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By "write out every single exception" I suppose you mean "verify that my claims are true"?

1. wireless: all my wireless cards are ones that I bought with their state of support in Linux by Free drivers specifically in mind. Works For Me.
2. video: same as above: Works For Me
3. java: I'm not doing very much with Java at all, I've played a bit with gcj and Jboss and it seems like they're going to be an alternative to the Sun java, seems to work from my limited knowledge of it: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora. java/2150 : Works For Me (in limited testing).

The release of a GPLv3 Java by Sun will be great. I want the pressure kept on them to live up to their promise to do so. Ubuntu's inclusion of a non-Free version relieves that pressure.

In sum, despite the release of Treacherous Toad (or whatever it's called) there are lots of people working on Free alternatives. The reason that I care is not because of "morality" or something like that, it's because the pushing of non-Free alternatives robs the Free software of market share. That's all. I can't see why people can't just buy hardware that's supported, use the Free software on it and enjoy.

Ubuntu is effing it up for everyone else.

The chipset does support USB Host mode. Linux drivers for it don't... or should I say didn't. Someone just announced USB host mode patches for kernel yesterday on maemo-developers mailing list.

Presumably you'll still need power injection hack, though.

A properly crafted 802.11 beacon or probe response frame will trigger the bug when a process tries to get scanning results by calling ioctl SIOCGIWSCAN.

> Theo's initial response that it was that wide distribution that really torqued him into a pretzel. Nobody likes having their dirty laundry aired in public

The recipients list looks perfectly fine to me:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireles s.general/1558

.

None of these facts are relevant to the discussion. The sole issue is that Michael Buesch made a public spectacle out of Marcus' mistake. It should have been addressed privately between developers, and then broadcast publicly if discussions were unsuccessful. Regardless of whether you believe Marcus' actions were a mistake or a theft, you must give someone with his track record the benefit of the doubt. By embarrassing him publicly, Michael destroyed Marcus' motivation to work in bcw(4) and benefit the non-GPL user communities.

Even Jeff Garzik, one of the bcm43xx developers, admitted that Michael's actions were wrong. It's unfortunate that Michael Beusch is more concerned about defending his actions than correcting the injustice.

I made the following comments at the OpenBSD Journal, but I think they are valid and should be heard amongst the Linux zealotry.

• Nobody disputes that GPL code was committed to OpenBSD CVS.
• Nobody disputes that this was in violation of your license.
• Nobody disputes that the bcm43xx code was a cleanroom implementation that took a long time to complete.
• Nobody disputes that Michael Buesch was one of the authors of said code.

None of these facts are relevant to the discussion. The sole issue is that Michael Buesch made a public spectacle out of Marcus' mistake. It should have been addressed privately between developers, and then broadcast publicly if discussions were unsuccessful. Regardless of whether you believe Marcus' actions were a mistake or a theft, you must give someone with his track record the benefit of the doubt. By embarrassing him publicly, Michael destroyed Marcus' motivation to work in bcw(4) and benefit the non-GPL user communities.

Even Jeff Garzik, one of the bcm43xx developers, admitted that Michael's actions were wrong. It's unfortunate that Michael Beusch is more concerned about defending his actions than correcting the injustice.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireles s.general/1558

"Wow, that's a hell of a long cc list for a request for a fair
resolution. the last 3 lines are mellow, but the body before that was
not very nice."

As if misappropriating source code is "nice"...

"We always try to make our stuff as clean as possible too."

Obviously, not "always".

The copying - if it was extensive as claimed - was hardly inadvertent. So Buesch has a complete right to be pissed about his code being stolen.

And the BSD folks are whining about him being pissed.

Meh.

Actually, if you talk the kernel devs, they'll tell you it's a feature, not a bug. They'll tell you that the problem is with Nvidia and that they need to release the source code to their drivers. The kernel devs haven't gone to any lengths to stop people like Nvidia from violating the GPL (they wanted to, but Linus put a stop to it), but they have stated time and time again, that they're not going to go to any extra effort to play nice with closed source drivers.

Nvidia doesn't really have much of an exuse in this case. All they can do is mumble some nonsense about IP. The Linux devs even offer free driver development with NDAs and all that jazz.

Squeak and eToys are currently included with the OLPC. And it is a wonderful way for kids to learn to program games, as well as for programmers to learn about Alan Key's revolutionary ideas! It's purpose is to inspire people, expose them to Smalltalk's unique ideas, the possibilities of visual programming systems, and point the way for future development. But the mainstream of software development on the OLPC will be done in Python.

