Monday, March 2, 2009

Rants and Laughs 9

Well, it has been quite a while since I've posted one of these, so it is time once again for another Rants & Laughs section, where I review the goings on of the luser community at large.

  • Well, it looks like Linux is having some problems with battery life. Apparently, one luser reported that he could only get 75% of the battery life that he could under Windows. I am sure the new tickless kernels will fix everything.

  • Of course, what Linux really needs is another web browser. Nevermind that there area already thirty of them, and they all suck in different ways. This bunch of freetards can certainly do better than the freetards of the past!

  • Here is a good list of things you need to know in order to use Apt properly. I am glad that FLOSS is so easy to use!

  • CNet thinks Microsoft should fear Ubuntu's cloud computing efforts. Suuuurrreeee!!!! Folks, let's be honest with ourselves here. Cloud computing is nothing more than the same old Thin Client song-and-dance dressed up for Web 2.0. The problems with cloud-computing are the same as the problems with traditional thin clients: the fact that the client is useless without a net connection. Consumers are going to drop cloud computing the first time their net connection fizzles. It is snake oil. Move along.

  • LinuxJournal proclaims that Frozen Bubble is better than MS Solitaire. Wow! Freetards have topped a fifteen year old card game! This is truly the year of the Linux desktop!

  • Some freetardette wants drivers for the Eye-Fi card and says the response 'no one uses Linux' is not good enough since she uses it. Okay, Ms. Freetard, here is a response you might like better, "No one uses Linux except you and a handful of other lusers. The rest of the market (i.e. 99.1%) does not care about Linux support. Now, please take your complaints somewhere else; we are trying to make money here."

  • Another luser blog asks how green is Linux? Well, not as green as it should be considering the aforementioned battery life issues and the miserable ACPI support on many motherboards.

  • The freetard from the previous post is back and whining that vendors should brand 'Linux compatible' on their hardware so that the 0.91% of the market will be able to more easily tell if they are wasting their money or not (on Linux).

  • Well, apparently some luser tried to get QuakeLive working on Ubuntu. Sure, you have to copy some DLLs from Windows XP, which means you need a legal copy of Windows XP, but it works right? Well, sound and input work, but there is no video, which is not a big deal if you are blind! Yeah, that is definitely 95% working.

  • Finally, here is an example of open source development done right. Ubiquiti Networks is offering 5 prizes totaling $200,000 for the development of a GUI for their Router Station. I bet they will get some good projects back.


17 comments:

yOSHi314 said...

"Apparently, one luser reported that he could only get 75% of the battery life that he could under Windows."

few others reported something else. he seems to be a minority, or something.

"what Linux really needs is another web browser."
why not? it's based on webkit, unlike many ie-based "browsers" on windows. let the guy write the browser, if he wants. don't like it? - don't use it.

"Here is a good list of things you need to know in order to use Apt properly. I am glad that FLOSS is so easy to use!"
i hope you do realize that there are gui apt frontends, for normal users.

"The problems with cloud-computing are the same as the problems with traditional thin clients: the fact that the client is useless without a net connection. Consumers are going to drop cloud computing the first time their net connection fizzles. It is snake oil. Move along."

can you get any work done today without a net connection? even though my pc is no thin client, i need my connection operational in order to do work. in some way, we are already into "cloud computing".

"The freetard from the previous post is back and whining that vendors should brand 'Linux compatible' on their hardware so that the 0.91% of the market will be able to more easily tell if they are wasting their money or not (on Linux)."
actually they might be honest about what they sell.

e.g. you buy an some wifi card, just to find it uses a generic ralink chipset, which the other, cheaper wifi card also had. it's hard to find a hardware vendor that will say "we use XYZ and ABC chipsets in this card" - you find out after purchasing the card, or by asking around on the forums.

and that kind of info might be useful to wider audience than linux users, depending on the type of hardware.

oiaohm said...

Don't worry about the power management thing by end of year XP will be last. Intel, AMD, VIA and redhat guys working on it. So far there patches put Linux about 15 percent ahead of windows XP without any detectable slowdown. To be correct less power usage in general operation than XP and way less in powersaving with very little restore cost.

Yes No detectable slowdown. Complete different method of doing power-management.

