Re:Hi, Kevin. I'm one of your victims.
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So I assume that your credit card info getting into Kevin's hands caused you grievous financial harm? Oh, it didn't? Well then.
I've yet to hear about any truly harmful acts Kevin Mitnick ever "perpetrated". Maybe I just never heard about something truly terrible and destructive, but I have my doubts.
What I'm about to say only really applies to major metropolitan areas---yes yes, Canada has those, stop laughing. I entirely agree with other posts that if you're going off to a remote island, just enjoy it! The world'll still be around when you get back
That being said, for people who are going to a more average place in Canada, don't require a micro-SIM (or at least feel comfortable with a pair of scissors) and aren't restricted to the frequencies that Apple favours, there's a number of new smaller carriers here that are far better for data. At very least, I'm with WIND Mobile and it's kindof insanely good compared to the "Big Three" here (really two, since Bell and Telus are two not-anticompetative-we-sear names for the same network), for $35 per month my plan includes unlimited data, and to be clear that isn't a contract so I could walk away at any time. Similarly, any random tourist could stop by a WIND or similar small carrier and get a SIM (although annoyingly with WIND it costs $25, so far more useful if you're planning repeat visits I guess), I'm pretty sure any credit or debit card will work but failing that they accept cash. Just make sure it isn't any of that indistinguishable and childish-looking green stuff;)
I do so all the time when I'm at airports where there's only 15 minutes of free wireless. "Okay, system, my new MAC address is 00:00:00:00:00:01", rinse and repeat.
I mean, I assume you're being a bit silly on purpose (considering the "burning a new DVD" bit..."My gods, this person used the same browser and OS version as.....millions of other people! Now we know who they are!"). But there *are* some extreme measures I could imagine taking that, while these things are very much in the realm of diminishing returns, would have some positive impact on privacy. One hilariously overzealous idea would be, rather than getting a new wireless card all the time, simply making sure have a wireless card that has entirely open-source drivers, then going through and patching those drivers to be as tight-lipped as possible, or even adding random (or pre-programmed switchable presets that mimic the most common) elements for certain replies.
Paranoia, whoo!
Arghhhh I wrote "too" instead of "to" at the end there. Proof that no matter how secure your phone may be, it's never going to be secure against typos.
...but no, seriously, using as open-source of an OS as possible is the way I go, and having plenty of data (about what programs are running, about the networking data, etc).Knowing what your system is doing is the first and most important line of defence (contrast it against all those people whose Windows boxes are "running so slow...guess it's time to upgrade", we've all met those folks).
That being said, if you're on a far less free-as-in-speech OS (you freedom-hater!), you can indeed still try and use open-source software. For Android (my emergency backup smartphone is an Android device...yes, I have an emergency backup smartphone, I'm posting on Slashdot is that really a surprise?) I always check F-Droid first when I'm looking for an app to do something. It's much smaller than the Android Market (obviously) but it's a good first place to check, and I like the interface more than the Market personally. That may largely be because it's more a Repository than a Market/Store and, being a Linux user, I'm more comfortable with that, but that's another reason to recommend too anyone with a similar background.
I often have to try two or three times to get a USB connector into my laptop
Err, not to be snarky, but surely after twice at random orientations you've tried all possible permutations, considering it's always one way or the other? And most cables I use lately are at least somewhat marked (I understand that some, such as Apple, decide not to mark the connectors for style-over-substance reasons, but that's clearly not entirely the spec's fault).
I don't even understand why any self-respecting geek would buy a router that couldn't run OpenWRT, Tomato or DD-WRT. The stock firmware of commercial routers is always just rubbish compared to the open source (ish, in the case of DD-WRT) replacements.
For setting up bandwidth limiting for OpenWRT, well, OpenWRT is for real men (or real women), as this wiki page should make clear. Losta commandline and config files; there are web frontends but I'm unsure if any let you fiddle with these kinds of powers. But if you're looking for fine-tuned control, OpenWRT is pretty much a distro in its own right so the possibilities are pretty vast.
For Tomato (which I use 'cause the graphs are pretty), unlike what SighKoPath has said here, you don't have to set up specific rules for each MAC or IP; just set up the classifications for your own devices, then in QoS -> Basic Settings set the Default Class to something like, say, Class E. Now you can set the bandwidth limits for random strangers in Class E and any device or type of traffic that you don't have an overriding rule for gets categorized in Class E, so any new random neighbor devices will fall into that class. Simple.
