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For those who think a simple suspend is easy, go read one of Matthew Garrett's old posts about the mess. Here's an example:

http://www.advogato.org/articl...

Apparently it's much nicer now.

• I write therefore you are reading;
  else you are reading then someone has been writing;
  I am that someone;
  I am a literature machine;

}

what you're describing is what Professor Muhammad Yunus (joint winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize) outlines, in his book, "Creating a World without Poverty". in it he describes the best way to achieve the results that you've highlighted.

the absolute most critical point that professor yunus makes is that you can't just go in blithely and "help" people. you *HAVE* to get them to help themselves (or at least offer them the *opportunity* to help themselves). it's none of our business - not a government and not a charity - to go dictating what's best for people. that's what's so brilliant about the micro-loans system: the PEOPLE decide what they want to do - they decide what works for them, and, out of sheer overwhelming gratitude they go for it like you just wouldn't believe.

the loan repayment success rate is so high (over 98%) that the Grameen bank actually considers it THEIR failure if people get into difficulties. compare that to an EIGHTY SEVEN percent default rate in the west (which starts to make you appreciate that there's something desperately wrong with the western mindset). the Grameen Bank is so successful that they don't even bother retaining any lawyers. at all.

it may interest you to know that one of the chapters of Professor Yunus's book calls for IT specialists to take the initiative and create some infrastructure that would help people to uplift themselves out of poverty. that still hasn't really happened yet, and i'm really perplexed and slightly frustrated that it hasn't happened.

anyway, bit of an old article that's still relevant: http://www.advogato.org/article/966.html

A handful of people between nearby cities can extend the range of the web of trust.

As I understand the web of trust, a path from one party to another with more edges provides a weaker assurance than a path with fewer edges. A longer path increases the chance that a confused node is in the path. Thus, having to go through a couple dozen nodes to reach the other party dilutes the trust. And if only a tiny subset of people travel, these people will be bottlenecks in the trust graph.

Eventually, the web could spread between all cities, just by spreading between people at nearby cities.

Not between continents.*

the problem is getting everyone involved, not just crypto geeks.

But who has suggested a solution?

* Europe and Asia are one continent for this purpose.

Won't work, as long as spammers and scammers can cheaply create phony entities in the web of trust.

Can you think of a practical attack against, say, the trust metric used on Advogato.org?

http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary.html?start=296

To summarise, their argument is that LightDM is light on code because it can't do as much as GDM and the others, and if you removed those features from the others they would be light as well.

If that's true and that is the main difference, maybe it'd be easier to strip out, or turn off, parts of GDM if Canonical wants to dispose of certain features to achieve a faster boot time.

11.04 is SO SLOW to boot in comparison to 10.10.

I don't think stripping out parts from GDM would be a good idea, no matter how much it needs to be done. They've already caught a lot of flack about stripping out parts from gnome3 (by using Unity instead of gnome-shell).

As for 11.04 being slow to boot. I believe that is a kernel regression. A lot of other distros are having similar issues with boot time and also ath5k and 9k wireless. Once it is fixed upstream it will resolve itself in all the distros.

http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary.html?start=296

To summarise, their argument is that LightDM is light on code because it can't do as much as GDM and the others, and if you removed those features from the others they would be light as well.

If that's true and that is the main difference, maybe it'd be easier to strip out, or turn off, parts of GDM if Canonical wants to dispose of certain features to achieve a faster boot time.

11.04 is SO SLOW to boot in comparison to 10.10.

This is a well-studied "Who watches the watchers?" web of trust type issue. While there is no perfect solution, there are a number of good approaches. This page on Advgato describes a good trust metric for reducing the impact of spam and malicious attacks. It wouldn't be that big of a deal for FaceBook to incorporate some such system. However, it would require FaceBook to actually care about about being fair to its users, which it doesn't. FaceBook exploits for financial gain the tribal desires of people to band together and be part of a group. So FaceBook's really uses its abuse policy as a way to force people to follow the rules of the bigger and more aggressive tribes. Such battles actually help FaceBook to be successful because it strengthens the tribal behaviors that benefit FaceBook's bottom line.

