely about how they make us feel.

The so-called Halloween document makes for some fascinating reading, especially where it is annotated by open source advocates. I found the following section to be very interesting, considering that I had independently come to the conclusion that Microsoft is a force working against freedom of choice and human liberty. As described by the annotator, it was written by a Microsoft staff engineer “with contributions, endorsements, and reviews by two Program Managers, the Senior Vice President in charge of NT development, and two members of the eight-person Executive Committee (Microsoft’s Politburo, answering only to Bill Gates).”

After reading it, you’ll probably conclude two things: a) I’m glad I migrated / I really should migrate to Linux; b) Politburo is really an apt appellation.

One of the most interesting implications of viable OSS ecosystems is long-term credibility.

Long-Term Credibility Defined

Long term credibility exists if there is no way you can be driven out of business in the near term. This forces change in how competitors deal with you.

{ TN comments: Note the terminology used here “driven out of business”. MS believes that putting other companies out of business is not merely “collateral damage” — a byproduct of selling better stuff — but rather, a direct business goal. To put this in perspective, economic theory and the typical honest, customer-oriented businessperson will think of business as a stock-car race — the fastest car with the most skillful driver wins. Microsoft views business as a demolition derby — you knock out as many competitors as possible, and try to maneuver things so that your competitors wipe each other out and thereby eliminate themselves. In a stock car race there are many finishers and thus many drivers get a paycheck. In a demolition derby there is just one survivor. Can you see why “Microsoft” and “freedom of choice” are absolutely in two different universes? }

apt-get is a very useful Debian application, which is often cited as the reason that Debian’s installation tends to the crude side – not much point in polishing it up when it’s so easy to get everything configured after the fact with apt-get. Apt-get has been ported to Redhat Linux, and in combination with synaptic, provides the Redhat user with a graphical apt-get. It’s rather like Red Carpet, only with far more RPMs to choose from. This download is a no-brainer – I’ll have to add it to yesterday’s installation guide.

I’ve found the combination of apt-get and synaptic to be very useful, in part because they tell me what some of these random applications on my system actually do. I just used it to download XMAME, for which I already have all of the necessary roms to transform my Linux machine into a full-blown arcade. Wocka-wocka-wocka!