Waiting for Godot^H^H^H^Hentoo
on
KDE 4.0 Is Out
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· Score: 2, Interesting
As soon as this shows up in Gentoo Portage (the main branch, not an SVN overlay) I intend to backup my configuration and switch to KDE4. Yes, I know I'll run into things that don't work the way I expect and a few missing features. I figure if I want to see KDE 4.1 sooner, I can at least put in some effort to test and report problems. Now that the feature-freeze is over, developers ought to be able to deal with the "but the icons are icky" complaints that everyone seems to make, too.
It would probably also help if they quit focussing on "copying" at all. "Copying" isn't actually the issue and never was. Distribution is the issue. The only reason it's even called "copy"right is because the term was invented when the technology was such that the only reason to go to the effort of copying was for distribution.
Instead of making sure I can't watch DVD's legally on my Linux boxen (because the computer has to "copy" the data from the DVD into memory to decode and play it), maybe they should have just spent their lobbying money on actual enforcement against people engaging in genuinely harmful trespass on their copyrights (mass-production sellers of bootleg media).
The risible rhetoric that the "Intellectual Property" barons has been pushing for so long has been so plainly wrong that they don't even have the credibility left to make reasonable claims and be believed.
Insistently equating trespassing on someone's copyrights with armed robbery ("piracy") and "theft" when it plainly is neither for so long means that now a lot of people have trouble taking the whole concept of copyright seriously, unfortunately.
The one (and only) problem I have with them is the mercury in them. The amount of mercury building up in, for example, fish that were formerly safe to eat is already disturbing. CF bulbs do last a lot longer than incandescents, but they do die and then get thrown away and broken in landfills, releasing the mercury. I'm hoping LED equivalents become affordable soon. (Meanwhile, yes, I do use CF bulbs...)
(On the other hand, I suspect that the amount of mercury released is still going to be smaller than the amount dumped into the air by mining operations [are you listening, Nevada?] and coal-burning power plants, where I'm under the impression most of the mercury gets released.)
I'd guess that at least some of the problem is that the icons and such have been intentionally set to an unusually large size so that they'll be more visible in the screenshot.
(I don't know if that's TRUE, but that'd be my guess.)
Semacode, QRCode, whatever - I just want one that has readily available legally-free generation and decoding libraries available that I can use on my Linux box (in addition to J2ME applications)
It doesn't have to be all commercial advertisements, after all. I think this kind of thing would have great potential as a modern equivalent of the old hobo codes. Sure, it's also abuseable, but I think I'd rather have the "Skateboarding is not a crime!" stickers as innocuous barcodes anyway. Same goes for commercial advertisements, which to me would be as barcodes vs. traditional advertisements what inline text links are to pop-up ads
I imagine more artistically-inclined folks could have a fun time hiding barcode messages in graffiti or sculpture (imagine a sculpture that at a certain time of day casts a shadow that translates as semacode or QRcode, or crop-circle barcodes decodable from aerial photos)...
As I recall, I had originally extracted the older libgl.so from an older version of the ATI proprietary drivers. The previous version of the proprietary driver (8.39.4) seemed to work without it, albeit still in painful software rendering mode, so I made the mistake of deleting the file. Now I'm back to the "doesn't work at all" situation again with 8.40.4.
Phoronix was just raving about how wonderful the about-to-be-released next version (8.41.something) is going to be, and that it's supposedly a new codebase. I'm hoping it'll contain a fix for this obnoxious and seemingly perpetual problem, too, but I have no idea if it will.
This is an OLD problem that nobody seems to care about addressing, if it's the same problem I'm having. My laptop here is stuck with the "Radeon XPRESS 200M" video chipset. ATI's special proprietary drivers seem to work okay...except for Google Earth which sticks at the splash screen with near 100% CPU utilization. The only "fix" I've ever found involves copying an old version of libGL.so into the Google Earth install directory, which forces it to run in painfully slow software rendering (though at least it runs).
I'm under the impression that this is actually a problem with ATI's drivers, though the fact that Google Earth is the ONLY application that seems to have trouble with it right now. Given that Google Earth is actually the only thing I especially want to run with 3D hardware acceleration, this has been extraordinarily frustrating for me for well over a year now.
