I read in Barrapunto (Spanish version of Slashdot) that a new supercomputer is going to be deployed at Santiago de Compostela, which will allegedly surpass MareNostrum as the fastest computer in Spain.
What I want to remark is that (of course, hardly surprisingly) it will run on Linux (as do over the 74% of the supercomputers in the World Top 500 list. The rest run on UNIX, BSD, and even MacOS. NONE runs, or better “crawls”, on Windows), and will use Free Software to operate.
UPDATE: I’ve had no less than two (yeah, 2!!) visits from non-Spanish speakers who had looked in Google for the correct pronunciation of Xabi Alonso’s name (he playing in the Liverpool), and how it differs from Catalan “Xavi” (Barcelona FC player) so here it goes:
Xabi (Basque): very close to shabby ()
Xavi (Catalan): very close to chubby ()
Original post:
Este post va en castellano, porque dudo que interese a ningún no-hispanoparlante.
Hoy en las noticias deportivas de T5 he oido, por enésima vez, referirse al jugador del Barça Xavi, llamándolo Chavi. Como buen Donostiarra, cuando Xabi Alonso jugaba en la Real y le llamaban CHabi Alonso me rechinaban los oidos. Yo pensaba “Joder, que este no es catalán, que se dice Xabi“.
Pero hete aquà que me he enterado (igual estoy en un error, y si es asÃ, corregidme) que TAMPOCO en catalán se dice Chavi. Sólo XE y XI se leen CHE y CHI. XA, XO y XU se leen como en castellano o euskera (aproximandamente). O sea, que el jugador del Barça se llama XAVI, no CHAVI.
CORRECCIÓN: Parece ser que XA, XO y XU también se pronuncian CH, al menos en algunos (¿todos?) de los diferentes dialectos del idioma catalán. Yo estaba, por tanto, equivocado.
Just as in the USA they have the RIAA, here we have the SGAE, which “takes care” of the artists , composers, writers and so on. In the suspicion that what they defend are the interests of discography lobbys, and fed up with the whole “music business”, I turned my eyes to the music released under a Creative Commons (CC) license.
So far I haven’t had time to dive too deep in this world, but I have come across a very interesting resource for such music, namely a French site called Jamendo. All the music there is free to download, hear, burn, share, and probably broadcast (there are different CC licenses, some more restricting than others). Go ahead and give it a try, folks!
I am shocked to read this article in El Pais, regarding yet another bug in Internet Explorer, for which there is no official patch as of now.
What shocks me is that, in the same line, they go bash Firefox because “it also has its issues”. The example they give is the following: a guy browses to some date-finding web pages, instructing the browser not to save the passwords. Next, his girlfriend uses the same computer, but from her account, to surf the web (with Firefox), and apparently, when setting herself some password-related options, she comes across a list of sites that had the option “Do not save the password for this site”… the sites her boyfriend had visited. Result: a) they split up, and b) a bug gets reported (by the woman) to Firefox, regarding a user privacy breach.
Now, the reputed bug consists in the fact that the privacy settings (list of sites for which passwords are and are not saved) for a user (the guy), was supposedly accesible for another one (the gal). This would indeed be a security hole, and worth a big fat bug warning.
However, this was not the case. First, what seems to have happened is that the guy actually used her gf’s account to surf the web (when he set up her account), so there you are.
Second, they were running Firefox under Windows. If somehow the private settings of one account were accesible by the other one, it would be Windows’ fault, not Firefox’s. When running under, e.g., Linux, the privilege separation of users would not allow for that, no matter how wickedly wrong Firefox would have been made!
In short: the journalist reports a grave bug of Internet Explorer (product of Microsoft), and then tries to level the MS/Open Source battlefield by charging Firefox with another “bug” that is either due to user incompetence, or the OS’s fault (Windows, which is a product of… yes, Microsoft again). In my view, it’s a 2-0 victory for Firefox/Open Source movement, trying to pass as a 1-1 draw for IE/MS.
