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Posts published in “Humor”

Lumpis Linux: A Windows User’s Dream if I Ever Did See One

By Ken Starks on January 2, 2014 |

Humor

I’ve been friends with Nicholas Knight for 33 years. We met at Fort Lewis, Washington where we were both stationed. Even back then Nick was involved with computers, helping set up and administer the new computer system the US Army was adopting for their personnel centers. Me, being a dumb ol’ combat engineer…well, I didn’t breathe the rarefied air that Nick did.

After the army, we visited each other from time to time. Our families even took a cruise together in 1999. Nick was working for AOL, tending their servers and watching the dot com bubble turn billionaires into millionaires and millionaires into working class stiffs. Fortunately, Nick hung on and came out of it relatively unscathed.

Continue readingLumpis Linux: A Windows User’s Dream if I Ever Did See One
Torvald’s Diplomacy, Elop’s Riches & More…Microsoft's STEPHEN ELOP

Torvald’s Diplomacy, Elop’s Riches & More…

By FOSS Force on September 27, 2013 |

Business, Humor, Mobile, News, Politics and Security

FOSS Week in Review

Redmond Ups the Ante on Its Buyback Program

No sooner had we told you last Friday of Microsoft’s offer to buy certain “gently used” iPads for up to $200 in credit vouchers, good at your friendly neighborhood Microsoft store, than they went and upped the ante. What they’ve done is something of a reverse interpretation of a line from the old Proctor and Bergman comedy album from the early 70’s, TV or Not TV. To paraphrase, “What was once two hundred is now three hundred fifty.”

Yup. You heard us right. On Friday your old iPad was worth two hundred smackers to the Microsoft folk–which had to be taken in store credit. By Sunday morning, it was three fifty as cash loaded on a Visa card. Talk about inflation. Not only that, Redmond’s buyback offer now extends beyond a limited range of iPads to include many more devices. Now they’ll take Android devices, both phones and tablets, from Samsung, Lenovo and others, as well as iPhones and iPads. We understand they’re even offering to buyback BlackBerrys.

Continue readingTorvald’s Diplomacy, Elop’s Riches & More…
WWPL: The World Wide Party LineOnline with Univac

WWPL: The World Wide Party Line

By Christine Hall on June 26, 2013 |

Humor, Internet and Security

I don’t think there are very many people my age who’ve ever expected much in the way of privacy online.

Oh, maybe in the very early days some might’ve naively figured that if they didn’t actually interact with a site, like if they just went to the New York Times to read an article or something, they were pretty private, but they soon learned about tracking cookies and hackers with keystroke logging tools and right away understood that everything done online might possibly be being observed.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingWWPL: The World Wide Party Line

Why Schools Require MS Office; Nokia Plays Rope-A-Dope & More…

By FOSS Force on May 10, 2013 |

Browsers, Business, Humor, Internet, Media, News, Potpourri, Security and Software

Friday FOSS Week in Review

Pretty fonts coming to Linux?

Most of us here at FOSS Force have been using various flavors of Linux for thirteen years or so. During that time we’ve gotten used to reading comments on the ugliness of fonts in Linux, especially when it comes to browsers.

We’ve never particularly understood this or noticed any homeliness in regards to Linux fonts. Of course, we’ve also never been able to understand reviewers who write about how unexciting they find fonts like Times New Roman or Ariel to be. In our experience, Hunter Thompson is brilliant and compelling no matter what font is being used to render his rants, while Tom Wolfe is a pompous ass, no matter how humble a typeface used to display his insufferable prose.

Continue readingWhy Schools Require MS Office; Nokia Plays Rope-A-Dope & More…

Spy vs. Spy; Wikipedia Sports New DB & More…

By FOSS Force on May 3, 2013 |

Browsers, Distros, Humor, Internet, News, Politics, Security and Software

Friday FOSS Week in Review

Goodbye to Fuduntu, hello to FuSE

We already knew, of course, that Fuduntu was history, that the beloved distro was to be no more, evidently due to the fact that it was becoming nearly impossible to support GNOME 2 in any sort of meaningful way. We also knew there’d been talk among the developers at Fuduntu of continuing with a new distro. Well, now it’s a done deal and most of the developers of Fuduntu will be working on a new distro based on openSUSE.

Continue readingSpy vs. Spy; Wikipedia Sports New DB & More…

Mr. Zuck’s Magical Algorithmic Censor

By Christine Hall on April 9, 2013 |

Humor, Media, Politics and

Zuck the suck has a lot to learn about being cool and hip.

Last week Mr. Social proved that neither he nor his little Facebook site have an inkling of hippness away from the Starbuck’s universe, when they decided a historical photograph from counter cultural Toronto, taken in the late 60s or early 70s, was nothing but unacceptable nudity, or worse, porno.

Then again, I could be wrong. This could merely be a case of a computer algorithm with penis envy.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingMr. Zuck’s Magical Algorithmic Censor

Back to the Future With Apple’s Rumored Smart Watch

By Christine Hall on February 25, 2013 |

Hardware, Humor, Mobile and Patents


For the last couple of decades we’ve watched as our technology has caught up with the world of Star Trek much faster than Gene Roddenberry could ever have imagined back in the 1960s, when Kirk, Spock and the gang first rode into our living rooms, mostly in “non-living” or “dead” black and white, as not many of us had “living” color back then.

Well, here we are, nowhere even close to the 23rd century of the original Enterprise, and we already have our smart phones, which are an awfully lot like the gee-whiz communicators into which Kirk would bark “beam us outta here” whenever a bug-eyed monster got too close for comfort. Indeed, we even have satellite phones, which could presumably communicate with the crew of the Enterprise if they were in orbit around our third rock from the sun. Though we don’t yet have replicators, holodecks or transporters, we can only imagine its only a matter of time before we can pick them up at Best Buy too.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingBack to the Future With Apple’s Rumored Smart Watch

A Nightmare on Linux Avenue

By Christine Hall on February 11, 2013 |

Desktops and Humor

Let’s say it finally happens and the big OEMs get tired of dealing with Microsoft and decide to make Windows only one choice of several on new computers. Not a world like we have now, where the likes of Dell halfheartedly offer half baked and broken installs of Ubuntu, installs that need serious tweaking before they’ll work. Not that world, but a pretend world of Linux being offered across all models, with a choice between two or three distros. You know, OEMs giving Linux exactly the same treatment as they give Windows today.

Sounds like Tux heaven does it not? Don’t be in too big a hurry to celebrate.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingA Nightmare on Linux Avenue
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