davehayes.org

so we have some idiot over at associated content that calls themselves tsu dho nimh who has so graciously decided to bless us with their own idiotic “is linooks ready for teh desktops!?!1” article. as if we don’t see enough of this pointless and moronic discussion on the forums every day, this little gem managed to make it all the way to slashdot. now, i’m not sure what kind of a cranial vacuum managed to spawn this piece of garbage, but just for entertainment’s sake, let’s have a look.

right off the bat, we can tell this is going to be nothing but a boat load of asinine n00b drivel. the author provides us with a list of “non-negotiable requirements” that are all the evidence we need. just look at them:

1. It must have a GUI interface for installing and configuring the system.
2. Existing hardware must remain usable and the new operating system must make it “just work” without my having to edit text-based configuration files.
3. Existing software must remain usable unless the new operating system has equivalent features to the ones I use, and I can switch without losing data or doing much work.
4. Because I need to use software that has no Linux substitute, the Linux distribution must make it easy to create a dual-boot system. It has to recognize and preserve the existing operating system and its data during installation, and give me access to the data on the Windows drives after installation.

before we go any further, i want to address this list in two ways. first, without reading the rest of this stupid article, i can tell you that ubuntu linux meets and exceeds all of these ridiculous requirements.

1. the ubuntu desktop install cd boots directly to a live cd desktop and the complete install is done from there. you can surf the web, chat over your favorite im network, play games, whatever you want to do all while the installer is going. when it finishes, simply reboot into your newly installed desktop. there is nothing text-mode or command line to be done.
2. most hardware is going to be detected and work out of the box automagically. if not, you’ll know as soon as you boot the livecd, before you make any changes to your hard drive. you might want (or need) to install a proprietary driver, which is accomplished quite easily using the very friendly add/remove applications front end for synaptic.
3. ubuntu will resize windows partitions without data loss and provides a mechanism to migrate much of your data from your windows user account to your new ubuntu installation.
4. ubuntu will also automagically create entries in grub to allow you to boot either windows or linux and will automagically mount all your windows drives so you can access them from ubuntu.

the best part about this, aside from the fact that ubuntu linux blows his ridiculous requirements out of the water, is that the operating system this moron is currently using (windows 2000) doesn’t even come close to meeting them.

1. the first half of the windows 2000 installation (as well as xp) is in text mode. this includes the initial partitioning and whatnot.
2. windows 2000 does not make your hardware “just work.” hopefully you have your driver disk for you sata controller handy as well as a floppy drive to put it in or you may not be able to install it at all. after that, you’re most likely going to have to either locate discs or downloads containing drivers for your video card, motherboard chipset, sound card, network card, printer, etc to get any of those things to work properly.
3. windows 2000 does not provide any automated data migration facilities at all. not even from other versions of windows, let alone other operating systems. if you’re installing on a computer already containing an OS, you’re going to have to do some very careful partitioning to not lose any data and it’s going to be a fair amount of work getting everything transferred over.
4. windows 2000 does not provide any mechanism at all to boot any other operating system besides itself. it also cannot access the partitions and drives of any other operating system without 3rd party software, so it certainly is not going to work out of the box.

so, right off the bat we can see that this person is already doing the age old double standard thing and trying their best to run the complete opposite direction from objectivity. anyway, to dive into the article, let’s take a look at what the n00b thinks are problems.

Problem 1: The NVIDIA graphics card needs non-Linux drivers to get full benefit of the card’s features. The Ubuntu help on their website explained how to install what they call “restricted drivers”. Their solution was clear, easy to understand, and best of all, it worked. This is definitely an improvement.

savor this, it’s pretty much the only objectivity you’re going to come across.

Problem 2: Even after installing the correct drivers and rebooting, my 1280×1024 monitor could only be set to 1024×768 pixels. The answer is in the Ubuntu “community documents” area, and it works. It involved opening a terminal and using the command line (I cheat, I cut and paste instead of typing), but it also worked.

oh horror of horrors, you had to use the command line. perhaps we have scarred your poor little brain by forcing you to learn something? the thing here is, out of the box with ubuntu, your 2d works fully on an nvidia card. you don’t get the crazy slow screen redraws like you do on windows when you’re not using the driver. secondly, you can either obtain your driver from nvidia and download and install it (like you would have to do with windows) or you can use ubuntu’s mechanism to do it, which is very well documented.

not to mention you’re still making the glaring mistake of approaching everything like a windows nerd. from now on i’m going to start griping about how i can’t find my xorg.conf to change my monitor settings on windows, since obviously all my linux knowledge applies to any operating system i’m going to try to use.

