Just a thought about the new Hamas leader.

He has gone on record and stated plainly that the U.S. is not going to be a target of Hamas attacks. This is a very astute move.

The patience with Israel around the world is growing very thin. This is not mere anti-Semitism that many Jewish leaders automatically rail against every time the Jews are criticized. There is a growing disgust with the manner in which the Israeli government treats the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. This disgust is a direct result of our concepts of Western democracy and equal rights. Since the victory of Israel against its neighbors decades ago, the Jewish population has oppressed the Palestinian refugees in a system akin to apartheid in South Africa.

For a while here, since the beginning of the second intifada and significant increase in civilian bombings, the Palestinians were losing a lot of credibility. Of course the Israelis have the right to crack down on terrorists!

Even in the Yassin killing, Israel is fully justified in the eyes of many to have undertaken the operation.

But now the new leader of Hamas has done something very smart. He has focused his war onto a single opponent - Israel. This changes the dynamics of the war from one of Hamas vs. Israel/U.S. to only Hamas vs. Israel. The U.S. is now given the chance to disengage themselves from Israel. It also forces Israel to deal with Hamas as an opponent in a civil war rather than as part of an overarching War on Terrorism.

Bush has already taken the position that a Palestinian homeland is inevitable and desirable, and this is Hamas giving the U.S. the chance to push that position. If the U.S. is able to make Israel realize that they will lose American support unless the Jewish population stops treating the Palestinian refugees as interlopers, then we may see significant progress towards peace in Israel.

OTOH, we may see Israel lash out uninhibitedly against the Palestinians. However, the international backlash, including the possible invasion of Israel and arrest of Israeli leaders for violations of international human rights laws, would most likely put a damper on such a large Jewish offensive.

It doesn't look like the U.S. has any inclination to take the chance to disengage, if the public statements of American diplomats are any indication, though. It's too bad. This could have been a way of protecting the U.S. from increased terrorist attacks coming from opponents of Israel.

Trollback is well aware of your penchant for man-sex, but usually we are heartened to see that you can drag yourselves away long enough to post a month worth of trolling gold. Not this time; it seems that you and Bubba were having too much fun to keep up to last month's high standards.

The unfailingly entertaining CmdrTaco

In the event of a short list, Trollback can always fall back on reviewing the previous month of CmdrTaco diaries and slashdot goings-on.

CmdrTaco shares his harrowing tale of having a block of ice thrown at his car, narrowly escaping an icy death. It was while still in shock that a confused CmdrTaco came up with what was thought impossible: a way to make moderation even more like a game. Welcome to the idea of NOT moderation. We can see no possible confusion arising from a meta-mod reversing the effects of a NOT moderation meted out by a user to reverse an initial moderation.

As a warm-up for the coding this moderation change will involve, Taco decided he would change the comment history page to be cleaner and clearer. After all, a list of comments in date order is overwhelmingly complex.

Give a 'hacker' a Mac and they become an amateur designer. Welcome to the new system of grouped comments, which may or may not tell you which story they are attached to, leading to a page of inconsistently presented data in no useful order. Fortunately, he explains how preposterous it is to say the page is cluttered: there is less text, therefore it is less cluttered. We stand corrected. As always with feature changes, most of the feedback is "pretty cool" - selective memory at work, although there is a way to turn the new grouping method off.

Fyodor the Black-Hat and Slashdot

Fyodor revoked SCO's license to redistribute nmap, which counts as something news-worthy on slashdot. Slashbots were reminded of why Fyodor is a black-hat, not a white-hat freedom fighter as slashbots like to think he is. The GPL zealots rejoiced, as someone was using the GPL to shake their tiny fist at SCO. Fortunately, an anonymous coward, probably scared of putting himself and his company at risk from being hacked, posted the truth behind fyodor's questionable use of the GPL.

While we're briefly on the subject of SCO, we'd like to thank the SCO$699FeeTroll for regularly reminding slashbots to pay their licensing fees.

James A C Joyce

Congratulations to James A C Joyce, who got four controversial stories posted in February, passing Trollaxor's previous record of three.

Two of the controversial stories are in fact written for Vlad. Don't Be So Fucking Fat is a motivational weight loss guide, while Why C Is Not My Favourite Programming Language is a list of the things that makes understanding C hard, and why he chooses to now study in the arts.

The most controversial article was surprisingly voted to the front page of K5, causing quite a stir in web-log circles was the unprecedented Why your Movable Type blog must die. James' diary around the time makes for good reading, as he discovers web-loggers/lamers linking to his story [1, 2, 3].

