Tag: Linux

Greatest Hit : Why Would You Want To Do That?

The below is a post from November 6th, 2011. NINE YEARS AGO AS OF THIS POSTING. It was posted on my old open source blog and got popular enough to get passed around most of the very news sites I talked about in there. Much water has gone under the bridge since then.

I STILL want Dillo! I just gave up and use Lynx for that function now. I couldn’t get Dillo to even compile on a modern system without maintaining it myself. There are thousands of journalists out there that struggle with this same problem every day; they need to get the facts, and all the facts are behind either paywalls or a million popups and autoplaying videos. I wish we just had a blogger’s equivalent of a Press Pass.

I also no longer run any of the below Linux distros. I’m on the Mint bandwagon now. It’s been the default “works out of the box” Linux distro for a few years, but God knows what I’ll have to resort to if Mint gronks.

Anyway, I’m reposting this NINE YEAR OLD post because people loved it and linked to it. Do not be surprised if it is out of date, because it is an old post. Got that?

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Linux Gaming Roundup : Help, I’m Kinky For Bowsette!

I’ve been a busy game blogger lately, but before I get into Linux-specific gaming, I’d like to share my latest crush: Bowsette!

In the grim future of Bowsette there can be only war!

Bowsette is a fan creation I covered in my write-up of the top weirdest moments of the Mario / Donkey Kong franchise. As a Gen Xer, I’m in a unique position to sum up the scope of the historic Donkey Kong and Super Mario franchise. I was there twoscore years ago, a greasy triangle of disgusting pier joint pizza in hand at the Balboa Fun Zone witnessing the dawn of the Donkey Kong original arcade machine. (You can still play that on Linux, if you bootleg the ROM and load up Mame.) I catalog the weirdness from that day through all the magic mushrooms down to modern-day 4chan and its Bowsette abomination.

See, I understand where it comes from. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (2014) for the Game Boy Advance and Wii U had this moment where they decided a female-possessed Bowser would make a fun boss fight, namely Bowletta. Fans instantly repressed the memory until it manifested itself years later on image boards. Every fetish has a childhood trauma behind it.

As wrong as Bowsette is, on the teeth-grinding irritation level of Brony culture, it still feels like it belongs in 2020 pop culture somehow. It was inevitable. Torment the proles enough and even their escapism becomes twisted.

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Dissecting the Fallacies of the COBOL Programmer “Crisis”

I’ve been way too busy to address the story when it first broke, but that’s how the burrito’s been rolling around here lately. Briefly, here’s the sequence of the story which made my blood boil:

  • COVID-19 pandemic hits
  • World recession (if not depression) hits
  • An unprecedented number of citizens in US file for unemployment
  • US government issues economic stimulus checks so the economy doesn’t go boom
  • IRS, banks, and other institutions report a crisis: they can’t help people fast enough because their machines are using… COBOL!

This triggered an avalanche of ignorant technology story headlines the likes of which haven’t been seen since Y2K.

“Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims!” screams CNN.

“Government systems written in the old COBOL computer language are blocking us from our cash!” gurgles ZDNet, the FOX News of tech media.

“Unemployment checks are being held up by a coding language almost nobody knows!” valley-girls The Verge.

“An ancient programming language is suddenly in demand thanks to the pandemic!” derps Salon.

It’s been going on like this for weeks. The drooling stupidity dripping over these stories is inexcusable in the year 2020. The media, let us never forget, is chock full of stubbornly anti-intellectual reporters who flat out refuse to learn because what’s the money in reporting an accurate story?

So, for those of you just joining us (because everybody else lies to you), allow the World’s Oldest Blogging Hacker to explain this mess…

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I Can’t Believe It’s Not Unix!

DISCLAIMER: This post originally appeared in another technology blog that is now defunct. It is reprinted here with permission.

In the year 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie led a team of programmers at Bell Labs to develop the Unix operating system, which was to be a successor to Multics. It proved to be a smashing success in the growing computing field and became the standard for operating systems for the next two decades. In the year 1991, a Finnish programmer name of Linus Torvalds had an itch to develop a Free and Open Source (FOSS) port of Unix, and announced his intentions on Usenet mailing lists leading to a famous debate with one computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum.

We today know Linux as the root of the Android operating system, dominant in the tablet and smartphone market by as much as 85%. But what many people don’t realize is the huge amount of other attempts that were made to create the perfect Unix-like operating system. Like settlers braving the snow to lead a wagon trail out west, the early days of computing marked many attempts to forge a settlement in the digital wild west, and many met defeat. The players in this epic saga might surprise you.

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A Look Back at the History Behind the Firefox Web Browser

Today, Chrome is the web browser that dominates the online market, by virtue of being the home browser for Android, which dominates the mobile market. Hooray. #AnyoneButMicrosoft.

But before that, the web’s browser was Firefox, which is still pretty solid on the desktop. Firefox is the progeny of Mozilla, and the story of Mozilla’s most successful product, the Firefox web browser, goes even further back into the history of the web itself. Interestingly, Firefox’s lineage brings it surprisingly close to other web browsers that it competed with – especially the web browser with a big, blue ‘e’ for its logo…

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You know what I haven’t blogged about in awhile? LINUX!

Anybody out there remember the elder days of yore on the web, when I was one of the few bloggers to talk about Linux and FOSS? I figured it’s time to update distro recommends for a new generation. So here’s the top five Linux distros for every kind of user.
As usual, I dodged the trendy meme distros in favor of time-honored practical systems for anybody from the most clueless newbie to the salty veteran power user. Wow, it has been a long time!

Follow on for one of my classic Linux essays, the final battle report of the Microsoft vs. Linux wars:

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