Category Archives: grinds my gears

that really grinds my gears!

Google & Verizon are opening a can of worms

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Posted by lostson on August 10, 2010 – 6:16 am
Filed under Life, grinds my gears

Well if you haven’t heard about this yet you might want to start looking into it. The first link you should read is google’s own blog talking about this agreement

Google Agreement

Be sure to read the comments on the above link they are quite good
And the second you should check out is

google has sold you out

After reading up on all this last night my stomach started to turn this in no way can be any good at all. I use google products I even have a droid through verizon, but I am starting to feel very upset that I have either of these at all. Basically this agreement or whatever you want to call it will setup a pay for play style of internet via wireless providers. I for one do not see the difference between wired vs wireless you are paying to access the web at your convenience from either your home pc or your mobile device. What I fear most is that if things like this start to become the status quo in the wireless arena how long will it take for it to trickle down to the wired side of things. I work for a large cable company and I know the tests they are running in certain areas and rumors always abound about how they are gonna make it a pay for play service and on and on. This agreement if you will, will only serve to open the gateway to the wired side of things and other companies to start coming up with their own agreements be it wireless or wired. In the long run I only see this hurting the general consumer, prices are outrageous as it is but lets make it even worse for people to get service they can afford.

I don’t think its fair for them to decide what is and what isn’t priority traffic, what you might want access to and think is priority and what I want are gonna be two different things and for someone to be able to limit me but not you is just not right. Or to create their own private network/channel and then charge you more for access to that network/channel.

All in all you are gonna be able to read up on this yourself and form your own opinions, I for one am deleting my google accounts I cannot support someone who’s motto is “do no evil” but when it comes to lining their pockets with more cash they will sell out the little guy and you and me in a heartbeat is just B.S. Google has more and more been treading a thin line and I think more and more we are starting to see their true colors. For a long time i was leery about their privacy practices and other such things but I kinda turned a blind eye to it. Guess I should of stuck with my gut instinct to stay away, for now I have gotten used to the apps and other google things I like, but I will just have to find new ways to accomplish these things and I am sure it wont be hard for me to find options. Things are starting to get pretty damn scary out there and when the almighty dollar is the driving force behind things like this it will only serve to hurt the general consumer which is you and me.

social networking um IRC

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Posted by lostson on February 11, 2010 – 9:46 pm
Filed under grinds my gears

Well with all the buzz about google buzz competing with the likes of Facebook and Twitter a new thought occurred to me. What the heck ever happened to IRC ? You know good ol Internet Relay Chat ? Let us compare some of the similarities shall we. For instance on most of the social networking sites I can become a member or fan of a group, I can do that exact same thing by joining a channel on a IRC server, which is usually populated with people I want to talk with right ? Must be because I joined the channel.

Next say someone in this channel is a butthead and I really don’t want to listen to them anymore, so I use the /ignore command and they magically go away. Much like blocking someone on a social website. Now they can probably still see what I am saying but I no longer have to deal with them. Pretty nice feature huh. Now lets say I want to only talk to one particular person, I can then institute a dialog with this person, so now it is just me and them talking about whatever we wish to talk about without interruption.

Most IRC servers have a message system or memo service that you can use to leave a note for a friend, Hmm sounds alot like posting a status or something to one of these other social sites to me. You can also register your nickname so no one else on that particular IRC server can use the same nick as you. Is this all starting to sound very familiar ?

Some other points to mention is that some IRC networks allow encryption via ssl, so for those who hold their privacy near and dear to their heart can encrypt their sessions as well. Also if I want to post pics or a good article I read I can merely post the link in the channel and all my new found friends can enjoy. Even most media players have a irc script that will post the song you are listening to in the channel you are in. Wow does this not about cover all of the inglorious spam you wish to spread to the planet ? You can whoa wait for it —- create your very own channel, yep you read that right your very own channel. With its own topic and operators and everything. Wow what a novel idea huh ?

With that said I have been using IRC for years now and it is still my preferred way to communicate even over instant messaging which is basically again just over glorified IRC. So my question persists social networking ? Why yes I do I use IRC everyday all day!

this weekends rant

Posted by lostson on September 13, 2009 – 6:55 am
Filed under grinds my gears

Ok then LinuxCon is fast approaching and it is getting all kinds of press, but I have a complaint and that is that it is gonna cost me 500.00 bux just to register to go to the thing. Plus if you read the banner above the registration banner it is merely another 143.00 a night to stay at a hotel. So now we’re at almost 1000.00 just to get setup but yet this doesn’t even include my air fare or if i am gonna drive there so lets just round it out to 1500.00 and I am not even there yet. Plus lets not forget food, coffee and beer and probably some trinkets. Wow this is affordable in today’s economy is it not. To me this all seems so ironic that I support Free and Open Source software but yet it will cost me a small fortune to go to a convention about the software I love so much.

As a simple minded home user(to whom these conventions never seem aimed at, or we are just forgotten about) I suppose I don’t understand how things work. I have been a linux guy for years I spend all my free time pissing off my wife and kids as I toil in front of my screens learning to code run servers and support my distro of choice. Yet prices for conventions and tests and classes are so outrageous that the average joe like me would never be able to afford to go. I find this all so damn disgusting and it just irratates me to no end.

There is a fine list of speakers and things to do while there and these are included and that’s great, but I really hope that these speakers are not getting paid to speak. Yes you read that right, most of these guys are already high up in the food chain and have enough funds to live out their lives so they better not be getting paid to be there, that to me would be just another slap in the face. The fact is the home user( you and me) are hardly ever recognized in any way shape or form for the support and things we do( other than new software being released) we are the alpha and beta testers of code, bug submitters, master of home servers and home based web sites dedicated to the power of linux. We spread the word tirelessly to our friends and family but yet everything is merely aimed at corporations because this is where the money is at.

