Linux Hater's Blog

Rants and Laughs 6

2008-10-10T20:48:00.000-07:00

GregKH, kernel hacker extra-ordinaire, couldn't figure out to convert an avi of a video from his own conference to OGG format. Go open source!
Remember all those Linux netbooks? Well apparently they're so great, that they get returned 4 times as often as the same hardware running Windows.
John writes about his Ubuntu upgrade experience.
Im sure everyone reading this is aware of that feeling when you go and use a friends brand new $2000 Windows Vista computer. The way it runs so slowly with 2GHz of processing power at its disposal, crashes all the time and takes 6 minutes to turn on. It is brand new FFS. When I am in that situation it makes me feel like the entire engineering profession has failed me.
I got that feeling with Ubuntu this week.
Timothy Prickett Morgan at the Register writes about how Linux is what Windows wanted to be. Yes, an OS that supports a bazillion hardware platforms but has barely any useful applications. That's exactly what Windows wanted to be.
An article about how open source hippies have a hard time working at large corporations.
If possible, larger corporations that have open source components should do what they can to leave them alone and impose the very minimum amount of bureaucratic overhead on those teams. Results matter far more than process.
Mr. Toponce, once again, from Planet Ubuntu, talking about how Wikimedia has moved to Ubuntu. In the process, he points all the shortcomings of Fedora, for example "Fedora, although it strives for stability, never really gets that opportunity. Instead, each release is broken somehow, someway" or "Fedora places itself to be a test bed for new technologies and changes". Umm yea. Because every Ubuntu release is perfect, and Ubuntu doesn't ship bleeding edge stuff like Pulse Audio in a LTS release.. oh wait..
Don't you love it when open source folks fight among each other? I thought this whole thing was about cooperation.
A rant sent in by a reader about Linux and Marketing.
Another rant that shoots down common Linux claims.
A blog post suggesting that making your software free is a good approach amidst this global credit crisis. Right, because if you "Sell customers what they need, in their eyes its _just_ the right amount of support. Often this will exceed or equal the amount that you’d gain via licensing." And yea, when exactly are they going to buy this support? Like as a contract? Up front? So you're charging them more? And that's supposed to be attractive to them?
And finally, I thought Linux was about freedom and choice, and that extends to Satan warshippers. Apparently, distrowatch doesn't think so.

Pulse my audio

2008-10-02T23:06:00.000-07:00

I was saving this one until this article became free on LWN.net. It's awesomeness is truly unparalleled.

Let me attempt to summarize.

A) PulseAudio needs to work with existing applications, so it implements an ALSA emulation layer, except, it's not complete. Only 70% of ALSA applications work. So it's like, totally ready.

B) So, in the true open source fashion, you should port your app to be a native PulseAudio client. Except that you can't. There's this yet-another-audio-library called libsidney, but it's not ready yet. (Hmm, this sounds familiar...)

C) Fedora led the way in incorporating PulseAudio before it was ready, breaking audio for thousands of users. Then because open source is about copying good ideas and bad ones, a ton of other distros adopted it as well. Amazing guys. In a way, you've spread bad code that breaks audio on thousands of computers faster than a virus could have. And it's immune to antivirus!

D) so now that we're in this "mess" (as the lead developer of PulseAudio calls it*), LSB comes along and says "we're going to standardize how your write audio apps!" Oh, but wait, ALSA's now "old" (we hardly knew ye), and I can't directly program PulseAudio. Hmm... So the article's brilliant solution? Standardize on the PulseAudio-safe subset of ALSA.

WHAT THE FUCK.

I can just imagine the future alsa man page. A big listing of functions, with a nice little asterisk next to those functions that you shouldn't use unless you want your app to totally FAIL on a system which has been sodomized by Pulse Audio. I can just see the developers of commercial Linux sound apps (all three of them) jumping for joy.

And thus unfolds another chapter in long history of failed sound systems on Linux. Can they make it much worse? I, for one, am excited to see how much worse they can make it until we all go back to listening to square waves on our PC speakers.

* BTW, also notice that it's the PulseAudio guy calling Linux audio a mess. Did he forget that it was his project that took the existing mess, and unloaded a giant steaming turd on it? Congratufuckinglations. You've just made it worse. You're a truly a worthy OSS contributor.

Mini-Rant

2008-09-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

And then there was another.

I was going to wait for the next Rants and Laughs, but this one is too good. Jonathan Blow, a developer of the Braid game, starts out by asking for some solutions to problems he's running into doing a Linux port of the game.

The freetard brigade arrives, and hilarity ensues, causing Jonathan to give up, and then finish up with a comment worthy of an article here.

And since this is a mini-post, I'll leave you with a quick thought:

If you upgrade your version of Windows and an application breaks, it's Microsoft's fault. If you upgrade your version of OS X and your application breaks, it's the ISV's fault. If you upgrade your version of Linux and your application breaks, well, that's your own damn fault.

Rants and Laughs 5

2008-09-25T17:20:00.000-07:00

Mo' fo' dat ass.