As far as routers go, a lot of existing routers (as long as you didn't buy a really bad one with too little memory to even install anything to) are supported by at least one of the three main firmwares. Tomato is far more restricted in terms of choice, but if you can't find a spare WRT-54Gv1-4 lying around, Linksys deliberately sells the WRT-54GL for the sake of folks who'd like to install Linux-based alternate firmwares. For OpenWRT you can check their Table of Hardware, random pick, the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH is good bang-for-your-buck. DD-WRT's equivalent table is here; you can actually get some routers, like Buffalo's WHR-HP-G54-DD, which come with DD-WRT pre-installed. Never actually tried DD-WRT myself . . . I'm a bit of an open-source zealot, and DD-WRT has had a somewhat sketchy record. Plus, have I mentioned Tomato has pretty graphs?
the password is basically "!thisnetworkhasnotbeencracked". Figured if anyone bothers to take the effort and crack a WPA2 (AES) network, they'll appreciate a boolean-variable joke;)
However, C3 must use pre-PS3 Slim units, as new restrictions introduced with the latest iteration of the console prevent the agency from installing the open-source operating system.
I mean, really, on such a tech-y I'm surprised more people aren't annoyed by Sony's thinly-rationalized retroactive lockout of other OSes! (Personally, it's the reason why I've gone from "yeah, I should definitely pick up a PS3" to "hmm, maybe if I run into a used one I'll buy it, I guess.") It's also interesting that even the U.S. government is locked out of such hardware when a company like Sony decides to restrict "homebrew" uses. There's a lot more to be said on that issue . . .
But the 4.X beta runs incredibly fast on my dual core Windows workstation. If the Linux version is significantly faster in rendering, I would be very surprised.
Just because it runs quite fast on your machine in no way precludes it from running faster on a setup that's more optimized and/or with less overhead (ie. X11/Linux). And just because things happen in nearly the blink of an eye doesn't mean that relatively they couldn't be significantly faster...it just means that you'd be nearly unable to notice a difference and thus wouldn't be inclined to care;) "Whoo, this webpage loaded in 0.16 seconds instead of 0.20, I'm so glad I switched operating systems!"
(P.S. at this point, isn't dual-core the new single core? It's almost less "this system is so fast" and more "maaaan, this program is so non-bloated that it runs fine on a mere dual-core; suck it, Crysis!" I kid, I kid).
I just threw an NVIDIA 8400 GS 512MB PCI card into my ancient PIII 600mHz, and since I'm running Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 although I've seriously tweaked the install) XBMC just uses VDPAU to offload all the rendering to the video card. And yes, it can do 1080p x264 video just fine, which amuses me to no end since the majority of the parts in that computer are from 1999!
If you don't have a spare old computer around, or you want to buy a complete solution, basically any of the "Ion-based" nettops should be cheap, tiny and get the job done. There's tons out there, and you can even get one from System76 that already has Ubuntu installed ( http://system76.com/product_info.php?cPath=27&products_id=95 ) at which point you only need to add the XBMC PPA to the repository list, click install and apply, and voila, a tiny cheap machine capable of 1080p video. For some anecdotal evidence on how easily these setups can run you can hunt around the XBMC forums a bit. Basically the key is just to get any kind of machine with a GeForce 8-or-later card in it, and the newer ones have even more features as far as using VDPAU is concerned.
Gnome is corporately sponsored... Red Hat, Novell and I think even Canonical are contributing resources to GNOME.
On the other hand, although KDE uses Qt as a basis, it's otherwise nearly unsponsored (at least, to the degree of corporations actually contributing to it; Nokia's contributions seem to extend to their licensing of Qt allowing people to use it, and largely end there). Okay, that's a bit of a big "but", yet it does mean that a lot of what gets created really is independent first-rate "products" (although that term only applies if you're assuming a market economy paradigm). Good examples include Lancelot, DigiKam, and hell just Konqueror itself. After all, Konqueror was ported to OSX when Apple wanted their own browser; does that mean the Open Source community sponsored Apple?;) And don't forget about Samba, and probably tons of other absolutely essential parts of Apple's platform that I'm forgetting.
There's lots of examples like that, actually; the market economy way of doing things is based on money and profits, so corporations contribute that to FOSS projects. Meanwhile, though, FOSS contributes code that's free to use and modify, which often gets baked in as vital parts of corporations. So just because our system puts nearly all the money in the market economy, and thus it's the corporations doing the sponsorship in that sense, doesn't mean the relationship is so simple or that the power relationship is one way!
