I Was Brought Back To Life And Moved

Zef was so kind to give me a new home at his website. I will occasionally post there. I started to miss laughing at Free Software Freaks, I will now do it there.

Everything Has To End

Dear IT Conservative readers,

My name is Zef Hemel. For the past (almost) half year I have been writing IT Conservative. I enjoyed the writing and the nice comments and many e-mails I received. You have no idea how wonderful it is to have people write hostile e-mails and blogposts about/to a persona that you invented yourself.

I started IT Conservative as a challenge to myself. There is so much pro-free software propaganda around, I wondered if I could invent a persona that counters all the free software and anti-DRM beliefs, without making it sound too much of a joke. I think that from time to time, IT Conversative's partly faulty reasoning actually seemed plausible.

As much as I enjoyed writing IT Conservative, it also takes time. I started in a Ph.D. student position last September and since then found less and less time to write it. So rather than let it bleed to death (which was in the progress of happening already), I decided to end it properly.

Those who not know me might wonder who I am, and if in fact I have the beliefs IT Conservative has. I can say that mostly I do not, or not to his extreme extent. I use Linux full-time for my work. I haven't used Windows for many years. In that sense I'm very different. I am also very pro-open source. I do belief in the practical advantages of open source software. I do, however, not believe in the political agenda that many Free Software people are pushing. To be honest, IT Conservative was a great opportunity to express these feelings, albeit in an extreme way.

It has been a nice couple of months. Thank you for your reading and many responses. I hope you enjoyed it and I didn't offend you too much.

Thanks and have a great Christmas and a healthy new year,

Zef Hemel

PS: If you want to read about what I do in real life. I have another blog.

w00t!

ArsTechnica:

Had Merriam-Webster asked me (they did not), the 2007 "word of the year" might have been git, huckster, or, possibly, toadeater. (My mechanic, he likes to pad the bill.) But Merriam-Webster asked the Internet, and the Internet chose "w00t," complete with two zeros. Welcome to the wisdom of crowds.

Yes, 2007's word of the year is "w00t," an expression so likely to die off in the near future that I can just about see its pallbearers lining up down the hall. Merriam-Webster offers this definition for those not quite l33t enough to spend their lives in online chatrooms: "expressing joy; similar in use to the word yay."

I repeat: the nerds are taking over our language. Beware.

Freetards Stealing

Fake Steve:

A company called Lancor claims OLPC bought two of its keyboards, copied the software for adding accents used in Nigerian language keyboards, and then open-sourced the copied software. They're suing for patent infringement in Nigeria. See here. Money quote: "They didn't try to hide anything. They just copied everything verbatim. They took our code and made it open source for all the world to see."

Response from freetard blogs has been what you'd expect. Of course there can't be even a grain of truth in this because freetards would never steal. Therefore the explanation must be one of these: There are no patents in Nigeria; the stuff Lancor created isn't that innovative, ergo copying it wasn't wrong even if it was patented; the guys running Lancor are just a bunch of 419 scammers, because you know how shifty those Nigerians are, right? Hoo boy. That's going to help the cause.

This is just Disgusting

I posted before with pictures like these, but this one... Gosh. The profanity. It's even licensed under the GPL.

The first GPL-ed Linux butt, ladies and gentlemen...

King Richard on Babies

Someone asked King Richard why he doesn't have kids:

I heard you speak of the consumption pattern in the US and you mentioned about how you developed inexpensive habits. That included children. Why?

Which does more good: spreading freedom for millions of computer users, or raising a few extra children in a world that is already suffering from an excess of them? The question answers itself. Why in the world would I do the latter, when I have the chance to do the former?

Do you believe this is the real reason?

Eee!

The great computer company Asus got a brilliant idea when some of its employees were having lunch with their freetard friends. The freetards had this problem that nobody wanted to use their operating system (Linux) on the desktop, and Asus had the problem that nobody was all that interested in their computers anymore. So, they came up with something revolutionary. They thought, if we make our crappy computers and your crappy operating system really tiny, maybe the crappiness will also decrease! "Let's use left-over technology from the previous century and build something everybody will want!"



The Asus EEE! It's a great laptop with 256MB or more memory and a disk drive of 2 up to 8 GB, just like in the '90s! It has a whopping 900Mhz processor and a great 800x480 7" display. A great moment to pull out the magnifying glass again!

This thing has been out for only a little while and people are already fed up with the freetard OS that it's running, trying to install proprietary operating systems like Mac OS X. A version with Windows XP is coming.

Ah, the sanity.