As per normal Linux Hater Redux opens mouth without doing home work. Turns out the major power drain has nothing to do with ACPI. Video card GPU's not being power managed far nastier on power usage than not having ACPI. GPU can suck down more power than ACPI can turn off.

Also funny I just got a stack of Lazer printers that work perfectly because they don't have Windows Vista or Windows 7 drivers that work perfectly. Hardware waste age caused by MS windows. Funny enough all of them plugged onto Linux just work no drivers required. How much hardware has Windows forced into land fill.

Anonymous said...

.Don't worry about the power management thing by end of year XP will be last. Intel, AMD, VIA and redhat guys working on it. So far there patches put Linux about 15 percent ahead of windows XP without any detectable slowdown.

Yeah, yeah, we all know! We only have to wait some more for Linux to catch up with an eight-year old OS. Good job, guys!

Anonymous said...

Wow... printers... Really?

Um, in the main office I take care of, the printers get replaced every two years or so because we use them up. The basic office/workgroup HP laser printer is really only good for a million pages or so, and then its on its last legs, and time for a new printer.

I know from my own experience that desktop printers die off after a few thousand or tens of thousand pages printed.

I know this because we once tried to replaced the workgroup printers with desktop printers.

Also these are not the TPS reports that get printed, these are just the various revisions of school papers on the desktop printers, and invoices and purchase orders and that type of thing on the office printers.

Those are all versions of laser printers. Bubblejet printers have even shorter lifespans.

Complaining that antique printers (10+ years...)no longer work on the latest version of windows is probably the most retarded thing you have claimed yet...

Nevermind, that your workplace is now upgrading to Vista would contradict the fosstard'o'sphere cw that no one uses Vista...

Anonymous said...

Wow... printers... Really?

Um, in the main office I take care of, the printers get replaced every two years or so because we use them up. The basic office/workgroup HP laser printer is really only good for a million pages or so, and then its on its last legs, and time for a new printer.

I know from my own experience that desktop printers die off after a few thousand or tens of thousand pages printed.

I know this because we once tried to replaced the workgroup printers with desktop printers.

Also these are not the TPS reports that get printed, these are just the various revisions of school papers on the desktop printers, and invoices and purchase orders and that type of thing on the office printers.

Those are all versions of laser printers. Bubblejet printers have even shorter lifespans.

Complaining that antique printers (10+ years...)no longer work on the latest version of windows is probably the most retarded thing you have claimed yet...

Nevermind, that your workplace is now upgrading to Vista would contradict the fosstard'o'sphere cw that no one uses Vista...

Anonymous said...

oh great oiaohm, typical answer: better power management, we're getting there.

wow, your last century printers work. How about the one I bought last year ?

Oh, bad MS! They don't MAINTAIN third party drivers, yeah, morons. Better the linux way, where 20yo HW is working, 1yo won't, and binary drivers will "just work" until of course the next abi break, which is planned for the next Monday.

Anonymous said...

@March 3, 2009 7:32 AM

Support for antique printers is important if you don't do anything with them... ie you live in your moms basement and print the occasional thing on your free if you haul it away so we dont have to deal with it anymore printer.

And to think, I could have scored that old line printer with the 9-pin print quality! It sure was fast before this day of 10ppm $100 off the shelf laser printers...

Anonymous said...

Generic oiaohm post: That problem you mention will disappear forever in 6 or 9 months when some pie-in-the-sky open source project comes to fruition and solves in for all time, and then it will totally whup up on an OS from 2001. You can believe me because no open source project has ever fallen short of its promised results and FOSS has a 100% bulletproof record when it comes to resolving OS/hardware combinations.

Anonymous said...

EveryLinuxProblemWillEventuallyGoAway(TM)

yOSHi314 said...

"Complaining that antique printers (10+ years...)no longer work on the latest version of windows is probably the most retarded thing you have claimed yet..."

you missed the point - some of that hardware is in usable state, but useless on windows. it's a waste, because it can still work.

"wow, your last century printers work. How about the one I bought last year ?"

check here : http://openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi

and here : http://www.cups.org/ppd.php

unless you own a lexmark printer - chances are high it will work. lexmark doesn't really care about supporting linux, and likes to make models that are incompatible with previous ones, and require an entirely new driver.

Anonymous said...

