Red Hat plans 'popular' Linux for the desktop

RED HAT SAYS it is planning to release a Linux desktop for a broader audience that it has currently had to play with.

But this is not going to be the much-awaited push into the home desktop market to kick Microsoft to the baseline that Linux supporters have been hoping for.

According to eWeek the offering is designed to compete with Novell's SUSE Linux 10 which is hardly an operating system that your Grannie can install.

However the package will be targeted at small and Medium businesses, which is a level down from the big corporates which Red Hat traditionally likes to play with.

A spokesHat confirmed that the outfit had no plans to go and sell the software at Best Buy.

The dragoons

During the Average Age, the dragoons were considered symbol of apostasía and treason, although also of rage and envies. The dragoons of several heads meant decay, oppression and heresy, although also they were considered like independence emblem.

Many dragoons represented the wisdom. To kill a dragoon was considered a passport to the wealth and the demonstration of which a hero was really capable and astute. An example of this simbology we found it in a famous one develops Germanic épica: Cantar of the Nibelungos, whose hero Siegfried (Sigfried or Sigfrido) overcomes to the Fafner dragoon -- guard of the treasure of Nibelungos --, what he allows him to become owner of this fortune and to bathe in the blood of this fantastic creature. This transforms it into a invulnerable being, practically invincible, except by the small "weak point" that will know so well to take advantage of the treasonous Hagen to overcome it.

On the other hand, in some cultures like the Chinese, or in populations near the Himalayas, the dragoons considered amulets to attract the good luck

Dragoons in the Christianity

The draco Latin word, that gave to origin to the word "dragoon", means "the serpent", for that reason the Christianity has associated it historically to this diabolic animal with and the sinful thing.

The Biblical identification of the devil with the serpent originated the connotation of "badly" associated "dragoon". In the book of Job it is described to the marine monster Leviathan with own characteristics of the dragoon, which is called "King of the beasts". In the book of Revelation 12:3 an enormous red beast with seven heads describes itself, whose tail sweeps a third of stars of the sky on the Earth. This subject is related with the fall of the angels.

Finally, in some translations the word "dragoon" is used to describe to the beast (is to say: the devil), whereas in the religious iconography some Christian saints in the act imagine to kill a dragoon

Theories on its origins

Some think that the dragoons really existed in immemorial times, being inspired by fantastic legend that therefore affirms it. Others think that they were a biological variant of the dinosaurios, although does not exist empirical evidence to support this thesis.

The archaeologists and investigators of criptozoología affirm that giant lizards of qualities similar to the attributed ones to the dragoons existed, to which called "Megalania". Nevertheless, he does not turn out viable to affirm that they were the same animal class.

Another extended belief less is than the dragoons were in fact one class of flying machines created by certain unknown archaic culture. This hypothesis, at the present time, is considered seudo-scientist.

Formerly it turned out reasonable to maintain that the first found fossils of dinosaurio were, in fact, dragoon bones. A discovery conducted by Chang Qu during century III A.C. in Sichuan, China, catalogued the rest with that label.

Heródoto -- called often the father of history -- visited Judea in the year 450 A.C. and listened to speak of the existence of dragoons enjaulados in Arabia, near Petra, Jordan. This woke up curiosity to him and decided to travel there. According to the testimonies written by this historian, in this place it found two specimens of dragoons with wings that had been locked up in an iron cage, to that characterized like true "ferocious beasts".

The newspaper of Marco Polo explains that when this one was walking by Anatolia, in Persia, it found dragoons alive that they flew and that they attacked his caravan in the middle of the desert. In these chronicles, Marco Polo explained that they were frightful beasts that were on the verge of killing it.

Another hypothesis: the cultores of the catastrofismo have suggested I commit them and meteor rains were the astronomical phenomena that gave origin to the legend about fire serpents able to cross the firmament at great speed, and the belief in the dragoons dreamed up there.

