Slashdot

Why on earth would anyone want to run Linux on a Windows box? That's like building your house on a dung hill.

Though I suppose it comes in handy for accessing those Linux only web sites. ;)

Lev writes "Some says, it's because open software promoters remained unrecognizable by the governmental organizations (however EU efforts urged the country in this directions), while corruption runs trough in the state apparatus but others see it as a moment of the desperate war against the world's largest subjecter. Otherwise, his speech was pretty much about nothing considerable but popularizing the new Microsoft products and reinvented brand new concepts. Just as usual."
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207801080

An anonymous reader writes "I am not a wordsmith. Someone tried to egg Balmer during a speech and missed. He was upset because in that country they apperently have to pay a hefty Microsoft tax by law. [any summary you do will be better...]"
http://gizmodo.com/391736/steve-ballmer-egged-in-hungary

lipi writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was egged at a Hungarian University and had to take cover under a desk. The egg-throwing protester has accused Microsoft of stealing millions from the country's taxpayers, referring to the controversial $160 million deal signed by the Hungarian government and Microsoft to provide software for Hungarian education and government. Hungary's equivalent of the FTC brought the tender to court, because the phrasing made it impossible for anyone other than Microsoft to win, locking out competing software vendors including those who provide F/OSS solutions."

So just because there's a law against it, it's wrong?

In this day and age when most of the middle class doesn't give a fuck enough to vote with their dollars or otherwise, we techies do what we have to. If that means enabling everybody to steal from the big corporations that have been ripping everybody off for years, then so be it. I encourage everyone that I know to do the same.

An anonymous reader writes "In its youth, the Moon may have been bracketed by two asteroidal companions, says a new study. From Earth, these tiny moons — up to 100 km wide — would have appeared as two extremely bright stars, according to a mathematical modelling study detailed in the journal Icarus."
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1993

Lightweight programming, minus Google

Project Watch: Microsoft 2008 Those who have been following Project Watch will know that I have been leading the development in a large database project using SQL Server 2008, Windows 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.

http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/05/16/virtual_earth_visual_studio_20082/

dhavleak writes "The hoax e-mails that paint Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama as unpatriotic and as a clandestine Muslim are still having an impact on voters' perception of the Illinois senator, reports a Wednesday story the New York Daily News.

This kind of sentiment expressed through voter interviews — however remote — could play a factor in the elections. What's slashdot's take on how Obama can counter the whisper-campaign?"
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/05/hoax-anti-obama.html

dhavleak writes "The New York Times suggested Wednesday that future versions of the Zune might come with a tiny cop capable of catching digital lawbreakers.

Ina Freid on Cnet reports that Microsoft denied this with a statement saying ""Microsoft has no plans or commitments to implement content filtering features in the Zune family of devices as part of our content distribution deal with NBC".

Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn echoed the sentiment. "We've agreed to work with these guys on a number of issues, but we have no plans or commitment to put filtering technology as part of this arrangement with NBC""

Harvey Chute writes "Seven highlights of tomorrow's release of Version 2.5 of Zune software, firmware, and Marketplace. 1. Video downloads 2. Autoplaylists 3. Gapless playback 4. Enhanced metadata editing 5. New Social networking features 6. Multi-device sync 7. Improved memory management on the device MORE: http://www.zunerama.com/zune-software-2-5-overview.php Zune community reaction: http://zunerama.com/forum/index.php?topic=9755.0"
http://www.zunerama.com/zune-software-2-5-overview.php

dhavleak writes "A Washington DC advocacy group called Women's Voices, Women's Vote is being accused of waging a high-tech voter suppression campaign, after voters in predominantly black districts in North Carolina began receiving automated phone calls implying that they hadn't properly registered to vote in the upcoming Democratic primary.

It would be interesting to know how many votes have already been lost to these tactics, if the media will actually pick up this story, and if there will be any cases filed against the group behind this considering this is a Class 1 felony in North Carolina."
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/north-carolin-1.html

dhavleak writes "A guidance counselor at a Manhattan prep school is murdered while the prom is taking place in the gymnasium. Forensic scientists for the New York police attempt to recreate the crime scene by uploading hundreds of camera phone thumbnail photos snapped at the dance onto a computer. The PC screen fills up in a concentric square pattern, revealing a wide shot of the gym at the center. Investigators can manipulate the images to show close-ups of the scene from every angle.

This episode of the CBS crime drama CSI: NY, scheduled to run Wednesday night, is fiction. But the technology at its core, Microsoft's Photosynth software, is real. It analyzes scores of images for similarities and stitches them into a three-dimensional reconstruction."

NX-47 writes "I'd like to get my fellow slashdotters' input on how the Mainstream Media can be encouraged to act responsibly, and to serve the public as mandated in the First Amendment. We've all seen just how low the MSM will go to get viewers, instead of actually reporting newsworthy events, or -gasp- actually act as the Fourth Estate (maintain a separate check-and-balance watchdog of the government). Since the MSM clearly no longer has the public interest in mind, how can we, the public, encourage the MSM to actually act in our best interests? Without a well informed public, the government will continue serve it's own wishes instead of the People's, and the People will continue to suffer.

I'm intentionally speaking in generalities here, as I'm mainly interested in knowing what you, dear reader, thinks about the MSM and how we might go about instigating real change in this regard. Can the web be leveraged to organize some sort of unified movement? How can we speak as one voice?"

Over the years, I've tried a number of Linux distributions. Some I've liked, some I've hated, and some I was neutral about. I've been through dependency hell, I've had the frustration of attempting to find a configuration setting that would make my mouse work smoothly, or get my monitor resolution right. I've had the times when something in my hardware just wouldn't work because a driver wasn't available, or the driver wasn't quite what it should be. I think at one time or another, I have seen most of the problems in one form or another. Having said that, over the past 8 years, I've seen Linux distributions get steadily (even drastically) better.

