I'm now wondering why on earth I left Slackware Linux in the first place.

Having moved about a lot of distros [aLinux, Fedora, Arch, Suse, Ubuntu] I'm now back at slack.

And I'm realising how much I've actually missed it. Almost as much as I hate Windows when I use that for a long period of time ...

Possibly the only thing I miss from the other distros is package management, but I think I can live without it just for Slackware's stability, disaster recovery [formatting the MBR ...] and useability [especially in comparison to Fedora/Ubuntu], and linuxpackages.net will provide stuff for me anyway.

I'm mildly happy, and looking forward to some chips n kebab later on. Mmmmmm

I've been meaning to write this up for a while, so here it is;

Web Advertising. You know the stuff, flash ads everywhere, pop-ups, floating windows and so on.

They really really annoy me. I mean, really. Especially if I'm viewing a site and it's still loading because the ad server is busy and it can take ages, or the double underlined links that pop-up a flash window to advertise stuff ...
My pet gripe are sites or pages that have more adverts than content [or larger side bars than content]

Here's an example;

Can anyone spot the beginning of the content? Yep, right at the bottom [click the pic for a larger version]
Since I use 1024x768 screen resolution, most of the page is taken up with ads, sidebars, title bars, menus ... and not content.

Not to worry, a quick bit of wildcarding using Adblock Plugin will solve that;

Again, click the image for a larger version, but still, you can immediately see the content. This was done by stripping out most of the crap and ads around the page. Plus it loads faster too.

Yep, its yet another sam-berates-Windows comment.

3 Things in the new Vista Licence this time around, in increasing order of importance.

1) DRM-ed material won't/shouldn't work in a virtual Vista
Currently, most people don't know about virtualisation in the computing industry. It's kinda like the Net back in the early 90's; geeky and not much use.
But, in the next few years, you'll be able to run Linux, WindowsXP, 98, Vista and *BSD all at the same time, side by side, doing different things. Or have the TV using MythOS on the TV card, you writing a document in Linux and your kids playing the Sims in XP on a thin client upstairs, all from the same machine.
Alas, with Vista you won't be able to play all that DRM-ed music from Napster, according to the released EULA : http://www.macintouch.com/#tips.2006.10.13

2) Only 1 Re-Install
Yep, break Vista twice [or Vista breaks twice], buy a new shiny OS. Given MS' track record on bugs, security holes, flaws and the like, I have a feeling this will quickly be dropped when people complain, MS' phone lines get jammed with users trying to reinstall, the website goes down and the EC get involved again.

3) Validation fails, MS disables your computer
Yes. MS will disable most functionality of your computer if it fails the validation process, which "will from time to time validate the software, update or require download of the validation feature of the software"
What if it fails this validation? "the functionality of the software may be affected"
According to Techweb [http://www.techweb.com/wire/software/193300234], Vista disables itself "after a set period, leaving the user access only to the default Web browser, and then only for an hour at a time."

WTF? I suffer a hard disk crash, the validation key stored gets garbled, validation fails and Vista locks itself down??
'Aha', I think, 'I'll reinstall. Wait, I already reinstalled once, so it'll lock me out upon reinstallation'
Only thing is, I can't get on the net long enough to fix the problem because Vista keeps closing the browser down.
And my virtualized copy of Vista on my laptop won't play my Napster tunes, so I can't use that.
[Don't worry people, I'm not going out to buy Vista or Napster tunes, its for illustration purposes ]

So, to summarise, Vista will take a lot of the remaining freedoms away from it's users to squeeze even more money to maintain it's share price.
Thing is, I feel sorry for the good programmers who work at MS, as they hold a lot of the stock; when it tanks [and it will tank], they are out of pocket twice, once in stock and second being out of a job.

So people, bend over, Windows Vista is on its way, only MS forgot to bring the vaseline.

http://englishrussia.com/?p=376

I'm beginning to enjoy Russian art

I have also discovered logjam, for all your LiveJournal needs.

On an aside, the desktop is still out of action, after testing all the components, it seems that it was the RAM that is a bit dodgy [memtest is stating that theres an error with one of the memory blocks ... must swap it out and test it all again ... ]

Thats what I'm doing for the rest of the afternoon at any rate.

Oops.

All the world telling North Korea not to test a nuke has proved in vain.

But really, what was the world expecting? It's like telling a child not to do something; they'll do it anyway to see how you respond.
How will we respond? Sanctions probably, if only to keep China on board [they know that if NK uses a nuke in anger, they could end up in the firing line], but this doesn't really help the 23 million people in NK, does it? Maybe they'll rise up and overthrow the insane leader, but I somehow doubt it.

Ah well, back to near nuclear oblivion we go.