Brazil voted no, and we are a curruption paradise:)
Actually there was a strong fight in ABNT (brazilian standards regulation group) as happens in the government. The brazilian agencies and federal govern always used windows in a large scale from desktop to servers, while universities used most Unix and Linux. Current federal govern supports Linux, but there is a big resistance in sectors that always used windows and often there are problems with licitations (govern auctions) imposing a specific type of software.
For example, you can auction for "Microsoft Office" or "a Office Suite". Most states already fobid the first option in law, but at federal level it's not forbidden, even that there is a recommendation to avoid this kind of situation. But even with laws, often happens situations where the auction is so specific that it could only have a winner, when police does some investigation finds that someone got a "deal" to make sure company X wins.
Recently in my state they found a guy stealing mail stamps! Millions of them. He bought and kept the money for him, because the legislative house had a deal with the mail company to send letters. When found he buried the stamps in his house garden. Can you belive it?
Just pathetic, not only watning to get money from a mark, but a simple mark as a cross in color.
If I was the vatican I would sue them for using a cross!
After that the prostetants and other christian religions who DARE to use cross as a simbol!
Then the romans would sue the catholics!:)
Not in Brazil.
There is a law that prevents "venda casada" (marriage sale). That means that when you sell a product, you can't force people to buy something else together or lock him in a way he can't seek alternative products.
Even justice departments accept alternative cartridges on their buying.
hat's how I started.
When compiling some open-source projects found bugs, fixed, sent the fix.
Later started to help out stratagus (named freecraft at the time) and improved my skills a bit.
Now I'm working on Stargus (starcraft support for stratagus on the weekends). It's very fun!
In brazilian law there are similar obligations. You just not only have to invent something, but also have a working implementation of it. Besides you can't just file methods or ideas, and that is actually the problem with american copyright law, there are too many things that can be patented no matter if you actually created it or not.
C'mon! XUL is the worse part of Mozilla/Firefox/Whathever!
It's bloated like hell (just run konqueror and opera and see how it compares to firefox), complicated to program.. and you want a entire desktop written with it?
Oh yes, what's next, a Java slowperating system?:)
There is a *very* simple error of logic at this comparssion: Microsoft dosen't sell computers, they do sell software! Want to compare numbers, it should be with Dell, Acer, HP and all PC manofacturers *together*.
Here in Brazil, that is the worldwide bigger ethanol producer, we have some problems with it, mostly due to the lack of strong legeslations and agencies. Basically each mid-season from sugar-cane, the producers press the government for better prices and if they don't get it, they sell to sugar plants.
This led to the ethanol cars basically vanishing from market, only ressurging now with bi-fuel cars. Also we add a large portion of ethanol on our fuel (20%~25%), this is a great help to down carbone emission on cars. This new wave of ethanol led the government to move at least, and now they are creating a market with small producers with contracts with Petrobrás, and also are using other sources for producing fuel, mostly in oil form, from beans and plants like mamona (sorry, don't know how it is writen in english).
This will create a more diverse market that will not have so much mid-season problems and will in the medium term lower the prices, that currently are almost the same as regular gasoline. So pay attention on the move to ethanol for not being hostage of the producers as happened here.
Here in Brazil is almost impossible to find a double layer DVD media for recording, and when found it's way to expensive (R$ 15,00 against R$ 2,00 for a single layer, or in U$: 6.50/0.85).
I don't know about Unidet States, but here in Brazil PC consume is showing a boom as it has never seen before.
Thanks to the "PC para todos" (PC for all) program that reduces taxes for some -very low and cheap- systems.
Basically people are buying cheap and small PCs with bank credit (you can pay in 12 times) and it comes with linux. Unhappilly more than 72% of those PCs end up with running windows, but here is the thing, those PCs can barely run windows XP (most of them just have 128 MB of ram), how can they hope to run windows? And the companies selling those PCs are mostly brazilian, big companies as HP and Dell just don't get it, they want to sell expensive hardware for a small group. This is just like the wall mart selling cheap PCs US.
