Ibid is in fact not a journal. He is a prolific polymath who just happens to be a colleague of mine at a secret govt research facility (we've been kept alive using Atlantean gerontological medicine for 4 millenia). He has contributed widely to a surprising number of fields. Please do not spread unfounded rumours as fact and give correct attribution where it is due. Thank you.
the word "cajón" is really only used for medium to large drawers.
It's also used, at least in Latin America, to refer to a percussion instrument: literally a large box which the player sits upon and strikes with their hands.
The insect problem won't just be disease. They like to eat a lot of the things mammals like to eat. We'd better be prepared to switch to a new diet of pesticides and insects.
There is a firmware blob: it contains stuff that the FCC says can't be open to users to modify easily. It's a way of getting around intrusive govt regulation. I would agree that just dumping your board would be a problem, but that's not what I'm suggesting. If you can afford to then you could sell it to a windows user (unlike you they have the advantage of support from Nvidia and ATI) and buy a new Intel based set up. No waste due to dumping and the power savings will reduce your carbon footprint. Or you can just ride out the present uncomfortable situation and then when Free drivers are released in a year or so you can use your hardware. Your call.
Pfah! More negativism. There's another positive benefit to increased temperatures: we'll have more insects for more of the year, and insects taste FUCKING AWESOME! It's a good thing too, because they're going to eat all the crops unless we spray a lot more chemicals on them, which would make them poisonous. So it's a win-win, positive opportunity.
I accept your point about your hardware being expensive... but what I'm countering is the idea that there's no choice. You had a choice: buy older hardware with FOSS reverse-engineered drivers, or buy closed faster new hardware. And for someone considering buying new hardware there's a third option: Intel . Basically you're stuck without an option right now unless you can convince your hardware manufacturers to release FOSS drivers. Maybe it'll happen, but given the history of both ATI and Nvidia that looks like it'll be a while.
have not OSS their wifi drivers
I don't think that's true
Good point. I was being sloppy thinking about cards vs chips. However, for the price of some of the newer nvidia cards you could get one of the cheaper G965 Intel motherboards. Another $250 gets you a Core 2 Duo with virtualisation capability. I used to be an AMD partisan but Intel is really throwing down as far as Open/Free goes and their prices and power efficiency are excellent too.
Fuck "hacking the hardware" and "whining about it". The "Open Source Community", specifically Dave Airlie, have already written Free drivers for the ATI cards, that ATI WILL NOT ALLOW THEM TO RELEASE. Note that that blog entry is from the middle of last fucking year.
At this stage, to buy anything except an Intel GMA X3000 is madness. Intel are delivering fully Free/Open solutions that are powerful enough for anyone except hard core gamers (and said games don't exist on Linux anyway) and CAD people.
They're also significantly cheaper and more power efficient than the stuff being put out by Nvidia and ATI.
no competitive contemporary open source 3D any more, and the quality of nVidia's binary seems to be better.
I'm not going to directly disagree with you because I'm unsure how you'd define the above. What 3D tasks do you want the card to do? Because if all you want is basic 3D acceleration good enough for e.g. TuxRacer or Open Arenaand the fun desktop effects with Compiz/Beryl then Intel has very nicely provided complete Free/OpenSource drivers for most of their integrated components (*) including the GMA X3000 integrated graphics chips. The latter chips apparently do T&L shaders and other good stuff which is actually better supported under GNU/Linux than Windows Vista.
Of course, if what you're talking about is CAD or something really GPU intensive then you may be more out of luck, but I'm interested to know exactly what that is?
* Intel are also a great bet for wireless compared to e.g. broadcom or marvell
Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu are great. They spread non-Free firmware and drivers. Awesome. That's what I call leadership. What's this deal that Canonical is doing with Linspire, Microsoft, Dell and Novell?
Personally I like GNOME, but I'm no fan of Mono. Don't conflate Mono and GNOME please. I run GNOME with no Mono applications running on them. As soon as it becomes impossible to run GNOME without Mono (without loss of functionality) then I'll make the effort to retrain myself on KDE.
