Followup: Giving Up on Fglrx

I bought an nVidia card. Never been so happy to see a binary blob in my life. Pardon me while I go huggle my bug-free silky-smooth fps.

Giving up on Open Source

Well, sort of. I ditched the FOSS radeon driver. Why? I've been playing Minecraft. As you are probably aware, Minecraft isn't exactly a graphically intensive game. So when I have to run it on the lowest settings, and it still makes my system chug, I've had enough.

I know the open source radeon driver is a work in progress. But if I can have the performance I want now, for free, there's no reason to make myself suffer. Additionally, the driver has been a "work in progress" for years. There's obviously very little work and very little progress going into it.

So now I can play Fable, Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike Source, Doom 3, Guild Wars, Heroes of Newerth... all of those games that have just been sitting on my hard drive. Yay!

In other news, to switch back to fglrx, I upgraded to Oeneric. This is my first time upgrading releases while still in beta. No complaints so far, though aside from LightDM there's nothing really new for me in Xubuntu 11.10.

The current state of r600g

Xorg-eders on Xubuntu 11.04 current to 2011-09-02 on r600g with i386 libs installed on amd64. Just figured I'd share the level of success I am having with this.

OpenMW

Just wanted to take a second to show the new OpenMW Wordpress theme that I made! Doing the phpBB forum next, and then the wiki...

How Fark Does Patents

Following up on my recent post on patents, here's a (WARNING: strong language) blog post from Fark about their recent troubles. Good to see more people calling this stuff out for what it is.

Patents in the Blagosphere

Patents seem to be all the rage at the moment, ever since NPR did a piece called "When Patents Attack!" It's a bit dry, but gives a really good overview on the current patent situation. Well worth a listen, or a read (pdf) if you prefer.

The Economist also recently did an article entitled "Patents Against Prosperity" that gives a revealing look into the ridiculousness of recent patent legislation.

And then there's this recent post on Google's own blog, calling out its competitors for effectively ganging up on the open source Android platform. In an update to that very post, it looks like the Department of Justice was having none of it, going so far as to slap the GPL on all acquired patents:

"All of the Novell patents will be acquired subject to the GNU General Public License, Version 2, a widely adopted open-source license, and the Open Invention Network (OIN) License, a significant license for the Linux System."

Here's hoping all of this recent dialog pushes patent reform into public discourse. I've got my fingers crossed!

Linus Torvalds moves to XFCE.

Albeit grudgingly, Linus Torvalds himself has gotten fed up with Gnome's disregard for usability, and has switched to XFCE. Along with Ubuntu Studio's somewhat recent switch, this is great news for XFCE, hopefully heralding further adoption and contribution to the project.

So nyah. :P