Cosine's Corner

Every morning when I wake up, I open up Firefox and it brings me to my iGoogle homepage. I spent about 30 minutes to and hour reading the latest headlines from the BBC, Google News, Slashdot, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. I've been following the story and rumors of Dell providing desktops and notebooks with Linux on them for quite some time now and have been thinking about how I feel about it. Well, I feel really good about it. With a major OEM supporting Ubuntu it will be a very short while until other manufacturers follow suit and at least start putting out better drivers (closed source or open source, doesn't matter to me). This, in my opinion, will be the beginning of the biggest boon Linux has seen since the 2.6 kernel. When a major player like Dell steps up like it has, it will only be a short time until they start releasing drivers publicly for people to download for their older Dells that people have chosen to install Ubuntu on and even newer models. After the next coupl...

So, those who've read my previous posts may be wondering how Vista is working out for me after loading all those applications and daily use of my laptop. Well let me tell you, it's great. While Vista is a bit more resource intensive than previous versions and other OSes (Linux, Mac OS, *BSD) it utilizes those resources that it's keeping to itself rather well. I rarely, if ever, have any kind of inconvenient slow downs or bogging of the system unless there is actually something using up the system like virus scans, WoW, AIM (6.1 has this weird flaw that it'll lock up and hog some serioues resources), or anything else disk and CPU intensive just like any other OS.

With my finals over and the school year wrapping up, I decided I have a little bit of time on my hands this weekend to do a clean install of Windows Vista Home Premium. Now, it didn't take long at all for Vista to install. The clean install actually went a lot faster than the upgrade did. It took ~45min to install and take me to the desktop. Right now, I'm using IE7 (shudder) on this clean system. But, some may be wondering "but why Justin? Why did you do a clean install instead of stick with the upgraded system?"

Thanks to my buying a new laptop in January I was able to get in on Acer's Express Upgrade program to get a free copy of Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit version. Note, this isn't just an upgrade disk. It will let you install a clean version of Home Premium and the disk is also bootable. So far, it hasn't been too terrible. Due to the laptop being "Vista Capable" and coming with Windows Media Center Edition 2005 already installed, upgrading to Vista wasn't a horrible process. My laptop is an Acer Aspire 5100-5022, the specs can be found here - which is where I also bought it. It cost me $740 when I bought it and I think I got a pretty good deal at the time. Especially considering the free upgrade to Vista Home Premium. The newer model of the Aspire 5100 laptop (5100-5033) does come with that as well and is down to roughly the same price I paid for mine in January. It features all the same hardware except 20 more gigabytes of hard drive storage space.

The Faculty Senate is deliberating the motion for a vote of confidence regarding Concord University’s Vice Presidents. After the motion was presented in the Faculty Senate floor, some faculty members started trying to rally more support for this action by approaching SGA President, Sean Noland. The unnamed faculty members Noland told about asked for the Student Senate to vote in support of the Faculty Senate’s motion for a vote of confidence. As Dr. Charles Brichford explained, what happens with a vote of confidence is if the deliberating body votes a majority of “yes” to the motion, it shows confidence in the entity that they want to show support or no support. And if the majority vote is “no” it shows no confidence and that it is urged that the entity in question be replaced. These kinds of motions are usually aimed at replacing chiefs, presidents or anyone in the position of highest authority.

With a new position being proposed in the Student Government Association comes passive aggression and controversy. This has already happened with the resolution 04182007A, which creates (or was going to create) the new Legislative position “President Pro Tempore.” This position would be a significant boon to bringing more power over to the Legislative side of the SGA from the Executive Board. One of the major shifts of power the resolution proposes is taking seemingly major responsibilities of the Vice President. The major ones being the coordinator of all standing committees and “[to] serve as ex-officio member of all the committees and commissions of the Student Senate…” This position will also be elected by the Senate directly in a fair election with no bumbling election committee to gum up the works. During Wednesday April 28’s SGA meeting the SGA Affairs committee proposed a motion to defer the resolution to the committee. What the committee’s motivations were to bring ...