So all in all, no matter what brilliant, cost-effective, robust moderation/abuse system you design or crowd source, the very, very best that you can hope for is that somebody at FaceBook might pat you on the head and thank you for your efforts and say that they aren't interested in your contribution at this time.

Makes for interesting reading since you bring up pyjamas and the general topic is web development and standardization.

Microsoft already have threatened to sue an open source developer, using a patent on the ASF video format. http://www.advogato.org/article/101.html

Don't confuse GPL with LGPL. What you described is considered a loophole in GPL (and only if you used shardel libraries), maybe in recent revisions of GPL it have been fixed.

http://www.advogato.org/article/148.html

OpenNTPD does not account for hardware drift, which is what I attempted to describe in my second post. Multiple hits on google for "openntpd hardware drift" support this. Unfortunately the OpenNTPD docs do not say what they don't do with regards to NTPD or chrony, so you don't know what you are missing. Without clock disciplining, all it's really doing is setting the time.

From http://www.advogato.org/person/dtucker/diary.html?start=52

The comment about clock disciplining (compensation for systematic skew or drift) is a fair point, within limits.

From their design goals http://www.openntpd.org/goals.html they are not trying to be as accurate as NTP, which they give as a response to claims of not being as accurate as NTP in the OpenBSD manual (http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq6.html#OpenNTPDaccurate)

Reach a reasonable accuracy. We are not after the last microseconds.

As someone else has pointed out, given the lack of features that OpenNTPD provides, calling it "NTP" is misleading; it's like calling "telnet" "ssh". It's a step backwards in terms of functionality and accuracy, especially since they don't document up-front what they don't support with regards to what is considered standard.

I quess it depends on your machine and your grub version.

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Serial-terminal

Here's an interesting tidbit on the subject: http://www.advogato.org/person/pedro/diary/64.html

However, grub does not understand USB *anyway*, so unless you are lucky enough to have a BIOS which supports USB serial ports as native devices (like it does for keyboards and mice), your USB dongle will not allow you to control your bootloader. Period. This is because making a USB serial port work requires a functional USB subsystem, which is more than a bootloader is supposed to handle. As of now, it's not clear if or when grub will support USB. So laptops are screwed.

But a desktop machine can us a PCI card, right? You'd like to think that, wouldn't you? Unfortunately, grub only knows the standard IO ports (memory addresses and IRQs) for COM 1-4 (units 0-3 in grub parlance) -- which means if your PCI serial card appears at a different address, grub will not be able to use it. There is code in the pipe for PCI expansion serial ports in grub, but I'm not sure of its status. It doesn't work in my Hardy Heron Ubuntu, although I'm hopeful that this will work reliably in the future. (If so, then PCI cards could be a good solution for "desktop" PCs.)

No, not really. I was looking for a particular post from Benjamin Otte, the latest swfdec maintainer, but I couldn't find the one I wanted This one paints part of the picture, but not the whole thing.

The problem is that the Flash spec is very incomplete. It doesn't specify how errors should be handled, and, while it does specify what Adobe *wanted* the official Flash player to do, the official Flash player has tons of subtle bugs, many of which lots of real-world Flash apps depend on to function properly. So implementing the Flash spec isn't enough to run anything but trivial Flash apps. After you implement the spec, then you have to guess how various errors are handled, and compare it to how the official player does it. Then you have to figure out all the places where the official player deviates from the spec, and effectively make your player buggy. And then you have to take behavior that's specified as being undefined by the spec, and implement it in the exact same "undefined" way that the official player does. Unfortunately, they only way to find most of these things is to throw a *lot* of flash files at your player and then painstakingly debug to figure out why they don't work.

It's a mess, and of course Flash is a moving target, which doesn't help matters.

http://advogato.org/ stores their passwords in plaintext, or at least in non-hash form. I think it's more common than you believe.

ACPI sucks on Linux. E.g.

http://mjg59.livejournal.com/96270.html
Other OSes get the same values as Linux, other than the OSYS field. Now, what do these writes do? They're all to PCI config space, so since the machine in question is a 945/ICH7 machine we have publically available docs. A bit of digging later and it shows that the firmware is disabling PCIE active state link control and programming more conservative timings for entry into the C4 processor idle power saving state. In other words, certain bits of power management functionality are compromised if it detects that it's running anything other than Vista. Weirdly, it also flags the HPET as present but invisible on Linux, but I suspect that's an oversight rather than anything deliberate.

