Well, I guess it all depends on your definition of full. There are those people that won't believe there is an over population problem until the bodies are stacked to the upper reaches of the atmosphere and fed by single-cell organisms. Then there are those people who think a place is crowded if they can see a neighbor from their front porch. You can enjoy living like a cockroach so long as I can't see you from my front porch...

Netflix depends on Silverlight. Silverlight is not supported (or usable) on Linux. Doesn't even work under Wine. A good alternative to Netflix is Hulu. It uses Flash for video.

Just a quick search shows "Newt Gingrich" has not yet been claimed as a trademark. However, "Sarah Palin" filled for trademark protection on 11/5/2010. Maybe Newt should file before an opponent claims the trademark...

This is how everyone I know treats politics. Substitute American football for American politics. Look at how fans react. Fans will stand behind their favorite team, no matter how bad that team is. They will argue how theirs is the greatest team no matter how poor the team. Once you have team loyalty, nothing else matters. I see the same thing happen in politics all the time. The devil could rise from hell and offer to accept American servitude. Americans would jump at the opportunity as long as he was signed to their favorite political team.

Not that I disagree at all. However...

Do people really expect the company's IT to take over administration and maintenance of their personal computers? I thought the restriction on personal computers had more to do with data walking out the door.

People store that stuff on personal computers? My place of employment keeps that stuff on the email server and makes regular backups. All emails and IMs would be covered by handing over the backups.

I received a message a few months ago from Gentoo that Oracle had changed their licensing back to a distribution unfriendly version. Gentoo turned on the fetch restriction switch and gave me a link to download the needed files. I followed the link and read their new license only to discover that it forbade installing Java on Netbooks and cell phones. Three of the computers I maintain are Netbooks. I opted to skip updating Java until I learned more. Then life happened and I stopped paying attention to Java.

Today, I see this headline and I follow it to see what is going on. The comments seem to fall into two groups, Windows fan boys and OpenJDK discussion. OpenJDK is new to me and useful information. I've never heard of it before. Unfortunately, "emerge -s jdk" doesn't show an OpenJDK. I'll have to research it more. Perhaps it has a different name in Portage?

I originally installed Sun's JDK because my bank said I needed Sun's specific implementation to access my account on-line. I also worked for a company at the time that insisted that any data you wanted to capture needed to have an application coded in Java. I had played around with the idea of learning the language for work. That was given up when I figured out that any application I wrote wouldn't be approved for work use. I just did what most people did there, keep the data in Excel and away from the databases. It was that, or wait for the Dev team's multi-year backlog to clear.

I'll have to see what I can learn about OpenJDK and see if it covers my banking needs...

After glancing at the article, I have to ask, what is a TV? From the article:

So that tells me that a TV is not a video unit capable of displaying television shows. Perhaps they are referring to those old all-in-one units that had a television decoder built into the display? I have a 42-inch plasma display connected to a computer and home network. It is primarily used to view NetFlix, Hulu, and some light gaming. I also have a DTV tuner in a different computer on the same network. It can send video out to about ten other computers scattered around the house. Not a single display in the house has an integrated tuner. Does that mean I have zero televisions, or ten?

On a side note, I do laugh when I read Hulu's message that the current program is not viewable on televisions, then proceeds to display the show on my television.

I always figured Microsoft was at odds with itself. On one side, you have an operating system company that needs to recruit 3rd parties to write applications for their OS. On the other hand, you have an application company that needs to prevent 3rd parties from producing better software than you. Novel needed to trust Microsoft as their OS vendor. It has to be a weird situation to depend on your biggest competitor to deliver a stable platform that runs your software.

I've always enjoyed World of Padman. It is a cartoon-styled world of paint ball fights based on the Quake III Arena engine.

Seems to be working now. I just signed up using Firefox 7.0.1 on Windows XP.

My 2 seconds of Googling didn't find it. However, I remember Gates talking about a completely sealed computer system running Windows NT. The idea was that the system would only run MS software on MS hardware. No upgrades would be possible. I always figured the Xbox evolved from that prototype.

I'm also on Gentoo. However, my /tmp is on the hard drive. Gentoo has an automatic setting that wipes /tmp upon booting the system.