Archive for January, 2009

It is pitch black. You are likely to be flamed by a fanboy.

2009.01.18 at 00:53 · Filed under Technology ·Tagged ,

I feel the need to comment about this (and, subsequently, this and this).

First, a summary, for those who get a case of the tl;dr’s.  A woman bought a laptop to use for her coursework at a local college.  She accidentally bought a Dell laptop with Ubuntu on it.  When she realized her ISP’s setup disk wouldn’t work, she tried to get Dell to swap the laptop for one with Windows.  The Dell representative apparently convinced her to keep the one she had.

She claims that this problem, combined with a lack of Microsoft Office, forced her to withdraw from classes.  The local news ran the linked article; it is worth noting that the bottom portion (the part where the news agency contacted the college and Verizon, and everything got cleaned up) did not appear in the initial article.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment

5 things I hate about Fedora 10

2009.01.14 at 16:14 · Filed under Technology ·Tagged

Every release of Fedora feels like a step in the wrong direction.  I don’t say this lightly – I use Fedora at work and at home; it is my primary operating system.  I have staunchly supported it in the face of critical Ubuntu fans for a while now.

First, a little background.  I switched to Fedora from a mixture of gentoo and slackware around the time I started my current job, since it was far easier to keep track of one package management toolset, and several things about gentoo’s packaging system had started to irk me.  The current release of Fedora at the time was 7.  I have been using it since, usually upgrading to new releases (via a clean install) about a month after they release.

My needs are simple, but apparently elusive to Fedora.  I use fluxbox as my window manager.  I prefer to perform all of my system configuration from the command line.  My graphical application use is minimal (firefox, games, pidgin).

Let’s explore the problems I’ve noticed have started creeping in, starting with the release of fedora 8.  My solution/workaround for each problem is included, if I have one.  For what it is worth, I realize that some of these could be the result of 3rd-party packages (such as Nvidia’s proprietary drivers).  However, if any of these are the result of user error, then the solution should rightly be easy to find by searching documentation, which I have done extensively in every case.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (5)

An aside on Education

2009.01.07 at 15:33 · Filed under Technology ·Tagged

I first encountered Clay Burell on his blog Beyond School, where he had started a series of Unsucky English Lectures.  These posts were brilliant, engaging, and poignant, and I followed them to their tragically early conclusion. (Clay, if you’re reading this, pick those back up, man!)  It turns out that Beyond School was actually a blog about revolutionizing education.  I just happened in while he was doing a special series.  I kept following his blog, though.

At any rate, Mr. Burell now has a new blog at education.change.org.  In particular, one recent post impressed me, and I wanted to increase its distribution, at least by the tiny amount that people actually view this blog :P

Why Schoolwork Doesn’t Have to Suck

There’s some important ideas here.  The concept that our technology could (should, must) become the medium through which we engage in learning is as groundbreaking as it is obvious.  Enjoy.

Leave a Comment

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 136 other followers