Why would they do this? I've no idea. I suspect it's something to do with the degree of platform validation performed rather than a subtle attempt to degrade Linux's battery life on the hardware (frankly, we do a good enough job of that ourselves right now), but this is exactly the kind of reason we removed _OSI("Linux") support from the kernel. Vendors will do stupid things with it.

There are two issues here. One is that vendors don't test with it, the other issue is that the developers don't test it with enough hardware. Ok, that's one issue. The manufacturers don't care either way and developers don't test all kernel releases on all hardware.

Because of this lack of testing the Linux ACPI code is buggy, which is what Matthew Garrett spends time working on.

Actually there are deeper issues like this one

http://advogato.org/article/913.html
The single biggest problem is video hardware. The spec doesn't require the BIOS to reprogram the video hardware at all, and so often it'll come back in an entirely unprogrammed state. This is an issue, since we (in general) have absolutely no idea how to bring a video card up from scratch. One of the easiest workarounds is to execute code from the video BIOS in the same way that the system BIOS does on machine startup. vbetool lets you do this from userspace, and it works a surprisingly large amount of the time. However, there's no guarantee that it'll be successful. Vendors often unmap that section of BIOS after the system has been brought up, since they've got far more BIOS code than will fit in the BIOS region of the legacy address space. In the long run, the only solution is drivers that know how to program an entirely uninitialised chip. The new modesetting branch of the Intel driver aims to do this, as do the developers of noveau.

See the hardware manufacturer writes a Windows driver that does this right. Maybe they write a Linux driver, maybe they don't. If they do, that driver is most likely closed source like NVidia's and therefore not installed by default. Or it is open source and not complete yet (ATI's). Or you can use the freetard reverse engineered NVidia driver which is not complete. Hell even the closed source driver might have been broken by some freetard developer trying to persuade them to open up by breaking it as often has he can.

Basically hardware manufacturers by and large care about Windows working because it has 90% market share. They don't care about Linux. Since the Linux developers don't test and patch on all hardware it is up to the end users to kludge around the defects.

So suppose you make USB widgets and want to support Linux. You want to test S3 or S4 but you need to fiddle around getting S3 and S4 to work at all on the laptop before you can test your driver's support for power management.

Of course the freetard response to all this is to blame the manufacturers. Famously Ryan Farmer accused Foxconn of a conspiracy to break Linux because his Foxxconn motherboard had these issues

http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php

read the article: in it, you will see links to the fact that Git already has GPG signing on tags.

also, you will see references to KeyNote, aka RFC 2704. for convenience, i'm cut/pasting the top bit, here:

"Trust management, introduced in the PolicyMaker system [BFL96], is a unified approach to specifying and interpreting security policies, credentials, and relationships; it allows direct authorization of security-critical actions. A trust-management system provides standard, general-purpose mechanisms for specifying application security policies and credentials. Trust-management credentials describe a specific delegation of trust and subsume the role of public key certificates; unlike traditional certificates, which bind keys to names, credentials can bind keys directly to the authorization to perform specific tasks."

This is cool, your code can be free. But unfortunately you're still stuck with hosting the documentation on a central website of some sort.

no - you're not :) read the article: it mentions that static content such as that generated by ikiwiki could perfectly well be generated by a locally-checked-out (gittorrent-distributed) copy of the documentation

extend that concept a little further (one step at a time!) and you have, as you rightly mention:

a standard for hosting the documentation website. IE PHP + SQlite + GitTorrent docRoot == Distributed website.

yes! although, to be much better, technically, you'd have a distributed SQL server - a peer-to-peer SQL server. there's a project that IngreSQL are keeping an eye on, called "d", that might show some promise, here.

Could even contain Trac or something, so all the bug tracking is also in the GitTorrent repository.

yes!

_now_ you're getting it :)

GitTorrent isn't my project. and, if you read the description of the projecton its own, gittorrent looks utterly boring.

