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.

The Linux Attitude

I've been talking to some Linux users (sometimes you cannot avoid to). I am really trying to understand what is going on in their mind -- what their attitude towards computers is. After observing the way they work with computers for a while I concluded that whereas I hate it when software does not work that I install, a Linux user gets excited. He (yes, let's be honest, it's going to be a he) gets excited and feels challenged to get the software to work anyway. "And you can," he will say, "because the source code is available!" I'm psyched.



In my experience this is the attitude a Linux user needs, because, contrary to operating systems like Windows or Mac OS X, not working seems to be the default behavior in Linux. Segmentation faults, permission problems, kernel panics, you name it.

So Linux users are excited most of the time.

Wired Joins the Freetards

Wired has a first look at the "iPhone Killer" OpenMoko:

The Neo1973 is the first physical manifestation of a grand idea -- a new breed of wireless handheld built for the open-source age.

Grand idea? Are you kidding? What's grand about this?

It is the first release from the OpenMoko project, a group working to create a fully open source software platform for smartphones, a community-driven alternative to, say, the iPhone. Using Linux as a starting point, the OpenMoko developers have built a system which, although not everyday-usable yet, can be successfully installed and run on a variety of ordinary smartphone hardware: Treos, Motorolas, JasJars and so forth.

What the heck is a JasJar? A product with a name like that should run equally crappy software.

There's no charger. It charges via a USB connection to my computer -- good enough. I powered on the phone and marveled at the scrolling screens of Linux bootup jargon, which terminated after a few seconds with the line, "Kernel panic."

'nuff said.