They're subtly different from Firefox extensions, at least in their original form.
Orignally BHOs could be installed silently by all sorts of crapware like toolbars and the like.
They are written in C++ and use COM, and are pretty hard to get right.
Firefox extensions need to be installed manually by the user and are written in XUL and Javascript.
Though actually I think any extension is going to reduce reliability. And there's always a possibility of some packaging a malicious extension with other software.
Seeing IE's market share drop is always nice for clueful web devs.
Fixed that for you.
I know plenty of web developers who create horrible, broken pages because they render nicely on IE. When I say something along the lines of "you're not even close to being XHTML complaint" they respond with something along the lines of "I hate Firefox! I can never get my layouts to look nice."
That's not just an IE thing. I've seen pages totally broken on Opera. The dumb webdev will start ranting about how IE doesn't follow standards, discover you use Opera and then say "we didn't have time to test with that".
It's pretty clear they only tested on Firefox. And that the issue is not standards compliance because the page is totally broken on Opera too.
Actually most of the time, it will be broken on Firefox too, so the issue is not so much only testing on Firefox as not testing properly on any browser.
Do you realize what it really means? He kinda accepts some blame for not being efficient, but in the same sentence he said that he had to stop TELLING ACPI SCRIPTS THAT HE ACTUALLY IS RUNNING LINUX because of the amount of brokenness and possibly sabotage that gets triggered in those scripts when they see Linux. So when the choice is to pretend being Vista (and possibly bring up more brokenness of workarounds made specifically for Vista) or using supposedly Linux-specific ACPI definitions, sections "for Vista" give better results.
If you read his blog you'd know that he doesn't believe Bios vendors are sabotaging Linux and Linux doesn't claim to be Vista for this reason, it claims to be Vista because the Vista section is the only one that the manufacturers test. Also he says Linux can't define an OS Interface (_OSI) for Linux because Linux is refactored to frequently to maintain an interface.
Personally I think that this constant refactoring is not what you want in a production OS. You need to define interfaces carefully and then preserve them for as long as possible. Constant refactoring just breaks stuff. It's the sort of thing hippy programmers working on non commercial projects and students think is a good idea. People that have to support what they do, in the sense of dealing with angry customers and providing a fix quickly when they break something learn not to work like this.
See the hardware manufacturer writes a Windows driver that does this right. Maybe they write a Linux driver, maybe they don't.
There are no "drivers" for ACPI,
If you bothered to read what he wrote, the driver in this case is the video driver, which needs to reinitialize the video card on the way back up from S3 or S4 because the power was cut to it on the way down. He claims that because the Linux video drivers don't get this stuff right, people get crashes on the way back up. Now he's a kernel ACPI specialist, and it seems reasonable he talks from experience.
Plus I know from my experience he's right. All the Linux laptops in my clients test lap have problems switching to and from at least one of the ACPI power states even without any external hardware. Which makes it impossible to test things like S3 with their device plugged in.
Hence my statement ACPI support on Linux sucks. I don't really care that the suckage is not Linux's fault by rather due to some conspiracy, and neither does anyone worth talking to. In fact your blathering about how the blame lies not with Linux but a conspiracy of Microsoft, manufacturers and the ACPI standard itself means we have now crossed the Linux Fault Threshold
http://prakharagrawal.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/linux-linux-linux-part-two-crossing-the-linux-fault-threshold/ The important concept to bear in mind when discussing software issues with Linux apologists is the "Linux Fault Threshold". Clever use of this concept helps you to avoid losing your temper with someone who might actually be able to render practical help, while ensuring that you give the correct dose of venom (60cc of scorpion juice, administered per anem with a rusty syringe) to the vast crowd of mindless apologists who just want you to use their pet operating system because it makes them feel good and gives them something to boast about on Slashdot. I provide this as a service to all the blind, alcoholic, incontinent grandmothers out there who appear to be installing Linux without any trouble if the Slashdot comments on any article remotely related to user interface design are to be believed.
The Linux Fault Threshold is the point in any conversation about Linux at which your interlocutor stops talking about how your problem might be solved under Linux and starts talking about how it isn't Linux's fault that your problem cannot be solved under Linux. Half the time, t
In the standard historical accounts, the way that the bomb's gun mechanism worked was by shooting a cylindrical "male" uranium projectile into a concave, stationary uranium target. This act of atomic coitus created a mass sufficient to produce a critical reaction. The mass of the projectile was said to be 38.5 kilograms, and the mass of the target was said to be 25.6 kilograms. But no matter how many times Coster-Mullen did the math the numbers never quite worked out in a way that allowed the projectile and the target to fit inside the gun barrel while remaining subcritical.
The source of the error, Coster-Mullen recognized, was an assumption that every (male) researcher who studied the subject had made about the relation between projectile and target. These scholars had apparently been unable to conceive of an arrangement other than a "missionary position" bomb, in which a solid male projectile penetrated a vessel-like female target. But Coster-Mullen realized that a female-superior arrangement in which a hollow projectile slammed down on top of a stationary cylinder of highly enriched uranium-yielded the correct size and mass.
It's like he can't concentrate on engineering at all and his mind drifts to thoughts of sex and from there to some garbled feminist critique of science and technology being phallocentric and sexist. That sort of thing strikes me as only being plausible to people that have no interest in or understanding of science and technology. Essentially it's a pretentious way of telling people not to feel quilty about their ignorance.
And to me a 'female' projectile seems more likely just looking at the relative mass of the projectile vs the target.
It's not a question of whether they are odious or not. They are terrorists - quite literally. They terrorise people to fulfill their political objectives.
Once you start to do that the police will try to lock you up. And if people try to stop them or even don't help them to the best of their ability, they will lock them up too.