K5 Ascii Enactment Players comes to Slashdot

Proving the sort of quality code that makes up the lameness filters, AEP has arrived at Slashdot. Regulars will be aware of his works on K5, and hopefully we will see a similar quality of work here. Trollback presents two small golden nuggets for your review: [1, 2].

It is a challenge to get good quality ascii art past the lameness filter. Even timothy struggled with ascii art back in the day. After 250 revisions of the ascii art filter, the editors have succeeded in gagging their own ascii art, but not the trolls.

Jimmy O'Leary madness

After getting a special mention in the previous edition of Trollback, Jimmy O'Leary madness reached a two-month high for the month of February. When CmdrTaco posted the story "Saturn Rings But No Spokes" - you can probably guess what happened. We salute whoever got the first post on that story, keeping Jimmy mania alive.

The List

(2,9,15) Freston Youseff | Pretty amazing
(5,10,33) Chess_the_cat | Re:Not all Advertisers win
(3,9,15) Sheetrock | After looking at the possible solutions
(-1,5,15) Anonymous Coward | Re:Death to magnetic stripes
(3,8,13) Srividya | Will this last very long?
(3,18,48) Samuel Duncan | Law-abiding citizens
(-1,17,35) Samuel Duncan | "generics"
(2,15,41) bonch | The reasons geeks don't get laid
(1,11,27) Tirel | i call bullshit
(5,7,13) Debian Troll's Best | Other ways to improve Linux security?
(4,13,113) ObviousGuy | Really? Infamous?
(3,6,16) Sheetrock | Sounds interesting.
(3,36,149) Can it run Linux | Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Post)
(2,18,21) Srividya | Unfortunate, but unlikely in the future.
(2,5,6) Anonymous Coward | "Consumers" have no "rights"
(0,10,30) ObviousGuy | Cemeteries are landfills
(-1,12,35) Amsterdam Vallon | Slashdot is an international site
(2,19,149) Tirel | huh
(0,12,28) Tirel | small article nitpick
(-1,7,37) Anonymous Coward | Not bad, but...
(5,9,11) Clockwurk | Re:Injunction?
(3,17,44) Chess_the_cat | 2+2=3
(3,11,14) Sheetrock | A friend came up with an amazing analogy...

[If Trollback has missed anyone, please submit a comment.]

Honourable Mentions

• A joke about BSD and Gentoo users is -1 Funny. It must have struck a nerve.
• Calyptos has absolutely no sense of humour, even if the joke is lame.
• ObviousGuy shares a short history of Dungeons and Dragons with us. He is the target of a rather pathetic troll-bust.
• Ballmer visited last November and fondled donkeys. Chortle-chortle.
• Cecil bites on a troll and tries to tell said troll that they lost.

Finally, we'd like to bring your attention to one of the greatest sids on slashdot: sid 3903. Take a walk down amnesia lane and recall a day when you could post ascii art boobies, naked Jackie Chan, and shemales. Remember the VA Linux / Slash-dot giveaways, and the time when chrisd bit. Recall the early days after VA bought andover.net for nearly US$1b. Lastly, remember the trolls.

That's it for this month!

Gotta love the Japanese military

Republicans rejoice.

Aside from having my Karma stomped down to Terrible and being completely blocked from posting comments, I'm also being automatically logged out after viewing several pages.

If this is another problem, I'd like to begin the count of issues I've encountered so far.

1) Moderation weightings have been skewed such that a negative moderation affects karma significantly downward while positive moderation barely affects karma upward.

2) The new comment history page is completely fucked.

3) New cookie? New security? WTF?

4) Automatic logging out.

Anything else?

What is the weighting of Moderation to Karma?

It is common knowledge that a +1 Funny is worth 0 karma, but are there other values that are not commonly known?

I currently have Bad karma. However, looking over my recent posts, I have many +5 Insightful/Interesting posts and have a positive moderation balance despite several downmods.

However, my karma has steadily declined. Likewise, my karma barely moves at all from Positive to Good even though I have received a moderation balance of +20 as evidenced by the daily moderation totals.

I was given notice that this Friday will be my last day at this company. The notice actually came at the end of January, so it is no surprise. My company is finally closing the Japanese office. I was given the chance to transfer back to the home office or to another office in nearby Taiwan. I chose to remain here in Japan for the sake of my family.