Yes, for people with lots of money that can afford a PC with 1 GB of ram this is no problem, but the reality check is that in Brazil, Vista will need some years to take off for real people (not gamers, etc). So, why shold people care about it, really?
I'm not a kid, but R$ 3000 (1300 US dollars) for a new generacion is just too much for me. This is the value Microsoft is asking for Xbox 360 in Brazil, and PS3 probally will be much more expensive. AND I am a poor student;)
I know the importing/selling taxes are the guilty for this, but, damn, a PS2 is being sold for R$ 600 (260 U$), so I'm trying to get one for graduation gift! (Did I said I'm a poor student already?)
That's why the law here in Brazil says that you can't register, patent or have any rights over programming methods (as double linked lists, that I use a lot anyway).
Recentlly Bush administration, in coordination with their effort to combat piracy tryied to get brazilian government to adopt patents for software togheter with enforcing piracy combat, otherwise we would be in a black list and loss millions on tax reduction for products like orange juice (yeah, buying computers and selling juice is stupid, but we are starting to change, give us some time). They received a, yes, we will figh more piracy (and belive me, this is really happening), and a big NO about patents.
Why you ask? We can not be a rich country, but hell, we aren't stupid apes! Patents on software methos id just idiotic:)
Einstein face for news about quantum physics is very funny, because he didn't aceepted it's existance. You know the famous phrase: "god dosen't play dices":)
I hope they apply this study on Gmail. Using it on a non-broadband connection (plain 56k modem) is a pain unless you use the pure HTML view that is crap compared to other HTML webmails. The fun is that newer AJAX products from google (like goffice) don't suffer from this behavior, they have a much more cleaner code (just pick view code on your favorite browser and see). Probally Gmail HTML/Javascript is already showing it's age, and paying the price for being a first at google AJAX apps.
I've dist-upgrated from Ubuntu 5.10 to 6.06 and it was very good.
Now I've upgrated to 6.10 and I'm having a hell of problems:
Brazilian ABNT2 keyboard just dosen't work on KDE, needed to include export QT_IM_MODULE=simple on/etc/X11/Xsession. It's easy, AFTER 3 hours looking in phoruns and kubuntu bugzilla:-P
Firefox just keep crashing, after tests, I found the problem was the flash plugin Ubuntu ships
Brazilian ABNT2 keyboard is missing some important (as/) keys on console. This is a well know bug on Debian Unstable that was imported to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is a nice distro, but my feeling is that this time they rushed too much the release. They should had take more time to polish it, and include some bleeding edge things on it that where left out because of the schedule.
Can someone who is already using Edgy tell me if the upgrade is worthy?
I'm running a fairy updated Ubuntu with Kde 3.5.5 and Firefox 2.0. So basically the "new program version" reason isn't a plus for me.
Is upstart, new kernel and other stuff a good reason to upgrade, or keeping my stable as rock Dapper a good idea until a release with more changes is released?
The machine is in constant evolution, but some of them aren't very good, and I belive the machine is loosing it's safety guards. The original machine had a system read-only for the operating system, now it's stored on a SD card, still it's locked with a seal, and when election os over (by the way the election was yesterday and all results are already out) all machines are verified to see if there wasn't any violations.
It's possible yes, to compromise a voting machine, but doing the same for a dozen of them is really hard. The transmassion system is still hacker-proof, mostly because Brazil is very advanced at digical certification and have a good understanding of security in this area. This is the weak link on the chain, but still, after voting the regional and national data are matched often, so if you hack a transmission, it simply will appear, as will exist a difference in numbers.
All in all the system works pretty well, the operating system on the machine really dosen't matter much (even the I like it to be linux instead of winCE), and most contries around here in south america are already adopting it, I hope others with fraud problems (did I'd said USA?) will turn to at least learn some lessons Brazil already know.
If you just take the brazilian law, all ways of racism are a crime.
