Posts made by trentreviso

^ I know what you mean, Halfang.

I've spent hours trying to get sound under Windows 7.

But with Ubutnu, everything "just works!"

My apologies for having opinions.

Microsoft has made the Windows 7 Release Candidate available for FREE download and FREE USE FOR 13 MONTHS!

Free is decidedly an UN-Microsoft-like behavior. Microsoft is, no doubt, reacting to new competition it has been facing on the desktop. The Release Candidate will be nearly indistinguishable from the final product, and so should be reasonably safe for installation and use as an everyday OS.

Free downloading of the Win 7 RC is officially permitted beginning today (5 may 2009). To get Windows 7 RC from Microsoft, you will first need to register for a product key. The keys are free, but you do have to register with Microsoft. That means you have to give them information about yourself (name, occupation, current OS you use, etc.) and a valid email. (I gave them a false name, and told them I was a student in Afghanistan!).  It also means you will be getting advertising emails from Microsoft for the rest of your life (there's no way to refuse them). Once you have confirmed your email is valid, you will be given a product key and offered a download link. Submit a request for a key here:

hxxp://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx

You can also certainly find Windows 7 RC on many torrent sites (look for "Build 7100"). You'll still need the product key, though, if you want to use it indefinitely.

The Windows 7 RC will run normally with your product key until 1 March 2010. Then, between 1 March 2010 and 1 June 2010, it will limit you to sessions of no more than two hours at a time. Effective 1 June 2010, your Windows 7 RC installation will shut down and refuse to operate until you pay Microsoft a ransom (still no word on what Windwos 7 is going to cost).

Microsoft developers have had access to the RC for over a week now. So, of course it leaked to the torrent sites early, and has actually been available for installation before today. I have been using it for a few days and have some observations.

First, installation was very straightforward and reasonably fast. I didn't actually time it, but I'm guessing it took 20 to 30 minutes on my (new) Athlon dual-core 64-bit build with 8 GB RAM. It runs reasonably fast, and has been stable so far (although I can't say I've logged a great many hours with Win 7 yet). The installer seems to have mis-identified my audio hardware, so I've been forced to use it without sound so far. (I'm trying to figure out how to find and install the correct sound driver so I won't have to live in silence forever). Aside from that, all hardware appears to have been identified correctly and  properly configured.

It's been a while since I've used Windows, so I'm having trouble finding everything. It seems to me a clumsy interface, which requires far too many clicks to get things done. But much of that is just my lack of familiarity, and I'm sure I must have felt that way about Linux when I first switched to it. But for now, my impression is that Win 7 lacks the finesse of OS X or Ubuntu 9.04. That said, it's still a perfectly usable desktop interface, and probably feels a bit more like Windows XP than does Vista. User Account Controls is now very Linux-like in how it operates.

As always with Windows, it really shines with automatic installation of software and drivers. I turned on my Epson scanner/printer, and Win 7 recognized it and configured the drivers for me. You won't get that kind of help with Ubuntu! Very impressive!

I couldn't get Google Chrome to run on Windows 7. It installs okay, but won't go anywhere or do anything ("Oh Snap, Something happened!" is all I ever got). Firefox runs better on Win 7 than it does on Ubuntu. I avoided IE8 (except to use to download the others), but I hear it's better than IE has been in the past.

I had forgotten the "joys" of anti-viral software and EULAs and frequent restarting of the computer when new software is installed. That's something I don't miss from my Windows past. I thought for a moment that I'd have to live without free application software, then it occurred to me ("duh!") that most open-source stuff has been ported to Windows. I downloaded OpenOffice 3.0.1 and AVG and a free CD/DVD burner program. Then I downloaded GIMP and that made me feel at home! Everything ran flawlessly. The Windows version of Firefox very much resembles the Linux version. GIMP also looks very much the same on Windows as on Linux. OpenOffice has a cooler look on Windows than Ubuntu, and it seems to run faster (at least, on my system).

A few stupid things annoy me. There should be a demarcation on the taskbar, to separate launch icons from icons of applications that are actually running (they can look the same). Notepad doesn't have tabs to make it easy to work on several documents at once. Some of the "bling" seems a lttle over the top (for example, the constantly-changing wallpapers if a theme is installed struck me as slightly annoying). The desktop gets easily cluttered with the launch icons of installed software (but you'll want to leave them there, as it is slightly cumbersome to launch apps in Windows which do not have desktop icons). Similarly, the "quick launch" menu rapidly becomes cluttered with installed apps (rather limiting its effectiveness as a "quick launch" menu).

