When I upgraded my computer, I wanted to make it available to my family even when I’m sitting in front of it (this happens most of the time). Natural way to allow this is to connect additional terminals to the computer. The simplest, cheapest and power saving kind of terminal consists just of a set…
Well, not only proprietary drivers are crappy, they are just more crappy than anything else. Free software sometimes suffers from serious problems too. I use a dedicated virtual machine to manage my printing services. One of the reasons I’ve put it on a separate machine is stability: While software on my other machines is updated,…
My long term observation about GNOME and KDE is that GNOME is stronger in desktop, while KDE is stronger in applications. One of the excellent KDE applications is digiKam. The most popular free image processing tool, GIMP, hasn’t succeeded to become a tool for serious work. Its lack of important features (such as 16-bit color…
ATI graphics cards suck and I can’t recommend buying them. I’ve spent significant amount of time trying to get run their proprietary drivers on Linux and the conclusion is that the X.Org free drivers are dozen times better than those from ATI, despite 3D acceleration and TV-out don’t work with my ATI card. Effectively, my…
KMa s.r.o. – Levné knihy is a Czech publishing company specialized on publishing and selling cheap books, especially classic literature with expired copyrights. Now they publish cheap movies on DVDs as well, for a price of 3-4 €, that is about 1% of common salary here and easily affordable. They publish various kinds of movies, including…
OSA (The Performing and Mechanical Rights Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) was successful again with their lobbying. The upgrade of Czech copyright law brings great news for them: While it’s now illegal to make any copies of a protected work (so you can’t make backup copies of your CDs anymore!), we not only still…
Perhaps the first non-commercial TV broadcasting has started in Czech Republic about a month ago. It’s called TV Noe (Noah TV) and it’s a Christian broadcasting focusing on positive values and supposed to be financed mostly by voluntary contributions from its viewers and by broadcasting short messages from sponsors. Unlike other TV broadcasters in Czech…
Our second son was born. Photos at http://marek.zamazal.org.
Linux has always been a nice free and stable operating system. But from the user’s point of view it was somewhat primitive and lacking some basic features. Perhaps that was one of the primary reasons why GNU continued to develop another operating system, the Hurd. But things have recently improved a lot. By integrating FUSE…
One of the interesting features of the AMD64 X2 architecture is that its declared power consumption is not higher than of single core AMD64 processors running on similar frequencies. So if you perform significant amount of tasks that can be parallelized (e.g. running a build daemon), you can choose between two different advantages of the…