Despite my liking for Linux, I still have to work with Microsoft Windows. Windows is the "standard", and though I like Linux myself, I always had trouble recommending it to non-technical people. One look at the disk partitioning at set-up, and people would get really nervous, even when I assured them it wouldn't hurt their computer. Forget the idea of handing many of the people I know a CD and telling them to "just try it!" I'd do it if they were only going to use it as a LiveCD, but unless I could be there watching, not to install. Even then, if they didn't like it, they were going to have trouble removing it without help. There is only so much time I'm willing to dedicate for things like that.

However, a statement in a recent interview with Mark Shuttlesworth caught my eye: Ubuntu 8.04, "Hardy Heron" could be installed and uninstalled under Windows. If it were true, it would be one of the best ways to get people to actually try a Linux distributions. They could install it, and if they didn't like it, they could use the Control Panel and Add/Remove Programs to remove it!

With that in mind, once it was released, I decided to attempt this as if I were a complete newbie, who had only used Windows. I downloaded two Hardy Heron versions - Ubuntu 8.04, and Kubuntu 8.04. After burning the CD's, I put the claim to the test. I'll also admit that I've never used either of them before, so in a way I could be considered a newbie.

First up was Ubuntu 8.04. I put the CD in my Windows XP Pro box, and immediately an installer window popped up. After selecting "Install under Windows," it asked me the size on my hard drive I wanted to assign to Ubuntu, my user name, and a password. I put them in, and clicked the ok button. It proceeded to run an install, copying an image over (it told me), and at the end, it asked me if I wanted to Reboot.

On rebooting, I saw a menu choice: Windows XP or Ubuntu. I selected Ubuntu, and watched as Ubuntu went through its setup paces. It extracted its files, set up a swap ext3 partion, and then went through a hardware detection. It then cleaned up and booted. Within 5 minutes of starting, I was in! Now the fun part - just how usable is this?

It didn't take me long to browse through the menus, and see what programs were on there. I saw a little flashing icon at the top of the desktop, and when I clicked it, it asked if I wanted to install a "restricted" driver for my NVIDIA card. I said "yes", and it went and got the new driver, installed it, and after a reboot, I was on again. I started playing around with the programs. Firefox. OK, worked fine. Pidgin for IM. I put in my AIM account and password, and was on in a heartbeat. Open Office - great. Media players - I needed codecs, but they went and got them. They worked fine, until I tried to open a WMV file. Oops! I opened up Synaptic, and went looked to see if I could find anything. Nope. I then did some looking and found Medibuntu, a restricted repository which did have the codecs, so I added that repository to Synaptic.

Let me take a moment here to go over what's not quite right here. As someone who uses Linux regularly, I knew that I needed to add codecs (actually, even more so, that I knew what they were), how to go look up repositories, and use a package manager. I know the difference between "free," "non-free," and "restricted" packages. Someone who only knows Windows will not know any that. Opening a terminal, and going through the whole apt-get procedure(s) was not bothersome to me, but would confuse the heck out of someone not aware or used to it. Another confusing issue is that Ubuntu puts the Windows partition in a file folder called "Host". This is non-obvious to anyone. It took me a few minutes of stumbling around when I happened to trip across it. Despite that, it wasn't long before I had a nicely functional Linux distribution up and running. I could browse the web, check my e-mail using Evolution, IM, and play media files.

It was at this point, before getting into serious tweaking, I decided to check out the removal. I rebooted, went into Windows, then to the Add/Remove. I got the standard removal queries, along with an option to save my Ubuntu settings. I said no, and then went through with it. A few seconds later, it was uninstalled. A reboot put me right back into Windows - no grub menu, no Ubuntu. Gone.

In went the Kubuntu 8.04 CD. Once again, the Windows installer popped up. After again selecting a user name, password, and size of the partition, it went through a similar process to the Ubuntu install. After rebooting, I again saw the Grub menu - and chose Kubuntu. Again, as with Ubuntu, the process ran seamlessly, with the exception of having (or at least telling me) several more steps. Shortly later, I was looking at a standard KDE desktop

This came with most of the standard KDE software: Konqueror, Kopete, and so on. One nice addition that was not in Ubuntu was Wine. A head scratcher was the apparent decision to not synchronize application offerings with the parent distribution. No Firefox, Pidgin, Evolution, Synaptic, etc. Having not used either of these distros before, I had come in thinking that Kubuntu was Ubuntu using the KDE Desktop. Instead, it appears to to be a completely different distro. My overall impression was that this was a much "rougher" distro than Ubuntu. When I pulled up the installed media players, they didn't attempt to look for codecs for me as they had in Ubuntu. Instead, I had to go out and locate them, and install them. Then there was the problem when my sound card didn't work - yet it had worked perfectly in the Ubuntu trial.

After trying both, I have to say that that Ubuntu 8.04 is probably the single easiest install for Windows-only people who want to try out Linux. I feel this is a very big jump towards a Linux desktop that can be used by the Windows-only crowd, but it's still not quite at the stage where I'd just hand a CD to someone who's not technology literate and expect them to run with it. It doesn't need as much hand-holding as previous distributions, but it still will need some. So be prepared to answer some questions if you recommend this to your "non-techie" friends. Having said that, there are still some hassles to be worked out, particularly with Kubuntu. While I generally prefer KDE, and feel that it is an easier migration path to Linux for Windows users, I'm going to hold off recommending Kubuntu until they smooth out the rough edges.