When Vista misbehaves
I am the “elected” tech-supporter of my family. Sometimes I can help,
and sometimes I’m puzzled by the Vista operating system. My
wife’s computer suddently had a problem connecting to our wireless
router, and I just could not figure out why Vista kept disconnecting
from the network after 15 min. One thing I never want to see again is
the stupid “wirless troubleshooting” help thing. After some time I got
annoyed and rebooted the computer. Booom! Wireless works! That’s just
great I thougth, everything works. Only thing is that she needs to
reboot every 15 min as long as she wants to browse the net (at this
point I should point out that I’m over dramatizing a bit, it was
after only 4 reboots that the issue was resolved). But as a GNU/Linux
user I found this dance kind of strange. I’m used to being told that
Linux is to hard and arcane for most people, but this was just
ridiculous. And the “help-guide/throubleshooting” didn’t help at all,
even after reading it several times. I really don’t want to be mocked
for using GNU/Linux any more. Not after the trouble and magic involved
in fixing a Vista problem. My choice of operating system is both free as
in freedom and working. RTFM all the way as opposed to Vista.
Running with the HURD
The situation is not unfamiliar. It’s exactly Mon Nov 17 03:16:23 CET
2008, and you can’t sleep. In the morning, at 08:15:00 sharp, you need
to be located in the classroom where you will be given a
introductory lecture to programming using C. Since you can’t sleep
anyway, why don’t read up on some of the subjects for the lecture?
No, that’s just stupid. As a hacker-wannabe, you decide to do some
really heavy-ubergeek stuff. Something that might score you a lot of
geek-cred. You decide to install GNU hurd 0.3 GNU-Mach 1.3.99/Hurd-0.3
i686-AT386 GNU!
Which wasn’t so really that hard, to be quite frank. Although I used
the Debian GNU/Hurd “distro” with APT and everything, things seems to me as running quite nice. I hope I learn something by running this over time. Perhaps I can become a *real* C hacker after a bit.
Happy Hacking!
"Windows is free"
That incredible stupid, misinformed and ignorant statement came during an class I was attending yesterday. It was a uttered as a response to a question asking if there was an alternative mac-compatible program to a Microsoft-program we have to run during that class. “Windows is free, why don’t you run that” a fellow student said. The Mac-guy was a bit annoyed by that. Myself, as a free software supporter, I was fucking furious.
I’m not sure what kind of direction this guy came from to arrive at that conclusion. He may have bought a computer, or several computers over a longer period of time, with some copy of the Microsoft Windows operating system, and got into his head that the operating system itself don’t cost any money. He might have gotten the OS from someone in his family, I’m not sure if that is legal or not and I don’t care because I run gNewSense. He might have found it on the Internet, and believed that stuff found on the Internet is free. One other thing I found out was that the school I attend have some kind of agreement with Microsoft that enables the school to give away licenses to students, because the school is paying such an outrageous amount of money anyway. He may even have been referring to this deal, but still Windows is not free. Someone have paid for the license, in this case the Norwegian people through taxes.
So there you have it, there are ignorant and/or misinformed people all around us. Even on a higher engineering education that educate IT-professional. Guess I have a lot of “free software”-education to do during this and other classes.
09.16.08I hate programs we have to run at school
What’s the point of making students use proprietary and insanely expensive programs during their education? Most of the people I see running Windows just goes strait to known sites which provide illegally versions of the given software. Which dosen’t educate anyone about values and respect for lisences.
On the other hand, it dosn’t seem like business respect "Free Software" and licenses like the GPL and the artistic license either. But student’s should be educated to instead find other programs that are under the GPL and GPL-compatible licenses. (There probably a lot more licenses which constitutes freedom (I don’t even know if constitutes is the correct word in this sentence)).
So my question is: why educate students to break the licenses, and thereby also the law, during theire education? Why not teach about how to use computers to slov a problem? Not how to use a proprietary program to solv a problem. That’s just stupid!
GNU Emacs and Vim vs. All other programmers IDE (almost)
My .emacs config file is getting quite large and I think GNU Emacs is using a long time to start up. Sometimes I use Vim as it is good to know the two most widespread editors on non-apple and non-microsoft systems. Yet in my C-programming class there is a whole lot of different integrated development environments running in either Apple or Microsoft operating systems. It seems like most of the splash-screen of these IDE’s is lingering just several seconds more then the version of GNU Emacs running on my machine. Take into account that I have an older laptop running Debian and most other people have newer hardware running either Vista or OSX. I rather take a finely tuned GNU/Linux system running Emacs or Vim over a Microsoft or Apple system running just about anything. Of course you can get both Emacs and Vim running on both of these, but some of the point with Windows and OSX is that you pay for the hardware, the operating system and the software running on top of that? It just stupid to pay for hardware and then run a free operating system and free software, right? "That makes no sense, what so ever", to quote Chris Procter from lugradio.