Fixing the Nautilus Garbage bin

I’ve recently bought a new 500GB hard drive and installed it on my home machine which is currently running Ubuntu 7.10, once installed, I’ve setup the new hard drive to be mounted under “/usr/local”, made a directory in there for my day-to-day regular user, and moved key large folders, such as my “incoming” folder, from my home directory to the new drive, placing symlinks in the home directory instead.

So far so good, I’ve been enjoying my new drive space without having to change my habits and place files in new locations, but this morning I encountered a weird problem: attempting to move a file in Nautilus, the Gnome file manager, from my “incoming” folder to the Garbage bin, yielded the following friendly but not very helpful error message:

Linux is about to take over the low end of PCs?

While I’d like to believe SJN here (been a Linux user for a while now…) I’m a bit skeptical when considering the logic and assumptions behind SJN’s claims:
As his claims go, he argues that low-end cannot currently run Windows, therefore manufacturers deliver them with Linux thereby providing additional cost savings, he also notes that Microsoft can reduce the price of Windows to stay competitive, however, he claims, it would still not be enough of a total price reduction because of the costs of the hardware needed.
This is where I have a problem with his claims, as Moore’s law projects, the low-cost PCs will be able to run Windows soon enough, so Linux advantage here can only be temporary rather then long-term.
In his cost analysis SJN show a case where Linux offers a neat 50% of cost savings, however, I must ask, if by coupling cost-reduced Windows with slightly more powerful, yet cost-effective PCs, Microsoft is able to provide an offer that is just 20% more expensive, won’t the assumed familiarity benefit of Windows be enough to justify the additional costs for most businesses?

VM Cloning script published

Trying to kickstart my “Sources” section, I just published a very simple script for cloning VirtualBox virtual machines, check it out.

Why watch Claymore

If you take a look at my “My Stats” section, you’ll note that I mention Claymore as the next Anime I’m going to watch, it is quite apparent that this isn’t quite the usual kind of Anime I prefer watching, for once, on the face of it, its completely Shounen, full of 15 year-old testosterone and slim girls with huge-ass (Berserk-style) swords killing Yoma, which are nowhere as colorful as even the ones in Inuyasha.

And indeed, when I gave it my customary 3-episode evaluation watch, I couldn’t find many reasons to keep on watching, for once, I find the crybaby character of Raki (Lucky?) quite annoying.

Still, I kept on watching, I don’t know what was it that compelled me to, maybe it was the cliffhanger at the end of the 3rd episode, or Clair’s character design (I do seem to have a weakness for short haired Anime characters), or maybe there was something to the interaction between Clair and Raki after all.

Winleeching, verb.

The should be a verb for the act of borrowing a friend’s computer so you can use his copy of Windows to perform a pesky task such as removing a piece of useless software that can only be done with Windows, possibly damaging his computer in the process.

As you might guess I’m annoyed with  the existence of U3 on my shiny new 4.0GB SanDisk Cruzer Titanium, but I’m not gonna repeat what have been said by many all over the web.

After doing some extensive googlin, I could only find the following 2 pages that say something useful rather then repeating the “run the uninstaller on XP” mantra:

• U3 information (mainly for Linux)
• Hacking U3 Smart USB Drives
  

Unfortunately no one seem to have cracked the problem of removing U3 without Windows yet, I guess I have to go winleeching…

Battlestar Galactica probably isn’t for me

I gave that series my customary “1st and 2nd episode decision making watch”, and since its usually hard for me to decide negatively, I even gave it the “mercy 3rd episode watch”, but it the end the conclusion was unavoidable, in my view it is only worthy of it initials, B.S. Galactica…

I really can’t see a reason to spend more then 40 hours of my life (4 seasons! why can’t the Americans and Brits keep their series short?!) on that series, the story is technophobic and implausible, the characters and stereotypical and uninteresting, and the scenery, well, white-boards on an FTL spaceship?!? and why oh why do they cut off the corners of all their paper?

Giant-Robot Anime characters on BoingBoing

Well, not really, but there is no way in hell I won’t link to this, and while Cory gets it wrong, few commentators to the post bother mentioning that this just screams Rei Ayanami to anyone whose ever been into Anime.

But I must admit that looking at the image on Cory’s post, it just doesn’t convey the same sense of silent strength the Rei’s character does, indeed it seems to suggest at some woman degrading fetish.

Copyright law in Israel

I’ve been an avid reader and listener of both Cory Doctorow and The Command Line and hence I’ve heard a great deal of discussion about copyright issues and had become concerned about those issues myself, hence I began to wonder what was going on with regard to those issue here in my own little pond of Israel, all I had was a vague notion that here the copyright law was a little less restrictive then the US DMCA.

This is why I was both surprised and please to hear The Command Line mentioning Israel in his last show and specifically noting that a new copyright law had been passed recently.

Wishing to learn more about this I did some searching and found this, overall it seems to be good news, there is no (in my view, stupid) anti-circumvention legislation, and there was an emphasis put on civil and consumer rights.