Problem 3: Although CDs played immediately, to play DVDs I had to locate and install some files that bypass content protection coding. The website I acquired them from, www.getautomatix.com , warned me that I might be installing something illegal, but I said, “Yarrr, matey”, and clicked the install button. Automatix installed itself, then I selected what I needed. More files were downloaded and installed … really automagically! After that DVDs worked. I have no clue what it did, and that’s the way I like it.

dvds don’t play out of the box on windows 2000 either, captain. and news flash, unless you paid for dvd playing software for windows 2000, you’re just as much of a pirate when you watch them there, too. and i’m glad you like being ignorant because you’re doing a damn fine job of it.

Problem 4: The Linux Flash players did not work with YouTube, and Adobe’s Flash video player was extremely difficult to install. I have a 64-bit microprocessor, and installed 64-bit Ubuntu. Although 64-bit Linux has been available for more than five years, Adobe hasn’t bothered to develop 64-bit version of Flash for Linux yet. My live-in geek tracked the problem down for me, and Adobe is reportedly working on 64-bit software.

here you’re already breaking your testing method. if you just read and clicked you would’ve downloaded the i386 version and not the 64 bit version and you wouldn’t even have this problem. if you had done what you said you were going to do, all you would’ve had to do was install the flash player package in the add/remove programs thing.

and suddenly, it’s linux’s fault adobe doesn’t make a 64 bit flash? hell, they don’t even make a 64 bit version of windows 2000. even better, adobe doesn’t make a 64 bit version flash for any operating system, not even xp or vista! just the fact that you can even run anything in 64 bit mode puts you 110% ahead of windows 2000.

Problem 5: Google’s Picasa does not work. Every time I launch Picasa it locks up my computer and sends the CPU utilization to 100%. The problem is Google, not Ubuntu. Instead of writing real Linux software, all Google did was take their Windows version and wrap it in WINE (fake Windows) to make it work in Linux. I expected Google to do better than that.

no, again, the problem is that you installed the 64 bit version of ubuntu, which is not supported by picasa. you wouldn’t have this problem if you had done what every other sane and reasonable person does and stuck with the i386 version. and in the end you say that the outline feature of word is the showstopper that keeps you from using linux?

you are not ready for the desktop. in fact, you’re an idiot. i’m begging you, please stick with windows. the linux community does not need blockheads like yourself running around spewing idiocy all over the place and getting in the way of development by complaining about things that we have no control over. for the love of all things holy, stick with windows and stay out of our hair. and keep your asinine opinions to yourself from now on, too.

i had to share this…

or, a stream of consciousness account of an insomniac’s (that would be me) typical evening…

12:05am

0.84 miles is entirely too far for me to drive to taco bell. i wish it were closer so i could walk and get some exercise before compulsively overeating. man, i am such a fat kid these days… but i am starving to death and will have to make the journey at some point, and they close in 2 hours. i probably should get going soon.

i’ve always been amazed at the people that are disgusted by taco bell’s food. seriously, i’ve always really enjoyed it… it’s not like it’s any less healthy or consistently any less clean than any other fast food, so why the hate for taco bell?

i’m looking forward to listening to imogen heap in the car. hopefully it’s not too cold.

how is my dad so obsessed with ren and stimpy? he’s been talking about that show for weeks, which is odd considering it’s the first time he’s really mentioned it since i’ve been old enough to be allowed to watch the show.

El Kabong: my 2 favs are Stimpy goes through puberty and the other where they join the army

off to newzbin we go. i seem to remember a ren and stimpy cartoon where ren had insomnia… unfortunately all the ren and stimpy at newzbin is dvds, and hopefully i won’t be up long enough to wait for one of those to download so i’ll just skip it.

you know, the last time i was home i sat and watched evil dead 2 with my parents. that was pretty interesting since it’s one of my favorite movies and draws heavily from the 3 stooges, who my dad loves. the 3 stooges do rock pretty hard. i don’t think he liked evil dead though.

stupid god forsaken stomach! i guess i’ll get dressed and drive to taco bell. $2 says i come back with a steak nacho cheese chalupa (no tomatoes), a steak quesadilla and some of those new steak taquitos. you’re on.

12:48am

what do you say,
that you only meant well?
well of course you did
what do you say,
that it’s all for the best?
of course it is
what do you say?
that it’s just what we need
you decided this
what do you say?
what did she say?

i love fourthmeal. WHERE IS THE SAUCE ON MY QUESADILLA!? dang it, that’s the best part, don’t skimp on it!

