I am absolutely stunned that Slashdot's editors would give credibility to a completely false story, pushed by a paid industry PR professional. As Rugrat said,

The "article" is not an article, but a press release written by an employee of a public affairs company.

"Tom Harris is mechanical engineer and Ottawa Director of High Park Group, a public affairs and public policy company."

For a website that spends so much time and energy combating FUD from Microsoft, and the MPAA and RIAA, it is baffling that FUD that was paid for and is pushed by the oil industry would make the front page here.

Come on, Slashdot. You can do better.

For the last year or so, I've been happily using Debian, with a mixture of sources so I was stable, but current, just like nearly everyone who uses Debian.

Then I tried to upgrade or something insane like that, using aptitude, and the whole thing went tits up on me. No amount of cussing, kicking things, or actual tinkering with the software could save my machine.

I thought about asking for some advice in the Debian forums, or on one of the lists, until I ran out of fingers in my entire family tree to count the times someone said some variant of, "Shut up, noob! Your stoopid and not leet leik I am! Go back to Winblows! Ha! HA! HA!!!1"

Yeah. Guess I'm not venturing into those waters, so I figured I'd just have to grab my network install CD and start over (luckily, I set up /home on its own partition a long time ago, so if I fuck something up really bad, I don't lose all my porn very important data.

The day I planned to reinstall Debian, I read that Dapper Drake had been released, and everyone loved it so much, they totally wanted to marry it. A friend of mine, who is wise in the ways of science and the air speed velocity of unladen swallows has also been singing the praises of Ubuntu for a long, long time, so I grabbed a Live CD to see what all the fuss was about.

Holy shit. What an awesome bit of work it is! It's the first Linux distro to find every single bit of hardware on my old Sony Vaio desktop machine, including all the USB ports. It looked great, too, and was the most "Mac-like" Linux I've ever used.

I realize that a lot of you are mocking me right now, but listen for a second: I'm not interested in hacking on my kernel to make sure something is detected during boot, or modifying all sorts of settings in a text editor just so I can make the damn thing find my camera . . . and don't get me started about CUPS. I love technology, and I love and fully believe in "free" as in speech, and I'm grateful for free as in beer. But also really into "works," as in just does. And on my machine here, Dapper Drake just works, and it's awesome. This is the Linux distro that I can take to my parents, and to my friends who are drowning in a sea of FUD, and convince them that they don't really have to be part of the Borg if they don't want to.

And ultimately, I believe that has to be our goal if we're going to convince people to give Linux a real, serious try as an alternative to Windows. We need to be able to tell them, with confidence, "Put this CD in your machine, and give it a try. I think you'll like it, because it just works."

Here is my current backup strategy (data only): Use Winrar to create a series of CD sized compressed archives. Burn each to CD.

Not fun. Ten CDs now, and growing. I can move up to DVD (and will soon).

I am concerned, though, about corruption. If one file goes corrupt, I understand I can bypass an individual file. I am also doing incremental backups quarterly (a single CD usually) with the full backup annually. I figure this way I have redundancy built in. CDs are stored in my safety deposit box.

My most valuable data is the pictures of my kids. I could never reproduce (obviously). I've even considered using GMail as a secondary backup source, but feel this is a bit unethical.

Anyone have any other advice to ensure that I keep my stuff safe? Any advice would be appreciated. Specifically, making sure I can get to the stuff on my CD-R's. But also, a fast, easy way to do incremental backups.

TIA

I really respect the BBC. It does not mean I always agree with everything they write. My respect is not dependent on the degree to which I agree with someone. In fact, some folks that I don't respect much tend to have very similar views as me. Sometimes it is the way one arives at one's choices in life.

The BBC has a really good IT staff. They use technology in a way to make news more understandable. A recent example was their illustrating the hard choices the U.K. would have to make in order to meet demand and meet environmental regulations. You were allowed to make some basic choices, and see the results. try to be to "green", and you blow the price of energy thorugh the roof. Try to go the other direction, and you got to see what the result would be in envronmental terms. It hink it made it very easy to understand the hard choices we all have to make.

Now, look at MSNBC. They are trying to show the immigration issue in the U.S. They were showing how many immigrants live in each state. Yet the way they did it was horrendous (see for yourself here. Not only can you only see one state at a time, but it is virtually impossible to jusp to the state you want without numerous clicks. Is this a good way to present information.

The big difference between MSNBC and BBC. The tech crew at MSNBC uses Flash for the sake of using Flash. Not that it is called for. Usually, it detracts from information presentation instead of adding to it. The BBC uses technology in an intelligent way. It is clear the "information presentation" group and the "web guys" work closely, and have a good understanding of each other.

Please read the alert here. The Broadcast Flag is back, this time as a WIPO treaty, and if you don't speak up, it'll be decided by bureaucrats without any democratic input at all.

The alert provides a web form to write to your congress person. Please do that. And please put the alert up elsewhere, so that other people can help too.

I'm in Washington DC working on this today, and your support will help.

