KDE Blogs 

Feel like upping your l33t Perl skills? PerlNomic is a very funny game that is a community effort in making a world where all laws are laid down in Perl code. The fuzzyness of natural languages is replaced by the illegibility of Perl code. Lawyers cannot help you here. You get points by having patches to the book of laws accepted by your fellow citizens. Everybody is in it for the points but without getting supporters for your patches you will get nowhere. Read More

Reading this funny transcript of bloggers philosophy (aaron, ade, telex). It reminded me of a blog that looks at the same problem from a different perspective, and only published days before this thread started. Read More

Don't you love it if a Brit with a good command over the subtleties of the English language takes on his U.S. friends? Here is a hilarious piece (of satire?, of drawing historic analogies?) by Terry Jones in The Observer (UK): "In 59BC, Julius Caesar declared he was so shocked by the incursions of the dangerous Helvetii tribe into Gaul, and the suffering of the Gaulish peoples, that he had himself appointed 'protector of the Gauls'. By the time he'd finished protecting them, a million Gauls were dead, another million enslaved and Julius Caesar owned most of Gaul. Now I'm not suggesting there is any similarity between George W Bush's protection of the Iraqi people and Caesar's protection of the Gauls." "[Cesar] desperately needed a military victory to boost his standing in Rome and give him the necessary popular base to seize power." "George W Bush, on the other hand, [....] didn't need to boost his popularity, because the popular vote had nothing to do with his getting into power in the first place."   (full text here)

For people like me, who are addicted to Klipper: Klipper has search as you type. Just click on the icon, and start typing away! Only the parts of your paste history that match the typed text will be shown, the irrelevant entries will be hidden. This allows you to set the history size to a huge value, while Klipper still remains completely usable to handle. This is just so handy, I'm almost sad I didn't know about this before :) Thanks to ThomasZ for pointing this out, or I'd have never known. Read More

Yes, on first look it may appear so. No, not because Microsoft now pays lots of $$$ to Novell for 70,000 SLES support vouchers each year (making it the single biggest distributor of SUSE products). But because the NeoCon cabal seems to leave the sinking ship of the Bush Administration. Read More

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the difference in the headings of the "Joint Letter to the Open Source Community" (described below) is gone. (Screenshots of original versions linked in the comment by RangerRick, below). Microsoft updated their respective webpage and now uses the same heading as Novell uses. Looks like this change is due to this blog entry :-) While we are still a good few days away from a daily need to seriously watch out for arial pork (so that they don't shit on our heads), nevertheless strange things are happening already. Just look at this headline: "Fox marries chicken; honeymoon to be spent in henhouse." Naah, just kidding... Read More

Meanwhile I read a bit more about the Microsoft <--> Novell cooperation deal. Hell, what an utterly shameful sell-out! In essence, Novell (and the guys leading it, Ron Hovespian & Co.) have defacto acknowledged that Linux violates Microsoft patents. They bought themselves (as a company) some exclusive "peaceful co-existence" (limited to 5 years from now) with the Evil Empire of Global Software Monopoly. Read More

Some months back I read about the GPLv3 for the first time. Just like many I was compelled by the arguments of Linus against it more then by the arguments from the FSF for this new license. Reasons for that were that the EU doesn't allow software patents as well as the silly example of Tivo which is pretty far fetched. Read More

My head is dizzy from seeing all the current news about "Microsoft ♥♥♥♥s Novell". Had no time to carefully read all the stuff. What struck my eyes was this sentence: Quote: "This is a watershed moment for Linux. It fundamentally changes the rules of the game."       (Joint letter to the Open Source Community, From Novell and Microsoft) Read More

Some interesting details from the Google/YouTube deal. I had already suspected some maneuverings along these lines, but preferred to not say anything. Now that others have gone public, lemme chime in..... Read More