The point is that political speech has limits, and one of those limits is violence or incitement to violence. Here's a handy cut out and keep guide to where the limit is in this case.
* Saying Huntingdon Life Sciences should be shutdown. This is protected political speech and is ok
* Demonstrating outside Huntingdon Life Sciences. Once again, so long as the demonstration is peaceful, UK law protects the demonstators.
* Calling for boycotts of HLS. Once again, completely OK.
* Dressing up in masks and beating employees of HLS half to death with baseball bats, planting fire bombs or sending letter bombs, posting leaflets around the homes of contractors for HLS accusing them of being pedofiles. Sending letters to HLS employees or contractors threatening them with 'terrorism' or calling their house every hour of the night and screaming death threats at their kids. Digging up dead relatives of employees ( really - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/staffordshire/4176446.stm ). All these things have been done by SHAC or its allies. And none of them are protected political speech. In fact they are terrorism, literally KKK/mafia tactics.
The original reason they got involved with the police is because some SHAC activist posted a judge's name and address on the site to encourage the goon squad to go after him. That crosses a crucial line to being incitement, and inciting violence against judges is the best way I can think of to get yourself raided by the police.
The problem with Indymedia is that they don't differentiate between SHAC and other legal protest groups.
It's not about odiousness and it's not about free speech. If protect people like SHAC, you should expect to have problems with the police. What they did was like refusing to help the police find the name of a KKK or mafia thug who was trying to intimidate a judge back in America back when the KKK or mafia was at war with US law enforcement.
Actually I think they sort of want a confrontation so they can scream about 'state repression' and accuse the police of being Gestapo/Stasi etc. However if you step back and look at this, you realise that SHAC are not a legitimate political group that has renounced violence. In fact quite the reverse, they avoid politics completely and work exclusively through violence.
I think in a democracy, regardless of how you feel about animal experimentation you should not try to get shield people like them from law enforcement. Actually legally you don't have much choice. If you know anything about a crime and don't report it you can be prosecuted as an accessory.
http://abelits.livejournal.com/ 11:25 pm October 6th, 2008 I finally made Ubuntu properly suspend and resume on XO, so now I don't have to wait for it to boot up when I carry it around.
05:01 am April 27th, 2008 Ubuntu installation on XO laptop
Right so it took you six months to get suspend working on an XO, and yet ACPI works flawlessly on Linux.
The thing is if someone is paying you to test some device's S3 support, spending even six minutes getting your test laptop to suspend properly even without the device is going to make you complain. Especially if that same laptop suspends and resumes just fine in Windows.
LOL at the MS Paint pictures of you BTW. I can see why Bad Ass Boutique thinks your some kind of commissar
You remind me of the Yugoslav tourist board people who told me and my parents very sternly that there was coffee in all supermarkets when we complained that we couldn't find any on holiday there back in the 80's.
The system is perfect, right? Anyone criticizing it is lying and needs to be browbeaten into silence?
You know if you really want to help you actually need to fix bugs, not just lecture people who talk about them that they are wrong and no bugs exist.
Linux sucks for ACPI and covering up the bugs will just mean it will continue to suck. Ironically people like you are doing far more damage to free software than the Windows fanboys you rave about on the Internet.
http://mjg59.livejournal.com/96270.html Other OSes get the same values as Linux, other than the OSYS field. Now, what do these writes do? They're all to PCI config space, so since the machine in question is a 945/ICH7 machine we have publically available docs. A bit of digging later and it shows that the firmware is disabling PCIE active state link control and programming more conservative timings for entry into the C4 processor idle power saving state. In other words, certain bits of power management functionality are compromised if it detects that it's running anything other than Vista. Weirdly, it also flags the HPET as present but invisible on Linux, but I suspect that's an oversight rather than anything deliberate.
Why would they do this? I've no idea. I suspect it's something to do with the degree of platform validation performed rather than a subtle attempt to degrade Linux's battery life on the hardware (frankly, we do a good enough job of that ourselves right now), but this is exactly the kind of reason we removed _OSI("Linux") support from the kernel. Vendors will do stupid things with it.
There are two issues here. One is that vendors don't test with it, the other issue is that the developers don't test it with enough hardware. Ok, that's one issue. The manufacturers don't care either way and developers don't test all kernel releases on all hardware.
Because of this lack of testing the Linux ACPI code is buggy, which is what Matthew Garrett spends time working on.
Actually there are deeper issues like this one
http://advogato.org/article/913.html The single biggest problem is video hardware. The spec doesn't require the BIOS to reprogram the video hardware at all, and so often it'll come back in an entirely unprogrammed state. This is an issue, since we (in general) have absolutely no idea how to bring a video card up from scratch. One of the easiest workarounds is to execute code from the video BIOS in the same way that the system BIOS does on machine startup. vbetool lets you do this from userspace, and it works a surprisingly large amount of the time. However, there's no guarantee that it'll be successful. Vendors often unmap that section of BIOS after the system has been brought up, since they've got far more BIOS code than will fit in the BIOS region of the legacy address space. In the long run, the only solution is drivers that know how to program an entirely uninitialised chip. The new modesetting branch of the Intel driver aims to do this, as do the developers of noveau.
See the hardware manufacturer writes a Windows driver that does this right. Maybe they write a Linux driver, maybe they don't. If they do, that driver is most likely closed source like NVidia's and therefore not installed by default. Or it is open source and not complete yet (ATI's). Or you can use the freetard reverse engineered NVidia driver which is not complete. Hell even the closed source driver might have been broken by some freetard developer trying to persuade them to open up by breaking it as often has he can.
Basically hardware manufacturers by and large care about Windows working because it has 90% market share. They don't care about Linux. Since the Linux developers don't test and patch on all hardware it is up to the end users to kludge around the defects.
