Look what they figured out.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5120662.stm

Summary: putting up pictures of eyes makes people more honest.

The world in 1984 was not a good thing. Big Brother was once a symbol of oppression. Then they made a TV show. Now it’s lost its stigma, so you put it in a headline, and people think of reality TV, not a poorly written book with terrifyingly familiar themes.

Just wait. The freedoms that have been destroyed in the name of “fighting terror” are a terror in and of themselves.
You see, the goal of terrorist activity is to cause fear, and to get a fearful reaction. The Muslim terrorists cannot be appeased – our very way of life offends them. We are infidels. Our country is morally diseased.

So they attack – try to destroy our freedoms. Our president believes that fighting back is the answer – a holy war. And what happens in time of war?

An unregulated, secret branch of the federal government is permitted to search without a warrant, arrest without charges or probable cause, try and convict without a jury (much less due process), eavesdrop on all DOMESTIC communication, And now, track all your bank transactions.

And Bush has the audacity to become upset when the news leaked out. He claims the newspapers are undermining the war on terror.
No, they are helping. He is playing right into their hand…

Fred Upton is a bad man. He is a very bad man.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5063072.stm

“Representative Fred Upton, head of the House telecommunications subcommittee, said competition could mean people save $30 to $40 each month on their net access fees.”

Representative Fred Upton has TWICE pushed through a policy that will have a negative impact on all but the weathly.

Network performance Tiering is not competition. Competition is when CONSUMERS have the ability to chose between a number of distinct organizations providing similar services. That sort of competition is a good thing – people will not pay more when they can pay less for the same thing.

Internet service tiering ONLY BENEFITS THE TELECOMUNICATIONS COMPANIES. Nobody else. They will be given the ability to arbitrarily decide that one server does not deserve the same bandwidth as another. Who do you think will get highest priority? Why the telecomunications companies themselves, and their business partners of course.

This is a slippery slope. There is a slight – VERY SLIGHT possibility that consumer internet bills might go down a little. But the bills for service providers will go up.

Already companies have to pay exorbitant amounts for an OC3 connection. It really is obscene. But once they had that connection to a backbone they were set.
Well not anymore. Now you also have to bribe the owners of the backbones to let you use enough bandwidth. Sure, the internet ACCESS cost may go down, but the SERVICE costs are going to go up. Free services could disappear. Hosting costs, colocating costs are going to shoot through the roof once you start seeing any quantity of traffic.

THIS IS VERY BAD FOR THE FREEDOM AND OPPORTUNITY ON THE INTERNET.
THIS COULD STRIP THE INTERNET OF EVERYTHING FREE.

The argument being made is that phone companies cannot offer video services because the internet is too congested. This is bogus. Video streaming is not possible because residential internet bandwidth is not high enough yet. The infrastructure is capable. The congestion is not the backbone, it is the endpoints.

But lies from wealthy people have a way of becoming truth.

And the words of slimy politicians like Fred Upton have a way of ruining things for everybody.

Please people, tell your republican congressmen that they represent you, not big businesses. Tell them to support internet neutrality, and set the dollar signs in their eyes aside.

Save the internet.

Recently I purchased a new 120 gig drive, and I was inspired: Hey I should try installing linux again.

For those who know me, and have a memory for such things, I have linux moments. I would really like to be using linux. I would prefer it. As yet I have never paid for windows, and I do not look forward to having to. (Yes, I’m legal…)

So I decided to give SuSE a try. I have used in as a 64-bit server OS, and it was much easier for a gibbon like me to install and configure that any other *nix I had tried.
After reading the reviews going around the internet, it looked like SuSE was the closest to being a desktop OS. Better installer, easier to configure, more features etc…

My last affair with linux lasted a week. I had completely switched, and used it exculsively. For the regular day to day tasks, it worked acceptibly. I could chat, check my email, surf the web, listen to music and watch most videos.
Everything was working ok (aside from my hatred of open office – word processors should not be written in java…). I believe I was using Mandrake, and that particlar version did not come with firefox. Ok, so after MUCH ado, I did get it installed. And it worked acceptibly.

There was one thing that was driving me nuts, however. The fonts looked… yucky. They were muddy, fuzzy around the edges and blocky. After much research and even more ado, I recompiled X.Org to support font hinting and installed the MS fonts.
After switching to these better fonts, I still had fuzzy text in some programs. I found out there are multiple places you have to turn off antialiasing. So I edited config files, I edited xml files, and as far as I could tell, there should have been NO antialiasing.

Wrong. Firefox was still muddying up the fonts. So, I had to go though the advanced configuration page and look through hundreds of poorly documented settings turning off anything that resembled “blur, fuzz, smooth, alias”. No good. Nothing worked. I managed to make them look worse, but it refused to use my truetype fonts, and it refused to stop makeing the fonts look ugly.

To top it off, gaim’s window flasher was buggy. I need that feature.

The stray the broke the camel’s back, alas was lack of support for Windows Mobile devices.

Fastforward about a year. I don’t really use my pocketPC much, so it is not nearly so much of a priority.

Well SuSE got one thing right – font hinting is compiled in by default now. ClearType is also an easily selectable option, as well as cleartype configuration.

But…

It doesn’t appear to work.

When I switched between them I saw no difference. Even using the truetype fonts, linux was mucking them up.
The killer in this case came from Firefox once again. The fonts just look bad. They look terrible, and they still have not made it easy (or perhaps even possible) to correct.

I was not going to waste my time on it again. I have found that the linux community does not think clear fonts are important, and that I am whining without cause. So I will just not use linux. Perhaps in another year they will get it together.

They need to stop this multiple font rendering engines. They need unity.

One thing I use a lot in windows is my second monitor. I have a dual head graphics card, and I like to have the extra space. To get this in linux, I have to install ATI’s proprietary drivers.
When it first started up, it looked like they had it right. They had created two desktops, and you could move your mouse between them. Then I noticed something. An annoying series of little windows containing the icon for all running programs showed up on the left desktop. Before I installed the drivers, this had been like the system tray in windows – a part of the upper taskbar. Now each program took up a full section on the lower taskbar and cound not be minimized to the tasktray.

Ok, I can live with this I guess…

Next, you cannot drag windows to the second screen. If you right click, you have the option of seding the program the the right desktop. So I chose that, and it places it on desktop # 2 on the left screen. Nothing shows up in the right screen. Apparently the right screen was supposed to correspond to desktop two. That is a great idea, but it didn’t work. Aside from being able to move the mouse between them, the two screens were completely independent.
No thanks. I need to be able to move things to my second display when the primary gets too cluttered.

The other issue is that the photo sharing feature in Yahoo Messenger (by far one of the nicest features I’ve seen in such a product) is not supported in linux. And I can’t use my napster subscription.

So there you have it. Two years in a row, and the fonts are still muddy. The cleartype does not appear to do anything, and programs do not play well together.

I guess I’ll try again next year.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4635233826986620052

NEVER USE A MESSY RECIPE!!!!