Posts by Martin Owens

Snark not required

$110 to rent your software from Microsoft and have all the rights of a London lease-less tenant.

Or pay $0 and get Ubuntu, which you actually get to own and control.

Oh how we in the community shake with fear. *roll eyes*

The Correct Response

Is for a large number of website developers to ban people coming to their websites using IE 7 or lower. (Me I just ban all internet explorer, but I'm a jerk).

Give them a link to Firefox or some other browser and ask them kindly to use something better. Something easier to develop for.

Yup

I'll be there in Boston, going to be giving a lightning talk on foss economics. Oh and Ubuntu isn't the darling child of the FSF, not while it includes various naughty proprietary bits to get hardware working and allows users to easily install flash and other stuff.

Company via Freedom

"""Since when does a competition committee force a company to continue a product they want to discontinue"""

Since said company controls the market so effectively that there isn't a single competitor that anyone is trained on and comfortable using. Of course I'd just ban Microsoft from selling products at all and write my own god damn software, but I'm not practitioner,

Freedom is a funny old thing, even when your company strips it from the world, the world will just go a little loony and take it back in uninformed and randomly short sighted ways. *oh well*

Please Contact

Hey Microsoft, the Ubuntu LoCo Council called, they want their release party idea back.

Seriously, does Microsoft really think it can pull off the kind of grass-roots party we have for Ubuntu every 6 months in most cities and countries? We'll be happy to send Ubuntu Karmic CDs to any of these frat parties, full version software for all!

Although I am surprised at El Reg for not picking up on the Ubuntu LoCo teams comparison.

Government

Windows in Government == Sacked IT Staff

There just is no excuse.

@AC Re Screens

You might like the new versions of Xorg with kernel mode setting drivers. Of course if you have nvidia cards then your out of luck, but xrandr and the gui that slaps around it should be able to do everything your talking about without much of a problem.

Seriously, if you need to complain, either point us at the launchpad bug report your filed or the answers support ticket where you specifically listed your settings and hardware. Sometimes the reason it doesn't work is for outside complications like nvidia being rotten scallywags.

Would it be too much to ask

For a nod in the article to the fact that both operating systems are guilder cages? gosh, closed source stuff, all technical, not practical.

Old Computers

We refurbish a ton of old 1Ghz, 512MB ram machines into Ubuntu machines. I just want to know why the bleedin hell all these students are being led astray into buying slow, old, crippled windows netbooks and not fast, efficient, complete and competent Ubuntu netbooks.

tut, tut, netbook makers.

As for Apple? Irrelevant.

Profit by Proxy

Support is great and it's a lovely business to be in while the majority of people are not trained and the technology is too hard to use.

But in the end, support services that encompass excludable products like training and call in support is only ever going to be a small pie slice compared to the bigger economic footprint of all those internal knowledgeable employees.

Better start coming up with a more direct funding model if we want to seriously push the software forwards. We won't always have Oracle and Microsoft overpricing their services to make it easy for Red Hat and Novell to undercut them and still have money left over to show at R&D style core programming.

In Public view

Serving the Public.

God you can't even be seen to be doing your job right as a police officer any more. *roll eyes* Is it any wonder that this kind of behaviour breeds mistrust?

You Watched it! You can't unwatch it!

Although I'd recognise that crappy Final Cut Pro chroma key anywhere. Man why don't these viral guys get better video editing software? even blender's non-linear video editing does a better job.

Re: The Linux OS (sic) is crap

>> to make latest driver work like with WinModem.

Where do these people come up with such stuff?

1) Linux isn't an operating system, it's a kernel. OTOH Ubuntu, Fedora and Gentoo are all operating systems.

2) All work in the FOSS world is done based on demand, if you don't have winmodem support, or a working mouse (that made me laugh) then perhaps it's because there isn't the demand, or the people who demand the work fail to pay for it to be done.

3) What exists is Free, what is yet to exist costs to make. Make a note and learn it for next time. If you want something done, make sure you have your chequebook out.

Microsoft, not a company worth doing business with.

@greenmantle

Why don't you just use the Adblocker firefox extension? I always remove adverts from websites that are crippled with them. Although I haven't bothered to remove any of the adverts from some sites as they're ignorable.

Improve

Well apart from the massive amounts of adv... I mean news stories surrounding Microsoft Windows 7 and comparing that to the number of news stories about Apple or Ubuntu... well I've gotta say I don't think the market's going to change until advertisers... I mean news organisations start being even handed.

Not El Reg of course, I'm talking about the BBC.

Not giving Back

It's not just about giving back, there is much more to Free and Open Source community involvement that just that. And your company fails to take advantage of a whole host of shared commons resources if you don't go all in.

Someone ort to write something explaining that really, otherwise it'll take 20 years before people cotton on to what's going on.

Ubuntu also...

Offers a family pack, you pay $0 now, download or request a free CD and you can install it on as many devices as you can. Added bonus that you get the family pack versions of every useful productivity suite for the office, studio or home.

Fair's fair The Register, give prices to FOSS alternatives when you do these sorts of comparisons.

Never Stops

Are You being Served never seems to stop playing in America, if it's not BBC America it's PBS. Thank god I chucked the TV away (well not really we use it for the Wii, but no tv reception of any kind)

Member

Ubuntu has been one of the better communities precisely because of things like the Code of Conduct. It does help to be made aware of the conditions of being a part of the community.