As in, the port of KDE 3.5.10 for Jaunty (*buntu 9.04) backported PDF rotation into KPDF, among other things (it's mentioned in the release notes that were linked to on the front page of Kubuntu.org back right before Jaunty Final came out). With those packages you can run KDE 3.5.10 as your DE but still load KDE 4 apps when they're preferable. I know I've now responded to two of your comments and mentioned the KDE 3.5 Jaunty Remix in both comments, but I really wanted to be sure you noticed its existence!
As to NetworkManager, unfortunately current developments in NetworkManager have broken KDE 3.5's KNetworkManager, which is the main problem with running KDE 3.5 on Jaunty. It's fairly easy to get around, though, by just either installing network-manager-gnome and running nm-applet, or (and this is what I've been doing on my netbook) installing Wicd, which is in the repos for Jaunty.
All that being said, although I'm running Jaunty on my laptop, netbook, backup PC and projector computer (albeit that's just an Openbox session and XBMC, not even a DM is running), and gone the Jaunty-KDE3-remix route with two different friends' netbooks, on my main PC which is also my duplex's file server I'm riding out this LTS to the next LTS if I can (and I might not even reboot until then).
Examples of stuff that still doesn't work on Kubuntu Jaunty: About half the wireless networks I try to connect to, the brightness keys on my laptop, transcoding in Amarok, switch compositing on and off more than once or twice and compositing slows to a crawl, with a high chance of krunner or plasma crashing.
Okay, speaking as a guy who's running KDE 3.5 on Kubuntu 8.04 on his main computer I guess I can't argue with you too much;) All my other computers are dabbling to degree in KDE 4, though, and at least one thing I have to take issue with. The Amarok team is quite independent of the main KDE development; the fact that it's based on KDE 4 isn't really why it's so broken it's just that they decided to re-write it from the ground up on their own anyways. Personally they can take Amarok 1.4 from me when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers (or when Amarok 2 is finally on par, which I expect in about 2011), and I've installed Jaunty with KDE 3.5.10 on three different laptops (in case you didn't know, see the Ubuntu KDE 3.5 maintainers home page).
That being said it seems to be a very per-user experience. I tend to have a lot of wacky hardware and setups, so I get screwed; I know and know of people that utterly adore KDE 4 though (like Klaatu from The Bad Apples). Furthermore, for the most part (Amarok 2 being one of the exceptions) I rather like the KDE4 apps. I have a netbook on which KDE 4.3 on Jaunty works almost flawlessly and with 95% of the features of KDE 3.5 with about 30% extra new ones, with of course the annoying problem of how it starts to slow to a near-crash-level crawl if I leave it running for more than 20 minutes...but just running LXDE or Fluxbox or Openbox, and then I can use all the flashy new KDE4 versions of programs in a stable environment, that's how I've dealt with it for the most part.
Totally random, but connected to the topic of Open Source Design, one of the really cool innovations that has come about in KDE land, which is ported to KDE 4 so you can use it in Konqueror there too, is Filelight. It's the best graphical representation of filespace usage I've ever used. Especially if you're like me and have dozens of hard drives filled up with downloaded media distro.iso's and rainbow tables really big but innocuous stuff, and especially especially if also like me things tend to become messy despite vain attempts at OCD-level sorting, then Filelight utterly revolutionizes things. When I look at Konqueror using views like that, then think of OSX's Finder or Windows' Explorer . . . well, then Open Source design doesn't seem like it has anything to answer for!
I wish I had mod points. In fact I wish I had spare accounts and they each had mod points too, so that I could single-handedly mod you to a +5 Insightful. Parent, I salute you and the truth you speak.
Example: Maybe it's gotten better, and there's a nice GUI for this somewhere, but when I plug in a second monitor to my laptop, I restart my X server -- I could never quite get Xinerama or the nvidia stuff to cooperate without a restart.
I don't even think that it's "gotten better", I think you just have terrible luck. I've never had an issue with plugging extra monitors in with Linux (from adding new ones to my main PC back in 2003 when I first started using Linux, out to when I bought myself a new projector and on-the-fly set up a dual-monitor display with FreeDOOM from my Acer Aspire One to test it out....pixels as big as my hand!). Windows is another story, mainly having to do with crashes and absurdly irritating bugs; dual-monitor support and how it gets handled is one of the main reasons I switched over to Linux full time back while I was living in University Residence.