Guido Van Rossum writes about Alan Kay's talk on his blog:

Alan also talked about the $100 laptop project; he is on the OLPC advisory board. Apparently Python is specifically involved. There was little Python content to Alan's talk, which is fine by me -- Keynotes like this one are supposed to challenge or tickle the audience, not necessarily to confirm their world view. Alan did end by expressing the hope that a system like he demonstrated will be implemented in Python; apparently (or just for the occasion :-) Alan believes that Python has a much larger mindshare than Smalltalk or Squeak, and that because of this a similar environment in Python will have a greater chance of succeeding than the current Squeak one. Also, the $100 laptop already has Python, and Alan is of course hoping that a Squeak-like environment will be part of it, so this appears expedient. (At the Shuttleworth summit in April I believe Alan also suggested that Squeak is suffering from its extremely simple graphics model; apparently it cannot benefit from graphics accelerator cards because of its platform-independent architecture. [Update: this is incorrect, see responses below.] Python on the other hand already has bindings to OpenGL and DirectX, for example.)

The idea is to re-implement the ideas of Squeak and other educational constructionist visual programming systems in Python, deeply integrated with the OLPC's Sugar user interface, and based on its libraries like GTK/Cairo/Pango, etc. Alan Kay writes on the Sugar mailing list:

Guido knows that I've been advocating that the Python folks should do Etoys or a very Etoys like environment in Python (and that the rest of the OLPC be given an objectification and media and scripting integration that is Etoys like).

However, there are simply zillions of things left to be done everywhere for OLPC so the first round of SW on the XO will be more of a gathering of "suggestive" features and abilities (of which Etoys is just one). That seems fine to me.

Viewpoints Research (our little non-profit) doesn't have any "ego or identity" staked around whether the children's authoring environment is Python based or Squeak based. I have said many times that, if the general integrative base of XO is to be Python, then the Etoys-like authoring should be based in Python also.

However, I will personally fight to the death to make sure that there is a children's authoring environment that allows even young children to do simulation style programming with very rich media objects.

For now, that is Etoys. It could be a suitable object-oriented Logo with media objects (this is essentially what Etoys is). It could be some better design (let's do one). The base could be Javascript (if implemented on top of an integrated environment of sufficient power), Python (ditto), Ruby (ditto), etc. Whatever it is, it has to be above high thresholds, not a hack or a gesture.

Besides the programming the children use to learn important ideas in math and science, they also need to be able to see how their own computer world is structured by being able to "pop the hood" on practically everything they use. Perhaps it is OK for high school children to see the current code (but I don't think so). I think there needs to be a wrapping on the entire set of facilities that uses the same conventions that 9 year olds do th

Google sez: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pygame

And: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.laptop.olpc .sugar/1568

So I believe the answer is "yes" and there's also some cool software to run under it.

On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 03:30:08PM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

This is so out of contact with reality that it makes me grind my teeth.

Eric I think you lost the plot, actually I don't think you ever got the plot in the first place but that is another story

He also states that AMD and ATI are being punished for their poor Linux support by getting less time spent on bugs related to their hardware. Note that these are actually bugs in open source code that has no affiliation with either company. The only people really getting punished are the end users who get lumped with buggy sofware in order to coerce them into boycotting AMD.

Remember that old ideal that was all about writing a good code base and then using the license to keep it free and help it improve faster? What were we smoking, eh? All this time we could have been using shitty drivers to lead the huddled masses to revolution!

Consider that you don't need a special driver for a particular brand of ATAPI CD-ROM drive, or for a particular USB Mass Storage Device. Heck, Windows has USB class drivers for Bluetooth devices, smart-card devices, hubs, HIDs (keyboards, mice, CueCats and such), mass storage devices, printers, PTP-protocol scanners and cameras, audio devices, modems and video devices. Linux has a variety of supported class drivers as well. There are, of course, more classes, and that's all just for USB devices.

Sure, there are a lot of corner cases and pathological hardware--I think video cards are the best example--but it's entirely possible and indeed desirable to support all kinds of devices in the kernel. Even if sometimes we have to say goodbye to one of them, it was worth it to have them around.

Benchmarks in the article shows that it is slower than XEN. Do you know why?

But they really liked usenet. The web forum has supplanted it, but they didn't really see that.

