…If it only had 640×480 (or better) instead of QVGA.

…If only it had an accelerometer & magnetometer buried in that thick frame.

…If only it were VGA/DVI, and powered by USB by default.

…If only it had a halfway reasonable DDC reply.

…If only the company that once made this knew it’s true place in the market.

…If only ten other companies made things just like it.

…If only the connection between this class of device and Compiz/X11 (and to some degree KWin) weren’t so obvious..

..If only…

“You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate
energy policy.

You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn’t get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in  Iraq.

You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.

You didn’t get mad when we gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich.

You didn’t get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.

You finally got mad when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.  Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all okay with you, but helping other Americans…oh hell no.”

–rosie o’donnel

Whether or not Obama’s doing a good job or not isn’t the point… How funny that quote is is the point.

So, another Ant email arrives. One of about 50 each day. And sure enough, it’s never the quantity of email, it’s the quality.

One of the latest little dittys is about Razer mice! I love’s me a good mouse, especially a left-handed one, and it turns out there’s an astroturfing contest!!

Well, let me be the 29,351st person you’ve heard it from.. Another excellent mouse manufacturer has made what looks like the market’s second fabulous left handed mouse. It might actually be better than the Logitech offering (which I won’t link to, because they aren’t the ones with the free mouse contest), since the Razer DeathAdder Left-Handed edition is actually a wired mouse.. The one real shortfall of Logitech’s wireless Left-Handed mouse; wireless = bad for gaming..

Being that I’m left-handed, I often pick up stuff people don’t normally think about. For instance, I’m exclusively a Linux user. I feel Linux is the most ideal platform for gaming and game development on Earth. It’s too bad the gaming development scene has been held hostage by one private company for so long, the stockholm syndrome is almost too painful to watch. If game development shops gave Linux half a chance as their PC platform for gaming, we’d see a lot more, and better results.

So, seeing that I’m a Left-Handed Linux Gamer, who isn’t on Facebook (because free (as in cost) social networks are just another corporate assault on your civil rights)(really, if you don’t understand that, don’t ask for an explanation, you wouldn’t believe it anyway), to find a company breaking the mold of “there are no left handed people”, and offering a high quality gaming peripheral like this one,  you’ll find me and my ilk first in line for the offering. You know, as we discover its availability, through aggressive, customer driven marketing pieces like this.  Now go buy one!

Thanks Razer!

It’s that season again! Being delivered today is my new Sager 9280 notebook! I wonder how it’ll stand being indoctrinated into the Church of Debian Unstable..

Ha, notebook my chocolate starfish… This thing is more of a laptop, in the traditional sense of the word.  This monstrosity makes me think there should be yet another mobile-computing term beyond ninja, monk, and samurai.. I’m considering this one in the Sumo Class.. I’m really quite excited about it. Maybe more later on Sager’s win/lose ratio..

It took forever to find a notebook to match my requirements.. 17″, 1920×1200, no Windows pre-installed.. it was as if I could have the physical size, or the resolution, but not both, and when I did find both, I was forced to accept the Microsoft Tax, or GTFO.. Naturally I chose the latter option.

It’s even worst than it sounds. When talking to sales staff, it didn’t matter which company, I was uniformly told that there was no option whatsoever to be sold their equipment without Microsoft’s Windows OS. Being told I must purchase software I’ll never use, is first, telling me to waste my own money (not something I have a lot of to begin with), and consequently, a sure fire way to lose that sale.

Sadly the problem doesn’t even stop with the sales of equipment. Once you stop using Windows, it’s exactly like being black in America in 1951.. Sure, you can ride the bus, but sit in the very back, don’t cause a ruckus, and don’t transport white women across state lines. It is that reminiscent of Jim Crow, it does vaguely approach Godwin’s Law, and it’s certainly corporately imposed civil repression.

Civil repression? Really? Is that even  a fair metaphor? Because I don’t use Windows, I’m being immorally discriminated against?

Unfortunately, not only is it accurate,  it’s not even a metaphor.

Since I choose to use Free Software, and choose to purchase hardware free of any operating system, and choose to exercise my rights as a free person in the management of my personal and private data (a right every free person should have), I am literally sanctioned against by powerful corporate interests who would rather see me use their software, which is not free, and as such, strips me of my freedoms. These same interests have paid big bucks to shape our new, young information based culture on treating other people and customers who choose free software as outcasts. Corporations pay big bucks to make sure people believe that  not having rights to ones own property, data, knowledge, and life, is somehow “normal”.

