Gimp is getting some good competition from Krita now. The image editing application that is part of Calligra Suite with a focus on painting is very active with many releases. It has CMYK support, tons of filters and brushes and an active community of artists. And there is a tablet version called Krita Sketch.
No, I'm not being paid. I work on a similar project: WebODF. I wrote the post so someone (thank you) would ask me what is in it for me and I could plug this project.
Seriously: my experience is that PDF.js works acceptably for most PDFs I threw at it. That included large PDFs with designer layout and scientific papers. Granted, poppler (okular, evince) is still way faster in rendering, but I enjoy PDF.js because it is good enough and I know the work it took to make it and can see the improvements they are making still. Trying to write a desktop type application in the browser makes one appreciate a good one like PDF.js.
The PDF viewer in Firefox, PDF.js is an amazing piece of software. It is written entirely in JavaScript and runs in the same sandbox in which a webpage runs. So it is very safe. The layout accuracy and speed of PDF.js are simply amazing. Text selection happens just like it does in the browser. Some PDF viewers only allow you to draw a rectangle on which to do OCR. PDF.js simply lets you select the glyphs.
The difference is that you are in a child-like hypothetical that lacks any of the real issues involved in free software. On the contrary, I was asking about what type of software provides most freedom: software that I can control completely, but which does not exactly do what I want it to do (yet) or software that I cannot control completely but which I can reasonably assume performs the task that I want it to perform quickly and cheaply.
You also make a bunch of assumptions that show you don't know anything about free software, why it even exists, much less, what makes it free. I program Free Software for a living and I use mostly Free Software and have done so for more than ten years.
For example, you suppose that people who use Free Software don't have any software to choose from, and that they will have to write it yourself. I do not assume this. I do assume that often it is necessary to adapt the Free Software to make it work according to my wishes. If there really is this glut of software and no need to write any more then all computer programmers would be out of a job. Yet, there is still demand for more and better software, both free and un-free.
In a market for closed software, a developer can anticipate a demand, write software for it and distribute the development costs across many customers. In FOSS, this is very hard. One customer can not achieve some useful improvement to an application for the price that is normally paid for an un-free application. One can group funds and then order software from a developer, but this will yield a very different quality of software and it will create it only after a delay. In the un-free market, an entrepreneur has anticipated my demand, loaned money to implement it and tries to make a profit by selling the software after creating it.
An argument that RMS will likely use, is that if you use proprietary software, you are helping to keep the majority of software proprietary, while if you use and advocate Free Software, you will help in improving it, which leads to a better medium-term situation.
The same argument can be used for situations where a vendor benefits from the network effect to keep people locked into their service. These arguments can be made for using the metric system in the USA or for resisting the Mafia in Sicily; in many cases it is hard to get everyone to behave in a way that leads to optimal situation.
I use a proxy that I wrote myself to surf the web. Its purpose is similar to the Firefox add-on RequestPolicy: to selectively block requests to website B that originate from a visit to website A. An example is the loading of content from google-analytics or scorecardresearch.com.
This proxy is written in Javascript and runs on Node.JS. I have not put it online and not plan to share it soon. Nevertheless, a similar script could be used to cache your web site visits and index their content.
When using Free Software, a lot of time is spent in trying to find the right software or in writing it. The software store model, where controlled devices offer cheap software, allows the market place for software to work efficiently. Programmers have an incentive to write good software because there is a lot of competition. With a market like that, when you choose to use closed software, you often get functionality faster.
A simple definition of freedom might be: being able to do what you want to do. If I need to write software to do what I want to do, that could be considered to be less free than when I have the ability to use a closed product that does what I want instantly.
Talking about freedom in this way, is quite different from the way the Free Software movement looks at it. In Free Software, freedom is linked to more control. In closed software the emphasis is on more convenience and more spare time. Do see the balance between control and convenience as black and white?
He explains it right there. We live in an abundance of webpages. I think this workflow might actually work fine once you have a good archive of reference materials local and properly indexed.
The web is not just a source of information, it's also a source of distraction. By building in a latency, one can be more productive. Stallman is not the only one that does this.
In addition, by limiting himself to fewer types of communication channel instead of a complex mix of twitter, facebook, irc, mail, telephone, web, voip, text and more, he needs less brain cycles to deal with the different formats.
Redhat with Fedora is a good model. The codebases are quite different. Fedora takes the community input: code and questions for free support. Redhat takes the large support contracts with more mature codebase.
Then let them enter the company address or the account number before speaking to a human. If they cannot provide this data, they are connected to an operator that does no technical support whatsoever and only tries to resolve the contract status of the caller.
How do you currently know if a caller has a support contract?
Tim Berners-Lee promotes the idea of linked data everywhere. Wikipedia is on board with wikidata. The Nokia N9 features a triple store, the same one that is used in Gnome. KDE implements Nepomuk. The UK is linking all legislature with RDF.