Windows 7 remains very territorial. It won't offer a dual-boot at installation (at least, not with Linux - it will try to overwrite your Linux partitions).  Even after installation, it kept asking me if it could format over my Linux partitions (!). Microsoft still refuses to support open standards, so Windows can't read my Ubuntu ext3/4 partitions (although Ubuntu has no problem reading everything in the Windows partitions, so it's easy to share things between the two when you're in Ubuntu).

It turns out that the famous "Windows XP Mode" (a Win XP virtual machine inside Windows 7) only operates with certain multi-core processors. Many Intel multi-core processors won't allow you to utilize this feature of Windows 7.

Windows 7 is a perfectly functional desktop OS. I like it. It's surprisingly fast. My complaints are incredible nit-picking, and much of that can probably be fixed with a little work. Except for my lack of sound, I could learn to live with Win 7 if I had to. Of course, I don't have to, so Ubuntu will remain my primary OS, for now. I'll dual boot Win 7 with Ubuntu, until Microsoft requires that I buy it in a year. Then, I'll probably resize my Ubuntu partition to wipe out Win 7. (I'm a cheapskate. I like FREE way too much!)

For most people, Windows 7 will be their OS of choice. This is probably one of the better OSs Microsoft has ever made. And you can hardly agrue with FREE (at least for the next year). Check it out.

hxxp://www.blogspottutorial.com/2009/05/installing-step-carousel-viewer-in.html

I came across this quite by accident and thought it funny.  ;D

Chin Wong is a computer journalist in the Philippines. He attended an Ubuntu 9.04 release party last week in Manila. There he met Dax Solomon Umaming, who happens to act as liaison between the Philippine Ubuntu community and Canonical, Ltd. (the British company which manages the Ubuntu distribution). Dax, who works for a power company in Baguio City, had traveled all the way to Manila for the release party.

“I got into Linux because of porn,” said Dax. “I got viruses from porn sites, and the last time, they sent out my personal notes to everyone in my address book! So, I decided to stop using Windows.”

So, there you have it. Windows may email your love of gay porn to everyone in your address book!

That suggests an advertising line for Canonical. Ubuntu: Do it for the porn!

hxxp://www.chinwong.com/index.php?/site/comments/linux_for_real_people/

^ Thanks, twinkletoes!

I left the other place at the request of a moderator, who felt I was too opinionated.

Jóhanna  Sigurdardóttir has been elected prime minister of Iceland. The 66 yr. old Social Democrat will lead a coalition with the Green Party. Sigurdardóttir's election represents a shift to the left for Iceland, in what is seen as punishment by Icelandic voters for years of conservative leadership which wrecked the nation financially (sound familiar, Americans?).

Sigurdardóttir, a former flight attendant, is openly gay. She began her political career after she became a union organizer for the flight attendants of Loftleidir Airlines (now Icelandair) in the 1960s and 1970s. That experience led her to election to Iceland's parliament in 1978. She has been continuously re-elected to parliament since 1978, without  break. She served as social affairs minister from 1987-1994 and again from 2007.

Jóhanna  Sigurdardóttir is the first openly gay leader of any nation on Earth (in the "modern era," that is). She married Þorvaldur Steinar Jóhannesson in 1970 and the couple had two sons (born 1972 and 1977). After her divorce from Þorvaldur, Jóhanna joined Jónína Leósdóttir, an author and playwright, as her life partner. The couple were joined in a civil union in 2002.

It is thought that Sigurdardóttir may pursue entry for Iceland into the European Union. Her immediate task will be stabilization of the nation's economy, which was abruptly wrecked in 2008, when all three of the nation's largest banks simultaneously effectively collapsed overnight. So great are the problems facing Sigurdardóttir that it is questionable whether she will be able to maintain a viable coalition within Iceland's parliament through May, when new elections will occur. For now, however, Sigurdardóttir is distinguished as the world's first and only openly-gay leader.

hxxp://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6175547.ece

The latest version of Ubuntu was released on Thursday (23 April 2009). While you guys are waiting for Windows 7, you might want to give Ubuntu a try. Renai LeMay of ZDNet says Ubuntu 9.04 is every bit as slick as Win 7 or OS X, and Ubuntu is FREE! The latest version offers faster boot-up and shutdown times and many subtle but signifigant tweaks to the interface to improve ease of use. The new ext4 file system can be implemented on new installations (although the default is still the old ext3).