Read the article - which i _did_ write - http://advogato.org/article/994.html - to get an idea of what the absolutely massive implications are.

whilst many people would be capable of making the same deductions, many people are not.

so, consequently, i thought it best to spell them out. not least so that other people who are _not_ as technically aware as you or i, who may be just coming in or out of university, can take a look at the list of inter-related projects listed on the original article, and go "cool!"

that's why i mention RubyJS and GWT as well. all three - RubyJS, Pyjamas and GWT - are javascript compilers.

there are plenty more: see part-way-down the responses to http://advogato.org/article/985.html for a list which one of the advogatians posted.

How about a decentralized Blue Frog? Hook up the system to a DHT and use cryptographic signatures with some sort of replication system. The idea would be that the "maintainers" would introduce a (properly signed) message into the network, then the computers on the net would propagate it to the other nodes. If any single node is taken down, well, the net just routes around it. So that it wouldn't be considered a DDoS, each node might have a backoff system that stops sending stuff if the target computer is unresponsive.

For bonus points, have each node host a small "web server" that just serves up an AA419/Lad Vampire type script, so anyone can join in the action. If you really want to make the Best Blue Frog Ever, connect the entire thing to a corruption-resistant trust metric, like Advogato's.

Javascript is an awful language to develop in, yet it is also incredibly powerful.

That makes it a better target as an "intermediate" language - as human-readable assembler, if you will.

There are two projects that allow web browsers to be programmed in much more understandable languages:

1) GWT http://code.google.com/gwt which is a java-to-javascript compiler and AJAX library

2) Pyjamas http://pyjs.org/ which is a python-to-javascript compiler and AJAX library

by using this kind of technology, not only do you get to write your code in a decent high-level language, subdividing it into modules, classes and functions, but also the technology takes care of all the browser incompatibilities - again, by putting them behind well-written modules and classes with a common API.

until AJAX was properly discovered, browsers were being treated as no more than "thin clients", where the HTML was generated by the server. AJAX has turned that on its head, as code is now being executed client-side (browser-side).

it's becoming increasingly clear that javascript is a wildly inappropriate language to do web development in, yet it's also not going to go away and, because it is so powerful, it shouldn't HAVE to go away.

and, if you have a compiler which turns decent high-level languages into javascript, automatically, javascript DOESN'T have to go away.

see http://advogato.org/article/985.html comment "a question and an open request" for more information on javascript compilers such as rb2js.

Speaking as someone who majored in ancient Greek and Latin as both an undergraduate and in graduate school at U Cal Berkeley, IMHO computer science is now at the cutting edge of philosophy.

Now that AI has been solved, the philosophy of mind has switched from theory-mode to practicum-mode, just as AstroNomy switched from theory-mode and observation-mode to practicum-mode when ManKind ventured into SpaceTravel in the nineteen-sixties.

Even NeuroScience is moving into computer science, as a Theory of Mind for artificial intelligence gets implemented in Open-Source AI SoftWare.

AI Funding is now available for philosophers-turned-computer-scientiosts.

no don't laugh, it works very well! there are a number of very good reasons for this.

1) javascript is actually an incredibly powerful language, in particular due to the concept of "prototype"ing.

2) javascript, thanks to web browsers, has an unbelievably large amount of attention spent on it, to optimise the stuffing out of it. as a result, the latest incarnation to hit the streets - the V8 engine - actually compiles to i386 or ARM assembler.

3) the number of "-to-javascript" compilers is really quite staggering. see the comments from pyv8 article for an incomplete list.

GWT has a java-to-javascript compiler; Pyjamas has a python-to-javascript compiler. There's a ruby-to-javascript compiler - the list just goes on.

then there's the pypy compiler collection, which has javascript as a back-end. (and, for completeness, it's worth mentioning that it also has a CLR backend, LLVM.org backend, and a java backend).

>How could the company management take the project close source if it was open source?

I know it's controversial here, but some people have concluded that some open source licenses may be revoked by the copyright holder according to the laws in some places.

http://www.advogato.org/article/606.html#15

I don't know the specifics of this case, so I can't say if that's what happened here.