A BBC Editor is Getting to grips with Linux. Yes lusers, this is what usually happens when normal people try to use Linux when not in your odorous presence.
Even Shuttle-man doesn't think you can replace Windows with Linux.
Another six reasons why Ubuntu isn't the #1 OS. With rare insight such as: It seems that people don't mind spending hundreds of dollars on closed source commercial software. They even put up with ads in their software - just so they can send animated smilies (aka Yahoo Messenger).
Uh huh. Whatever you say dude.
A luser begrudging finds his way back to Windows, then finds out that it actually works way better. Then, he challenges lusers to "bring him back" to their freetard commune.
LinuxToday editor Carla Shroder proves that she knows very little about other operating systems which supposedly can't do "Cool Compiz/Beryl blingy stuff".
Sam Varghese with another lame "20 reasons to use Linux" article.
Let's blame Asus for Linux sucking on the eee 901. I used to have a lot of respect for Asus and generally sought out Asus components when building a computer. My experience with the eee has really turned me off and I doubt I will ever look at Asus the same.

At the moment I’m looking for a solution to all of this. Can anyone recommend a Linux distro that does work well on the 901 model? I have absolutely no interest in putting windows on this no matter how well it may work.
FSM's 10 easy ways to attract women to your free software project. Who knew it was so easy. And the title sounds like something that should be on the front conver of Cosmo.
Wow, a fellow hater. I have a feeling this guy might hate Linux as much as I do.

Free as long as you "give back"

2008-09-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

So like, this FOSS shit is supposed to be free right? Like I can take the code and go make a bajillion dollars with it, or make some pretty awesome product with it as long as I release all the source code when I'm asked to, right?

That's what the fucking license says right?

Well, apparently there's some stuff that they might have forgotten to stipulate.

Enter the infamous GregKH. mdz of Ubuntu sums up his keynote speech at the Linux Plumbers Conference quite nicely.

It turns out, with open source code, you can take a free kernel, integrate it into a larger desktop distribution that manages to make like 10 people happy and whole bunch of people wet their panties over Linux, and ship it marginally successfully for several releases. But in the process, you might have just forgotten to "give back" a little. You might have spent your time making the desktop stack work better instead of the kernel or gcc. You might not have sent in thousands of kernel patches because you were more worried about making Xorg work, or codec installation easier.

It doesn't matter. Use the kernel in a media-visible way but don't actively contribute upstream? Bingo! you get a big fat steamer on your doorstep. You get called out at the opening speech of Luserfest 2008.

So you see? maybe the GPL isn't really free. Sure you can take the code, but don't you dare go and do something that makes you seem like you have a bigger dick than everyone else, at least, not without giving your testicles back to the cause. The GPL just talks about the code. What it doesn't talk about is how you also have to follow the "spirit" of open source, or be prepared for incoming PR shit mortars.

This is fucking amateur hour people. You know what all those big software companies do? They have PR people. Most engineers hate them, mostly because they're yet another layer between you and your customer. Most customers hate them too, because you're trying to explain what you want, and they don't really have any clue what you're talking about. But then once in a while, you see freetard engineers like Mr. KH here make an ass-clown of themselves, and then you understand.

I'm glad your conference got off to such a great start. You're all gonna talk about how you should improve Linux plumbing, and then spawn off like 20 projects, half-finish all of them, and call it progress. I'm like super serially excited here.

Wine, with a side of Chrome

2008-09-15T16:01:00.000-07:00

I know I've already hated on the wine project before, but what the hell, it's fun!

I came across this really wonderful story today, about how CodeWeavers has a wine-based package to run Chrome on Linux.

First of all, isn't Chrome FOSS!? (as in fucking open source software?) Aren't you supposed to port that shit, instead of create a matchsticks-and-glue emulation of a proprietary API just to run an app written for another platform that uses a bunch of open source libraries in the first place? Google totally threw the source over to y'all. Where's the freetard brigade that's supposed to patch it all up and make it run really great on Linux? Oh, right. I forgot. They're busy fighting Shuttle-man about Firefox. Seriously guys. Shuttleworth is some day going to really regret all that money he spent trying to buy you guys a fucking clue.

And secondly, look around wine dudes. Out of all the missing applications on Linux, you decide to spend 11 days working on porting another browser. Sweet. Because THAT's what Linux is missing right now. *

But I shouldn't be surprised right? I mean if y'all had any kind of clue at all, you'd realize that you only really need Wine to support three apps to make a huge dent (and no, one is not Picasa). They are Outlook, Word, and Solitaire (And I don't mean Outlook 2000 ok?). Spider Solitaire for extra credit. Oh, but my bad, that would require some coordination and focus. I've read my own fucking rants long enough that that I know that ain't gonna happen. Keep trying boys, if you want to. I'll just remember to laugh at you again when the virtualization boyz totally beat you to a pulp.

* Which makes me think, aside from games and picasa, what useful apps does wine let me run on Linux for which there is no OSS alternative? uTorrent? FAIL. EAC? FAIL. Nope, I guess it really is all games these days. So much for being productive on Linux.

It's all about determination

2008-09-13T18:46:00.000-07:00

A wonderful post on "Linux Weekly" reminded me of another lame luser talking point.

I think one of the main reason most of the people try Linux and go back to Windows is that they aren't determined to make the switch, and they can't conceive that there are other ways of doing things than the Windows methods. If something is done differently on Linux, they quickly jump to a conclusion that goes like 'This is not right, on Windows it's done the other way around.

What the fuck? People don't switch to Linux because they aren't determined enough?

Talk about putting the cart before the horse. You lusers always make the same damn assumption, that for some self-mutilating reason,"people" actually want to switch to Linux.

You know, it turns out that if you make something better and it makes people more productive then people will switch to it, regardless of whether they are "determined" or not. I mean look at Google Chrome for example. That thing has been out one week and it already has more penetration than Linux on the desktop.

Making people more productive usually means either that a) they don't have to learn anything new and they can do what they always did a little better, or that b) they have to learn a tiny bit more, but they could do something before that they couldn't previously.