Ubuntu could make a large contribution by making the data graph of the user and of the distribution visible and searchable. Do you see a future for the semantic web and will you participate in it?
There should not be any installers. A software package should be one file that is download and run. The file should not be unpacked, it should simple be one executable with all necessary parts inside.
Any software that is not simple a single file is complex and brittle.
Is dressing childeren in a particular clothing that is offensive to some immoral? Is it immoral to teach them religion or a specific (minority) first language? Should children be given boys or girls toys or no toys at all? Must you learn a child to play the piano when it is five? Or is reading and writing more important? Is it immortal to make you child immortal? May you kill to feed your child? And if so, only plants or also animals and perhaps other humans?
Parents in modern society have responsibility for the welbeing of their childeren. The welbeing is defined very broadly. Malnourishment and violence is not allowed, but smoking while pregnant or refusing vaccination is permitted. Children are designed or at least formed by their environment. The genetic makeup (genotype) is just one aspect of the outcome (fenotype). Today parent have the ability to steer the genotype more than ever and many will use this ability, be it to steer the sex, the skin color or simply to avoid hereditary diseases.
This is a very interesting development and I'm eagerly awaiting the spectacle. We have plenty of humans and a large portion will eagerly make use of the new possibilities. The companies that provide these services will need to improve their marketing though.
e-paper is nice way of reading. The only reason why i do not own an e-reader is that the time to go from page to page is too long. With these improved speeds (12 fps or 80ms) this last drawback is being solved. That is very good news. Playing video well on these screens will take longer, but already the speed improvement will really help selling e-readers.
You can use identica or tweeter for seeding and logging. Get the most recent message of a public source and use that to prove that there was no prerecording. While recording, push a hash to a public server regularly. To the readers, these hashes will be unintelligible and when you publish them at regular intervals regardless of what you are doing, you are not even letting know that you are currently actively awake.
Here's some irrational hate for you based on my use of a Lumia 800 Nokia gave me for free. 1) i cannot write software for it without a license to develop, because the phone is locked down 2) once i write something for it, it cannot share that code with my friends even if they also had a windows phone, because the phone is locked down 3) the phone cannot work as a usb drive, it is locked down and can only sync data via closed protocols or closed applications 4) the battery drains very quickly, this is just a problem for this model 5) there is no decent browser on the phone, it has internet explorer that does not handle many of the basic things a browser should do like implement createElementNS() 6) i cannot write c++ code for this phone, this phone need C#, or javascript or maybe some other CIL based programming language 7) this phone is product of a company with a very bad track record which uses the profits of its other monopolies to bully itself into this market 8) because windows phones are so locked down, like apple devices are, they are the bringing about the end of digital freedoms for consumers 9) the phone is riddles with licence agreement and dialogs that want you to give away all your data. for example, the first time you run Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, it will ask you: "Do you want to share you browser history with Microsoft so we can [...]? {YES) (CANCEL)." The use of 'CANCEL" implies that IE wont start, thus bullying people into clicking YES.
As a Free Software and more generally digital freedoms advocate, many of the problems I have with windows phone, I also have with iOS, which is shiny and has a nice UI but also a horrible lock in model and many features that cannot be modified.
I have been using a Nokia E75, a N900 and an N950 as phones and they are all pretty nice, but not perfect, but neither are any of the closed alternatives. For any future phone I might buy, I will go with openness primarily. That means the phone should be able to run an open version of Android, Mer, maybe Tizen or the Mozilla phone operating system.
Is there anything positive about Windows Phone? Not really. It is not that much different or better than the alternatives. It has a home screen, you can put widgets on it, it has an app store. Nothing revolutionary there.
There is a lot of modelling you can do on water levels that uses rainfall, erosion, climate models. This modelling is not just useful for academics, but also useful for governments that want to improve their water management.
You could go and model the decline of rain forests. There are many agencies that keep track of this. These are not acadamic jobs either.
And of course you could go into modelling the climate or dynamics of ecosystems (how do amounts of organisms change in time).
All of these topics are very challenging and very relevant for society.
The Vaadin demo applications all require cookies to work. That is unfortunate for the user. With stricter cookie regulations in many countries, it means your site is at a disadvantage if it uses cookies.
Zu Guttenberg is now adviser to the European Commission on the digital agenda. This shows that his political carreer is far from over. He is now very close to the most powerful people in europe.
Slashdot Mirror
Gimp is getting some good competition from Krita now. The image editing application that is part of Calligra Suite with a focus on painting is very active with many releases. It has CMYK support, tons of filters and brushes and an active community of artists. And there is a tablet version called Krita Sketch.
MuseScore Player
Partly closed but based on MuseScore from the same people.
EbookDroid Nice PDF reader.
A gaymer is a camper in the closet.
