Paul O'Flaherty

Debian buries it’s head in the sand, sticks it arse in the air and Digg users ram it home!

I just read a a post on Digg which just gets right up my nose! It’s entitle “Debian Forced to Stop using name “Firefox” which perfectly crafted to begin a flame war.

Not only that, a lot of people promote sites like Digg.com because they demonstrate the “wisdom of the crowd”, this however only displays that some members of crowd are capable of idiotic knee jerk reactions without even reading through the referenced material.

Way to go Diggers!

Here’s the original digg quote, the actual blog post it points to and here’s the discussion that started it all:

The Mozilla Foundation has asked Debian Linux to either use both the ‘Firefox’ name and the Artwork or get rid of both. Because the Artwork has non-free Copyright License, it seems Debian (and most likely, many other Linux Distros) has no choice but to change the name of the application to something else. IceWeasel is the number one choice so far!

Okay, first let me give my opinion on the actual point of the article, as it’s rather simple: Mozilla Corp are 100% right in defending their trademark. It’s that simple. My understanding of US law with regards to this requires them to enforce their trademark or lose it.

Mozilla have provided Debian with a simple means to use the Firefox browser without any trademarked branding, so they can do with it as they will. Debian wants to have their cake and eat it. They want to use the trademarked name, but not the logo.

Well lads, you can’t have one without the other. So pucker up and change, just like you expect everyone else to if they wanted to release their own Debian distro and still call it Debian!

Now I complained about the Digg crowd being knee jerk and idiotic but I wasn’t referring to all of them. There were plenty of clear voices of reason among the fanboy idiots but it was comments like these that made me think “Who the hell are these morons?”:

• Didn’t Firefox gain the browser market they have now through grass roots marketing? It was thousands of bloggers and webmasters plastering the “Get Firefox” buttons on their sites, with the Firefox logo. Now they want to give the middle finger to that same group of people?
  Is there any sanity left in the software world?
• Geez… Renaming Firefox? Sounds like that’s just going to cause more confusing in the already splintered world of Linux.
  So Mozilla *asked* them not to use the name Firefox. Does that mean Debian *has* to? Can they just snub their nose at Mozilla and use the name anyway, sans the logo?
• I’ve never heard of Debian Linux. I’ve heard of Debian GNU/Linux. . .
  On to subject, that’s fucked of the Moz devs to do. Debian is their friend.
• Until the logo is made free Firefox cannot be considered FOSS as the logo is an integral part of the identity of the software.
• fuck Mozilla.
• … and people wonder why Linux doesn’t have more desktop share. Great time to be idealistic, Firefox peeps!
• Debian is not and never has been a desktop distribution.

There were others as well, but I’m too lazy to copy and paste them. Also I’m not even going to explain why all of these comments are lame and made by people who couldn’t be bothered to spend a little time reading about something before jumping to an uninformed conclusion. And trust me, I’m very good at being that kind of lazy uninformed person, so I know what I’m talking about here!

The worst thing is that it’s not just this particular post in question. I’m seeing more and more of this on other social/news sites and it really dilutes the quality and value of those services for me. I’m sure it does for other you to!

I’m sure it also degrades the value of the service for the guys who make those daft comments without thinking, unless of course, that’s the kind of thing they like, flamewars etc…

Weekly Roundup – Saturday 23-09-2006

“Weekly roundup” is a list of interesting and noteworthy news and links on the web that I discovered this week.

Topless Sunbather Caught in Google Earth! (via Digg)

Imagine having a quiet afternoon’s sunbathing on your private, secluded, back patio – and then one day discovering that your nearly naked body has been posted all over the Internet!

Looks more like one of those inflatable dolls to me

Send a Piece of Chocolate to somebody for free (via Digg)

Make somebody happy.. send them some chocy

White and Nerdy

Cool Weird Al video from his new album.

All Vista Upgrades on one DVD!

Oh come all ye hackers…

Restless Computing

Do you ever feel like technology is becoming too invasive? Email, mobile phones, 24 hour connectivity! I often feel like it is far too intrusive but wouldn’t have it any other way!

Right now I’m lying in bed unable to sleep. It’s 12:09am so you won’t be reading this until tomorrow and I’m damn happy that technology has become so pervasive, intrusive and miniaturized.

Why am I so happy? Well, as I mentioned earlier I can’t sleep. If it weren’t for my iPAQ I would be bored out of my proverbial tree.

Some might suggest that I haul my tired ass out of bed and go do something else. Unfortunately that’s not an option as we have guests staying and I don’t think they would appreciate my stomping around the house at this hour.

My laptop is also out of the question as the noise would surely keep the bitch awake.

