The Linux Launderette
Contents:
./configure humour
Stupidity
Debian changes its position on the GFDL
Delaveaux
Weather
Interesting mail on the wine-devel list
./configure humourMon, 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
StupidityWed, 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 GFDLTue, 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.
DelaveauxMon, 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]
WeatherWed, 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'...
[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 listMon, 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!
