Alsa was rock solid on this computer with Ubuntu 7.04. With PulseAudio in 8.x sound was completely useless. 9.10 was fixable and now works reasonably well but it still goes into a fugue state from time to time. Did they remove the drivers for Nvidea's onboard sound? I ended up having to get an ancient C-Media card to get it working again and that's in Alsa emulation mode. It was a cheap enough fix but I'd like to get the onboard sound working as it would improve airflow to my graphics card.

That's modern patent law for you. There's a reason why most patent-holding trusts are owned by lawyers.

"Hey nice idea there, it'd be a shame if something unfortunate happened wouldn't it?"

True that. Our local DSL provider is CenturyLink which is just the old Verizon crap after a couple of name changes. Verizon was famous locally for delivering service that failed from 3 pm to 1 am and always when it rained. They recently got a friend to change their service and we ended up having to go through a mess to get them to drop their charges when it failed to work.

In this area cable beats them easily not just in speed but service and reliability. I really don't know how they stay in business unless its just by taking advantage of the 'Internet is always flaky' crowd. Apparently they decided that the old name change and run an ad campaign routine is more profitable than fixing the network. That's why we left them years ago.

It's Slashdot: Arguments for people who are bored and have nothing better to do right now.

Ok, ok, seriously, it is an opinion site. We're not deciding policy here. Relax.

My problems with the iPad have much more to do with the fact that it seems to be trying to be too much, rather than too little. I like the concept and I like the physical implementation but the battery life is going to be a problem. It's bad enough to need batteries to read books to begin with, but 10-12 hours on a charge makes it useless on a hike. Good battery life for a reader begins in days, not hours. Sure I can plug it in if I'm not hiking, but I can do that with anything and chances are good that I don't want to carry a charger around with me anyway.

For stuff like ssh and other admin duties I'll use a netbook or even my old pda. A pda is as usable as an iPad for this and it's smaller too. For everything else the netbook just works better. It's not good enough a reader to pull me off of a purpose built reader nor is it good enough at the rest to pull me off of my current gear.

They're also talking about 15$ for books. That's a pretty hefty mark up from the $7-$9 that I usually pay now for new books let alone the price of a used one.

I've never understood the need to jailbreak a device that's working properly. Why bother? I don't really care about the argument over freedom vs. walled gardens because if I want to do something that Jobs don't allow I'll have the sense to do it on something else.

I'd rather it strip the icons than the text. Like someone mentioned above there are so many icons now and they're so similar to some other icon that there is really no info there. Yes, I'll eventually get use to doing it by memory, at least in readers and other simpler devices, but for a desktop or a laptop this would be a regression in usability.

Seconded. This is a wonderful idea. I've tried it on and off for decades but it never seemed to last. There was always some thing or other that broke it to the point that just using autohide was better. If they can make it really work it'll be great but that top bar needs to be on the right.

Or better yet, the other way around.

Oh and they both need to be wide enough that the widgets remain useful. And there needs to be room for optional text labels as icon-only buttons are both unintuitive and nearly useless on complex devices.

That link has more cogent info than I've seen anywhere else in this little pissing contest. I'd mod you up If I could right now.

Once the get an address they can check it easily against other databases to verify it. Once they do that the only way to change it is probably to move.

It would be nice to have a distro that uses 0SS4 by default. Pulseaudio fails on most of the machines I've tried it on. It seems to do better on Intel hardware. It didn't like the NVidea boards that we have at all.

9.10 was the first version of Ubuntu that I could get sound up on since 7.04. The developers of Pulseaudio supposedly said "We will break your sound." They certainly did. I'd tried no fewer than 5 distros and had decided to go back to WinXP when a last-ditch effort got 9.10 working right. Usually. It still goes into a 'funk' sometimes.

I'd still be on Verizon if they could actually get their service to stay up. It went out two days before Christmas last year. Given that it was the season I gave them two weeks to get it back up and they couldn't manage it. It had done something similar before and it turned out to be intermittent line noise coming from a particular source near a local restaurant. It took them several hours to track it down last time but they did fix it. This time they switched out the bridge, tested the line for 5 minutes and pronounced it done. It dropped out about half an hour after they left and stayed down until noon the next day. I could not get them to do a more thorough examination.

Thank god for Charter. I've heard bad things about them too but the connection does actually work now which is a distinct improvement.

Because games on dial-up suck. They're going after the gamers and the movie downloaders and are using the P2P abusers to justify it. Of course they're also trying to leverage their media services by creating a walled garden. This lets the attack piracy and lock out their competition with one move.

Seconded. That's an excellent analysis.

You've never dealt with fundamentalists then. Or feminists. Or Nascar fans. Or Slashdot geeks. Or.. a lot of other groups. The squeaky wheel gets the oil so it sometimes pays dividends to act like a bunch of whiners.