Please copy this as your status if you...

Dear friends,
So you didn't have a laptop in your childhood. That was not because of how your parents raised you, but because it was not at all useful for you to have that prohibitively costly toy then, which can bring to a kid today the world's storehouse of knowledge, and a lot more. 

The iPod wasn't invented, Blackberry is not meant for children to play with, some of you probably did have a Nintendo, and just didn't know it, and the Xboxes and PS3s were yet to be brought out in their current form. 
 
And really, Wi-fi? What would you be doing with a Wifi again, if there was no internet backbone to connect it to?

You have possibly lost out on a lot more than you purportedly gained because you had a Contra instead of a Commodore, an Atari, an Apple II, or the likes back then.

I had a beautiful childhood too, not because I didn't have a lappie, a PS3 or whatever, but because of all the great things I did have, among them great family and friends.

It is good to appreciate what you have, but that does not entail begrudging others their benefits or differences.

Sharing lame statuses in an attempt to appear what ever you are trying to appear as, does not change the lameness of the initial premise.




GROW UP!

Yours sincerely,

Koushik Kumar Nundy.

P.S. This is in direct response to a facebook status meme about how beautiful some of my peers' childhoods were, and how cool they are courtesy their non-involvement in technical and democratic exercises in their tiny tot times. However it can be generalised to cover any such "Please copy this as your status if you.." incidents, because,

1. FB asks for what's on YOUR mind, G+ asks for what's NEW,... please, this is neither particularly in your mind, nor is it too new!
2. Twitter asks what's happening, if you post such status forwards, your childishness, if not your childhood is still happening.
3. If copying statuses would cure cancer and rid us of terrorism, corruption and a thousand other maladies, oncologists, radiologists, soldiers, political leaders would have all become "Social Media Experts" instead.
4. People who are on such platforms to keep in touch with old friends or develop bonds with new ones, are truly, madly, deeply getting irritated.
5. When people start getting tired of such stuff, they will write even more tiring blogposts as this.
6. Some people will get an irrepressible urge to post this as their status "Please copy this as your status if you don't like "Please copy this as your status ..." statuses."

openSUSE 11.4 - A new life

As many of you know, and the rest, well they'll know by the end of this sentence, openSUSE 11.4 released yesterday, the 10th of March, 2011. It'll be the seventh straight release I use, and the 4th release since I became associated with the Project.

To download visit : http://software.opensuse.org/

Unfortunately, my old machine is still running on 11.3, and the all new Vostro I got today has, wait for it, Windows Vista, both of which I plan to amend tomorrow. Sadly, that was not possible today because seeding the ISO was, I felt, more important than selfishly enjoying Geeko glory. So, no donut, oh sorry, screenshot for you.

The journey to openSUSE 11.4 has been anything but smooth. [1] says well why.
But I'd like to add to that.

The initial rumours about Novell, openSUSE's primary being up for sale did not go down well with the community, as we have seen the last major sale of a Free Software leaning company, Stanford University Networks, as very unfavourable to the FOSS community, with important jobs axed, opensolaris dead, and Openoffice.org left to potentially rot, with Libreoffice being a bold step by the people who care, to infuse life into the best office suite in the world.

The sale to Attachmate that eventually followed, did not help cool matters, due to the following,
1. No one had ever heard of it.
2. The sale of those patents to a shady conglomerate!

However, Attachmate seems to be serious enough about the feasibility of SUSE to run it as a separate division. And THIS is what they have to say about openSUSE. May be lip service, or may not be.

Now to the many firsts. openSUSE 11.4 is the first major distribution release to have stable LibreOffice, has Firefox 4, GNOME 3 preview(optional), KDE 4.6 and loads of other new stuff like Scribus 1.4, KOffice 2.3.1, etc. Also new is the support for Tumbleweed, a rolling release.
A more detailed Product Highlights is available.

But these are not the only important changes. Many new faces in every team, marketing collaboration days, a great openSUSE Conference, attempts at clearly defined strategies and trademark guidelines, all this has worked to largely improve the cohesive co-operation that is the openSUSE project.

We have had our share of growing pains, with membership issues and policy being cause for heated debate. Stability has always been the strength of the openSUSE distribution. The openSUSE community has done well to learn that it has to show the same stability in every step, not just in the lines of code. We have come out of it, not just better, but cleverer. We are a community that has a worldwide spread, contributors and users alike. In our do-o-cracy, we are not judged by our race, sex, or politics, but by our actions. A great example would be our team of 125 Ambassadors, who come from a whooping 47 countries. Another new initiative to overcome the gender divide otherwise stark in FOSS is the Women of openSUSE Project.

We have been lucky to have partners like OMG!SUSE! at our side.

With a clearer sense of identity and purpose, we hope to march from strength to strength, so that we can continue to bring to you, openSUSE, all of it!
(Now, now I can't promise what the next release number will be, so hang on for the ride!)

Join us in making the world Greener (most puns intended)! http://www.opensuse.org

As we heard in Batman Begins, "It's not who you are underneath - it's what you do that defines you."