As for Macs, my success rate with plugging them into secondary displays is hit and miss, about 25% complete success, 25% failure, and 50% took a bit of effort and fiddling. That's not counting the times I tried to help people hook their Macbooks up to classroom projectors or such and then realized that they didn't realize they needed a proprietary adapter cable to do so, at which point I laughed at their $1200 new 15" Macbooks and smugly offered them the usage of my $200 13" shitty laptop that I installed Kubuntu on. Yeah, I'm the kind of person who can't stop from helping people but also can't stop from being a bit of a dick about it.
Also, what's the fear of Ctrl+Alt+Backspace?;) Maybe that's just me, though; I've always got a kick out of the visceral feel of hitting that key combination and watching everything blink out of existence and then back in.
I'm not saying I entirely disagree with you, to be clear. Luck of the draw has a lot to do with user experience, for one (nvidia-settings has rarely let me down, but I'm not going to pretend you're lying about having issues with nvidia and on-the-fly adding displays), and secondly I've recommended Macs to people before, convinced them to go over to that platform in fact. It's just that in my experience Macs seem to suffer when they go out of their comfort zone; they may often Just Work when Linux doesn't, but there's also times Linux Just Works when Macs don't, it's just that those scenarios tend to skew more towards power user stuff.
P.S. I notice that you said "Powerbook", so I'm guessing when you say "nvidia stuff" you were running Linux on a PowerPC computer. That's probably where our experiences diverge so harshly; Nvidia has never had an official, fully-supported Linux driver for PowerPC, right? AFAIK to a large degree it's a port of, or at least shares development with their Windows driver (on one occasion I ran into a big issue on my Linux install which was identical to the problem a friend had in Windows...unfortunately for him the trivially simple Linux fix had no Windows analogue), so it was fated to never come out for PowerPC. I actually have a friend who owns and loves a small old Powerbook that he dual-boots, and he mainly uses OSX because with Linux+NVIDIA on PowerPC you're stuck with the feature-incomplete drivers. Alas!
Last minute editing of ppt presentations and easily displaying through a room's digital project are two things that would push me towards a windows netbook.
Those are also two things I've done with my Linux-only laptops (both my 13" running Kubuntu and my 8.9" AA1 running a slightly modified Acer-ized Linpus).
yea then you have to learn dvorak in the first place. God I think the only reason people use that kbrd config is to be an elitist. I taught myself dvorak a few years ago buying into the hype that it was faster...well its not, and this is coming from someone that can do ~100 WPM QWERTY
Uhhhhh....did it never occur to you that your speed and familiarity with QWERTY would be why Dvorak is slower for you? I know my sister types significantly faster with Dvorak than Qwerty; she wasn't terribly fast at Qwerty at the time, nowadays she uses Qwerty about 30% of the time and Dvorak 70% at the time and is at about ~100 WPM on Dvorak but 60 WPM on Qwerty.
Out of curiosity, why Windows 7 on the media center PC? For all my own media centre goodness I just went with XBMC on a rather minimal install of Ubuntu (basically just an openbox session that it boots right into and loads XBMC in, chosen since I'm familiar with Debian and the XBMC team provides a PPA for their program), and XBMC in my experience is far superior to the other media center programs out there (especially if you're serving your media from a Linux server) and it can even decode 1080p videos on my paltry spare 600mHz PIII since I added a GeForce 8400GS 512MB PCI card to it (it's kindof funny how much the processing ability of the graphics card outmatches the entire rest of the computer, heh). I even set it up (in about 30 seconds) so I can use my roommate's Wii remotes to control it. It's pretty much the perfect setup for an HD projector deal.
I too try and use the best tool for the job, but I've found in the past that if I end up deciding on something other than Linux then I usually just didn't know what I was talking about;) (errr, not as a dig against you, I just meant that truthfully from my own experience).
Honestly, I only buy the "bloat" argument from those who have Pentium III's with 128MB of RAM and 50-100GB of disk space where this starts to get significant.
Well okay, it has 256MB of RAM, but I'm currently using an old PIII of mine (600E) to play HD videos (ie. x264-encoded 720p and 1080i/p videos) in XBMC on my projector....uhhh actually I'm not sure whether my argument is saying that bloat still matters in the modern computing world or that one can easily avoid bloat in said world.
It still took two service packs for users to be happy with XP.
Really? I liked the first service pack; the second service pack broke enough that was keeping me using Windows (such as a few games I liked) that I finally made the switch to using Linux full time, and I haven't looked back since (well that's not true, I've often glanced back and gone "phew, there but for the grace of Linus....")
By the way, Fallout 3's third mini-expansion will change the ending and allow you to continue playing once you complete the main quest. Why they didn't think to do that right away confuses me...