I prefer something I can actually get. Most of the aps on my Wing are open source, and nothing else is filling the OS gap for me on any device I can currently afford.

I'm not opposed to an open source mobile OS, if I could get a slim, functional Ubuntu on my Wing I would be all over it. It appears that some inroads are being made, but nothing is 'ready for the palmtop' yet.

BASIC and PASCAL etc. are of the "functional programming" ilke (as is SQL, but that's another story - look up "the vietnam of computer science" if you're interested and also http://advogato.org/article/964.html ).

python falls into the same category as LISP, scheme and smalltalk: incredibly incredibly powerful.

it is very difficult to write unreadable code in python, for two key reasons:

1) the indentation method

same number of tabs (or spaces) indicates a block - FORCES programmers to make their code "tidy". many programming languages are absolutely xxxxing awful and impossible to read due to inadequate use of white space.

2) compactness and elegance.

key to python's readability is the lack of messing about and the use of english words. LISP, SCHEME and SMALLTALK were all developed when space was at a premium. so, you kept the source file small by using as obtuse-as-possible a syntax.

by the 90s, this was completely unnecessary, and so languages like python are not only highly readable, but also due to having similar OO capabilities as the other elegant languages (lisp, scheme, smalltalk) you can do more with less code.

result: less code on-screen, therefore you don't end up wading through pages and pages of code.

overall... there's just really... no comparison to any other programming language.

_especially_ java.

It doesn't seem very new or interesting to me. But then I don't think politics really fit into the "liberal"/"conservative" thing.

I thought something like The Circle[1] would work much better for something like this. It's postings were sorted by a trust based system, so the more you trusted someone, the closer to the top their posts would appear, and you could rate each post as well. Supposedly Advogato's site uses it to, but there membership is closed, so I haven't seen it in action. Their Trust Metric system is described at www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html. Though it seems to be more centralized than the Cicle's system was.

Though I suppose it would require too much processing for a centralized web server with a large userbase to handle.

[1] I don't know what happened to the Circle project--I think their site was thecircle.org.au

It doesn't seem very new or interesting to me. But then I don't think politics really fit into the "liberal"/"conservative" thing.

I thought something like The Circle[1] would work much better for something like this. It's postings were sorted by a trust based system, so the more you trusted someone, the closer to the top their posts would appear, and you could rate each post as well. Supposedly Advogato's site uses it to, but there membership is closed, so I haven't seen it in action. Their Trust Metric system is described at www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html. Though it seems to be more centralized than the Cicle's system was.

Though I suppose it would require too much processing for a centralized web server with a large userbase to handle.

[1] I don't know what happened to the Circle project--I think their site was thecircle.org.au

An interesting case is this article discussing exactly that.

Eben Moglen was contacted (lawyer for FSF) and said that CPhack had that problem, and was never resolved.

The best explanation is that explicit language would be needed to be added in the GPL and other type-like liceses to hold true. As it seems, as long as there is not intertwining copyright interests, redacting the GPL seems legal. Yuck.

Actually, the OpenBSD guys believed the original NTP implementation to be a security risk and thus created their own: see Using OpenNTPD and this post by the OpenNTPD maintainer.

Actual totalitarian regimes - you mean like the CIA puppet regime in Iran before the Iranian revolution, whose SAVAK tortured so many secular leftists and liberals to death that when the puppet was finally kicked out, the revolution was directed from the churches, to the surprise of everyone (including the USSR)? Totalitarian regimes like the Israel occupation regime over the occupied West Bank that the Palestinians live under? Totalitarian regimes like US supported Saudi Arabia, where censorship and government make Iran look like a paradise of freedom?

I would not make the claim that Iran has completely fair elections or that there is no censorship there. However, the government is widely supported by the population, and the government alternates between hardliners and reformers, both of whom go by their policies. Despite painting Iran as a country full of religious fanatics, there is a large secular professional class there, whom the US claims to support but does exactly the opposite, it tries to destroy it as it has been trying to do for decades. The US government steps in and bans coders like Roozbeh Pournader from coming to do some programming in Google's Summer of Code. It wants Iran to be and to be perceived as a bunch of all isolated religious fanatics.

