Comment Re:Could someone post a link? (Score 2, Funny) 296
Leonid Brezhnev with lipstick.
Well, still no lipstick, but a start anyway... http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_SPpWp0E7Th8/SGJjHYjA_oI/AAAAAAAAAVI/e0wWURoKzHY/s400/brezhnev.jpg
WHO Declares H1N1's Spread Officially a Pandemic 368
juggledean writes "The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a global flu pandemic after holding an emergency meeting, according to reports. It means the swine flu virus is spreading in at least two regions of the world with rising cases being seen in the UK, Australia, Japan and Chile." Whether it's called a pandemic or not, there's a hopeful note in the story about H1N1's spread: "...there were people who believed we might be in a kind of apocalyptic situation and what we're really seeing now with H1N1 is that in most cases the disease is self-limiting."
What Data Recovery Tools Do the Pros Use? 399
Life2Death writes "I've been working with computers for a long time, and every once and a while someone close to me has a drive go belly up on them. I know there are big, expensive recovery houses that specialize in mission-critical data recovery, like if your house blew up and you have millions of files you need or something, but for the local IT group, what do you guys use? Given that most people are on NTFS (Windows XP) by the numbers, what would you use? I found a ton of tools when I googled, and everyone and their brother suggests something else, so I want to know what software 'just works' on most recoveries of bad, but partially working hard drives. Free software always has a warm spot in my heart."
Ball And Chain To Force Children To Study
346
You haven't tried everything to get your kids to study until you've tried the Study Ball. The Study Ball is a 21-pound prison-style device that locks onto your child's leg and only unlocks after a predetermined amount of study time has passed. The homework manacles can't be locked for more than four hours, and come with a safety key. The product website states, "Quite often, students who are having problems concentrating tend to get up every ten minutes to watch TV, talk on the phone, take something out of the fridge, and a long list of other distractions. Were they to dedicate all this wasted time to studying, they would optimise their performance and have more free time available. Study Ball helps you study more and more efficiently." Stop Teasing Your Brother Pepper Spray coming soon.
FMRI Shows Man Loves Wife More Than Angelina Jolie 347
An anonymous reader writes "We've discussed (at length) functional MRI technology as it pertains to marketing and virtual reality, but now Esquire writer A.J. Jacobs has become the first person to go inside the controversial machine to test the science behind his sex drive. As in, he has fMRI experts read his mind as to whether he's actually more turned on by his young wife or Angelina Jolie. The results, unsurprisingly, are both geeky and hilarious. Would you subject yourself to this kind of reality check?"
Military Enlists Open Source Community 131
jmwci1 writes "The US Defense Department is enlisting an open source approach to software development — an about-face for such a historically top-down organization. In recent weeks, the military has launched a collaborative platform called Forge.mil for its developers to share software, systems components and network services. The agency also signed an agreement with the Open Source Software Institute to allow 50 internally developed workforce management applications to be licensed to other government agencies, universities and companies."
Comment The numbers are a bit to big (Score 1) 384
A Swedish source (Google translation) says that there where a tax loss of 3.6 million SEK and the total income amounted to 40 million SEK, not that the tax loss was of 40 million SEK. The Swedish source also says nothing of these numbers being annually.
Debian Gets FreeBSD Kernel Support 425
mu22le writes "Today Debian gets one step closer to really becoming 'the universal operating system' by adding two architectures based on the FreeBSD kernel to the unstable archive.
This does not mean that the Debian project is ditching the Linux kernel; Debian users will be able to choose which kernel they want to install (at least on on the i386 and amd64 architectures) and get more or less the same Debian operating system they are used to.
This makes Debian the first distribution, and probably the first large OS, to support two completely different kernels at the same time."
Comment Re:Let me be the first critic (Score 1) 1127
The stated goal - at least from a large portion of the linux community - is to see as many people using Linux as possible.
Yes, that seems to be the goal shouted most often, but I for one think it's the wrong one. I think the goal should be to have an operating system that work as we want it to work, not one that works in such a way that as many people as possible will want to use it, when that way very well might conflict with the way we want it to work.