For years the Japanese office have been a drain on capital never having reached profitability, but also it has been a source of several very big name customers in the consumer electronic space. Unfortunately with the prolonged downturn in the economy, the home office has scrutinized the various divisions within the company and has decided to lop off those unprofitable parts. I don't blame them for the decision and I have been treated more than fairly, though my experience seems to have been out of the norm.

The company tried their best to place me elsewhere in the company because I am an expatriot specifically for them, so they felt that they had an extra responsibility to at the very least to bring me back to the U.S. I simply couldn't accept though. Aside from my suspicion that I would have been laid off after two months or so back in the U.S., I have actually just gotten settled here in Japan. I bought a car and renewed my apartment lease for another two years. I'm just not at a point where I can up and move again.

I mentioned earlier that the layoffs were actually announced at the end of January, but my last day will be this Friday. The Japanese employees, for the most part (there are still a couple people like country manager and office manager still around to help with the closing), had their last day back in January. I have had my employment extended in order to handle visa transfers and to handle other things that are required for living here that were handled by the company previously.

I've been doing that for a couple weeks now and I'm just taking a little break today. I've been running all over the place for my visa. I've been to a couple interviews which I'm still waiting on. And just last Friday I found out that I'm supposed to be working on wrapping up development for one of the customers for whom we had to cancel a project on. It gives me a chance to polish my programming a little more before being hurled into unemployment, so that's a plus. But I would have much rather had this week to finish what I need to finish in terms of things that are important to me, not for some ex-customer.

So I am going to be employment-free next week. I've talked to a few recruiters and have gone to a couple interviews through them. The companies seem cool, and I'm definitely qualified for the positions that I'm seeking (Lead QA engineer, Junior developer, or FAE). I'm not worried about finding a new job. There are plenty of jobs out there for developers, but there aren't as many for QA engineers. There is no premium nor respect for QA in Japan, it is seen as an expense only and it's engineers are no more than trained monkeys, so companies end up hiring part time workers to perform QA for less than 1000 yen an hour typically. It's a little disheartening to say the least. But I'm looking for something a little more involved than button pressing.

I've got 5 and a half years of experience at this latest company. 1 of that was as a developer, just before I moved to Japan 2 years ago to help with the Japanese QA team as a technical lead which they desperately needed. After the other members of the QA team finally left after the PM mismanaged them for the last time, I was left as the sole QA engineer. I named myself QA manager and hired on two interns (at 1000 yen per hour) and trained them to do QA while I handled the customer contacts and project scheduling. I tried my best to give them some grounding in C because they could then become much more useful to my QA team and also to any future engineering job they would get. It's funny, neither of them had any computer experience when they came in, but they left able to write simple tests in C. They were really great, for the most part. Having to fire them in November due to cost cutting was tough, though.

Now I'd like to find a position that I can grow in. QA in Japan was really a dead end because of the inability to move upwards. Becoming the QA manager is like becoming the top monkey, you're still a monkey. That's why I'm looking for stuff in development if possible. I've got development experience, but that was two years ago before I moved to Japan. I'm doing my best at interviews to emphasize that most of what I did in QA was development of test cases so I'm not rusty. That's my biggest challenge in the interviews now.

I did finally receive the results of my Japanese Language Proficiency Test last weekend and I am officially a Level 2 certificate holder. There is only one more level to go and that is Native Speaker status, so I'd like to think I've come a long way, but I know there's still quite a bit to go. I'll need to update my resume...

Heh. If you've know any positions for a Japanese-speaking American who's got several years of experience in Development, QA, and Management, please drop me a line at my email address. I'd really appreciate it.

Welcome to the first monthly edition of Trollback for 2004. This edition has been a pleasure to put together, thanks to the sheer quantity of quality posts presented in The List.

omfg ror lolf

One of Trollback's regular duties is to skim through 20721 to make sure that any posts recorded there for peer review and gentlemanly competition are not missed when the time comes to assemble The List. jimmy o'leary has made 20721 readable; the team can laugh at funny crap as we skim through the wasteland. Trollback's favourite contribution is this:

> I am a trolling stalwart. Please consider me for president.

only if you tell me your stances on 1) death penalty 2) immigration 3) stem cell research and 4) omfg ror lolf

A round of applause for jimmy, please.

FortKnox

Moving along with the "affirmative action" theme of Trollback, we'd like to turn briefly to FortKnox. Despite promising Trollback a few cheap laughs, it would appear that FortKnox has not been able to follow through with the diary entry where he proclaimed that he was a troll, and damn good at it. The diary has been pulled, and trollback is only aware of one feeble attempt. The Trollback team respectfully requests that FortKnox be removed from the Troll Blacklist.