I suspect either ATI, Google, Or x.org's developers could solve the problem - Google by bypassing whatever specific feature is causing the lockup, ATI by making the driver respond correctly, or x.org by figuring out how to initialize the Radeon XPRESS 200M correctly (there's evidently something strange about the chipset and ATI won't reveal how to properly initialize it) so I can use the open-source drivers. But so far, the former two just don't seem to care, and the latter is still trying to get it worked out.
I wonder how the java Worldwind project is running on Linux these days?...
This is silly. If they want the NRC to track at THAT level of detail (on-site inspections of everybody who wants any piece of equipment with any amount of "radioactive" material...which includes smoke detectors by the way [hasn't anyone ever read "The Radioactive Boy Scout"?]), congress is going to need to get off their butts and give the NRC the budget necessary to hire the large number of additional employees they're going to need.
The article describes that the amount of material involved would have done the same kind of damage as the off-the-shelf Mooninite Invasion in Boston did - money lost to panic, not to actual harm from the material. AAAIIIEEE!!! NUKULAR RADIATION STUFF!!!! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! EVERYBODY PANIC!
I await the call to have the NRC inspect sales of smoke detectors from Home Depot...and perhaps confiscate people's water bottles in case they contain Tritium.
(From the Article) "The economic and psychological effects of a dirty bomb detonating on American soil would be devastating[...]The N.R.C. has a pre 9-11 mindset in a post 9-11 world" 9/11! 9/11! 9/11!...Never mind that it's a lot cheaper and more dramatic to use readily available conventional material to terrorize people (as the article points out). Thanks, "Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota", for letting the Terrorists know that they can greatly increase your panic by sprinkling the guts of a few smoke detectors into their pipe bombs. Heck, they wouldn't even need to set them off - just leave them somewhere and wait for the tiny amount of smoke-detector-guts to be detected. "Terrorists are deploying radioactive dirty bombs in our cities! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11!..." and that'll keep them entertained for months. Leave it somewhere near an airport and a subway and you have a perfect trifecta for inducing orgasm in the news media.
(I also notice the mention at the end that when someone tried to obtain a more substantial amount of nuclear material in another exercise, they DID need to be inspected first.)
Finally - I may be wrong about this, but I don't think it's the NRC that deals with nuclear weapons (That's the Department of Defense or the Department of Energy, isn't it?). Just how clear are the regulations concerning which agency deals with "radioactive weapons materials?" Does congress need to start paying a little more attention to the tangled mess that is the federal bureaucracy?
Is it too much to ask that my own government NOT help the terrorists spread terror and panic in my country?
I'll second the "Google Earth" thing - I rarely have a need for accelerated 3D (the open-source radeon driver does 2D just fine for me), but the one thing that I'd like to run that would need it is Google Earth...
...which just plain stops at the splash screen when using ATI's accelerated drivers. (The "fix" involves forcing it to software rendering...)
That, and being able to work with the current kernel version are my only serious complaints, though I haven't even tried the TV-out on this laptop yet.
Oh, and a followup - I agree with you - I'd love to see this in the mainline kernel. I think part of the problem might be that the current driver is written for the deprecated v4l version 1. A v4l2 version has been mentioned as being in development for some time now on the website, but no releases or news that I've heard of yet. Perhaps when the v4l2 version is ready the author might consider having it added to the mainline kernel?
[...]instead, they have to do all sorts of voodoo magic[...]
Man, tell me about it. I'm still exhausted from typing "emerge gspcav1"...Glad I'm not using Ubuntu, or I'd have to do about twice as much work! ("gspcav1" being much shorter to type than "gspca-source"...)
Okay, in fairness, it actually was kind of a pain finding this package in the first place, but other than that, the three different types of webcams I have floating around all DO seem to "just work" with it. And don't let the "2.6.19" thing on the Gentoo package page fool you - it seems to at least compile for 2.6.21.
Now, does anyone have any good recommendations for webcam capture software? (How the heck do I get mencoder to use the webcam for input, anyway?...)
37, escaped a 15-year career in IT, back to college to finish my Microbiology B.S. (emphasis on applied environmental and industrial microbiology). If my local institution can be convinced to accept my second semester of English as a second semester of English and my semester of Calculus as a semester of Calculus (this place is evidently notorious for refusal to accept transfer credits) I should hopefully graduate this summer.