Even a good old fashioned book is out of the question as the light would also keep the bitch awake. That’s a shame really as I’m nearly finished the “Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy”, hardback edition with all 4 books plus the extra “Young Zapphod plays it safe”, again!

So thank god for my intrusive little iPAQ, for without it I’d be at my wits end with nothing but darkness to stare at.

Thanks to this tiny little device I have something to wrench my mind from the darkness. I have email, internet, RSS, games and much more. Just sorry I didn’t stick a few podcasts on it before coming to bed!

Who would have thought that this tiny thing would serve so well? It’s a far cry from setting the Commodore 64 up next to my bed when I was a lad!

Weekly Roundup – Friday 15-09-2006

“Weekly roundup” is a list of interesting and noteworthy news and links on the web that I discovered this week.

Researchers identify “male warrior effect”

Men may have developed a psychology that makes them particularly able to engage in wars, a scientist said on Friday.

New research has shown that men bond together and cooperate well in the face of adversity to protect their interests more than women, which could explain why war is almost exclusively a male business, according to Professor Mark van Vugt of the University of Kent in southern England.

I.B.M. to Build Supercomputer Powered by Video Game Chips

“Roadrunner” is being built by I.B.M fir the US Department of Energy.

It will ne capable of 1,000 trillion calculations a second, using an array of 16,000 Cell processor chips that I.B.M. designed for the coming PlayStation 3 video game machine.

The initial phase of the contract will be for $35 million. There will be two more construction phases through the completion and installation of the system in 2008. The total cost is expected to be $110 million.

Get a Windows Vista product key.

Follow this link to get a free product key for Windows Vista. Requires passport.

Cross browser synchronization

Ionut Alex. Chitu has given some tips about using the “Google Browser Sync” extension in Firefox to save all your browser settings, history and bookmarks and have them available on multiple computers.

While this tool has proved invaluable to me over the past few months, I must admit to finding the functionality lacking. Why? Because I want it to work with IE as well.

The Google Toolbar is available for both IE and Firefox, and already allows me to have my bookmarks available in both browsers on multiple machines as long as I’m using Google online bookmarking service (as long as I an extension such as Gmarks in Firefox).

So, the question is, why doesn’t Google integrate the abilities of Google Sync with Google toolbar? Heck, why not release an extension for Opera as well!

I don’t know about other people, but this would be incredibly useful to me as I skip between multiple browsers all the time, and would benefit immensely from having my history, bookmarks and settings synchronized between the lot of them.

I know some people might have privacy concerns with this, but if you’re already using Google Browser Sync, then I don’t think they apply to you.

True Viral Marketing

Weekly Roundup – Friday 08-09-2006

Google to Use PC Microphones to Listen In?, then targets its ads

People got a little riled up over this one I think, but to be honest I don’t see how it can currently be practically implemented. Here’s what I said on Digg.com about it. It’s a little tongue in cheek!

You all should realize that this technique could only work for women! Us male TV viewers are usually more entertained by flicking through all 350+ cable channels every 3 minutes. That’s why my girlfriend refuses to hand me the remote.

But seriously, besides that, any such advertising coming from Google would have to be opt in. Also, consider the bandwidth issues involved here, its not really practically to have a constant stream of audio heading to Google from every computer with a microphone that’s turned on. Then the processor power required to analyze all of those sound streams and send out the adverts.

ErrorZilla – A Better HTTP Error Page

ErrorZilla is a Firefox extension that replaces 404 and other error pages with more descriptions and options such as reload button, Google Cache, Web archive, and three buttons for: ping, trace and whois.

Unlimited E-mail Addresses with Gmail

Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign (+) after your Gmail address, and it’ll still get to your inbox. It’s called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with. Here’s how it works: say your address is pinkyrocks@gmail.com, and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com and set up a filter to label it work (to access your filters go to Settings – Filters and create a filter for messages addressed to pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com. Then add the label work) (more…)

Hey Pirillo! What’s an asshat?

Continuing the postings about AboutUs.org, comes this little gem I just received in an email from Tom (hopefully he won’t mind me posting it here).

Paul

I just got a reply back from Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome.com – which read

“Oh, jeeze… asshats.”

To an email where I pointed out his domain’s entries on aboutus.org! Maybe we’ll start seeing some more coverage (we can hope… I don’t know what “asshats” means, but I guess he’s less than impressed too)

Tom

So, that just begs the question of what an Asshat is?

UPDATE: I just found a definition for Asshat on Urban Dictionary :

One who has their head up their ass. Thus wearing their ass as a hat. Asshat

describing when one’s head is so far up one’s ass that one is wearing the ass as a hat. in other words, extreme stupidity.

Unfortunately Wikipedia does not, as yet, have an entry for “Asshat”.