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If it's GPL'd, then no proprietary drivers. That's pretty much the purpose of the GPL.

The Geek Cruises certainly are great, I haven't gone on any but the list of luminaries that give presentations are impressive, and I've heard good things about them. Is the Ottawa YAPC turning into a marketing scheme at all? ExitCertified has been quite active & helpful for not only the local PerlMongers group, but also the Ottawa Unix Users' Group (OCUUG); as you'll notice from their Meetings page, they're actually held every month at ExitCertified. There's also substantial cross-pollination between ExitCertified people, the Ottawa Capital Linux Users' Group (OCLUG which hold monthly meetings just around the corner from ExitCertified, hmmm...), as well as PMs and some of the same suspicious characters can be seen at the Macintosh User's Group of Ottawa (MUGOO) (ahem, Jay et al)

These nefarious groups indeed seem to be as thick as theives. But if a firm like ExitCertified is devoting their time, office space, and personnel to so much in the local OSS/programming communities, haven't they earned the respect of our community? Just because they're an active company dosen't mean they're all bad. I wouldn't worry about the vacancies either; speakers were still being lined up for the local Open Source Weekend/Business Of Open Source Conference (BOSS) held a few weeks ago in the city and look who showed up.

He showed us a demo of the Sims (ran without a hitch) and talked to us about Wine being an implementation of Windows and not a Windows emulator, just so we'd know the difference. It was nice and all, but I kept wondering "Will this actually work?" So the night after, I compiled it and tried to install a non-copy-protected piece of software. This turns out to be very hard, as the install procedure is kind of strange, and they don't include some of the nice setup stuff by default that WineX has when you subscribe and grab an RPM.

So... what does this have to do with WineX 2.0? I recently subscribed to their web-services so I could get a copy of WineX to use on my girlfriend's Linux box so she could play any video games she owned when she ran Windows. I installed the RPM and tried to run the setup of The Sims (this should have worked) and it couldn't read the disc... hmmm...

So I figured, I'll wait til WineX 2.0 comes out after I tried every game we own and only had success with Starcraft. I hope this release is a good one, and I hope I can play Diablo II with it, but if I can't everyone will catch hell. :)

The subscription fee is pennies btw, $15.00USD for three months. Well worth it if the damn thing works. :)

This may be a good moment to plug an event occurring this Sunday, November 25th.

The Business of Open Source Software is an event being held by the Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group (OCLUG). We have Eric S. Raymond giving a keynote speech, followed by a panel discussion of members of various open-source related companies (Xandros, IBM, Roaring Penguin, Steamballoon, OEone, and Open Source Development Labs).

Click the links for more info. It promises to be a very interesting event.

Cheers,
Vic

Go to the Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group homepage, and check out the great Tux jack-o-lanterns linked at the top of the page!

No offense, but the odds of you finding one thousand computer users willing to keep Linux on their desktop for everyday use is also next to ZERO.

Gee, it would probably take me so long to look up a few Linux Users Group pages and ask who uses Linux for a desktop. There can't be any of them out there ...

• OCLUG - Ottawa Carleton Linux Users Group - The OLS is always discussed heavily by OCLUG members, especially since the mailing list is hosted by Achilles who organized the Symposium. It's also a great place to meet other local Linux enthusiasts, read about other events, and learn plenty.
  
• Linux.org Events Listing - Go here for a list of many different Linux conferences, events, etc.
  
• Slashdot! - OLS was mentioned several times here....
  

With that kind of grouping of Linux Power, there's an awful lot of Linux interest in this town - hence, a great deal of interest in running a Symposium (Thanks AH!)... if you want a symposium in your neighborhood, start one up! Can't guarantee that Alan Cox will make it (I got to sit next to him and Telsa during Miguel's keynote speech... I think I absorbed some kernel-kung-fu via osmosis)... but you never know what might come of your attempt. Maybe a few attendees will create the next great OpenSource project...

There are some people in Ottawa, Canada, doing just that with the schools in the region with varying degrees of success. The project is organized by Milan Budimirovic at milan.budimirovic@sympatico.ca or Dave Neil cricket@storm.ca

More info can be obtained from OCLUG: Ottawa Carleton Linux Users Group

cheers,
El Malo

The main problem, as stated before, is that what people think of as intuitive is generally biased by their experience or knowledge. And this reminds me of what someone said on OCLUG: "There is no such thing as an intuitive interface design, the only intuitive interface is the nipple, everthing afterwards is learned."
(I forget the source...some Ottawa Hacker)

cheers,
Frank

In that case, you might also want to check out the
Ottawa Carleton Linux Users Group (OCLUG) too.

Welcome!

Cheers,
Vic

Look like it's time to switch to Linux for good John. You've been made to look like an idiot by Microsoft "smart quotes" - a prime example of de-commodification of standards. Microsoft smart quotes are those specially formatted `` , '' and ' (as single chars) symbols. Applications running on windows tend to through them in regardless of what charset they are supposed to be using. They're characters with decimal codes somewhere in the 128-159 range.

They don't work on anything except Windows. That's why we have to read through all those ?'s in your text.

From someone on the Ottawa-Carleton LUG mailing list:

This problem appears to infect a growing number of products under W95: probably some OSR patch changed the common text-edit widget to enable these extended characters without any input from the application itself. I have seen the problem from:

• Outlook
• Netscape
• Eudora, and Eudora Pro
• and I think Pegasus.

The insidious bit is that applications get them without asking (or wanting) them. - Richard Perrin