If I try hitting Fn+F2 to turn my WiFi on and off the system crashes HARD. Millions of 9xx model eeepcs have been sold--all of them with the Ralink rt2860 WiFi card. Some 10xx models of eeepcs are also reporting this issue. Considering this is an issue that has been known since JULY and the Canonical developers made the choice to release known buggy software that causes kernel panicsrather than accept an alteration in their precious schedule...I think people have a right to be annoyed.
The attitude seems to be 'let upstream (Debian) fix it' while Canonical pisses around with themes and icon changes--well if I have to wait for Debian to fix the issues, why not simply run Debian?
Your Google-fu is weak my son. Apparently the quote really is from Heinlein's first published story, "Life-Line", written in 1939.
Wait... you had to google a Robert A Heinlien story?
That's it, we're going to have to revoke your geek card now...
--bornagainpenguin
PS: Note that I've replaced the original link in the quoted text with a much better one to the text of the actual story which despite its apparent age is still as timely as the day Heinlein typed it out...
PPS: Remind me again who it benefits to keep the great man's works locked up in copyright for another hundred years now that both he and his wife are deceased? It's not like he's going to somehow produce another novel now that he's gone. (No the Spider Robinson novel doesn't count.)
Nonsense. If you as an individual, don't like Apple's "I'm a Mac..." ads, that's one thing, but to suggest these ads were the reason Amazon hasn't released a Kindle reader for Mac yet is ridiculous.
Oh but I do like the Apple commercials! I think they're funny as all get out, but I recognize them for what they are, the codifying of "Macs" as something distinctly different than "PCs" with the implicit understanding that by "PCs" they are referring to Windows machines. In this paradigm there is no room for a third or even fourth party to exist. There is only "Mac" and "PC" and this is the way Apple likes it.
They don't get to go through all that work at setting the perception they way they did and then complain "Hey, Macs are PCs too! And what about Linux?" when this is the direct result of the mindshare they have created by those ubiquitous ads they pay so much for. Please read upwards to see who I was posting to, maybe then you'll understand what I'm getting at?
It's not for the PC. It's for Windows only. I don't see any other OSes there.
Also, I already have a better "Kindle" on my PC. It's called a "PDF reader". ^^
Blame Apple's now ubiquitous "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" commercials for the results of this oversimplification. Those ads were intended to position Apple as the only provider of alternatives to "PCs" with the assumption writ large all PCs are Microsoft machines. Now that they've succeeded beyond their wildest dreams Apple will be forced to wear "Mac" clothes for the next few decades and in this case being a "Mac" means not having a Kindle viewer for the time being.
It's a case of bed. make. lie.
What bothers me is now Linux distributors or any other providers of alternatives to either Apple's "Mac" or Microsoft's "PC" will have that much more difficulty in explaining who and what they are in the future... Maybe Novell wasn't all that far off the mark with their "...And I'm Linux" parody ads? While it is certainly suboptimal to comment on a competitor's advertising if using it as a framework makes it easier to get your point across to the willfully computer illiterate, why not?
Seriously. Have you tried it? A major improvement over every vendor slopping their own clunky interface together, the only thing I've used that comes close is the Network Manager in Ubuntu. Otherwise Windows XP is rather spartan in value and the best part of Vista (the Windows Sidebar) can be backported to Windows XP but needs to run in two instances of memory!
Truthfully there really isn't anything not possible in Windows 2000 you'd need to upgrade for that isn't an external limitation imposed by Microsoft in gambit to force upgrades. The lack of updates? That's a choice Microsoft made in order to force people to "upgrade" to Windows XP and higher. This includes system components like Direct X and driver issues by corporations seeking people to purchase new hardware, while not wanting to support older hardware that still works. Much of the above is artificial though and can be worked around by way of using modified dll thunking to get those things running on Windows 2000 despite supposedly not being capable of performing in that operating system.
Meanwhile I've found I can pretty much get all the features of Windows XP and Vista by upgrading to Linux and making use of Wine to run some of my applications and by using more and more native Linux applications as I go on. This way I get all the cool toys (Compiz with Virtual Desktops is something you'll never want to give up once you start using it) and still stay within reasonable memory usage. I have an entire gig of RAM on my desktop and my netbook--I have yet to see either exceed 500mbs despite doing things that would easily have me hitting the swap file in Windows XP or 2000.