Well, sometimes a magazine is lighter and easier to carry around and higher resolution than a laptop. You can get a nice DVD of the latest Fedora/Debian/whatever plus some articles to read for about $10 (e.g. Linux Format), you can help pay for the journalism that goes into something like Linux Journal (which is excellent).
I think you're confusing multiple issues: 1) Ogg Vorbis is plenty high quality enough. I really doubt you'd be able to tell the difference between a Vorbis encoded show and the RealPlayer content.
2) There is no DRM that the BBC can put on anything which will stop it being copyable... it's a losing battle. So, they may as well just put it out in the most useful format for license payers. Or else stop pretending.
What percentage of BBC material is not (c)BBC, especially for BBC Radio 7? Everything that I've heard on there is BBC (c). Please provide specifics. Thanks.
Granted, this also puts a challenge to Canonical - STOP BREAKING DRIVERS!!! Every new release seems to have a spate of driver-compatibility regressions. I know this is due to the nature of upstream maintenance vs. distro maintenance, but it's time for them to step up to the plate and make it a non-issue.
Ubuntu/Canonical CAN'T do this unless they either stick with an old, static version of the kernel, or else they get hold of the source code for the drivers that break.... but guess what?... those drivers (especially for latest/greatest video cards and wireless) are CLOSED SOURCE. So Ubuntu is stuck unless they join in the effort to write our own drivers or else boycott proprietary hardware, but it looks like many Ubuntu users don't get this point.
I've heard that argument made, but I suspect that it does not apply to the vast amount of license-payer funded material written for, produced by, and broadcast on e.g. BBC Radio4 over the years. Add to this that once they've put the material out there in any form it's possible for anyone to capture it and redistribute it digitally should they wish. For example, in order to turn the RealPlayer formatted stuff from BBCRadio7 into OggVorbis so that I can listen to it when I need to (as opposed to when it's broadcast) I can
I'd be happier if I could obtain that show at any time that I wanted from the BBC archives, in a more compressed format instead of having to store it myself and go through the trouble of getting hold of it. Hell, I'd even be willing to pay a modest sum to listen to it any time I wanted. I hate having to store files of music and whatever else, worry about backing them up etc. That's the future of online "content": "always on, always accessible" warehousing for the convenience of the consumer.
I don't get the BBC at all. They make a lot of noise about how they can't release some material in some formats because it would create competition for private industry, but then they prop up the largest monopolist in software world. They also waste massively stupid amounts of bandwidth by broadcasting their archived material in e.g. RealPlayer format instead of something more compact like OggVorbis or even MP3 (take a listen to their BBC7 radio station), there's no need to broadcast that material in that high a quality. It makes it wasteful for most people to listen online and it creates exactly what they say they want to avoid: a very high quality digital copy that competes with commercial vendors (e.g. of books on CD).
CAcert also offers free, personal certificates based exclusively on WoT checking, and Class3 certificates for code-signing, it's similar to Thawte's model except for the free Class3 certificates.
The big hurdle seems to be that the Mozilla Foundation won't include the CAcert root certificate in the browser because CAcert doesn't pay them (unlike all the other root authorities).
You are suddenly changing the topic to the amount of code Ubuntu has contributed. I agree that other distros so far have created more substantial code, but we will see how this develops in the future:
Well, I'm not suddenly changing it. If you look up the thread here you'll see that what I'm worried about is that Ubuntu is gaining marketshare at the expense of the companies that actually fund the hackers that release GPL'ed software. That includes things like the nouveau project. Ubuntu has contributed precious little to this as far as I can see which is why I asked you to provide evidence of a concrete substantial contribution from Canonical to either funding developers in independent projects or else releasing your own code.
Ubuntu is scarcely 3 years old, and you just cannot compare it to RedHat and Debian. Even in its short lifetime it has contributed "metric shit-loads" of something the others ignored: polish.
The only thing that really counts is Free code. Without it there can be no polish. And I completely dispute your point that Mandriva or Fedora or Debian or FreeBSD or OpenSUSE are less "polished". In fact my point tests at the time of Ubuntu 6.10 showed no significant differences except that I preferred the rpm-based distros (probably out of experience and not any innate advantage).
