Yeah, but your version has the unfortunate side-effect of not making a Boeing competitor look bad. Can't have that, you know.

(Seriously, WTF is this summary? Fox News Scare Quotes around 'brilliant'? Really, Slashdot?)

Back when I was still at school, one year, my classroom was one overlooking a deep vale. One of our primary pastimes that year was chucking assorted stuff out the window and see how it'd fly. Mostly (but not limited to) paper planes.

The record winner for that year in terms of distance covered, and by far, was also the simplest model we ever came up with.

It was much like the Ring mentioned above, except even simpler. Where the Ring's profile makes an O, the Box's makes a square U. So you don't even need tape.

Just take a rectangular piece of paper, fold the front over several times to make a thicker leading edge, and fold two vertical wings so the thing will look somewhat like an elongated cube with three missing sides. That's it. Not only it flies, but it flies pretty well, so long as you balanced the 'wings' well enough.

I'm surprised rdiff-backup hasn't been mentioned yet. It's a very nice piece of software, does incremental backups, and is easy to automate.

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.