I'm working even harder now than I was in IT, but now at least I feel like it's productive work.
As far as I've ever been able to find, C and D rechargeables are complete rip-offs.
Every time I see a rechargeable C or D, they appear to have exactly the same capacity as a mid-range AA. Apparently, they just stick a AA core inside a C or D sized "shell". Anybody ever found a "real" NiMH D-Cell?
Despite what they say on the packages, you can recharge standard single-use Alkalines - about 2-5 times[...]
You can actually do this MORE than that under certain conditions. The trick to treating alkalines as rechargeables is that unlike NiMH and NiCad batteries, alkalines do best if you recharge them frequently, after every small use (whereas usually you hear people recommending that you mostly drain NiMH and NiCad batteries before recharging, for fear of "the memory effect"). You can never get quite back up to completely full charge, but if you charge them after every small use, you can stay pretty close to new for a long time.
Once they're drained below a certain point, you can no longer get them to recharge. I'm not sure why, but "Energizer" brand seems to drop into the "no longer rechargeable" range every easily, while on the other hand I've been using the same set of "Duracell" AA's in my digital camera for about a year and a half (recharging after every session of use.).
It sounds like the "GPL2 or later" clause in their previous license terms meant that someone could conceivably donate some code (and/or fork the project) under GPL3 terms, in which case either parts of their code (or the entirety of the fork) would end up being GPL3.
Now any donated code or forks of subsequent version of MySQL (currently) must be GPL2 licensed. Of course, if someone wanted to go back one version and fork from there, GPL3 would still be a possibility, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess it's not just Ted Stevens, then...
As soon as this shows up in Gentoo Portage (the main branch, not an SVN overlay) I intend to backup my configuration and switch to KDE4. Yes, I know I'll run into things that don't work the way I expect and a few missing features. I figure if I want to see KDE 4.1 sooner, I can at least put in some effort to test and report problems. Now that the feature-freeze is over, developers ought to be able to deal with the "but the icons are icky" complaints that everyone seems to make, too.
And don't get me started on the whole "IntelliActiveDirectCrapX.NET" stuff...
It would probably also help if they quit focussing on "copying" at all. "Copying" isn't actually the issue and never was. Distribution is the issue. The only reason it's even called "copy"right is because the term was invented when the technology was such that the only reason to go to the effort of copying was for distribution. Instead of making sure I can't watch DVD's legally on my Linux boxen (because the computer has to "copy" the data from the DVD into memory to decode and play it), maybe they should have just spent their lobbying money on actual enforcement against people engaging in genuinely harmful trespass on their copyrights (mass-production sellers of bootleg media).
The risible rhetoric that the "Intellectual Property" barons has been pushing for so long has been so plainly wrong that they don't even have the credibility left to make reasonable claims and be believed.
Insistently equating trespassing on someone's copyrights with armed robbery ("piracy") and "theft" when it plainly is neither for so long means that now a lot of people have trouble taking the whole concept of copyright seriously, unfortunately.
The one (and only) problem I have with them is the mercury in them. The amount of mercury building up in, for example, fish that were formerly safe to eat is already disturbing. CF bulbs do last a lot longer than incandescents, but they do die and then get thrown away and broken in landfills, releasing the mercury. I'm hoping LED equivalents become affordable soon. (Meanwhile, yes, I do use CF bulbs...)
(On the other hand, I suspect that the amount of mercury released is still going to be smaller than the amount dumped into the air by mining operations [are you listening, Nevada?] and coal-burning power plants, where I'm under the impression most of the mercury gets released.)
I'd guess that at least some of the problem is that the icons and such have been intentionally set to an unusually large size so that they'll be more visible in the screenshot.
(I don't know if that's TRUE, but that'd be my guess.)