So there are options forward, but if Windows 2000 works for you and you don't need cleartype or use WiFi you shouldn't upgrade until you hit the application availability and lack of security updates wall. Personally I think it sucks we should have to make these kinds of choices at all, but at least with Windows 2000 you still have those options. Once Microsoft decides to stop activating our copies of Windows XP I expect there will be a lot of people in for a world of hurt!
--bornagainpenguin
Hah! If only that's what they did...
on
The Fresca Rebellion
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Instead it is a bait and switch - tax something unpopular to make an attempt to close a very large budget hole.
If only that was what the stupid legislators actually did, that wouldn't be too bad of a thing--instead they pass a "sin" tax on whatever supposedly immoral thing is popular to hate on this week in order to encourage people to stop the offensive behavior. So far so good* right? Except the dumb %&*# then guesstimate the new amounts of tax dollars coming in and instead of actually closing the budget hole they immediately pull out a long list of pork projects to spend that imputed income on. Only then when people start cutting down due to high costs for what ever "sin" it was that was legislated against lo and behold, another budget hole which can only be filled by taxing the sin du jour!
It never ends and there is always some "sin" that can be taxed to take up the slack...
--bornagainpenguin
*assumes you think state sponsored morality is a good thing. Me, I could have sworn there was that thing about congress making no laws respecting the establishment thereof and all, but I seem to be in the minority when it comes to keeping the politicians from infecting spirituality...
"This is Sony." should've been all the warning anyone needed. How many times are people going to let Sony screw them over before they quit buying Sony products?
Seriously. Going exactly by the comparison you have just made this is a classic textbook example of the kind of stuff the po-po sent hundreds of hackers to prison on by claiming this was breaking and entering.
the real issue is that copyright law protects the entity with the largest legal budget
It's crap like this that makes me favor a corporate death penalty--if a corporation is found to be guilty of not acting in the public good, they shouldn't be eligible for fines (just the cost of doing business in most places, don't you know,) instead they should be hit with various degrees of temporary unincorporation for various lengths of time, with a total dismemberment and set period of ineligibility for its CEOs and corporate officers to work in any leadership positions for a set period of years. If they're legal people, then they can be subject to real sanctions. Crap like this should apply.
Great troll, there friend! You almost had me until you said "reasonably modern" and then I lost it! I tip my hat to thee!
Seriously though, WinXP is about as good as it gets when it comes to Windows, and seriously, you could have probably stopped with Win2000 if you were willing to live without the WiFi applets, cleartype, and current support from Microsoft--although given the direction of their last few releases, that last one might not really be a negative at all...
Not that I'm against world domination by US corporations:-)
Haven't you heard? Balmer is planning on moving the company out of the country if they can't continue to cheat on their taxes they way they can now, by routing the money offshore.
Does this bit of information change your opinion in any way?
As radical as it sounds, I'm in agreement with the grandparent poster--all other options have failed and only revolution remains untried. Everything else has not only failed miserably in bringing change, it has actively aided our enemy's cause! Boycotting, as the title of my post indicates just gets spun as piracy on paper when these *IAA types want to use the courts or the legislative to beat down and shake down money.
Screw it! Hand me a rifle and let's get to work at reaffirming the damn piece of paper actually means what it says rather than going through the motions in this pretend democracy we now live in. Otherwise we're nothing but serfs living on our Lord's land and utterly without rights and subject to their whims...
If you're that bothered - just stick with Windows 98 which doesn't do any of this stuff.
Gladly! Now please explain to me where I can get drivers for my ASUS EeePC 901 that will drive the video card, sound card, webcam, ethernet, bluetooth, and wifi... I'm more than able to make Win9x my bitch and get it to sit up, roll over, play dead, and beg but without fully working drivers Win9x simply isn't an option any more.
This is pretty sad too, because I've managed to run Win9x without the infamous bluescreens and other issues thanks to the patches and upgrades put out by the Win9x community at MSFN... Tihiy's shell upgrades and Xeno's kernel upgrades really make the platform look and behave much nicer than you'd believe! If you know anything at all about the history of the Win3x and Win9x systems and how they were constantly extended each time they were thought to have hit a brick wall you'd understand how tragic this really is.
