A while ago on Slashdot, I read about a contest titled “We’re Linux”. The Linux Foundation has asked the community to develop their own “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC…” style commercials. I watched a handful of the other submissions, littered with cheesy jokes and poor production quality. However, the simplistic approach fared quite well. Here is the winner:

Apple, Linux, Linux Foundation, Mac, microsoft, Operating Systems, Personal computer, slashdot Hide

So as some of you know, I recently bought a new mouse. So, I decided to bring my Razer Diamondback to work, seeing how I was stuck using an old MS Intellimouse Explorer 2.0. The Explorer 2.0 was great, untill the wheel started to wear out. So I visited www.razersupport.com to grab a copy of the latest drivers. To my surprise, the drivers completely nullified the functionality of the side, scroll, and middle mouse button. It was now nothing more than your standard Apple Mouse. Next logical step for any geek would be to uninstall the drivers. So re-launch the install utility expecting to see an Uninstall option pre-selected, when it proceded to re-install over the old version. I was not pleased.

After examining the forums on razersupport.com, I found this:

QUESTION
How do I uninstall the Razer Pro|Click V1.6 drivers?

SOLUTION
There are 2 methods to uninstall the drivers. Note that the below does not remove the SystemLoginItem entry in the system preference.

1. Run the uninstall.sh file that is included in the driver package.

2. Launch the Terminal Application. Copy and paste the below commands one at a time.

sudo rm -r /System/Library/Extensions/RazerPRODriver.kext

sudo rm -r “/Library/Application Support/Razer/RazerPRODaemon.app”

sudo rm -r /Library/PreferencePanes/RazerPRO.prefPane

rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/com.razer.PRO.plist

sudo rm -r /Library/Receipts/Razer\ PRO.pkg

This leads me to my next thought….

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING, RAZER?

Seriously? Do you honestly expect your everyday consumer, albeit ‘gamer’, to venture into console-land? I’m sure half of my readers will have already stopped reading this article as soon as they see, what looks to them like, alphanumeric hieroglyphics. Razer, fire everyone. Start over. Hire me! —-> dackstheninja at gmail dot com thx die.

On a side note, this was included in uninstall.sh, hidden within the contents of the installer package, however not linked to any function from what I can see. Idiots. The mouse works better without the drivers.

Apple Mouse, Cut copy and paste, diamondback, Operating Systems, razer, Rm, Shareware, Sudo, Utilities, windows Hide

This is just plain freakin cool. Ever seen Minority Report? Here’s the real-world version.

The SOE’s combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise. - from http://oblong.com/

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g-speak, Geometry, Graphical user interface, imaging, Living room, minority, Operating Systems, os, Pixel, report, SOE, spatial, Special Operations Executive, vimeo Hide

I picked up a T-Mobile Android G1 the other day. I must say, this is the coolest device I’ve ever owned. My one complaint so far is. WHERE IS THE FLASH SUPPORT! Come on Adobe… I’ve seen this done before (see below), and I’ve got a decent background in Linux (compiling software, package management, ect..), so why can’t it be done? Is there an .apk file floating around somewhere?

I’d like to see an ‘alternate’ market app for non-free ports, grey-area apps, and other things that Google might not want to be tied to legally. 

Anyone who can shed any light on this, please comment below. For now, just drool over this video.

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Android, Computers, Google, Linux, Operating Systems, Package management system, Projects, T-Mobile Hide

10. Email Sniping

Server side fun. “Did you get my email?” <<zap>>, “No…(yes)”

9. The Decaff. Suprise

See how the marketing department feels when their java lifeline is switched to non-caffeinated pisswater. 

8. Good ol’ password change.

Make it something like )*(_&ifhu-)*&D)FH_)87fy-09y8Y_)* and insist they memorize it. Idiots. 

7. The straight up crash

Burn their fucking computer to the ground with a few well-placed lines of code. 

6. Torrent framing

“Well Johnny, it seems as if you’ve been using $100,000 of company equipment to download the My Little Pony DVD Box set from thepiratebay. You’re fired.” with a Mac/Unix/Linux based office, one could do this rather easily.

5. VNC Takeover

They will never figure it out. They’ll blame the gremlins and tiny japanese people in the box they know as a computer.

4. Goatse Wallpaper

Not up on your internet lingo? Prepare for a doozie.

3. Share the dirt.

‘Accidently’ share someone’s ‘hidden’ stash of ’special’ files. Make sure you label it “Marks Disgusting Porno Collection On the Company Server”

2. Annoyatron

This amazing little device found at ThinkGeek.com is a great way to piss off any desk jockey.

1. 2girls1cup Screensaver

Just make sure you use your VNC connection to blast their volume. Nothing like walking away from a quiet office, only to come back to 2 girls shitting in a cup, moaning. 