For most people, switching to Linux is neither a) or b). You have to learn a bunch of new stuff to do the same old shit. And by switching, you lose access to tons of apps, thereby enabling you to do less. Oh but it does enable you to spend many of your weekends now trying to learn to program so that you can fix bugs and contribute code so that programs will let you do what you could already do before you started going down this merry path. No, there is no command to give you your life back.

Oh by the way, I have this invention that you might like. It's a new kind of scissor. It's got one big handle hole to put your leg through, and another smaller one to stick your dick through. It's really great. You can cut shit and get off at the same time. I'm sure you can totally throw away your old scissors it if you are determined enough to do so. So who wants one?

And before I go, Twitter is a flaming pile of shit.

Real time hate

2008-09-11T12:13:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to mention, I've started a twitter feed: http://twitter.com/hatinglinux .

I've always thought twitter was kind of lame, but we'll see how it goes.

Word to your mother

2008-09-09T21:56:00.000-07:00

reddit is fucking awesome. It really is. It's got this whole Linux section where freetards automatically mod up the stupidest stories. I don't even have to go looking for material any more. It's just there.

This evening, I'd like to give a little shout out to a great new blog I found: "Help for Linux". This is like the archetype of a luser blog. Doesn't seem very popular, but I don't really understand why, as it has scintillating articles such as "Is Fedora better than Ubuntu?" or "7 Reasons Why KDE Sucks" (I hope you have your shit-shield equipped, dude).

But one post caught my eye in particular: "Mombuntu - Ubuntu For Your Mom!"

This post starts with your standard "why Linux is better than Windows" crap. But the rest of it is a list of instructions on how to set up Ubuntu so that it's palatable to your mentally retarded mother. Among his useful suggestions:

Install drivers that don't suck
Create desktop shortcuts like "Internet" and "Word"
Set OO to use the .doc format by default, "rather than explaining the difference between doc and odf"
Set up auto-login
Give her detailed instructions on how to write the Ubuntu forums or give her people to contact when she has questions

As I was reading through this list, I surprsingly found myself in agreement. Most of these suggestions would actually be useful. They simplify the experience, and reduce the cognitivie dissonance for the poor mother whose son just totally p0wned her computer.

Then I thought to myself, why the fuck do I have to read this list on a luser amateur's blog? Why aren't these same steps done out of the box? Really guys? some random dude can come up with numerous concrete suggestions for improvements in like 10 minutes?

Let's not forget that most of these steps are to make your brand new Linux act more like Windows...

Rants and Laughs 4

2008-09-02T21:58:00.000-07:00

Got a whole bunch of 'em queued up for you guys tonight.

8 reasons why every computing student will love Linux. If you're a student out there and reading this... don't fall for it! They're just trying to harvest your boredom to do work for them.
Moving from Mac to Ubuntu: Why I'm switching. Wow, she's changing her whole OS over a file manager and some panels. Complete with the standard luser comments.
A nice little rant from jimmac.
Another "I'm so proud" post. I see that, in no time, Linux has become the OS for annoying and condescending grandsons.
An autopackage dev gives up on Linux.
In case you haven't see it, a bit more on Ryan Farmer, of the Foxconn BIOS (non-)issue fame. mjg's observations. Farmer complaining about being banned from Ubuntu forums. And his very own blog.
Who knew? CrossOver still doesn't work.
A luser laments at the failure of his Summer of Documentation project. I think he missed reason #5: writing documenation sucks donkey balls.
Ah, the eeePC, darling of the luser community. Apparently some developers really don't understand how third party software installation works.
And finally, an OSnews discussion thread on the Apple-Psystar conflict, with freetardism-a-plenty.

A reader suggested a cool idea. In honor of the FAIL blog, I will now accept submissions of screenshots of spectacular Linux failures. Maybe direct visual evidence will help free the lusers from their collective trance.

My perl caught a bug

2008-08-29T20:02:00.001-07:00

There were a lot of things that I could have written about this week. Like, for example, Red Hat getting p0wned. Or how freetards in Quebec want their goverment to be even more inefficient. (Does this mean now they have to come to the US to buy their copy of Windows, along with their MRI's?)

No, the fruit ripest for the picking this week is Red Hat's perl performance bug.* Long story short, it turns out that the version of Perl that RH shipped has a huge performance bug that a whole bunch of people have just been working around. There's also apparently a bug report open about this that's been around for the better part of a year. Nicolas Clark, a core perl developer, also chimes in on how Red Hat fucked up.

The bug itself is not that interesting. It's just a performance bug. Whatever, it happens. But it's everything around it that has the ever so recognizable luser stench.

First there's the bug report it self. Go ahead, read through the comments. It's full of a bunch of whiners being actively hostile in an attempt to get RH to fix the bug. Way to set an example guys. To all the companies who have yet to go deploy a public-facing bugzilla, you're effectively saying, "do this, and we will shit all over you whenever you have a bad bug." It's a really great way to show that open bug DB's can be good for companies. **

Second, it's yet another example of where access to the source code causes stupid things to happen. RH released a version of the source code that upstream never released. I guess they have the freedom to do so, in this case, this freedom wasted a bunch of time for a bunch of people.