You seem to forget whenever these corporations don't make whatever number of dollars they seem to think they're owed by us peons, they simply attribute the losses to piracy and push even more restrictions on people using technology. What good does it do to avoid RIAA music, MPAA movies, BSA software, etc when your actions only get you labeled as a pirate any way? If we're all going to show up as statistical pirates any way, why not get some booty for our troubles?
The Forever War uses the time dilation of the jumps as a way to illustrate how a soldier feels when they have to leave home to do fight and the strains that doing so puts on his family, society and lover(s). If you remove that human part of the story, it will just be crap. You will end up with 300 in space suits, just war porn.
I agree no one wants 300 in space suits, however, no one wants Ridley to "Hancock" up The Forever War either. That's the trend I think the OP was talking about. Well, that and the complete "Hancock" they did with Battlestar Galatica...
Knowing our luck Ridley Scott will probably turn the book into a lesbian love affair by changing the genders around and making Mandella's mom be in a heterosexual relationship with a man! Oh and the homosexual armies Mandella leads will be all women to appeal to the feminist market and show how women are just as good as men, but are more peaceful and less violent. How's that for a "Hollywood twist"?
--bornagainpenguin
PS: Note to self, stay away from any classic SF books being "reimagined" "updated" or given a new "Hollywood Twist" as they will invariably be crap.
When you install it you need to select that feature in the options window. I generally turn off the add more sites feature, but the filter feature is worth its weight in gold!
I guess it's back to the torrent channel for me and thee, then, innit? So instead of watching SOME ads, ye and me will watch a-none, with nary a soul venturing out ter get screwed again! Tis so brilliant a move it could have only come from NBC/Universal! Those bleeding rotters only know how to lose money naught how ter be making it, so me boys will ignore th fools and hoist ye jolly roger we will...
The last time I tried Miro it installed something called "OpenCandy" on my system without my permission. I think I'll pass until the Miro developers realize who owns this computer....HINT: Me, not them, not opencandy, or whatever else wants to piggyback with the installer.
Slashdot Mirror
If I try hitting Fn+F2 to turn my WiFi on and off the system crashes HARD. Millions of 9xx model eeepcs have been sold--all of them with the Ralink rt2860 WiFi card. Some 10xx models of eeepcs are also reporting this issue. Considering this is an issue that has been known since JULY and the Canonical developers made the choice to release known buggy software that causes kernel panics rather than accept an alteration in their precious schedule...I think people have a right to be annoyed.
The attitude seems to be 'let upstream (Debian) fix it' while Canonical pisses around with themes and icon changes--well if I have to wait for Debian to fix the issues, why not simply run Debian?
--bornagainpenguin
Wait... you had to google a Robert A Heinlien story?
That's it, we're going to have to revoke your geek card now...
--bornagainpenguin
PS: Note that I've replaced the original link in the quoted text with a much better one to the text of the actual story which despite its apparent age is still as timely as the day Heinlein typed it out...
PPS: Remind me again who it benefits to keep the great man's works locked up in copyright for another hundred years now that both he and his wife are deceased? It's not like he's going to somehow produce another novel now that he's gone. (No the Spider Robinson novel doesn't count.)
Oh but I do like the Apple commercials! I think they're funny as all get out, but I recognize them for what they are, the codifying of "Macs" as something distinctly different than "PCs" with the implicit understanding that by "PCs" they are referring to Windows machines. In this paradigm there is no room for a third or even fourth party to exist. There is only "Mac" and "PC" and this is the way Apple likes it.
They don't get to go through all that work at setting the perception they way they did and then complain "Hey, Macs are PCs too! And what about Linux?" when this is the direct result of the mindshare they have created by those ubiquitous ads they pay so much for. Please read upwards to see who I was posting to, maybe then you'll understand what I'm getting at?
--bornagainpenguin
Blame Apple's now ubiquitous "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" commercials for the results of this oversimplification. Those ads were intended to position Apple as the only provider of alternatives to "PCs" with the assumption writ large all PCs are Microsoft machines. Now that they've succeeded beyond their wildest dreams Apple will be forced to wear "Mac" clothes for the next few decades and in this case being a "Mac" means not having a Kindle viewer for the time being.
It's a case of bed. make. lie.
What bothers me is now Linux distributors or any other providers of alternatives to either Apple's "Mac" or Microsoft's "PC" will have that much more difficulty in explaining who and what they are in the future... Maybe Novell wasn't all that far off the mark with their "...And I'm Linux" parody ads? While it is certainly suboptimal to comment on a competitor's advertising if using it as a framework makes it easier to get your point across to the willfully computer illiterate, why not?