I'd be perfectly happy though if Ubuntu were doing some polishing in a way that didn't negatively affect me.
Anyway, if we have 5 distros providing raw code and one providing polish that makes it actually nice to use, which the others can incorporate back, I don't see the big problem.
The problem is that Ubuntu is NOT educating people about the problem of binary-only proprietary drivers. It's doing the opposite, it's spreading confusion about the problem, and your own support forums are starting to show it. If you take a fair look at the whole thread and the responses to me from people that clearly say they don't care about free or open code you'll have to admit that they are a significant portion of the Ubuntu user base. Again, I wouldn't give a **** about that but for the problem that it eats market share and revenue from the other distros that actually release Free code.
If you are opposed then maybe you are less the Free software guy than you want to make us think.
I don't get it? Being in favour of Free software and releasing my code under GPLv2 means I'm not allowed to criticise people that push non-Free code? Guess I'd better go and look at the GPL again. As far as I'm concerned Free software is a quid-pro-quo, tit-for-tat. I put something into the pot, you put something into the pot and we both gain. What Ubuntu is doing is to put nothing in the pot and to set up a fancy table beside the pot and encourage others that put nothing in the pot to cluster around and gorge themselves on the free food.
You are deliberately ignoring stuff, like the new completely free Ubuntu flavor,
I'm ignoring it because it's irrelevant to the damage that Ubuntu/Canonical are doing by spreading non-Free software. We don't need another Free distro, there are loads all as good as gNewSense. What's needed is for Ubuntu to stop distributing proprietary, non-Free drivers.
the fact that Canonical is employing many developers that can now work fulltime and whose work also benefits Debian,
Again, I'm asking you for details of what these people have released because I don't know. I'm interested in what Ubuntu gives back. Bear in mind though that even if Ubuntu releases a reasonable amount of useful code (say on a par with the hated Novell/SuSE who employ some serious kernel hackers and maintainers of things like PAM and Evolution), it would still be causing damage.
and that you haven't been able to argue how nonfunction
Slashdot Mirror
Ibid is in fact not a journal. He is a prolific polymath who just happens to be a colleague of mine at a secret govt research facility (we've been kept alive using Atlantean gerontological medicine for 4 millenia). He has contributed widely to a surprising number of fields. Please do not spread unfounded rumours as fact and give correct attribution where it is due. Thank you.
It's also used, at least in Latin America, to refer to a percussion instrument: literally a large box which the player sits upon and strikes with their hands.
The insect problem won't just be disease. They like to eat a lot of the things mammals like to eat. We'd better be prepared to switch to a new diet of pesticides and insects.
There is a firmware blob: it contains stuff that the FCC says can't be open to users to modify easily. It's a way of getting around intrusive govt regulation. I would agree that just dumping your board would be a problem, but that's not what I'm suggesting. If you can afford to then you could sell it to a windows user (unlike you they have the advantage of support from Nvidia and ATI) and buy a new Intel based set up. No waste due to dumping and the power savings will reduce your carbon footprint. Or you can just ride out the present uncomfortable situation and then when Free drivers are released in a year or so you can use your hardware. Your call.
Pfah! More negativism. There's another positive benefit to increased temperatures: we'll have more insects for more of the year, and insects taste FUCKING AWESOME! It's a good thing too, because they're going to eat all the crops unless we spray a lot more chemicals on them, which would make them poisonous. So it's a win-win, positive opportunity.
I accept your point about your hardware being expensive ... but what I'm countering is the idea that there's no choice. You had a choice: buy older hardware with FOSS reverse-engineered drivers, or buy closed faster new hardware. And for someone considering buying new hardware there's a third option: Intel . Basically you're stuck without an option right now unless you can convince your hardware manufacturers to release FOSS drivers. Maybe it'll happen, but given the history of both ATI and Nvidia that looks like it'll be a while.
have not OSS their wifi drivers
I don't think that's true
Good point. I was being sloppy thinking about cards vs chips. However, for the price of some of the newer nvidia cards you could get one of the cheaper G965 Intel motherboards. Another $250 gets you a Core 2 Duo with virtualisation capability. I used to be an AMD partisan but Intel is really throwing down as far as Open/Free goes and their prices and power efficiency are excellent too.
