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Slashback: Cinelerra, Dolphiname, Phoenix
And you don't want your database being a Flipper. MySQL has finally announced the name of their logo dolphin, and the winner is... Sakila! The name, submitted by Ambrose Twebaze of Swaziland, was chosen from 6357 entries "because it represents the global reach of MySQL as well as the friendly, open nature of the company." Slashdot covered the contest back in January, and MySQL listed some of the more popular names submitted back in April.
Perverse incentives are the most fun. Mark Barnett writes in reference to the ongoing pets.com lawsuit story Update: 10/04 00:18 GMT by T : Sorry, that's "PetsWarehouse," not "pets.com.":
"I was one of the settling parties. I did not settle out of fear. I settled because he wanted me to run his banner on my website for 120 days. The settlement did not say anything about the number of times it had to run. I ran it once per day at about 4 AM EST for 120 days. It was my joke on him. I think I got the better deal. I ran the defense fund banner about 1.5 million times versus his 120 times."
Wings for a lizard. Espectr0 writes "Phoenix 0.2 has been released!. Improvements include the return of the sidebar, extensions management and web form autocomplete. It's also a little smaller and faster, and 0.3 will be released in about a week. Get the scoop here."
Unsolicited testimonial. boomerang_56 writes "Wanting to see what the fuss was about, I just installed Red Hat 8. For me, working IEEE1394 features are a must. It was nice to see that now I don't have to recompile the kernel just to have Firewire working. So I downloaded and compiled Kino, and was able to capture from my camcorder, and even control it, without the major tweaks I used to have to do. Then I found out that Cinelerra has been released at version 1.0!!! So I downloaded and installed it via RPM (Pentium II binaries). I had to install an old version of libstdc++-3, but that was easy. No "--force" or the other hassles we used to have to go through. So the first time I fired up Cinelerra, after changing the preferences for IEEE1394 capture, I was impressed to see it actually captured on the first try. I guess the bottom line for this submission is as a user I wanted to say "thanks" for all the developers working on this kind of thing. We all know that besides gaming, video editing is the big killer app. It's really nice to be able to have this kind of power in open source software and not have to boot to Windows just to edit video now. It's not easy enough for my mom yet, but the way things are going, it won't be long. Oh, links... get Cinelerra here (check out the screenshots too). Get Kino here."
Blinkenlampen ueber Paris. fluxdvd writes "In celebration of the Nuit Blanche art festival in Paris, Project Blinkenlights has transformed Tower T2 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France into what is claimed to be the world's largest computer screen. The system used to drive the display runs an embedded version of Linux.
Read the story at Linuxdevices.com. They have live streams of the building at night (Paris time) and replay the previous night's display druing the day. It's quite impressive :)"
We mentioned the plans for this display a few weeks ago.
Don't you hunger for a patent-free, royalty-free, better-at-identical-bitrate alternative? The release of Red Hat 8.0 included the notable, intentional ommission of MP3 software, a decision Red Hat made on the basis of possible patent and royalty problems.
Now SnowDeath writes "After two days of trying to get my ALSA install to work correctly in RedHat 8.0 (Psyche), I finally headed over to the xmms website to see if there were any known bugs with ALSA. Low and behold, the first thing my eyes read tells how RedHat Software decided to not include the mp3 plugin in their xmms install in Psyche in fear of pending patent problems. So, do not despair, there is an rpm "update" for this particular problem on the xmms site."
Of course Red Hat respects the mp3 patents. Red Hat (through employee Ingo Molnar) is applying for its own software patents, after all. If Red Hat does anything to interfere with the mp3 patents, then they would threaten their own ability to use the courts to quash competitors, should they win their own patents.
What patents are Molnar and Red Hat applying for? Why, patents on parts of Linux itself. See applications 20020059330 and 20020091868 at http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html
Why is the name Sakila more global than any other name? I think the choice of a non-White African name is a manifestation of the typical White liberal hatred of their own kind. They hate the fact that the origins and legends of the open source movement are White, so they need to feel trendy and pick an African name to prove how progressive, enlightened and tolerant they are. It's cool to be a race traitor. How about the name Mugabe instead? Maybe they can commission a talented Ugandian artist to fashion a dolphin logo out of elephant dung?
Paraphrasing Isaac Asimov, "--force is the last refuge of the incompetent."
If you are trying to install something and you find you need to use (rpm -i --force foo.rpm), you're sure to screw something up, or something's already been screwed up.
If you build a brick wall, each row of bricks depends on all of the bricks below being installed orderly. RPM and other dependency systems attempt to manage those bricks so you don't have mixed files, duplicates, holes or half-packages below the applications you want to use. Ignoring the errors or circumventing the checks for errors... well, some of us remember Humpty Dumpty.
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