So suppose you make USB widgets and want to support Linux. You want to test S3 or S4 but you need to fiddle around getting S3 and S4 to work at all on the laptop before you can test your driver's support for power management.
Of course the freetard response to all this is to blame the manufacturers. Famously Ryan Farmer accused Foxconn of a conspiracy to break Linux because his Foxxconn motherboard had these issues
Kent Police had e-mailed imc-uk-contact in the morning requesting that personal information about the Judge from the recent SHAC trial in the UK be removed from the site. However this information had already been quickly removed in line with IMC UK policy. The e-mail also requested information relating to the poster be retained. Indymedia as an open posting news service does not log such information about its sources.
The machine was handed to the Police by the management of UK Grid, a Manchester based colocation facility, without a warrant being shown. It is believed that a warrant for this one server may exist and have been issued by a Chief Inspector. As the server was a mirror of the site, it can be concluded that the validity of the seizure wasn't checked, and the police attacked Indymedia infrastructure in the UK.
...
Andy Robbins, the cop whose name is on the document posted here, is the main person behind the repression of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) over the past few years.
How about setting up a server that does not keep logs, allowing the SHAC to post on it and then claiming the whole operation was part of "the repression of SHAC"?
They've also blocked out the UK Grid's contact name on the warrant and left Andy Robbins' name readable despite their privacy policy.
Even though you and I think SHAC is odious, it seems like it's pretty clear where their sympathies lie. And that's the reason they have legal troubles.
Imagine if a right wing website hid anti abortion, KKK or Neo Nazi terrorists' identities from the police like this? Indymedia may not be terrorists themselves, though one Indymedia activist was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage, but they're clearly acting as a forum for them.
Seems like if they want to stay in business they need to both disown these people and help the police trying to catch them.
From TFA "A circular steel plate was positioned inside the 17.0"-diameter tail cylinder at the front of the tail tube and another towards the rear of the tube," Coster-Mullen writes. "These allowed the tail to be slid over the 10.5"-diameter gun tube during assembly. The forward plate was positioned 26.5" in front of the aft plate and was welded to the front of the tail tube."
Though the bookâ(TM)s specificity about dimensions, shapes, and materials was mind-numbing, the accumulation of detail was strangely seductive.
Indymedia doesn't log ip numbers, there is nothing to obtain from the servers
If your posters are indulging in a campaign of intimidation against scientists and judges, not logging IP numbers is not a morally neutral choice. I also wonder what the legal implications are of knowing an IP address and deciding not to record it.
But that's what happened last year, when a top official at Marsh USA Inc. was informed that he and his company's employees had landed in the crosshairs of an extremist animal rights group. The reason? Marsh provides insurance for one of the world's biggest animal testing labs.
"If you bail out now," the letter advised, "you, your business, and your family will be spared great hassle and humility."
That letter â" and the harassment campaign that followed, after Marsh declined to "bail out" â" was another shot fired by Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC).
This British-born group, now firmly established in the United States, is waging war on anyone involved with Huntingdon Life Sciences, which tests drugs on approximately 70,000 rats, dogs, monkeys and other animals each year. In the process, SHAC is rewriting the rules by which even the most radical eco-activists have traditionally operated.
In the past, even the edgiest American eco-warriors drew the line at targeting humans. They trumpeted underground activists' attacks on businesses and laboratories perceived as abusing animals or the environment â" the FBI reports more than 600 incidents, causing $43 million in damage, since 1996.
But spokespeople for the two most active groups in the U.S., the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), have always been quick to claim that their underground cells have never injured or killed any people.
Since 1999, however, members of both groups have been involved with SHAC's campaign to harass employees of Huntingdon â" and even distantly related business associates like Marsh â" with frankly terroristic tactics similar to those of anti-abortion extremists.
Keynesianism didn't work very well in the UK, the US or India.
Before Thatcher and Reagan the US and the UK had high 'progressive' taxes. Economically they did rather poorly. Growth was sluggish, inflation high. Post Reagan and Thatcher growth was higher, inflation lower. The problem is that the government spends money paying off extortion from unions and bailing out failed auto manufacturers. If failed companies can count on a bailout they have no incentive to improve.
India was dirt poor during its regulated economy periods and have got much richer as it moved to a free market.
All this explains why Keynesianism has become unfashionable - it stopped working.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think the government should allow the economy to collapse completely in a Great Depression scenario. However in the normal case, the free market has access to more information than government planners. You can see this now with government intervention in banks - the plan is to buy shares when the sector is in crisis, clean things up and then sell the shares. It isn't to keep the banks nationalized indefinitely.
Keynesian vs free market economies reminds me a bit of bond vs stock based funds. Bond based funds have too low a return to be a good investment strategy long term - they don't keep up with inflation. Stock based funds have a higher average return but are more unstable. When things go well, stocks are great. You need bonds to keep you from being wiped out by stock market crashes.
Since we seem to be in a crash at the moment, I'd expect to see more Keynesianism and more planning. In a year or so, I'd expect to see less. The Labour Party in the UK is smart enough for this, not too sure about the Democrats in the US.
In fact rather than viewing the two extremes as being complementary parts of an economic strategy, most Americans of either party are rabidly partisan about one or the other being sufficient in itself, ignoring any evidence to the contrary.
The client makes USB peripherals not laptops. They have a Linux driver which supports power management. Unfortunately pretty much all Linux distributions suck at power management. Poor battery life, S3 and S4 broken.
And if you read this blog written by one of the Linux kernel ACPI developers it's clear that this is due to limitations in Linux's ACPI support -
Not necessarily. Most cultures have myths of ancients that left traps to protect their treasures from grave robbers. Seems to me that gassing a few of them will motivate the survivors by convincing them they've found something really valuable.
