In all seriousity, you speak a bitter truth. My Nvidia 8600GT recently died, so I replaced it with an ATI Radeon 4770, as phoronix had raving reviews about good linux performance. Now the drivers for it have killed my linux completely, black screen with artefacts replaces the login screen and I can't rescue it from a login shell because ubuntu disabled the root password. Rather pathetic that they didn't account for the removal by implementing the option to log in with your normal username (I'm talking about in the recovery mode shell-login here)
NVIDIA is a wonderful company that loves all of us (the linux community in particular) - they would never do something like this! This story is blatantly evil ATI propoganda!
Time for me to delete my social networking accounts methinks, it's lost all the glitter and sparkle as my eyes have been gradually opened to the loss of privacy they effect and the risk of identity theft they engender. I've watched facebook degenerate into an oozing fest of self indulgence and crappy quizzes about peoples aura/star sign/some other mystic crap or how good they are in bed, and too many of my friends now use it to grandly announce every mundane detail of their life to the world as if they're some sort of celebrity and we're all supposed to be deeply concerned about them cutting their pinky finger or enraptured by their new haircut, etc etc. A friend related similar sentiments to me earlier today, saying people were using it as if it were twitter.
What concerns me the most is the loss of privacy entailed in having an account with any of these sites, knowing that cops and employers can pull up all this info instantly... it's a worry.
Enough ranting for me, I'm going to delete my facebook account and my twitter account (which I created once and used never:P)
Founded in the mid-1980s by hacker-activist Richard Stallman, the FSF argues that free software and source code is a moral right. It takes pains to distinguish itself from the open-source movement, which advocates sharing of source code but tolerates charging for software.
I find this point rather interesting, as Richard Stallman gave a speech at Otago University here in small old New Zealand last year, and he was quite adamant that there was nothing wrong with charging for software, and took great pains to make the distinction between "free as in freedom" and "free as in beer". Is Computerworld confused?
Nowhere near as bad as The Dollman vs. the Demonic Toys. A one-foot-tall man fighting against demon-possessed toys at a childrens toystore - at one point you can see the hand up the evil puppet. The best part is when he finds a one-foot-tall woman and makes love to her on a slice of bread.
I concur that PulseAudio rocks - once you finally get it working. Yes I know that in the case of Ubuntu, Ubuntu is largely to blame for not implementing PulseAudio properly, but still... I installed UbuntuStudio on a friends computer and spent about four hours navigating through a maze of terrible documentation and outdated fixes and all sorts of nightmarish crap trying to get his 5.1 surround sound system working. Granted once it was done it sounded better than it did before on XP, as expected; but that was honestly the hardest thing I have ever had to configure, it was downright stupid.
Sadly, the victory was short-lived once we found out that ATI had moved his relatively recent GPU onto a legacy support branch, and that there was no adequate Linux driver - subsequently X crapped his pants and now he has a broken partition, bummer.
I had this too for several weeks, it was driving me mad. If I remember correctly, the fix was to change VLC's video output module to X11. Give it a go, hope it goes well.
I know this. I was merely pointing out that the parents post could have been worded better, "i don't buy music anymore, i refuse to support such behaviour" and that not *all* music goes through the slimy RIAA.
You speak truth, my friend. Several months ago, I begrudgingly bought a Microsoft wireless mouse/keyboard combo, because - get this - it was the only set stocked at The Warehouse (New Zealand's Walmart) that played nicely with linux.
Now, I dual-boot Ubuntu and XP. The pure gold part is that roughly 75% of the time, XP doesn't recognize the hardware at first and I have to piss around replugging the USB cable, pressing the connect button and watching tiny green flashing lights for ten minutes before I can log in. When I boot Ubuntu, it just works.
So it becomes clear, the reason that Microsoft's software is second-rate is that it wasn't made to run on linux.
Hah, I recall phoning Hewlett Packard's tech support line some years ago... After tediously explaining my problem to the indian bloke on the other end, he said "I'm sorry, I do not know very much about computers"
Apparently, HP's buzzword for outsourcing is 'innovation'.
I wish this were true, sadly SKY is available here in New Zealand. I refuse to live in a flat with SKY TV as the people that have SKY TV are paying their hard-earned money to have a mindset forced down their throats in the form of terrible sitcoms, repeated movies and advertisement after advertisement after sanity-warping advertisement.
It can be hard to get insightful commentary on anything from some of these SKY customers, and understandably so - if you're paying good money to drown yourself in mass media, subconsciously you will perceive a need to partake of the service often in order to get your moneys worth. Subsequently, as you inevitably approach the threshold of over-exposure, your intuition is eroded and your standards lowered.
Remember folks, TV feeds the banal desires of the lowest common denominator. Moreover, it aims to stop you from thinking.