1:00am

i’m not even close to tired. i have to get up for work in exactly 5 hours, which sucks immensely. it could be worse i suppose… i could be getting up for school. or i could be getting up to be executed. either one of those would suck much worse i think. at least this way i get to make a little money.

i’m pretty sure the get up kids are my favorite band. i love the new amsterdams too, but they can be a little bleak at times. the get up kids’ music just makes me feel good, which is strange. it’s strange that recordings and pictures can evoke such strong emotions in most of us, both positive and negative. i’m glad matthew pryor is out there doing his thing to counteract idiots like the zach guy from rage against the machine. have a glass of chocolate milk and smile once in a while, sour puss.

where did sierra mist come from? one day i was happily going along with my life, enjoying my sprite. then, out of the clear blue sky, none of the restaurants around here have sprite… they all have this sierra mist stuff. and it’s great. thanks for that one, God.

if you’re ever trying to install windows (as paul is right now), do remember to keep your driver disc for your SATA controller handy, or you’ll run into trouble because windows won’t be able to see the drive. that presents a problem considering you’d like to install windows to the drive, which it does not currently see.

The Paul: I’m the bomb.com: on a note… for a mass cleansing of a computer, would taking off both sides and using a the compressor from a gas station be a plausible idea?

upon further consideration, perhaps his problems are more far reaching than i had previously thought.

another strange thing about music is the way that it can trigger certain memories in a very big way. the new amsterdams’ never you mind, the get up kids’ something to write home about and reggie and the full effect’s promotional copy evoke very strong winter memories for me. i can remember having a snow day, and braving the storm to go spend the day at erin wexstten’s house and listening to never you mind for most of the day. i can remember listening to promotional copy at the new year’s eve party i attended that year. i can remember working at inky dew by myself on a saturday, listening to something to write home about. i sat for hours and watched out the window as it snowed and snowed and snowed so badly that i had only a brave few customers the whole day.

none of these things happened a terribly long time ago, 5 or 6 years at the most, yet i suddenly feel quite old and distant from them. only last week, my friend’s 15 year old daughter was amazed that i (being a quite elderly 23 years old) would have a myspace account. i am, apparently, much too old for such things, at least in her mind (i hope you don’t mind me re-using this, rachel). so, 23 years old… and here i sit with my laptop resting on my buddha belly and scratching the top of my balding head thinking fondly of a better time… long before global warming came and ate our winters like a big bowl of snow ice cream.

dagger576: some music makes me think of the video games i was playing as i listened to it

i hadn’t thought of that, but nothingface’s an audio guide to everyday atrocity does evoke the memory of playing the catacomb abyss on that old 386 dale reese gave me. dos games rock.

1:38am

my eyes feel like they’re going to bleed.

1:40am

this season of 24 is pissing me off. i don’t know what it is… just seems like the middle ones (3, 4 and 5 maybe) were so much better. i still haven’t watched last week’s episode. it wasn’t too long ago i would be up at this hour simply because i was so engrossed in 24 that i couldn’t turn it off. now, i’ve had last week’s episode sitting on my hard drive for a week and just can’t get excited about watching it. maybe those chinese losers beat all the BA out of jack, i don’t know. rush says to just wait, cause it gets better… but i don’t know man. it’s honestly boring me to death. i’m ready to see some terrorists meet the wrath of jack bauer.

myspace is such a huge hunk of crap. seriously, what a flaming poo of a web site. i curse it.

well, it’s now 1:50am. i’m feeling somewhat tired so i think i’m going to try to actually go to sleep.

2:40am

still can’t sleep. why is it that the most “enlightened, progressive and culturally aware” people tend to be the biggest racists, bigots and irrational, emotional, unreasonable and least tolerant loudmouths in a given area? news flash: the toothless redneck, backwoods hillbilly and various iterations of billy bob and bubba, yeah… those are offensive racial stereotypes. we get the point, you’re an elitist, hypocritical jerk face and you think that since obviously the entire southeastern united states is running around barefoot banging their sisters, eating roadkill and spouting their ridiculous fundamentalist values, none of the rest of the country (or world) will mind your belittling an entire geographical region and culture. well, guess what: we do mind. we do not act out deliverance on a daily basis, like i’m sure you think we do.

i’m a network administrator. i am a linux enthusiast. i enjoy writing xhtml and css. i went to school for audio engineering. i scored a 29 on my act as a junior in high school. if, after reading that, the fact that i am a christian who enjoys drag racing and firearms instantly invokes caricatures of buck toothed, uneducated imbeciles in overalls with straw hanging out of their mouths… congratulations! you’re a bigot, a prejudiced scum bag and probably a racist too. your offensive and inaccurate portrayal of the people southeastern united states and their culture needs to stop.

3:13am

regardless of the fact that i am now mad enough to spit, i’m going to try to sleep again.

about 10 minutes ago, my dad sent me a link to an article with the headline “Women talk three times as much as men, says study.” as i skimmed through the article, i chuckled at the opening paragraphs;

It is something one half of the population has long suspected – and the other half always vocally denied. Women really do talk more than men.