At this stage, to buy anything except an Intel GMA X3000 is madness. Intel are delivering fully Free/Open solutions that are powerful enough for anyone except hard core gamers (and said games don't exist on Linux anyway) and CAD people.
They're also significantly cheaper and more power efficient than the stuff being put out by Nvidia and ATI.
I'm not going to directly disagree with you because I'm unsure how you'd define the above. What 3D tasks do you want the card to do? Because if all you want is basic 3D acceleration good enough for e.g. TuxRacer or Open Arenaand the fun desktop effects with Compiz/Beryl then Intel has very nicely provided complete Free/OpenSource drivers for most of their integrated components (*) including the GMA X3000 integrated graphics chips. The latter chips apparently do T&L shaders and other good stuff which is actually better supported under GNU/Linux than Windows Vista.
Of course, if what you're talking about is CAD or something really GPU intensive then you may be more out of luck, but I'm interested to know exactly what that is?
* Intel are also a great bet for wireless compared to e.g. broadcom or marvellWhat bibliography formatting service are you talking about?
And Adobe's Project Apollo and to some extent Sun's announcement of JavaFX are more the competitors in this area than MS.
Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu are great. They spread non-Free firmware and drivers. Awesome. That's what I call leadership. What's this deal that Canonical is doing with Linspire, Microsoft, Dell and Novell?
Order a free CD from Ubuntu and bin it.
Good point, he also doesn't seem to understand that CC type licenses actually use copyright in a socially responsible way.
Personally I like GNOME, but I'm no fan of Mono. Don't conflate Mono and GNOME please. I run GNOME with no Mono applications running on them. As soon as it becomes impossible to run GNOME without Mono (without loss of functionality) then I'll make the effort to retrain myself on KDE.
Well, sometimes a magazine is lighter and easier to carry around and higher resolution than a laptop. You can get a nice DVD of the latest Fedora/Debian/whatever plus some articles to read for about $10 (e.g. Linux Format), you can help pay for the journalism that goes into something like Linux Journal (which is excellent).
There's a place for dead tree still.
I think you're confusing multiple issues:
... it's a losing battle. So, they may as well just put it out in the most useful format for license payers. Or else stop pretending.
1) Ogg Vorbis is plenty high quality enough. I really doubt you'd be able to tell the difference between a Vorbis encoded show and the RealPlayer content.
2) There is no DRM that the BBC can put on anything which will stop it being copyable
What percentage of BBC material is not (c)BBC, especially for BBC Radio 7? Everything that I've heard on there is BBC (c). Please provide specifics. Thanks.
Ubuntu/Canonical CAN'T do this unless they either stick with an old, static version of the kernel, or else they get hold of the source code for the drivers that break.... but guess what? ... those drivers (especially for latest/greatest video cards and wireless) are CLOSED SOURCE. So Ubuntu is stuck unless they join in the effort to write our own drivers or else boycott proprietary hardware, but it looks like many Ubuntu users don't get this point.
I've heard that argument made, but I suspect that it does not apply to the vast amount of license-payer funded material written for, produced by, and broadcast on e.g. BBC Radio4 over the years. Add to this that once they've put the material out there in any form it's possible for anyone to capture it and redistribute it digitally should they wish. For example, in order to turn the RealPlayer formatted stuff from BBCRadio7 into OggVorbis so that I can listen to it when I need to (as opposed to when it's broadcast) I can
I'd be happier if I could obtain that show at any time that I wanted from the BBC archives, in a more compressed format instead of having to store it myself and go through the trouble of getting hold of it. Hell, I'd even be willing to pay a modest sum to listen to it any time I wanted. I hate having to store files of music and whatever else, worry about backing them up etc. That's the future of online "content": "always on, always accessible" warehousing for the convenience of the consumer.