What kind of country is it that claims it holds the rights and freedoms of its individual constituents above all, yet allows corporate interests to impose segregation of its population into  “Consumers” whom are more valuable than “Citizens”?

So, it’s not skin color today, it’s Operating System? It isn’t nonsense to compare the free software movement today, to the civil rights movement of 50 years ago, it’s common sense. If your personal and private knowledge and information is so important to you, the machinery with which you store it, view it, share it, and keep it private with, had damn well better also be yours, and only yours.  Since the Powers-That-Be insist otherwise, it’s an old American tradition, that those Powers be questioned.

This would be a pretty hollow argument if Linux were written by a company. However, remember that it is not. Linux is written by you, me and everybody. This is why it’s called Free Software. Everyone is free to contribute to it.

I’m happy to have found a vendor that would sell me a notebook with NO operating system. They’re few and far between, but they’re out there.

Sager themselves won’t sell you their hardware without Windows, however many other resellers of their hardware will. There are also other companies that sell Microsoft-free hardware, including Zareason, and System76..

(12:45:08 PM) mprov: it still seems like we’ll have to tackle HAL and XInput after we have a driver, but maybe understanding those layers will help us understand what, at the kernel level, we’re trying to achieve
(12:46:58 PM) mprov: HAL depends on (d-bus, and then) udev to provide the manifestation of the /dev entry for the device, when the kernel registers the device, it shows up in /sys, where udev gets the info it needs to generate the /dev entry. Then dbus provides the notification to HAL which provides the permissions and access to the device to XInput
(12:48:01 PM) mprov: that’s the flow of things, once we have a complete handler for the HID layer once we have a recognized device registration
(12:48:58 PM) mprov: what we need in the kernel seems to be just that, a handler for the HID registration, which will provide the /sys entries for /udev to make the device. then we can interface it higher up the stack
(12:49:30 PM) mprov: for udev to make the /dev entry i mean
(12:49:32 PM) mprov: not /udev
(12:50:34 PM) mprov: (i’m repeating myself here, but) once udev generates the device, d-bus will notify HAL to parse the device and register it with XInput, which will make it available to the user

After that.. Wearable computing on every computer, using any HMD, by any manufacturer. Death to monitors!

So, Twitter goes down and Facebook goes down, and suddenly people don’t know what hit them? I’ve never understood how so much of the Internet’s population can mistake a website for a public utility. It’s as if Twitter is supposed to be some deeply embedded component of the internet’s inherent architecture, and when it’s not working; teh OMG, Now what?!

That the majority of twitterers & facebookers don’t realize, much less care, that they’re communicating over a closed, privately owned channel (which may or may not be harvesting their information, relationships, and communications for purposes they never intended) really isn’t my point.

That the attacks were targeting one person, and wound up crippling entire social networking sites (illustrating a lack of integrity in the operating systems involved in the attack,)  isn’t my point either..

I just find it so crazy how surprising and paralyzing it can become to people when one random websites or another goes down. Like a handful of corporations think they can be their own social revolution or something. It’s odd that people have such a hard time seeing past the facade. It seems the strengths of open protocols and federated systems would be far more evident in times like these, but instead, people hardly remember email, or XMPP, or their own blogs.

Whatever. I guess I get it. It’s just so disheartening.

So, there’s nothing like watching both Microsoft and Apple getting kicked in the balls.. Here ye, here ye, the first Linux platform running Microsoft products.. or wait, EAS? Are you serious? On a Linux based phone??

Ouch..

Oh, but lets not forget everyone’s favorite.. Hi, I’m an iPod.. and I’m a.. uh.. what he said.. iTunes says… ok! ^_^  …Will Apple actually try and stop them? You know that sensation when you see somebody take one in the sack? Damn…

It’s like some perverse capitalistic kung-fu movie with Palm as the down and out hero coming back full force…

All they need now is developer support.. So far, they’re not helping themselves by the SDK being so far off, but you can tell they know, since they’re expanding their early access..

We’ll see.. Its quality is quite an affront to, at least two, industry giants, but in a subtle way. It’ll be interesting to see how the dominoes fall over the next 6 months. Maybe the best of all cases, nothing big will ever come of it, and reason has one more prevailing precedent on its side.

So we came to the conclusion one night; if the true and proper definition of Discordianism is indeed the ability to play the accordion poorly, then the majority of the human population of the planet is indeed Discordian! This is a great moral victory for our species..

Happy Birthday!!