It's this simple: All the current instant-on solutions involve packing the computer with a flash memory chip, one that contains a downsized operating system. Guess what operating system? Dell and SplashTop both use Linux. For Microsoft, bundling Linux into a Windows computer is still unthinkable. Okay, they can think about it, but the survey makes sense. Microsoft will either need to accept Linux as part of the product, or much more likely spin off yet another mini-Windows, as the company did for PC games and cell phones. Can you see Steve Ballmer's face? I'd rather be the senior vice president who tells him we can all relax about Instant On — nobody wants it.

That's when you also notice that the whole US voting system is apparently expressly designed to be polarizing (winner-take-all electoral system etc). To somebody from Finland, that looks like a rather obvious and fundamental design flaw. In Finland, government is quite commonly a quilt-work of different parties, and the "rainbow coalition" of many many parties working together was the norm for a long time. And it seems to result in much more civilized political behaviour.

Of course, in the US there are also much wider social, educational, religious and economic differences between people, and issues range all over the map. Which then means that it's hard to bring up any nuances in politics, since either people won't care about them (not relevant for that group), or they simply won't understand them (what does "foreign policy" matter to somebody who has likely never been outside the US unless you count things like day-trips to Tijuana?).

So you couple a polarizing voting system with a campaign that has to make simplified black-and-white statements, and what do you get?

Ugly, is what you get.

(Photo by tobo)

Most security scare stories are about potential problems. This was a real, successful break-in at the open source movement's most high-profile brand. So here's the big question: Why did it take Red Hat a week to acknowledge the problem? Because I can imagine the reaction if Microsoft did that.

(Photo by Eric Skiff)

Eygptian civil engineer Mamdouh Hamza offered to pay a hired killer $100,000 to assassinate an Egyptian government minister and three other government officials. Hamza called his plan "the final solution." The hired killer — actually an undercover British police officer — arrested Hamza, who went to trial in 2005.

In 2006, prosecutors charged Chinese national and Canadian citizen Xiaodong Sheldon Meng with 36 felonies, including economic espionage to benefit a foreign government. Meng's crime? Stealing code his former employer, Silicon Valley-based Quantum3D uses in fighter-pilot training software. A judge sentenced Meng to 24 months earlier this summer.

In 2007, Lan Lee, 42, of Palo Alto, and Yuefei Ge, 34, a Chinese national living in San Jose also faced charges of economic espionage after prosecutors accused the pair of stealing computer chips from Mountain View-based NetLogic Microsystems with plans on selling them to the Chinese government. Their indictment alleges the pair formed a company, Sico Microsystems, in order to create new chips based on stolen designs.

In May 1995, Silicon Valley engineer Bill Gaede rushed into a New York Times office and told a reporter: "I'm a spy, and I think they're going to kill me, so I want you to know what has happened." Gaede claimed he'd stolen computer chip designs from Intel and tried to sell them to Cuba, China and Iran before the CIA got onto his case and began hunting him down. The Times reporter didn't believe it at first, but it all turned out to be true. Gaede began serving a 33-month sentence in July 1996.

Richard Wade Farley goes by three names in the newspapers — never a good sign. In 1988, Farley was fired from Sunnyvale-based ESL, accused of sexual harrassment. Not long after, he returned with a shotgun. Seven of his former coworkers died. He barricaded himself in the office for six hours before police dragged him out.

In a way that reminded some of Farley's rampage, recently fired NEC Electronics employee Kenneth M. McMurray came back to his old office and forced Maria Elizabeth Lualhati, his ex-girlfriend and an associate systems programmer, into a lab where he shot her and then himself.

Aptix founder and ex-CEO Amr Mohsen faced charges of perjury, mail fraud, and obstruction of justice after prosecutors said he forged engineering notebooks in a failed attempt to sue a rival for patent infringement. When that case started to go against Mohsen, he allegedly told another inmate he wanted the judge to "disappear." The plan failed. Mohsen was sentenced to 17 years on January 5, 2007. According to AmrMohsen.com, "Amr and the family believe the 17-year punishment to be excessive."