No, I'm not being paid. I work on a similar project: WebODF. I wrote the post so someone (thank you) would ask me what is in it for me and I could plug this project.
Seriously: my experience is that PDF.js works acceptably for most PDFs I threw at it. That included large PDFs with designer layout and scientific papers. Granted, poppler (okular, evince) is still way faster in rendering, but I enjoy PDF.js because it is good enough and I know the work it took to make it and can see the improvements they are making still. Trying to write a desktop type application in the browser makes one appreciate a good one like PDF.js.
The PDF viewer in Firefox, PDF.js is an amazing piece of software. It is written entirely in JavaScript and runs in the same sandbox in which a webpage runs. So it is very safe. The layout accuracy and speed of PDF.js are simply amazing. Text selection happens just like it does in the browser. Some PDF viewers only allow you to draw a rectangle on which to do OCR. PDF.js simply lets you select the glyphs.
This viewer has been available as an add-on for a while already.
The difference is that you are in a child-like hypothetical that lacks any of the real issues involved in free software.
On the contrary, I was asking about what type of software provides most freedom: software that I can control completely, but which does not exactly do what I want it to do (yet) or software that I cannot control completely but which I can reasonably assume performs the task that I want it to perform quickly and cheaply.
You also make a bunch of assumptions that show you don't know anything about free software, why it even exists, much less, what makes it free.
I program Free Software for a living and I use mostly Free Software and have done so for more than ten years.
For example, you suppose that people who use Free Software don't have any software to choose from, and that they will have to write it yourself.
I do not assume this. I do assume that often it is necessary to adapt the Free Software to make it work according to my wishes. If there really is this glut of software and no need to write any more then all computer programmers would be out of a job. Yet, there is still demand for more and better software, both free and un-free.
In a market for closed software, a developer can anticipate a demand, write software for it and distribute the development costs across many customers. In FOSS, this is very hard. One customer can not achieve some useful improvement to an application for the price that is normally paid for an un-free application. One can group funds and then order software from a developer, but this will yield a very different quality of software and it will create it only after a delay. In the un-free market, an entrepreneur has anticipated my demand, loaned money to implement it and tries to make a profit by selling the software after creating it.
In a comment on this topic I asked a similar question.
An argument that RMS will likely use, is that if you use proprietary software, you are helping to keep the majority of software proprietary, while if you use and advocate Free Software, you will help in improving it, which leads to a better medium-term situation.
The same argument can be used for situations where a vendor benefits from the network effect to keep people locked into their service. These arguments can be made for using the metric system in the USA or for resisting the Mafia in Sicily; in many cases it is hard to get everyone to behave in a way that leads to optimal situation.
I use a proxy that I wrote myself to surf the web. Its purpose is similar to the Firefox add-on RequestPolicy: to selectively block requests to website B that originate from a visit to website A. An example is the loading of content from google-analytics or scorecardresearch.com.
This proxy is written in Javascript and runs on Node.JS. I have not put it online and not plan to share it soon. Nevertheless, a similar script could be used to cache your web site visits and index their content.
Here is a slightly philosophical question.
When using Free Software, a lot of time is spent in trying to find the right software or in writing it. The software store model, where controlled devices offer cheap software, allows the market place for software to work efficiently. Programmers have an incentive to write good software because there is a lot of competition. With a market like that, when you choose to use closed software, you often get functionality faster.
A simple definition of freedom might be: being able to do what you want to do. If I need to write software to do what I want to do, that could be considered to be less free than when I have the ability to use a closed product that does what I want instantly.
Talking about freedom in this way, is quite different from the way the Free Software movement looks at it. In Free Software, freedom is linked to more control. In closed software the emphasis is on more convenience and more spare time. Do see the balance between control and convenience as black and white?
He explains it right there. We live in an abundance of webpages. I think this workflow might actually work fine once you have a good archive of reference materials local and properly indexed.
The web is not just a source of information, it's also a source of distraction. By building in a latency, one can be more productive. Stallman is not the only one that does this.
In addition, by limiting himself to fewer types of communication channel instead of a complex mix of twitter, facebook, irc, mail, telephone, web, voip, text and more, he needs less brain cycles to deal with the different formats.
Or if you want to combine Java, JavaScript, and a few other scripting languages in a Node-like server, use Vert.x.
Redhat with Fedora is a good model. The codebases are quite different. Fedora takes the community input: code and questions for free support. Redhat takes the large support contracts with more mature codebase.
Then let them enter the company address or the account number before speaking to a human. If they cannot provide this data, they are connected to an operator that does no technical support whatsoever and only tries to resolve the contract status of the caller.
How do you currently know if a caller has a support contract?
Tim Berners-Lee promotes the idea of linked data everywhere. Wikipedia is on board with wikidata. The Nokia N9 features a triple store, the same one that is used in Gnome. KDE implements Nepomuk. The UK is linking all legislature with RDF.
