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The Linux Launderette


Contents:

(?)./configure humour
(?)Stupidity
(?)Debian changes its position on the GFDL
(?)Delaveaux
(?)Weather
(?)Interesting mail on the wine-devel list

(?) ./configure humour

Mon, 13 Mar 2006

From Thomas Adam

The link below was posted into #fvwm by a German speaking person -- my German is like my Russian in that respect: non-existant. Nevertheless I picked out through the bits I understood -- quite amusing. :) If anyone knows of some others, let us all know.

http://www.linuxforen.de/forums/showthread.php?t=48669&highlight=linux+liebe


(?) Stupidity

Wed, 26 Apr 2006

From Jimmy O'Regan

Not even off-topic to this list, but this follows on to, and outdoes, the stupidity I mentioned here: http://linuxgazette.net/124/misc/nottag/dhs.html#trains

See attached stupidity.html


(?) Debian changes its position on the GFDL

Tue, 14 Mar 2006

From Jimmy O'Regan

http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/13/1615216&from=rss

They still reject anything that has Invariant Sections, but that's only to be expected.


(?) Delaveaux

Mon, 17 Apr 2006

From Marcin Niewalda

Witam [ Translation below ]

(!) [Jimmy] Witamy
Myślę, że to pomyłka: pan napisał do listy adresowego magazynu internetu.
(!) [Jimmy] magazynu internetowego
(!) [Jimmy] Dlatego, że nasz magazyn jest napisany w angielskim,
(!) [Jimmy] napisany po angielsku
(!) [Jimmy] przetłumaczyłem e-mail Pana. Adres, którego Pan szukał, jest Delaveaux@heagmedianet.de ale myślę, że ten pan mowi tylko po angielsku i po niemiecku; a nie wiem, czy ten adres jest nadal aktualny.
(!) [Jimmy] Forgot to translate what I was writing: I think there has been a mistake: you have written to the mailing list of an internet magazine. As our magazine is written in English, I have translated your e-mail. The address you were looking for is [...], but I think that person only speaks English and German, and I don't know if that address is still current.
I'm glad I sprang for the extra thick dictionary :)
(!) [Ah... see, what happened here is, in issue 64 someone named Roman Delaveaux sent a 2c tip: http://linuxgazette.net/issue64/lg_tips64.html]

(?) Poszukuje genealogicznych informacji o rodzine Delaveaux

(!) [Jimmy] [Searching for genealogical information about the Delaveaux family?]

(?) - Pański mail znalazłem w internecie -

(!) [Jimmy] [I found sir's mail on the internet]
(!) [Jimmy] Hmm. There was probably a typo in the first sentence, which would make the above "While searching for genealogical information about the Delaveaux family, I found your e-mail address on the internet".

(?) czy byłby Pan zainteresowaniem kontaktem ze mną w tej sprawie?.

(!) [Jimmy] [Would sir be interested in contacting me about this matter?]

(?) Nadmieniam że dostałem właśnie informację o niszczejącym grobowcu żony Augusta Delaveaux w Osobnicy.

(!) [Jimmy] [In addition, I have just received information about the spoiling of the tomb of the wife August Delaveaux in particular.]
(!) [Jimmy] of the wife of. It's not every day I get to make errors in two languages in one e-mail :)
I liked seeing that, as I had been wondering how to 'stack' things in the genitive case, and have only tried to use it once[1]: Beata had told me that her brother's fiancée was visiting, so I said "Musisz pokazywać narzeczoni twojego brata wszystko warto zobaczyć w Thurles'ie, n.p. dworzec kolejowy, ulica do Dublina..." (You must show your brother's fiancée everything worth seeing in Thurles, e.g. the train station, the road to Dublin...)
[1] And it wasn't even the genitive, it was the dative, but for feminine nouns, the dative is the same as the locative, which (aside from a set of exceptions, of course) is the same as the genitive.
And that's one of the easier aspects of Polish grammar :/

(?) Marcin Niewalda

ps. moja praprababcia była z domu De Laveaux

(!) [Jimmy] [ps. My great-great-grandmother was De Leveaux]

(?) ps2. drzewo rodziny Delaveaux przygotowane przeze mnie znajduje się pod adresem http://www.genealogia.okiem.pl/laveaux.htm

(!) [Jimmy] [A Delaveaux family tree prepared by me can be found at this address]

(?) Weather

Wed, 19 Apr 2006

From vince werber

Ok... here I go...