    I for one still prefer Usenet. Most web forums (phpbb, etc) don't support even the most basic functionalities of Usenet: Threads(!), Cross-posting, etc. One of the few exceptions are Slashdot (in a sense) and Gmane which allows you to see same content via Web-browser interface, your favorite newsreader, or as a mailing list.

    Web forums are worse than Usenet 25 years ago. Of course, for most people, they are "adequate". Still, I'm glad that Usenet has not yet died (well, the alt.* hierarchy is a pain...). Kudos to Google for getting Dejanews archives!

Kernel Virtual Machine - http://kvm.sf.net/ It requires a processor with Intel's Vt or AMD's SVM technology (cpuflags will read vmx for VT or svm for AMD-V). The developers are looking for people to test optimizations that have just gone in. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.kvm.d evel/657/focus=662 It uses a slightly modified qemu.

Guys, this is fake!

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.devel/ 22603/match=shark

Linux seems to be responding OK. A patch for yesterday's ext3 denial of service bug is on the mailing list and in -mm.

"A glance at http://news.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel [gmane.org] indicates that the gentleman stays fully engaged in emacs development, though one could contend that he does more managing than hacking, I suppose."

I doubt the validity of that statement simply because of the use of the word "gentleman".

A glance at http://news.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel indicates that the gentleman stays fully engaged in emacs development, though one could contend that he does more managing than hacking, I suppose.

Or one could realize, that the far superior Xemacs forked long ago because of Stallman's "attitude problem."

"He hasn't hacked much new code in a decade or more."

At least that's what happens to a sinking ship. A maintainer going missing does not quite instill the users with confidence, especially when it is happening due to reasons other than flagging interest. Most commercial distributions have SLAs which sort of work against such brilliant work by an individual contributor - they just can't depend on the whims of a person or his fate.

One of my friends once told me that "Extraordinary hackers are people with socially acceptable problems". In fact to achieve what they feel they must, a lot of them give up a lot - health, social lives and financial security. But because a few do that, does not mean FOSS programmers are crackpots. And I say this as a son who's home (which I can because my commits go to a public CVS) watching over a sick father.

So as understandable as it is that commercial vendors might want to switch away, but that doesn't mean anyone gets to shine a torch or make jokes into somebody else's darkness.

apparantly

Here's a brief rundown of the story:

• Guy notices his phones aren't working
• Guy calls in Comcast to get phones fixed
• Comcast line tech digs up a buried cable
• Comcast line tech chops the aforementioned cable into little tiny bits
• Comcast line tech marches into the house and hurls abuse at the guy's wife

It's an interesting story - at least read the messages from the OP before replying, he mentions a lot of important stuff later on (for instance, the cable was actually a private LAN cable and wasn't wired up to the DSL at all)...

NVIDIA don't want the 'open source' driver to be too good. They prefer us to continue to suckle at the teat of their proprietary offering.

Besides, they are only technically open source. The 'nv' driver is basically undocumented and pretty much unmaintainable by anyone other than an NVIDIA employee.

No, it's very much alive. Just before I posted this story, I sent a similar e-mail to the list. BTW, there's currently a call going out for people to work on the OpenGraphics drivers.

However, I do worry that should Intel decide to put their graphics chip on a discrete PCI card it would eat up much of our potential market...

Check http://gmane.org/ (best viewed in a news reader). It's a treasure.

I think you are missing the point of what that ABI is there for, that ABI is so that you don't have to recompile the kernel everytime to match things up. Instead of everytime I virtualize something I had to recompile the kernel for the virtual machine, I have a standardized ABI for older and newer kernels to be able to talk to the hypervisor. What VMware proposed an open API framework that anyone could use, which would allow different kernel revs to use a stable ABI to talk to, rather than recompile to the specific hypervisor version. It would be like having to recompile bash everytime you upgraded the kernel to the new specs, a standardized ABI for the guest kernel keeps you from having to do that. It's not specific to VMware, it would be beneficial to everyone (unless you really want to recompile every kernel in every VM everytime you patch your hypervisor). So what really is being debated is the implementation details of that proposal (do memory this way not that way), not the proposal of VMI itself.

If it really was what you seem to think it would be, don't you think that when they proposed it that someone on the kernel mailing list would have been jumping up and down about it? That would be something that someone would have mentioned by at least the 3rd message. Check the thread yourself: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/388353

The official website may be down may be down, but the rockbox mailing list is also archived at gmane.org. Although there are earlier wishlist type posts about voice menus, the main development appears to have started in May, 2003.

