WTF is a "super taster"?

L. Spiro is one, weren't you following the thread !?

WTF is a "super taster"?

I don’t expect many to know the term as I only learned it this year.
Supertaster.
Since a child I always wondered why no one else reported an intense burning when drinking Coca-Cola or Pepsi.

Of course there's "nice" beer. There's also terrible beer and outstanding beer. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I didn’t say it doesn’t exist, I said I don’t think it exists.
As for me, all alcohol is disgusting (to the point that just the smell of some can make me throw up), so the only purpose for me to consume some is for the buzz, in which case I am better off taking stronger drinks and quickly diluting the taste with both a liquid and solid chaser (without which I will definitely throw up).

And *that* photo was your representation of Japanese scenery? Christ, I was there for all of two weeks and I say better scenery than that. I see better scenery than that driving to work in NZ.

Yeah, not what I would have picked either.

The point was that I had to post a picture I had actually taken. Of course I could have just taken something from online, but the point is to actually be there and take the photo myself. That is the point in visiting a place right? We are talking about going to Munich. Taking a random online photo to represent Japanese scenery doesn’t make much sense, even if it better represents what Japan has.

And of course (pronounced as Cenk Uygur’s, “Of cooouurse”) I’ve seen better, even just 2 weeks ago when we filmed a movie at a location in the mountains surrounding Mt. Fuji.
I just don’t take pictures because I am not really into that kind of scenery, hence I don’t really have the best to share. My type of “scenery” is modernized and tall buildings/structures, of which I have plenty of photos.


L. Spiro

Sorry to nitpick L.Spiro, but visiting a place for the sake of taking pictures?

Unless you are a photographer, that is so wrong. (Yet, so many people seem to do that).

It's interesting how you picked those cities, they seem to be random. Why those cities? London and Paris are not even cities of tall modernized buildings. You could have picked St.Petersburg or Budapest too.

Sorry to nitpick L.Spiro, but visiting a place for the sake of taking pictures?

I did not say I would ever do that.

Why those cities? London and Paris are not even cities of tall modernized buildings. You could have picked St.Petersburg or Budapest too.

You do realize you are asking why you like the kind of girls you like, right?

At least with cities I can recognize desirable features more easily and give a closer description of what attracts me, but there are always going to be outliers.

But I probably have a clue about London and Paris: Familiarity in a positive way. A lot of good movies took place there and they aren’t “non-modern” enough to ruin the appeal (lots of good movies took place in Africa but not enough to overcome its lack of modernization). Plus I have lived in France and it is more familiar for that.

And of course they both have famous sights to see. They may not be super-modern and tall buildings, but they are an accumulation of enough other things, specifically things that bring back good memories from childhood.

L. Spiro

London, Paris and Munich are all very similar cities.

Munich is one of the cultural centers (and a formal capital city) of Europe, there are plenty of famous sights to see (for example, Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein castles are a short trip out of the city).

I'm a bit shocked at how negative and ignorant attitude this community has towards linux, I would have expected so much more from people that are in good terms with computers.

The article does also give worse impression of linux than it really is and it's not all just it being outdated ugly GUIs. The popular distributions like Ubuntu are truly amazing alternative to trying to keep up with Windows and I wish more people would look into it.

This is not a parade example of a well-done migration, not because it wasn't done well but because it took so long. The Bundestag did the same thing (NT4 --> Linux) some 7 or 8 years ago, in under 2 years. In comparison, it took Munich (which has what, maybe 1/4 as many computers?) close to 10 years.

It is funny how people are trying to show how they're not saving money, however. Which is exactly what Hofmann predicted, too. Saving cost is a nice byproduct, but was never the driving factor, as he clearly points out. What they wanted was to get away from vendor lock-in.

The "custom Ubuntu build" they use seems to be nothing spectacular. From the screenshot that is on Wikipedia and that Techrepublic stole for their article, it looks much more like SuSE, although on the project's site it clearly says Ubuntu+FAI, KDE, OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, plus their custom stuff (the project page is quite huge, I won't read through all of it). Maybe the screenshot was only an early prototype, or is alltogether fake, who knows.

My guess is they use a pretty much standard install with the previously named packages, plus a custom desktop wallpaper, and 2-3 custom tools for accessing databases such as the population register (unless these have a web interface). It really doesn't take a lot of "custom".

OK, so they do not have a compositing desktop manager, and they don't have Windows Store, nor Skydrive, nor Bing Desktop. Who cares for that in a citizens' office or in a registry office. What they need is being able to access a custom database and print out some documents.

2-3 custom tools and a text processor with a custom letter head (it seems they even made their letter heads publicly available, the package is named WollMux) will do.

Most clerks don't even know how to use a text processor properly, so having much more than that is really superfluous.

But what they do have is a system that works, and a system that has no explicitly built-in security holes (like Windows) and that can be maintained relatively easily and automatically, without having to pay a license fee again and without needing to buy bigger hardware every 2 years to keep up with a new Windows version's demands.

All in all, not bad if you ask me.

How safe is Linux as an Open Source OS system?

It depends on what crap you install on it, the OS itself is very stable and secure as long as you don't install any Adobe or Oracle products on it (pretty much the same as with Windows)

I must STRONGLY disagree with that. Linux very difficult to get working properly due to it's many issues {LINK TO KNOWN ISSUES & BUGS} and I personally have had nothing but headaches when attempting to develop for that platform.

If you use a smaller distro however you might not get the patches as quickly as you would with a big commercial distro and that can greatly cripple your security

As a former Linux user I can say that, that depends on the distro. Smaller distros by smaller teams indeed don't release patches early. However as distros tend to be based each one to another a user is "free" to make the patch by himself. That being said you are not locked in at all as others have already stated.

Also if security is someone's main concern you can just pick up a distro that is known to be secure, and as bug free as it can be. The amount of choices in the world of linux is enormous.

I must STRONGLY disagree with that. Linux very difficult to get working properly due to it's many issues {LINK TO KNOWN ISSUES & BUGS} and I personally have had nothing but headaches when attempting to develop for that platform.

Well that's not true. Linux does have its issues which makes it unusable as a Windows replacement (most notably bad support for graphics drivers, though this is improving, and also notably that it isn't Windows, i.e. the desktop manager looks and feels different to what people are used to). However, getting it to work is not an issue.

Slackware was a nuisance (straightforward, but a nuisance, unpacking tar archives by hand from ~20 floppy disks) to get working in the 1990s and Gentoo is a real bitch even nowadays -- but if you aren't a geek who doesn't care about what time it takes to fiddle with setup, simply don't use such a distro.

If you use a mainstream "customer friendly" version of Linux, such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora/RedHat, or SuSE, you insert the install medium, tell the partitioner tool what partitions to make and format, make some easy high-level choices (and optionally detailled packages), and you have a fully working system in about 10 minutes. No shit.

Then you fire up the package manager and tell it to install the rest of packages that you want to use. Another 5-60 minutes later (depending on how much crap you download/install) you have a working system with everything installed that you need to do your work.

But more importantly, you have a freshly installed system with secure default settings. This is much different from Windows. A well-configured Windows system can be just as secure as a Linux system. But the Linux system needs to be badly configured to be insecure, Windows defaults to being insecure.