What happened to /. ? I see ads in the middle of the comment section. Seems to be after comments which has been modded up. This is going too far I would say! OK, I can take them away with my privoxy but I don't like it. (update: I was in wrong browser, not logged in)

About Hans Reiser's trial I'm following it daily through Google Alerts. I do not have an opinion about whether he is guilty or not, but I can surely understand that at some point in Sept 2006 after Nina had disappeared the police started to become suspected of Hans. And, what can make you behave more suspicious than being suspected? It is really a terrible situation and I feel a great sympathy for Hans. I really hope he didn't do it, but this whole process shows how terribly hard, I would say impossible, it must be to judge someone fairly. I have been in a situation where I too was accused of something, not at all as serious as this, but it seemed as my "geeky" attempts to prove my innocence had the opposite effect on the court. There I had real substancial proofs (a manual and a product) and a sentence from the other side which was a genuine lie, which I could easily show as it counteracted the specification in the manual. It seems as the court just laughed about this and considered me guilty anyway. Then I lost my confidence in this type of system.

It is really a pity for the Linux community that Hans has not had the opportunity to get ReiserFS4 to become an accepted standard earlier. For my own I run ReiserFS3 on almost all of my computers. I've seen some hints that git, may actually be an alternative.

It's been done before. It is called advogato. This is a site where developers can join, blog, and rate each other based on a trust matrix.

note that there was no clause in there for revocation of that license, it was granted in perpetuity. that is a deliberate and well-publicised feature of the GPL.

Sorry. It doesn't work that way. At least in the U.S., unless there is an explicit grant that a contract is irrevocable, it is presumed revocable "unless coupled with an interest or grant". You'll note that there is now an explicit irrevocability clause in version 3....

Now because this can be construed as a copyright license, there are additional laws that cover this which may or may not (depending on the circuit in question) require that the license remain in force for 35 years, with the caveat that the interpretation of those laws is highly variable. This issue could easily go either way, depending on the local jurisdiction in which a lawsuit was filed.

More discussion from back in 2003 at http://www.advogato.org/article/606.html.

The game you're looking for is (apparently) also known as Exterminator. However, there is a *nix port in the bsd-games project, which exists in Gentoo Portage and probably thus in some other distros' package managers. Under the Exterminator name, Rinkworks has a page where you can play a web-based version right here. I had the bsd-games version installed, but found the Exterminator online version in three seconds of googling (search for robots teleport, it's the fifth result.)

Correct, more people should donate, especially to software they use (of course it has to be said that the greatest donation is your time in writing code). I am trying to bootstrap a project (AlgoLibre) modelled after philanthropy giving circles to enable people donate services (eg free email, web space, svn, cvs etc) to free software developers (the idea is, whoever manages Internet servers to take a small slice of each server, VPS or not, and give it gratis for use by free software developers, then my idea is to extend this somehow and I specifically want to create the impetus for the creation of various benefits for free software people, like some form of health insurance scheme). There is Advogato as well.

I'm a big fan of Ubuntu. I don't want to see Ubuntu hurt because it's not Ubuntu who is setting these aggressive power management defaults.

Some background of the problem :

If your harddrive spins down and spins up again your Load_Cycle_Count increases by one. If your harddrive head parks and unparks again your Load_Cycle_Count increases by one.

You don't want your Load_Cycle_Count to increase too fast.

Harddrive manufacturers seem to claim most harddrives can handle at least 600.000 Load_Cycles but this is probably an average under ideal circumstances. My harddrive started to die slowly when at a Load_Cycle_Count of 200.000.

Ubuntu is NOT causing aggressive power management.

The following things might instead cause aggressive power management settings :

* your (laptop) harddrive firmware might have aggressive power management defaults (operating system independent)
* your (laptop) BIOS might set your harddrive to use aggressive power management (operating system independent)
* you might have enabled laptop-mode in /etc/default/acpi-support (disabled by default) which will set your harddrive to use aggressive power management

These aggressive power management settings are set by your BIOS or harddrive firmware. Windows and/or Mac OS X might be overriding these settings which might make Ubuntu look bad if Ubuntu doesn't override these settings.

