Jaunty

YESS!!!!! The new Ubuntu Jaunty is on my computer (9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, which is officially alpha, erm, 6, right now). Hey there are a few bugs but it's an alpha, it's actually much more stable than the alpha of Gutsy or even Hardy was. Although the name 'Hardy' really does suit that particular LTS release of Ubuntu. It is hardy to the most foolish of people, and is crash-able by only the people who want to crash it, like me. I kernel panicked it once, but only by deleting some major system file in the /boot folder! But the alpha of hardy? That was a different story: 1) open a gtk dialog. 2) click on the desktop. 3) click on the gtk dialog. 4) there is no 4. Reset button please. That's just one particularly awful bug I found in hardy alpha though.

Anyway, back to the original topic. Jaunty. Now don't get me wrong, I do like Ubuntu kinda, but lately the development has seemed to have, erm....hit something hard, and...fell over shall we say? yes there are things here and there like, um, new popups (those are a real improvement and kick windows's ass on that front btw), plus a new computer 'janitor' that cleans up junk on your computer. And it uses the ext4 file system, of course, which reduces fsck times by about a magnitude of 25 (if I got my estimates right, that is). But apart from things like that, things the general user wouldn't even notice if he/she wasn't a geek, things really do seem to have hit a plateau on the development front. I really haven't noticed many new features, so if it continues this trend I might consider switching to something with a faster development cycle. The trouble with them is that, with that there tends to be the fact that it's still quite a new and undeveloped distro, like gOS for instance (which is based on Ubuntu I believe).

On the KDE side, things are looking bad. Not bad, worse than that...erm...you can think of any word and it won't be quite bad enough to describe the badness of KDE4. It is UNUSABLE. UNUSABLE. Can't use it. I have reinstalled KDE4 three times, reinstalled my system once, then reinstalled KDE4 another time, and each time it has the same fault: it just won't work. I try launching a program and it freezes. why couldn't they stick with KDE3.5 for $&%@ sake? It worked and it was damn good. Sorry KDE guys, but I'ma stick with GNOME for the time being. KDE sucks big time.

On the windows side, things start to be getting better, bit by bit, slowly but surely recovering from the miserable days of Vista, the second worse windows distro (actually, make that the worst. I'd take win95 over vista any day :P). Yes, low-IQ person, I'm talking about windows 7 if you're wondering. I've installed the Beta of it on my machine and...well...things are at least a bit better than Vista. It's supposed to be faster than vista, haven't noticed that yet but I haven't been doing anything intensive on it apart from a few games of GRID (and that's not all that intensive even on max settings). From what I've seen of it, I wouldn't pick it over XP x64 though (which I use right now for anything that needs Windows).

Oh btw I had some hardware additions to my computer:
New harddisk. 750GB Samsung Spinpoint F1. One Windows XP partition, one Linux /home partition, one Linux root partition, one Linux swap partition. £70 inc. P&P
New GPU!!! nVidia 9800GT 512MB GDDR3 RAM PCI express x16 (duh). £100 inc. P&P

windows 7

apparently Microsoft are gonna do what Apple did 7 years back, for windows 7. They're gonna make everything incompatible, hopefully for the best, like what Apple did when they released OS X. READ THIS for more info.

GUI's GUI's and more GUI's

GUI's ("gooies" Graphical User Interfaces) are what almost everybody uses to operate a PC.

But they aren’t all good...

Windows Xp made a real good improvement to the old grey look but it is still not so cool.

When Vista Aero came out you could see that they had been working hard at it, a really cool GUI that was easy to use and navigate with, apparently you could find all your files and folders at the touch of a button or so.
But there is one big disadvantage to it, very big.
IT TAKES 1G OF RAM JUST FOR THE GUI!!!!!!.

That is why I would go for the Mac GUI that is even easer to navigate with and is slick and smooth, only takes 64mb (tiger and below) of ram and is well easy to use and cool (compared to windows xp) .

But wait...
There is another better option...
UBUNTU
see this video:

And Ubuntu Beryl has a skin that looks and feels a lot like Vista Aero all in 512mb (But it works better with 1G) ram!

So what do you think Pls post your comments 8-)

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Edit:
1. Theguywholikeselectronicsandlinux
2. Theguywholikeselectronicsandlinux

A little app

Here's a little app that I made as a joke.

BSoD on a mac (my mac)

This is a video of me making Windows 95 Blue Screen of Death, inside VPC. I did it by making an HTML document that tries to access C:\con\con, which makes it BSoD.

Still image:

UPDATE: Notice that you still see the normal GUI top and bottom? That's because the aspect ratio of the BSoD is different to the normal desktop, and the excess at the top and bottom isn't being redrawn. I.E you still see what was there before where the BSoD doesn't replace. I think that was a glitch of VPC though, as it didn't happen another time (as in the image below the video).

Vista is so useless!

My friend's computer runs Vista. Actually, his laptop that has 512MB RAM runs Vista.

Anyway, one day I was at his house, changing his DNS settings for him. I put some information in a text file, which was in the Documents folder. I then cut and pasted the text file to the desktop.

Vista then proceeded to spend a whole 20 seconds "estimating time remaining", then finally copied the file in about 1sec.

Thanks, Microsoft.

Windoze users: happy activation!

But mac users: happy knowing that your supplier trusts you!

Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes

Off topic: Happy halloween everybody! :D

Some alternatives

MICROSOFT. Because you have no choice. MUA HA HA HA HA!!!

But is it? NO. If you bought a PC and the windows OS is annoying the sh*t outta you, there are plenty of alternative OSes, most notably linux. Our fave distro (although you get plenty of others) is Ubuntu, who's slogan is "Linux for human beings". This is because Linux used to be an OS that only geeks could use, but now it is very easy to configure/use it even if you have limited technical knowledge, and there's even a forum for getting answers to your problems with ubuntu. The word "Ubuntu" is an ancient african word that means 'Humanity to others'. And linux is free, so no more 30 day free trials, activating, and the like. And its not just free as in beer, its free as in speech, so anyone can get access to the source code and edit it themselves, free of charge. More of this in the GPL general public license. Another point: If you switch to linux, you can safely say that you won't get viruses. This is because for every Linux computer there are 1,000,000 windows computers. A virus maker's not going to make linux viruses if there are 1,000,000 times the amount of windows machines.

So no more of that stupid Operating System, Microsoft Window$!!!

NOTE: Ubuntu, unfortunately, is only an option for people with a reasonable amount of computer knowledge. (mal)

Easy ubuntu install

Interested in linux, have a rather slow connection and don't want to risk losing data? Wubi is just the tool for you. Grab a copy at wubi-installer.org, run the program, choose your username and password and it will automatically download the alternate Ubuntu ISO and install on a virtual partition!

WARNING: If you have Vista, Wubi will corrupt your bootloader and basically require you to at least fixmbr. It's for Windows XP only!

Macromedia Eastereggs

In Macromedia flash pro 8, when you click about flash pro from the Flash menu (in windows i think is the help menu) you get a couple of pretty cool eastereggs. Just click the dot above the i in Macromedia, or around it until the screen flashes white and you get 6 cool flash games! I got this from Malachy, but you can find plenty more cool eastereggs at eeggs.com.