I mostly write small tools that I use for a variety of purposes. Some of them are scripts, and when a gui is really necessary i either do it webbased on a local server, or...........java.

I don't quite understand why people don't write more tools in java, not only is it compatible across linux distributions, it even works on a crapload of other operating systems. There are a massive amount of libraries, GUI development is dead-easy, backwards compatibility is a non-issue...

Am I the only one who immediately though of Bill O'Reilly upon reading the title?

My first real experience was trying to install gentoo on my machine, I don't quite remember when that was, but I was new to the computer scene in general. After spending an entire weekend reading how-to's and what not, I was still unable to get my sound card working.

I gave up on linux for a little while, but then I got back when ubuntu dapper came out. There was a small transition period, especially cause my laptop wouldn't quite work, but it's been a long time now since windows has "graced" any of my computers.

I for one like to get my news from such established, objective, concise, accurate, informative establishments like /.

What's this "karma hell" you speak off?

I'm not sure why people keep having problems with upgrading their ubuntu machine to newer versions. I have upgraded through most releases (though not always continuously cause for instance i switched to 64 bit recently) and I've never run into any problems really.

Sorry, i forgot to toggle the output mode of my previous reply, here is the proper one:

-- The US has a long history of third parties springing up, or independents running for election. A recent example example is Ross Perot who won 19% of the vote in the 1992 presidential election. In 2000 it was the votes won by the Green Party (Ralph Nader) that were the difference between Bush or Gore winning.

Fact remains that the president always comes from one of the two big parties, the other parties are more a diversion then anything else. The same goes for england and others. It's not that there are only two parties, but that two parties rule so supreme that the others never actually get to power. Maybe I should've clarified this in my original post.

-- And at the local level it is even more pronounced. I've had neighbors get fed up with the current local officials, say on the school board and just up and run on their own. And get elected.

That is very possible, I was not referring to local politics.

-- Also let us know when in Europe a person of mixed race like Obama is elected President of a MAJOR state like France or Germany. That is when you;ll know you have a strong, open democratic process.

The election of someone of mixed race is by no means a measure of how democratic a country is. This is something that has been bugging me for so long. Americans are so afraid of everything being seen as racist, that they overcompensate in the other direction. For me race is simply a non-issue. I don't care. If someone of a different race got elected, I would not rejoice particularly hard, nor be overly depressed, as long as (s)he is qualified, that's fine by me. You have to understand that much of the rest of the world is not quite as oversensitive to race as you are and that we do not count our accomplishments by how non-discriminatory we are, for us equality is simply a given, not something to be proven.

-- The US has a long history of third parties springing up, or independents running for election. A recent example example is Ross Perot who won 19% of the vote in the 1992 presidential election. In 2000 it was the votes won by the Green Party (Ralph Nader) that were the difference between Bush or Gore winning. Fact remains that the president always comes from one of the two big parties, the other parties are more a diversion then anything else. The same goes for england and others. It's not that there are only two parties, but that two parties rule so supreme that the others never actually get to power. Maybe I should've clarified this in my original post. -- And at the local level it is even more pronounced. I've had neighbors get fed up with the current local officials, say on the school board and just up and run on their own. And get elected. That is very possible, I was not referring to local politics. -- Also let us know when in Europe a person of mixed race like Obama is elected President of a MAJOR state like France or Germany. That is when you;ll know you have a strong, open democratic process. The election of someone of mixed race is by no means a measure of how democratic a country is. This is something that has been bugging me for so long. Americans are so afraid of everything being seen as racist, that they overcompensate in the other direction. For me race is simply a non-issue. I don't care. If someone of a different race got elected, I would not rejoice particularly hard, nor be overly depressed, as long as (s)he is qualified, that's fine by me. You have to understand that much of the rest of the world is not quite as oversensitive to race as you are and that we do not count our accomplishments by how non-discriminatory we are, for us equality is simply a given, not something to be proven.

I have always maintained that an essentially two-party system is NOT a democracy. You can see the results in the US, in England, in France to a degree... Political systems like the one in Belgium are more like a democracy, where there are a whole lot of independent parties and new ones can spring up at any time. (a party that is now like two years old already has about 15% of the votes here).

The flipside of course is that it takes longer to get things done, but then again, that is the price you pay for democracy. Either you go with a dictator who can solely decide everything, meaning it takes but a snap decision to change policies, or you go to the other end of the spectrum, a true democracy, where every possible opinion has to be weighed in and a satisfactory conclusion has to be reached. America leans much more towards the dictator regime then the democratic one, whilst most of Europe's political systems lean towards the democratic side.

Sun has some amazing technologies and I would really hate to see it be sold. However, since that seems to be the way Sun wants to go, I can't make up my mind who would be best suited to take it over.

I wasn't too crazy about IBM's bid, because the large overlap would probably deprecate some Sun technology.

Oracle is another matter, mysql could indeed be a nice "lightweight" addition to their database portfolio and the other technologies probably would not get wasted. However, what scares me about Oracle products is the IMMENSE pricetag. If they buy out Sun, how long till they start charging exorbitant fees for their products?

Cisco could be a good option, though I am unsure how well they would fare with these technologies. It would be kind of a new market on many fronts for them, not sure if/how they could handle it.

I doubt Dell will buy them, and that leaves us with... what?
Red Hat? In some parallel reality, possibly, in this one, na.
Microsoft, for the sake of Sun's kickass technology, let's hope not. ...

So here's me hoping Sun doesn't get bought out at all and that they clean up their marketing act a bit.

This is all fun and games until you trip over a branch or something... Watch with horror as in that split second it takes you to hit the ground, you can see the lawnmower backing up at full speed...

Only Sweden

In belgium, there are two (well actually three, but German isn't that wide-spread) national languages: dutch (also referred to as flemish) and french. (for the record, I'm speaking as a Flemish person)

You start learning French at school at about 10 years of age, so people usually grow up speaking both flemish and french to some degree. In high school, they usually throw in a bit of german or spanish. English is also usually a big factor in high school, but even if it's not, it's becoming very widespread amongst the younger generations.

That multilingual nature is rather deeply entrenched in our culture. On the train the other day a couple was alternating between dutch and french during a conversation. In casual conversation it's not unusual (especially online) to switch between say dutch and english. Lectures at college are sometimes in different languages as well. For example, sometimes the course material is in english, but the teacher speaks dutch, or the other way around. Or the teacher teaches in english, but takes questions in dutch.

I have never (thank science!) seen a dubbed movie, they are simply accompanied by subtitles (in theaters the subtitles are both in french and flemish at the same time: top one is french, bottom one is flemish).

As far as I understand, there is some limited automated captcha breaking, but most captcha's are broken by outsourcing them to foreign countries where people just look at them and send back the answer. If this is correct, then there is simply no way to make a good captcha.

Cloud computing, as we generally view it: keeping data offsite and running apps over say a browser. There is nothing worse in my eyes. First, I like to hang on to my data myself, second, I like being able to toy with programs (read: open source & local).

And yet, I develop most of my apps to be website-driven.

This is because I like to have most of my stuff on a central computer under my control. Also, I generally develop my apps so I can in fact host them somewhere else, but very easily retrieve copies of the data. This make them highly accessible and yet circumvents the problems I stated above. I still control the data and I can toy with the program as much as I want.