Never worked in support and this isn't a phone support story, but I always crack up when I read this post

Note on terminology

There is a growing concern among womyn that there are important gender issues with the English language. As a result, it became common to use terms such as "chairperson" instead of "chairman". In this manual we will use the words person, per, pers and perself. These words are used just like the words she, her, hers, herself. For example, we will say: "person wrote a manual to feel good about perself, and to encourage per potential significant other's heart to become pers". These terms were introduced, and perhaps invented, by Marge Piercy, and have been first used in software documentation and email correspondance by Richard Stallman. By using these terms, we hope to make this manual less threatening to womyn and to encourage our womyn readers to join the free software community.

Caerwyn said he was going to make a new release in a few days with the bug fixes. Most importantly this one. Check it out again in a few days. The Plan 9 from User Space acme has been well tested and is mostly bug free.

On another gmane post http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.licenses.open- source.general/2073/match=/ he describes himself:

I wish to thank you for responding to my musings. I am a retired physicist with little to do but ponder things in my spare time.

• Why someone actually uses the crappy email address from their ISP
• Why he seems to be so legally clueless
• Senility might be the only excuse for anyone being this stupid

On another gmane post http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.licenses.open- source.general/2073/match=/ he describes himself:

I wish to thank you for responding to my musings. I am a retired physicist with little to do but ponder things in my spare time.

• Why someone actually uses the crappy email address from their ISP
• Why he seems to be so legally clueless
• Senility might be the only excuse for anyone being this stupid

Here are a few of mine:
http://images.google.com/images?q=%25s
http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%25s
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=%25s
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=%25s&section=projec ts
http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=all&query=%25s
http://dir.gmane.org/search.php?match=%25s
http://search.gmane.org/search.php?query=%25s&sort =date

Here are a few of mine:
http://images.google.com/images?q=%25s
http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%25s
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=%25s
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=%25s&section=projec ts
http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=all&query=%25s
http://dir.gmane.org/search.php?match=%25s
http://search.gmane.org/search.php?query=%25s&sort =date

I don't use MPlayer, largely because the built-in UI (or lack thereof) makes it a pain to deal with.

When I first started using it, I was largely derided for not knowing all about video encoding to begin with and got more than one RTFM response.

It's got a variet of filters, including I think 4 just for de-interlacing

If you want to see some newbie bashing, the mencoder mailing list definitely a good place to hang out.

I don't use MPlayer, largely because the built-in UI (or lack thereof) makes it a pain to deal with.

When I first started using it, I was largely derided for not knowing all about video encoding to begin with and got more than one RTFM response.

It's got a variet of filters, including I think 4 just for de-interlacing

If you want to see some newbie bashing, the mencoder mailing list definitely a good place to hang out.

I don't use MPlayer, largely because the built-in UI (or lack thereof) makes it a pain to deal with.

When I first started using it, I was largely derided for not knowing all about video encoding to begin with and got more than one RTFM response.

It's got a variet of filters, including I think 4 just for de-interlacing

If you want to see some newbie bashing, the mencoder mailing list definitely a good place to hang out.

Even easier, mail them a .desktop file and tell them to open it.

It's not that difficult. You could send someone an inocuous.desktop file that, when saved, appears as hotgrits.jpg with the correct icon for a JPEG image. When the user double-clicks the file,the shell script in the .desktop file's Exec field is executed, which can do whatever it wants.

..to spread is the hard part.

How to write a Linux virus.
http://virus.enemy.org/virus-writing-HOWTO/_html/i ndex.html

There are numerious reasons why this is true.
Reasons include:
GNU/Linux is a minority platform.
GNU/Linux is highly fragmented.
GNU/Linux security is refined and updated often.
GNU/Linux users are more educated.
Windows has numerious security design flaws that promote viruses, that GNU/Linux systems don't have.
Windows has numerious user interface design flaws that promote viruses, that GNU/Linux doesn't have.

Although this WILL CHANGE if certain Pro-GUI factions get their way.

Like having Gnome and KDE user interfaces ignore the traditional Unix permissions for certain types of files... http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.xdg.devel/7014

Damn stupid shit.

But as it stands now a combination of social and technical issues keeps Linux users safe.

One example of a flaw in Windows that causes easy transmission of viruses... Executable files are based on their file names, not based on a permission model.

