Excellent. I hope this carries through. Scilab is one app that labels itself as open source but fails to meet the open source definition, because it doesn't allow commercial distribution of derivatives. I hope it gets smacked in the butt for being the non-free tool it is.
I've always found it amusing how Google censors prostitutes but not pornography. It's ok if thousands of people profit enjoy your sex services at once, but not if only one or a few do it at a time.
Ok, fine. I know you can take Darwin and put Gnome on top of it and have a free operating system, but Darwin isn't "an open-source version of the Mac OS" like the article claims, it is the kernel that MacOS X is running.
Damn people confusing kernels for operating system... this is the stuff of flamewars, y'know.
But for those of us who are holding our breath for release time, a good and rough indicator of when it will ship is the number of release critical bugs. When the number hits zero, Debian is (almost?) ready. Since the etch freeze was announced about a week ago, the number of release bugs has wavered around 130, with a slight downward trend. This is the stock market of the free software world.:-) The etch freeze means that no packages can move down from unstable (sid) to the current testing (etch) automatically anymore (normally, packages in unstable are automatically moved down to testing by a script if no bugs are filed against them for some time, several days, iirc). Packages can still be moved from unstable to testing, but only manually if it's clear that they are stable enough for the next release.
The dunk-tank drama in the Debian mailing lists is old news. Yes, some developers expressed concerns about the dunc-tank project, but I would hardly call this "frozen development". Developers are working hard to get the Debian release. I estimate January or February at the latest will be beer and pizza party time for all the Debian developers that have produced the largest binary free GNU/Linux distribution amongst which so many other distros depend.
Personally, I'm very excited. I'm not sure how much truth there is in this, but Ubuntu has probably put pressure in Debian to more timely releases, and this release will be much more in time than the previous sarge release was. I've been given permission to install Debian in 20 workstations of our local network, and I'm waiting for the stable release and the renowned Debian quality and security to do so. I'll probably be tracking the next testing release after I install them, though, since testing works well for desktop use and workstations.
Actually most scientists publish in journals that everyone can read.
I don't know about "most", but certainly not most mathematicians, physicists, or engineers. Certainly not in journals my school can pay for. We have tremenduous difficulties getting some of those journals and information, which is contrary to the spirit of science and academic collaboration. There are huge problems with publishing in the sciences. Witness for example the resignation of the board of editors of Topology and the rants of John Milne.
I've never heard of a university library that turned away the public.
Have you been to the university libraries of many different countries? Here in.mx that has happened to me.
FYI, all journals (that I've published in) require us to pay to publish our articles
Which is a damn shame... The cost of having people publish, peer review, and publish journal articles is already indirectly paid by taxes and government, sometimes private investors, but it shouldn't come directly come out of the scientist's pocket, and this cost certainly shouldn't be inhibitting the public at large from gaining access to information. Again, I speak for the hard sciences most of which are pursued for their own sake; perhaps in scientific applications with more interest for Big Business the rules are different.
Hm. In 1.5 in Debian I had to specifically make those changes, and I did see the aforementioned memory reduction. It wasn't default, for some reason. I don't know if this doesn't hold for Windows, however.
You can tell Firefox to be smarter about memory usage in about:config (type that into the address bar). Create a key called browser.cache.memory.capacity of type integer and set it equal to -1. Also set browser.cache.memory.enable of type boolean to true. This should drastically reduce your Firefox's memory usage, at least by 50%-60%. Granted, this setting should be more obvious from the main prefs instead of being so hackish, but it can be done. More details on this and other tweaks in the link below:
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent. I hope this carries through. Scilab is one app that labels itself as open source but fails to meet the open source definition, because it doesn't allow commercial distribution of derivatives. I hope it gets smacked in the butt for being the non-free tool it is.
I've always found it amusing how Google censors prostitutes but not pornography. It's ok if thousands of people profit enjoy your sex services at once, but not if only one or a few do it at a time.
That's because, by default, there aren't any open ports.
Of course, if you really want secure by default, you know whom to call.
Ok, fine. I know you can take Darwin and put Gnome on top of it and have a free operating system, but Darwin isn't "an open-source version of the Mac OS" like the article claims, it is the kernel that MacOS X is running.
Damn people confusing kernels for operating system... this is the stuff of flamewars, y'know.
Debian ships When It's Ready.
But for those of us who are holding our breath for release time, a good and rough indicator of when it will ship is the number of release critical bugs. When the number hits zero, Debian is (almost?) ready. Since the etch freeze was announced about a week ago, the number of release bugs has wavered around 130, with a slight downward trend. This is the stock market of the free software world. :-) The etch freeze means that no packages can move down from unstable (sid) to the current testing (etch) automatically anymore (normally, packages in unstable are automatically moved down to testing by a script if no bugs are filed against them for some time, several days, iirc). Packages can still be moved from unstable to testing, but only manually if it's clear that they are stable enough for the next release.
The dunk-tank drama in the Debian mailing lists is old news. Yes, some developers expressed concerns about the dunc-tank project, but I would hardly call this "frozen development". Developers are working hard to get the Debian release. I estimate January or February at the latest will be beer and pizza party time for all the Debian developers that have produced the largest binary free GNU/Linux distribution amongst which so many other distros depend.
Personally, I'm very excited. I'm not sure how much truth there is in this, but Ubuntu has probably put pressure in Debian to more timely releases, and this release will be much more in time than the previous sarge release was. I've been given permission to install Debian in 20 workstations of our local network, and I'm waiting for the stable release and the renowned Debian quality and security to do so. I'll probably be tracking the next testing release after I install them, though, since testing works well for desktop use and workstations.
Actually most scientists publish in journals that everyone can read.
I don't know about "most", but certainly not most mathematicians, physicists, or engineers. Certainly not in journals my school can pay for. We have tremenduous difficulties getting some of those journals and information, which is contrary to the spirit of science and academic collaboration. There are huge problems with publishing in the sciences. Witness for example the resignation of the board of editors of Topology and the rants of John Milne.
Science ought to push copyright aside.
I've never heard of a university library that turned away the public.
Have you been to the university libraries of many different countries? Here in .mx that has happened to me.
FYI, all journals (that I've published in) require us to pay to publish our articles
Which is a damn shame... The cost of having people publish, peer review, and publish journal articles is already indirectly paid by taxes and government, sometimes private investors, but it shouldn't come directly come out of the scientist's pocket, and this cost certainly shouldn't be inhibitting the public at large from gaining access to information. Again, I speak for the hard sciences most of which are pursued for their own sake; perhaps in scientific applications with more interest for Big Business the rules are different.
No, aptitude install java. ;-)
Hm. In 1.5 in Debian I had to specifically make those changes, and I did see the aforementioned memory reduction. It wasn't default, for some reason. I don't know if this doesn't hold for Windows, however.
You can tell Firefox to be smarter about memory usage in about:config (type that into the address bar). Create a key called browser.cache.memory.capacity of type integer and set it equal to -1. Also set browser.cache.memory.enable of type boolean to true. This should drastically reduce your Firefox's memory usage, at least by 50%-60%. Granted, this setting should be more obvious from the main prefs instead of being so hackish, but it can be done. More details on this and other tweaks in the link below:
http://www.tweakguides.com/Firefox_8.html