I installed Jaunty on my latest computer build (a 64-bit AMD 5000+ dual-core box with 8 GB of RAM!) and I've been living with it for four days now. I'm very pleased with it. I've encountered some rare odd, irreproducible partial system "hangs," but overall it's very stable, very fast, and significantly easier to use than earlier versions of Ubuntu. Firefox continues to crash occasionaly and randomly (as it has for years on Ubuntu), but it seems better than it was with 8.10. And it always restores to the pre-crash point on re-launching if you ask it to (an annoyance, but not a big problem). Other browsers are much stabler on Ubuntu (for some reason, far more browsers are available for Linux than for Windows).

Ubuntu can be run "live" from the CD (just to test it without installing), or it can be installed alongside an existing Windows setup, without affecting Windows at all (each time you boot, a screen asks you what OS you want to boot into).

As always, Ubuntu is available as a 32-bit desktop, 64-bit desktop, 32-bit alternate, 64-bit alternate, or 32- and 64-bit server editions. The desktop editions are what most people will want, with fully-graphical interfaces and the ability to boot and run "live." The server editions are much smaller (<600 MB), as they do not include a graphical desktop interface (command-line only). The "alternate" versions are intended for computers with especially problematic hardware (but alternate installation disks cannot be run "live").

I've become a big fan of Ubuntu, which has saved me a lot of money and just keeps getting better with every release. Anyone who wants to try it can get it here:

hxxp://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

hxxp://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-291651.html?tag=nl.e589

I don't plan to "upgrade," either.

Microsoft products are just too expensive when you consider you can get free OSs that are even better.

I do think that the "XP Mode" will win over a number of businesses and other users, though. That's brilliant.

But Win 7 isn't going to win back 95% market share for MS.  They're just gonna have to learn to live with a mere 90%!

In a pitch to get businesses to finally abandon Windows XP and migrate to a later version of Windows, Microsoft has announced that Windows 7 will have available an "XP Mode" (aka "XPM") by which it will be fully compatible with Windows XP programs. The XP mode will be implemented as a virtual machine. This is the first time Microsoft will have used a virtual machine in order to maintain backward compatibility with older software. XPM will be available as an add-on to Windows 7, it will not come standard. Microsoft says that XPM will not require purchase of an additional XP license, but it is not yet clear if the add-on will be offered free of charge.

Because the virtual machine is processor-based, running XP on Win 7 will require at least a dual-core processor. Not all computers will be able to use the new feature.

You can find a series of screenshots detailing the installation on XPM here:

hxxp://www.winsupersite.com/win7/xp_mode_pre_shots.asp

Windows XP virtual machines can easily be run from other operating systems, of course (most notably Linux). But legal implementation of such a virtual machine would require purchase of an XP license.

Microsoft will offer the release candidate for Windows 7 for public download on May 5. Still no word on what the new OS will cost, however.

hxxp://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9132119&intsrc=news_ts_head

A surprisingly emotional outburst has developed as a response to the verdict.

"Operation Baylout" has been launched.

hxxp://partyvan.info/wiki/Operation_Baylout

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's Swedish website was defaced on Thursday. Hackers have begun hitting the IFPI and its lawyers with DDoS attacks. A campaign is underway to saturate the MPAA's anti-piracy office with faxes. People are being encouraged to saturate bulletin boards with threads criticizing the verdict.

"They want to get the message across that the IFPI can not mess with the internet and that the internet is serious business," coldblood, an admin at anonnet.org told El Reg.

hxxp://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/20/ddos_hacktivism_pirate_bay/

@trentreviso:

The Whitecaps have developed something of a reputation recently for gastronomic excess, serving up at park concession stands such delights as deep-fried twinkies, deep-fried Pepsi (?)

I was curious about the deep-fried Pepsi thing, so I looked into it.

