Well, after 5 years and the setting of the Sun, Java SE 1.7 (originally code-named “dolphin”) has finally been released. Joyous celebrations from the land of Duke.
Tag Archives: rant
Back to openSUSE
Well, my stint in *buntu is over, and it ends with an award to openSUSE: this is the first Linux distro I’ve returned to.
Kubuntu is nice, and I’m happy that I’ve tried it out, but it’s not for me. It’s nice enough if you want a simple desktop system, and APT rocks (especially with the aptitude front-end). But it’s just not as good as openSUSE, sorry.
Shifting Interfaces
Once again, Microsoft have drastically changed their Office interface.
While the new interface is very nice eye-candy and probably has some new features that could help (arguably), it represents yet another need to re-train.
The old argument that OpenOffice is too different from MS-Office to be quickly useable has just vanished. OpenOffice is more like MS-Office 97 than MS-Office 2007 will be, and really, who has needed any of the features in Office XP or Office 2003? What were they, again…? Oh yeah, anoying interface changes, and removal of the stupid Paperclip.
I think I’ll be distributing my work documents in PDF, created by OOo now, except where I must absolutely use MSO documents for work. Everthing else will be OOo. Now I just need to convince my wife that it’s not worth continually purchasing MSO, or even having it on our home PC.
Can’t trust the papers…
Why does “mainstream media” think blogging is such a huge hit? It’s not that Internet is immediate, or that anyone can do it (which has big down-sides as well as it’s egalitarian advantages). It is simply that people everywhere are fed-up with WWII-era propagandists telling us what to believe and have started researching it for themselves.
This is the Information Revolution: the Revolution is greatly improved access to the information. People are more educated now than they were 50 or even 20 years ago and can make informed judgements. They don’t need some “journalist” to do it for them. This is quite appart form the fact that today’s journalism is extremely poor compared to yester-year’s.
I don’t buy papers because I know that I can’t trust them to bring me news in an unbiased, non-politically or commercially influenced fashion, or full of Tabloid rubbish like British newspapers. I accept the risk that the news I learn via the Net can be from the “uninformed” masses and mitigate this by using many sources so I can judge for myself where the “truth” may lay.
I won’t even read over people’s shoulders anymore.
For at least the last 10 years, newspapers have been good for only one thing: the ink used in newspaper presses is fantastic for removing streaks and smudges from my computer monitor!
“Cyber” security
I wish USA would stop calling it “cyber security”. It’s just stupid. The word “cyber” was coined by AI researchers for the ability of computers to interact with humans, either via a human interface, or by acting human. Later, it turned more towards embedding computers into humans as a form of prosthetic (a la “$6 millon man”) or to build composite computer-humans (cyborg).
Lately I think the US “cyber security” push has one of these aims:
- To control cyborg’s access to the net?
- To curb “cyberterrorism” — the attack on America by those cyborgs?
- To promote safe use of teledildonics within federal agencies, a sort of “Monica Lewinsky” protocol aimed at avoiding future political embarrasments.
Obviously, the most likely of these is the third aim… 