A less credible affirmation indicates that the dragoon was a compound creature. In many cultures the idea that is rooted the dragoons have characteristics of three types of predators: they have legs, claws, capacity to crawl and a feline cleverness, for that reason they are looked like the leopards.

By its capacity to fly and to have its guarida in moved away places, generally rocky, one compared them with eagles. But the dragoons keep greater similarities with the serpents; in fact, our word modern "dragoon" comes indirectly from the Greek, through the Latin, in which draco it means "serpent".

The Web smiley's motto: Grin and bear it

Author Vladimir Nabokov said in a 1969 New York Times interview that "there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile--some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket."

Now, nearly four decades later, there is just such a typographical symbol-- :-), or :) for the minimalists, and it'd be tough to find a tech-savvy person who hasn't leaned on it. There's also a special typographical symbol for a frown-- :-( -- and one for a cool dude in sunglasses -- B-) -- and one for a wink -- ;-). There's even a typographical sign for wearing a baseball cap-- d=D.

These are emoticons (or emotive icons), the arrangements of letters and symbols that have been inserted into e-mails, message board posts, and instant messages since the fledgling days of the Internet. "Fledgling days," in this case, refers not to the mid-'90s when people were beginning to learn what AOL was, but to the early '80s, when accessing the Internet was largely limited to research universities and defense contractors.

But the Internet is changing, and typing is no longer the only way to communicate online. With the onset of new technologies that facilitate, for example, a more graphic representation of moods, tone and inference, it's arguable that there could be frowns in the emoticon's future.

After all, the phenomenon is about to turn 25--a dinosaur in Web years. The origin of the ASCII smiley face is typically traced to September 1982, when Scott Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science, suggested that the :-) symbol be used in the subject line of an online bulletin board post to denote a humorous or non-serious topic.

"Nobody ever guessed that this would catch on. I certainly didn't," said Fahlman, who is still on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon. But as he recounted, the trend spread, initially to other Internet-pioneering universities like Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then beyond.

"As the Internet grew, it escaped this little closed community of computer scientists and made it into first other universities, a much larger group, and then out into the general public," Fahlman said. "It's been interesting to see (smiley faces) trickle from place to place, and now it's showing up in postings from Russia and China and all over the world. It's been fun to watch that."

Essentially, the emoticon proliferated along with the Internet itself.

"For people who first get into it, it's like they know the password to the secret club," Fahlman said. But now that emoticons have spread into every niche of Net culture and morphed into myriad (arguably irritating) spinoffs, that sense of exclusivity has lost some of its luster. "It's kind of pathetic when the 'in group' is sort of half the world," Fahlman observed. "But originally, people were using these because it was some cool thing and it showed that you were a real expert user of the Internet, that you knew the secret language."

Of course, the vicissitudes of human taste have it that there's almost guaranteed to be a backlash against any trend, and emoticons were no exception. "I tried to fight (using emoticons) for a long time," confessed C.C. Chapman, vice president of new marketing at the new-media marketing agency Crayon.

"Then I just realized it was easier to showcase emotion (with emoticons)...Sometimes tone, and sarcasm especially, can be taken completely wrong in e-mail depending on who's reading it," he said.

Nevertheless, Chapman acknowledged the presence of emoticon overkill. "I'm glad the super-customization of them went away," he said, referring to the extensive lexicon of representations for hangovers, black eyes or Elvis haircuts. You don't see those used a whole lot these days, Chapman said. "It's reverted back to the simple smiles and frowns."

While simple frowns, winks and smiles have proven to have lasting power beyond their more complex counterparts, emoticons have nevertheless evolved. Most message board and instant-messaging client features now automatically convert them into cartoons or animated faces. AOL, which inaugurated its Buddy List feature in 1996 and the free AOL Instant Messenger software in 1997, has been converting ASCII emoticons to cartoon smileys since 1998, according to spokeswoman Erin Gifford.

"I kind of hate to see that," Fahlman mused. "I think it kind of destroys the whimsy of the original."