Microsoft is quite present here in New Zealand. On a few occasions I have mentioned that I run linux on my desktop PC to IT tutors / teachers; the responses have varied from "what's that?" to "isn't linux just for servers?"(that one was today)
In fact, barely anybody else that I know is familiar with linux; everybody assumes it's Microsoft as far as the eye can see - how can there be possibly something better out there if everybody still uses MS?
There was one person I tried to introduce to linux, and to my distress the result wasn't exactly glamorous - after spending half a day figuratively breaking through brick walls with my forehead to configure PulseAudio with his 5.1 surround system, grr, I find out that ATI had decided to dump support for his relatively new card, grrrr.
So X is pulverized completely and he has a filesystem he can't access on a brand new hard drive that's good to kill small bugs with or stop paper from blowing away. I tried to explain to him that this was ATI's doing, not the fault of Linux.... Seems he'll never give FOSS another chance after that.
All in all there's many walls to break through to get linux out there, and many of them come back to Microsoft doing what it does best, which to be blunt is using it's inflated wealth and influence to overstay its welcome.
At any rate, we need to tighten a lot of loose screws before we can really get Linux out there. I hope and pray that Ubuntu considers changing the fixed release cycles so there isn't something major broken with every new release, as the OS has the potential to go far. But I digress...
At the end of the day, the less I see of Microsoft in my blessed country the better. My uncle works in government in New Zealand, and the laptop that Microsoft pilfered down through the grime channels to him has made his job a bit harder - in his words, "Computers are supposed to get smaller and faster, this thing is huge, heavy and slow". So yes, Microsoft is indeed hampering productivity here; this news gets a begrudging thumbs-up from me to a government I like as much as the smell of a long-dead seal.
Slashdot Mirror
And all I need is a glow-in-the-dark sundial, so that I know when to crawl out of the basement in search of sunlight to power up my ebook!
Being a geek, I want one that will let me look at my exercise data
*head explodes*
In all seriousity, you speak a bitter truth. My Nvidia 8600GT recently died, so I replaced it with an ATI Radeon 4770, as phoronix had raving reviews about good linux performance. Now the drivers for it have killed my linux completely, black screen with artefacts replaces the login screen and I can't rescue it from a login shell because ubuntu disabled the root password. Rather pathetic that they didn't account for the removal by implementing the option to log in with your normal username (I'm talking about in the recovery mode shell-login here)
So for now I'm using windows XP... Bugger.
NVIDIA is a wonderful company that loves all of us (the linux community in particular) - they would never do something like this! This story is blatantly evil ATI propoganda!
Time for me to delete my social networking accounts methinks, it's lost all the glitter and sparkle as my eyes have been gradually opened to the loss of privacy they effect and the risk of identity theft they engender. I've watched facebook degenerate into an oozing fest of self indulgence and crappy quizzes about peoples aura/star sign/some other mystic crap or how good they are in bed, and too many of my friends now use it to grandly announce every mundane detail of their life to the world as if they're some sort of celebrity and we're all supposed to be deeply concerned about them cutting their pinky finger or enraptured by their new haircut, etc etc. A friend related similar sentiments to me earlier today, saying people were using it as if it were twitter.
:P)
What concerns me the most is the loss of privacy entailed in having an account with any of these sites, knowing that cops and employers can pull up all this info instantly... it's a worry. Enough ranting for me, I'm going to delete my facebook account and my twitter account (which I created once and used never
What is this, 1985?
In light of the subject matter, I would say no, it is 1984.
Founded in the mid-1980s by hacker-activist Richard Stallman, the FSF argues that free software and source code is a moral right. It takes pains to distinguish itself from the open-source movement, which advocates sharing of source code but tolerates charging for software.
I find this point rather interesting, as Richard Stallman gave a speech at Otago University here in small old New Zealand last year, and he was quite adamant that there was nothing wrong with charging for software, and took great pains to make the distinction between "free as in freedom" and "free as in beer".
Is Computerworld confused?
Nowhere near as bad as The Dollman vs. the Demonic Toys. A one-foot-tall man fighting against demon-possessed toys at a childrens toystore - at one point you can see the hand up the evil puppet. The best part is when he finds a one-foot-tall woman and makes love to her on a slice of bread.
I concur that PulseAudio rocks - once you finally get it working. Yes I know that in the case of Ubuntu, Ubuntu is largely to blame for not implementing PulseAudio properly, but still... I installed UbuntuStudio on a friends computer and spent about four hours navigating through a maze of terrible documentation and outdated fixes and all sorts of nightmarish crap trying to get his 5.1 surround sound system working. Granted once it was done it sounded better than it did before on XP, as expected; but that was honestly the hardest thing I have ever had to configure, it was downright stupid.
Sadly, the victory was short-lived once we found out that ATI had moved his relatively recent GPU onto a legacy support branch, and that there was no adequate Linux driver - subsequently X crapped his pants and now he has a broken partition, bummer.