Legendary Linux developer Hans Reiser, a hero to the open-source community, murdered his wife, Nina. He swore to his innocence almost up to the very end — until a judge agreed to reduce his sentence if he led police to her body. He eventually did. The reaction from Reiser's most ardent defenders: "Whoops."

(Photo by AP)

Scott, Scott, Scott: Negroponte has never been in the business of doing anything. His core competency is talking. The sooner you learn this, the happier you'll be at One Laptop Per Child. Negroponte's goals with One Laptop Per Child are admirable and visionary. As with many visionaries, his contact with reality is infrequent and tenuous. The best way to get OLPC's hardware and software built: Send Negroponte on another worldwide goodwill tour, keeping him as far from the labs as possible.

If you're truly looking to save your cash, Dell's entry-level Windows model is a third cheaper than the Penguinmobile — $499 versus $774. Its Windows Vista Basic is hardly the "stripped-down" operating system Times writer Larry Magid claims — see this checklist. It'll run iTunes. It'll play DVDs without choking, unlike Magid's Ubuntu test unit. Spring for the cheaper laptop and your savings will more than cover an upgrade to Vista Home Premium ($30), a gigabyte of RAM ($50), a legal copy of Office 2007 ($149), and a double cappuccino for me as a reward for saving you from this sort of alterna-chic foolishness.

While Microsoft has been known to try just about every tactic in the book to undermine the competition, this paranoid theory mischaracterizes the open source community's beloved Mono. True, Mono, in theory, weakens Windows. But only in theory. In practice, Mono is not a threat to Microsoft — rather, it's spread the popularity of .Net far beyond Microsoft's Windows-developer base, and thereby tied the open-source developers who use it to Microsoft's software-development roadmap.

No, rather than a devious and elaborate ploy concocted in Microsoft's legal department, the right way to see Microsoft's Shared Source program is as a feeble attempt to mask its inability to move its business to the open-source model, as rivals IBM, Sun, Novell, Adobe, and Apple have done to varying extents. Sure, Microsoft could start suing developers — with the result, of course, that they'd simply drop .Net and move to other development tools untouched by Microsoft's hands. (Photo by BotheredByBees)

This ad is completely unoriginal. Linux Journal ran an almost identical ad seven years ago, in its November 2000 issue. And the 1.0 version stirred up just as much controversy — so much that the magazine apologized for and promised to pull from any future editions of the magazine. Promises, promises.

Obviously QSol ran the ad to titillate and shock, and get talked about — and from that perspective, the company has succeeded. But then there's the quality of the ad itself. Leave aside the broken promises, and the ad's tiresome execution. Why would you want to buy servers from a company that clearly hasn't had a new idea in seven years?

–Video by Sarah Meyers

Perl is for idiots: Programming language stereotypes
Coders argue about languages like gearheads argue about car brands. Think of Perl and C++ like Ford and Chevy. Some characterizations gleaned from the Joel on Software forum and the helpful, exhaustive list, Shooting yourself in the foot in various programming languages:

• C++: "A good way to turn a 1-month project into a 12-month project;" "masochist language."
• Lisp: Ugly, old, and full of parentheses.
• Ruby on Rails: For webheads who think it's God's gift to programming. (See this RoR joke.)
• Visual Basic: Cute to play with if you're not a programmer
• Java: Clogs up a computer's memory (remember those old Yahoo Java games that would break your browser?)

Unix is funny, and not just for ball jokes
Almost 90% of the world runs Windows, but the geeks who run the world often wrangle with hardier operating systems. Here's a breakdown:

• Windows: Windows jokes center around the OS's bloated size, proprietary nature, and unfixable errors.
• OS X: Apple's latest OS doesn't elicit many jokes, now that the Mac is no longer a toy.
• Unix: The preferred OS for running servers and shared workstations. Jokes center around puns using Unix commands and clueless users.
• Linux: The open-source OS used in all sorts of devices, with variants that do a decent job running a PC. Linux can arguably do everything (except games, movies, and anything "fun"), so Linux jokes are about how much Windows blows.