Indeed, despite the conversion features (which IM and message board users can, and often do, turn off), the sideways emoticon has become a cultural icon of sorts. In the United States, the smiley is now such a recognizable phenomenon that marketing campaigns have begun to take note. Last year, the Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP), famous for the "Got Milk" ads, incorporated a "branded emoticon" into its latest youth-oriented media strategy. It's a smiley face with a milk mustache, or :-{).

"We created a MySpace page that we used to launch our celebrity mustache ads," explained Victor Zaborsky, assistant director of marketing for MilkPEP. "Of course, MySpace allows you to have friends, so we e-mail our friends when a new celebrity (ad) is launching...and then we sign off with the emoticon."

Zaborsky is uncertain as to whether MilkPEP's emoticon campaign will expand its reach beyond teen-oriented online channels--currently its only medium. "It's really hard to tell," he said when asked whether it would expand into offline media or target a wider demographic. "The emoticon (campaign)'s only about a year old...It's just a way to fit into what they're already doing and be part of their world."

Funny how a 25-year-old piece of Net culture is still considered the stuff of youth marketing.

But new Internet trends could relegate emoticons to the history books. The culprit in question is none other than the avatar, that customizable cartoon or 3D virtual identity famously used in virtual worlds like Second Life and the newly announced Home from Sony, as well as massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft.

Avatars can be tweaked to look like just about anything, and they can be made to express emotions, too. Second Life and Warcraft offer commands called "emotes," keywords that can be entered into the games' text fields and program an avatar to dance like a chicken or pick its nose.

. C. Chapman, whose company, Crayon, operates a headquarters in Second Life, thinks avatars will see wider use in the future. "I think it adds what's been missing for so long, where all of a sudden you have chats and conversations in a three-dimensional environment where showcasing emotion, excitement or anger is much easier," Chapman said. "It's getting closer to real life."

And virtual worlds don't have a monopoly on avatars anymore. Instant-messaging clients like AIM and Yahoo Instant Messenger now offer customizable (albeit two-dimensional) avatars in lieu of "buddy icons," and one of the trademark features of Nintendo's Wii console is the "Mii channel" that allows players to create virtual likenesses. To top it off, many of these instant-messaging clients are now also offering voice or video chat functions. In comparison, emoticons seem downright prehistoric.

"You're definitely going to see much more convergence of all this media," Chapman said. "You have to. We're getting spread so thin with all these different tools, they're going to have to pull together to interact with each other."

And emote-equipped avatars are largely still a nascent phenomenon just as emoticons were two decades ago. "In Second Life, they're definitely not there yet," C.C. Chapman said. "To get the emotes you want, you have to buy them and plug them in." They just aren't fully integrated into the world, he added. "It has to become a standard part of the application."

Emoticons certainly aren't dead yet. For one, it's already pretty clear that people should never underestimate the power of retro. Just look at all the embedded Flash games of Pac-Man that have popped up in the MySpace profiles of teenagers who were nowhere close to being born when the classic video game first hit arcades.

And then there's the fact that emoticons, however outdated, may have already solidified a permanent spot in Web-surfing and communication habits. "It's become almost a convention," said Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon. "The original reason may have completely evaporated, but I think these things will live on for a little bit longer until e-mail itself goes away and we're all just talking and videoing at each other and everyone's forgotten how to write."

And most of us don't foresee humanity forgetting how to write anytime soon. ;-)

Card reader via ExpressCard

A card that serves to read other cards, peculiar. The Delkin mark on sale puts new cards PCMCIA, in fact ExpressCard, that are able to read several types of memory cards, can be a solution if you have several types of cards which you use commonly like SD, MMC, xD, MemoryStick… Hill 45€ and is compatible with:

SD
MMC
Memory Stick
Memory Stick PRO
xD
SDHC
miniSD
microSD
M2
M2 PRO Duo

PopCatcher MusicDock Md-601, the radio anti publicity

Moment anti publicity, if you are of the people who enchant the radio to him, but hates the publicity in the radio and mainly in musical radio stations there is an apparatus that is going to solve this task just a little bit to you, is PopCatcher MusicDock Md-601, one radio that has entrance USB so that you connect your reproducer or hard disk, this radio catches the signal that you say to him of radio and automatically eliminates the publicity between song and song.