Read here what Matthew Garret an experienced and well known Ubuntu Developer has said about this problem :
http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary/82.html

for more information see :
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695
http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/ubuntu-is-not-causing-aggressive-power-management

Ubuntu is NOT causing aggressive power management.

The following things might instead cause aggressive power management settings :

* your (laptop) harddrive firmware might have aggressive power management defaults (operating system independent)
* your (laptop) BIOS might set your harddrive to use aggressive power management (operating system independent)
* you might have enabled laptop-mode in /etc/default/acpi-support (disabled by default) which will set your harddrive to use aggressive power management

These aggressive power management settings are set by your BIOS or harddrive firmware. Windows and/or Mac OS X might be overriding these settings which might make Ubuntu look bad if Ubuntu doesn't override these settings.

Read here what Matthew Garret an experienced and well known Ubuntu Developer has said about this problem :
http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary/82.html

for more information see :
http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/ubuntu-is-not-causing-aggressive-power-management/

As Jefferson (no mean author and inventor himself) put it,

Thanks for the link.

Except in the eyes of the law and the United States constitution. Courts in this country, and almost anywhere in the first-world will support the definition of IDEAS as PROPERTY.

You really ought to read the Constitution before you comment on it, you know. It only grants Congress the power (though not the requirement) to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". It in no way mentions "intellectual property".

The authorized copyrights and patents are nothing like land deeds, which are 1) issued by states, 2) perpetual, 3) issuable to anyone, not just "authors and inventors" (I didn't create the land my house is on, after all) and 4) not are required to promote the public good. This is because the framers had the good common sense to understand that ideas are not like physical property.

As Jefferson (no mean author and inventor himself) put it,

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. [emphasis mine - tms]

As for the courts, Dowling v United States shows that copyright violation is not theft; that makes it pretty clear that songs are not property.

ACPI is still not sabotaged, and it won't start being sabotaged just because you wish it was.

One day you'll realise that all you have as 'proof' is an email that is not only nearly nine years old but completely at odds to the fully working ACPI implementations on OS X, Windows and Linux. ACPI is an open spec. To sabotage it would be to have every part of that sabotage documented for people to read.

I suggest you go read it and quote the specific parts of it that are Microsoft-only, then copy them up here for everyone else to look at.

Widespread uptake? Did I miss something?

Apparently you have. Java became the most popular language for projects on SourceForge back in 2005.

But at the time all I could do to distribute my music was to manually duplicate cassette tapes. I just gave a few to friends and family. CD burners were still horrendously expensive, as were CD-R blanks.

When I got my own website, I offered some free downloads in Sun's old .AU format. I think it's 8-bit, so it didn't sound that good, and the downloads were quite large. But MP3 and psychoacoustic compression was still a ways off.

The copyright on my music said "All rights reserved" at first, and I specifically forbid sharing my songs over the Internet, but instead requested that those who wanted to share my music direct others to my website.

But I had always been a big fan of Richard Stallman and Free Software, and I knew that the right thing to do would be to copyleft my music.

I'm not signed with any record label, not even an indie one. I'm completely on my own. But my music gets downloaded by hundreds of people each month, with the downloads growing over time.

By learning to play by ear, I didn't learn to read sheet music. But for several years now I've been taking piano lessons and learning to read music, with the aim that when I can pass the entrance audition, I will enroll in music school to major in musical composition. I want to compose symphonies someday.

The Internet is, frankly, a miracle to me as it is enabling people throughout the world to get to know me and my music. When the time comes that I play professionally - or hopefully, symphony orchestras play myy compositions - I expect that there will already be a base of fans who will buy tickets to my performances.

Please download, share and enjoy:

• Geometric Visions: The Rough Draft

The lot of it is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license. There are various formats as well as sheet music in PDF and Lilypond (source code) format. (I would be honored if any of you learned to play my music.)

I've been playing at Open Mics for a couple years now. I recently moved to Silicon Valley, and often visit Santa Cruz on the weekends. If you'd like to hear me live, check my live performance schedule. (It presently says I'm in Vancouver, but I'll update that in the next day or so.)

