Hmmm. This is awesome news. The last 40 or so systems we purchased were all Intel based purely because of the fact that they were so much less trouble due to being supported with Free drivers. This changes the equation though. It sounds from the announcement that we'll be getting better quality drivers because AMD/ATI will be releasing the full specs and not merely documenting through the use of code (which is cool and still makes Intel supportable).
Some things I still wonder about are whether or not the comparably priced AMD/ATI systems will have good Free drivers for other integral components such as wireless (which Intel have also got a lead with due to their IPW3945ABG). Intel have also got some very important work underway with PowerTOP. The upcoming Fedora 8 will be benefiting from the results of extensive testing with PowerTOP (which is written by ex-Red Hatter, now Intel employee, Arjan van de Ven). This allows monitoring of the major drains of power in laptops and can also be a major factor in server rooms.
I'm delighted by this whole move and it means that I can now make recommendations which include ATI cards as part of the specifications to purchasing. In terms of whether the AMD/ATI platform as whole will be a competitor that depends on whether the AMD motherboard chipsets will also be as open, Free and supportable. Intel have an incredible headstart in this area and possibly this will prevent them from moving into the stand-alone 3D card market (which is what I thought was going to inevitably happen). It looked as though AMD/ATI were headed for extinction, but I guess the reality of sales started to catch up with them.
All in all good news that opens up some more options for us. Perhaps we'll be seeing some interesting Dell machines soon!
Think of the children you monster. If you're not cowering under the bed then... oh why do I bother, you're obviously some sort of a terrorist or you wouldn't want to argue with your democratically elected representative.
Hear hear! If it's good enough for Kazakhstan, Kenya and Saudi Arabia then it ought to be good enough for the world. It's technical merits are obvious. I salute your bravery Sir in speaking the thoughts which the Stalinist, politically correct oppressors will no doubt now jump upon and demolish. We need more forthright people like yourself, unfraid to speak their minds in the midst of conformity;)
A small victory, but an important one. Maybe Massachusetts can now be persuaded to move to an actual open, easy-to-implement and reliable standard to preserve government records. It can join Russia and Norway in using ODF.
Ugh, a guy gets arrested standing up for basic rights and all you can do is attack him through his little sister? I'm sorry but your comment reeks of petty tactics. I'll bet his little sister is proud of him for what he did.
Agreed. That was an excellent review which certainly gave me a feeling for the book's content, approach and failures. Even though it was slightly critical I'll be giving the book a shot, mainly because it sounds like although it could have done with restructuring it's nevertheless comprehensive.
Thanks. And thanks for Fedora. The amount of negative propaganda about Red Hat is mind blowing at this stage and as a happy user of Fedora, CentOS, RHEL (and Debian and OpenBSD and Gentoo) I'm very appreciative of the fact that Red Hat runs a succesful business within the paramters that Free Software imposes.
It makes an absolutely crucial point: there may well have been howls of protest, but they were from people that either wanted to spread confusion or else were completely ignorant.
There's another point: Fedora is the basis of RHEL not the other way around. Fedora is a very aggressively moving distribution that tries out new technologies. Red Hat looks at how succesful those are in Fedora and rolls any that work out well into its supported product: RHEL. It's in a good position to do so because many of the engineers that it hires are involved in the Fedora Project and so know intimately what features are stable and easily supportable.
It galls me that Red Hat as a company is so open, adhering in both letter and spirit to the ideals of Free Software, makes money from selling support for that software, re-invests the money in hiring top-notch hackers that contribute Free Software for everyone and then are shit on by people that know that they're doing this work and yet a company like Canonical with a non-Free "launchpad" are fawned over. Feh.
As a CIO his review displays a disturbing lack of appreciation of how to achieve the goals of reliability and stability. He takes a potshot at the Debian developers who provide _exactly_ the experience of reliability and stability:
"At the risk of sounding like a software atheist, I really care about getting my work done via a reliable, stable operating system and not about the philosophical subtleties of Firefox vs. Ice Weasel artwork. This is likely one reason that corporate CIOs are wary of Linux on the desktop: They have mission-critical operations to run, and worrying about which icon is used to launch a browser is about as relevant as arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin."
What he doesn't understand is that in order to provide reliability and stability the distro engineers need to be able to: read the source; make changes to the source; and redistribute the modified source. That allows them to fix the security holes or instability bugs that militate against mission-critical operations. The ability to patch and release is why FL/OSS does such a better job. The Mozilla Foundation want to remove this decentralized improvement because they want to control their brand so _they_ stop the Debian people from releasing their improvements under the name of Firefox.
The number of angels that can dance on the head of that particular pin is very relevant to exactly what Halamaka says he cares about.