Thanks in advance.

Goatse.cx

As many of you will already know, the goatse.cx domain has been placed in registry lock mode. Many of you feel as if an important piece of Internet culture has been censored needlessly, although by now you're probably used to it. This is not the first time the goatse.cx domain has had troubles. You can read about the last time over at k5 here.

A bunch of articles commemorating the demise of goatse.cx were submitted to k5, although only this one was considered good enough by the unwashed masses for it to be posted on the front page.

OSDN Ad Parodies

Regular Trollback readers will recall last month's parodies of the OSDN Dating service advertisements. It would seem that OSDN is now running an advertisement for a magazine on open source called "wide open". The parody for this month can be viewed over at HuSi.

The List

(4,16,32) Krapangor | Fall of Western civilization ?
(3,12,16) Sheetrock | Look to the past for examples of future success.
(-1,8,29) Tirel | Why do we need two widgets?
(0,12,26) Gary Whittles | Re:I need to ask
(-1,8,17) ObviousGuy | Ever buy a car with auto-everything?
(3,21,36) ObviousGuy | BF Skinner was right
(-1,5,20) ObviousGuy | The problem is that the ISS is 'international'
(4,16,103) Tirel | Objectivity my arse
(1,30,102) Tirel | where is the peer review?
(0,5,9) Anonymous Coward | the Mac Zealot Translator a go-go!
(-1,9,31) SexyKellyOsbourne | Your tax dollars at work...
(5,12,19) radish | Re:HP CEO fails to understand basic economics
(-1,25,52) Tirel | it breaks easily
(-1,4,9) Anonymous Coward | Real world vs. fanboy fantasies
(3,32,136) Amsterdam Vallon | This is NOT right - Please DONATE to his fund
(0,5,11) egg troll | IPv6: Not Ready for Prime Time
(-1,14,39) Krapangor | Bad joke.
(1,16,95) Krapangor | Stupid.
(1,12,28) Krapangor | Clever
(1,25,59) sulli | No, only 0.9094 TB
(-1,8,30) ObviousGuy | Helium is a great chemical
(3,10,10) Krapangor | Who will win ?
(0,14,18) Krapangor | Problem.
(-1,8,11) Anonymous Coward | Re:speaking of IPv6 vs IPv4
(-1,13,28) ObviousGuy | If you gave the code away for Free
(-1,7,15) Krapangor | I am sick of this.
(5,11,66) egg troll | Ugh stop this cliche
(4,11,27) larry bagina | pot, kettle, black
(-1,7,13) benzapp | Re:Long live masculinity
(4,31,85) (1337) God | Sounds good, right? Here's the problem...
(-1,8,51) Sheetrock | There's one major reason I choose Python over Perl
(-1,5,11) Krapangor | Bad foundations.
(2,60,130) krog | Here are the IPs in question
(1,14,25) Krapangor | Rubbish.
(3,31,194) (1337) God | They don't care about us
(-1,7,16) Freston Youseff | Linux Cost Tax Payers at least $410M...nothing in
(5,13,37) Krapangor | Get non-tech certs
(-1,21,210) Forge | Congratulate "Sir William" and move on
(3,10,27) Anonymous Coward | Napster and Shawn Fanning
(0,12,34) ObviousGuy | Why does anyone give Lucas any more chances?
(4,18,32) Anonymous Coward | Not only Macs...

Honourable Mentions

• Krapangor posts great flamebait, first response sums it all up.
• Klerck: Microsoft Security. What's it all about? Is it good, or it is whack? Slashbots say whack.
• larry bagina starts the mother of all BSD vs Linux flamewars with a simple post we've all seen before. The war between ninejaguar and kirkjobsluder is something to behold.
• Eric does his best Big Gay Al impression.
• A slashbot gets his units wrong and a bunch of really helpful slashbots come to his rescue.
• Sheetrock posts something truly bizarre, gets moderated down as a troll.
• Tirel shows that patriotic NASA fan-boys are assholes.
• What is the second greatest achievement after Score: 5, Troll? Here's your answer.

Finally, you might remember hearing something about Linus putting on a pair of speedos for charity. The nice people at Fark.com ran a photoshop contest on a photo of Linus in his speedos. The winner is worth a laugh; the rest of the entries are pretty dull.

That's it for this month! ror

The FreeBSD bootloader does not seem to talk to my USB keyboard, so I have to sit through 10 seconds of 'devil menu' every time I boot up.