Second sentence, re: first sentence;) No, seriously, it's a smart (but dick) move on their part, make people pay to eliminate something they actually had to do more work to program into the game (or at least would have been monumentally trivial to do). Package it up with a few extra morsels and the crowd, especially the console crowd who thinks this kind of open world RPGing is somehow revolutionary and new, will be throwing money at them shortly thereafter.
And this is why so many companies are reluctant to have really open worlds, like how WoW still doesn't have player-created cities and other content while other (less successful) MMORPGs do; the less leeway you give the players, and the more tightly you control the extent of their experience, the more you can dole it out in costly chunks. That's the sad part about the system, that it encourages that instead of encouraging what the technology could actually allow.
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So I assume that your credit card info getting into Kevin's hands caused you grievous financial harm? Oh, it didn't? Well then.
I've yet to hear about any truly harmful acts Kevin Mitnick ever "perpetrated". Maybe I just never heard about something truly terrible and destructive, but I have my doubts.
What I'm about to say only really applies to major metropolitan areas---yes yes, Canada has those, stop laughing. I entirely agree with other posts that if you're going off to a remote island, just enjoy it! The world'll still be around when you get back
;)
That being said, for people who are going to a more average place in Canada, don't require a micro-SIM (or at least feel comfortable with a pair of scissors) and aren't restricted to the frequencies that Apple favours, there's a number of new smaller carriers here that are far better for data. At very least, I'm with WIND Mobile and it's kindof insanely good compared to the "Big Three" here (really two, since Bell and Telus are two not-anticompetative-we-sear names for the same network), for $35 per month my plan includes unlimited data, and to be clear that isn't a contract so I could walk away at any time. Similarly, any random tourist could stop by a WIND or similar small carrier and get a SIM (although annoyingly with WIND it costs $25, so far more useful if you're planning repeat visits I guess), I'm pretty sure any credit or debit card will work but failing that they accept cash. Just make sure it isn't any of that indistinguishable and childish-looking green stuff
I do so all the time when I'm at airports where there's only 15 minutes of free wireless. "Okay, system, my new MAC address is 00:00:00:00:00:01", rinse and repeat. I mean, I assume you're being a bit silly on purpose (considering the "burning a new DVD" bit..."My gods, this person used the same browser and OS version as.....millions of other people! Now we know who they are!"). But there *are* some extreme measures I could imagine taking that, while these things are very much in the realm of diminishing returns, would have some positive impact on privacy. One hilariously overzealous idea would be, rather than getting a new wireless card all the time, simply making sure have a wireless card that has entirely open-source drivers, then going through and patching those drivers to be as tight-lipped as possible, or even adding random (or pre-programmed switchable presets that mimic the most common) elements for certain replies. Paranoia, whoo!
Arghhhh I wrote "too" instead of "to" at the end there. Proof that no matter how secure your phone may be, it's never going to be secure against typos.
Maemo.
...but no, seriously, using as open-source of an OS as possible is the way I go, and having plenty of data (about what programs are running, about the networking data, etc).Knowing what your system is doing is the first and most important line of defence (contrast it against all those people whose Windows boxes are "running so slow...guess it's time to upgrade", we've all met those folks).
That being said, if you're on a far less free-as-in-speech OS (you freedom-hater!), you can indeed still try and use open-source software. For Android (my emergency backup smartphone is an Android device...yes, I have an emergency backup smartphone, I'm posting on Slashdot is that really a surprise?) I always check F-Droid first when I'm looking for an app to do something. It's much smaller than the Android Market (obviously) but it's a good first place to check, and I like the interface more than the Market personally. That may largely be because it's more a Repository than a Market/Store and, being a Linux user, I'm more comfortable with that, but that's another reason to recommend too anyone with a similar background.
Err, not to be snarky, but surely after twice at random orientations you've tried all possible permutations, considering it's always one way or the other? And most cables I use lately are at least somewhat marked (I understand that some, such as Apple, decide not to mark the connectors for style-over-substance reasons, but that's clearly not entirely the spec's fault).
I don't even understand why any self-respecting geek would buy a router that couldn't run OpenWRT, Tomato or DD-WRT. The stock firmware of commercial routers is always just rubbish compared to the open source (ish, in the case of DD-WRT) replacements.
For setting up bandwidth limiting for OpenWRT, well, OpenWRT is for real men (or real women), as this wiki page should make clear. Losta commandline and config files; there are web frontends but I'm unsure if any let you fiddle with these kinds of powers. But if you're looking for fine-tuned control, OpenWRT is pretty much a distro in its own right so the possibilities are pretty vast.
