Not the distro, per se, but the concept. I am as ardent a supporter of the Free Software cause as anyone, and Debian most closely represents my views as a proponent of Free Software. By not including any software which does not conform to the terms of the GPL, Debian has taken a firm stand against the encroachment of closed source software into their distribution.
While I run Windows at work and home, I also find Linux to be incredibly interesting as an experiment in Free Software, and Debian is at the fore of the movement.
What dismays me sometimes with Debian is that it is perceived as being behind the curve with regard to the state of the art. However, as can be seen by this latest inclusion of XFree86 Debian proves again that it is ready and able to lead the Linux horde flying the flag of Freedom high upon its shoulders. Though Debian takes a while to include the latest software releases in the distro, you know when the release is finally made that you have not only a distro that is up to date and on the cutting edge of Free Software but also that the distro itself adheres strongly to the concept of Free Software. Though many people will mock such a stance, seeking to include "useful" programs regardless of their software Freedom, for those of us who care about such things Debian is invaluable.
It is obvious what it is designed for and easy to use.
The TiVo folks really did a great job in the design of the remote, however I would have liked it a little smaller. It's kind of like the phasers in Star Trek TNG which went from being gun-like to being tamagotchi-like to the final TV remote shape. If TiVo could fit all that functionality into a tamagotchi sized remote, I would be the first one at the store to buy.
When someone starts spouting off about production, distribution, and culture and associates those with political goals, one of those little sirens starts going off.
Free Software is an incredibly awesome idea. It's too bad that its biggest proponents (ESR notwithstanding) speak the doublespeak of communism.
This is probably the least important thing the EFF could be doing with donation money. Scratch that. The silly Flash cartoon game that shows users how to fileswap without breaking copyright law is the least important. But this is the least important fight they needed to take up.
I also find this indicative of the types of cases that the EFF takes up. If you look over the cases that they've litigated over the past several years, all the cases are essentially prima facie decideable on the side that the EFF takes up. They never fight the fight on the side that looks to lose. There are hundreds of people getting squeezed by the RIAA for filesharing and the EFF all of a sudden has short arms to match their deep pockets.
I wish I could believe that the EFF was fighting for electronic rights, but they are nothing more than tag-a-long lawyers ready to jump into a winning battle than dedicated visionaries ready to fight the good fight.
I don't know anything about the project, but from the information on the website it seems that it is an extension of SGI's source code. How did the author get the source code in the first place to extend? Why would he expect, other than verbal assurances from sources inside SGI, that he would be licensed to release the code.
Likewise, if he intends to release the code under the GPL, he is essentially forcing SGI to release their code under GPL because he would not be able to relicense the code otherwise.
But can someone explain what this project is all about? There is a myriad of things that seem to be going on, but it is hard to nail down what the project in its entirety is about.
I mentioned that the level of technical depth required for this QA group is much shallower than my original QA group. This is a result of the project completion schedules. The projects which I work on now are on the order of 3 months at a maximum and I've been on some projects that have lasted no more than a week. It would be impossible to do much more than run already existing tests which take several days in and of themselves. Compound this with the fact that several projects are running at once, so QA is running tests on a variety of projects all the time. There simply isn't time to write new tests or do much more than finetune existing tests. I was lucky that I got a chance in Japan to spend a significant amount of time developing tests as well as fixing existing tests while the QA engineers already on the team ran the tests.
My original QA team, in contrast, had projects lasting years. These were product-related, so the QA effort was much more important as we were the last line of defense before the product hit the shelves. We started from nothing and built our test environments from there.
Both teams had technically excellent people, the home company never hired anyone who couldn't pass a technical interview. The ones that I know that remain feel quite underused and that their skills are slowly diminishing, but all of them have BSCS at a minimum. I'm glad to have worked with them, as they have been my support while I have been in Japan.
I am about to face unemployment starting next Monday and have something similar on my resume.