It's actually a Pepsi-flavored batter (shaped into spheres) which gets deep-fried. Then, it's topped with Pepsi syrup, Pepsi-flavored frosting, and whipped cream.

People say it kinda tastes like Pepsi. Kinda.

hxxp://www.lockergnome.com/griffin/2008/10/18/deep-fired-pepsi-are-you-serious/

A Swedish court has sentenced the founders of "The Pirate Bay" torrent site to one year in prison and 30 million kronor collectively ($3.5 million) for their actions in maintaining their famous torrent site. The judgement was reduced from 117 million kronors sought by the content owners.

"By providing a site with, as the district court found, sophisticated search functions, easy upload and storage, and a website linked to the tracker," the defendants were guilty of assisting copyright infringement, the court said.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry was thrilled with the verdict. CEO John Kennedy, who testified at the trial, said "Today’s verdict is the right outcome…"

More than 1,000 people turned out across Sweden to protest the verdict. The protest is being lead by Malin Littorin-Ferm of the Pirate Party's Ung Pirat youth league. Since the verdict was announced, support for Sweden's Pirate Party has exceeded that for the Green Party! At the moment, almost half of all Swedish males under the age of 30 are considering voting for the Pirate Party in the 2009 European Parliament elections.

"We young people have a whole platform on the Internet, where we have all our social contacts – it is there that we live. The state is trying to control the Internet and, by extension, our private lives," Littorin-Ferm said.

Carl Lundström, fourth defendant and heir to the Wasabröd cracker fortune, appears to be good for the money to pay the fines. But, the future of The Pirate Bay remains uncertain. To date, The Pirate Bay continues to operate.

It is doubtful that the content owners have accomplished anything with the Pirate Bay verdict. Decentralized torrent tracking may be the wave of the future. Tribler is an open source peer-to-peer client which enables users to share content without the centralized tracking of torrent sites. Tribler's searches are done over the networks of fellow bittorrent users, sidestepping centralised torrent tracking altogether. As Emily Bell of The Guardian says:

The Pirate Bay is not the beginning of the end for copyright infringement. That ship has already sailed, carrying more than just pirates.

hxxp://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/the-pirate-bay-verdict-guilty-with-jail-time.ars

hxxp://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10567532

hxxp://www.tribler.org/trac

hxxp://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/20/pirate-bay-digital-media

Photo below is Pirate Bay co-founders Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi.

Congratulations, lover!  (although quite belated)

During my driving test, I was directed up a one-way street. Another car soon came down the street the wrong way, head-on at us. I pulled over and let the car pass.

In another part of my test, the car in front of me stopped to carry on a conversation with the driver of another car, passing in the opposite direction. There was no space to pass on either side. My examiner and I waited perhaps a full quarter hour until they were done talking, then continued on.  I just waited patiently, afraid to honk or otherwise complain, since it was my driver's test.

I passed the test okay, but I asked the examiner if I did the right thing in those two situations.

"I don't know," he answered.

The West Michigan Whitecaps are a Class A minor league baseball team in Comstock Park, Michigan. Their home field is Fifth Third Park (presumably named for the bank).

The Whitecaps have developed something of a reputation recently for gastronomic excess, serving up at park concession stands such delights as deep-fried twinkies, deep-fried Pepsi (?), and whole drumsticks of turkey. They've just introduced the "Fifth Third Burger" made up of five one-third pound beef patties (get it? hahaha!). The enormous 1.67 lb. burger is served on an eight inch sesame seed bun, made especially for the Whitecaps by Nantucket Baking Co. of Grand Rapids. It has five slices of American cheese, nacho cheese, a cup of chili, salsa,  Fritos, lettuce, tomato, and sour cream. Jalapenos are optional. The whole thing weighs about four pounds. It costs $20.

The Fifth Third burger contains 4,800 calories (9x that of a Quarter Pounder w/ cheese), 300 gm fat, 744 mg cholesterol, and 10,000 mg sodium. It comes sliced into four pieces (they use a pizza cutter), and is intended as a meal for whole families. If you can eat a whole one yourself in one sitting, however, they give you a T-shirt.

hxxp://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/03/whitecaps_fifth_third_burger_n.html

A dietary group in Washington thinks the burger should come with a warning!

hxxp://sports.espn.go.com/minorlbb/news/story?id=4031453

Over the past weekend, Amazon.com appeared to have begun re-classifying nearly all of its gay-themed books as "Adult," regardless of considerations of language, sexual situations, or violence. Although Amazon will continue selling the books, the re-classification removes gay titles from Amazon's sales rankings.