So far it seems that they do not say the price of this apparatus, but reserves can be done, we do not know if there is to pay something sooner or later.

http://www.popcatcher.com/index2.html

Tenbuno, one doubles screen

Inc. Woojin will send the next month of May, the double Tenbuno screen. It has a 19"screen LCD and another one in the superior part of 8,4".

With this insurance that we will avoid the annoying part to diminish windows or to be continuously moving windows, we will be able to maintain, for example our client of post office or the reproducer of music, simultaneously that we are in favorite the inferior part reading ours blogs.

http://aving.net/usa/news/default.asp?mode=read&c_num=37753&C_Code=02&SP_Num=0

Archos 704 like center multimédia

If do not like to everything what takes you the white apple and you look for PVR (AppleTV) for your house can that the 704 Archos WiFi interests more to you. As he tells well us Hector Milla in his blog makes just like an Apple exactly TV and more since he is portable. We were centered in which Archos 704 when having WiFi can be connected to your PC and be relayed photos, videos or music from your PC to your TV, that if, aside from the PMP of Archos you need to have dock to place it like PVR next to your TV.

I believe that its strongpoint is going to be that, if before it said that he is too expensive for which does, the certain thing is that if you are a person whom it likes these apparatuses it would have to be one of the next ones in your collection. Nonsingle which it is WiFi and it has access to your PC from the hall if which you can take it and also sail by Internet in a while thanked to its touch screen and stylus is not simple.

http://www.hectormilla.com/gadgets/1449/el-archos-704-hace-de-media-center-wifi

SoundGate, concept of computer for musicians

Being even a design, a concept, something completely unreal that it wants to be it, it is a mravillosa idea. It is a design of the Argentinean Nicolas Gonzalez Garrido who has designed east so rare portable PC. Him any instrument could be connected, and to be like portable present the as portable one as anyone, but that if, in a rare design, with a qwerty keyboard that is covered with more controls, a screen of 10 inches.

See a video: http://www.hellonico.com/soundgate_video.wmv

Developer Xbox360s spotted

THERE WERE tons of an Xbox360 variant that I had never seen before at GDC - the developer unit.
They came in two colours, grey and white, were bigger, and had a bunch of new ports on the back.
All were labelled Xbox XDK on the ID sticker.

With the white one, you will immediately notice that it is quite a bit longer, about 20% or so. The added length does not tell you much until you see the back.

On the back, the extra has two ports, the top labeled PIX and the bottom labled DVD Emu. They also had HDMI ports to the left of these on the 'normal' Xbox portion.
We saw several of the machines, and all the grey ones had both new ports wired up, all the white ones had PIX blanked off. Other than those changes, they looked like normal Xboxes.

korn - Thoughtless

korn

Thoughtless

untouchables


This song I like much

Come and fill the pages of my fantasies
Pushing all my mercy down, down, down
I want to see you try to take a swing at me.
Come on,
Gunna put you on the ground, ground, ground.
Why are you trying to make fun of me?
You think it's funny
What the fuck you think it's done to me?
You take your turn lashing out at me
I want you crying, when you're dirty in the front of me
All, All my hate cannot be bound
I will not be drown
By your thoughtless scheming
So you can try to tear me down?
Beat me to the ground
I will see you screaming
Come and fill the pages of my fantasies
I'm above you, smiling at you, drown, drown, drown
I wanna kill and rape you the way you raped me
And I'll pull the trigger and you're down, down, down
Why are you trying to make fun of me?
You think it's funny
What the fuck you think it's done to me?
You take your turn lashing out at me
I want you crying, when you're dirty in the front of me
All, All my hate cannot be bound
I will not be drown By your thoughtless scheming
So you can try to tear me down?
Beat me to the ground
I will see you screaming
All my friends
Are gone,
They died (Gunna take you down)
They all screamed and cried (Gunna take you down x4)
Never gunna forget
Never forget
I can't get no where,
I never forget
Never forget
I can't getttt... x4
All, All my hate cannot be bound
I will not be drown
By your thoughtless scheming
So you can try to tear me down?
Beat me to the ground
I will see you screaming x2

