It's one of these days. Sometimes I feel like one of a small number of lemmings who have learned to turn right before they reach the edge of the cliff. Now we few lemmings are standing there, desperately trying to keep all the others from following their one-dimensional path to self-destruction. But is it really worth it?

Sometimes I feel that people have an inalienable right to their own stupidity. Users using Windows is natural selection at work. Let them go down. Don't try to help...

This isn't so much about Linux today as about the internet. Just yesterday I had one of those moments where I wondered how I ever got through life when there was no internet.

Last November I decided to take up learning Russian. I went for the traditional approach first, got myself a couple of books for self-teaching and took off. Only the books wouldn't get me very far, and they did not quite fit my style of learning, which is more geared towards immersion and using a language rather...

On a different forum I've been having quite a lively discussion on computer security. The most recent worm outbreak which, as of today, appears to have infected at least ten million computers, has triggered some comments by myself about the sorry state of Windows security.

I am comparing Windows to a house sold to you without any doors because this is oh so user-friendly. No fiddling with locks, just walk in and out whenever you feel like it.

And when, some time later,...

I spent this weekend working on three notebooks. One was a Windows XP notebook I had been given because it was impossible to work with anymore, due to malware infestation. Two others (used notebooks) I had mail-ordered for a friend and a colleague of mine, respectively, to set up with Linux.

I got the Windows one on Thursday. It would take almost seven minutes to boot until it would respond to any input, but then it would quickly freeze thanks to an infection with a piece of scareware...

I just noticed, it's thanksgiving day in the US (I'm German). So this is something of an unintentional thanksgiving post.

Every now and then something turns up when using Linux which I am really grateful for, even though it is a small thing. Of course we're all thankful for the system as such, its security, the price it comes at, the freedom attached with it, the great software available for it and so on, but sometimes there are just small things which crop up, things you never thought...