Thanks

Bruce

Please see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175093&cid=14558550 I don't see a reason for the negative moderation. I'd appreciate if anyone with mod points would help fix this.

Bruce

Slashdot user rodgster sent me 1000 slashdot subscription pages because he likes my comments. Thanks, rodgster!

(Cross-posted to WWdN)

The final table of the 2005 World Series of Poker started at 4pm yesterday afternoon, and wasn't finished until just after 7am today. I'm not sure, but I think that's a record. I'd call Pauly to be sure, but something tells me he's crashed out until at least Sunday.

Two qualifiers from PokerStars made the final table, and one guy, who qualified using free play points, made it to the final two tables, finished in 13th place, and won $400,000. Not bad for a freeroll!

Speaking of Pauly and PokerStars, we're doing a charity tournament on Sunday in memory of Pauly's friend Charlie Tuttle:

Charlie is from Clarksville, Tennessee and he's a twenty-six year old music enthusiast who loves hanging out and playing poker with his friends. Charlie was dealt a bad hand in life when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, which he has been battling this past year. A couple of weekends ago, he was hospitalized because two tumors in his chest pressed up against his lungs, causing him breathing problems. I don't have to tell you how serious his condition was.

Felicia Lee, who is fighting her own battle with cancer, knows several top professional poker players, so she got several of her friends to call Charlie: John Juanda, Marcel Luske, Max Pescatori, and Barry Greenstein to name a few. In fact, when Barry Greenstein won his bracelet in the $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha event, he dedicated it to Charlie.

As Pauly wrote:

Situations like this one make you reassess what's really important in life. Las Vegas is a city built on greed. Poker is a game that often attracts some of the lowest forms of life. However, in the past two weeks, there has been a small group of professional poker players who have earned my respect and admiration. Amidst all the darkness and debauchery, I have caught a few glimpses of the bright side of humanity. The hearts of some of the biggest sharks in Las Vegas are filled with compassion.

Thank you, Charlie, for inspiring us all. We'll never forget you.

Charlie passed away on June 22 and his friends have organized a charity poker tournament this Sunday at PokerStars. It's going to be a lot of fun, and I hope to see lots of WWdN readers there.

Details:

SUNDAY, JULY 17th
18:00 EDT (15:00 CDT)
PokerStars
Buy-in is $20 — all of it goes to charity.
"WPBT Charlie Tournament" under Tourneys -> Private tab in the lobby

I'm sure this is just begging for vandalism (unless those douchebags have grown up and finally kissed a girl) . . . but there is an error on my Wikipedia page that needs to be corrected. I'd do it myself, but that's against Wikipedia editing policy.

I am not in Brother Bear. Willie Wheaton, Wil Wheaton, Jr., and Reginald Maudling (Mrs.) are all not me. I've tried to get this taken off imdb, but someone (well-intentioned, I'm sure) keeps putting it back, and Wikipedia editors (also well-intentioned) are putting Brother Bear back up . . . so we're in an infinite improbability loop, and my towel is getting dirty.

Would someone please correct that, and cite this journal entry so it doesn't get corrected back?

Here is my next project. I want to have wireless speakers for my computer. They must be able to operate outdoors, and be resistant to weather.

Will operate within 50-75 feet of PC.

I've done some googling, have a couple ideas, but hate to buy equipment without hearing from a couple of folks who have tried this. Anyone have any advice?

Never used Linux before.

Here is what I want to do:
I have a guest bedroom with PC that I use for business purposes. I want to have a separate partion (or live CD) that will allow guests to boot and play DVD's and/or CD's.

I want boot times to be as quick as possible, and I want the interface to be very simple. Ideally, it would be as easy as "put DVD in drive, turn on PC, wait 15 seconds, movie starts".

Any thoughts on where to begin?

How do I lookup a user by user id? For example the URL for me is: http://slashdot.org/~MyLongNickName. How can I change the URL to look up by my number, 822545?

I got my first two meta-mod's today. I was very surprised and excited. Slashdot has a great business model... lots of us willing to work for free, and are very excited about it. Kinda sad in a way...

Anyhow, the first set, I modded 4 as fair, 2 as unfair, and left the rest alone. The second set I got, I modded 9 as fair, 1 I left alone (decided not to mod funnies, as I guess anything is funny to the right person...)

Kinda curious to see how others choose to moderate...

Some of you may remember my technology policy / technology news site Technocrat.net. The site is reactivated. It's intended to be a more mature, and hopefully more relevant, forum than Slashdot. No ACs, a special focus on technology policy and high technology outside of the conventional corporate model, but conventional tech news as well.

I'd really appreciate it if you'd create a login on the site and submit articles. Especially original work, which hasn't always been well recieved on Slashdot - they seem to prefer linking to other people's coverage. RDF and RSS are available at http://technocrat.net/rdf and http://technocrat.net/rss, so you can keep track of articles from elsewhere.

Bruce

Please read this article. And please pass the link around, if you agree with it.

Thanks

Bruce