BunkBlog

Friday –

There have been a series of articles on ZDNet (and therefore on Yahoo Tech) about Linux and Open Source vs. Windows and Shared Source.

I am still amazed, after so long using Linux and Windows (as well as Solaris and Xenix) that the two sides are so entrenched that they can’t even have a rational discussion.

The Linux fanatics (not users, just the fanatical ones) automatically associate anyone who doesn’t call Windows Windoze or Windoofs with the evil empire. Apparently it’s some sort of requirement to put dollar signs in all things MS-related in order to show one’s disdain for the company and their (obviously) inferior products.

Meanwhile, the Windows fanatics (same disclaimer) portray all Linux users as programming geeks, with some strange communist or socialist bent. They further seem to believe that Linux users are like children, and should be shown the error of their ways, since they obviously don’t understand how business works.

I think it’s all quite apparent. The two sides have nothing in common. I don’t mean that completely literally, since they obviously both are looking at the prevalence of their favorite operating system in the market (or community, depending on your bent). When I say they have nothing in common, I mean that they are approaching computing from two completely different philosophies, and neither set of fanatics is capable of seeing that there may be others who don’t find their views completely transparent as soon as they’ve been explained forcefully enough (preferably with cursing or semi-random spelling errors).  

Linux is a good OS, and it keeps getting better. It is stable, although not as stable as BSD. It is fast, and it has decent support for hardware and various filetypes. Its adherents are generally propellorheads, but not exclusively. They know it is a solid system, and it can do great server things and decent desktop things. They also are unconcerned with market share, because it fits their needs now, and they don’t care if grandma uses it or not. Basically, there is no desire to dominate the marketplace. To Linux adherents, there is no marketplace

Windows is a decent OS, with an amazing amount of cruft built up over the years of backward-compatibility. Linux does not need to be backward compatible, since it has no “market” to worry about, and there is no company running the show. Windows is slow and unstable, but supports every file format around, and is easy to use. The Windows zealots are sure that Linux is run by some secret communist cabal, and the sole purpose of any software is to own the market. The fact that Linux is not trying overtly to conquer the desktop market just means they don’t have the strength to do so yet.

Where it gets entertaining is when people talk about the “ease of installation” problems with Linux vs. Windows. HA! Linux takes me 30-45 minutes to install, and Windows 2 hours or more. The reason people can continue to get away with claiming Linux is a bear to install is because almost nobody outside of powerusing geeks ever installs Windows. It came on your machine, and it stays there.

But, you must install Linux on most machines, and so you can see how annoying installing an OS can be.

Other fun things to think about are when folks claim that there is no problem with GNU/Linux as an OS, the problems are all in poor support from hardware and software vendors. Sorry to tell you zealots, but that’s irrelevant to Joe User. If he can’t watch 405 the Movie on his system, he doesn’t care that the real blame lies in the patents behind the Sorenson codec. To him, Linux sucks.

That’s about all I can come up with today. Hope you enjoyed this short primer on Linux-vs-Windows.

Am I the only one for whom IE5.5 automatically resets to “Smaller” for font sizes at random times for no apparent reason?

Is this a bug or a really stupid feature? With Microsquishy, it’s a crap shoot.

OK, so now (or actually it has since the latest re-install), the machine will take a five-second siesta every minute. This is most noticeable during high-speed gaming sessions, when it is (naturally) the most important to not have a random hesitation pop up.

Anyone know of something that causes a five-second period of sluggishness every minute (or 70 seconds), like clockwork? Very annoying.

OK, it looked like the RAM that came with the machine was at fault, and the new RAM I bought (from the same company) was fine and dandy, no crashes for a full day.

And then…

Now, when I hit the power button, I get a green power light, hear the drives spin up, and that’s it. No BIOS info on the monitor, nothing. Hell, the monitor is not registering a video signal from the machine at all. Six months old, still haven’t paid for it yet, and the machine appears to be a paperweight. Oh, I don’t think so.

OK, so now my “new” computer (all of 6 months old) is going down more than a bargirl. Windows ME is crashing with such regularity I can almost set my watch by it. I can rip 2 tracks from a CD before a BSOD, or I can try to talk to someone on AIM at the same time as I download my mail. Now, since I’ve got a 1 Ghz Athlon with 384MB or DDR RAM in a Micron machine, I’m assuming my hardware is not an issue.

The big question is: Do I go back to Win98SE (the machine was preloaded with WinME but it blows), or should I go to Windows 2000? Either one requires much time-consuming backup and restore stuff to bring ICQ and such back from the dead, but which is better for a normal home user that plays a few games? I’m kinda leaning toward Win2k right now, but if I install that, will I be able to dual-boot with Linux later? NTFS5 is supposed to be a bitch file system, from what I hear.
current_music: A Perfect Circle – Nom De Mers
current_mood: bitchy

Reading over some email, cleaning out crap, doing maintenance on the file system, you know: usual geek crap. Came across this gem “The good ones are always taken.” HA! Sure, if you waste enough time, they are. 🙂

I suppose I shouldn’t be too gleeful that someone who treated me poorly has realized her error. But, it sure is cathartic.
current_music: Staind – Can’t Believe
current_mood: happy

I want a new Palm. My old hand-me-down Palm III is getting wiggy, and the new M505 looks sweet. Anyone used one and can tell me if I’m looking at the wrong company? Visor Prism is nice-looking too…

Everyone go over to Neurosis’s journal and tell her to get naked. All these people going for posting numbers before they’ll bare all, what an interesting trend…

I blame Nikki for starting the whole thing with her breast shot last week. Oooh, I hope she starts something else. Gnomey Breasts are good

Honestly, this will be my last complaint about peculiar online choices tonight.