--bornagainpenguin
Seriously. Have you tried it? A major improvement over every vendor slopping their own clunky interface together, the only thing I've used that comes close is the Network Manager in Ubuntu. Otherwise Windows XP is rather spartan in value and the best part of Vista (the Windows Sidebar) can be backported to Windows XP but needs to run in two instances of memory!
Truthfully there really isn't anything not possible in Windows 2000 you'd need to upgrade for that isn't an external limitation imposed by Microsoft in gambit to force upgrades. The lack of updates? That's a choice Microsoft made in order to force people to "upgrade" to Windows XP and higher. This includes system components like Direct X and driver issues by corporations seeking people to purchase new hardware, while not wanting to support older hardware that still works. Much of the above is artificial though and can be worked around by way of using modified dll thunking to get those things running on Windows 2000 despite supposedly not being capable of performing in that operating system.
Meanwhile I've found I can pretty much get all the features of Windows XP and Vista by upgrading to Linux and making use of Wine to run some of my applications and by using more and more native Linux applications as I go on. This way I get all the cool toys (Compiz with Virtual Desktops is something you'll never want to give up once you start using it) and still stay within reasonable memory usage. I have an entire gig of RAM on my desktop and my netbook--I have yet to see either exceed 500mbs despite doing things that would easily have me hitting the swap file in Windows XP or 2000.
So there are options forward, but if Windows 2000 works for you and you don't need cleartype or use WiFi you shouldn't upgrade until you hit the application availability and lack of security updates wall. Personally I think it sucks we should have to make these kinds of choices at all, but at least with Windows 2000 you still have those options. Once Microsoft decides to stop activating our copies of Windows XP I expect there will be a lot of people in for a world of hurt!
--bornagainpenguin
Instead it is a bait and switch - tax something unpopular to make an attempt to close a very large budget hole.
If only that was what the stupid legislators actually did, that wouldn't be too bad of a thing--instead they pass a "sin" tax on whatever supposedly immoral thing is popular to hate on this week in order to encourage people to stop the offensive behavior. So far so good* right? Except the dumb %&*# then guesstimate the new amounts of tax dollars coming in and instead of actually closing the budget hole they immediately pull out a long list of pork projects to spend that imputed income on. Only then when people start cutting down due to high costs for what ever "sin" it was that was legislated against lo and behold, another budget hole which can only be filled by taxing the sin du jour!
It never ends and there is always some "sin" that can be taxed to take up the slack...
--bornagainpenguin
*assumes you think state sponsored morality is a good thing. Me, I could have sworn there was that thing about congress making no laws respecting the establishment thereof and all, but I seem to be in the minority when it comes to keeping the politicians from infecting spirituality...
DRM will never be defeated by shooting the messenger.
How about we give it a try a few times and see what happens to the DRM when there are no more messengers?
--bornagainpenguin
Martin Ankerl made a theme for Gnome that fixes many of those types of issues:
http://martin.ankerl.com/2008/05/13/human-compact-gnome-theme/
--bornagainpenguin
This is Sony having it's cake and eating it, too.
"This is Sony." should've been all the warning anyone needed. How many times are people going to let Sony screw them over before they quit buying Sony products?
--bornagainpenguin
Seriously. Going exactly by the comparison you have just made this is a classic textbook example of the kind of stuff the po-po sent hundreds of hackers to prison on by claiming this was breaking and entering.
--bornagainpenguin
A contract is binding on two parties--not one party gets to do whatever the hell they want while the other is obligated to put up with it.
--bornagainpenguin
you can thank Disney for copyrights being extended
Fuck Disney.
--bornagainpenguin
the real issue is that copyright law protects the entity with the largest legal budget
It's crap like this that makes me favor a corporate death penalty--if a corporation is found to be guilty of not acting in the public good, they shouldn't be eligible for fines (just the cost of doing business in most places, don't you know,) instead they should be hit with various degrees of temporary unincorporation for various lengths of time, with a total dismemberment and set period of ineligibility for its CEOs and corporate officers to work in any leadership positions for a set period of years. If they're legal people, then they can be subject to real sanctions. Crap like this should apply.
--bornagainpenguin
Bwhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Great troll, there friend! You almost had me until you said "reasonably modern" and then I lost it! I tip my hat to thee!
