…a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.
Stephen Fry. New tech column. In his blog. Life is bliss.
This one has a wonderful section arguing that style and substance SHOULD be intertwined in a device. As ever, his points are articulate, witty, and RIGHT.
A snippet:
“Mechanisms so devilishly, stunningly, jaw-dropping clever as the kind our world can now furnish us with are No Good Whatsoever if they don’t also bring a smile to our face, if they don’t make us want to stroke, touch, fondle, fiddle, gurgle, purr and coo. Interacting with a digital device should be like interacting with a baby.
So, yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself. Le style, c’est le truc, as De Buffon would have written today.”
As a sheerly joyful cup runneth over bonus - a reference to Umberto Eco’s piece on Mac and DOS, Catholic and Protestant.
…because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
Ten Reasons Not To Support Gay Marriage.
- Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
- Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
- Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
- Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can’t marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.
- Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
- Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.
- Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
- Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
- Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
- Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.
Hehehe. If you can still say you are against Gay Marriage because of these reasons, then you, my friend, are a total and utter smeghead.
…all the things I can’t do anything about.
I have an ATI Technologies Inc Radeon IGP 330M/340M/350M graphics card in my Compaq NC4000 laptop, which I dearly love. It has more ram than standard, (760Mb, but shares 32 with the video card), a 1.6Ghz processor, and a 60Gb hdd option. The laptop runs Gutsy Kubuntu (7.10) like a dream.
Except.
The 2.6.22 kernel has issues with this card, and not just in Ubuntu, according to responses in the Ubuntu forum about it. Sure, the ATI driver in Xorg works, but fglrx doesn’t. No Compiz whizzbang desktop effects, no brilliant rendering of Neverwinter Nights *sob*. (Actually, the game plays, it’s just like wading through treacle).
Installing fglrx drivers leave X broken, no screen, flickering, it is a mess. Restoring back to ATI is fine, but glxgears still runs appallingly slow. Grinding gears!!!
Looking around, I found Unofficial Linux/ATI resource, (imho) it is the best resource for this card.
I did follow suggestions on the site, no *major* success. BUT. I have increased the speed of glxgears. (1766 frames in 5.0 seconds = 353.155 FPS compared to 565 frames in 6.5 seconds = 87.177 FPS). It looks much smoother.
And here is how.
The suggestions for restoring after a failed attempt to install fglrx included the information that the install overwrites the libgl1-mesa package. So, I decided to reinstall libgl1-mesa. Hmm,that package/library doesn’t exist.
A quick sudo apt-cache search libgl1-mesa produced a nice list, and from it, I (re)installed libgl1-mesa-glx:
sudo apt-get install –reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx
A suggestion from another post to a forum somewhere, (I lost track, lets be honest, I had twelve tabs of info going at once), led me to also add to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf, down the very end:
Section “Extensions”
Option “Composite” “Disable”
EndSection
Section “ServerFlags”
Option “AIGLX” “off”
Now it seems to be a matter of waiting for a new kernel and some joy!!!
UPDATE:
From this article:
“For ATI Linux customers, last month was certainly a very exciting time from AMD announcing open specifications (and the subsequent delivery of the first batch and the creation of the RadeonHD driver) to the release of the fglrx 8.41 display driver. The AMD 8.41.7 driver was the first driver to be based upon AMD’s new code-base and had not only delivered R600 support for the Radeon HD 2900XT, but clear performance improvements across the board from the R300 to the R500. However, this 8.41.7 driver was not well received by all. AMD had intended this driver to be targeted solely for the R600 customers, but many with older GPUs had immediately upgraded with some then having a foul experience.
Today it’s now time where the fglrx driver reaches yet another milestone. Not only does today’s release address many of the outstanding bugs for the earlier GPU generations while also introducing a few new features, but it also delivers AIGLX support! Yes, you read that right. You can finally run your ATI graphics card with the fglrx driver and run Compiz, Beryl, or Compiz Fusion without using XGL! This is coming 13 months after NVIDIA had introduced its AIGLX support, but now just days after the release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon it’s here for ATI hardware. “
