[ Thanks to Marcel
Gagne for this link. ]
“What can I say? It has been a crazy couple of weeks.
Not just for me, but for the world in general. Well, not in
general, but certainly on some fronts on which I find fascinating
and, not surprisingly, I have an opinion. First off, if you wander
off into the wilds of planet *buntu, you may notice an increasingly
Lucid Lynx prowling around. Be warned, however, that this Lynx is
an Alpha and unless you’re the sort of person who likes to mess
with Alphas, you might want to steer clear until this Lynx turns
into a beta. As a side note, you should read Christopher Moore’s “A
Dirty Job” where he provides us with a wonderfully amusing, and
mostly true, description of a Beta Male.“And yes, I’m just the sort of person who likes to mess with
Alphas, so I downloaded the Kubuntu and Ubuntu versions, for the
sheer unparalleled joy of seeing what’s new under the hood. The big
news is no more HAL, which is just as well since HAL was an
embarrassing choice for acronym given that it never had a chance of
living up to Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL 9000. HAL (that would be
Hardware Abstraction Layer) was certainly insane, but it became an
integral part of the system, providing among other things, instant
device recognition so that when you plug in your USB stick, it was
magically available on your graphical desktop. DeviceKit will,
according to the Ubuntu folk, make “Ubuntu faster to boot and
faster to resume from suspend.” Sure, but will it still support my
wireless card? Remember what I said about Alphas.”