As regards the Fedora Core 5 and RHEL4-WS parts of the review: they're well over a YEAR OLD! The improvements in network management (in the surprisingly named NetworkManager) come courtesy of Red Hat engineers and have been available in Fedora Core 6 and the current Fedora 7 and RHEL5 for quite a while now. Comparing FeistyFawn to FC5 is misleading due to the fact that the appropriate comparison is Fedora7. The insult added to the injury is that the work on NetworkManager was paid for by Red Hat as a result of their succesful enterprise server business.
Other glaring points of ignorance that stand out include the description of the "simple Ubuntu menus" of Application:Places:System. This is completely standard with the current versions of the GNOME desktop especially in Fedora 7 which tracks upstream GNOME HIGs aggressively. A final off-the-cuff piece of ignorance comes with the description of the Intel Pro Wireless 3945abg driver as "non-free": it's not. Intel have done a superb job of releasing the specs for this driver.
In summary, Halamaka's review is interesting solely because it reveals the extent of confusion and ignorance (which Ubuntu helps to foster by downplaying the serious issue of spreading non-Free drivers) even among those that consider themselves "fans of open-source". (It's Free Software buddy or else it's a piece of non-maintainable binary that no decent CIO should consider even running in an enterprise desktop environment of 40,000 users in a health care group, just the same way that anyone should not consider running WinXP or Vista in that environment.)
Commodity meaning that there are multiple sources of supply instead of a single monopolist producer which results in competition either driving down price or resulting in the incentive to add value in some other way. This would exclude mainframes or specialist realtime OSes in the embedded market.
I don't think it's a flame. All that this certification means is that a government department tested specific aspects of security on specific hardware. It shouldn't be thought of as anything more, it's just a rubber-stamp for administrators that don't want to understand security.
The certification is specific to the combination of RHEL on IBM eServers. So specific hardware and specific version of the OS. That said, practically there'd probably be no functional difference with CentOS on the same hardware... but you couldn't run it if the certification were mandated.
It's worth pointing out that this is actually equivalent to a "B1" TCSEC rating
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCSEC
and that it's impossible to get any higher rating for a commodity operating system. This is all specifically due to the SELinux support in Red Hat EL (and consequently CentOS and Fedora and other derivatives). Supposedly SuSE/Novell are trying to achieve this rating ATM but due to the limitations of AppArmor compared to SELinux it seems unlikely that they will.
Even funnier is the fact that Red Hat released replacements to the common TT fonts under a GPL license. The full-hinted versions will be released circa September 2007.
Where the fuck are all the other companies in sponsoring stuff like this?
I agree... kudos to Sun as long as they actually do release everything GPLv3! If that happens then Sun have a winner on their hands for people that want Free software that can't be taken advantage of by manoeuverings like the Novell/Microsoft deal. Coupled with a Free java that makes for a much more appealing platform than a GPLv2 GNU/Linux. I'm sure that Linus is aware of that, and indeed his position has softened from complete hostility to GPLv3 to trying to negotiate with the hated FSF.
To paraphrase: "Am I cynical? Yes. Do I expect people to act in their own interests? Hell
yes! That's how things are _supposed_ to happen. I'm not at all berating
Linus, what I'm trying to do here is to wake people up who seem to be living
in some dream-world where Linus wants to help people.
I'm sorry I have no more to suggest as I know next to nothing about video editing on any platform, but I'd be very interested in your final experiences with it. It'd be cool if you could put up a page about it somewhere. In any event if/when you get round to further exploration I'd appreciate hearing your final take on the state of this sort of video editing on Linux.
The dynebolic livecd bittorrent listed on that page took me 15 minutes to download. I wouldn't go to the trouble of setting up a system to try it (although the cinelerra package is available from MatthiasSaou's FreshRPMS repository)
There're actually two versions of cinelerra, the "no binary" one maintained by Heroine Virtual who do movie studio work, and the "community" version which you can get at cinelerra.og. Apparently the community version is essentially a "made friendly with nice patches" version of the berionevirtual one. I just did a "yum install cinelerra" on CentOS5 and it was pulled in from the DAG repository. No searching, no fuss, no complicated install. However, like I said I don't do video editing so I don't know how much use it is. There are also LiveCD images at the link, so you could just burn one and see if it's up to your needs.
Vegas is somewhat analogous to Final Cut Pro (though cheaper and not quite as powerful) or Adobe Premier
Ah. OK. I was looking at the wrong thing (Soundforge). Thanks for the info. I don't do anything like that, but have you looked at Cinelerra or Kino? A/V friends claim that Cinellera is essentially Adobe Premier. I'd be interested to know what your opinion is.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm. This is awesome news. The last 40 or so systems we purchased were all Intel based purely because of the fact that they were so much less trouble due to being supported with Free drivers. This changes the equation though. It sounds from the announcement that we'll be getting better quality drivers because AMD/ATI will be releasing the full specs and not merely documenting through the use of code (which is cool and still makes Intel supportable).