Yes it's mean spirited but it's also satire. And like most satire it contains a kernel of truth. Ok, it doesn't have an entry specifically for this situation. I'll just knock one up
Real life: Governments keep secrets
Aspieration :... and they will therefore be totally understanding (and not try ship you to a hellish prison for decades) if you hack into their computers to find those secrets.
Or you can scroll down for comments containing the acronym IANAL explaining how this self proclaimed geek should be let off due to a complex and totally bogus legal argument. I WANT TO BELIEVE!
Students having rights is bad for discipline. Back in my school days, the teachers could crucify students to the wall for dumb insolence. But we respected them and worked hard, damn it.
It seems the main problem is customer expectation; people expect a netbook to work just like a normal laptop and are surprised when it doesn't. Behind that would seem to be a lack of willingness to acquiesce to the charm of Ubuntu. Around 60,000 of the netbooks were shipped; mostly with a broadband bundle.
It's not the first time we've heard about high return rates for these reasons. TechRadar has previously investigated strong rumours of high netbook return rates to DSG stores (PC World, Dixons, Currys.digital) but was rebuffed.
And it seems that high return rates aren't only a problem this side of the pond. In an interview with Laptop Mag in the US, MSI's Director of US Sales Andy Tung admitted that people just weren't used to Linux. "Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux," he said.
'Not what they are used to'
"People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don't know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realising that it's not what they are used to."
"They don't want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks."
Consumers may be realising that you do actually get what you pay for - and that cheap netbooks don't actually come with the ability to edit video or work just like Windows. At the launch of a big-name netbook in the summer, TechRadar spoke to a product manager who admitted the big problem with netbooks was letting consumers know what they were buying.
We spoke to Ben Russell, a recent Eee PC purchaser. "I find the OS a little bit confusing coming from a PC background - and to be honest I still prefer my Windows laptop. However it is light, cheap and fine for a bit of word processing, email, etc. The biggest bugbear is getting Mobile Broadband to work. It took a long time to get up and it's still not stable or doesn't work every time. It's a real downside."
The fact that companies like HP and Dell sell netbooks (and pre-load Linux across their product lines) shows just how far the Linux trend has already progressed.
Linux netbooks have a 4 times higher return rate than XP ones though
Sunday we reported on an interview with an MSI manager, who stated that internal research had shown that the return rate for the Linux version of MSI's Wind netbook was four times as high as that of the Windows XP version. He claimed that the unfamiliarity of people with Linux was the culprit. This claim sparked some serious discussion around the net, but now MSI's statement is being repeated by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu.
One of the problems with MSI's Andy Tung's statement was that it was impossible to say if the figures extended beyond MSI's own Wind, and if it was possible to apply this claim to the general netbook market. Canonical's marketing manager, Gerry Carr, confirms in an interview that retun rates for netbooks running open source software is indeed higher than that of those running Windows XP. "We don't know what the XP return rates are," Carr states, "But I will say that the return rate is above normal for netbooks that offer open-source operating systems."
Carr further explains:
Unclear selling is happening, typically online. The customer will get their netbook sent to their home and they imagine to find something like a Microsoft desktop, but they see a brown Ubuntu version. They are unwilling to learn it and they were expecting to have Windows. We said a long time ago, we didn't want to make a Windows clone. It has a different interface especially with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. We think it's a better way but it's not the same way people are used to. That unfamiliarity can take a while to learn and there is an education that has to be stressed.
As some have noted, it's interesting that people who switch from Windows to Mac OS X do not seem to have this problem. Personally, I believe that there are some logical reasons why this is the case. I think most people buy a Mac after having it seen in operation at a friend or relative, or even after having played with it at an Apple Store or an official retailer. Also, I think most people already know that Apple is different than Windows, and as such, when they choose to purchase a machine from Apple, they are aware it's going to be different. There is also a psychological effect at work; an Apple computer is not cheap, and post-purchase rationalisation will certainly play a role here.
These factors do not play much of a role in the purchase of a netbook. They are much cheaper, and often, online resellers are unclear that they do not come with Windows. In addition, people are simply less familiar with the whole concept of Linux than they are familiar with Apple - it is easier to deal with something new and different if you know there's going to be something new and different in the first place. And to make matters worse, there are probably very few 'real' retail stores who carry Linux machines for prospective buyers to test.
All in all, I agree with Carr when he says that it doesn't really matter how good or bad desktop Linux is; the fact that it's different is in and of itself reason enough for its adoption rate to be slow.
One of my clients makes hardware and they support Linux. They have Ubuntu machines in the test lab and the testers absolutely hate Ubuntu. Whereas thinks like Sleep and Hibernate just work on Windows, even the much maligned Vista, getting them to work on Ubuntu requires endless fiddling around.
For some people this fiddling around is a hobby, and a chance to prove to yourself that you're smarter than average. For most people, it's a waste of time.
Slashdot Mirror
They're subtly different from Firefox extensions, at least in their original form.
Orignally BHOs could be installed silently by all sorts of crapware like toolbars and the like.
They are written in C++ and use COM, and are pretty hard to get right.
Firefox extensions need to be installed manually by the user and are written in XUL and Javascript.
Though actually I think any extension is going to reduce reliability. And there's always a possibility of some packaging a malicious extension with other software.
Seeing IE's market share drop is always nice for clueful web devs.
Fixed that for you.
I know plenty of web developers who create horrible, broken pages because they render nicely on IE. When I say something along the lines of "you're not even close to being XHTML complaint" they respond with something along the lines of "I hate Firefox! I can never get my layouts to look nice."
That's not just an IE thing. I've seen pages totally broken on Opera. The dumb webdev will start ranting about how IE doesn't follow standards, discover you use Opera and then say "we didn't have time to test with that".