Third, is something that the upstream developer notes this himself:

RedHat seem to have an aggressive policy of incorporating pre-release changes in their released production code. This would not be so bad if they actually communicated back with upstream (i.e. me and the other people on the perl5-porters mailing list), or demonstrated that they had sufficient in-house knowledge that they didn't need to. But evidence suggests that neither is true, certainly for
5.8.x

Just because you have the source code, doesn't mean you have the expertise to maintain it, modify it, and release it. This is one of the biggest fallacies of the open source model. Lusers always like to say that as long as they have the code, they can make it work and fix things themselves. Never do they say that as long as they have the code, they have way more opportunities to fuck things up, because they often have no idea how or why the code was written as it was. This is just another example of this. *cough* Debian *cough* SSL *cough*

* Bad week for them, I suppose.
** Not that people don't do this already on various forums and bulletin boards. But when the nastiness appears on the same company-hosted page that everyone else is going to be looking at to find a solution, it looks especially bad.

National Convention of Anarchy

2008-08-25T21:54:00.000-07:00

What else happens every four years other than the olympics? Why, the DNC!

OMGWTF! I can't view the videos using Linux! EPIC FAIL!

Slashtards. Seriously, how do you keep doing it? How do you stay so inspired? I find myself struggling to keep up.

First of all, they do support Windows and Mac. So, that's like 99% of all computers. Why don't we first worry about the people who don't have computers, instead of worrying about the 1% of computer users who just like being fucking annoying.

But that last 1%, don't we care about them too? or wait just a second, do the Democrats not care about lusers? Could it be? Such an intelligent, polite crowd? What if they are the swing vote? Doesn't their quest for freedom synergize with the Democratic message? Don't we want them on our side?

Even though their numbers are small, they're all on the internets! And like 23 hrs a day! They could all unite behind a common cause, organize, work together, and .... oh wait. Ha ha. I get it now. They can't even do that to produce a working operating system. What makes anyone think they can do it in real life?

Yes that's right folks. Lets not kid ourselves. Linux is not a democracy. Linux is anarchy. Everyone going in their own damn directions. It's not about working together. It's about works for me! It's not Yes We Can, it's Yes I Can.

So if you guys want to create all your own rules and abide by them on your silly internet chatrooms, be my guest. Just don't come bitching when you find out that the real world doesn't really care about you.

BTW guys. A few words of advice.

You can watch the damn thing on TV. You know that thing you could watch if only your video capture card was actually supported under Linux? I hear there are like a bajillion TV-compatible devices. Why don't you go enjoy your analog hole why you still can?

Also, if you're making your political decisions based on all the contrived, sugar-coated moments that they broadcast during the conventions, you're already lost. Go read a newspaper or something. I hear there's also this globally accessible network of computers that is actually a good place to read about what the candidates really stand for.

Rants and Laughs 3

2008-08-25T14:03:00.001-07:00

Yay, Olympics over! Burning man begins!

Another freetard comes around.
Now, I know that I should have got something more compatible with the community that I’m a member of. Maybe one of those OpenMoko powered Neo FreeRunner devices or even an Ubuntu Mobile powered prototype device.

But an iPhone it was. Why?

Well, frankly I needed something that works today.
And just for kicks he throws in a rant about the sound and UI library jungles.
A nice rant from Thiago Macieira, on Trolltech Labs.
I have been trying for the past few days to make desktop effects work and not
use 90% of my CPU. I am frustrated, so this blog will step on people’s toes.
Maybe you shouldn’t read it.
Which means you definitely should read it.
This dude is proud of his wife because she managed to get a machine on an encrypted wireless network. Wow, first of all, I dunno why the hell she married you when you sound so condescending. And second of all, female computer users have been accomplishing these tasks you talk about for ages using OSes that make it easy. Are you proud of all of them too? Actually, may I suggest another post about how proud you are when she successfully cooks dinner for you?
Apparently, perl is seriously fucked on Redhat. Go open source! Many hands to fuck shit up once again.
apt-get can solve sudoku?! Well, df can show you some silly math. Apparently -h not only means human readable, but also horrible arithmetic.
Adrian discovers IE is actually important. It's totally like one of those coming-out-of-the-basement moments. It made me cry. In pain.

Certified to suck

2008-08-22T15:10:00.000-07:00

Hey guys. Turns out, I had the awesome privilege to look in to Linux certification this past week. You know, like how when Novell says SUSE runs well on some laptops, then, well, it should? Well, turns out they have a funny definition of "well".

So umm, lets see, say I'm looking at HP's certification page, and I decide the 6510b is the one I want. Oh, look, it's certified by Novell. But you know, I'm thorough, so let me check out the certification report.

Nice, this thing is YES CERTIFIED. Ok. So far so good. Let me take a look under the Tested Configuration spec. Desktop Effect Enabled? Yes. Cool. Power Management? Also Yes. Sweet. That means I'm set to go right?

Oh, what are these Config Notes?

1) Intel 865GM graphics needs to install seperately, please download the driver from http://forgeftp.novell.com/hp/HP-Compaq-6510b, and follow instructions 2) Suspend to disk and Suspend to RAM: Hotkey (fn+f3) does not work, however, powersave -U and powersave -u function at the command line and hibernate, sleep works when invoked from the power management icon on the gnome panel. Occasionally, the system may need a reboot when waking up 3) Same behavior as #2 is observed when Desktop Effects are enabled.

Uhh. Certifcation Fail? How the hell is this acceptable? You're telling me that you've certified a machine that, when I put to sleep, I might "Occasionally" lose my data? Great guys. You've proved to me that your definition of working "well" really means "occasionally, not at all".

And then farther down on that page, look at the driver that they used to check the video card. fbdev_drv.so? Seriously? the frame buffer driver?