Some things I still wonder about are whether or not the comparably priced AMD/ATI systems will have good Free drivers for other integral components such as wireless (which Intel have also got a lead with due to their IPW3945ABG). Intel have also got some very important work underway with PowerTOP. The upcoming Fedora 8 will be benefiting from the results of extensive testing with PowerTOP (which is written by ex-Red Hatter, now Intel employee, Arjan van de Ven). This allows monitoring of the major drains of power in laptops and can also be a major factor in server rooms.
I'm delighted by this whole move and it means that I can now make recommendations which include ATI cards as part of the specifications to purchasing. In terms of whether the AMD/ATI platform as whole will be a competitor that depends on whether the AMD motherboard chipsets will also be as open, Free and supportable. Intel have an incredible headstart in this area and possibly this will prevent them from moving into the stand-alone 3D card market (which is what I thought was going to inevitably happen). It looked as though AMD/ATI were headed for extinction, but I guess the reality of sales started to catch up with them.
All in all good news that opens up some more options for us. Perhaps we'll be seeing some interesting Dell machines soon!
Why?
... oh why do I bother, you're obviously some sort of a terrorist or you wouldn't want to argue with your democratically elected representative.
Think of the children you monster. If you're not cowering under the bed then
I'm a happy Mutt user, but I have to say that you are wrong to assert that GMail lacks hotkeys.
Hear hear! If it's good enough for Kazakhstan, Kenya and Saudi Arabia then it ought to be good enough for the world. It's technical merits are obvious. I salute your bravery Sir in speaking the thoughts which the Stalinist, politically correct oppressors will no doubt now jump upon and demolish. We need more forthright people like yourself, unfraid to speak their minds in the midst of conformity ;)
A small victory, but an important one. Maybe Massachusetts can now be persuaded to move to an actual open, easy-to-implement and reliable standard to preserve government records. It can join Russia and Norway in using ODF.
Ugh, a guy gets arrested standing up for basic rights and all you can do is attack him through his little sister? I'm sorry but your comment reeks of petty tactics. I'll bet his little sister is proud of him for what he did.
Informative, factual, clear.
Agreed. That was an excellent review which certainly gave me a feeling for the book's content, approach and failures. Even though it was slightly critical I'll be giving the book a shot, mainly because it sounds like although it could have done with restructuring it's nevertheless comprehensive.
One of the best Slashdot reviews in a while.
Thanks. And thanks for Fedora. The amount of negative propaganda about Red Hat is mind blowing at this stage and as a happy user of Fedora, CentOS, RHEL (and Debian and OpenBSD and Gentoo) I'm very appreciative of the fact that Red Hat runs a succesful business within the paramters that Free Software imposes.
It makes an absolutely crucial point: there may well have been howls of protest, but they were from people that either wanted to spread confusion or else were completely ignorant. There's another point: Fedora is the basis of RHEL not the other way around. Fedora is a very aggressively moving distribution that tries out new technologies. Red Hat looks at how succesful those are in Fedora and rolls any that work out well into its supported product: RHEL. It's in a good position to do so because many of the engineers that it hires are involved in the Fedora Project and so know intimately what features are stable and easily supportable. It galls me that Red Hat as a company is so open, adhering in both letter and spirit to the ideals of Free Software, makes money from selling support for that software, re-invests the money in hiring top-notch hackers that contribute Free Software for everyone and then are shit on by people that know that they're doing this work and yet a company like Canonical with a non-Free "launchpad" are fawned over. Feh.
As a CIO his review displays a disturbing lack of appreciation of how to achieve the goals of reliability and stability. He takes a potshot at the Debian developers who provide _exactly_ the experience of reliability and stability:
"At the risk of sounding like a software atheist, I really care about getting my work done via a reliable, stable operating system and not about the philosophical subtleties of Firefox vs. Ice Weasel artwork. This is likely one reason that corporate CIOs are wary of Linux on the desktop: They have mission-critical operations to run, and worrying about which icon is used to launch a browser is about as relevant as arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin."
What he doesn't understand is that in order to provide reliability and stability the distro engineers need to be able to: read the source; make changes to the source; and redistribute the modified source. That allows them to fix the security holes or instability bugs that militate against mission-critical operations. The ability to patch and release is why FL/OSS does such a better job. The Mozilla Foundation want to remove this decentralized improvement because they want to control their brand so _they_ stop the Debian people from releasing their improvements under the name of Firefox.
The number of angels that can dance on the head of that particular pin is very relevant to exactly what Halamaka says he cares about.