Seriously though, WinXP is about as good as it gets when it comes to Windows, and seriously, you could have probably stopped with Win2000 if you were willing to live without the WiFi applets, cleartype, and current support from Microsoft--although given the direction of their last few releases, that last one might not really be a negative at all...
--bornagainpenguin
I don't know, but I'm certainly going to try it!
--bornagainpenguin
Not that I'm against world domination by US corporations :-)
Haven't you heard? Balmer is planning on moving the company out of the country if they can't continue to cheat on their taxes they way they can now, by routing the money offshore.
Does this bit of information change your opinion in any way?
--bornagainpenguin
Parent was referring to the somewhat recent Google April Fool's joke, not actually trolling. See: http://www.google.com/tisp/
My God Slashdot, have we gotten to the point where people just mod as "Troll" anything they don't understand?
--bornagainpenguin
As radical as it sounds, I'm in agreement with the grandparent poster--all other options have failed and only revolution remains untried. Everything else has not only failed miserably in bringing change, it has actively aided our enemy's cause! Boycotting, as the title of my post indicates just gets spun as piracy on paper when these *IAA types want to use the courts or the legislative to beat down and shake down money.
Screw it! Hand me a rifle and let's get to work at reaffirming the damn piece of paper actually means what it says rather than going through the motions in this pretend democracy we now live in. Otherwise we're nothing but serfs living on our Lord's land and utterly without rights and subject to their whims...
--bornagainpenguin
If you're that bothered - just stick with Windows 98 which doesn't do any of this stuff.
Gladly! Now please explain to me where I can get drivers for my ASUS EeePC 901 that will drive the video card, sound card, webcam, ethernet, bluetooth, and wifi... I'm more than able to make Win9x my bitch and get it to sit up, roll over, play dead, and beg but without fully working drivers Win9x simply isn't an option any more.
This is pretty sad too, because I've managed to run Win9x without the infamous bluescreens and other issues thanks to the patches and upgrades put out by the Win9x community at MSFN... Tihiy's shell upgrades and Xeno's kernel upgrades really make the platform look and behave much nicer than you'd believe! If you know anything at all about the history of the Win3x and Win9x systems and how they were constantly extended each time they were thought to have hit a brick wall you'd understand how tragic this really is.
--bornagainpenguin
You seem to forget whenever these corporations don't make whatever number of dollars they seem to think they're owed by us peons, they simply attribute the losses to piracy and push even more restrictions on people using technology. What good does it do to avoid RIAA music, MPAA movies, BSA software, etc when your actions only get you labeled as a pirate any way? If we're all going to show up as statistical pirates any way, why not get some booty for our troubles?
I agree no one wants 300 in space suits, however, no one wants Ridley to "Hancock" up The Forever War either. That's the trend I think the OP was talking about. Well, that and the complete "Hancock" they did with Battlestar Galatica...
Knowing our luck Ridley Scott will probably turn the book into a lesbian love affair by changing the genders around and making Mandella's mom be in a heterosexual relationship with a man! Oh and the homosexual armies Mandella leads will be all women to appeal to the feminist market and show how women are just as good as men, but are more peaceful and less violent. How's that for a "Hollywood twist"?
--bornagainpenguin
PS: Note to self, stay away from any classic SF books being "reimagined" "updated" or given a new "Hollywood Twist" as they will invariably be crap.
When you install it you need to select that feature in the options window. I generally turn off the add more sites feature, but the filter feature is worth its weight in gold!
--bornagainpenguin
I guess it's back to the torrent channel for me and thee, then, innit? So instead of watching SOME ads, ye and me will watch a-none, with nary a soul venturing out ter get screwed again! Tis so brilliant a move it could have only come from NBC/Universal! Those bleeding rotters only know how to lose money naught how ter be making it, so me boys will ignore th fools and hoist ye jolly roger we will...
See ye and thee at th' bay laddies!
--bornagainpenguin
..the magic of "Bugmenot.com" which via an extension in Firefox allows me to go right in many many more sites than just the NY Times.
--bornagainpenguin
The last time I tried Miro it installed something called "OpenCandy" on my system without my permission. I think I'll pass until the Miro developers realize who owns this computer....HINT: Me, not them, not opencandy, or whatever else wants to piggyback with the installer.
--bornagainpenguin