babe ruth has been one of my favorite bands for a long time.

every few months i’d check this “bobby shred” web site which seemed to have the scoop one what was going on with the band.

when i found out they were releasing a new album it was a bit of a thrill.

to ground this for people who are musically uninformed and believe me if you were born after ‘77 you probably fit into that category unless you went out of your way to find music from the 10 years or so before you were born.

anyway meatloaf’s 1984 album (you know when you were 7 years old?) “dead ringers” was produced by alan shacklock…who also happens to be the original guitarist for babe ruth.

the album work for the first babe ruth album was done by roger dean who also did a lot of yes album covers, you were probably 5 or 6  when “owner of a lonely heart came out” if you’ve heard of yes at all. roger dean  also did a few uriah heep covers.

to ground this even further, this was back when a band had to trash a hotel room for street cred. you know, instead of killing cops like the rap morons of today have to do to make it in the industry.

so… if you want to hear some great music check them out. if you were born after ‘77  AND like music from the early ’70’s AND  you feel like you really missed out…well you did. i kinda feel sorry for you… good news though: the cd’s are readily available for that era. sure you could download the music off your favorite p2p infrastructure but you’d be missing out on some great album artwork…

so linux isn’t failing on the desktop…

so what will it take for linux to actually compete on the desktop? there’s a ton of software, but very little of it i would call polished.

firefox and thunderbird are great apps, and it’s good to have them on the linux side, but until they(and by “they” i mean “whoever”) can  fix the font problem firefox is always going to look a bit off. fonts in general seem to be a problem on linux. this isn’t late breaking news, but in 10 + years nobody has done anything about it?

games. games have state of the art graphics…for 1986.

if there were a supreme commander or command  and conquer 3 for linux you wouldn’t hear linux people say “i have a windows machine strictly for gaming”

another thing that isn’t exactly the fault of the linux desktop is cross platform softwre. i have yet to see one that doesn’t look off or work flawlessly. maybe tkblog is the only one but i could be biased there.

one thing i’d have to say is there should be no complaint about linux eye candy on the desktop. it’s better than what you can get on windows or the mac. although it’s harder to install and configure. of course i’m thinking of beryl or compiz fusion… i haven’t tackled either of them but i’m not expecting either of them to work out of the box.  especially on feisty

all this frustration comes from my experience with songbird on feisty. not ready for primetime. i had to find gstreamer packages for codecs. isn’t apt-get supposed to take care of dependancies? unless the package maintainers just forgot about that half of a multi-media app…

i have songbird half working but i had to spend WAY too much time on it. so linux on the desktop is not a failure but it’s taking a long time to make any windows user happy