Semacode, QRCode, whatever - I just want one that has readily available legally-free generation and decoding libraries available that I can use on my Linux box (in addition to J2ME applications)
It doesn't have to be all commercial advertisements, after all. I think this kind of thing would have great potential as a modern equivalent of the old hobo codes. Sure, it's also abuseable, but I think I'd rather have the "Skateboarding is not a crime!" stickers as innocuous barcodes anyway. Same goes for commercial advertisements, which to me would be as barcodes vs. traditional advertisements what inline text links are to pop-up ads
I imagine more artistically-inclined folks could have a fun time hiding barcode messages in graffiti or sculpture (imagine a sculpture that at a certain time of day casts a shadow that translates as semacode or QRcode, or crop-circle barcodes decodable from aerial photos)...
There's only one person who can save us from this belief in ghosts:
Carl Sagan!
Oh, crap, he's dead, isn't he. How ironic...
I think somebody must have been upset that you called them "Hillbillies".
Utah is The West. Out here, we have Rednecks, not Hillbillies.
If you have trouble remembering the difference, just remember Hillbillies|Moonshine=Rednecks|Meth.
As I recall, I had originally extracted the older libgl.so from an older version of the ATI proprietary drivers. The previous version of the proprietary driver (8.39.4) seemed to work without it, albeit still in painful software rendering mode, so I made the mistake of deleting the file. Now I'm back to the "doesn't work at all" situation again with 8.40.4.
Phoronix was just raving about how wonderful the about-to-be-released next version (8.41.something) is going to be, and that it's supposedly a new codebase. I'm hoping it'll contain a fix for this obnoxious and seemingly perpetual problem, too, but I have no idea if it will.
You're stuck on an ATI video chipset, aren't you?
This is an OLD problem that nobody seems to care about addressing, if it's the same problem I'm having. My laptop here is stuck with the "Radeon XPRESS 200M" video chipset. ATI's special proprietary drivers seem to work okay...except for Google Earth which sticks at the splash screen with near 100% CPU utilization. The only "fix" I've ever found involves copying an old version of libGL.so into the Google Earth install directory, which forces it to run in painfully slow software rendering (though at least it runs).
I'm under the impression that this is actually a problem with ATI's drivers, though the fact that Google Earth is the ONLY application that seems to have trouble with it right now. Given that Google Earth is actually the only thing I especially want to run with 3D hardware acceleration, this has been extraordinarily frustrating for me for well over a year now.
I suspect either ATI, Google, Or x.org's developers could solve the problem - Google by bypassing whatever specific feature is causing the lockup, ATI by making the driver respond correctly, or x.org by figuring out how to initialize the Radeon XPRESS 200M correctly (there's evidently something strange about the chipset and ATI won't reveal how to properly initialize it) so I can use the open-source drivers. But so far, the former two just don't seem to care, and the latter is still trying to get it worked out.
I wonder how the java Worldwind project is running on Linux these days?...
Seems to be working fine in my 64-bit Firefox (Gentoo, AMD64). AND Konqueror.
It's actually extremely easy:
emerge -v mozilla-thunderbird
(Sorry, couldn't resist...)
This is silly. If they want the NRC to track at THAT level of detail (on-site inspections of everybody who wants any piece of equipment with any amount of "radioactive" material...which includes smoke detectors by the way [hasn't anyone ever read "The Radioactive Boy Scout"?]), congress is going to need to get off their butts and give the NRC the budget necessary to hire the large number of additional employees they're going to need.
The article describes that the amount of material involved would have done the same kind of damage as the off-the-shelf Mooninite Invasion in Boston did - money lost to panic, not to actual harm from the material. AAAIIIEEE!!! NUKULAR RADIATION STUFF!!!! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! EVERYBODY PANIC!
I await the call to have the NRC inspect sales of smoke detectors from Home Depot...and perhaps confiscate people's water bottles in case they contain Tritium.
(From the Article) "The economic and psychological effects of a dirty bomb detonating on American soil would be devastating[...]The N.R.C. has a pre 9-11 mindset in a post 9-11 world" 9/11! 9/11! 9/11!...Never mind that it's a lot cheaper and more dramatic to use readily available conventional material to terrorize people (as the article points out). Thanks, "Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota", for letting the Terrorists know that they can greatly increase your panic by sprinkling the guts of a few smoke detectors into their pipe bombs. Heck, they wouldn't even need to set them off - just leave them somewhere and wait for the tiny amount of smoke-detector-guts to be detected. "Terrorists are deploying radioactive dirty bombs in our cities! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11!..." and that'll keep them entertained for months. Leave it somewhere near an airport and a subway and you have a perfect trifecta for inducing orgasm in the news media.
