Well said. Also don't forget that Evince, the default pdf viewer in Gnome and in Ubuntu, is immune to this exploit, as confirmed by several comments on Didier Stevens' original announcement.

So here we have another good reason not to use Acrobat Reader on Linux (or on anything else, for that matter), but also not to trust closed-source alternatives like FoxIt. Evince is fast, efficient, easy to use, has all the necessary features, nothing more, nothing less. And hey, there's even a Windows version!

Now I'm even more confused. Could you give an exemple in metric units, for those of us not living in Liberia, Myanmar, or the US? Also, 50,000 square feet sounds awfully large for a hard disk to me. Perhaps you're referring to one of those contraptions they had back in 1960s, when you could fill several Libraries of Congress, (or their imperial equivalent, Royal Albert Halls), with a single hard disk.

So I guess you know every single one of them personally? Because if not, this statement would be chauvinist, maybe even racist. Which would make it only the worst part of a largely pointless rant.

Sure I could trust some random guy from the internet, but I think I'd rather trust my own judgement and take a look at that professional, clean, nicely designed Windows source code. Oh wait --

Why not display the browser options according to their scores on the Acid3 test, in decreasing order? That would make Opera very happy and give Microsoft a strong incentive to make their product more standards-compliant.

Using dnsmasq, which runs on pretty much any Linux-based router, it's trivial to defeat any OpenDNS evilness. Just add these settings to your /etc/dnsmasq.conf:

server=208.67.222.222
server=208.67.220.220
bogus-nxdomain=67.215.65.132
bogus-nxdomain=67.215.66.132

That's it, no more redirects for invalid or temporarily unavailable addresses, respectively. To also stop OpenDNS from interfering with searches initiated via the Firefox address bar, just remove the sourceid=navclient parameter from the keyword.URL string in about:config.

These simple precautions allow me to use OpenDNS anonymously without ever noticing it -- a real treat in a country like mine, where it's not only ISPs who fiddle with DNS but the government too. That said, I'll give Google's new service a try anyway.

It's a fact that most proprietary software is invariably sneered at by folks like us living a happy life outside the commercial software circus.

Where Vista, a. k. a.Rev. 6.0 = Beta state, maybe, and Alpha, more than likely. Immature, even after many years of development. Fucked up beyond recognition. Unusable.

Think of it as another handicap, like naming your cash-cow word processing program WORD - which to the enlightened translates simply as "crippling its users' freedom", "perversely expensive" and, therefore, "evil".

The OptimizeGoogle add-on for Firefox has, among many other useful features, a filter function that lets you remove unwanted websites from Google search results. I recommend it.

As for experts-exchange, I share your disgust. Their business model is an abomination. Sometimes, however, I find the solutions posted there by poor ignorant souls useful. As long as you block their cookies you can see all the answers without registering simply by jumping to the bottom of their pages. Use AdBlock to make sure they don't get any ad revenue from your page views. This way you benefit from them and help to accelerate their death at the same time. It's a clear win-win!

On this picture you see two members of the German national football (soccer) team. One of them killed himself on November 10th by leaping in front of a train, suffering from severe chronic depression. Guess which one.

(You'll find the solution here. If you picked the right answer, you may want to consider a career in insurance. I'd suggest this one for starters.)

Some people think that sometimes a single song can be "worth" more than that. Put differently, the cost of buying a certain number of CDs has almost nothing to do with their value. Just try selling your precious CD collection on eBay, and you'll realize that.

In fact, we think he didn't! But we can't help but wonder ... Why won't he deny that he raped and killed a young girl in 1990?

This may be true for many parts of the U. S. A. In much of civilized world, however, owning a firearm is indeed illegal for most people. Here in Germany you even need a special license for many types of knives. Which, in my opion, is a good thing, but that's a different matter altogether.

For Handbrake, try the snapshotfor Karmic which has just been released. You'll have to forego avi and xvid, which have been dropped from Handbrake 0.9.4 and will never return. Good riddance, I'd say, but many people won't agree.

Me too! In my case, it's a total of four machines, a MacBook, a Lenovo netbook, an ancient Pentium 4 box plus a fit-PC2 server. Did fresh installs of Karmic on the first two, upgraded from Jaunty on the other two. No serious issues, just a few remaining annoyances on the MacBook (display brightness adjustment not working with KMS enabled, two keys swapped on international keyboards, touchpad sometimes slow after resuming from suspend -- minor issues on a somewhat exotic machine and nothing that can't be worked around). Otherwise, everything's fine and dandy.

To everybody who hasn't been so lucky: please don't just complain, file bug reports to help the Ubuntu community fix those problems! There are people out there who will listen and who will try very hard to make things work better for all of us. Flooding ./ with angry messages won't bring us any closer to fixing bug #1. Contributing real information on Launchpad will.

I've been running Ubuntu as my only OS on my MacBook for over 18 months now, without an OS X install and without rEFIt. Neither is essential for using a MacBook, and anybody who says anything to the contrary is clueless.

That said, I did boot my machine from the OS X installer DVD a couple of times to bless the Ubuntu partition into the EFI after reinstalling the system (following a hard disk upgrade and/or as a spring-cleaning measure). This wasn't strictly necessary, it just cut about 20 seconds from the boot time. With Grub2 having finally found its way into Karmic, even that won't be necessary any more.

As for firmware updates, these may require a running OS X install (which can be on an external drive). For my machine, however, there haven't been any updates that would have been relevant for Linux and there probably never will be.

Well, people are different, you know. I like my MacBook's look and feel, the slick and intelligent design, those little things like all the slots and connectors being on one side, the power adapter with its MagSafe mechanism (I tend to stumble over cables and to go berserk with vacuum cleaners), the touchpad with all its great little secrets ... Back when I bought my MacBook it didn't cost much more than a comparable high-end Windows notebook, like a Sony Vaio, with the added benefit that it's not a Sony (bah) and didn't come with a Vista tax (double-bah).

On the other hand, I don't have much love nor any need for OS X. I tried it, I didn't like it, it's somehow not compatible with the brain-half that's in command up in my head. Linux, while certainly not being for everybody, is just the right thing for me, the freedom, the power, even including the seemingly endless fight against numerous shortcomings great and small. I need that, all of it, I couldn't live without it. I don't want a computer that "just works", I want a computer that works exactly the way I want it to work, whatever it takes. And I've never been closer to that ideal than with Ubuntu on my MacBook. Which, by the way, works extremely well by now.