It's pretty clear they only tested on Firefox. And that the issue is not standards compliance because the page is totally broken on Opera too.
Actually most of the time, it will be broken on Firefox too, so the issue is not so much only testing on Firefox as not testing properly on any browser.
Do you realize what it really means? He kinda accepts some blame for not being efficient, but in the same sentence he said that he had to stop TELLING ACPI SCRIPTS THAT HE ACTUALLY IS RUNNING LINUX because of the amount of brokenness and possibly sabotage that gets triggered in those scripts when they see Linux. So when the choice is to pretend being Vista (and possibly bring up more brokenness of workarounds made specifically for Vista) or using supposedly Linux-specific ACPI definitions, sections "for Vista" give better results.
If you read his blog you'd know that he doesn't believe Bios vendors are sabotaging Linux and Linux doesn't claim to be Vista for this reason, it claims to be Vista because the Vista section is the only one that the manufacturers test. Also he says Linux can't define an OS Interface (_OSI) for Linux because Linux is refactored to frequently to maintain an interface.
Personally I think that this constant refactoring is not what you want in a production OS. You need to define interfaces carefully and then preserve them for as long as possible. Constant refactoring just breaks stuff. It's the sort of thing hippy programmers working on non commercial projects and students think is a good idea. People that have to support what they do, in the sense of dealing with angry customers and providing a fix quickly when they break something learn not to work like this.
See the hardware manufacturer writes a Windows driver that does this right. Maybe they write a Linux driver, maybe they don't.
There are no "drivers" for ACPI,
If you bothered to read what he wrote, the driver in this case is the video driver, which needs to reinitialize the video card on the way back up from S3 or S4 because the power was cut to it on the way down. He claims that because the Linux video drivers don't get this stuff right, people get crashes on the way back up. Now he's a kernel ACPI specialist, and it seems reasonable he talks from experience.
Plus I know from my experience he's right. All the Linux laptops in my clients test lap have problems switching to and from at least one of the ACPI power states even without any external hardware. Which makes it impossible to test things like S3 with their device plugged in.
Hence my statement ACPI support on Linux sucks. I don't really care that the suckage is not Linux's fault by rather due to some conspiracy, and neither does anyone worth talking to. In fact your blathering about how the blame lies not with Linux but a conspiracy of Microsoft, manufacturers and the ACPI standard itself means we have now crossed the Linux Fault Threshold
http://prakharagrawal.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/linux-linux-linux-part-two-crossing-the-linux-fault-threshold/
The important concept to bear in mind when discussing software issues with Linux apologists is the "Linux Fault Threshold". Clever use of this concept helps you to avoid losing your temper with someone who might actually be able to render practical help, while ensuring that you give the correct dose of venom (60cc of scorpion juice, administered per anem with a rusty syringe) to the vast crowd of mindless apologists who just want you to use their pet operating system because it makes them feel good and gives them something to boast about on Slashdot. I provide this as a service to all the blind, alcoholic, incontinent grandmothers out there who appear to be installing Linux without any trouble if the Slashdot comments on any article remotely related to user interface design are to be believed.
The Linux Fault Threshold is the point in any conversation about Linux at which your interlocutor stops talking about how your problem might be solved under Linux and starts talking about how it isn't Linux's fault that your problem cannot be solved under Linux. Half the time, t
Actually this is another liberal arts gradism
In the standard historical accounts, the way that the bomb's gun mechanism worked was by shooting a cylindrical "male" uranium projectile into a concave, stationary uranium target. This act of atomic coitus created a mass sufficient to produce a critical reaction. The mass of the projectile was said to be 38.5 kilograms, and the mass of the target was said to be 25.6 kilograms. But no matter how many times Coster-Mullen did the math the numbers never quite worked out in a way that allowed the projectile and the target to fit inside the gun barrel while remaining subcritical.
The source of the error, Coster-Mullen recognized, was an assumption that every (male) researcher who studied the subject had made about the relation between projectile and target. These scholars had apparently been unable to conceive of an arrangement other than a "missionary position" bomb, in which a solid male projectile penetrated a vessel-like female target. But Coster-Mullen realized that a female-superior arrangement in which a hollow projectile slammed down on top of a stationary cylinder of highly enriched uranium-yielded the correct size and mass.
It's like he can't concentrate on engineering at all and his mind drifts to thoughts of sex and from there to some garbled feminist critique of science and technology being phallocentric and sexist. That sort of thing strikes me as only being plausible to people that have no interest in or understanding of science and technology. Essentially it's a pretentious way of telling people not to feel quilty about their ignorance.
And to me a 'female' projectile seems more likely just looking at the relative mass of the projectile vs the target.
It's not a question of whether they are odious or not. They are terrorists - quite literally. They terrorise people to fulfill their political objectives.
Once you start to do that the police will try to lock you up. And if people try to stop them or even don't help them to the best of their ability, they will lock them up too.
The point is that political speech has limits, and one of those limits is violence or incitement to violence. Here's a handy cut out and keep guide to where the limit is in this case.
* Saying Huntingdon Life Sciences should be shutdown. This is protected political speech and is ok
* Demonstrating outside Huntingdon Life Sciences. Once again, so long as the demonstration is peaceful, UK law protects the demonstators.
* Calling for boycotts of HLS. Once again, completely OK.
* Dressing up in masks and beating employees of HLS half to death with baseball bats, planting fire bombs or sending letter bombs, posting leaflets around the homes of contractors for HLS accusing them of being pedofiles. Sending letters to HLS employees or contractors threatening them with 'terrorism' or calling their house every hour of the night and screaming death threats at their kids. Digging up dead relatives of employees ( really - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/staffordshire/4176446.stm ). All these things have been done by SHAC or its allies. And none of them are protected political speech. In fact they are terrorism, literally KKK/mafia tactics.