I'm making a difference

Today Microsoft is launching the "I'm Initiative," a new charity program carried out through Windows Live Messenger, benefitting nine different organizations. At the main site for I'm making a difference, you can learn more about the charities and how to help them out.

By placing one of the following emoticon codes in your Display Name, Microsoft will automatically donate to the charity of your choice whenever you start a new conversation. We're not sure whether or not putting the emoticon in your Personal Status Message registers a donation, maybe a Softie who's in the know can clue us in on that detail. Here are the charities available:
Text Code
Cause
*red+u
American Red Cross
*bgca
Boys & Girls Club
*naf
National AIDS Fund
*mssoc
National Multiple Sclerosis Society
*9mil
ninemillion.org
*sierra
Sierra Club
*help
StopGlobalWarming.org
*komen
Susan G. Komen for the Cure
*unicef
The US fund for UNICEF
The strongest point of this program is that it's so easy to participate that it would be foolish not to. Although this program has been known by some since the launch of Windows Live Messenger 8.1, it is new to the general public and today marks the official start of the campaign. Also, according to the FaQ people not living in the United States will not be able to participate. Each charity is guaranteed to recieve at least $100,000 in donations in the first year of the program, with no upper limit.
The program is already seeing a big response internally on the first day and I hope it grows into a big deal beyond the confines of Redmond. Microsoft has a great history of being a charitable company and it's good to see that they're taking another step in the right direction.
Go here to learn more and get started
Update:MisinformedDNA has informed us in our comments that the emoticon does indeed have to be in your Display Name. It will not count if it is in your Personal Status Message. Also, the MessengerSays blog has a post up on the initiative here.

Live rock the rock is my life

+88_____________________________ _ _+880____________________________ _ _++88____________________________ _ _++88____________________________ _ __+880_________________________++ _ __+888________________________+88 _ __++880______________________+88__ __++888_____+++88__________+++8__ __++8888__+++8880++88____+++88___ __+++8888+++8880++8888__++888____ ___++888++8888+++888888++888_____ ___++88++8888++8888888++888______ ___++++++888888888888888888______ ____++++++88888888888888888______ ____++++++++000888888888888______ _____+++++++000088888888888______ ______+++++++00088888888888______ _______+++++++088888888888_______ _______+++++++088888888888_______ ________+++++++8888888888________ ________+++++++0088888888________ ________++++++0088888888_________ ________+++++0008888888__________ ________...............8888888___

OneCare places last in AV comparison

In a report released February 28 and reported by Computerworld, Austrian researcher Andreas Cleminti from AV Comparatives rated Windows Live OneCare dead last out of 17 anti-virus programs, the only program in the comparison to receive no certification from Cleminti.
The report, available online in a report or in pdf form, rated G Data Security's AntiVirusKit (AVK) the top performing AV program, catching 99.5 percent of malicious code in the comparison tests. OneCare came in well behind all of the other products, catching only 82.4 percent of the malware.
According to Computerworld, Microsoft responded to the results, saying:
"We are looking closely at the methodology and results of the test to ensure that Windows Live OneCare performs better in future tests," a Microsoft spokesperson said.
A quick search on AV Comparatives shows a number of anti-virus products touting their results in previous tests, from Nod32 to Kapersky, and AV Comparatives have been posting testing results since February of 2004. This appears to be the first test in which OneCare has been included.
Thanks to picturepan2 at Windows X's Shrine for this one.