In fact, women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day – 13,000 more than the average man.

i actually laughed out loud at these bits:

Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat – and actually get a buzz out of hearing their own voices, a new book suggests.

And, if that wasn’t enough, the simple act of talking triggers a flood of brain chemicals which give women a rush similar to that felt by heroin addicts when they get a high.

good times, good times… who doesn’t enjoy a little gender rivalry? just as i was about to close the article, something caught my eye (emphasis added);

Dr Brizendine, a self-proclaimed feminist, says the differences can be traced back to the womb, where the sex hormone testosterone moulds the developing male brain.

wait, the person proliferating this fun little finding is a feminist? that doesn’t seem right… what’s going on here? a-ha!

The areas responsible for communication, emotion and memory are all pared back the unborn baby boy.

The result is that boys – and men – chat less than their female counterparts and struggle to express their emotions to the same extent.

“Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road,” said Dr Brizendine, who runs a female “mood and hormone” clinic in San Francisco.

i get it now, lure us in with a funny, email-friendly headline and then smack us in the face with your thinly veiled anti-male diatribe. Dr Feminazi continues;

There are, however, advantages to being the strong, silent type. Dr Brizendine explains that testosterone also reduces the size of the section of the brain involved in hearing – allowing men to become “deaf” to the most logical of arguments put forward by their wives and girlfriends.

But what the male brain may lack in converstation and emotion, they more than make up with in their ability to think about sex.

Dr Brizendine says the brain’s “sex processor” – the areas responsible for sexual thoughts – is twice as big as in men than in women, perhaps explaining why men are stereotyped as having sex on the mind.

wow. before we get to the part where i say what i think, let me remind you of what the important things are here are davehayes.org;

race cars, rock ‘n’ roll and things that go boom? check. keeping that in mind, let us continue.

now, i know that there has been a mass wussification of the men in this country as evidenced by the rise of the metrosexual, pervasion of increasingly feminine men in media (queer eye??) and a literal drop in testosterone levels of the male population. not to mention the demonization of father figures be it the bumbling idiot sitcom dad or the embarrassingly helpless husband in seemingly every advertisement we come across. daddy can’t cook, daddy can’t clean, daddy can’t discipline the child, daddy can’t control himself in best buy, daddy runs in circles holding a baby at arm’s length. possibly worst of all, daddy can’t express his feelings.

when the heck did it become wrong to be a man?

you know what, i’m going to say this. label my a misogynist, label me a chauvinist… i don’t care, it needs to be said to counteract the kind of insanity that’s becoming commonplace these days.

i submit that men, with their supposed backwoods brains unable to express emotions and crippled by a preoccupation with sex, are not the flawed gender. nay, women are the flawed gender. their inability to suppress emotions is what hinders their ability to engage in rational, cognitive thought and ultimately trivialized them in the workplace for so long. only now they’ve gayed the whole thing up enough that no one notices anymore. well, i notice. emotions are ultimately not useful when things need to get done. things need to be bought, sold, built and blown up. emotions, hissy fits, stomping, crying and whining do not get things done. men get things done. at least, they used to.

and where do you think your precious babies, the objects of your endless coo-cooing and coddling come from? the babies that you will pamper and protect and put in a no-score soccer league so they can grow up and be the spineless, non-competitive, limp-wristed, emasculated, emotional, fashionable and ultimately useless excuse for a man that you want me to be? that’s right, they come from us. without men and our stereotypical sex-crazed mindset, you wouldn’t have any children to ruin. left to yourselves and your underdeveloped (and frankly inadequate) sex drives, the human race would cease to exist in 2 generations, max. like i was saying, men get stuff done.

and how interesting, dr brizendine, that your research happens to substantiate the oldest complaint from a woman to a man that i can remember… you don’t listen to me! well you’re right, i don’t listen to you. maybe if you didn’t talk so much… seriously, through all your nagging and whining and feminist BS propaganda, all i hear is, “i’m useless in the real world!” you want to be taken seriously in the workplace? you want to be treated as an equal by your significant other? i have some advice for you: start acting the part. don’t cry when the police pull you over. don’t cry when you’re having a bad day at work. don’t cry when i tell you the honest-to-God truth when answering a question you asked me. don’t call your mom every time something doesn’t go your way. learn to work with people you don’t like, let little things go and punch someone in the nose when it needs to be done. don’t try to pull the playing field down to your level, rise to meet it. then maybe i’ll be able to take you seriously. until then, bugger off, i’ve got things to do.

dave: jake
dave: tell me aboot the wedding
jake: dave
jake: well
jake: my shirt didnt fit
jake: so they wrapped me neck to belly in packing tape
jake: and it fit
jake: but icoulndt beath
jake: so i nearly passed out during the wedding
dave: wow
jake: it was prettty funny
jake: i looked like a body builder