So, readers may remember that when I upgraded to Fedora Core 6, I lost dual screen abilities. Well, after today’s update of the nVidia drivers from livna, it suddenly was working again (after I tried to set it up). But then compiz no longer wanted to work! That frustrated me as I wanted to have both the advantages of dual screen as well as the helpful and fun eye candy of compiz. Well, Yupman in Fedora’s freenode chat helped me through it and showed me how to change my xorg.conf to make it work.

MSNBC predicts Democrats control the House of Representatives with anything from 7 to 47 seat majority. The Senate is nearly 50-50. This will leave us in a very interesting place where they will either need to get all bipartisan or nothing at all will get done. With the voting machines and their uncertainties I predict there will be massive calls for recalls. The Republicans will not just go out without a fight. And I don’t blame them - the democrats would do the same in their shoes.

Newegg.com has begun selling them and they have a Plextor brand Blue Ray burner for $835.99. Sounds similar to how much a DVD burner would have set you back just a few years ago. Now they are selling for $60 and less. So I’m predicting that Blue Ray technology burners will be about this price in 3-5 years. Also, there was a fiasco with DVD+R and DVD-R just as there is now Blue Ray and DVD-HD. Yet burners now burn both DVD + and - so it may end up the same with the newer technologies.

Vote today!

I have to say that the first thing I noticed when I booted into gNewSense is that they have chosen a supremely ugly theme for their icons. I felt like plucking my eyes out rather than continue with this distro. I don’t know why I had such a against it. As you can see in the screenshot below, it’s just not aesthetically pleasing! I gues I’m just used to Fedora’s nice, smooth icons. Some people may say that Fedora’s icons are getting tired, but I like it.

“What happened to Roper? Is it dead? - Yes. Roper was a project put together by 5minutewalk records. We had a falling out with them, and are too lazy to start over again. Everyone has real jobs now, and although we miss seeing you all, we are just going to let it die. Unless you are a record company executive that wants to give us an enormous signing bonus and not make us tour.” -Reese Roper, source: Wikipedia, Roper entry.

Eben Moglen, a lawyer for the Free Software Foundation, remarks that the new deal may violate Section 7 of the GPL! So now you see that the stakes in the GPLv3 talks are very high! The GPLv2 may indeed be our saviour against Microsoft’s tyranies, but more on that momentarily! Mr. Moglen specifically comments:

“If you make an agreement which requires you to pay a royalty to anybody for the right to distribute GPL software, you may not distribute it under the GPL,” Moglen told CNET News.com Thursday. Section 7 of the GPL “requires that you have, and pass along to everybody, the right to distribute software freely and without additional permission.”

It was just an audio footnote on NPR’s story, but he has confessed to his church that some of the allegations are true.

This story should remind people why religion and politics shouldn’t be mixed. This guy wanted to be all big, calling into the White House and stuff and he wanted to support and anti-gay amendment. Now, the whole world gets to watch his fall. It always makes me sad when religious leaders get caught up in stuff like this because, as a religious person myself, it makes it seem as though all Christians are hypocritical or something. Sure, even Christians, sin, but the cliche is true - the bigger you are, the harder you fall. If this guy was just some regular local preacher, this would just be a Colorado thing instead of a National issue.

So, by now this is a little older news, but I wanted to wait for some more information before blogging. Novell has signed a deal with the devil, I mean Microsoft. When I first heard the story yesterday I thought, “OH sh$t! It’s embrace and extend and it’s with Linux!” Novell’s Press Release spun it as a positive thing for Linux. In reality, if you pay attention for the words, their point is that this partnership is good for Novell and Suse Linux, not all Linux users. I could have said, “Well, at least we have Red Hat in the business spaces to keep things going well.” But, no, Oracle had to botch that up last week. One of the biggest steps backwards this agreement takes, is that now Novell is support Microsoft’s Office XML format. NO NO NO! We were supposed to be going towards OPEN standards! You know, like the IEEE promotes! Why? Because we all know that proprietary standards can really cause things to get locked up when the proprietary vendor stops supporting it. But then again, maybe Novell doesn’t know this since it promoted Netware and other such proprietary produces before trading its stripes for Linux.