The original reason they got involved with the police is because some SHAC activist posted a judge's name and address on the site to encourage the goon squad to go after him. That crosses a crucial line to being incitement, and inciting violence against judges is the best way I can think of to get yourself raided by the police.
The problem with Indymedia is that they don't differentiate between SHAC and other legal protest groups.
It's not about odiousness and it's not about free speech. If protect people like SHAC, you should expect to have problems with the police. What they did was like refusing to help the police find the name of a KKK or mafia thug who was trying to intimidate a judge back in America back when the KKK or mafia was at war with US law enforcement.
Actually I think they sort of want a confrontation so they can scream about 'state repression' and accuse the police of being Gestapo/Stasi etc. However if you step back and look at this, you realise that SHAC are not a legitimate political group that has renounced violence. In fact quite the reverse, they avoid politics completely and work exclusively through violence.
I think in a democracy, regardless of how you feel about animal experimentation you should not try to get shield people like them from law enforcement. Actually legally you don't have much choice. If you know anything about a crime and don't report it you can be prosecuted as an accessory.
From your homepage
http://abelits.livejournal.com/
11:25 pm October 6th, 2008
I finally made Ubuntu properly suspend and resume on XO, so now I don't have to wait for it to boot up when I carry it around.
05:01 am April 27th, 2008
Ubuntu installation on XO laptop
Right so it took you six months to get suspend working on an XO, and yet ACPI works flawlessly on Linux.
The thing is if someone is paying you to test some device's S3 support, spending even six minutes getting your test laptop to suspend properly even without the device is going to make you complain. Especially if that same laptop suspends and resumes just fine in Windows.
LOL at the MS Paint pictures of you BTW. I can see why Bad Ass Boutique thinks your some kind of commissar
http://abelits.livejournal.com/35021.html#cutid1
You remind me of the Yugoslav tourist board people who told me and my parents very sternly that there was coffee in all supermarkets when we complained that we couldn't find any on holiday there back in the 80's.
The system is perfect, right? Anyone criticizing it is lying and needs to be browbeaten into silence?
You know if you really want to help you actually need to fix bugs, not just lecture people who talk about them that they are wrong and no bugs exist.
Linux sucks for ACPI and covering up the bugs will just mean it will continue to suck. Ironically people like you are doing far more damage to free software than the Windows fanboys you rave about on the Internet.
ACPI sucks on Linux. E.g.
http://mjg59.livejournal.com/96270.html
Other OSes get the same values as Linux, other than the OSYS field. Now, what do these writes do? They're all to PCI config space, so since the machine in question is a 945/ICH7 machine we have publically available docs. A bit of digging later and it shows that the firmware is disabling PCIE active state link control and programming more conservative timings for entry into the C4 processor idle power saving state. In other words, certain bits of power management functionality are compromised if it detects that it's running anything other than Vista. Weirdly, it also flags the HPET as present but invisible on Linux, but I suspect that's an oversight rather than anything deliberate.
Why would they do this? I've no idea. I suspect it's something to do with the degree of platform validation performed rather than a subtle attempt to degrade Linux's battery life on the hardware (frankly, we do a good enough job of that ourselves right now), but this is exactly the kind of reason we removed _OSI("Linux") support from the kernel. Vendors will do stupid things with it.
There are two issues here. One is that vendors don't test with it, the other issue is that the developers don't test it with enough hardware. Ok, that's one issue. The manufacturers don't care either way and developers don't test all kernel releases on all hardware.
Because of this lack of testing the Linux ACPI code is buggy, which is what Matthew Garrett spends time working on.
Actually there are deeper issues like this one
http://advogato.org/article/913.html
The single biggest problem is video hardware. The spec doesn't require the BIOS to reprogram the video hardware at all, and so often it'll come back in an entirely unprogrammed state. This is an issue, since we (in general) have absolutely no idea how to bring a video card up from scratch. One of the easiest workarounds is to execute code from the video BIOS in the same way that the system BIOS does on machine startup. vbetool lets you do this from userspace, and it works a surprisingly large amount of the time. However, there's no guarantee that it'll be successful. Vendors often unmap that section of BIOS after the system has been brought up, since they've got far more BIOS code than will fit in the BIOS region of the legacy address space. In the long run, the only solution is drivers that know how to program an entirely uninitialised chip. The new modesetting branch of the Intel driver aims to do this, as do the developers of noveau.
See the hardware manufacturer writes a Windows driver that does this right. Maybe they write a Linux driver, maybe they don't. If they do, that driver is most likely closed source like NVidia's and therefore not installed by default. Or it is open source and not complete yet (ATI's). Or you can use the freetard reverse engineered NVidia driver which is not complete. Hell even the closed source driver might have been broken by some freetard developer trying to persuade them to open up by breaking it as often has he can.
Basically hardware manufacturers by and large care about Windows working because it has 90% market share. They don't care about Linux. Since the Linux developers don't test and patch on all hardware it is up to the end users to kludge around the defects.
So suppose you make USB widgets and want to support Linux. You want to test S3 or S4 but you need to fiddle around getting S3 and S4 to work at all on the laptop before you can test your driver's support for power management.
Of course the freetard response to all this is to blame the manufacturers. Famously Ryan Farmer accused Foxconn of a conspiracy to break Linux because his Foxxconn motherboard had these issues
http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php
Kent Police had e-mailed imc-uk-contact in the morning requesting that personal information about the Judge from the recent SHAC trial in the UK be removed from the site. However this information had already been quickly removed in line with IMC UK policy. The e-mail also requested information relating to the poster be retained. Indymedia as an open posting news service does not log such information about its sources.