Confederacy of dunces: The human characters

• The programmer: As Valleywag's Paul Boutin explained, geek humor follows logic because that's how the geek mind (or a computer, and isn't that the same?) works. The most-spotted species of logical geek is the programmer. Thus logic-based jokes like: "How do you trap a programmer in the shower? Give him shampoo that says 'lather, rinse, repeat.'"
• The project manager: Doesn't do anything but earns more than the programmers. Not necessarily dumb, but not helpful. Best joke: the monkey joke.
• The sysadmin: The guy who runs UNIX. Picture Comic Book Guy reigning over his domain, and check out these variants.
• The Microsoft, Intel, and Sun programmers: See here.

Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Blogebrity, and Look Shiny. The only language he writes is English.

Rumors of the Oracle's Linux have been swirling all over the Geek Wire for almost a year. O'Reilly's OS Dir has already called the Ubuntu the winner, and Red Hat Linux the loser.

[OS Dir]
[ZD Net]
[CBR Online]

Well, what illustrates Ubuntu? A hug? An image of many hands supporting one person? How about this?

Yep, it's a thong emblazoned with the logo of Ubuntu, a form of the open-source Linux operating system, added to some Cafepress store as an afterthought. Chances are no one ever bought this made-to-order thong, so it technically doesn't exist, but now it's in the BBC News. Fantastic.

All you need is ubuntu [BBC News]

LinuxWorld, like a long impacted colon, is about to pass. Your bombastic ConFonz has seen many LinuxWorlds come and go, and none have had that breathy fresh air feeling that accompanies a clean colon. Until this year.

Picture the far corner of the show floor. The Slashdot lounge is filled with net-hungry crotch warriors, desperate for the only hardwired connections in the building. The airwaves here benefit only from Socialtext, the oh-my-god-they're-still-around company behind the first Bar Camp's venue. But thanks to the dozens of other networks, combined with the Nokia 770s and a handful of Ethereal enthusiasts, the wireless was unusable.

Let's do the math, here. (12 channels - 3 notused)/35 networks = Shitz!Bonerz!

Is the ConFonz off base in his rememberance of 802.11 arithmetic? To quote the Conference Fonzie's favorite show:

I fear the signals from the satelites may be crossing and interfering, canceling each other out. I would like to buy another cell phone.

And, a further nugget of wireless truth: Any access point labeled "Free Public Wireless" is a trap, sure to own yer Linux-box.

Despite the terror on the airwaves, the calm undertones of a confident floor-population was palpable. These people know they're on the winning team. They're confident. They're cocksure. But they're not brainwashed like Mac dorks.

These zealots have stopped saying that Linux will beat Windows. They've stopped envisioning a world of only penguins. Or at least, that's what they say. Ask a punk if he's really a punk and he'll blush. Ask a poseur if he's a punk and he'll shout "DAMN STRAIGHT!"

And these decidedly sweatier, uglier punks are looking for some hot press girl lovin'.

Picture that red dress and the high platform shoes. That sexy-as-hell stomping authority of the fresh-meat young pressling, pushing through the crowd, tottering against the weight of a half-her-size laptop bag. Krad koder kidz kome kqwik. She's the nerd-enthusiast. Smiling at the geeky kids and kissing the alpha-nerds behind the gym.

The cool kids (read: Mormons) are here, of course, hawking Geckos and light-up blue Moto keychains. But the once A/V/chess/computer geeks are the prime draw, and the main audience. They salivate over the new nerd girls, and they congregate in the corner by the Slashdot Lounge.

Deep within this tangled web of donated booth-space and overstuffed Slashdot/SourceForge beanbag chairs was the meaty nutpulp-center of the show: The Great Wooly Debianoid. Their time is spent almost exclusively in the service of the Gnu Debian Gnu Linux Gnu operating system. Not to be confused with the equally fearsome Speckled Gentootoo Beast, the Great Wooly Debianoid is readily identifiable by his oblique fatness and inscrutible sassy nature.

Fortunately for the female nerd-enthusiasts (not to be confused with the female-nerd-enthusiast) manning the EFF booth, they were protected from direct sight of the Great Wooly Debianei (note the plural) for most of the show by CmdrTaco and an army of t-shirt and headphone seekers answering trivia questions.