The weather IS changing... Why?... the Sun is getting hotter and the sun being a 'star' normally gets hotter as it burns out... Basic physics... Therefore... global warming is real but we have little to do with it...

(!) [Ben] Not Linux, but - destroying the ozone layer, which blocks a large percentage of the damaging UV from the Sun, permits those wavelengths to penetrate our atmosphere. More energy coupled into the system = greater heat. Basic physics, and we have lots and lots to do with it.
Also, that little star we're discussing is about 5 billion years old, and is projected to live to a ripe old 10 billion. Claiming that the weather change over the past couple of years is relevant to the age of the Sun doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

(?) Depressing aren't I??? (I hope anyway...)

(!) [Ben] [grin] Nope. Too many optimists here.
I have often said there are two kinds of mystics, the optimystics and the pessimystics. Now, pessimystics seem to be more in touch with "reality," but optimystics are happier and live longer for some reason. The pessimystics have been crying, "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!" The optimystics say, "No. It just looks that way because we are ascending." -- Swami Beyondananda (Steve Bhaerman)

(?) As for 'the great lizzards'... (Dinosaurs)

(!) [Ben] Are they related to the Great Wizzard?

(?) The stories of my people (Cherokee) claim that we moved south about 15,000 years ago because of an 'ice-age'... such was the ways of 'Turtle Island' (North America) in those times...

(!) [Ben] [blink] The Cherokees claim to have records going back that far? That would be a fascinating new discovery, given that, in general, the reach of recorded (in the roughest sense) human history is considered to be ~13,000 years, at which point (as far as I know) we had not yet spread to the Americas. Africa, however, is indeed supposed to have experienced an "aridity event" lasting from 20,000 to 11,000BC (cooler, drier climate with less rainforest and greater desert spread.)

(?) As for G-d... read and understand what Einstein was saying... Do you think the newly formed Nation of Israel would have even considered a 'non-believer' as their first leader?

(!) [Ben] Um, yeah, actually. Israel was never a theocracy - and Einstein had clearly, repeatedly, and publicly stated his absence of belief in a "personal God".
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/albert_einstein
(!) [Ben] Modern Israel, I should have said. Not that anyone from a couple of thousand years ago was asking Einstein anything, but still worth clarifying.
(!) [Rick] In fact, the founding fathers of that state in 1948 were overwhelmingly secular people (which is still true of its citizenry to this day), to the point where one of the few religious attendees, Moshe Shapira, tried and failed to get a reference to God into the Declaration of Independence draft, which was vetoed by the majority Labour Party attendees.
Eventually, as a sop to make everyone happy, the concluding sentence was amended to read "With trust in the rock of Israel ["tzur Yisrael" in the original Hebrew text]...."
Shapira was thus free to interpret it as a reference to "the Rock of Israel" (i.e., God), while nearly everyone else could read it as a poetic reference to the territory in question, and historical roots.

(?) Why do I use Slackware? To avoid all of the above and all of those Microsoft 'undocumented features' (bugs)... <heh>

Have a good day and a better tomorrow!

BTW Theory's are just that... theory's... based in air... not provable... Keep the 'truth' and pass me the 'facts'... <grin>

(!) [Ben] Erm... I think you've confused the popular and the actual meanings of "theory", Vince. As used by scientists, it means "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world", not "wild guess". However, scientists - in contrast to priests - are willing to learn new and better explanations for natural phenomena, and thus change their theories. This is what intelligent human beings do; this is how our state of knowledge continues to improve.

(?) Interesting mail on the wine-devel list

Mon, 13 Mar 2006

From Jimmy O'Regan

http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2006-March/045546.html

In short, a Microsoft employee mailed a Wine developer asking for help with a function (presumably under the assumption that the Wine developer had written MS's version). Normally, that'd be enough to make me start watching the skies for signs of porcine bombing raids, but the reason the MS guy wrote was to not recommend a customer upgrade to the latest version of Windows!

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Published in Issue 126 of Linux Gazette, May 2006

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