I don't get the BBC at all. They make a lot of noise about how they can't release some material in some formats because it would create competition for private industry, but then they prop up the largest monopolist in software world. They also waste massively stupid amounts of bandwidth by broadcasting their archived material in e.g. RealPlayer format instead of something more compact like OggVorbis or even MP3 (take a listen to their BBC7 radio station), there's no need to broadcast that material in that high a quality. It makes it wasteful for most people to listen online and it creates exactly what they say they want to avoid: a very high quality digital copy that competes with commercial vendors (e.g. of books on CD).
I'm wrong. Thanks for the correction.
I'd agree with you completely, but that's where the objection comes from.
I don't really understand what the original poster meant by saying CACert is not open source.
Well this is the license, and it seems to not allow us to modify and redistribute the source.
Here's a link to the paperwork, and here's some info about it
CAcert also offers free, personal certificates based exclusively on WoT checking, and Class3 certificates for code-signing, it's similar to Thawte's model except for the free Class3 certificates.
The big hurdle seems to be that the Mozilla Foundation won't include the CAcert root certificate in the browser because CAcert doesn't pay them (unlike all the other root authorities).
You are suddenly changing the topic to the amount of code Ubuntu has contributed. I agree that other distros so far have created more substantial code, but we will see how this develops in the future:
Well, I'm not suddenly changing it. If you look up the thread here you'll see that what I'm worried about is that Ubuntu is gaining marketshare at the expense of the companies that actually fund the hackers that release GPL'ed software. That includes things like the nouveau project. Ubuntu has contributed precious little to this as far as I can see which is why I asked you to provide evidence of a concrete substantial contribution from Canonical to either funding developers in independent projects or else releasing your own code.
Ubuntu is scarcely 3 years old, and you just cannot compare it to RedHat and Debian. Even in its short lifetime it has contributed "metric shit-loads" of something the others ignored: polish.
The only thing that really counts is Free code. Without it there can be no polish. And I completely dispute your point that Mandriva or Fedora or Debian or FreeBSD or OpenSUSE are less "polished". In fact my point tests at the time of Ubuntu 6.10 showed no significant differences except that I preferred the rpm-based distros (probably out of experience and not any innate advantage).
I'd be perfectly happy though if Ubuntu were doing some polishing in a way that didn't negatively affect me.
Anyway, if we have 5 distros providing raw code and one providing polish that makes it actually nice to use, which the others can incorporate back, I don't see the big problem.
The problem is that Ubuntu is NOT educating people about the problem of binary-only proprietary drivers. It's doing the opposite, it's spreading confusion about the problem, and your own support forums are starting to show it. If you take a fair look at the whole thread and the responses to me from people that clearly say they don't care about free or open code you'll have to admit that they are a significant portion of the Ubuntu user base. Again, I wouldn't give a **** about that but for the problem that it eats market share and revenue from the other distros that actually release Free code.
If you are opposed then maybe you are less the Free software guy than you want to make us think.
I don't get it? Being in favour of Free software and releasing my code under GPLv2 means I'm not allowed to criticise people that push non-Free code? Guess I'd better go and look at the GPL again. As far as I'm concerned Free software is a quid-pro-quo, tit-for-tat. I put something into the pot, you put something into the pot and we both gain. What Ubuntu is doing is to put nothing in the pot and to set up a fancy table beside the pot and encourage others that put nothing in the pot to cluster around and gorge themselves on the free food.
You are deliberately ignoring stuff, like the new completely free Ubuntu flavor,
I'm ignoring it because it's irrelevant to the damage that Ubuntu/Canonical are doing by spreading non-Free software. We don't need another Free distro, there are loads all as good as gNewSense. What's needed is for Ubuntu to stop distributing proprietary, non-Free drivers.
the fact that Canonical is employing many developers that can now work fulltime and whose work also benefits Debian,
Again, I'm asking you for details of what these people have released because I don't know. I'm interested in what Ubuntu gives back. Bear in mind though that even if Ubuntu releases a reasonable amount of useful code (say on a par with the hated Novell/SuSE who employ some serious kernel hackers and maintainers of things like PAM and Evolution), it would still be causing damage.
and that you haven't been able to argue how nonfunction