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DVD, Entertainment, Linux, My Little Pony, Networking, Operating system, Operating Systems, Password, Shopping, Thin Clients, Virtual Network Computing Hide

Today sees the release of Kubuntu 8.10 featuring the KDE 4 desktop. The Kubuntu developers have been hard at work, bringing you the latest and greatest software the open source community has to offer. KDE 4 reworks your system with a major new revision of the desktop.

This Intrepid release lives up to its name by including many changes, but there are some features that are not yet available in KDE 4. If you would rather stay with what you know then remember that Kubuntu 8.04 is still fully supported, see KDE3-KDE4Migration and Is KDE 4.1 for you? for more information on deciding. You can try it first with the Kubuntu Intrepid Live CD to see for yourself whether or not it really is “for you”.

Get Kubuntu 8.10

Upgrading from 8.04

To upgrade from Kubuntu 8.04, press Alt+F2 and type in kdesudo “adept_manager –dist-upgrade” (including quotes) into the command box. Adept should open up and offer a Version Upgrade button. Click Version Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

See the full upgrade instructions.

Download the CD

If you want to do a new install of Kubuntu the easiest way is to download a CD. You can also request a free CD if you are unable to download.

New Features since Kubuntu 8.04

KDE 4!

At last, fully supported, the reworked desktop, KDE 4. Kubuntu ships with KDE 4.1.2.

Featuring Plasma, the desktop with slick widgets

By default, our Plasma desktop has a customized offering of widgets, bringing the best configurations that our KDE3 desktop had back to KDE4, along with some new additions such as the QuickAccess plasmoid in the panel which provides quick access to the files in your home directory.

Taskmanager tooltips have also been backported from KDE trunk.

Desktop Effects

In KDE4 KWin has been given the bling-bling with shiny new Desktop effects ranging from the standard shadows and translucency to Wobbly Windows to a Coverswitch alt-tab window switcher shown above. These effects will be on by default if your video card supports them.

Dedicated File Manager

Dolphin gets a breath of fresh air in KDE 4, with numerous new features, a load of bugfixes, and those tiny polishing details that make Dolphin a very capable file manager. As in past releases, Konqueror is still available for file browsing if you prefer it.

Discover more about KDE 4.1.

http://www.kubuntu.org/news/8.10-release

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Desktop environment, Graphic Subsystems, KDE, KDE 3, KDE 4, Kubuntu, Operating Systems, Plasma Hide

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst expects the enterprise open source software business to emerge from the economic crisis stronger than the proprietary market.

In August Red Hat posted second quarter revenue 29 percent higher than the same quarter a year ago, while its subscription revenue also enjoyed double-digit growth to beat analysts’ estimates. Whitehurst said that while predictions of a recession will likely mean fewer new projects, the economic benefits of going open source are already encouraging proprietary customers to switch.

“I’ve had a couple of conversations with CIOs who said ‘we’re a Microsoft shop and we don’t use any open source whatsoever, but we’re already getting pressure to reduce our operating costs and we need you to help put together a plan for us to help us use open source to reduce our costs’.

“And we’ve had other customers literally looking at ripping and replacing WebLogic or WebSphere for JBoss, so I do think that we will pick up quite a bit of new business where companies are looking to save money from what they are doing…I think we’ll know in about six to nine months but there is no question that open source will come out of this in relatively better shape than our proprietary competitors,” he told Computerworld.

Whitehurst, who visited Australia last week to promote the Open Source Collaborative Innovation program, said telecommunications is his company’s largest represented sector at around 12 percent, followed by government and the financial services sectors each about 10 percent of Red Hat’s business.

Since arriving at Red Hat at the beginning of the year, Whitehurst said it became clear that his company’s offerings are most popular among high-tech companies that use IT for a competitive advantage - something he is working to change.

“We’ve been working to build a commercial ecosystem that almost mirrors our technical ecosystem…We make open source consumable for the enterprise by the testing we do, by the certifications, the performance testing, the Service Level Agreements, the documentation, the localisation and ultimately the support. The obvious next step for our business model is to do an even better job at making that software easier to consume for less sophisticated customers.”

What Red Hat offers that other enterprise Linux distributions don’t, Whitehurst says, is an insistence that any changes to its OS make it upstream into the Linux kernel.

“There have been times frankly when we’ve had customers that are frustrated and say ‘we want this change just put it in’ and we’ll say no, because if we can’t get it upstream the next time there is an update of Linux you are going to be non-standard and it’s going to be a separate thing that you’re going to have to support. 

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economy, Linux, Linux distribution, Linux kernel, microsoft, Open Source, Operating Systems, Red Hat, Whitehurst Hide