It's A Binary World 2.0

Category: Computers

  • The Linux Half-Truth

    With Windows Vista requiring a computer more powerful than the majority of computer users have, many have touted Linux as the savior of these PCs. Do not throw away your PC because you must upgrade to Vista. Get all the graphical goodness and latest software with Linux. It has modest hardware requirements and will even…

  • Andrew’s comments on Imus (and my response)

    Andrew’s post on Imus and his firing prompted a response from me. I decided that since I hold a dim view that other sites may exist in the future, that I will post select bits from his post and my full response. By clicking on that link you can see his whole post and my…

  • The Science Fiction Jargon File

    Most of you tech readers have heard of The Jargon File in which esr maintains the best of geek jargon and the lore behind their etymologies. What most people didn’t know is that esr also maintains a science fiction jargon file. It’s not as funny as The Jargon File or as comprehensive, but it’s pretty…

  • Why Unbreakable Linux is a bad idea

    Oracle decided, a few months ago, to exercise a right they have under the GPL: they have taken Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and copied everything about it, rebranded it and called it their own. This is not unique to Oracle. On a basic level, this is what Ubuntu, Linspire, Mint, Xandros, CentOS, and others do…

  • Huge Moves in the land of libre software!

    First of all, Debian has finally turned 4.0! It’s been YEARS in the making and they are 4 months late, but better late than never! Believe it or not, this is a huge improvement over the prior release cycle! With Ubuntu and Fedora releasing every sixth months now, it’s up to Debian to find a…

  • Another Look at Thoggen (Part 2)

    So, according to Thoggen’s count, it took 4.45 hours to encode into Theora. At least with this DVD it seems that the coding team has fixed their error where the software seems to keep going past the end of the DVD. As far as I recall from one year ago, it didn’t add more infomation…

  • Another Look at Thoggen (Part 1)

    Thoggen is a tool for backing up DVDs to the ogg container with the theora video codec and vorbis audio codec. Theora is the darling video codec in Linux because it is unencumbered by patents. There are other free formats, such as Xvid – a format compatible with Divx, but it is based on MPEG-3,…

  • First GUI Program! (I think)

    First GUI Program! (I think)

    I’m pretty sure this is the first GUI program I’ve ever gotten to a useful state. No source code yet, as a lot of the buttons don’t work, but the basic functionality does. It’s a GTK-based RSS reader. I did it based off of code in LXF# 91. They called theirs Chomp. Since Mono is…

  • Andrew

    I replied to your Iran comment with something nearly long enough to be a blog post. Looking forward to any future debate on that thread.

  • [LXF 89] RSS Reader complete

    I’m including the file here. It’s just a command line RSS reader. The included readme file will tell you which parameters to pass it. It doesn’t really do a lot of checking or than for the words “sub” and “unsub”. It’s a pretty neat proof of concept. I’m not going to improve on it much…

  • Second Mono Project in the bag

    It was another toy program, although a bit more useful than last time. It reads through a directory and recurses through subdirectories to fine all txt files and builds up a cache. Then it searches those for any text you want to search for. Perhaps I missed a subtlety, but it appears to only search…

  • Be Careful with Super Gamer 2 livecd

    I booted into this disc to see what games it had. It is a decent disc and I discovered that there’s a Penguin-based Mario Kart Clone. It mostly has FPS shooters. Anyway, when I booted back into Windows my network card was no longer working. After fretting for about an hour and rebooting and shutting…

  • I should have listened

    Despite the fact that the ReactOS test specifically said that 0.3.1 was not ready for installation on computers, I tried anyway. Looks like they decided to keep that horrible installer from Redmond. Quite a shame when most Linux distros are using graphical installs. You don’t need to copy the bad stuff too, ReactOS team! However,…

  • Mac vs PC ad gets an update

    Some guys over at Novell decided to update the Mac v PC ads to become Mac v PC v Linux. I think they’re pretty creative and he gives a great reason behind the choices he made for the video. I’ve got the videos here, below, but be sure to follow the link above and see…

  • Tax Cuts Explained with a story

    Whenever one political party expresses wishes to give a fixed percentage tax cut to all Americans, the other party portrays it as tax cuts for the rich. (I’ve complained on this blog about this before) Their proof: the rich get back a few thousand bucks while the poor only get back a few hundred. The…