# UNSTABLE _

Someone asked me the other day why I always talked about how nice this or that was for being cross-platform, and they even suggested that it seemed like cross-platform technology suffered in its attempt to be overly-diverse. Like they sacrifice quality for allowing any computer running any OS to hook up to them and actually Just Work.

I'm really starting to get annoyed by the preferencial treatment that a certain Operating System which I have never run (hint, it is not Unix-based or Unix-like) gets from...well, seemingly everyone...

For example.. I go to a site for a keyboard and mouse, and at the top of the site it says "This site recommends Wind0ze 7"

It's opposite day in Kdenlive today!

So, I was shooting some test footage on a new 1080p camera at the film institute where I work, and I dump the footage onto my main Slackermedia workstation and load the clips in and start playing them back, only to find them horribly stuttered. Not just frames but seconds were skipped in my machine's attempt to play the footage. I panicked. My i7 8-core, 24gb RAM, 1gb dedicated video machine cannot play back some simple HD footage? Where have I gone wrong? Is Linux really so cruel?

Here's how it went. About a year ago, KDE announced that KDE wasn't just a desktop environment, but a sum total of all its contributors, community, and code. It sounded neat, seemed like a really good and uplifting notion. But the message got lost in a typically pointless debate among pundits about whether KDE should be called KDE or KDE Software Compilation or what.

And now Robyn Bergeron has been appointed Fedora Project Lead, and in a statement said something about Fedora being more than just software; that it was the community and developers and stuff.

Interesting.

I speak one language fluently and I play around with two or three others. I've started translating stuff as practise, so I realized that I needed to really figure out a way to make using two languages on my computer very easy.

I've already covered on my oggcast how to manipulate and use Xmodmap to gain alternate characters on your standard keyboard. That works well enough, but there's another way to do it with keyboard layouts.

So, on the typical GUI Linux desktop, there are three things to think about when designing a multi-lingual setup:

I've been slowly throwing out old computer stuff that has been collecting dust for the past 8 years at the place I work. Today I found some software from the year 2000 (sorry, did I say 8 years? I guess I meant 12) that shed some light on some modern complaints. This software isn't the first I've found to drive this point home, but it's the proverbial straw.

So, you know how companies now say things like "We can't support Linux because there's just too many distributions out there" and "Linux support? we can't do that, it's too expensive" and nonsense like that?

It's a critique of Linux that because it is developed from so many different sources, it tends to suffer inconsistency in how things are done. This criticism is often broadly stated such that it leaves the impression that nothing is ever the same on any Linux system, or even on one's own computer; which, of course, is not correct.

And often times, naturally, we Linux users value that "inconsistency". We like that there is variation, variety, and choice. Sometimes that's one of the top selling points of using Linux at all.

I haven't used my old gmail account in ages, even for junkmail. Since Google is revamping its "privacy policy", I figured now was a great time to finally get around to deleting my account entirely. Since I'm "the computer guy" among friends and family and usually have to end up supporting something regarding Google, I'll maintain a dummy account with google, but the old "real" account is gone. Here's how you can get rid of your Google account:

They're kind of a dime a dozen, but I will say that they're a great dozen to have around.

I am speaking, of course, of Linux-based "System Rescue CDs".

The one I tried recently is called the Trinity Rescue Kit, which came as the bundled bootable DVD in an ADMIN magazine.

Someone in the finance department at work (the only room in the entire organization that runs wind0ze) ordered a Zotac mini PC (the Zbox Nano V01-Plus or something) because they needed an upgrade from the Pentium 4 box they were running. Turns out, the Zbox doesn't ship with an OS, or a CD drive, and the wind0ze admin guy who stops in once a month to make sure the finance department is up and running, couldn't be bothered to set it up.