Pay to get bugfixes ?

Yes, you’ve heard it : now you have to pay to get bugfixes… What I’m talking about ? Not Mandriva, of course, nor even linux ! I’m talking about Award, AMI and Phoenix, famous BIOS makers.
Most people know BIOS are generally buggy crappy pieces of code (even if I admit the job isn’t easy given space constrainst). So like in any piece of software, there are bugs.
If you seek help to update your BIOS, MOST pages on the internet will lead you to this page (who talked about google poisonning ?). Look at those smiling people on the upper right hand corner of the homepage : they’re all happy to have paid approx. 30$ to get a BIOS with less bugs and be able to run their shiny brand new version of MS Vista (why do people love to install crappy softs ? is it some kind of masochism for geeks ?)…
If you don’t believe it, you’ll probably end up like me : on google desperately seeking for free BIOS updates and reading this ton of posts from people selling BIOS updates themselves (they’ve bought it from the previously mentionned website…) I’m pretty sure people will start selling their second-hand BIOS updates on ebay sooner or later.
I was about to install linuxbios but remembered the computer I just wanted to upgrade was my girfriend’s and I wasn’t 100% sure about what problems I could have run into…
Finally, after googling around, I found some support from the motheboard vendor, but it was already late and I abandonned my quest for the bugfree BIOS. I’ll do it when I’ve more free time.

Powertop and pm-utils

Just a little post to say that thanks to Thomas’ kernel “2.6.21.3-tmb-desktop-1mdvsmp”, I’m now able to suspend to ram successfully and use powertop ! I tried suspend to disk and it didn’t work “out-of-the-box”, but I need to investigate further.

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Juste un petit article pour annoncer que grâce au noyau “2.6.21.3-tmb-desktop-1mdvsmp” de Thomas, je suis maintenant capable de mettre en veille (en mémoire) mon ordinateur et d’utiliser powertop ! J’ai essayer d’hiberner (mettre en veille sur disque) et cela n’a pas marché d’emblée, mais je dois encore enquêter sur ce problème.

Interesting

So let’s blog and use my new little kblogger applet I’ve just built on my system (by the way, the package is outdated on cooker, I should tell them)
I’ve just found two interesting features for konqueror in less than 2 seconds… Both of them are really trivial and may be implemented in other browsers as well, but it shows how you can discover features using your brain (well my neuron, should I say)
Feature #1
You can split your display, you probably already know. But you can use this split display to navigate both on a download site (http) and on your disk and copy/paste files from the first one to the second one… I’ve never realized I could have used konqueror like this…
Feature #2
You can right click on a link and ask it to open in a new tab. But it’s the first time I use it the other way around : you can force a window which should open in a new tab or a new window to stay in your current window and tab.