Ubuntu could make a large contribution by making the data graph of the user and of the distribution visible and searchable. Do you see a future for the semantic web and will you participate in it?
There should not be any installers. A software package should be one file that is download and run. The file should not be unpacked, it should simple be one executable with all necessary parts inside.
Any software that is not simple a single file is complex and brittle.
#2 is not Linus. I guess CmdrTaco prefers the author of Harry Potter over Linus.
Is dressing childeren in a particular clothing that is offensive to some immoral? Is it immoral to teach them religion or a specific (minority) first language? Should children be given boys or girls toys or no toys at all? Must you learn a child to play the piano when it is five? Or is reading and writing more important? Is it immortal to make you child immortal? May you kill to feed your child? And if so, only plants or also animals and perhaps other humans?
Parents in modern society have responsibility for the welbeing of their childeren. The welbeing is defined very broadly. Malnourishment and violence is not allowed, but smoking while pregnant or refusing vaccination is permitted. Children are designed or at least formed by their environment. The genetic makeup (genotype) is just one aspect of the outcome (fenotype). Today parent have the ability to steer the genotype more than ever and many will use this ability, be it to steer the sex, the skin color or simply to avoid hereditary diseases.
This is a very interesting development and I'm eagerly awaiting the spectacle. We have plenty of humans and a large portion will eagerly make use of the new possibilities. The companies that provide these services will need to improve their marketing though.
Case in point: terminator in movies vs in reality.
Movies require action and emotions. This makes them very bad for predicting the future.
I wonder if this application will be open sourced. A high profile person like Romney could get many young people interested in programming.
e-paper is nice way of reading. The only reason why i do not own an e-reader is that the time to go from page to page is too long. With these improved speeds (12 fps or 80ms) this last drawback is being solved. That is very good news. Playing video well on these screens will take longer, but already the speed improvement will really help selling e-readers.
You can use identica or tweeter for seeding and logging. Get the most recent message of a public source and use that to prove that there was no prerecording. While recording, push a hash to a public server regularly. To the readers, these hashes will be unintelligible and when you publish them at regular intervals regardless of what you are doing, you are not even letting know that you are currently actively awake.
Here's some irrational hate for you based on my use of a Lumia 800 Nokia gave me for free.
1) i cannot write software for it without a license to develop, because the phone is locked down
2) once i write something for it, it cannot share that code with my friends even if they also had a windows phone, because the phone is locked down
3) the phone cannot work as a usb drive, it is locked down and can only sync data via closed protocols or closed applications
4) the battery drains very quickly, this is just a problem for this model
5) there is no decent browser on the phone, it has internet explorer that does not handle many of the basic things a browser should do like implement createElementNS()
6) i cannot write c++ code for this phone, this phone need C#, or javascript or maybe some other CIL based programming language
7) this phone is product of a company with a very bad track record which uses the profits of its other monopolies to bully itself into this market
8) because windows phones are so locked down, like apple devices are, they are the bringing about the end of digital freedoms for consumers
9) the phone is riddles with licence agreement and dialogs that want you to give away all your data. for example, the first time you run Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, it will ask you: "Do you want to share you browser history with Microsoft so we can [...]? {YES) (CANCEL)." The use of 'CANCEL" implies that IE wont start, thus bullying people into clicking YES.
As a Free Software and more generally digital freedoms advocate, many of the problems I have with windows phone, I also have with iOS, which is shiny and has a nice UI but also a horrible lock in model and many features that cannot be modified.
I have been using a Nokia E75, a N900 and an N950 as phones and they are all pretty nice, but not perfect, but neither are any of the closed alternatives. For any future phone I might buy, I will go with openness primarily. That means the phone should be able to run an open version of Android, Mer, maybe Tizen or the Mozilla phone operating system.
Is there anything positive about Windows Phone? Not really. It is not that much different or better than the alternatives. It has a home screen, you can put widgets on it, it has an app store. Nothing revolutionary there.
There is a lot of modelling you can do on water levels that uses rainfall, erosion, climate models. This modelling is not just useful for academics, but also useful for governments that want to improve their water management.
You could go and model the decline of rain forests. There are many agencies that keep track of this. These are not acadamic jobs either.
And of course you could go into modelling the climate or dynamics of ecosystems (how do amounts of organisms change in time).
All of these topics are very challenging and very relevant for society.
The Vaadin demo applications all require cookies to work. That is unfortunate for the user. With stricter cookie regulations in many countries, it means your site is at a disadvantage if it uses cookies.
Zu Guttenberg is now adviser to the European Commission on the digital agenda. This shows that his political carreer is far from over. He is now very close to the most powerful people in europe.
http://blogs.ft.com/brusselsblog/2011/12/zu-guttenbergs-brussels-political-comeback/