I had this too for several weeks, it was driving me mad. If I remember correctly, the fix was to change VLC's video output module to X11. Give it a go, hope it goes well.
I know this. I was merely pointing out that the parents post could have been worded better, "i don't buy music anymore, i refuse to support such behaviour" and that not *all* music goes through the slimy RIAA.
You speak truth, my friend. Several months ago, I begrudgingly bought a Microsoft wireless mouse/keyboard combo, because - get this - it was the only set stocked at The Warehouse (New Zealand's Walmart) that played nicely with linux.
Now, I dual-boot Ubuntu and XP. The pure gold part is that roughly 75% of the time, XP doesn't recognize the hardware at first and I have to piss around replugging the USB cable, pressing the connect button and watching tiny green flashing lights for ten minutes before I can log in. When I boot Ubuntu, it just works.
So it becomes clear, the reason that Microsoft's software is second-rate is that it wasn't made to run on linux.
it is because of the RIAA's heavy hand in sueing p2p file sharers that i dont buy music anymore, i refuse to support such behaviour.
Why yes, the nerve of those folk! How dare they play instruments and sing songs! I for one do not condone such atrocities!
In all seriousity dude, you're missing the forest for the trees here...
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah! I wish I had mod points right now.
A period is what a girl gets once a month
Hence the exclamation "goodness gracious"... And we say herbs in New Zealand, you insensitive clod!
Sure, this article is a total astroturf, but your post still sounds like an advertisement ;)
Who is this 'we' you speak of?
Hah, I recall phoning Hewlett Packard's tech support line some years ago... After tediously explaining my problem to the indian bloke on the other end, he said "I'm sorry, I do not know very much about computers"
Apparently, HP's buzzword for outsourcing is 'innovation'.
I don't know, but they left a pile of crap on the world plate for everybody else to eat up.
I think you need to be more concerned with the grammar pedants . --- Goodness gracious folks, it's a period!
I'm not sure if you were talking to me or about me.
Given the percentage of Chinese coders in comparison to US, they still did roughly twice as good. (Cue the math pedants)
Sky currently only operate [sic] in the UK
I wish this were true, sadly SKY is available here in New Zealand. I refuse to live in a flat with SKY TV as the people that have SKY TV are paying their hard-earned money to have a mindset forced down their throats in the form of terrible sitcoms, repeated movies and advertisement after advertisement after sanity-warping advertisement.
It can be hard to get insightful commentary on anything from some of these SKY customers, and understandably so - if you're paying good money to drown yourself in mass media, subconsciously you will perceive a need to partake of the service often in order to get your moneys worth. Subsequently, as you inevitably approach the threshold of over-exposure, your intuition is eroded and your standards lowered.
Remember folks, TV feeds the banal desires of the lowest common denominator. Moreover, it aims to stop you from thinking.
Don't be a statistic. Turn off your television.
This information is irrelevant to many of us; for a frame of reference, how does HD performance on 7 compare with XP?
Microsoft is quite present here in New Zealand. On a few occasions I have mentioned that I run linux on my desktop PC to IT tutors / teachers; the responses have varied from "what's that?" to "isn't linux just for servers?"(that one was today)
In fact, barely anybody else that I know is familiar with linux; everybody assumes it's Microsoft as far as the eye can see - how can there be possibly something better out there if everybody still uses MS?
There was one person I tried to introduce to linux, and to my distress the result wasn't exactly glamorous - after spending half a day figuratively breaking through brick walls with my forehead to configure PulseAudio with his 5.1 surround system, grr, I find out that ATI had decided to dump support for his relatively new card, grrrr.
So X is pulverized completely and he has a filesystem he can't access on a brand new hard drive that's good to kill small bugs with or stop paper from blowing away. I tried to explain to him that this was ATI's doing, not the fault of Linux.... Seems he'll never give FOSS another chance after that.
All in all there's many walls to break through to get linux out there, and many of them come back to Microsoft doing what it does best, which to be blunt is using it's inflated wealth and influence to overstay its welcome.
At any rate, we need to tighten a lot of loose screws before we can really get Linux out there. I hope and pray that Ubuntu considers changing the fixed release cycles so there isn't something major broken with every new release, as the OS has the potential to go far. But I digress...
At the end of the day, the less I see of Microsoft in my blessed country the better. My uncle works in government in New Zealand, and the laptop that Microsoft pilfered down through the grime channels to him has made his job a bit harder - in his words, "Computers are supposed to get smaller and faster, this thing is huge, heavy and slow". So yes, Microsoft is indeed hampering productivity here; this news gets a begrudging thumbs-up from me to a government I like as much as the smell of a long-dead seal.
Yay! Someone's being a dick in response to an informative post.
I'm only doing it for the cameras, my friend.