Ramskov.org: September 2006

Google Talk is now open for everyone!

Google has opened up for Google Talk meaning that you don't need a gmail account to use it anymore. Read all about it on the official Google blog. This has the potential to draw more people to using Jabber and that can only be a good thing :)

Arrrrr

"What's the pirate movie rated? - Arrr!"
"What kind o' socks does a pirate wear? - Arrrrgyle!"
"What's the problem with the way a pirate speaks? - Arrrrticulation!"

What if pre-flight announcements were truthful?

I just saw this linked on Boing Boing. I can't help laughing but some might find it scary instead of funny :)
Here is a snippet:

Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero. This aircraft is equipped with inflatable slides that detach to form life rafts, not that it makes any difference.

New KDE start menu

This isn't exactly "new news", but still interesting. It looks like openSUSE 10.2 will have a redesigned start menu. It's difficult to say whether it is a big improvement or not without having tried it, but to me it looks quite nice and I certainly looks forward to trying it at some point even though I don't use openSUSE currently.

Don't forget to click on the screenshot in that link to see an animation of the new start menu.

Myths, Lies, and Truths about the Linux kernel

This past summer at OLS Greg Kroah-Hartman (a Linux kernel hacker) held a keynote speech called Myths, Lies, and Truths about the Linux kernel. This is a really great keynote and very much worth reading.

One of the myth he is talking about is hardware support. The fact of today is that there is no OS that supports as much hardware as Linux does. That is really quite amazing. My experience is pretty good in regards to support in Linux. Linux isn't perfect though as there are hardware on which Linux fails. The few areas where Linux still have problems is wifi, videocards and laptops. Who is to blame for these problems? Often Linux is given the blame, but this is actually wrong. The real part to blame is the companies making these products. The least these companies could do was to release the specifications for the hardware they sell. That would make it possible for the Linux developers to create drivers for it. The obvious thing to do is of course to not buy hardware from these companies. This is not always possible, but the laptop I bought recently is a good example: I bought a laptop with Intel graphics instead of ATI or NVIDIA since Intel provides open source drivers where the others don't. ATI and NVIDIA provides proprietary drivers for Linux, but that is simply just not good enough. In fact, those drivers are illegal and unethical! Read the keynote speech and you'll understand why.