I’ve finished installing KDE 3.1 on my laptop, and let me tell you, it is awesome. The Linux GUIs are finally starting to compete with Windows and the Mac OS in terms of look and feel. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.
My experiment with Gentoo Linux continues. For some reason, I’ve created a productive relationship with Gentoo Linux such that my nonstop experimentation has not yet resulted in a completely hopeless Linux installation. In other words, I’ve not yet had to boot off of the CD and reformat the hard drive to get things working again. For most people, this may not be impressive, but for me, it’s astounding. I will say that I managed to massacre my installation of binutils (which prevented new applications from installing), wipe out everything important in /etc, and foul any number of other things in the past couple of weeks, but I have been able to recover every time without starting over from scratch. Considering that my general half life with a Red Hat installation is about a week, that’s darned impressive for me. Currently I have the KDE 3.1 beta installing – if I don’t break everything with that I really will be on a roll. ...
Josh Marshall has done a great job of following the ongoing story of the Republicans’ flight from the now dirty word privatization. Anyone who pays attention to politics at all remembers not long ago when the Republican party proudly endorsed partial privatization of Social Security. Now, not only do they fear the word, they protest any time the media or their opponents refer to their plans as privatization. The real irony is in the fact that the policies the Republicans endorse have hardly changed – they still want to privatize Social Security, they just don’t want to call it that any more. ...
From the archive: 11 September 2001 11 September 2000 11 September 1999
Bill Clinton: the path to peace. There’s plenty to argue about in his speech, but it’s worth reading in any case.
It looks like there’s no substance to the allegation that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were working together. I don’t think the case for going to war against Iraq rests on this link, but certainly when the government was initially trying to generate support for invading Iraq last year, suggested connections to al Qaeda were a big part of their argument. To me, the argument for war hinges on one variable – the overall cost in lives of the various actions that are available to us. If invading Iraq tomorrow would save lives (not just lives of Americans, but lives overall), then I’d be all for it. My personal beliefs don’t allow me to accept that killing 100,000 Iraqis is OK if it saves 100 lives of Americans (for example). Obviously, I don’t want to die nor do I want any of my loved ones to die, but by the same token, I imagine that’s the case for most people in Iraq as well. ...
Now that Windows XP Service Pack 1 is out, some people will need to read this article.
Dan Gillmor’s latest column is Richard Bradner’s list of 10 choices made during the development of the Internet that led to its success.
Anil Dash writes wisely today about ways of grieving.
Salon: Hollywood’s war on innovation. I bought an in-dash MP3 player for my car this weekend (a cheap Sony), and there’s no doubt in my mind that as a result, I’ll be purchasing more audio CDs so that I can burn compilation disks to listen to while I’m driving. The fact that the entertainment industry doesn’t see this is infuriating.