For Tomato (which I use 'cause the graphs are pretty), unlike what SighKoPath has said here, you don't have to set up specific rules for each MAC or IP; just set up the classifications for your own devices, then in QoS -> Basic Settings set the Default Class to something like, say, Class E. Now you can set the bandwidth limits for random strangers in Class E and any device or type of traffic that you don't have an overriding rule for gets categorized in Class E, so any new random neighbor devices will fall into that class. Simple.
As far as routers go, a lot of existing routers (as long as you didn't buy a really bad one with too little memory to even install anything to) are supported by at least one of the three main firmwares. Tomato is far more restricted in terms of choice, but if you can't find a spare WRT-54Gv1-4 lying around, Linksys deliberately sells the WRT-54GL for the sake of folks who'd like to install Linux-based alternate firmwares. For OpenWRT you can check their Table of Hardware, random pick, the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH is good bang-for-your-buck. DD-WRT's equivalent table is here; you can actually get some routers, like Buffalo's WHR-HP-G54-DD, which come with DD-WRT pre-installed. Never actually tried DD-WRT myself . . . I'm a bit of an open-source zealot, and DD-WRT has had a somewhat sketchy record. Plus, have I mentioned Tomato has pretty graphs?
the password is basically "!thisnetworkhasnotbeencracked". Figured if anyone bothers to take the effort and crack a WPA2 (AES) network, they'll appreciate a boolean-variable joke ;)
I mean, really, on such a tech-y I'm surprised more people aren't annoyed by Sony's thinly-rationalized retroactive lockout of other OSes! (Personally, it's the reason why I've gone from "yeah, I should definitely pick up a PS3" to "hmm, maybe if I run into a used one I'll buy it, I guess.") It's also interesting that even the U.S. government is locked out of such hardware when a company like Sony decides to restrict "homebrew" uses. There's a lot more to be said on that issue . . .
But the 4.X beta runs incredibly fast on my dual core Windows workstation. If the Linux version is significantly faster in rendering, I would be very surprised.
Just because it runs quite fast on your machine in no way precludes it from running faster on a setup that's more optimized and/or with less overhead (ie. X11/Linux). And just because things happen in nearly the blink of an eye doesn't mean that relatively they couldn't be significantly faster...it just means that you'd be nearly unable to notice a difference and thus wouldn't be inclined to care ;) "Whoo, this webpage loaded in 0.16 seconds instead of 0.20, I'm so glad I switched operating systems!"
(P.S. at this point, isn't dual-core the new single core? It's almost less "this system is so fast" and more "maaaan, this program is so non-bloated that it runs fine on a mere dual-core; suck it, Crysis!" I kid, I kid).
I just threw an NVIDIA 8400 GS 512MB PCI card into my ancient PIII 600mHz, and since I'm running Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 although I've seriously tweaked the install) XBMC just uses VDPAU to offload all the rendering to the video card. And yes, it can do 1080p x264 video just fine, which amuses me to no end since the majority of the parts in that computer are from 1999!
If you don't have a spare old computer around, or you want to buy a complete solution, basically any of the "Ion-based" nettops should be cheap, tiny and get the job done. There's tons out there, and you can even get one from System76 that already has Ubuntu installed ( http://system76.com/product_info.php?cPath=27&products_id=95 ) at which point you only need to add the XBMC PPA to the repository list, click install and apply, and voila, a tiny cheap machine capable of 1080p video. For some anecdotal evidence on how easily these setups can run you can hunt around the XBMC forums a bit. Basically the key is just to get any kind of machine with a GeForce 8-or-later card in it, and the newer ones have even more features as far as using VDPAU is concerned.
On the other hand, although KDE uses Qt as a basis, it's otherwise nearly unsponsored (at least, to the degree of corporations actually contributing to it; Nokia's contributions seem to extend to their licensing of Qt allowing people to use it, and largely end there). Okay, that's a bit of a big "but", yet it does mean that a lot of what gets created really is independent first-rate "products" (although that term only applies if you're assuming a market economy paradigm). Good examples include Lancelot, DigiKam, and hell just Konqueror itself. After all, Konqueror was ported to OSX when Apple wanted their own browser; does that mean the Open Source community sponsored Apple? ;) And don't forget about Samba, and probably tons of other absolutely essential parts of Apple's platform that I'm forgetting.