It would be nice if this were configurable, skippable, or if the loader would just talk to my USB keyboard so I could skip the menu manually.

No update on the DHCP issue. The machine still isn't talking to the Internet.

This weekend I downloaded the FreeBSD 5.2 .iso and tried installing it on my new used PC. I'm having some trouble with setting up the DHCP client.

The LAN card is a 3Com card that is detected properly by the FreeBSD installation script. During installation, it asks me whether the card will use IPv6 or DHCP and I choose DHCP. The script then goes off to contact the DHCP server and retrieves what appears to be an appropriate IP address. 192.168.xx.3. The router is 192.168.xx.1, and my other PC (Win2K) is 192.168.xx.2 and works fine. So the .3 IP seems to be correct.

However, when the OS boots up, I am unable to make contact with anything. I can't ping the router, much less anything on the internet.

I went through the installation again and tried to install via FTP rather than from CD. That didn't work either, though the DHCP client seemed to retrieve an appropriate IP address from the router.

Besides a network connection, I seem to have everything installed correctly. My video needs a little tweaking, but I'm not sure how much I can do with that, it's an old system.

What can I do to get DHCP working?

What happened to Search.pl and Comments.pl? They don't seem to be keeping up with the front page at all.

Yes, if everyone else jumped off a cliff I would too.

The Kingdom of the Obvious

Motto: "Prima Facie"

UN Category: Capitalist Paradise
Civil Rights: Very Good
Economy: Thriving
Political Freedoms: Excellent

Location: the West Pacific
The Kingdom of The Obvious is a tiny, economically powerful nation, remarkable for its absence of drug laws. Its hard-nosed, hard-working, intelligent population of 5 million are either ruled by a small, efficient government or a conglomerate of multinational corporations; it's difficult to tell which.

There is no government in the normal sense the word; however, a small group of community-minded individuals is effectively ruled by the Department of Commerce, with areas such as Law & Order and Religion & Spirituality receiving almost no funds by comparison. Income tax is unheard of. A large private sector is led by the Information Technology industry, followed by Cheese Exports and Basket Weaving.

Crime is a serious problem, and the police force struggles against a lack of funding and a high mortality rate. The Obvious's national animal is the dog, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation, and its currency is the Value.

Trollback is here with the last montly edition of Trollback to cover 2003. Trollback will post a year in review edition in the coming days, which will review some of the highlights of the year, as Trollback saw them.

The trollback team has struggled to put together the review. Trollback has a fair idea of what will make it and what will not, but would certainly like to hear from the community as to what the highlights were for you.

Perhaps some fresh perspective will help.

OSDN Dating Service

As if the zoo system wasn't enough of a black-book of booty calls, OSDN now has partnered with match.com to provide its readers with even more assistance in the difficult business of finding a girlfriend when you're addicted to linux. Some discussion on this topic has taken place at K5 and at HuSi.

The advertisement for this service is poorly photoshopped, perhaps one of many reasons why it has been parodied extensively [1, 2, 3, 4]. While we're on the subject, slashbots ponder if slashdot trolls are more or less lonely than they are.

Troll Blacklist

The Troll Blacklist project continues to censor many great users that Trollback reports on. This month saw the banning of FortKnox, who admitted that he was a troll and damn good at it in his widely read journal.

Trollback is not so sure about FortKnox's troll status, but if FortKnox or one of his many legions of adoring fans would like to submit a list of FortKnox's finest work, Trollback will feature that work in the January 2003 edition.

Elsewhere

Over at K5, Trollaxor managed to have three stories on the front-page at once. Strangely, not a single one had anything to do with politics. They are Sovereign Semiconductor, Cubing the Power Mac G5, and Linux vs. OpenBSD.

The List

(-1,21,98) Sheetrock | Science is a constantly evolving field
(5,20,61) Sheetrock | Time for better security.
(0,16,81) Overly Critical Guy | Well, well, well
(-1,23,40) Angram | Linux File System?
(4,10,25) Anonymous Coward | My suggestions.
(3,13,16) Exmet Paff Daxx | Are you sure this is a good idea?
(0,41,137) Amsterdam Vallon | I DON'T CARE -- I BUY MUSIC LATELY
(-1,2,66) Anonymous Coward | More American garbage
(1,13,150) adzoox | The geeks that clapped during the movie/review:
(0,16,75) rkz | Its crap but just as crap as anyone else
(1,10,19) Anonymous Coward | Myth: Linux is more secure than Windows NT.
(1,26,119) rkz | India
(0,9,15) Sheetrock | Looks good.
(-1,20,50) egg troll | Poor Taste in Title of Game
(-1,19,30) SexyKellyOsbourne | Your tax dollars at work, folks.
(2,12,17) Amsterdam Vallon | I was a National Weather Service researcher
(1,7,30) Anonymous Coward | Stigma? Try Porn Star
(-1,14,54) Amsterdam Vallon | My experience as a consultant for the Israelis
(-1,13,24) Amsterdam Vallon | 1975 - The year I consulted for Magnusson-Moss
(0,15,63) Amsterdam Vallon | In 2002, I researched the COSMIC background