YES! I'm certified to have a 1990's era desktop experience with this machine. Super Hyphy. So now, not only do I know that the experience will likely suck on this machine, I also have no idea what the hell you mean when I see all the other machines that have been certified.

I'm glad you've got all this money from Microsoft and you've decided to invent a huge system that tells me absolutely nothing. Think of all the Ximian folks that you could have paid to stay to maybe actually finish Evolution.

Flash me a clue

2008-08-17T23:56:00.000-07:00

Idiotry at Slashdot continues.

No matter how stably, smoothly, efficiently, and correctly Linux runs on a machine, the public will continue to view it as second-rate if Flash keeps crashing. This is the worst example of being tied down and bound by a crappy 3rd-party product over which no Linux distribution has any control.

This is so typical. Without having any evidence whatsoever, lets blame the closed-sourceness of Flash for all of desktop Linux's problems.

When will you lusers fucking learn? In case you haven't noticed, users want Flash. Say it again. Users want Flash. Anything you do to make Flash not work is your fucking fault. Not Flash's. Yours. At some point in time in the past, Flash worked on Linux. In some configuration. Otherwise Adobe wouldn't have released it. Whatever you did to deviate from that configuration is your responsibility. Not Adobe's. The fact there are a bazillion Linux configurations that Adobe couldn't possibly test: OSS sound, or Alsa sound, or alsa-oss sound, or pa-alsa emulation, or pa-alsa-oss-jack-esound-vagina emulation, or all of the above inside nspluginwrapper, or whatever the fuck... it's all your fault. Not Adobe's.

I don't give a shit if Flash is the worst piece of code since Microsoft Bob. Your users want it. That's all that matters. If you ever cared about your users, you'd give them what they want. Users don't give a shit whether your browser is open source, or whether you have the latest greatest audio system with shitty emulation of the 20 audio systems that came before it.

When you guys have actually bent over backwards to make Flash work for your users, only then can you even beging to complain to Adobe about what they do to make it difficult. Right now, Linux is the making it difficult for Flash, NOT the other way around.

As if it weren't enough, the Slashdot entry finishes with:

I really do have to suspect Adobe's motivation for keeping Flash on Linux in such a deplorable state.

Are you shitting me? Yes, Adobe's spending precious developer resources to release a half-assed version of Flash just to subvert the Linux desktop. If you maybe had one more brain cell (bringing you to a grand total of one), you'd realize that it's actually beneficial to Adobe if the Linux desktop takes off. They have the only credible cross-platform rich application delivery mechanism in Flash and Flex. When Linux spreads, MS-specific technologies like Silverlight look worse and worse to developers. As diversity increases, cross-platform Flash looks increasingly appealing.

But no. You guys not only make it hard for Adobe to ship anything that works, you have to swiftboat Adobe and accuse them of subverting the cause. I hope Adobe just stops supporting Linux altogether for a year or two. Just to teach you lusers a lesson. Then you can concoct some crazy wine-based browser plugin emulation scheme to make the windows Flash run on Linux, and then write another article complaining that Adobe not open sourcing their Flash plugin makes it difficult for lusers to port it to FreeBSD or some shit.

Rants and Laughs

2008-08-16T23:00:00.000-07:00

Olympics are still going on, and the day job is a tad busy these days (don't worry! it'll calm down soon enough). Maybe I should give it up and move back into my mom's basement and work on free software.

Anyways, looks like you guys are still finding the good stuff out there, so here's another bunch of links:

I can't use Linux because I'm addicted to porn. Man if you think getting porn on Linux is too easy, then just wait until you get to Windows. You can actually watch all that WMV shit out there too. And you'll be able to hear the sound.
The DNA lounge has had some trouble with Linux sound in the past. Also noticed by Jeff Atwood.
You may have noticed that the audio archives have only had one channel for the last few weeks. You would probably assume that's a simple matter of replacing a cable; turns out, not. As far as we can tell, the audio going into the computer is stereo, and somewhere in there, it drops (most of) the right channel. So, bad connector, right? No, we've tried four different sound cards, and checked the mixer settings. At this point it seems like the last time we (accidentally) upgraded ALSA, it introduced some software bug that is making one channel go away. I can't even fathom how such a bug could exist, but that's Linux for you.
Free Software Magazine says market share is not important. Wow, if that's not moving the goal post, then I don't know what is.
Remember the Foxconn BIOS scandal? Well apparently the fix is out. And it's one line of code. Lusers have really out-done themselves this time. A true congratulations is in order. You are the Michael Phelps of lusers.
First part of an uber rant by Ed Ropple.
FSM again on Microsoft trying to kill Apache. Dude, seriously guys, if Microsoft throwing $100K at you guys makes you shit your pants this bad, you are seriously fucked.
An IBM exec says he's tired of waiting for industry-specific open source software. Whaa?? Freetards don't write software for problems they know absolutely nothing about? OMG WTF?
Let's blame Firefox for not supporting old distros. Actually, no, lets blame distros for making it so hard to ship software on them. Actually no, lets blame upstream for constant churn. Actually no, lets just ignore the problem and write clueless blog posts.
Paul Venezia goes off the deep end. Jeez InfoWorld. I knew you were bad. But you are not only scraping the bottom of the barrel, you have broken through it. Is August 8th like an April fool's in some country that I don't know about? Seriously. It pisses me off that people get paid to write this crap.
IBM to Linux: Stop Copying Windows. Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I didn't say it. One of your biggest supporters did.