There's lots of examples like that, actually; the market economy way of doing things is based on money and profits, so corporations contribute that to FOSS projects. Meanwhile, though, FOSS contributes code that's free to use and modify, which often gets baked in as vital parts of corporations. So just because our system puts nearly all the money in the market economy, and thus it's the corporations doing the sponsorship in that sense, doesn't mean the relationship is so simple or that the power relationship is one way!
As in, the port of KDE 3.5.10 for Jaunty (*buntu 9.04) backported PDF rotation into KPDF, among other things (it's mentioned in the release notes that were linked to on the front page of Kubuntu.org back right before Jaunty Final came out). With those packages you can run KDE 3.5.10 as your DE but still load KDE 4 apps when they're preferable. I know I've now responded to two of your comments and mentioned the KDE 3.5 Jaunty Remix in both comments, but I really wanted to be sure you noticed its existence!
As to NetworkManager, unfortunately current developments in NetworkManager have broken KDE 3.5's KNetworkManager, which is the main problem with running KDE 3.5 on Jaunty. It's fairly easy to get around, though, by just either installing network-manager-gnome and running nm-applet, or (and this is what I've been doing on my netbook) installing Wicd, which is in the repos for Jaunty.
All that being said, although I'm running Jaunty on my laptop, netbook, backup PC and projector computer (albeit that's just an Openbox session and XBMC, not even a DM is running), and gone the Jaunty-KDE3-remix route with two different friends' netbooks, on my main PC which is also my duplex's file server I'm riding out this LTS to the next LTS if I can (and I might not even reboot until then).
Okay, speaking as a guy who's running KDE 3.5 on Kubuntu 8.04 on his main computer I guess I can't argue with you too much ;) All my other computers are dabbling to degree in KDE 4, though, and at least one thing I have to take issue with. The Amarok team is quite independent of the main KDE development; the fact that it's based on KDE 4 isn't really why it's so broken it's just that they decided to re-write it from the ground up on their own anyways. Personally they can take Amarok 1.4 from me when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers (or when Amarok 2 is finally on par, which I expect in about 2011), and I've installed Jaunty with KDE 3.5.10 on three different laptops (in case you didn't know, see the Ubuntu KDE 3.5 maintainers home page).
.iso's and rainbow tables really big but innocuous stuff, and especially especially if also like me things tend to become messy despite vain attempts at OCD-level sorting, then Filelight utterly revolutionizes things. When I look at Konqueror using views like that, then think of OSX's Finder or Windows' Explorer . . . well, then Open Source design doesn't seem like it has anything to answer for!
That being said it seems to be a very per-user experience. I tend to have a lot of wacky hardware and setups, so I get screwed; I know and know of people that utterly adore KDE 4 though (like Klaatu from The Bad Apples). Furthermore, for the most part (Amarok 2 being one of the exceptions) I rather like the KDE4 apps. I have a netbook on which KDE 4.3 on Jaunty works almost flawlessly and with 95% of the features of KDE 3.5 with about 30% extra new ones, with of course the annoying problem of how it starts to slow to a near-crash-level crawl if I leave it running for more than 20 minutes...but just running LXDE or Fluxbox or Openbox, and then I can use all the flashy new KDE4 versions of programs in a stable environment, that's how I've dealt with it for the most part.
Totally random, but connected to the topic of Open Source Design, one of the really cool innovations that has come about in KDE land, which is ported to KDE 4 so you can use it in Konqueror there too, is Filelight. It's the best graphical representation of filespace usage I've ever used. Especially if you're like me and have dozens of hard drives filled up with downloaded media distro
I wish I had mod points. In fact I wish I had spare accounts and they each had mod points too, so that I could single-handedly mod you to a +5 Insightful. Parent, I salute you and the truth you speak.
I don't even think that it's "gotten better", I think you just have terrible luck. I've never had an issue with plugging extra monitors in with Linux (from adding new ones to my main PC back in 2003 when I first started using Linux, out to when I bought myself a new projector and on-the-fly set up a dual-monitor display with FreeDOOM from my Acer Aspire One to test it out....pixels as big as my hand!). Windows is another story, mainly having to do with crashes and absurdly irritating bugs; dual-monitor support and how it gets handled is one of the main reasons I switched over to Linux full time back while I was living in University Residence.
;) Maybe that's just me, though; I've always got a kick out of the visceral feel of hitting that key combination and watching everything blink out of existence and then back in.