I had 2 years of QA experience with increasingly technical and detailed responsibilities followed by a move into development for a year, then I transferred to the Japanese office to provide technical assistance here. I was placed in the QA department and essentially became the technical backbone of a technically inept QA group. As QA is very low priority in Japan, these groups are typically staffed with people who may not have any technical experience. Also, the QA procedural requirements in this group (company-wide) is not as technically deep as the QA group in which I performed the first two years of my employment.
As the years passed, I eventually moved into the role of QA manager, but QA manager is still considered to be far below the rank of even a beginning junior developer. This means that in my future job search, I have to prove that not only am I not technically stymied by my QA label, nor am I to be pigeonholed into a QA management role. I am interested in moving back into development or even an FAE-type role interfacing with customers.
I'm doing what I can, passing the Level-2 Japanese Language Proficiency Test and brushing up on my assembly programming, not to mention setting up a heterogeneous wireless 802.11g network consisting of a Win2000, Linux, and FreeBSD machines.
In interviews I try to highlight these technical things. But I also try to start out the interview by asking the interviewers what they are looking for and write down those points. I then repeat those requirements back to them with a description of my experience that is appropriate to the requirement.
Over on Fark there is a debate going on about parental discipline vs. child abuse. The running theme is that parents who are consistent and firm with their children turn out well-adjusted kids whereas parents who are inconsistent and abusive turn out some really fucked up gems.
It seems to me that a parent who would take the time and effort to fall in the first category would also be the kind of parent who spent 5 seconds looking at the video game and deciding whether the kid should be allowed to play it or not.
OTOH, parents who do not put that time and effort in to raising their kids would be the type to just shell out 40 dollars to shut the kid up for a week.
It's no wonder that kids who play these violent and sexually explicit games turn into the freaks they are. It isn't the games, it's the parents.
Thanks to the tireless people at Groklaw for doing this, and thanks to SCO for finally telling us what they are on about.
Is the code SCO's? Yeah, probably.
The question is whether or not they ever gave explicit or implicit go ahead to release the code under GPL. They can probably claim that the license to which IBM agreed may have been generous but at the time of drafting it could not be foreseen that IBM would put the code effectually in the public domain. Such a move would essentially neuter SCO's copyright, something to which they could never have accepted nor meant as a licensing condition.
My guess is that the 2.4 kernel will probably be done away with altogether unless some enterprising coder took it upon himself to rewrite all those portions. 2.6 is out now without those infringements, so I expect that most people will simply migrate towards that instead of using the older 2.4 kernel.
Heh, this may even give Debian some incentive to bring themselves up to date with the rest of the Linux community.
Yes, the RIAA is out of control and really should stop to think about what they are doing to their reputation by suing all these people. That is a given.
However, they are well within their rights to be doing what they are doing. It is the music traders who decided that copyright did not apply to them who took the first step in breaking the law, and it is they who ultimately hold responsibility for their actions.
I remember back when the RIAA started out shutting down P2P sites like Napster that people were screaming about how Napster wasn't at fault, it was the individual members of the file sharing community who were responsible for violating copyrights. The thought went, "if the RIAA wants to sue anyone it should be those users individually, and it would be unfeasible for the RIAA to do such a thing because how much could they really gain by suing kids in their basements? Happy days!" Well, now the RIAA is doing exactly that. It's kind of ironic how those users who thought they could hide in anonymity behind the crowds of file sharers are now finding that there is no hiding because the RIAA is just going to catch everyone with a wide net.
I don't think the RIAA is going about this the right way, but I can't see how they are overstepping their legal bounds.
Rambus, long an innovator in memory designs has been virtually sued to death by JEDEC members over their IP rights to the RDRAM designs. With this ruling finally telling those JEDEC members to pay up the licensing fees to the Bus, Rambus now stands to gain a better foothold in the memory design space. More money should allow them more room to invent and innovate further, pushing the limits of memory speed past all bounds.
