There is this song I would hear all the time when I was a little kid. My stepdad was a huge Frank Zappa fan, and he had a large collection of zappa on wax. He would play these records a lot, and tell me that some of these songs were frighteningly accurate social commentaries. When I was a little kid, I had no idea what he meant, nor did I really care. I just thought the quality of the music was pretty bad.
But every time I turn on MSNBC, CNN, or 24-hour news channel dujour, I remember his voice and this little bit of a Zappa song:

I'm the slime oozin' out
From your TV set
You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help . . . no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold

And I have to wonder, did Zappa really foresee cable "news" channels selling military industrial complex propaganda 24 hours a day? In 1978?
Every time I read a YRO story here on slashdot, that song echos in my mind, and I simultaneously shudder at the truth of US society in 2003 ("Until the rights to you are sold") and smile at the idea that my dad tried to warn me 20 years ago. Thanks dad, for implanting in my 8 year old mind the idea that there is more to life than MTV. :)

I *like* the April 1st tradition around here. The only thing that spoils it is the people who insist on bitching in every frelling story about how unfunny it is. *sigh* You think I'd be accustomed to the jackass faction on /. by now.

Thanks Taco, I've been looking forward to /. April Fools all week!

Someone PLEASE bootleg the MC Frontalot show Thursday at the Voodoo Lounge. I can't make it because I'll be at the slashdot meetup, oh and I'm over 4000km away.

HOOK ME UP WITH SOME OGGS, YO!

That's it. Mandrake is being wiped from my powerbook. I'm downloading a debian netinst iso for ppc right now. By this time tomorrow, I'll be rolling around in a big pile of apt goodness.

In high school, I went to Rocky every Friday night. It was my release valve for the pressures of the week. Last Friday I went for the first time in 11 years. It was like I had never left. It is nice to know some things never change. :) Guess where I'll be tonight at midnight...

I love my country. We are not a bad people.

Yeah, I like Linux. Ok, I love it. I always have. I code GNOME, I read the LKML, I wear a dorky penguin cap all of the time. I have a Mandrake/KDE desktop box, a debian powerbook, and a smokin' Slackware8 Athlon in the closet that serves up the penguin love. I only play linux games. (Even my dreamcast runs Linux/MAME mostly)

But I'm not a Linux troll. I never proselyte Linux to anyone who doesn't start in on me first. I will politely sit there and mind my own business until someone tells me how stable MS Windows XP is or how fast Mac OSX runs now (or how great AmigaOne could have been). You can't really expect me to sit there and take it, can you?

I prefer the term "Linux Enthusiast."

It may seem lame, but I really enjoy the RDU slashdot meetups. There have only been two so far, but I have had fun both times.
        I know that the idea of a slashdot meetup in the real world might conjure up images of greasy teenagers screaming "Penis Bird", but my experience has shown that the only people who would show up are the +5 insightful folks. (Besides the salesmen and politicians, who show up at any tech gathering and try to sell you something. Of course a meeting of web-people is sure to draw spam.)
        The meeting was pretty diverse. We had nerds of all sorts, and beer. It's nice to see ag folks, audiophiles, Linux hackers, and MacOSX Ruby hackers in one place a discuss nfn/stm topics. We had beer, bitched about GPS, and played with tech toys. We discovered a WiFi system, browsed slashdot with it. We considered war-chalking it, but no one had chalk. And we drank beer.
It was blast. I wish more people could have attended. If you haven't gone to your local meetup, I suggest you consider it. But please, only if your karma is positive. :)

I hate WineX.
Not the actual WineX software itself, which is actually pretty nice. I have been able to place Rage of Mages (the last Windows game I bought for myself) under Linux, which makes me happy. It is the Sims and now Kohan that are pissing me off.
For my spouse's enjoyment, we have purchased The Sims (windows), House Party(windows), Hot Date (Mac, thanks Aspyr), and Vacation(back to windows). I have spent over $150US on this game. Now the spouse wants Linux on the laptop, but doesn't want to lose the Sims. Well, it would be another $70 dollars for the Linux version of the Sims. Actually, I'd have to buy Mandrake 8 to get the Sims.
This in itself is not so bad, I bought Alpha Centauri for Windows, and then bought the Planetary Pack when Loki made the port (it's that good!), so I will double-buy a game to get some penguin-love. But the Linux Sims is not a real port. It uses the infernal winelib (here on known as half-port). Some people will argue that winelib is as native Linux as SDL or OpenGl, but it isn't. SDL is a *thin* wrapper over a raw framebuffer/sound/input, and Mesa is hella-native on my rapidly-aging (but well supported in Linux) 3dfx card. WineX thunks DirectX calls to X11 and OpenGL functions. That is hardly native. I've heard that Max Payne runs half as fast under WineX as Windows. I don't know, because I won't buy that crap, but I am certain that the Loki version of SMAC runs at full speed on my ancient Pentium 166 laptop, while Windows SMAC crawls under WineX on my Athlon 700.
Now Trannie-Gaming wants to butcher Kohan and make a half-port to Linux. I guess if you have a 2.5 Ghz Pentium4 with 2Gigs of RAM and a geforce 4, you won't notice the slowdown from the DirectX emulation. It's still not good enough. People (all five of them) who bought Loki's KIS native will still be stuck without a patch to bring them back into compatibility with the Windows version. Unless they want to buy the game again, and be stuck with a slower version of the product for which they already payed good money! And it guarantees that there will never be a true native port of KIS (or the Sims). And this WineX is x86 only. What about my Powerbook running Mandrake 8.2? I have Alpha Centauri and Myth running native. Will this computer ever see the Sims? Hell-no. Thanks transgaming. By making high-end x86 Linux boxes run half-ports of windows games, you are destroying any chance of a real market emerging for linux entertainment software.
I'm not a foaming-at-the-mouth open source freak or anything, but I have a little pride. I don't want any damn Windows sloppy-seconds. I don't want a DirectX 11 game running at half-speed ("with sound coming in the next version of WineX, we promise! pay us now!"). I don't want game publishers to think they can throw us a lame-assed winex port that runs half as fast and say "See, this is good enough for those Linux folks."
I want native gaming, dammit! And if that means I am stuck wishing for native games to trickle out, then so be it. I am not paying any more money for a windows game in penguins clothing.
I hate WineX.

I think the whole blackout thing is going to backfire. It is becoming apparent to me that the people involved, the ones who always complain about /. , are actually the ones who are making /. into a shithole.
Slashdot is nicer than it has been in years. The volume is low enough that you can get into the conversations, but still high enough to give that "bustling community" feel.
My only wish is that there would be some way to prevent those blackout dipshits from returning. Oh well, thanks for giving me a solid week of the "old" slashdot.

Wow, I don't know if the blackout is going well, or if the stories are a little less interesting than usual, or if it is just Monday, but I *love* the lower volume on slashdot today. You here me, troll asswipes? Thank you for having made /. a little nicer with your absence. Please don't come back next week!

I really hate the "Troll Community" on slashdot. Do they really believe they represent a vital section of the slashdot user base? Does anyone really think goatse is funny? What, are they 12 years old? They ruin many good threads with off-topic ranting. <sigh> I do miss how it was in early '99 around here.

Anyway, I am glad to have read Taco's IRC log yesterday. Now I have my "foes" list (mostly trolls) set to -6 bonus. Bye-bye, I'll not look at you any longer!