c133.org/blog

Mon, 03 May 2004

.: my own personal reason to hate Microsoft ::

How's this for a reason?

I called up HP/Compaq, Dell, and IBM today. I can't get a notebook/laptop computer from any one of these manufacturers without paying for a Windows license.

That's right. I can't even get any of these systems blank, sans operating system. I explained to the guys over the phone - and especially the HP rep seemed sympathetic - but the problem is that Microsoft has strongarmed these manufacturers such that they can't ship any laptops without a Microsoft OS.

This is complete and utter bullshit. I'm just going to wipe the hard drive and put Linux on it anyway; I'd rather that the hard drive just came blank, as I don't expect any of the hardware guys to install Linux on it for me.

Ugh. I was hoping that one of these guys might be able to set themselves apart from the rest by satisfying this one wish. Looks like I was wrong.

[16:28] | [tech] | # | G

.: asteroid surprise ::

I wrote a new style from scratch a long time ago called Asteroid. It was done half as a gag, and half because I was bored. I also decided to implement it from scratch (instead of following my usual method of hacking on the dotNET code) so that I could provide a better platform for others to build their styles on. (As an aside, I also took out all of the Asteroid-specific code and put it into a Skeleton style, which is BSD-licensed and available on my site).

However, being that I'm lazy and Asteroid got Good Enough TM for me to use without being too annoyed with it, Asteroid was put on hold at version 0.2. Until today, that is. I got an email from David Chester, with the Munjoy Linux distribution, and he has implemented much more of the widget style code, and submitted his changes back to me. (As an aside, Munjoy looks quite nifty, and I'm going to have to try it out. KDE + Debian = Righteous.)

So, yeah. I started something neat, and somebody else picked it up and ran with it. Open Source code rocks.

[16:02] | [tech/KDE] | # | G