Sometimes I just don’t get it. I understand people dislike windows. I’ve used windows when I cannot avoid it. But then, they switch to linux, of all things. Why? I don’t understand…

the following copied from the hates-software mailing list

Ubuntu: Linux for Human Beings. My arse. They say that noone ever got sacked for choosing Windows, but even more importantly, they don’t get grief from their significant other about how annoying their computer is if its Windows.

“Why do weird things happen when I move around using the touchpad?” Oh, the synaptic touchpad’s not well configured, I kind of mainly know how to move my fingers in the right way, but otherwise it fires a click event when I lift my finger, it’s badly configured and I don’t know how to fix it yet.

“Why can’t you call me with Skype?” Oh, well, on my laptop, I worked out after reading the wiki pages that I just need to kill the Enlightened Sound Daemon for it to work. Oh, and then switch the mixer settings to enable microphone input, and it works as long as I have the OSS mixer selected and not the ALSA one, though that works better for other stuff. The only disadvantage is that I can’t have another program that makes sound working at the same time, so I can’t receive calls when I’m listening to mp3s. And if I’ve listened to mp3s in the meantime then I just need to kill that Sound Daemon again. And though it doesn’t work from my PC at work at all, I’m sure I’ll get that fixed in the next couple of days.

“Why are you rebooting your computer?” (gf uses a Mac rather than Windows) Oh, the power ran out, and there’s no ACPI event that I can find that tells it to sleep when it’s about to run out of power. OR ALTERNATIVELY: Fuck! The fucking thing won’t wake up from sleep mode. Usually if I’ve closed the lid rather than explicitly sending it to sleep, I only have to press Ctrl-F7 to wake up the GUI window (because the script doesn’t enable the video terminal like it should do) and everything’s ok, but sometimes it doesn’t and refuses to do anything at all, the bag of shite. OR SIMILARLY When I set it to sleep and then unplug it, the battery icon doesn’t realize that it’s no longer connected to the power supply, so it didn’t tell me it’s about to die. If only I’d remembered to ‘killall gnome-panel’ that would have restarted it. Silly me!

“Why can’t you download pictures from your phone?” Oh, Nokia doesn’t supply a CD to connect to Linux. But there’s a community based one called Gammu, only that won’t install with Ubuntu because it needs a later version of libbluetooth which clashes with the one that’s there, so I think I have to compile it myself, only I’m not sure how.

“Why are you shouting abuse at your laptop when you’re supposed to be working from home?” I can’t a) connect to the wireless network in the flat, or b) connect to the VPN. Despite having done both tons of times before.

“Why can’t you use the scanner or your memory card reader?” I can’t find the drivers/get the drivers to work.

“Why do the fonts look so ugly?” Oh, that’s just Linux.

“Why are you using this stupid system then?” Oh, Windows is completely broken.

For programming, the Unix command line, apt-get/Synaptic, ssh keys, and virtual desktops make my geek knees wobble, but there’s still a way to go to impress me as a human.

No, telling me Linux used to be more annoying doesn’t help.

[Quote:]

In the summer of 2004, a clam-dredging operation off New Jersey pulled up an old artillery shell.

The long-submerged World War I-era explosive was filled with a black tarlike substance.

Bomb disposal technicians from Dover Air Force Base, Del., were brought in to dismantle it. Three of them were injured – one hospitalized with large pus-filled blisters on an arm and hand.

The shell was filled with mustard gas in solid form.

What was long feared by the few military officials in the know had come to pass: Chemical weapons that the Army dumped at sea decades ago finally ended up on shore in the United States.

It’s long been known that some chemical weapons went into the ocean, but records obtained by the Daily Press show that the previously classified weapons-dumping program was far more extensive than ever suspected.

The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste – either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.

Plane-ly amazing!

This is a “tiny” version of a 14 meg jpg (zip file because it will kill your browser).

Usually I don’t copy a post in total, but this one is just not funny if you take out one paragraph…

[Quote:]

The word around town was that the Hummers weren’t moving. It looked like high gas prices and a White House reversal on fuel conservation meant that fewer “W” bumper stickers would find their exposed sticky sides mating gloriously with the smooth rear bumper of an H2, somewhere between the tow loop and the access hole for a Class 3 hitch.

We were skeptical at first. Sources can be unreliable, but the scuttlebutt was that inventory had been building for months now and the local Hummer dealer had panicked. He had begun storing his Hummer inventory at an undisclosed location, far from the dealer showroom so as not to spook jittery, prospective buyers with the mounting number of unsold H2s and H3s.

When an anonymous caller phoned in with the location, we were off. “The rear parking lot of the Hyatt Westlake Plaza Hotel”, he said, just before the line went dead.

TMTGM investigative sleuths Erik Ustin and Ray Pizzuti grabbed your still somewhat skeptical editor, and after stopping at Human Resources to pick up a few “half-off at Togo’s” coupons we scurried past security, through the main entrance, and out to the parking lot.

A security guard spotted us and yelled, “Hey you three, stop right there!”

