Where your taxes goes (and a bit more besides)

Want to know where your taxes have gone? This is a great pictogram: http://tinyurl.com/mpsd9e Missing the funding pie chart though showing the current shortfall.

The Banksters Win Again

So the banks have been bailed out again - this time by the courts. Apparently it is OK to create opaque penalty charge schemes that you need an Oxford Mathematics degree to understand. The rich can continue getting richer and the poor and innumerate can be damned. What a country we have created.

The banks have a totally transparent mechanism to charge people for borrowing money. It is called an interest rate. It levers a charge in direct proportion to the amount borrowed and the duration it is borrowed for. It is completely fair.

The issue is not charging people for borrowing, it is overcharging for borrowing at colossal imputed interest rates.

And of course if banks did try to carry out their threat to charge those in credit for bank services, then that would show without doubt that they operate as an oligopoly and run a cartel. So I don't buy their FUD.

Banks should be required to charge for everything via an interest rate. It's transparent, fair and understandable to Joe Plumber.

The value of University Education - is it a myth?

I doubt that the increase in University places translates into 'better jobs' for the majority - regardless of the truth by repeated assertion spouted by the government, Universities and so called business leaders. What we are creating here is a system where ordinary individuals pay for their own apprenticeships so that business can bank the profits. Very simply if University was such a good investment that the majority would get a much higher paid job because of it, then it would make sense for the Government to invest in it fully - because it would get much more back in increased taxes later on from the higher wages earned. Apparently we can borrow billions to bail out bankers, but when it comes to investing in the future skills of the country we can't afford it. The current system and the proposal is essentially another tax rise by stealth using a straightforward front loading mechanism. Why not just put an additional income tax band in at the income level of a 'graduate job' and have done with it?

How to get HDMI sound out of a Radeon Device in Ubuntu Karmic

After much searching of the Interweb I've managed to get sound out of my TV when connected to my Acer Aspire 5536 via HDMI.

It turns out that Ubuntu Karmic has full support on the Audio side for the sound part of the RS780 chipset. Pulseaudio picks it up and the new volume control lets you select the output effortlessly.

Unfortunately the Radeon Video driver that Ubuntu uses by default doesn't support 'HDMI Sound pass through', so the bits never get to the TV.

Fortunately there another Radeon driver - 'radeonhd' and that does have HDMI sound support, but it doesn't detect it automatically so you have to configure it in the good old 'xorg.conf'.

To get the driver, first make sure you have the 'universe' repository activated and then install the driver via apt.

apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd

and then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to add in the following:

Section "Device"
      Identifier      "ATI Radeon HD 3200/RS780"
      Driver          "radeonhd"
      Option          "DRI" "On"
      Option          "Audio" "On"
      Option          "HDMI"  "all"
EndSection
Section "DRI"
      Mode 0666
EndSection

(Change the Identifier as required so that it ties in with the rest of the configuration).

The DRI Option activated direct rendering, which again doesn't active by default for certain chipsets. The DRI section allows non-privileged commands to access direct rendering.

Details of the options and default are on the radionhd manual page that is installed alongside the driver.

Making Wine sound work with PulseAudio on Ubuntu - properly

Wine sounds in Ubuntu has had a problem for a while now since they introduced to PulseAudio sound server. There are a lot of kludgy workarounds on the Internet that will get the sound working for one particular application, but the side effect is that it stops it working for everything else. And you lose pulseaudio's ability to move sound streams between sound cards and sound servers.

There is a way of fixing it properly, and that is to run a version of Wine with a native Pulseaudio driver installed. The code exists, but due to the politics of Open Source it hasn't been included in the main upstream codebase.

Since I can't stand kludgy workarounds I decided to take it upon myself to create a wine package with the pulseaudio driver in place and now that is available on my PPA.

It is targeted at the Karmic Koala release, which contains the required version of PulseAudio. Can I ask all those currently testing the new Ubuntu release to try out the package and see if it improves matter for you. Everybody else will have to wait until October :)

If you do try out the software can you report back your experiences in Launchpad

https://bugs.launchpad.net/wine/+bug/371897

The more data we collect, the more evidence we have that this should be included in Ubuntu as standard. And of course if you have problems I can work with upstream to get them sorted.

You can install the software from my PPA

https://launchpad.net/~neil-aldur/+archive/ppa

To install the software follow the instructions on Launchpad (https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/PPA/InstallingSoftware)

Read more about the Winepulse patches and why they're not in the mainline

EULA and cars - an analogy

Let's say that you've just bought a shiny new car. It's your pride and joy, and you've spent weeks researching the market just to find the perfect model. You've been to the showroom; you've grimaced at the lousy 'complimentary' coffee and you've shook hands and laid out your hard-earned. After waiting what seems like an eternity it's pick up day.

So you're stood there with the new car gleaming in front of you and you're itching to get in and hear the roar of the engine. The salesman is there with the keys and you reach out your trembling hand to take them...

However the saleman then says:

"Before I allow you to use this car, you must agree to these terms

(i) you can't sell it on to anybody else

(ii) whenever you drive it, it can transmit its location and what music you're listening to on the radio to a central location and they can use that information for whatever they like.

(iii) and you must come back here for warranty and services and not go anywhere else

If you don't agree to these terms then you musn't use the key to start the car and you need to go to talk to the manufacturer about a refund"

And then he walks off leaving the keys in a locked box with a button on it marked 'I accept the terms".

You wouldn't stand for that. You'd explode with rage. You never agreed to those terms when you laid out your money. How dare they. You'd be onto trading standards in a flash. You'd demand that the retailer drops those terms instantly.

So why do you meekly accept this situation when you buy an operating system to run on a computer?

Getting your Microsoft Windows Tax back from Amazon - it's not all plain sailing.

Based on the encouraging exploits of The Opensourcerer in getting a Windows refund from Amazon I thought I'd have a go at getting a refund as well for the copy of Windows on my new Acer Aspire 5536 machine (which definitely does have VM capability 'cos I've checked the cpuflags).

I was quitely confident that Amazon had adopted a sensible refund position in accordance with the law of the land. And so I sent off my email in the same manner that The Opensourcerer had done expecting it to be sorted in minutes.

Unfortunately it hasn't turned out like that and after several frustrating exchanges I ended up with this.

We are not in a position to offer a partial refund for this product. You can of course return the laptop to us for a full refund if you wish.

So it seems I must turn to the law of the land and enforce those mystical 'statutory rights' that you see mentioned in every retail establishment.

The next few posts will describe what I believe is the statutory basis for recovering the cost of Windows and the result of my discussions with Amazon will determine whether I'm right or not.

We shall see.