The machine was handed to the Police by the management of UK Grid, a Manchester based colocation facility, without a warrant being shown. It is believed that a warrant for this one server may exist and have been issued by a Chief Inspector. As the server was a mirror of the site, it can be concluded that the validity of the seizure wasn't checked, and the police attacked Indymedia infrastructure in the UK.
...
Andy Robbins, the cop whose name is on the document posted here, is the main person behind the repression of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) over the past few years.
How about setting up a server that does not keep logs, allowing the SHAC to post on it and then claiming the whole operation was part of "the repression of SHAC"?
They've also blocked out the UK Grid's contact name on the warrant and left Andy Robbins' name readable despite their privacy policy.
Even though you and I think SHAC is odious, it seems like it's pretty clear where their sympathies lie. And that's the reason they have legal troubles.
Imagine if a right wing website hid anti abortion, KKK or Neo Nazi terrorists' identities from the police like this? Indymedia may not be terrorists themselves, though one Indymedia activist was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage, but they're clearly acting as a forum for them.
Seems like if they want to stay in business they need to both disown these people and help the police trying to catch them.
From TFA
"A circular steel plate was positioned inside the 17.0"-diameter tail cylinder at the front of the tail tube and another towards the rear of the tube," Coster-Mullen writes. "These allowed the tail to be slid over the 10.5"-diameter gun tube during assembly. The forward plate was positioned 26.5" in front of the aft plate and was welded to the front of the tail tube."
Though the bookâ(TM)s specificity about dimensions, shapes, and materials was mind-numbing, the accumulation of detail was strangely seductive.
Fucking liberal arts graduates.
Yeah, but by not helping the police to catch the SHAC posters, Indymedia have put themselves in a rather precarious position.
Indymedia doesn't log ip numbers, there is nothing to obtain from the servers
If your posters are indulging in a campaign of intimidation against scientists and judges, not logging IP numbers is not a morally neutral choice. I also wonder what the legal implications are of knowing an IP address and deciding not to record it.
Agreed. These people are terrorists
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=42
A Chicago insurance executive might seem like one of the last people who'd be opening a letter with this succinctly chilling message: "You have been targeted for terrorist attack."
But that's what happened last year, when a top official at Marsh USA Inc. was informed that he and his company's employees had landed in the crosshairs of an extremist animal rights group. The reason? Marsh provides insurance for one of the world's biggest animal testing labs.
"If you bail out now," the letter advised, "you, your business, and your family will be spared great hassle and humility."
That letter â" and the harassment campaign that followed, after Marsh declined to "bail out" â" was another shot fired by Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC).
This British-born group, now firmly established in the United States, is waging war on anyone involved with Huntingdon Life Sciences, which tests drugs on approximately 70,000 rats, dogs, monkeys and other animals each year. In the process, SHAC is rewriting the rules by which even the most radical eco-activists have traditionally operated.
In the past, even the edgiest American eco-warriors drew the line at targeting humans. They trumpeted underground activists' attacks on businesses and laboratories perceived as abusing animals or the environment â" the FBI reports more than 600 incidents, causing $43 million in damage, since 1996.
But spokespeople for the two most active groups in the U.S., the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), have always been quick to claim that their underground cells have never injured or killed any people.
Since 1999, however, members of both groups have been involved with SHAC's campaign to harass employees of Huntingdon â" and even distantly related business associates like Marsh â" with frankly terroristic tactics similar to those of anti-abortion extremists.
Keynesianism didn't work very well in the UK, the US or India.
Before Thatcher and Reagan the US and the UK had high 'progressive' taxes. Economically they did rather poorly. Growth was sluggish, inflation high. Post Reagan and Thatcher growth was higher, inflation lower. The problem is that the government spends money paying off extortion from unions and bailing out failed auto manufacturers. If failed companies can count on a bailout they have no incentive to improve.
India was dirt poor during its regulated economy periods and have got much richer as it moved to a free market.
All this explains why Keynesianism has become unfashionable - it stopped working.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think the government should allow the economy to collapse completely in a Great Depression scenario. However in the normal case, the free market has access to more information than government planners. You can see this now with government intervention in banks - the plan is to buy shares when the sector is in crisis, clean things up and then sell the shares. It isn't to keep the banks nationalized indefinitely.
Keynesian vs free market economies reminds me a bit of bond vs stock based funds. Bond based funds have too low a return to be a good investment strategy long term - they don't keep up with inflation. Stock based funds have a higher average return but are more unstable. When things go well, stocks are great. You need bonds to keep you from being wiped out by stock market crashes.
Since we seem to be in a crash at the moment, I'd expect to see more Keynesianism and more planning. In a year or so, I'd expect to see less. The Labour Party in the UK is smart enough for this, not too sure about the Democrats in the US.
In fact rather than viewing the two extremes as being complementary parts of an economic strategy, most Americans of either party are rabidly partisan about one or the other being sufficient in itself, ignoring any evidence to the contrary.
( Every time you fail to close a parenthesis, an aspie leaks memory.
The client makes USB peripherals not laptops. They have a Linux driver which supports power management. Unfortunately pretty much all Linux distributions suck at power management. Poor battery life, S3 and S4 broken.
And if you read this blog written by one of the Linux kernel ACPI developers it's clear that this is due to limitations in Linux's ACPI support -
http://mjg59.livejournal.com/?skip=20
Not necessarily. Most cultures have myths of ancients that left traps to protect their treasures from grave robbers. Seems to me that gassing a few of them will motivate the survivors by convincing them they've found something really valuable.
I think all of us should leave our hugboxes for a few minutes and read this
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Aspierations
Yes it's mean spirited but it's also satire. And like most satire it contains a kernel of truth. Ok, it doesn't have an entry specifically for this situation. I'll just knock one up
Real life: Governments keep secrets
Aspieration : ... and they will therefore be totally understanding (and not try ship you to a hellish prison for decades) if you hack into their computers to find those secrets.