(I also notice the mention at the end that when someone tried to obtain a more substantial amount of nuclear material in another exercise, they DID need to be inspected first.)
Finally - I may be wrong about this, but I don't think it's the NRC that deals with nuclear weapons (That's the Department of Defense or the Department of Energy, isn't it?). Just how clear are the regulations concerning which agency deals with "radioactive weapons materials?" Does congress need to start paying a little more attention to the tangled mess that is the federal bureaucracy?
Is it too much to ask that my own government NOT help the terrorists spread terror and panic in my country?
It does make me wonder - how does, say, Luxembourg deal with the surrounding European countries' use of the broadcast spectrum?
Seems like a very similar argument could be made against laws that prohibit decrypting signals that pass through one's property
I'll second the "Google Earth" thing - I rarely have a need for accelerated 3D (the open-source radeon driver does 2D just fine for me), but the one thing that I'd like to run that would need it is Google Earth...
...which just plain stops at the splash screen when using ATI's accelerated drivers. (The "fix" involves forcing it to software rendering...)
That, and being able to work with the current kernel version are my only serious complaints, though I haven't even tried the TV-out on this laptop yet.
Oh, and a followup - I agree with you - I'd love to see this in the mainline kernel. I think part of the problem might be that the current driver is written for the deprecated v4l version 1. A v4l2 version has been mentioned as being in development for some time now on the website, but no releases or news that I've heard of yet. Perhaps when the v4l2 version is ready the author might consider having it added to the mainline kernel?
Man, tell me about it. I'm still exhausted from typing "emerge gspcav1"...Glad I'm not using Ubuntu, or I'd have to do about twice as much work! ("gspcav1" being much shorter to type than "gspca-source"...)
Okay, in fairness, it actually was kind of a pain finding this package in the first place, but other than that, the three different types of webcams I have floating around all DO seem to "just work" with it. And don't let the "2.6.19" thing on the Gentoo package page fool you - it seems to at least compile for 2.6.21.
Now, does anyone have any good recommendations for webcam capture software? (How the heck do I get mencoder to use the webcam for input, anyway?...)
Who else has the capability to fight the last of the Space Nazi armada and the last of Japan's remaining Giant Space Robots?...
Sign me up...
37, escaped a 15-year career in IT, back to college to finish my Microbiology B.S. (emphasis on applied environmental and industrial microbiology). If my local institution can be convinced to accept my second semester of English as a second semester of English and my semester of Calculus as a semester of Calculus (this place is evidently notorious for refusal to accept transfer credits) I should hopefully graduate this summer.
I'm working even harder now than I was in IT, but now at least I feel like it's productive work.
As far as I've ever been able to find, C and D rechargeables are complete rip-offs.
Every time I see a rechargeable C or D, they appear to have exactly the same capacity as a mid-range AA. Apparently, they just stick a AA core inside a C or D sized "shell". Anybody ever found a "real" NiMH D-Cell?
You can actually do this MORE than that under certain conditions. The trick to treating alkalines as rechargeables is that unlike NiMH and NiCad batteries, alkalines do best if you recharge them frequently, after every small use (whereas usually you hear people recommending that you mostly drain NiMH and NiCad batteries before recharging, for fear of "the memory effect"). You can never get quite back up to completely full charge, but if you charge them after every small use, you can stay pretty close to new for a long time.
Once they're drained below a certain point, you can no longer get them to recharge. I'm not sure why, but "Energizer" brand seems to drop into the "no longer rechargeable" range every easily, while on the other hand I've been using the same set of "Duracell" AA's in my digital camera for about a year and a half (recharging after every session of use.).
It sounds like the "GPL2 or later" clause in their previous license terms meant that someone could conceivably donate some code (and/or fork the project) under GPL3 terms, in which case either parts of their code (or the entirety of the fork) would end up being GPL3.
Now any donated code or forks of subsequent version of MySQL (currently) must be GPL2 licensed. Of course, if someone wanted to go back one version and fork from there, GPL3 would still be a possibility, I think.