I'm also planning to buy an amp so I can play my keyboard on the street. When I do, I'm going to have a sign hanging off of it advertising "Free Music Downloads", and will have a box of my free music download handbills.

Last weekend I spent four hours walking up and down Santa Cruz' Pacific Garden Mall passing out the handbills. I got many reactions - most people think it's too good to be true, that there is some kind of catch, but most who accept the handbill are quite delighted.

You could really help me out if you shared my music over the Internet.

Look for music with the Creative Commons seal of approval. There are Creative Commons search engines, in which you can specify whether you want music you can use commercially, or whether you can create derivative works.

There is also the Common Content Catalog, which has a Music Section.

If you like piano, there is my humble offerring, in a variety of audio formats as well as sheet music. I chose to place my music under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license, not just to "eat my own dog food", but because I feel that doing so helps me to advance my music aspirations:

I am weary of my twenty-year career as a software engineer. I need a change. That's why I'm taking piano lessons with the aim of passing the music school entrance audition someday. I'm going to major in musical composition; I want to learn to compose symphonies.

And the lot of my compositions are going to be CC-SA licensed.

I have already found that doing this encourages more people to get to know my music. Now, I know I'm not a pop artist - in fact most people don't like my music, but many do. By giving away my music I'm building a base of fans who will buy tickets to my live concerts some day.

This last weekend I spent four hours in downtown Santa Cruz, California, walking up and down Pacific Avenue passing out handbills that advertise my downloads. On the back is the Creative Commons logo and an encouragement for the recipient to share my music over the Internet and to burn CDs for their friends. I think I gave out over a hundred handbills, and left stacks of them on the counters in two record stores and a musical instrument store.

It's funny, the reactions I get from some people. Many believe that this is too good to be true, that there is some kind of catch, or that I'm trying to sell them something, or indoctrinate them into some kind of cult.

Well, sort of: the Cult of Copyleft.

I made a couple of new friends as I did this, one of them a "Downtown Host" and the other a street musician who plays the guitar.

I also burn CDs of my music to give away. I have a CD label printer that's just a regular inkjet printer with a feed mechanism for CDs. In this way I can make CDs a few at a time, and inexpensively, yet that look professional.

I try to always carry some in my backpack to give to new friends. I also give them to any street musicians that I come across, as a way of introducing myself to the local music community.

I'll give you a CD too - autographed even - if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area or in Santa Cruz County. Just email me at michael@geometricvisions.com and meet me somewhere for coffee or a beer, and I'll bring your CD with me.

That post is but one Googler's opinion. Here is another. Clearly, there is much in that original post with which I disagree, and neither of us is representing official Google policy.

The health insurance system in this country needs changing. If anyone tries to convince you otherwise, look at them as an arm of an organized, effective, and massively funded propaganda campaign. And if they're an unwitting arm, that just means they're not smart enough to tap in to their share of the obscene overhead that the insurance industry rakes in.

Overall, I think Google is going to do a lot more good than evil in terms of contributing to the debate on healthcare reform. If I thought this, or anything else they were doing, was really evil, I would not be working there.

Tell me again, why would I use a container or a codec that can only be processed by a Microsoft software installed on a Microsoft OS, when immensely better and totally free alternatives predates it ?
Oh well, I guess it's because writing a tool to work with it would earn me a C&D letter or something, awesome, let's get coding !!

Advogato: Not invulnerable.

Well, there's Advogato's Trust Metric system.

I've been of the opinion for a while that a similar system could be devised using PGP or S/MIME certificates to combine identity verification with "web of trust" reputation evaluation. Under such a model, every user would import the public certificate of authorities that they trust. For example, consider a consumer review web site, where I decide to trust the site's admin. The admin trusts its editorial staff, and their certificates are signed by the admin. Any of the editorial staff may trust one of the site's frequent contributors, based on the quality of their work. That editor may sign the contributor's certificate. Now, my level of trust for that contributor can be established as a function of the proximity of that user to the admin in whom I placed trust. This differs from Advogato's system in that the "Master" certificates are simply those whom I've decided to trust.

The same thing can be applied to social networking sites, as well. I can trust my friends by accepting their certificates, and gain insight into social relationships by examining the signatures in their keys.