Or you can scroll down for comments containing the acronym IANAL explaining how this self proclaimed geek should be let off due to a complex and totally bogus legal argument. I WANT TO BELIEVE!
The choice is yours.
Students having rights is bad for discipline. Back in my school days, the teachers could crucify students to the wall for dumb insolence. But we respected them and worked hard, damn it.
Get off my lawn.
I accidentally the whole wallaby.
Yeah, and Grandma will soon be using Linux, right? Dream on, fanboy.
It's not just MSI
http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/buyers-give-thumbs-down-to-linux-netbooks-484642?src=rss&attr=all
Carphone Warehouse is to stop selling one of their Linux netbooks after the return rates went through the roof. The Elonex Webbook, which ships with Ubuntu, was taken back to the shop by 20 per cent of purchasers. Contrary to some reports, the laptops are not being 'recalled.'
It seems the main problem is customer expectation; people expect a netbook to work just like a normal laptop and are surprised when it doesn't. Behind that would seem to be a lack of willingness to acquiesce to the charm of Ubuntu. Around 60,000 of the netbooks were shipped; mostly with a broadband bundle.
It's not the first time we've heard about high return rates for these reasons. TechRadar has previously investigated strong rumours of high netbook return rates to DSG stores (PC World, Dixons, Currys.digital) but was rebuffed.
And it seems that high return rates aren't only a problem this side of the pond. In an interview with Laptop Mag in the US, MSI's Director of US Sales Andy Tung admitted that people just weren't used to Linux. "Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux," he said.
'Not what they are used to'
"People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don't know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realising that it's not what they are used to."
"They don't want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks."
Consumers may be realising that you do actually get what you pay for - and that cheap netbooks don't actually come with the ability to edit video or work just like Windows. At the launch of a big-name netbook in the summer, TechRadar spoke to a product manager who admitted the big problem with netbooks was letting consumers know what they were buying.
We spoke to Ben Russell, a recent Eee PC purchaser. "I find the OS a little bit confusing coming from a PC background - and to be honest I still prefer my Windows laptop. However it is light, cheap and fine for a bit of word processing, email, etc. The biggest bugbear is getting Mobile Broadband to work. It took a long time to get up and it's still not stable or doesn't work every time. It's a real downside."
Yeah, because no one has ever thought of doing that on Windows
http://www.yorkspace.com/pc-de-crapifier/
Actually you could probably do it with MSIEXEC. Grep for $OEM_NAME, uninstall if found.
I think you mean Feyd Rautha.
>
The fact that companies like HP and Dell sell netbooks (and pre-load Linux across their product lines) shows just how far the Linux trend has already progressed.
Linux netbooks have a 4 times higher return rate than XP ones though
http://www.osnews.com/story/20362/Canonical_Confirms_MSI_s_Linux_Return_Rate_Statement
Sunday we reported on an interview with an MSI manager, who stated that internal research had shown that the return rate for the Linux version of MSI's Wind netbook was four times as high as that of the Windows XP version. He claimed that the unfamiliarity of people with Linux was the culprit. This claim sparked some serious discussion around the net, but now MSI's statement is being repeated by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu.
One of the problems with MSI's Andy Tung's statement was that it was impossible to say if the figures extended beyond MSI's own Wind, and if it was possible to apply this claim to the general netbook market. Canonical's marketing manager, Gerry Carr, confirms in an interview that retun rates for netbooks running open source software is indeed higher than that of those running Windows XP. "We don't know what the XP return rates are," Carr states, "But I will say that the return rate is above normal for netbooks that offer open-source operating systems."
Carr further explains:
Unclear selling is happening, typically online. The customer will get their netbook sent to their home and they imagine to find something like a Microsoft desktop, but they see a brown Ubuntu version. They are unwilling to learn it and they were expecting to have Windows. We said a long time ago, we didn't want to make a Windows clone. It has a different interface especially with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. We think it's a better way but it's not the same way people are used to. That unfamiliarity can take a while to learn and there is an education that has to be stressed.
As some have noted, it's interesting that people who switch from Windows to Mac OS X do not seem to have this problem. Personally, I believe that there are some logical reasons why this is the case. I think most people buy a Mac after having it seen in operation at a friend or relative, or even after having played with it at an Apple Store or an official retailer. Also, I think most people already know that Apple is different than Windows, and as such, when they choose to purchase a machine from Apple, they are aware it's going to be different. There is also a psychological effect at work; an Apple computer is not cheap, and post-purchase rationalisation will certainly play a role here.
These factors do not play much of a role in the purchase of a netbook. They are much cheaper, and often, online resellers are unclear that they do not come with Windows. In addition, people are simply less familiar with the whole concept of Linux than they are familiar with Apple - it is easier to deal with something new and different if you know there's going to be something new and different in the first place. And to make matters worse, there are probably very few 'real' retail stores who carry Linux machines for prospective buyers to test.
All in all, I agree with Carr when he says that it doesn't really matter how good or bad desktop Linux is; the fact that it's different is in and of itself reason enough for its adoption rate to be slow.
One of my clients makes hardware and they support Linux. They have Ubuntu machines in the test lab and the testers absolutely hate Ubuntu. Whereas thinks like Sleep and Hibernate just work on Windows, even the much maligned Vista, getting them to work on Ubuntu requires endless fiddling around.
For some people this fiddling around is a hobby, and a chance to prove to yourself that you're smarter than average. For most people, it's a waste of time.
(This is my first-ever slashdot post...how do I get a web link to work?)
You have to buy Slashdot Gold to do that.