As regards the Fedora Core 5 and RHEL4-WS parts of the review: they're well over a YEAR OLD! The improvements in network management (in the surprisingly named NetworkManager) come courtesy of Red Hat engineers and have been available in Fedora Core 6 and the current Fedora 7 and RHEL5 for quite a while now. Comparing FeistyFawn to FC5 is misleading due to the fact that the appropriate comparison is Fedora7. The insult added to the injury is that the work on NetworkManager was paid for by Red Hat as a result of their succesful enterprise server business.
Other glaring points of ignorance that stand out include the description of the "simple Ubuntu menus" of Application:Places:System. This is completely standard with the current versions of the GNOME desktop especially in Fedora 7 which tracks upstream GNOME HIGs aggressively. A final off-the-cuff piece of ignorance comes with the description of the Intel Pro Wireless 3945abg driver as "non-free": it's not. Intel have done a superb job of releasing the specs for this driver.
In summary, Halamaka's review is interesting solely because it reveals the extent of confusion and ignorance (which Ubuntu helps to foster by downplaying the serious issue of spreading non-Free drivers) even among those that consider themselves "fans of open-source". (It's Free Software buddy or else it's a piece of non-maintainable binary that no decent CIO should consider even running in an enterprise desktop environment of 40,000 users in a health care group, just the same way that anyone should not consider running WinXP or Vista in that environment.)
Commodity meaning that there are multiple sources of supply instead of a single monopolist producer which results in competition either driving down price or resulting in the incentive to add value in some other way. This would exclude mainframes or specialist realtime OSes in the embedded market.
I don't think it's a flame. All that this certification means is that a government department tested specific aspects of security on specific hardware. It shouldn't be thought of as anything more, it's just a rubber-stamp for administrators that don't want to understand security.
And it should soon (Jun 21) also be certified to the same level on HP hardware. See entry 10165 here: http://www.niap-ccevs.org/cc-scheme/in_evaluation. cfm
The certification is specific to the combination of RHEL on IBM eServers. So specific hardware and specific version of the OS. That said, practically there'd probably be no functional difference with CentOS on the same hardware ... but you couldn't run it if the certification were mandated.
It's worth pointing out that this is actually equivalent to a "B1" TCSEC rating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCSEC and that it's impossible to get any higher rating for a commodity operating system. This is all specifically due to the SELinux support in Red Hat EL (and consequently CentOS and Fedora and other derivatives). Supposedly SuSE/Novell are trying to achieve this rating ATM but due to the limitations of AppArmor compared to SELinux it seems unlikely that they will.
If they're not freely redistributable then they're not free at all. That's what the last 10 years of Free Software has been about: freedom.
Even funnier is the fact that Red Hat released replacements to the common TT fonts under a GPL license. The full-hinted versions will be released circa September 2007.
Where the fuck are all the other companies in sponsoring stuff like this?
Or even better GPLv3 GNU / GPLv2 Linux. Catchy.
I agree ... kudos to Sun as long as they actually do release everything GPLv3! If that happens then Sun have a winner on their hands for people that want Free software that can't be taken advantage of by manoeuverings like the Novell/Microsoft deal. Coupled with a Free java that makes for a much more appealing platform than a GPLv2 GNU/Linux. I'm sure that Linus is aware of that, and indeed his position has softened from complete hostility to GPLv3 to trying to negotiate with the hated FSF.
To paraphrase: "Am I cynical? Yes. Do I expect people to act in their own interests? Hell yes! That's how things are _supposed_ to happen. I'm not at all berating Linus, what I'm trying to do here is to wake people up who seem to be living in some dream-world where Linus wants to help people.
I'm sorry I have no more to suggest as I know next to nothing about video editing on any platform, but I'd be very interested in your final experiences with it. It'd be cool if you could put up a page about it somewhere. In any event if/when you get round to further exploration I'd appreciate hearing your final take on the state of this sort of video editing on Linux.
The dynebolic livecd bittorrent listed on that page took me 15 minutes to download. I wouldn't go to the trouble of setting up a system to try it (although the cinelerra package is available from MatthiasSaou's FreshRPMS repository)
Get it at cinelerra.org
There're actually two versions of cinelerra, the "no binary" one maintained by Heroine Virtual who do movie studio work, and the "community" version which you can get at cinelerra.og. Apparently the community version is essentially a "made friendly with nice patches" version of the berionevirtual one. I just did a "yum install cinelerra" on CentOS5 and it was pulled in from the DAG repository. No searching, no fuss, no complicated install. However, like I said I don't do video editing so I don't know how much use it is. There are also LiveCD images at the link, so you could just burn one and see if it's up to your needs.
Vegas is somewhat analogous to Final Cut Pro (though cheaper and not quite as powerful) or Adobe Premier Ah. OK. I was looking at the wrong thing (Soundforge). Thanks for the info. I don't do anything like that, but have you looked at Cinelerra or Kino? A/V friends claim that Cinellera is essentially Adobe Premier. I'd be interested to know what your opinion is.