Bundle me this

2008-08-12T00:57:00.000-07:00

Hey y'all. Sorry about the whole comment thing. I've decided (like many of you also have) that disqus sucks (threading seemed like a good idea, until it indented so much that you couldn't even see the messages), so let's go back to the old Blogger comments. Besides, having comments stored in a separate site is still a little weird in the web-2.0-epic-fail kinda way.

BTW, in case you've been wondering where I've been for the past few days... well, you see, there's this little thing going on called the Olympics. Oh, and if you go to the NBC site, you can use this thing called Silverlight and watch tons of footage of sports that I never got to see before. But I know you lusers can't see any of that stuff, so instead you were busy commenting away on the last post. Sounds like fun. Sorry I couldn't join you.

But really, what I wanted to talk about today is bundling. As in "shipping software with your OS", not "what you want to do with Jessica Alba".

Lusers like to always bring up the whole IE + Windows thing as an example of Micro$oft being evil. And somehow the EU caught the same mental disease and continues to go after them over a stupid media player. Those same lusers will also talk about how the latest release of their favorite distro has so much software out of the box that you don't need to install anything else.

Do you guys like being ironic? And don't even try to get me started about Apple.

The thing that everyone likes to forget in the IE 3/4/5 days when all this shit happened was that IE's (especially 4 and 5) were better browsers than what Netscape had to offer. Yes, it was ever so slightly more inconvenient to use Netscape (the huge download size of Communicator didn't help), but there was also no reason to go through the trouble.

And what do you know? When something like Firefox comes along, which is actually better than IE in many ways, people start to use it. OMFG. Shocking.

Then there was that whole bit about M$ giving IE away for free. That was what really killed Netscape, but the freetards don't really talk about that part of it now do they? Oh hellz no, they're trying to give M$ some of its own medicine. Except there's a huge difference. Microsoft had a business plan when they made that fateful decision. Give away the browser, sell the OS. Freetards on the other hand? Uhh. Uhh. Uhh. Oh! I got it, let's whore out the search bar! Yay!

Some lusers like to think it was the Mozilla folks collective business genius that made Firefox successful. Sorry to break it to you, but it was Google that figured out how to make the dough. They just happen to also realize that giving a tiny bit of it to Firefox could benefit them. FF was, as they say, just in the right place at the right time. Let's just keep things in perspective, pleez?

Challenged

2008-08-06T22:59:00.000-07:00

Yay. A challenge. But before I start, let me point out a few mistakes you've already made:

You commented on my blog.
You replied to another commenter. (Hell, even I know not to do that)
You challenged me.

You know, I don't even know if I want to spend so much time on this. It looks like commenters on your blog already called you on your bullshit. There's not really much for me to add. But I'll try anyways.

I’m a system administrator, and I want to get XP and Ubuntu installed as quickly as possible on as many machines as possible. What flexibility do I have with the Windows XP Professional CD as far as meeting this need? Well, as far as I can see, I only have the CD to do the install. I have to sit through each screen by hand, clicking through the dialogs one by one until the install finishes.

Really? That's your opener? Did you even try googling for "windows automated install" before you wrote that? Hey, why not try "windows 95 automated install" for that matter. Boom. I AM feeling lucky.

Hey BTW, FYI, JIC, for your future reference, you should try googling things before you make claims like this. It turns out, Microsoft actually writes this thing called "documentation". AND it's not out of date like 10 minutes after it's written, just because someone replaced a working subsystem with something "shiny".

With Ubuntu, by default, if services are setup, they are only listening on the local interface, localhost. Coupled with AppArmor, I have a Mandatory Access Control system keeping my processes in check with my files. A default firewall is disabled, but can be enabled with the Netfilter kernel module, and built easily with the uncomplicated “ufw” command.

Wow. I have to know what a kernel module and a terminal command to set up a firewall? Can I just have XP's default firewall, which can let me pass through specific apps on-demand and in just a few clicks?

Users created on the system are not administrators, so system-wide security vulnerabilities introduced through the user and highly improbable. Antivirus software, as well as software needed to remove malware, spyware, etc. is not needed, as the security design behind the operating system does not let this software grow beyond the user’s home directory.

Thank God! My rogue script only deleted my home directory! I'm so happy it spared my /usr/lib! I just have to reinstall Ubuntu to get my home directory back, right?

With Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org is shipped and installed by default providing the employees the necessary tools to begin working. Evolution is provided for email communication, which gives me the ability to connect to POP3(s), IMAP(s) and Exchange servers. Ubuntu ships with Evince as the default PDF viewer, and a PDF “printer” is installed by default, giving me easy access to create PDFs. Three compression utilities, zip, gzip and bzip2, coupled with GNU tar, give me the ability to archive and compress anything on disk. GnuPG is installed by default for encrypting those sensitive emails. Lastly, Pidgin is my mult-protocol application for using instant messaging, giving me the ability to connect to Jabber, MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Novell groupwise, and many, many others simultaneously. As for Windows, I have Notepad and Wordpad installed for my “word processing”. There is no spreadsheet application installed. Outlook express is available as a minimal email client. There is no PDF creator or viewer. Zip is provided for compression, but no encryption application is installed. A Windows Messenger application is installed for instant messaging. Of course, many third party utilities can meet many of these needs, but none of them are provided by default

So, out of the crapware you listed that comes with Linux, the only ones that I could possibly want are OO and pidgin, and guess what, you can get those for Windows. Yay! Zip files? Have you heard of right-click, send to compressed folder? Yay! Tar and bzip? turns out you don't need a separate archiving format and compression format if you support one that does both (zip).