And it's not just 'exe' or 'bat'.. Here is a partial list of executable file extensions in Windows.
ADE - Microsoft Access Project Extension
ADP - Microsoft Access Project
BAS - Visual Basic Class Module
BAT - Batch File
CHM - Compiled HTML Help File
CMD - Windows NT Command Script
COM - MS-DOS Application
CPL - Control Panel Extension
CRT - Security Certificate
DLL - Dynamic Link Library
DO* - Word Documents and Templates
EXE - Application
HLP - Windows Help File
HTA - HTML Applications
INF - Setup Information File
INS - Internet Communication Settings
ISP - Internet Communication Settings
JS - JScript File
JSE - JScript Encoded Script File
LNK - Shortcut
MDB - Microsoft Access Application
MDE - Microsoft Access MDE Database
MSC - Microsoft Common Console Document
MSI - Windows Installer Package
MSP - Windows Installer Patch
MST - Visual Test Source File
OCX - ActiveX Objects
PCD - Photo CD Image
PIF - Shortcut to MS-DOS Program
POT - PowerPoint Templates
PPT - PowerPoint Files
REG - Registration Entries
SCR - Screen Saver
SCT - Windows Script Component
SHB - Document Shortcut File
SHS - Shell Scrap Object
SYS - System Config/Driver
URL - Internet Shortcut (Uniform Resource Locator)
VB - VBScript File
VBE - VBScript Encoded Script File
VBS - VBScript Script File
WSC - Windows Script Component
WSF - Windows Script File
WSH - Windows Scripting Host Settings File
XL* - Excel Files and Templates

Good luck training users not to use those. And the fact that you can launch executable programs by double clicking email attatchments is another huge shitfest of bad designs.

It shouldn't take 2-6 months. Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu 6.04 (6.06?) will be out in the near future (FC5 on Monday, 20 March 2005) and both will have GNOME 2.14. Debian Sid should have it shortly. I can't speak for Mandriva, SUSE or anyone else though....

It shouldn't take 2-6 months. Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu 6.04 (6.06?) will be out in the near future (FC5 on Monday, 20 March 2005) and both will have GNOME 2.14. Debian Sid should have it shortly. I can't speak for Mandriva, SUSE or anyone else though....

TFA: Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail.

It is: just send mail to a mailing list indexed by Gmane and then view the list with Gmane's blog interface. 'Course, you do have to create your own mailing list first...

TFA: Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail.

It is: just send mail to a mailing list indexed by Gmane and then view the list with Gmane's blog interface. 'Course, you do have to create your own mailing list first...

Yeah, I'm sure the Spotlight-alike dropdown menu widget just came from thin air.

Of course it didn't come out from thin air, just because some random slashdot troll didn't know about it until yesterday doesn't mean it hasn't been in development for a long time. It started with the Dashboard project, somewhere in mid-2003, who, about year later started the Beagle desktop search engine as their backend.

At this time, Google, Microsoft and Apple were almost certainly developing their own things, but since they were all unannounced, it was a case of convergent evolution, you can't rip off something you don't know exists.

Now, given this background framework and existing stand-alone search apps, sticking the search into panel applet is hardly a huge leap, but if you want to make it into rip-off of something, it's admittedly google desktop and copernic desktop search, not spotlight.

Yeah, I'm sure the Spotlight-alike dropdown menu widget just came from thin air.

Of course it didn't come out from thin air, just because some random slashdot troll didn't know about it until yesterday doesn't mean it hasn't been in development for a long time. It started with the Dashboard project, somewhere in mid-2003, who, about year later started the Beagle desktop search engine as their backend.

At this time, Google, Microsoft and Apple were almost certainly developing their own things, but since they were all unannounced, it was a case of convergent evolution, you can't rip off something you don't know exists.

Now, given this background framework and existing stand-alone search apps, sticking the search into panel applet is hardly a huge leap, but if you want to make it into rip-off of something, it's admittedly google desktop and copernic desktop search, not spotlight.

Jeff Garzik(kernel developer) has a very enlightening LKML post/rant about why wireless in the linux kernel is not yet quite up to par:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.network/31756

Why not check out Ruby On Rails?

Websites
RubyOnRails - http://www.rubyonrails.org/

Ruby general
http://www.ruby-lang.org/

Programming Ruby book - 1st edition online.
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/

Ruby Code and Style Online Mag
http://www.artima.com/rubycs/index.html

Small article on how to program in ruby.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/librar y/l-ruby1.html

RubyOnRails vs Java for web development efforts
http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=92#comments

Another comparing Java and Ruby for Web Efforts
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rail s/24863