Dude I Got a Dell!

After a very long wait, my Dell Inspiron Mini 10 finally arrived today! Huzzah!

Ubuntu: Featuring Closed-Source Technology

I ran across an interesting idea on Brainstorm today: Idea #20508: Emphasize Ubuntu’s reliance on closed-source technology on Ubuntu.com

The title is a bit unclear, but the suggestion and the comments actually provide some interesting discussion material: is Ubuntu featuring and delivering freedom and openness? Or is it focused on “just works”?

KDE Updates

Well! I just applied a bunch of KDE updates and am much impressed right away! I’ve only had it installed minutes and already noticed a lot of improvements:

Vindication

Stallman at the Free Software Foundation website:

Debian’s decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use.

[...]

We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing programs in C#. Therefore, we should not include C# implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions, and we should distribute and recommend non-C# applications rather than comparable C# applications whenever possible.

KDE 4 – Third Time’s the Charm?

Having recently upgraded to Jaunty, I thought it might be time to give KDE another try. I have been a little tough on KDE in the past, but I have always maintained it has potential. Time to see if 4.2 can finally deliver!

Earlier posts on KDE:
A Second Taste of KDE: Laptop Flavor
My first taste of KDE…

I give up.

I’m giving up the mono-arguing game.

Apebox.org just posted the most comprehensive and best defense of mono I have ever read … and it’s still full of shit from tip to stern, but people are praising it like it was the work of Hume himself.

I haven’t yet encountered a pro-mono person that can directly address the issue without personal attacks, logical fallacies or other extraneous bullshit, and that includes the man himself on my own blog.

On the flip side, I’m often embarrassed by the behavior by some on “my side” of the issue. I do not want to be associated with that. I like to think I’ve held myself to a higher standard, and I hope I can walk away with that knowledge at least.

On top of all that, the ubuntu forums are “disappearing” threads that are critical of mono … and people seem perfectly alright with that. I spent a lot of time posting to a thread yesterday, only to come back on today to see it removed from the boards. Same thing on brainstorm with votes being “disappeared”.

Anyway, I have projects that I’ve been neglecting!

Disinformation Disinfected, pt. 3: Banshee in Ubuntu

Here, let’s take a look at one of the main things that get’s me going about mono-supporters.There is a strong push to get Banshee in as the default media player in Ubuntu. Here’s my take on that.

Earlier in the series:
Disinformation Disinfected, Pt. 2: The False Dilemma
Disinformation Disinfected, Pt. 1

Fixing Missing Virtual Terminal

This is sort of a follow up to my latest post about Nvidia drivers: I forgot that I had been having a problem with virtual terminals not showing up. This is how I fixed that!

Read on for some good nerding…

NVIDIA 185.18.14 Drivers

Been running the 185.18.14 drivers for several days now – things are working fine. Check the release notes, lots of improvements this time around!

I even slipped back into a game or three of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (under a smurf name, natch!). Nice performance.

Bing Is Not Google

It’s been binging in all the news sources. You can’t even bing a hour on the internet without seeing something about it. Hell, I was binging in my bing just today and the radio starting binging about the binging thing.  So, I bing to my bing and binged out this bing!