We froze in place, eyeing our surroundings, thinking quickly, instantly evaluating possible courses of action.

“One of you didn’t scan out! Get back here and run your badge past the scanner again and make sure it beeps this time!”

OK, we’re not sure where this was headed or how long and how silly it would be enroute, so we’ll just get to it. The Hummer dealer in this part of Southern California is apparently having trouble moving his merchandise. After a row of Hummers was spotted behind the Hyatt Hotel, three of us went on a reconnaissance mission to find out more. Here’s the first picture we snapped:

Click to enlarge

Doesn’t look like much – about 25 H3s in the far corner of the parking lot, and the next aisle over was pretty much the same. But then when we came around the corner we saw this:

Click to enlarge … really, click it

That’s a lot of Hummers, all H3s, lined up neatly waiting for someone to take them home and love them. Looking to the right there were more, so we walked all the way down to the end of the row and snapped this picture:

Click to enlarge … now here, we will insist – click it and make it bigger

That’s the same view as the previous picture, just taken from about 30 Hummers further down to the right. Behind this hotel were about 150 Hummers – about 80 in this row alone – almost all H3s, along with eight or ten original H1s.

A police car drove by slowly – surely he wondered why we were taking pictures and laughing, but then he looked closer, recognized the unthreatening physiques of three software engineers, spotted our badges, and quickly lost interest.

Someone from the dealership pulled in with another H3, so we wandered over and asked how business was these days. He said something about hurricanes and gas prices, then we asked where the H2s were. He said, “They’re at the other lot”.

Hmmm…

Thrilled and amused as we were, we’d only learned part of the story. After getting directions we proceeded to lot #2, while placing a few quick bets with an over/under quickly set at 60. The thinking here was that the despite looking like a Jeep Cherokee on steroids, the H3s were about $20K less expensive than the H2s and had respectable fuel economy (16 city / 19 highway is what the sticker said) – maybe the dealer had just placed a very large, poorly timed order, a few months back.

Surely the H2 inventory was under control.

Pulling into lot #2, the “under” looked liked it would be the clear winner – forty, fifty tops, from the first looks of it:

Click to enlarge … this one’s up to you

Then we walked down to the end of the aisle to see this:

Click to enlarge … go for it

That’s about fifty H2s on the left, and a bit of congestion in the middle as the Hummers appear to be entering the lot at a rate far exceeding the rate at which they leave. After walking down to the end of this aisle we spied another aisle of about the same length stretching around the corner:

Click to enlarge … again, we will insist, make it bigger

When the counting was done, there were about 150 H2s in lot #2, for a grand total of around three hundred Hummers, just looking for someone to love them. In the above picture notice the attendant and the red 5-gallon gas cans – based on a brief conversation with this young man, we didn’t sense any love from him.

Apparently the thrill of driving Hummers back and forth between the remote storage lot and the dealer showroom wears off quickly, as each round trip requires that another five gallons of fuel be dispensed in order to ensure a complete round trip.

We’ve talked about SUVs in these pages before, having developed a California SUV Fill Up Index which we then updated as gas prices in this area hit $2.80 and then $2.90 per gallon. What a person drives or how much fuel they consume matters little to us, so long as they leave some gas at the pumps for others and don’t run us over on the freeway.

The reason that the story of rapidly rising Hummer inventory is so interesting and so amusing, is that America’s most ostentatious Sport Utility Vehicle, the Hummer SUV, is a metaphor for America in the world today – overweight, overpriced, inefficient, and unloved.

[Quote:]

A controversial proposed tax in the Netherlands on MP3 players of as much as € 3.28 ($4.30) per gigabyte has been revised, though still not enough to please the electronics industry.

A new proposal by the Foundation Onderhandeling Thuiskopievergoeding (SONT), which negotiates between hardware manufacturers and the collecting agency Stichting Thuiskopie, suggests a surcharge of €0.20 per 32MB with a maximum of €1 and €8 to €25 for audio players with a hard disk of 10GB or more. There also will be a tax on DVRs of €0.15 per gigabyte. SONT believes the levy will be more tolerable than the previous proposed tax, which was to put €180 ($235) to the price of a top end iPod.

However, ICT Office, the 450 members strong Dutch trade association for IT, Telecom and Office industries, has already condemned the new proposal. Spokesman Bernd Taselaar said Friday that the proposed levy ignores European policies and will hurt business. Other critics say that levies on MP3 players are outmoded, as more and more users buy content online, which means that copyright is being purchased twice over if a levy is also paid. The proposal also seem to ignore the fact that hard disc capacity is growing every few months. Introducing a levy would make hardware unjustly expensive.

Stichting Thuiskopie will discuss the proposal on Monday, but it may have to conclude that is little support for a levy, despite the fact that it can introduce the tax without any further discussion.

The Netherlands is small enough that a trip to another country to buy stuff that currently has a levy on it (such as blank DVD’s) is already easily worth it. This will drop the sales of MP3 players to zero in about a heartbeat. Belgian and German sales however…