Although I know some people who would argue that the CoC does nothing, I say it does plenty, just not with batons and tazers.

The Basics

>> They have to sort out the basics.

Do they now, who died and made you boss of volunteer land?

Damn pesky freetards, just because they think Freedom means charity they think they can order around people who they have absolutely no business relationship with. Get you wallets out and PAY for the fixes and improvements you want, or your just going to have to hope that someone else can save your arse (and watch as they do it their way).

What's wrong with people today? No social majesty in their souls.

Ubuntu Bashing

I think the windows fanatics, who despite always claim to be fair and balanced, despite being completely disingenuous about their experience and the expectations of the market, have to always try and pick holes in the quality of Linux, Gnu and the Ubuntu distro in general.

Take that pillock above who claimed that Ubuntu "won't even support the most basic USB device", had he any clue about how usb works then he may have cottoned onto the fact that all standard USB URBs are supported. And several serial non-standard ones. The most basic usb device is the HID controllers from mice and keyboards, go on, put up or shut up.

I think we're going to see more of this kind of silly attack as time goes on and the tribe of Microsoft is devalued.

My Job, made easy

Do they know how easy it's going to be to convince netbook users who get shafted with this stuff to move over to Ubuntu?

I'm looking forward to windows 7 already.

Or

You could run the disk in VLC and run which ever section of the disk you wanted?

Or perhaps your box is a MythTV box where it just throws away the rule book on DVD access.

Cute idea though, depends too much on the DVD protection crap though.

RE: Maths

Because it's plural? Mathematics, the multiple fields of mathematical thought?

Stats

What is odd is that they count households like mine in Boston. Where we are unable to receive any digital or analogue TV signal, unwilling to fork over ridiculous subscription fees for cable and generally watch BBC shows online anyway (and maybe the odd be of comedy central).

But that's the thing, I bet that they can't believe ANY household would have NO TV.

apple/finger search

I love giving Apple the finger. They want to make products, that's fine, but do it without ripping off the commons.

RE: Jaunty Jackalope?

>> When you get grown up version names, you'll get treated like grown ups.

The name is 'Ubuntu 9.04' how is that not grown up?

Jaunty Jackalope is the developer code name for this branch of software distribution. Users have no need to really know of it. But so many of them (including in the media) find it fun to use the code names.

How Hard

Does anyone realise how HARD it is to buy an ubuntu machine from Dell, without actually search for it specifically and then wading through pages of "Are you sure you REALLY want ubuntu? Go here for windows, no really, windows is what you need and Dell Recommends Windows Vista, so go here and save yourself before it's too late!"

Next week, someone got a HP "too high class to be called Ubuntu" MI machine and complains because it broke when they tried to add the detergent and the couldn't see where to put the laundry anyway.

Sleep er

The one thing that always cracks me up is how easily we fool ourselves into thinking that we are whole, single, immutable beings, barely even look like animals, let alone could ever be related to them.

Wake up humans! Your brains are just a pile of globs that turn themselves on and off and different parts of the day. Obviously the frontal cortex was kipping while the lobes went wild.

Heh, EFF or Microsoft

The difference as above is that Microsoft was never out to take you down. Beware highly focused people, who are out to get you and what ever scam your trying to pull.

Not to mention

Firefox is slaying the IE dragon (albeit very slowly).

All I can say is "Thank God" ANYONE who uses IE for authentication on websites should be sent back to computer-ed and have their surfing license ripped up.

Sci-Fi

Yes but when am I going to see some Sci-Fi on the BBC? I know ones broadcaster likes to pretend the good Doctor is sci-fi, but melodrama in space does not sci-fi make. I've been looking forward to Mofatt for some time, perhaps he can get at least some good scripting in (if not some actual science fiction).

But to hear of this new actor and proposed companions really does speak volumes about the direction. "The BBC is in a constant flight away from science fiction"

Freetard Developers!

>> What, pray tell, is a 'freetard developer'?

Someone who works for free, obviously. Although what is little known is that they're actually free as in speech-tard developers. So couldn't give two auto-random-monkeys about the latest drivel from Google OR Microsoft.

Wanted: toys for tots

The problem for Adobe is that they don't really grok FOSS in any meaningful way. From what I've seen of flex, it uses hardly any other FOSS tech, it's completely stand alone and is a total buy in which requires massive amounts of amnesia about your previous work on w3c standard websites.

Isn't FOSS supposed to be about scientific method? build upon each others ideas. Not invent some unwholely new stack. FAIL

Condorcet much?

I'm not sure, but this tax strikes me as being fairly similar to the patronage system that was rejected during the French revolution. You can't have the masses taxed blindly and some central organisation dishing it out to deserving artists. It's just too mechanically unsound an economic device.

Also see Macaulay's speeches around the same time on the subject.

Dump

Hot water on her, that usually turns people into males in Japan.

Does anyone

Still use windows? I thought that went out with the Bush administration.

No Gnu love? Linux-tards

>> most of the GNU tools ...

Were made by The FSF with Richard Stallman leading the charge.

Man you drop the Gnu project from the name and it's suddenly missing from the history too. See if you don't give credit were credit is due, you start saying silly things like "Linus created the Linux operating system":False