Linux, IF you want it to reach that "critical mass" market share point, needs to reach a certain bar of compatibility. This doesn't mean that it needs to be compatible with everything known to mankind, but it DOES mean that you need to support, say, the major product lines of the "big three" video board market share holders (NVidia, ATi, Intel), the "big three" styles of audio card (built-in AC'97, Realtek, Creative), and so on. And these need to work without users having to go hunt down some obscure repository, post to 5 messageboard forums, and then follow instructions written like "well obviously you have to bleep fraggle this and sudo command toggle bashznz that and then it'll work, what kind of a lame n00b are you if you don't understand that."
And this is a complaint I've heard once to many from people who only want to have something to complain about. This all comes down to circumstances. The primary reason to why it's sometimes easier to get troublesome/exotic hardware to work with Windows is that you probably have the driver disc that came with the computer. Once you lose that disc, it's not nearly as easy anymore.
I just can't count the times that I've been called over to a friend to help them fix their computer and having to search the web for hours just to find Windows drivers for every piece of hardware in the computer when everything just works when popping in a Linux live CD (and if it wasn't for the Linux live CD, I wouldn't have been able to connect to the internet and find the ethernet driver to begin with).
Comment Re:Let me be the first critic (Score 1) 1127
Linux does not [...] lack consistency.
Selectively quoting does not change what was originally written. If you read on, you will see that PitaBred does in fact provide arguments to why Linux does not lack consistency.
Comment Re:Let me be the first critic (Score 1) 1127
Linux remains a server OS. It's coming around very slowly to the desktop and I've no doubt it will get there
It has been there for a long time now, just not for everyone. There's to much obsession over everyone running Linux. Why do we have to change something that does not suit the greater mass so that it does suit them, especially when that might mean that it actually won't suit us anymore?
Comment Re:Let me be the first critic (Score 1) 1127
I am myself both a Linux proponent and a developer. However, I do not think there is a value in people running Linux just for the sake of it. I do want people to run Linux, but only if they're benefiting from doing so.
A lot of people are saying that the Linux world must learn this and that from Windows, so that we can gain more users. What is the point of that? We who run Linux today do not do it because we hope that some day Linux will come to be just like Windows, we run it because it is not like Windows. People think and function in different ways, and that is why we want different things. What therefor seems like a horrible system where you have to use the keyboard and type things to one person may seem like a wonderful system where you don't have to use the mouse to another.
I think people should stop obsessing over getting everyone to run Linux. If people want to run Linux and see a benefit in doing so, then they will. If they don't, why should we care?
UK Gov't May Track All Facebook Traffic 204
Jack Spine writes "The UK government, which is becoming increasingly Orwellian, has said that it is considering snooping on all social networking traffic including Facebook, MySpace, and bebo. This supposedly anti-terrorist measure may be proposed as part of the Intercept Modernisation Programme according to minister Vernon Coaker, and is exactly the sort of deep packet inspection web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee warned about last week. The measure would get around the inconvenience for the government of not being able to snoop on all UK web traffic."
Microsoft Shoots Own Foot In Iceland 476
David Gerard writes "The Microsoft Certified Partner model is: an MCP buys contracts from Microsoft and sells them to businesses as a three-year timed contract, payable in annual installments. Iceland's economy has collapsed, so 1500 businesses have gone bankrupt and aren't paying the fees any more. But Microsoft has told the MCPs: 'Our deal was with you, not them. Pay up.' The MCPs that don't go bankrupt in turn are moving headlong to Free Software, taking most of the country with them. (Warning: link contains strong language and vivid imagery.)"
State of Colorado Calls Firefox Insecure, IE6 Safe 530
linuxkrn writes "The State of Colorado's Office of Technology (OIT) has set up a work skills website. The problem is that the site says 'DO NOT use FIREFOX or other Browsers besides IE. It has been decided that Mozilla based, non-IE browsers pose a security risk.' (Original emphasis from site.) If the leading IT agency for the State is making these uneducated claims, should the people worry about their other decisions?"
