Some don't like to see the truth for a thousand reasons. Some shake their shoulders about any truth and in fact anything not touching them directly. Who cares? That our world has NOT become a safer place for instance. In fact things have gone worse since World War II. Did somebody notice? Just this is theme of a multi-awarded new movie and TV documentary from Barbara-Anne Steegmuller: "Superpower". The essence of Superpower is the analysis and re-examination of a part of the history of the USA. The United States emerged from World War II as an island, with its industrial base still intact and having the atomic bomb. It was without question the most powerful country on earth. What did it do with this potential and what were the effects on the Republic and the rest of the world? Experts and scholars such as Bill Blum, Chalmers Johnson, Michel Chossudovsky, and Noam Chomsky, and others with expertise in this subject such as the Executive Producer of The Unit, Command Sergeant (Ret.) Eric Haney; former Chief Economist for the US Department of Labor, Morgan Reynolds; three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Kathy Kelly; and Lt. Col. (Ret) Karen Kwiatkowski, examine the key moments in modern America's history, revealing a truth that some might not like to see...
...or is it Windows 7 on XP? I ran into this remarkable question when my son tried to run our ISDN internet connection. It can't be run under Windows 7. Next we ended up in a mess probing USB sticks and SSD card solutions, WLAN, Ethernet and router settings that various drivers on Windows 7 tried to access, troubles with 32-bit software for a 64-bit computer and more. When trucking through Europe he uses WiFi connections, but due to our terrain we only can use wired ISDN. There (still) isn't coverage for wireless devices where we live, so we are electro-smog free as well. It's not like the happy few 'big cities' here with hi-speed WiFi. For not so mysterious reasons his dual-booting Ubuntu 9.04 (that I must upgrade for him) had not the slightest problem to connect everything. Using this detour we downloaded Windows-software that could be stored in the common Windows folders on his hard drive. We gave up spending time on these well-known problems, considering to remove and replace things by some virtual Windows OS version. Or should we use Windows 7 virtualisation for XP that Microsoft itself offers? Or simply run both XP and Windows 7 from Sun's VirtualBox under Linux? Our preferred option. What a hassle to play some games...
For years I wonder how certain sounds are propagated in nature. Not so strange, then -living in a desert-like surrounding- one can easily find some places without any sounds at all! Total silence on windstill days, when you can hear your breathing as a violent storm and blood circulation as a bright hissing sound. However, the reverse also holds true for some auditive phenomena: unexplained humming with very low frequencies, sometimes waking me up in the middle of the night. Do they come from a bakery that is nearby? No, then these low sounds even occur when nobody is at work there. They occur intermittently, aren't always heard and not everywhere around our house. Are they part of the worldwide "Taos Hum" phenomenon. What's causing this?
In my earlier post I referred to new desktops for Linux. The desktop in fact is the playing field that a user sees when working with a computer. I wouldn't come back on this issue, weren't it currently so important. Apple's OSX appeared to have had great influence on the latest Windows-7 release, whereas Linux with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) on a Gnome footprint and particularly Kubuntu on KDE with Plasma go a slightly different way. KDE stands for: 'Kool Desktop Environment' and was proposed in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich (picture), who on November 6th was decorated with the German Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to Free Software. Likewise do other popular distros search for desktop innovations, like Mint, Fedora, Mandriva 2010, PCLinuxOS and Novell sponsored OpenSUSE. Sponsor Novell is commercially associated with Microsoft. Although similarities exist with Apple's OSX desktop some in Cupertino will be worried about these developments. Apple now also needs to show some better designs. The 'battle of the desktops' is taking shape since the first week of November. The heat is on... (PS below article updated on 16 Nov)
Ubuntu developments go fast these days, so do the innovations from DeskTop-Builders, like Gnome and KDE. Right there we already encounter the first and possibly most important obstacle for computer-users to switch from the "Cathedral" to the "Self-Service Restaurant", from Windows to Linux. How to explain that a Linux distro often is a clever, functional and stable combination of software upon a Linux operating system working with a variety of file systems? That a user can virtually endlessly combine and mix ingredients to his/her taste, for free. That a distro just offers a few 'starters' to get a taste for more. That's not easy. Take the new Ubuntu Karmic 9.10. The desktop that you get to see is Gnome's, looking pretty much an advanced XP to make a change more easy. When you work longer with Gnome you'll discover a taste for more, like the new KDE 4.3.3 desktop with its spectacular Plasma decoration. Imagine that you could combine the best of these worlds? A somewhat hidden button in the login-screen makes much of that possible...
Some don't like to see the truth for a thousand reasons. Some shake their shoulders about any truth and in fact anything not touching them directly. Who cares? That our world has NOT become a safer place for instance. In fact things have gone worse since World War II. Did somebody notice? Just this is theme of a multi-awarded new movie and TV documentary from Barbara-Anne Steegmuller: "Superpower". The essence of Superpower is the analysis and re-examination of a part of the history of the USA. The United States emerged from World War II as an island, with its industrial base still intact and having the atomic bomb. It was without question the most powerful country on earth. What did it do with this potential and what were the effects on the Republic and the rest of the world? Experts and scholars such as Bill Blum, Chalmers Johnson, Michel Chossudovsky, and Noam Chomsky, and others with expertise in this subject such as the Executive Producer of The Unit, Command Sergeant (Ret.) Eric Haney; former Chief Economist for the US Department of Labor, Morgan Reynolds; three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Kathy Kelly; and Lt. Col. (Ret) Karen Kwiatkowski, examine the key moments in modern America's history, revealing a truth that some might not like to see...
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