But as it's a case-by-case situation, and a judge have to study it, only in flagrant cases - for example, when being stopped by a policeman black saying that he's doing this because he is a dirty black pig, what is a crime in most countries anyway - or when involving planning actions against someone or a group - like for example "let's meet at sunday after the soccer game to hit all those yellow-bastards - are being taking in care.
But yes, justice is far from perfect in ANY country, and you have to keepo a eye open against abuses. You see, in USA government would loke to hit all those press guys telling bad stories about it, and they almost did take action against them for leaking information, luck of us that people started to see what they wanted to do with their "patriotic" act.
Just to make things a bit clear:
Most messages here are saying brazilian authorities are seeking data because of hate-pages. This isn't the true!
Living here in Brazil I can tell that the Public Ministery i(prossecutors) are looking against pages like scheduling meetings to hit or kill people during football (aka soccer) games, traffic using orkut to sell drugs, defending people who comits crimes - there was even a community for raising funds to free a drug dealer from prison with 1 million reais - child pornografy, fake profiles that hurts people's honror, etc. Hardly they are caring for anti-semitic or anti-black groups, if they don't contain things like "let's join and kill them", apology to crime is a crime around here. Basically people are using orkut to organize crime.
I'm a bit with both sides in this case. I belive google should cooperate with justice in Brazil to prevent people using orkut as a plataform for crime development, and for that they shold obey the brazilian laws, because it's about brazilian people (don't worry, they aren't asking for foreigns data). At same time public ministery is being too hard, they should know that because google is a american company the orders for data release should come from a federal judge, it's not google fault that justice here is very slow and asking for a federal judge help coul in meantime erase all the crime data or being too late for preventing it.
Also, what they are asking is that the orders should have to go to the brazilian representation of google instead of a lawyer google has designated as a representant, what is a bit of arrogant, because the law allows google to use a legal representant instead of the company working group in the country and google can answer to law in any way law allows it to do so.
Just some info from someone who is watching carefully the case because I'm studying Legislation for Informatic this semester in Computer Science, I hope it helps a bit:)
Plasma is the biggest vaporware open-source has ever producted. For now, it's just a vague idea, they didn't even created some conceitual images to guide from when star programming.
Don't take me wrong, I belive plasma will be great, I want to some presentations from Aaron Seigo and liked what he said... but I DOUBT it will launch with KDE4. Probally the interface will still (mostly) be the one used on KDE3. You know, we should learn from Microsoft mistakes, they ditched a lot of things (WinFS, most of interface, etc) from Vista because changing a lot of code at once isn't a good thing (TM).
There will be always be a 4.1 or 4.2 release where the new interface can be inserted.
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Brazil voted no, and we are a curruption paradise :)
Actually there was a strong fight in ABNT (brazilian standards regulation group) as happens in the government. The brazilian agencies and federal govern always used windows in a large scale from desktop to servers, while universities used most Unix and Linux. Current federal govern supports Linux, but there is a big resistance in sectors that always used windows and often there are problems with licitations (govern auctions) imposing a specific type of software.
For example, you can auction for "Microsoft Office" or "a Office Suite". Most states already fobid the first option in law, but at federal level it's not forbidden, even that there is a recommendation to avoid this kind of situation. But even with laws, often happens situations where the auction is so specific that it could only have a winner, when police does some investigation finds that someone got a "deal" to make sure company X wins.
Recently in my state they found a guy stealing mail stamps! Millions of them. He bought and kept the money for him, because the legislative house had a deal with the mail company to send letters. When found he buried the stamps in his house garden. Can you belive it?
Just pathetic, not only watning to get money from a mark, but a simple mark as a cross in color.
If I was the vatican I would sue them for using a cross!
After that the prostetants and other christian religions who DARE to use cross as a simbol!
Then the romans would sue the catholics!
Not in Brazil. There is a law that prevents "venda casada" (marriage sale). That means that when you sell a product, you can't force people to buy something else together or lock him in a way he can't seek alternative products. Even justice departments accept alternative cartridges on their buying.