I know from my own experience that desktop printers die off after a few thousand or tens of thousand pages printed.

I have a laserjet here that has printed over 20k pages (personal use), I've seen other laserjets print over 20k in a couple of months.

Oh, and printer drivers have nothing to do with the kernel, they live in userspace as a part of CUPS. Which means that if a printer is supported in OS X, it's most likely supported in linux.

The driver situation in Windows is even worse than what oiaohm describes: I have an HP scanner here whose interface is written in .NET (check amazon for some user experience with another HP scanner). It takes ~1 minute to start + several minutes to scan an image at 300dpi. In linux driver support was late, but now it scans faster and xsane starts immediately (the driver is one of the few written by HP themselves). Of course there is some functionality lacking here, however the situation is in many cases better than what Windows users claim.

Also, one thing Windows proponents never mention is that in Windows you must install the drivers for USB devices in many cases before you plug the device in. If you do otherwise, the device may simply not work or work but hang occasionally, and it's likely that the problem is impossible to fix without reinstalling Windows. So much for driver support and user-friendliness...

Anonymous said...

@March 4, 2009 3:14 AM

So a generic WorksForMe(TM) response, and the printer. I am guessing you have the old Hp Laserjet 2100 or some such. That is good for about 100k pages, then it will start to jam all the time.

Hp also makes a tiny little desktop model laser printer that has a life about about 20k pages. The problem with that one is the fuser wears out and it doesnt have a replaceable fuser. You start to get lines vertically on the page. But at $100 you chuck it in the garbage and get a new one.

For what its worth, we quit using scanners, and the couple of people who need to scan the occasional piece of artwork just snap it with their digital camera, and get resolutions in excess of 300dpi. Far faster than a last century scanner solution, with better results. Not to mention digi-cams are not uni-taskers like scanners...

Man its been a decade since I needed to touch a scanner, I figured they stopped making those things. LOL. Well at least for the desktop user.

Anonymous said...

If you do otherwise, the device may simply not work or work but hang occasionally, and it's likely that the problem is impossible to fix without reinstalling Windows.

are you on drugs? you just remove the device and then reinstall the driver

Anonymous said...

You start to get lines vertically on the page.
I've seen this problem with a cheap 1000 series laserjet. The problem is that the drum doesn't last more than ~ a year.

Man its been a decade since I needed to touch a scanner, I figured they stopped making those things. Do I see a YouDon'tNeedThis(TM) here? ;-)
I bought the scanner to scan some books and photographs, buying the equipment to mount the camera, lights etc costs much more than the scanner, and requires more time and space for worse quality.

are you on drugs? you just remove the device and then reinstall the driver
Tell this to the guy who tried the scanner using WinXP. He reinstalled it several times, still the same problem (scanning hangs in the middle of the page). Another USB device (bluetooth dongle) doesn't work after driver installation on a laptop. If I remember correctly, nothing else can be used from the USB port that dongle was connected to when I installed the drivers. Of course, it works fine on the linux system and I didn't bother any more.

My point is that driver support in Windows isn't as good as you describe, and Windows is definitely not user-friendly, because it acts like a black box. If a problem occurs, you're out of luck.

Anonymous said...

buying the equipment to mount the camera, lights etc costs much more than the scanner, and requires more time and space for worse quality.


You go the hard way on every thing, don't cha?

http://www.snapter.atiz.com/

LOL

Anonymous said...

My point is that driver support in Windows isn't as good as you describe, and Windows is definitely not user-friendly, because it acts like a black box. If a problem occurs, you're out of luck.

crappy drivers are the reason, most of the times; I agree that in Windows vendors bundle what should be just DRIVERS with all sort of crap.

But if you're out of luck on Windows, if it happens to you to be /unlucky/ on linux you can call whichever saint you're devoted to, but if your driver lacks a fucking maintainer (e.g. Via Mesa video drivers) there's really nothing more you can do.

Anonymous said...

You go the hard way on every thing, don't cha?

http://www.snapter.atiz.com/

Are you telling me that I should digitize 250+ page books leaning over my desk holding the camera?

if your driver lacks a fucking maintainer (e.g. Via Mesa video drivers) there's really nothing more you can do.
Agreed, that's why people that are interested in linux try to order only supported hardware.