journal: think
Ubuntu 5.10: The Breezy Badger
Introduction
I apologize for any factual errors in this. I am only writing this feature from my own knowledge, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. A really large grain.
Open Source Software is rapidly becoming a viable alternative to closed-source, proprietary software. This is due to OSS coders’ goals of making the software easy to use for the general consumer, as well as being as feature rich, yet streamlined as proprietary software, which dominated the market until only recently. OSS developers are targeting big name software vendors, such as Microsoft and Adobe, among others. You most likely have heard about Firefox, right? That’s showing just how much OSS has made inroads into markets dominated by vendors.
However, there’s more to open source than software. Most techies have heard of Linux, which has earned itself a bad connotation as ‘the hacker’s OS”, only fit for people who like spending weeks compiling everything through the command line. More and more, these developers have decided to shed this connotation by making their distribution much easier to use. Spearheading this attempt is a distribution called Ubuntu. Ubuntu is an African word meaning ‘humanity to others”. They believe that software should be free no matter where you use it, that it should be available in any language, and that anyone who wants to make improvements, can. Ubuntu comes in two flavors. Ubuntu, which uses the window manager Gnome, and Kubuntu, which uses the window manager KDE. This review will only cover Gnome,…
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$.99 Movie Scenes
From the funny article on Funny
What if that were real? An iPod store with quick clips from movies? Sounds great. They should give them away for free of course. I used to download the hot scenes from movies as a kid, and I loved it. I have a new site to do that at called CelebrityMovieArchive.com I particularly like the Wild Things threesome scene even though it’s short. Just watching the champagne dripping down Neve Campbelle I mean Denise Richards is awesome.
In fact, Apple should make comedy videos available. The article above jokingly said Apple should give us access to (paraphrased) ‘the stuff we want to see---the sex, the funny moments, the action/explosions’ Yes. So how?
1) CelebrityMovieArchive with more porn. HD porn is a bad idea because the actresses mostly look bad in real life, but do it anyway so it is survival of the fittest. Use some killer codec and 802.11n devices which does 600mb/s apparently.
2) ComedyCentral digital. Put standup comedians online. My brothers would love it. They want to see their favorite bits from the actors on ...well anything funny for that matter. If it’s funny it sells.
The format? The length? Whatever. Just get something out and do it as cheaply as possible with the best quality possible as soon as possible. Nothing complicated, as always.
3) The explosions? How do we see those? Well, Apple or whoever could make an iApp for special effects artists who need a stock library of guns, bombs,…
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The Lumberjacks of Design
Font designers are the lumberjacks of the world of design.
It occurred to me that font designers are the lumberjacks of the world of design. Font design is an incredibly important industry, yet it is highly underrated and overlooked. Most designers are graphic designers, or web designers, or multimedia designers, etc. But what ties all of these together (besides shaping the visual medium) is choosing the right typeface for the right design, which can be more difficult than it seems. And it is quite important to choose the right fonts.
Wood is everywhere. It is not quite as prevalent as it used to be, with modern cement, plastics, plaster, and other materials born of industry. But it holds our walls up, it provides a floor beneath our feet, a chair beneath our toochis, a desk beneath our children’s education, a fire to warm our hands on a cold night in the campground. It is important, therefore, to have high quality wood when building the walls, crafting the chair, etc. And who provides the good quality wood we use? The good quality timber companies, arguably corporations of lumberjacks. If the wood they produce is insubstantial, the walls crumble, the chairs splinter, the desks warp and the fire smokes like a chimney. The world as we know it starts to die in a subtle, often unconsidered way.
Similar is the story of the font. In the world of design, they are everywhere. They provide the typefaces for headlines, taglines, credit lines, and everything except the fishing line. They are big and bold when…
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Trolls: Friend or Foe
. . .Nothing that I have ever said has been any more or less than the truth as my own eyes see it. . .
It’s that time of the week again, that time when all the chips come down, and whatever gripes have been stewing slowly in our cortices are fit to be laid on that eternal parchment, the blog. In light of recent event, and I think we all know the events to which I’m referring, it’s high time that someone asked a few tough questions of the audience. It’s hard, in a public forum, to say something that pleases one and all, but we try to be relatively unbiased in what we say and be professional in our demeanor. There lies the conundrum: we are placed in a public forum, not able to hide behind the invisible door that separates print journalists from the frothing masses who wish to stride into the sunset with their severed heads. When we say something, be it true or false, opinion or hard fact, there is a line of people, stretching out the door, waiting to leave a nugget on our virtual doorstep either praising what we say as messianic, or damning it to the seventh level of Dante’s Hell. There are those who only wish to do the latter, and in turn seek out weblogs that have a good probability of posting stories and opinions with which they disagree. We like to refer to these maniacally perverted type b personalities as trolls.
Nothing is worse in the world of online media than to have your mailbox filled with spam, and your weblog crammed with comments that…
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^H^H^H^H?
I was OK when my brother used the term “Bizzzorred” to say via IM that he was bored. I even accept LOL and ROFL and anything we used in middle school to keep an AIM conversation going. But one term that stretches my knowledge of ever-evolving elite-speak and Internet slang, and doesn’t even appear in UrbanDictionary.com as far as I can tell, is “^H^H^H^H”
For a few years I’ve seen “^H” probably only on SlashDot but seemingly in different ways. Most recently it was part of a response on an article about The Nintendo Revolution controller.
“Surely Mario is Missing and Zelda: Wand of Gamelon are ideal ports to the CD-I^H^H^H^H Revolution?”
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=162425&cid=13574638
I’ve replied to the comment as an Anonymous Coward asking the poster what the term means. Anyone know? What other mysterious Internet-speak do you want defined?
Update: Thanks to the 1337 Arden for solving the mystery and providing the Wikipedia link on Backspaces. Each ^H, or Control-H, is a backspace. So the poster on SlashDot was writing out “CD-I” and jokingly taking it back.
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