Same here in Brazil. USA seems to be out of peace in some questions, as electronic voting and cellphones.
hat's how I started. When compiling some open-source projects found bugs, fixed, sent the fix. Later started to help out stratagus (named freecraft at the time) and improved my skills a bit. Now I'm working on Stargus (starcraft support for stratagus on the weekends). It's very fun!
In brazilian law there are similar obligations. You just not only have to invent something, but also have a working implementation of it.
Besides you can't just file methods or ideas, and that is actually the problem with american copyright law, there are too many things that can be patented no matter if you actually created it or not.
I tought: "where they still on beta?".
Stating "book review" on the title would just help out to figure what the post means!
It's bloated like hell (just run konqueror and opera and see how it compares to firefox), complicated to program.. and you want a entire desktop written with it?
Oh yes, what's next, a Java slowperating system? :)
There is a *very* simple error of logic at this comparssion: Microsoft dosen't sell computers, they do sell software!
Want to compare numbers, it should be with Dell, Acer, HP and all PC manofacturers *together*.
This led to the ethanol cars basically vanishing from market, only ressurging now with bi-fuel cars. Also we add a large portion of ethanol on our fuel (20%~25%), this is a great help to down carbone emission on cars. This new wave of ethanol led the government to move at least, and now they are creating a market with small producers with contracts with Petrobrás, and also are using other sources for producing fuel, mostly in oil form, from beans and plants like mamona (sorry, don't know how it is writen in english).
This will create a more diverse market that will not have so much mid-season problems and will in the medium term lower the prices, that currently are almost the same as regular gasoline. So pay attention on the move to ethanol for not being hostage of the producers as happened here.
So, who cares? It's news just for big players :-P
Basically people are buying cheap and small PCs with bank credit (you can pay in 12 times) and it comes with linux. Unhappilly more than 72% of those PCs end up with running windows, but here is the thing, those PCs can barely run windows XP (most of them just have 128 MB of ram), how can they hope to run windows? And the companies selling those PCs are mostly brazilian, big companies as HP and Dell just don't get it, they want to sell expensive hardware for a small group. This is just like the wall mart selling cheap PCs US.
Yes, for people with lots of money that can afford a PC with 1 GB of ram this is no problem, but the reality check is that in Brazil, Vista will need some years to take off for real people (not gamers, etc). So, why shold people care about it, really?
I know the importing/selling taxes are the guilty for this, but, damn, a PS2 is being sold for R$ 600 (260 U$), so I'm trying to get one for graduation gift! (Did I said I'm a poor student already?)
Recentlly Bush administration, in coordination with their effort to combat piracy tryied to get brazilian government to adopt patents for software togheter with enforcing piracy combat, otherwise we would be in a black list and loss millions on tax reduction for products like orange juice (yeah, buying computers and selling juice is stupid, but we are starting to change, give us some time). They received a, yes, we will figh more piracy (and belive me, this is really happening), and a big NO about patents.
Why you ask? We can not be a rich country, but hell, we aren't stupid apes! Patents on software methos id just idiotic
First the sensible robot, now mars rovers surviving, even without one wheel!
What a happy day for me, eheheh.
Einstein face for news about quantum physics is very funny, because he didn't aceepted it's existance. You know the famous phrase: "god dosen't play dices" :)
I hope they apply this study on Gmail. Using it on a non-broadband connection (plain 56k modem) is a pain unless you use the pure HTML view that is crap compared to other HTML webmails.
The fun is that newer AJAX products from google (like goffice) don't suffer from this behavior, they have a much more cleaner code (just pick view code on your favorite browser and see). Probally Gmail HTML/Javascript is already showing it's age, and paying the price for being a first at google AJAX apps.
Now I've upgrated to 6.10 and I'm having a hell of problems:
Ubuntu is a nice distro, but my feeling is that this time they rushed too much the release. They should had take more time to polish it, and include some bleeding edge things on it that where left out because of the schedule.