Here is the real LinuxWorld. These are the people that have come here to see and learn. Everyone else is here for work, and that work isn't really accomplishing much. Are they trying to sell things to these bearded goobers? Are they hoping to introduce Linux to these dottering old fools and little old ladies? Are they trying to show off the size of their kernels in the bathrooom?

And what are all these old people doing here, anyway? There's one or two in every aisle, looking around, completely mystified. Are these the conference lampreys of days gone-by? A visage of the ConFonz in his winter years? The species does exist in New York, but it's far more manipulative and calculated there: Old women register ahead of time as press, then arrive just in time for food and drinks.

But here in San Francisco, LinuxWorld is free to anyone who had the wherewithall to register before Sunday. And since old people have nothing to do, the ConFonzie feels that the species is on this coast as well. It's simply a more docile breed.

And docile is a great way to categorize this year's conference. Does this show even need to exist anymore? The kernel contributors wouldn't be caught dead here. This is the 50th LinuxWorld of the year, afterall. The companies that want server equipment aren't coming here to find out about the latest developments in processor boards. Folks looking for network equipment aren't here to see nifty new switches, either. Wide-eyed homeless children without the money for a copy of Windows to install on their third-hand Compaq laptops couldn't register ahead of time, and were thus deprived of Ubuntu CD's. And anyone coming here to see the newest handheld devices and phones would have left feeling like a raped little orphan.

So why pay any money for a fucking booth? Maybe it's the small businesses. Maybe it's the prospect of hiring smart young programmers who've not yet felt the bitter sting of a cubicle's cold steel. Or maybe it was to laugh out loud at Rapleaf.com's job postings in the bathroom stalls.

Do note that the Conference Fonzerelli is eternally grateful to the aforementioned Rapleaf. Without that flyer (pledging a $5000 bounty for anyone who can sucker a friend into applying for an 80-hour-a-week job) your humble narrator would have suffered a most unfortunate, coffee-induced fecal nightmare at the hands of a complicated and empty TP dispenser. Lo, in the heat of the moment, it looked very much like a flyer for something called Rapeleaf.com.

And lo, the Fonzie does wash his hands when he's done.

Photo from Tux Humor [Acota.de]

Penguins, penguins everywhere. LinuxWorld is here, and if you're press and have a fake ID, you too can steal a Nokia 770 tablet. Not that you'd really want one. They're cheap, they're slow, and they're sure as fuck not stable. But Nokia's insisting on lending these out to the press, and the press is still trying to convince Nokia to let them keep the devices.

Even the Slashdot crew has the little tablets stuffed into their bulging pockets. Though, frankly, CmdrTaco is neither witty nor humble, much like the little device he carries.

Of all the exhibits on the show floor, none is as polarizing as Dice.com. This booth, clad in aging hotties and a tap of Bud Light, has been torturing attendees by demanding they search for better employment, right in front of their bosses. Plus, the poor bastard stuck in the big fuzzy dice costume is making an ass of him or her self just outside the entryway to the floor. But, hey, free beer!

The schwag is certainly intriguing, though SAP did trot out the same flotation devices they gave out last year. Rather than spend any money, they just piggy-backed on IBM's booth this year. Don't these two compete?

Meanwhile, Red Hat is just too cool for the show floor. Instead, they've set themselves up at the St. Regis across the street, where even the janitors have secret-service style earpieces. Tonight is their big party, as is everyone else's. Fortunately for the ConFonz, the W Hotel is playing host to all of this year's parties, a sure-fire way to disappoint folks that are used to the swanky Los Angeles and New York versions of this hip hotel. What will they all think when they discover that the SF version smells like vomit and employs scum-bag waiters too ignorant to understand when they're being bribed for faster service?

Photo: Drunk Penguin Shotglass [Hacker Stickers]

Windows Vista: Now due in 2007. Honest.
OS X: Version 10.4.6 should come out soon, making Mac's OS a little better for gaming. Granted, the only Mac games out are World of Warcraft, Age of Empires and Photoshop.
Linux: Popular Linux-based OS Ubuntu is just a touch behind schedule, says pro-Linux site Linux-Watch. But in the meantime, shouldn't you be coding your own?
Solaris: OS's? You don't need no stinkin' OS's. Come play on Sun's grid.