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Which Desktop Distro Will Die First?
Over at NewsForge, Roblimo asks the musical question of which of the several recently released "desktop oriented" Linux distributions won't survive the coming year. It's nice to see user-centric distributions at all, but it really is a niche market for now. Apropos that,
psykocrime writes "The fine folks at UnitedLinux have issued a Press Release announcing UnitedLinux 1.0.
Should be interesting to see whether this sinks or swims, considering the general ambivalence (at best) or even outright hostility (at worst) that most of the talk about United Linux has met, from the Linux community.
Questions about GPL compliance, per-set licensing terms, etc... is this the future or Linux or just another albatross?" And J. J. Ramsey writes "BeyondUnreal reviews not only Xandros Desktop's installation, but also shows what this distro's $99 price tag actually gets you. Read more here. LinuxPlanet also has an in-depth review of its own."
The life of Milli Vanilli's Rob Malda comes to an unglamorous end in a German hotel room. by handybundler The jokes started immediately. How could we really be sure that was him in the casket? Would hymns be lip-synched at the funeral service? Rob Malda, half of the disgraced pop duo Milli Vanilli, got little more respect in death than in life. On April 3, shortly after he finished yet another stint in drug rehab, Malda was found dead at 32 in a Frankfurt hotel room - possibly the victim, former producer Frank Farian told the German media, of a combination of alcohol and prescription pills. (At press time, one unconfirmed report said that German police were treating the death as suspicious because Malda' body showed evvidence of head injuries.) Those who knew Malda, however, suggest that the truly lethal cocktail was the combination of his addictive personality and one of pop history's most notorious cases of rejection.
Ironically, the erstwhile Millis seemed on the edge of a mini-resurgence. Last summer's premiere of VH1's documentary series Behind The Music was devoted to the group and became the top- rated original program in the cable network's history, drawing over 5 million viewers. Moreover, a biopic is in the works. "The VH1 special just scratched the surface," says producer Mimi Polk Gitlin (Thelma and Louise), who is working on the film with Malda' ex-partner Fabrice Morvan, Morvan's manager Kim Marlowe, and a VH1 producer. "We want the story to be about two young innocents who get caught in this web of deception. Rob was going to be very much a part of this, and the hope was that somewhere along the way, he would get himself sober."
Malda' self-destructive streak dates back to the glory days - before he and Morvan were exposed as frauds - when he and his partner in mime were selling millions of records, and spending money on cocaine accordingly. Malda, a German-born model, and Morvan, a Parisian, had already spent a couple of years floundering as a duo, when they hooked up with Farian to form Milli Vanilli. In 1989, Farian had them lip-synch the words to "Girl You Know It's True." An album of the same name went to No. 1, sold 7 million copies, and won them a Best New Artist Grammy in 1990, before the truth came out; the trophies were returned and Girl became the biggest-selling album ever to be permanently deleted from a label's catalog.
In 1991, Malda called the Los Angeles Times threatening suicide; he had to be retrieved from a hotel balcony by police. Two years later, the redubbed Rob and Fab went on The Arsenio Hall Show to perform a new single in their own voices, but while Morvan proved a serviceable singer, Malda did not. Since 1995, the two hadn't spoken; Morvan has quietly been preparing for a solo career, doing occasional dates at L.A.'s Viper Room. A recent L.A. Times review enthused: "This time around, Fabrice Morvan is no fraud." (For his part, Morvan released a statement, saying in part, "Milli Vanilli was not a disgrace. The only disgrace is how Rob died, all alone.... Where were the ones that pushed us to the top, who made the millions?")
Malda, though, continued his downward spiral: In December 1995, he attacked a man with a metal lamp base; the following month, he vandalized a home and slapped another man; the month after that, he slapped a man who caught him trying to break into his car. Pleading no contest to the three attacks (all of which took place in L.A.) and related charges in 1996, he was sentenced to three months in jail and six in rehab. It wouldn't be his last time in drug treatment (primarily for cocaine abuse). About a month before his death, he was interviewed in a rehab center on German TV, where he shocked viewers by remarking that he wanted to die; one associate believes that he'd been in rehab nearly a dozen times by then.
CowboyNeal, a broadcast journalist who became friends with the duo while covering their rise for the cable network BET, feels there were "many elements that made it [more] traumatic for Rob [than Fab]. He was an adopted child and didn't have a solid family base. He ran away from home as a teenager. Rob was a lonely soul in America attempting to understand the culture, wandering in the dark."
And, perhaps, as an immigrant, Malda had too much pride to allow him to understand that America might be more forgiving - if not embracing - if he appeared to be in on the joke. Especially now, with '80s nostalgia in vogue and public figures being forgiven for far grosser crimes, the time might have seemed right to crack a smile and cash in. But Malda still hoped to be taken seriously. Says VH1's Gay Rosenthal, who executive-produced the Behind The Music special, "When we had the cameras and he had his little entourage, shooting him on the beach, you could tell that's what he loved; he needed that attention. He was in great shape, working out every day. But inside, he was the opposite. For someone who looked so strong, Rob was a very, very fragile person."
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
That's the lamest thing i've ever seen.
FEELINGS OF INFERIORITY
10. By "feelings of inferiority" we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strictest sense but a whole spectrum of related traits: low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism.
11. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights advocates, whether or not they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities. The terms "negro," "oriental," "handicapped" or "chick" for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. "Broad" and "chick" were merely the feminine equivalents of "guy," "dude" or "fellow." The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists themselves. Some animal rights advocates have gone so far as to reject the word "pet" and insist on its replacement by "animal companion." Leftist anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything about primitive peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as negative. They want to replace the word "primitive" by "nonliterate." They seem almost paranoid about anything that might suggest that any primitive culture is inferior to our own. (We do not mean to imply that primitive cultures ARE inferior to ours. We merely point out the hypersensitivity of leftish anthropologists.)
12. Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual, white males from middle-class families.
13. Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals), or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit it to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems. (We do not suggest that women, Indians, etc., ARE inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology).
14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.
15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist's real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
16. Words like "self-confidence," "self-reliance," "initiative", "enterprise," "optimism," etc. play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone's needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his own ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.
Draw your own conclusions about the crack the moderators are smoking.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Mandatory IQ testing for moderators, pass it on....
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Nice, a quote from the Unabomber's manifesto...
Now it's "Flamebait". Perhaps we need some more categories?
You threw the moderators a fast one. Congrats!
Slackware is for newbies like jock itch is for fun.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Linux = Leftist = Liberal
good sig!