Here's another Rubenerd Fun Fact for all you rabid Official Rubenerd Fun Fact fans. I know you're out there, I can hear you furrowing your brows and sighing.
Millipedes can still walk with a leg in a cast, but beluga whales can’t.
Thank you.
Dell's profits are way down, and Microsoft makes a move that could scare beige box makers even more.
CNET is reporting in an article surprisingly titled Dell earnings down 54 percent that Dell's earnings are down 54%. What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders ^_^.
This comes on the heels of Microsoft's downright bizarre move to brand an Acer notebook computer as their own, presumably in an attempt to deliver the same vertical experience Apple does. Much as they abandoned their PlaysForSure partners (with an outdated web page to boot) and went with their own integrated Zune system, could this be a sign Microsoft are willing to start their own hardware business to compete with their own partners in the personal computer space?
The recession, these moves by Microsoft, the razor thin profit margins on netbooks, it's certainly not a good time to be a beige box PC manufacturer. Especially when your products are being sold in stores where creepy, cringeworthy things like this happen. Run away!
I agree with No Illusions and G'day World host Cameron Reilly's comment on Twitter, it's almost as if Microsoft's strategy is to be as lame and embarrassing as possible. Another example of programmers and engineers like Nick Hodge being stifled by management and a marketing department that are so breathtakingly out of touch with the outside world it beggars belief.
Given I didn't have any exams today, I took a break from studying for a couple of hours and installed the final release of Fedora 12 that was released yesterday. So far so good, I torrented the i386 DVD image and installed it on my ThinkPad with no problems at all.
Fedora's default Gnome desktop has been tweaked a bit since version 11 and while I still had to rearrange it a bit to get it the way I use it on other systems, it's very usable. I've found that with much of the Fedora experience; its configured in a different way to what I'd like, has some software I don't want and some software missing, but they're all easy to fix and when I do, it works great.
As I discussed last week Fedora comes with Mono which is kinda creepy (to use technical McGee NCIS jargon) which I hastily uninstalled, but I'm really pleased to see Gnote is now included by default instead of Tomboy. Red Hat and the Fedora team should be applauded for this move, and other Linux distributions and BSDs should follow suit. The official Gnome project team should also take notice that a major distribution has ignored an official package and replaced it with a less encumbered, faster, lighter, equally capable alternative.
Of all the commercially backed Linux distributions, I think Fedora is by far the most polished and usable. If given the choice I'd still prefer to run FreeBSD because I've been spoilt by jails, security levels, ZFS, rc.conf, make world and The Handbook, and I still have a little desktop in Singapore running Slack, but Fedora will probably be the one I use when I have to use Linux, or on notebook hardware that FreeBSD traditionally has more trouble with.
Now I just have to learn not to accidentally try and run portsnap ;).
Links shared from del.icio.us today:
@Oliyoung on Twitter shared a link from the IE team's blog about what they're focusing on for IE9.
Our focus is providing rich capabilities – the ones that most developers want to use – in an interoperable way. Developers want more capabilities in the browser to build great apps and experiences; they want them to work in an interoperable way so they don’t have to re-write and re-test their sites again and again. The standards process offers a good means to that end.
Two quick thoughts on the subject:
This post originally appeared on the Annexe.
Links shared from del.icio.us today:
This post originally appeared on the Annexe.
Not that this software is being mirrored or used on hundreds of machines or anything… ;)
For a change of atmosphere after my exam, instead of going to the Boatdeck Cafe where I spend much of my Adelaide life, I decided to stay in the city and park myself at the Cibo Espresso in Rundle Mall. I'm a wild guy!
Coffee haunts aside, I had a point with this post. What continuously amazes me with some people is to the extent they'll tart themselves up for the most mundane or weird situations, such as for an exam. Having just left the Wayville Showground for my few hours of exam fun, I noticed more girls than not had skimpy but expensive looking clothes (ugh) and thick makeup on. Makeup! For an exam! I can barely cope with studying and going for an exam let alone caring that much about my appearance.
Adelaide really is a small place, I was just asked by a woman who saw me typing away on my laptop if I was the same fixture she sees at the Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes. I said yes, but looking back now I should have said I was a twin brother or a clone or something. Why is it we only figure out what to say after things like that happen!?
Are you sure? Wait, let me check. Well looky there, I was. You're not as much of a witless half bright than I thought. Kudos.
Here's a tip for those of you who carry bags and have to drop them off at the aptly named Bag Drop: take a brightly coloured bag! Just as they help you to see your bag easier when you're at an airport and using one of those newfangled baggage carousel things that are fun to stand on, having a bright coloured bag means when you go to retrieve it the overworked staff can see it much easier and get it back to you. It's sheer, unmitigated genius I tell you. I almost spelt genius wrong.
Next exam is Saturday so I still have a ton of studying to do as well as dealing with ongoing family issues and a landlord who wants to sell the house out from under us. I'm going to savour this hour or so I'm sitting here. It's a good time to be outside, because tomorrow Adelaide will be 41C (over 100F I think). Glad it wasn't that hot today, I can tell you that much :O.
Logging onto one of the shared computers at the UniSA Mawson Lakes campus this morning I got this error message. Again.
The virus definition file is more than 7 days old. Updating to a new virus definition file will help catch the most recent viruses.
Also, I like grilled cheese sandwiches. Put one in my CD-ROM tray.
Remember back in the day when having month old definitions was still cutting edge? Now Windows users are considered vulnerable if definitions are 7 days old. Is that why despite being version 6.1 the called it Windows 7?
What's more worrying is shared UniSA computers use a system that wipes them and reimages a clean install of Windows and custom software onto them over the network; it combines the negative insecurity and heavy hardware requirements of a thick client with the bandwidth problems of thin clients while delivering the benefits of neither — genius! But we're getting sidekicked sidetracked: this system means each shared computer across the university would have these old definitions.
Even though my notebooks run FreeBSD, Linux and/or OS X, I think I'll be using Hotspot VPN or GoToMyPC more often when I'm on campus.
