And yet another article that's basically all about My Little Pony.

Six years ago, ponies on Slashdot were a joke. We were all grizzled men with grizzled beards. We made systems run through sweat and tears, we coded heroic late night fixes, congregating here to share war stories of pride in ourselves and defiance of users.

Now we're grizzled men with grizzled beards and a Fluttershy desktop.

How the times have changed.

I seriously, seriously hope that someone out there isn't taking Jennifer Government for an instruction manual.

Holy crap, PernMUSH. What a great place that was. I basically learned English on PernMUSH (and can't thank the people there enough for their kindness and patience with me).

Dear AC, might I ask who you were there? Just on the off chance we knew each other. (Me, I was just some random weird Bluerider. Hi. :))

The musicians here may want to check out LMMS. I can't believe it took me so long to take heed of it.

Maybe it's time to be cautiously optimistic again.

When Unity came out, I gave it its 21 days[*]. After that time, I was still not very happy with it, so I figured that after using Gnome 2 for a while, it was time to give KDE another chance.

Well, I'm glad I did. There are still little niggles here and there if you look up close, but as a whole, things work pretty darn well. They've finally managed to return to that KDE sort of state from the 3.5 days, where multitudes of little features activate as needed to support your workflow and otherwise stay the fuck out of the way. Klipper is still so freaking convenient that I miss it sorely wherever I don't have it (the Gnome equivalent, Glipper, unfortunately didn't work very well for me). Also, Chromium now natively supports the KDE password storage thing. Quassel is like a smoother X-Chat with less bugs.

All in all I've been somewhat pleasantly surprised, and I think I may keep it after its 21 days. There are still things that annoy me -- their overthought Akonadi thing, for instance; seriously, guys, I shouldn't need an RDBMS to freaking read mails -- but much fewer so than I feared. Maybe it's time to be hopeful again for that Linux desktop thing we've been hearing about.

[*] When trying out a new tech, you've got to give it at least three weeks of real use, it is said; otherwise you can't necessarily tell if it sucks or if it's just different from what you're used to, and thus, uncomfortable at first.

Oh. Right. Thanks. :)

Completely unrelated and altogether offtopic, but it's been bothering me for years. Literally.

So, what the heck is your sig supposed to mean? It looks like a bunch of Dune-related vocabulary lumped together with an intent that escapes me, and it's been driving me nuts. (For relatively low values thereof.)

> Yeah pretty scary that ordinary posters on forums can come up with an
> "obvious" political move.

Actually, I was kinda fishing for second opinions there. Although /. is lots of noise and not much signal, quite often you get interesting bits of insight floating up to the surface by people who know more than you about the subject matter, and I was sort of hoping for something like that -- or maybe just a plausible reason why it'd make political sense to keep Gitmo open in the face of, well, every damn thing. For all I know it's just something as petty as Obama keeping it up his sleeve as a popularity chip to cash in come reelection time. Dick move, but that's politics.

"Politics are like tripe sausage. It's got to smell a little like shit, but not too much." -- Edouard Herriot

> I shall borrow your last line as my sig.

Uh. Be my guest, I guess? It's kinda weird, but whatever floats your boat, y'know.

No, I'm serious. I just can't make sense of that. At this point everybody hates Gitmo. Obama could score major points across the board by closing it with a flourish and be done with it. Judge and jail the guys and look tough on Terrism, or just ship them back to wherever they came from and close the joint with a few vibrant words about saving America's money. Mishun accumplisht. Easy reelection credit! A politician's dream.

So why the hell doesn't he?

Something's missing from the picture, and I can't tell what. Can't be anything good, though. :/

> The older I'm getting the more I want to play with engines and build
> things with wood and metal.

It's okay. We're all addicted to Minecraft too.

I tried out the new settings, and when checking out the password encryption, it automatically loaded KWallet, the default password store in KDE. That's it, as of right now Chromium is my default browser.

> States of WHAT? Animals have consciousness now?

No, it popped up MAGICALLY in us apes at some point; someone throw on a switch and BAM, consciousness overnight. MAGIC, I tell you.

Or, you know, maybe consciousness is not a binary variable, but, like most everything about the real world, a continuum, and like most things about the real world, various species have achieved various levels of it? You know? Just sayin'.

Funny. I've got another scenario for you.

1. Vodafone starts charging per MB for Facebook use.
2. Facebook threatens to shut off all access to Vodafone users.
3. Vodafone splits profits with Facebook.
4. Vodafone and Facebook BFF again.

Which do you think is likeliest?