According to gay author Mark Probst, the re-classifications seem to have begun noticeably April 11 with two high-profile gay novels, Transgressions by Erastes and False Colors by Alex Beecroft. The next day, hundreds of gay novels disappeared from Amazon's sales charts, including Probst's own The Filly. When Probst inquired with Amazon as to what was going on, he got the following email:

**In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D

Member Services

Amazon.com Advantage**

hxxp://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html

Probst isn't the only gay author to get this response from Amazon. Blogger Craig Seymour says he got the same answer from Amazon in February, when his own book's sales rankings disappeared.

hxxp://craigspoplife.blogspot.com/2009/04/is-amazon-homophobic.html

Michelangelo Signorelli reports that every one of his books has disappeared from Amazon's sales rankings. So has Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room," and Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance.

Meta Writer has posted a list of the reclassified books here:
hxxp://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11992.html

Meanwhile, racy heterosexual books have not been reclassified. Remaining in Amazon's sales rankings are Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller; American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis; Wifey by Judy Blume; The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison; the photobooks Playboy: Helmut Newton and Playboy: Six Decades of Centerfolds; Naked Lunch by William Burroughs; Incest: From 'A Journal of Love' by Anais Nin; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominque Bauby (2007 Vintage International edition), Maurice by E.M. Forster (2005 Penguin Classics edition).

A groundswell of gay outrage developed over the weekend, primarily on Twitter, when it seemed to become more obvious what was happening. By Sunday evening, Publisher's Weekly was carrying a report in which an Amazon official was quoted as saying it was all just a "glitch" in Amazon's sales ranking feature which "is in the process of being fixed."

hxxp://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6651080.html

But the "glitch" has evidently been going on for a few months, has affected only gay-themed books, and is not yet fixed.

hxxp://www.towleroad.com/2009/04/amazon-deems-gay-books-adult-strips-sales-rankings.html

Comcast Philadelphia was airing a Vatican Good Friday service at 2:00 A.M. Friday morning, when a glitch gave viewers 30 seconds of an ad for "Girls Gone Wild." Comcast says the glitch happened because of the emergency broadcast alert system.

Emergency broadcast tests are usually done overnight at Comcast. The emergency alert test automatically switches viewers to a preselected channel which is supposed to provide emergency information. In this case, the channel was in use, airing a "Girls Gone Wild" commercial.

Only a single viewer complained about the glitch.

Probably the only viewer who was watching the Vatican Good Friday service.

Happy Easter, everyone!

hxxp://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/odd_religious_broadcast_gone_wild

HPV (Human Papilloma Virus) has been found to be a much stronger risk factor for the eventual development of throat cancer than is tobacco or alcohol use. HPV is primarily transmitted by oral sex. A small study of 300 people at Johns Hopkins University showed that people who have had oral sex with more than six partners have nine times the risk of developing throat cancer as do persons who have had less than six oral sex partners.

Persons who have had clinical evidence of a prior oral infection with HPV have a 32x increased risk of developing throat cancer.

Although smoking and drinking have been thought to be the primary risk factors for throat cancer, study participants who also smoked or drank did not suffer an increased risk of throat cancer beyond that presented by exposure to HPV alone.

A particular strain of HPV, HPV-16 is primarily identified with throat cancers. Of 100 men and women with oropharyngeal cancers, 72% had demonstrable HPV-16 virus within their tumors.

HPV is the virus which causes genital warts and cervical cancers. A vaccine is available to protect against HPV strains 6, 11, 16, and 18, but it is very expensive, and American health insurance plans will only cover the cost of vaccination in some young women.

The Johns Hopkins study did not report whether throat cancers are more common in gay men.

hxxp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6639461.stm

A Vermont teen testifies to the Senate judiciary committee on behalf of gay marriage.

17 year old James Neiley, a student at Champlain Valley Union High School, helped persuade the Vermont legislature in favor of gay marriage. His testimony is worth a look.:

hXXp://www.proudparenting.com/node/2873]http://rdrct.com/http://www.proudparenting.com/node/2873

EDIT: disabled live link