But the thing you keep repeating is that none of this stuff is provided by default. Guess what? Windows lets you install 3rd party software that you download from a website. Look Ma! No compiler! Imagine that. But best of all, I don't have to update my entire distro to get Firefox 3.

I don't know why you freetards sit around optimizing installers all the time. If you had actually designed your system properly, I'd install once, like 4 years ago, and then I'd never care again. My secret theory is that it's exactly because you have a 6 month update cycle that you care so much about your sacred install time.

Let's do some math. Let's say I set up XP once 3 years ago, and never had to do any installs, and it took me like 2 hrs to get the base OS and the apps that I use. Now if I had install Ubuntu, I'd be on my 6th update, and all the package downloads and installs takes at least 30 minutes each time, plus fixing the all the shit that broke takes at least (and I'm being super generous here) 10 hrs each time, so we arrive at a grand total of 63 hrs. 63 vs 2. Awesome. Thanks for playing.

XP Professional has given me the ability to utilize the RDP protocol through remote desktop. RDP uses encryption by default, however, due to the nature of XP, I can only login via RDP when the user on the other end has logged off. XP only allows a single user logged in at any given time. Unfortunately, however, there is no scripting language provided by the operating system, so writing simple scripts to automate tasks for me is not possible.

Uhh... Remote Assistance? or install a VNC server (hey look! it's FREE!)? Dude, really, you're just starting to make yourself look bad. No scripting languages? Try googling cscript.exe. Actually, here, I'll save you a few keystrokes. Shipped in Windows 98 dude. That's like 10 years ago. Where have you been?

Honestly, I'm disappointed. I think you'll find that if you want to have a serious discussion, I'm more than willing to play along. But you have to first prove to me that you know what you are talking about. And Sir, respectfully, at this task, you have failed.

Rants and Laughs

2008-08-05T11:02:00.001-07:00

Argh. I'm getting way behind on these things, so I'm combining the Rants and Laughs posts into one series. I can feel that we're getting closer and closer to becoming the anti-slashdot. Perhaps ~/. is an appropriate way to refer to this site.

First the rants:

Aaron Toponce talks about immaturity in the Linux community. What you say? Lusers are often ignorant, arrogant, and unhelpful? Blasphemy!
Vertical panel's in GNOME suck. What you say? Half baked features in open source software? Again, Blasphemy!
Justin Carmony asks, why are some open source advocates hypocrites?
Fun with a Debian Install
This one has made the rounds, but in case you missed it, Matthew Paul Thomas discusses why Free Software has poor usability. Though he's much too polite for my taste.
Scott James Remnant on why LSB will continue to suck even at version 4.
An old John Gruber post where he takes a shit on ESR complaining about not being able to configure his printer.
Five Vista tricks you cannot teach Ubuntu.

Angry? Now some laughs for you to chillax:

Some dude complaining about Apple preventing lusers from accessing movie trailers. First comment: "Works on mine.." Nice. Get a fucking clue dude. Apple doesn't care about you. If Windows didn't have 90% of the market, Apple wouldn't care about them either. But instead they punish Windows users with quicktime.
Five reasons to choose Debian over Ubuntu. Umm. Umm. Sir? First of all, I believe that is Debian GNU/Linux? And secondly:
4) If you don’t like companies
Canonical is a company. I don’t know about you, but I never trusted companies, even if they’re just the sponsor. The Debian Project is run by a non-profit Foundation. I like that.
I salute your awesomeness.
OMG. I'm so clever! I asked a pirate for free software! Hee hee hee. Jackass.
Microsoft tells the truth. Quick! where's the sand? I need to stick my head in something!
Dear Mr. Toponce, I give you the honor of being both in the Rants section and the Laughs section at once. Your update on making your family Windows free is truly inspiring.
[My wife]’s been patient learning OpenOffice.org, of which I think she’s actually enjoying. Further, to increase her skill set for her resume, she has asked me to train her in depth with Linux, so she can teach others should she ever go back into education. That’s my girl!
Try going to this page with IE for some true awesomeness.
Stressed out by Ubuntu? Buy an Ubuntu Stress Ball! That's a great scam, actually. I wish I had thought of that.

Phewsh. That should keep you guys busy for a bit.

One bug report to rule them all

2008-08-04T13:32:00.000-07:00

Whatup y'all. I hope I haven't worn out all those refresh buttons on your browsers. Just because I don't post for a few days, y'all want to declare the death of this blog? You wish.

Anyways, today I'm talkin' about one of the community's crown jewels: bug trackers. We've heard it all before. Open bug tracking increases collaboration, transparency, and saves lives of poor, hungry children, etc.

But guess what? take a look at the bug trackers out there. They're mostly full of hogwash. Most of the bug reports go something like this...

Johnny User writes...
Hi. I'm trying to use ellipticaljerk-0.3.2, but my speakers make a farting sound when I click the jerk button. Then it crashes. Is this a bug?

Sammy Developer writes...
Hi Johnny. The jerk button works for me. Bug status updated: CLOSED - USER ERROR

Sally User writes...
I'm also seeing this problem. These farting noises suck. Bug status updated: REOPENED

Sammy Developer writes...
Ok, fine. Could you give me some more information? A backtrace maybe?

Johnny User writes...
What's a backtrace?

Sammy Developer writes...
It tells me where the problem is. You need to make sure you have debugging symbols installed. Also please tell me which compiler, which glibc, and which libjerk you are using.

