What can I say? It has been a crazy couple of weeks. Not just for me, but for the world in general. Well, not in general, but certainly on some fronts on which I find fascinating and, not surprisingly, I have an opinion. First off, if you wander off into the wilds of planet *buntu, you may notice an increasingly Lucid Lynx prowling around. Be warned, however, that this Lynx is an Alpha and unless you’re the sort of person who likes to mess with Alphas, you might want to steer clear until this Lynx turns into a beta. As a side note, you should read Christopher Moore’s "A Dirty Job" where he provides us with a wonderfully amusing, and mostly true, description of a Beta Male.

And yes, I’m just the sort of person who likes to mess with Alphas, so I downloaded the Kubuntu and Ubuntu versions, for the sheer unparalleled joy of seeing what’s new under the hood. The big news is no more HAL, which is just as well since HAL was an embarrassing choice for acronym given that it never had a chance of living up to Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL 9000. HAL (that would be Hardware Abstraction Layer) was certainly insane, but it became an integral part of the system, providing among other things, instant device recognition so that when you plug in your USB stick, it was magically available on your graphical desktop. DeviceKit will, according to the Ubuntu folk, make "Ubuntu faster to boot and faster to resume from suspend." Sure, but will it still support my wireless card? Remember what I said about Alphas.

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