I'm running a fairy updated Ubuntu with Kde 3.5.5 and Firefox 2.0. So basically the "new program version" reason isn't a plus for me.
Is upstart, new kernel and other stuff a good reason to upgrade, or keeping my stable as rock Dapper a good idea until a release with more changes is released?
Thanks in advance for the answers.
I'm curious to listen what Sony have to say about countries not served importing units.
You know, they never released any playstation here in Brazil.
The machine is in constant evolution, but some of them aren't very good, and I belive the machine is loosing it's safety guards. The original machine had a system read-only for the operating system, now it's stored on a SD card, still it's locked with a seal, and when election os over (by the way the election was yesterday and all results are already out) all machines are verified to see if there wasn't any violations.
It's possible yes, to compromise a voting machine, but doing the same for a dozen of them is really hard. The transmassion system is still hacker-proof, mostly because Brazil is very advanced at digical certification and have a good understanding of security in this area. This is the weak link on the chain, but still, after voting the regional and national data are matched often, so if you hack a transmission, it simply will appear, as will exist a difference in numbers.
All in all the system works pretty well, the operating system on the machine really dosen't matter much (even the I like it to be linux instead of winCE), and most contries around here in south america are already adopting it, I hope others with fraud problems (did I'd said USA?) will turn to at least learn some lessons Brazil already know.
But as it's a case-by-case situation, and a judge have to study it, only in flagrant cases - for example, when being stopped by a policeman black saying that he's doing this because he is a dirty black pig, what is a crime in most countries anyway - or when involving planning actions against someone or a group - like for example "let's meet at sunday after the soccer game to hit all those yellow-bastards - are being taking in care.
But yes, justice is far from perfect in ANY country, and you have to keepo a eye open against abuses. You see, in USA government would loke to hit all those press guys telling bad stories about it, and they almost did take action against them for leaking information, luck of us that people started to see what they wanted to do with their "patriotic" act.
So that6's why you are a anonymous coward!!
Most messages here are saying brazilian authorities are seeking data because of hate-pages. This isn't the true!
Living here in Brazil I can tell that the Public Ministery i(prossecutors) are looking against pages like scheduling meetings to hit or kill people during football (aka soccer) games, traffic using orkut to sell drugs, defending people who comits crimes - there was even a community for raising funds to free a drug dealer from prison with 1 million reais - child pornografy, fake profiles that hurts people's honror, etc. Hardly they are caring for anti-semitic or anti-black groups, if they don't contain things like "let's join and kill them", apology to crime is a crime around here. Basically people are using orkut to organize crime.
I'm a bit with both sides in this case. I belive google should cooperate with justice in Brazil to prevent people using orkut as a plataform for crime development, and for that they shold obey the brazilian laws, because it's about brazilian people (don't worry, they aren't asking for foreigns data). At same time public ministery is being too hard, they should know that because google is a american company the orders for data release should come from a federal judge, it's not google fault that justice here is very slow and asking for a federal judge help coul in meantime erase all the crime data or being too late for preventing it.
Also, what they are asking is that the orders should have to go to the brazilian representation of google instead of a lawyer google has designated as a representant, what is a bit of arrogant, because the law allows google to use a legal representant instead of the company working group in the country and google can answer to law in any way law allows it to do so.
Just some info from someone who is watching carefully the case because I'm studying Legislation for Informatic this semester in Computer Science, I hope it helps a bit :)
Don't take me wrong, I belive plasma will be great, I want to some presentations from Aaron Seigo and liked what he said... but I DOUBT it will launch with KDE4. Probally the interface will still (mostly) be the one used on KDE3. You know, we should learn from Microsoft mistakes, they ditched a lot of things (WinFS, most of interface, etc) from Vista because changing a lot of code at once isn't a good thing (TM).
There will be always be a 4.1 or 4.2 release where the new interface can be inserted.