Johnny User writes...
What are debugging symbols? How do I figure out all this information?

Sally User writes...
Johnny, I know what Sammy is asking for. Here's the info: gcc-4.1.3 glibc-2.5.1 libjerk-0.8a backtrace: : :

Sammy User writes...
Thanks Sally. Except that I can't reproduce this bug. But I'm using glibc-2.5.2 beta and libjerk-cvs

Sally User writes...
I don't know how to use the versions you talk of. And besides, this is how it behaves on Ubuntu. I don't care about how it works on your computer. It is broken in Ubuntu Masturbating Monkey.

Joe User writes...
OMG, I'm so glad I found this report. I think I have a related problem. I'm trying to play videos using mplayer for my wife, but she farts in my face everytime I have to look at the man page to remember the options. Here's my xorg.conf. Could you help me? : : (A huge long xorg.conf that makes a bug page a huge pain to navigate) : :

Sammy Developer writes...
Joe, you need to file a separate bug for that.

Johnny User writes...
When will this bug be fixed? I thought Open Sauce meant that if I report the bug, it'll get fixed

Sammy Developer writes...
Johnny, I can't reproduce it. Feel free to send me a patch

(a few months later) Sammy Developer writes...
Upstream libjerk-0.9 fixes this problem. Bug status updated: FIXED

(6 months later) Johnny User writes...
I just updated to Ubuntu Naughty Nutgoblin, and this broke again...

Sammy Developer writes...
It works for me. It must be Ubuntu's fault. I don't know what patches they apply, so please file a bug with them. Bug status updated: WON'T FIX

Joe User writes...
What about my bug? Will you please fix it? My wife is still farting at me.

Yep. That sounds about right to me. Open bug trackers are filled with so much noise that there's a constant call for "triagers", which really are zealous volunteers suckered into cleaning out the accumulated crap.* Meanwhile, all the noise hides the real issues, causes developers to get frustrated, and slows progress. It's no wonder companies rarely open up their bug trackers. If you do, you're just asking for it.

I stopped filing bugs long ago. If you're gonna ask me to do it for free, you should at least make sure it's worth my time.

Bug trackers can be useful tools to coordinate work between competent developers and testers who speak the same language, and who work within a well-design development workflow. But as a mechanism to collect problem reports from clueless non-technical users, they FAIL in the EPIC manner. So y'all need to stop acting as if an open bug tracker is some crazy new innovation that is going to make FOSS better than all other software. I bet these things slow you down as much as they help.

* by the way, the idea that just anyone can effectively triage bugs is a huge load of crap as well. Anyone who has worked at a real software company writing huge complex software will tell you the same.

Rants heard 'round the community ver. 11

2008-07-31T11:34:00.000-07:00

Yay! Version 11. We caught up to SuSE.

The truth about Linux on the PS3. Short version: it sucks. Who knew?
Even people on Planet Ubuntu are depressed about Hardy Heron. Congrats dude. You are now Luser Level 2.
XKCD knows the truth about Linux too. I like to think that somehow I inspired this one.
Help is on the way... eventually. Nice screenshot. This kind of retardedness is all too typical.

I'm also sending out a call for user-submitted rants. Of course, I'm not going to let just anything through, but if you feel like you need to make the world see some really broken part of Linux, here's the place to do it.

Feel free to send me the rants directly using the link to the right, or even better, post the rant onto your own blog and send me the link. A few guidelines for getting through my filter:

Don't complain about single trivial bugs, which are just, well, bugs. All software has bugs. Unless it's symptomatic of something that is larger and more fundamentally broken, it's not interesting.
The better technical or common sense argument you can make to show that something is broken, the better.
Aim high. Don't go after some random small project or program that nobody gives a fuck about. Find something that is the rage among fosstards and bring it down.
Keap it real. I don't want some conspiracy bullshit. If I get any sense that you have no idea what you're talking about, or that you are just purely speculating, you is out.

Anyways. Have fun. I look forward to hearing about brokenness in other parts of Linux that I know nearly nothing about.

edit: Doh. Apparently I can't count.

Lusers make me laugh ver.4

2008-07-29T15:36:00.000-07:00

Man, I can barely keep up.

Can we label the FSF as a terrorist organization? Please? Why is this tolerated? What if "M$" tried to pull something similar?
Shuttleworth says Linux should out-pretty the Mac: Yea, making it pretty will make it better. Lets make Linux the makeup-splattered cow of OSes! Why don't we just throw some bikini-clad women all over the place and call it a day? If you want it to look like a Mac, looks like that's already been done. Yay. Thank heavens we spent all of our time making sure we can theme our UI's to look like other OSess instead of making things work better.
Sound the alarms! Citibank is discriminating against Linux users! Didn't Sprint or someone start shedding customers that called the support line and otherwise annoyed them too much? I suggest Citibank take a page from that playbook. I think they'd lose like 0.05% of their customers.
Let's try to name all the women in the Linux community! Wow. A whole dozen women that somehow evolved to be immune to fosstard manners. Sadly, the first few comenters didn't get the jist. Maybe they should read this.
You can't even pay them to not suck. Jeff Atwood tries to donate cash money to an OSS project, and finds out that even that doesn't work.
Either Linux users are getting fat, or a bunch of Americans got involved.
5 reasons to pick Linux over Vista. Yea, I know, same old, same old. But I feel like if I keep linking to these things, maybe they'll stop. And besides, it's fun. In a whack-a-mole kinda way. Can someone hit him with a big fucking clue (BFC) 9000?