Honourable mentions

• Return of the bitchslap
• Michael will enter you from behind
• rkz's slashbot book review
• Another attempt at a spelling troll

Don't forget to send in your Year in Review nominations.

That's it for this month!

Slashdot ran a story about Knoppix yesterday and it piqued my interest. So I went ahead and downloaded the latest ISO and burned the CD.

I'm impressed at the automatic support of all my devices without any user input. It, as they say, "just works". All Linux installations ought to be this easy.

I have some gripes with the system, though.

The first is that Knoppix doesn't make it obvious how to complete the Linux installation. I understand that Knoppix is designed to be a distro on disk, but such a distribution is only a stepping stone to actually putting the OS on the disk for permanent installation. Why, then, doesn't Knoppix have an option under the Knoppix menu to prep and install the OS to the hard drive?

Another complaint is the lack of device control. Specifically I cannot figure out how to adjust the mouse sensitivity. The mouse pointer for my USB mouse flies across the screen at the slightest touch, and I can't figure out where the mouse applet lives. There doesn't seem to be any consolidated device control area, so I'm sure I just haven't hunted enough for the right applet. I would really like it if the device settings were all in a easily accessible and obvious place.

A very small thing I noticed and thought strange was that the KDE 'Start' button isn't activated by the Windows key.

I really don't like transparent system menus. I guess some people like it, so I don't begrudge them that. I just want to know how to turn it off. Where is this setting? It sure as hell isn't in the Desktop settings applet.

Why is the documentation so lacking? There seems to be a concerted effort to put the least amount of effort into writing the help documentation. I started Frozen Bubble, which I think is a game, and it hung when I selected the 1-player mode. So I clicked the 'X' and...nothing. So I right click Frozen Bubble in the task bar and select Close and...nothing. Now I'm stumped. It seems to me that the OS should realize that the application isn't terminating and do what it can to shut down the process, ideally it would prompt the user before it sent the final kill signal. There was simply no response from the application or any acknowledgement from the OS that the application was hanging.

Then I remembered, hey, this is Unix. There's got to be some manual way to kill processes. So I opened up bash and tried to figure out a way to kill the hanging process. The kill command needs a process number, so how do I get a process number? bash help doesn't help. This is where my documentation complaint really started to kick in. Why wouldn't the bash 'help kill' documentation have a pointer to whatever the command was to list running procs? I'm not asking for a hyperlinked set of docs, just a simple 'Also see: WHATEVER THE COMMAND IS TO GET THE PROC LIST'. Finally I found Kkill in the application menu (of all places) which proceeded to kill the game of Mahjongg I had to minimize to get to the hanging Frozen Bubble.

In general, I get the feeling of a very good OS from Knoppix, but it lacks the polish of Windows 2000/XP or MacOS. I'd like to get to know it more when I have more time. I really want to figure out what the attraction is to this OS. Windows has come such a long way since the nightmare days of Win98. Windows 2000 and XP are approaching the point of perfection from a user perspective and stability standpoint.

Is it my preconceived notions of how smoothly and comfortably an OS should work that turns me off every time I boot Linux?

I am watching CNN and a London-based reporter is spending a month with an Ethiopian village to document the life of a starving people. He is large in size, probably 250 pounds or so and taller than most of the Ethiopians he lives with.

He wants to discover for himself the reasons behind the famine and starvation.

On his first day he accompanies his host family to the 'church' which is nothing more than a small clearing with seats out in the open. Upon his arrival several of the congregation become possessed with fear. They spring out of their seats and shake all over, dancing around like people possessed in voodoo rituals. They scream and cry out at his large appearance. One old village leader sums up for me the primary problem of this village's starvation which isn't simply lack of food. He stands before the congregation and proclaims loudly that he "heard that the man eats other humans". The problem is lack of education and a culture based on superstition.