Red and Yellow do not make a good, eye-soothing, web design. If your intent is to look like the Oscar Meyer hotdog wrapper, congratulations. If your main desire was to entice people to actually view your site, sorry but you missed the mark.

Let’s go back to elementary school here and think of complementary colors, shall we? Yellow and Red aren’t. Red and Green are decent, although kinda Christmasy. Yellow and Purple are an acceptable combination as well.

Or, you could just look around and copy a webpage you like. If you like Oscar Meyer, then fine — stick with your red-on-yellow monstrosity. Just don’t be surprised at only getting visitors who are hankering for some processed meat by-product. 🙂
current_mood: silly

Been surfing the “random users” feature for a few minutes, trying to find ideas for new LJ Styles (rather unproductive at that task). There are a surprising number of folks that have journals with absolutely NO public entries. Um, why bother? Just use email or something. 🙂
current_mood: impatient

Why have a bicycle, if you stop at corners, walk across the street towing said bike, and then get back on and ride on the other side? Huh? Bicycles are meant to be ridden, look at how ungainly they are when pushed, in comparison.

Um, so the idea of using Canoma to model a human was pretty stupid, I’ll admit. Seemed like it would work, but Canoma doesn’t like curved surfaces.

So, anyone know how to map a photograph onto a Poser model? Anyone? Bueller?

So, I’m wandering through my httpd logs, and I notice that some folks have really funny machine names. What’s most interesting, though, is that a lot of the military domains are goofily named. For instance:

squid1.tacom.army.mil
jaguar.andrews.af.mil
centurion.warren.af.mil
viper.usafa.af.mil
B-Kahuna.hickam.af.mil

Alas, the vast majority of military domains, as most com and edu ones as well, are dull and cryptic. wrtc53254-139.westriv.com, anyone?
current_mood: silly

Yes, it is true, May has great significance as a commemorative month.

It is Masturbation Month.

Make a party this month to observe the event. Here’s some planning tips for you. hehe
current_mood: silly

I love Texas. I suppose it’s the same anywhere with a strong cultural identity, but I’ve spent more time in Texas than anywhere but California and Korea, so I’ll fixate on Texas.

There is a common phrase heard by anyone not from the South, when we are visiting Texas: “Where y’all from?” With major emphasis on the from, naturally.

My best “Where y’all from” story is one from a couple years ago. I was stationed in Texas, as an instructor at the intel school. (No, military intelligence is not an oxymoron, you cretin. Come up with a more original slam, ok?) We instructors would often go out to dinner together, when we were working evenings. This particular night, we went to the Catfish Corner nearby. Oddly, the Catfish Corner is not on a corner, and in fact is not even in sight of any street corners. But, it is alliterative.

So, we go to the catfish restaurant (and restaurant is a generous description), noting as we arrive that they are having an all-you-can-eat special on catfish and quail. I don’t eat enough to ever feel that “all-you-can-eat” is a good deal, but a couple coworkers did. So, Chip asks what quail tastes like, since his Ohio-born self had never tried such a delicacy.
“It tastes like dove,” replied the waitress, pronouncing dove in a way nearly impossible to describe in mere roman letters, but something like “du-uhve”. Extra long, with some breathiness in there.
“And what does dove taste like?” quipped friend Chip, while visions of the bird of peace bounced in my head.
“Where y’all from?”

It had never occured to her, apparently, that there was anyone who had never actually tried eating doves. Go figure.

.

OK, here I am, spouting about one of the few things I actually am an expert on for a change.

When you design your websites, or your LJ styles, here’s a very important thing to remember. Ready? OK, here we go…
Do not hard-code a specific point-size for your fonts.
Do you know how terribly annoying it is to change the font size setting and see no change? Maybe 8-point Arial Narrow is readable on your monitor, but I don’t run at 640×480, so 8-point fonts are TINY. The HTML standards include standard sizes, such as 1, 2, 3 or even relative sizes, such as +1 or -3. Please use them. Those folks running in a high resolution, as well as people with worse eyesight, will be very grateful.

Otherwise, I end up with two options: squint at the microscopic font, or discard all server font info and run every page in my fonts. Well, I LIKE other folks’ typography, just not itty-bitty fonts. Go look at some HTML primers, and stop using “8-point” as a font size.

/rant off

So, the FBI finally announced how often the infamous Carnivore email-snooping program has been deployed. During a 10 month period, they used it 13 times. Some civil liberties reactionaries.. er, groups claim that is too frequent. How often did they run wiretaps? Bet it’s more. Why are you more worried about email than phone taps? Or is it just the allure of the new? Seriously, most people are boring, so don’t worry about the FBI and the NSA snooping on your email: nobody wants to read it, including many of the recipients. Deal with it.

OK, so, when going to the US name generator, I discovered that, although my family name has been in the US since 1640 (130 years before there was a US), it’s not American enough. I guess we just have to breed faster. I am now Robert Greer.
current_mood: amused

To further prove my propellerhead status, I’ve been playing with my stats output. Yep, Added a graph and still made the HTML smaller. Pruned down the list of requested files, and added a graph showing where people are coming from.

Here’s a shocker: most folks are coming from LiveJournal to my site. A few months ago, most of my visitors came from Winfiles, but CNET has killed the site and not reinstated all the files that were listed there. So, my Linux Theme and startup screen have not been getting a lot of hits lately. Tux is lonely.

On my personal stats output (still huge, yes Corto), I find that the most popular PART of LJ that visitors are arriving from is (drum roll please) NakedParts. Go figure. Not that I’ve posted many nekkid pix there, but I guess my witty commentary is hard to avoid. My host has told me I may be charged 5 or 6 bucks next month for my profligate bandwidth usage. I think I can afford it. heh