As for Macs, my success rate with plugging them into secondary displays is hit and miss, about 25% complete success, 25% failure, and 50% took a bit of effort and fiddling. That's not counting the times I tried to help people hook their Macbooks up to classroom projectors or such and then realized that they didn't realize they needed a proprietary adapter cable to do so, at which point I laughed at their $1200 new 15" Macbooks and smugly offered them the usage of my $200 13" shitty laptop that I installed Kubuntu on. Yeah, I'm the kind of person who can't stop from helping people but also can't stop from being a bit of a dick about it.
Also, what's the fear of Ctrl+Alt+Backspace?
I'm not saying I entirely disagree with you, to be clear. Luck of the draw has a lot to do with user experience, for one (nvidia-settings has rarely let me down, but I'm not going to pretend you're lying about having issues with nvidia and on-the-fly adding displays), and secondly I've recommended Macs to people before, convinced them to go over to that platform in fact. It's just that in my experience Macs seem to suffer when they go out of their comfort zone; they may often Just Work when Linux doesn't, but there's also times Linux Just Works when Macs don't, it's just that those scenarios tend to skew more towards power user stuff.
P.S. I notice that you said "Powerbook", so I'm guessing when you say "nvidia stuff" you were running Linux on a PowerPC computer. That's probably where our experiences diverge so harshly; Nvidia has never had an official, fully-supported Linux driver for PowerPC, right? AFAIK to a large degree it's a port of, or at least shares development with their Windows driver (on one occasion I ran into a big issue on my Linux install which was identical to the problem a friend had in Windows...unfortunately for him the trivially simple Linux fix had no Windows analogue), so it was fated to never come out for PowerPC. I actually have a friend who owns and loves a small old Powerbook that he dual-boots, and he mainly uses OSX because with Linux+NVIDIA on PowerPC you're stuck with the feature-incomplete drivers. Alas!
Those are also two things I've done with my Linux-only laptops (both my 13" running Kubuntu and my 8.9" AA1 running a slightly modified Acer-ized Linpus).
Uhhhhh....did it never occur to you that your speed and familiarity with QWERTY would be why Dvorak is slower for you? I know my sister types significantly faster with Dvorak than Qwerty; she wasn't terribly fast at Qwerty at the time, nowadays she uses Qwerty about 30% of the time and Dvorak 70% at the time and is at about ~100 WPM on Dvorak but 60 WPM on Qwerty.
Out of curiosity, why Windows 7 on the media center PC? For all my own media centre goodness I just went with XBMC on a rather minimal install of Ubuntu (basically just an openbox session that it boots right into and loads XBMC in, chosen since I'm familiar with Debian and the XBMC team provides a PPA for their program), and XBMC in my experience is far superior to the other media center programs out there (especially if you're serving your media from a Linux server) and it can even decode 1080p videos on my paltry spare 600mHz PIII since I added a GeForce 8400GS 512MB PCI card to it (it's kindof funny how much the processing ability of the graphics card outmatches the entire rest of the computer, heh). I even set it up (in about 30 seconds) so I can use my roommate's Wii remotes to control it. It's pretty much the perfect setup for an HD projector deal.
;) (errr, not as a dig against you, I just meant that truthfully from my own experience).
I too try and use the best tool for the job, but I've found in the past that if I end up deciding on something other than Linux then I usually just didn't know what I was talking about
Well okay, it has 256MB of RAM, but I'm currently using an old PIII of mine (600E) to play HD videos (ie. x264-encoded 720p and 1080i/p videos) in XBMC on my projector....uhhh actually I'm not sure whether my argument is saying that bloat still matters in the modern computing world or that one can easily avoid bloat in said world.
Really? I liked the first service pack; the second service pack broke enough that was keeping me using Windows (such as a few games I liked) that I finally made the switch to using Linux full time, and I haven't looked back since (well that's not true, I've often glanced back and gone "phew, there but for the grace of Linus....")
Yeah, that pretty much sums up the modern world.
And, another case of the truth being flamebait (much like reality's well-known liberal bias).
Second sentence, re: first sentence ;) No, seriously, it's a smart (but dick) move on their part, make people pay to eliminate something they actually had to do more work to program into the game (or at least would have been monumentally trivial to do). Package it up with a few extra morsels and the crowd, especially the console crowd who thinks this kind of open world RPGing is somehow revolutionary and new, will be throwing money at them shortly thereafter.
And this is why so many companies are reluctant to have really open worlds, like how WoW still doesn't have player-created cities and other content while other (less successful) MMORPGs do; the less leeway you give the players, and the more tightly you control the extent of their experience, the more you can dole it out in costly chunks. That's the sad part about the system, that it encourages that instead of encouraging what the technology could actually allow.