Thursday, February 28, 2008

Sorry, not supported in Linux

I hate it when I buy a piece of hardware and find that it's not supported in Linux. Why don't I have the freedom to choose the operating system of my choice?

Some companies have problems with opening up their drivers. Fine. At least do what nVidia does, provide closed, binary drivers. (Thank you nVidia, at least you provide them, and they work!).

Flash on Linux has always been a problem. It runs slow, jittery and is practically unusable. I tried to find out if other users were facing this problem, and sure enough, many are. The solution posted on (this thread) was to downgrade to a previous release of Flash. I had to download a 73MB archive containing a number of previous releases from Adobe's website. Adobe doesn't seem to care much about Linux users. Even the downgraded version has issues, but at least its somewhat usable.

I'm in a good mind to write to every company I come across that doesn't provide Linux support. About time Linux users made themselves heard. There are already a number of petitions.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Adblock or not ?

Firefox has this neat extension called Adblock. It blocks out those annoying ads on web pages. Great! Now I don't have to look at flashing smiley ads anymore. (Who the heck would want to buy smileys anyway?)

But when I installed Google AdSesnse on my blogs, sure enough, I couldn't see them. Now, ads definitely help bring the pennies in, but do they have to be so annoying that people should want to block them? Most users hate ads, as they are distracting and loud[citation needed (LOL)]. In my case, Flash ads even use up a lot of CPU. (Hopefully, Flash will be faster with Firefox 3). In comparison, Google Ads are not irritating, and are usually quite relevant.

Some people go so far as to call Adblock "Stealing", and there are a number of discussions on this topic.

So my dilemma was: whether to Adblock or not. I thought of striking a balance. I have Adblock installed, but I'm not subscribed to any of the filters. I block the irritating, flashy ads manually.

Saturday, February 09, 2008

The Linux blog expanded

http://akulinux.blogspot.com/ is now http://bit-rot.blogspot.com/ . Why the change? The Linux blog was just a journal of problems and solutions that I came across while using linux. This blog however, deals with anything and everything that's tech-related.

Please feel free to leave comments, suggestions, your arguments, or if you simply wish to call me a nut for my naïve posts :)