I can only think if I had this kind of money laying around that I could waste on this kind of convention, how much better this money could be used if donated to my distro of choice or Dekstop of choice I’m sure CentOS or Gnome could put my 1500+ dollars to good use, probably to send someone out there to see your neat and tidy little convention, hehe.

I know the Linux Foundation and other supporting cast does alot of very good work and I appreciate all the hard work these people do, please don’t misunderstand me I am a linux user and always will be but things like this are really starting to piss me off. So please keep up all the good work you do but I hope all you drink sipping pinkie extending yuppie scumbags fall and break both of your hands while your playing wii bowling!!

kde4

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Posted by lostson on July 21, 2009 – 9:17 am
Filed under Linux, grinds my gears

I have recently been posting little blurbs about centOS and how nice it is to be using centOS and kde3 via my identi and twitter and got some comments back about why I don’t use kde4 or like kde4. Well needless to say I cannot fit all my opinions into 140 characters so here are my reasons why kde4 is not the desktop it was or should be.

#1 Plasma
This is a big one, plasma has done nothing for me but cause crashes, at least twice a day, or when adding a widget or trying to configure a widget or for no reason at all. So there is a big WTF! right there. To me plasma is nothing more than SuperKaramba on steroids accept that SuperK actually worked and was pretty damn stable. I applaud all the “innovative” ideas and such that goes along with plasma but there should be an option to turn it off, and go back to just a regular panel like kicker, with desktop icons, although I don’t use desktop icons but alot of people do just google “kde4 no desktop icons” and see that backlash from this idea. For me plasma widgets take up too much space and provide no added functionality that I need or want, its just eye candy nothing more. So give the user the option to turn it off.

#2 Unfinished
This has become the new trend and kde4 started it. With the release of 4.0 and the backlash that ensued all of sudden the statement was released that “oh this is a preview more of a developers release and is not feature complete, we just want to get it out there so people can test it” ok WTF #2! Hey thanks for this you have released something that is nowhere near comparable with what I have been using for years, brilliant! Let’s face it even the kde 4.2 series isn’t even close to having the features that kde3 has. To me the whole focus has been on fancy graphics and effects more than usability. Alot of apps have been left in the dust and either don’t work or barely work. Along with this Amarok which is got to be the most popular media player in linux which is very closely tied to kde has done the same thing. Completely borked over a awesome player to rewrite it all change the ui completely and it still lacks most of the features the 1.4 series did. They keep releasing new versions as well and all you have to do is go read the comments and see how people feel about what they have done to Amarok. Koffice has recently followed suit with this releasing koffice for kde4 but wait its not feature complete either, whooohoo more good news. So here we are into the kde 4.2 series and still lacking features and nowhere near a feature set that kde3 has.

Ok those are my top two that bug me the most but here are some other things that have irritated me about
kde4. Most of the apps that people have gotten used to over the years have not been ported over yet from kde3 to kde4. Now why is this ? k3b, konversation(in progress) and others have not made it to kde4 yet. So this just confuses the user coming from a kde3 environment. Now some distros still include these apps but they look so out of place. Quassel is a decent replacement for konversation but is pretty much overkill for the average user.
I could not get gpg signing with kmail working right on any of the distro’s I have used except for Fedora 10 and that was using the old qt3-pinentry yet, this was truly laughable.

Also what is up with Konqueror for web browsing, some sites just don’t work right at all on it anymore. What happened here. I have always like using konqueror as my web browser. It is much faster and more responsive compared to firefox any day of the week. Why can they not get this one right.

Following my konqueror train of thought. Making dolphin the default file manager, huge fail, dolphin has nothing on konqueror as far as file browsing is concerned. Dolphin should be delagated to a third party addon application if you want it not as default or even included in a default install. If your gonna include dolphin in konqueror together then you might as well throw in Krusader as well with a default install. Cmon konqueror can do it all there was and is no need to re-design the file manager. Now it is true you can now set konqueror as your default file manager but even it is lacking some of the features the old kde3 version had.

Kwrite, Kedit and Kate three happy text editors, lets simlify this right now get rid of kwrite and kedit, Kate should be default, why on earth would you need another one when kate can do it all. But instead kate was delagated to the SDK package instead of default, more billiance shown here.

Lets face KDE did not go back to their idea of simplicity and speed, their main focus is to make the prettiest desktop they can with the egregious use of desktop effects and plasma widgets all over the desktop. Its not about usability anymore because kde4 just isn’t usable, its shiny and sleek but nothing more. Once again they have decided to re-create the proverbial wheel instead of focusing on keeping kde at the top. To come from using kde3 for years to kde4 is a huge disappointment for users as they try to find all the happy options and features that were there to make them productive have now disappeared.

Now of course different distro’s package things up differently and who knows what patches or how much they are screwing up kde4 from the basic packages that are released from kde. So I am sure there should be some blame placed on the distro’s as well. One major issue is kde4 should not be the default in any distro yet. It should be set aside for now and only installed if the user wishes to install it, but if I were to recommend a distro for kde4 it would have to be Fedora or Mandriva both were pretty usable in my opinion.

Personally I think its time for kde3 users to join forces and take the kde3 branch and make their own port to Qt4, I think much like xfce is a very welcome addition to the gtk world a new Qt based desktop that is somewhat based on the kde3 version would be very widely appreciated and accepted by a wide variety of people. Not all of us want or need shiny and widgets and windows that explode when we close them.

And on a side note if your gonna develop applications with Qt4, just use Qt4 don’t build them specifically for kde4 that way those of us who don’t want to run kde4 can run your applications without having to install kde4 and its dependencies, thanks.