Month: January 2005

And There Goes Sound.

UPDATE: Boy is my face red. Sound was fine the whole time. While I was moving the computer I unplugged the speakers. When I plugged them back in, I plugged in the wrong set of speakers. I recently got a new set of speakers (thanks Mom) and the old ones were still nearby and unplugged, and the cord looks exactly like the one from the new set… and I plugged in the old set. Which were not plugged into the power outlet. So sound was working perfectly and was being piped to inert speakers. As for the wireless, I’m going to theorize that the connection was poor cause it was too far away. It got bad when I moved the base station significantly far away. It’s wired now and I’m not worrying about it.
Overall, I retract my frustration about Linux sound. This had nothing to do with Linux, it was just me being a dork. Sound in the 2.6 kernels seems pretty smooth. I must apologize to Linux, and thank my anonymous commenter for keeping the faith.

I hate Linux sound. It’s a gigantic mess.

Mysteriously, the sound on my Ubuntu system started working a while back.

Mysteriously, it doesn’t work now.

I have no idea how to begin to debug it.

No idea.

I don’t have that kind of time in my life.

Maybe I should try the newer, more bleeding edge version of Ubuntu. I dunno.

I just don’t know.

UPDATE: I know it would be a bit much to ask, but my old USB external CDR/W doesn’t seem to work either. All the unix cd burning utilities still depend on the hideously archaic “pretend any CD burner is a SCSI device” technique, and apparently Ubuntu isn’t hip to that. I know it was asking a lot to want my old external USB CDR/W to work, but… it would have been nice.

UPDATE: did I mention that wireless connectivity using ndiswrapper periodically flakes out too? Just plain doesn’t work sometimes, even though it reports having a good signal? Disappointing. Disappointing.

A lot of things *do* work on it, but the networking is a real problem, the sound is really annoying, and the usb burner — well, that’s just a minor disappointment. It’s got really pretty screensavers though.

RMS

“Free” software politics. – KenBlog quoting Kerneltrap via Steve Dekorte:

JA: What about the programmers…

Richard Stallman: What about them? The programmers writing non-free software? They are doing something antisocial. They should get some other job.

JA: Such as?

Richard Stallman: There are thousands of different jobs people can have in society without developing non-free software. You can even be a programmer. Most paid programmers are developing custom software–only a small fraction are developing non-free software. The small fraction of proprietary software jobs are not hard to avoid.”

RMS can fuck off now. ‘k, thx. Fucking hippie.

Actually RMS makes a lot of good points in that interview, including ones about problems of globalism. But his comment made me think about my own (very small and limited) participation in the IT industry, and what he said rang true: I’ve been a programmer for one year, and worked directly with programmers in one capacity or another for about six or seven years, and only in the first couple years of that time was I working with anyone who sold software to customers with a proprietary license. The rest of the time it was all companies writing software for their own use. Sometimes it was companies who released software open source, sometimes they just kept it under wraps and used it themselves, but they weren’t selling proprietary software with a shrink-wrap license or whatever.

And to be honest, those companies had their shiznit together much more than the ones I worked for the first couple years who sold their software as their product. They were pretty sleazebaggish. All inflicting copy protection nightmares on people, all filling their customers’ ears full of lies about when the the next version would be released and how many bugs it would fix, all trying to leverage their control over a set of tools to force another company into bankruptcy so they could buy it and dominate the market (I kid you not, that’s apparently what one of my employers did shortly after I left — the plan failed, btw). On the whole, companies who sell proprietary software seem to have a much greater than average tendency to fall into completely sleazebag practices. (Read that sentence carefully before you think I’m trying to generalize about *all* proprietary software companies.)

I think it’s just the nature of the game, relying entirely on artificial, legally-mandated scarcity for your business model (and that’s what proprietary licenses do: legally mandate artificial scarcity). It’s a tough game to play, the deck is stacked against you, and you’re always tempted to get an advantage in some dubious way.

More on the Search for a Nonviolent Future

More reading of The Search for a Nonviolent Future by Michael Nagel.

Overall since I started reading it I’d say the quality has held up. There are a couple details I’d quibble with.

For example, he has almost nothing good to say about the media, and he completely buys the “violent media make us (especially kids) violent” idea. However, I think that the book Killing Monsters makes a good case that this is simply not true — that what people get out of a particular kind of media is not always what you think, and that the “overwhelming evidence” that, e.g., TV and video games make kids violent, tends to evaporate when you try to nail it down to actual studies rather than proclamations by terribly concerned authorities.

That’s an example of the sort of thing that I find a little dubious in some parts of the book. But on the whole it is excellent and I would highly recommend it.

I’m going to try to start to put nonviolence into practice where I can.

Advocate the Prohibition of Torture

Well, kicking the bad guys out of office failed.

So let’s try the more positive step: insist that the so-called “bad guys” stop acting so bad.

Go here and sign a petition to ask the Senators who confirm Alberto Gonzales to ask Gonzales to unequivocally renounce torture as an instrument of American policy.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi reportedly arrested in Iraq

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi reportedly arrested in Iraq

Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, whom the US occupation authorities declared to be the “target number one” in Iraq, has been arrested in the city of Baakuba, the Emirate newspaper al-Bayane reported on Tuesday referring to Kurdish sources.

This means all the violence is going to stop now, right? Just like it did when we took Baghdad? And killed Uday and Qusay? And captured Saddam Hussein? Everything’s going to be all better now right?

UPDATE: a day later and zero Western sources have picked up on this story, that I can find. Al-Jazeera joins Russia and China and a Kurdish news service in reporting it, is all. If this is any more than a rumor I’d expect someone in the West to be picking it up soon now. So I’m kinda doubtful here.