But! Now we have a new design by Intel which seeks to dethrone the Rambus design as speed king. I don't know too much about the new design, but it is exciting to finally see someone come up with a design that isn't a cheap kludge on top of slow SDRAM. Hopefully this extra competition will allow the entire memory market not only more room to grow but also bring prices down for high end memory like RDRAM and the new Intel DRAM.
I'm sure that having a second monitor to provide extra game info is probably way cool, especially with games like flight sims and driving sims. But how many people really have two monitors?
My desk is not that big and because I care about resolution and sharpness I run a large 19" CRT. There simply isn't room on the desk for a second CRT.
Not to mention that extra monitors are quite pricey. I love games and gaming, but I can't see myself forking over several hundred dollars for the purpose of playing a game. At least if I were a graphic designer I could make money with the second screen, but gaming is only a money pit.
No second screen for me, I guess, no matter how cool it would be.:-(
If the Mars rover is wont to go off on its own accord to discover and analyze things instead of following the directions given to it by mission control, could this possibly have disastrous side effects?
What if there were an impending rock-slide and instead of maneuvering out of the way as mission control told it to, it decided to look at the shiny rocks instead and got crushed in the process?
A little 'intelligence' is important for these things to figure out how to move around correctly, but artificial 'curiosity' seems to be problematic.
One other aspect of growing up, besides losing interest in childish things, is moving out on your own. Preferably somewhere where your mom won't be able to give you sage advice so easily.
I remember when I first heard that movies are filmed at a very slow 24fps. Compared to tv which changes the display at 60fps, the 24fps is very slow. However it is a result of the high resolution as well as the movement of the actors (as opposed to multiple still-lifes) which makes the movie indistinguishable from normal movement.
Now take digital with its ability to blit high resolution graphics at very high framerates compared to traditional film. As good as these systems are, the loss in resolution due to compression is a killer. Though we may have all been agog at the CG used in the Star Wars prequels as well as the LoTR trilogy, much of the compression artifacts were still clearly visible. I don't think digital is ready for widespread usage yet. MHO, of course.
In Brazil, it fascinates me that there are movie theaters where there are no roads.
Funny you mention OPM. I actually didn't have any idea WTF all that proxy voting was about or what DeVito's character was so hated for or what he planned to do with the assets of the company until I saw Wall Street.
If, as DeVito said in his shareholders meeting speech, that the wire company was obsolete, I couldn't figure out what he wanted to do with it in that case. Wall Street really made it clear what Larry the Liquidator was up to, which wasn't quite clear in OPM.
Slashdot Mirror
Not the distro, per se, but the concept. I am as ardent a supporter of the Free Software cause as anyone, and Debian most closely represents my views as a proponent of Free Software. By not including any software which does not conform to the terms of the GPL, Debian has taken a firm stand against the encroachment of closed source software into their distribution.
While I run Windows at work and home, I also find Linux to be incredibly interesting as an experiment in Free Software, and Debian is at the fore of the movement.
What dismays me sometimes with Debian is that it is perceived as being behind the curve with regard to the state of the art. However, as can be seen by this latest inclusion of XFree86 Debian proves again that it is ready and able to lead the Linux horde flying the flag of Freedom high upon its shoulders. Though Debian takes a while to include the latest software releases in the distro, you know when the release is finally made that you have not only a distro that is up to date and on the cutting edge of Free Software but also that the distro itself adheres strongly to the concept of Free Software. Though many people will mock such a stance, seeking to include "useful" programs regardless of their software Freedom, for those of us who care about such things Debian is invaluable.
It is obvious what it is designed for and easy to use.
The TiVo folks really did a great job in the design of the remote, however I would have liked it a little smaller. It's kind of like the phasers in Star Trek TNG which went from being gun-like to being tamagotchi-like to the final TV remote shape. If TiVo could fit all that functionality into a tamagotchi sized remote, I would be the first one at the store to buy.
When someone starts spouting off about production, distribution, and culture and associates those with political goals, one of those little sirens starts going off.
Free Software is an incredibly awesome idea. It's too bad that its biggest proponents (ESR notwithstanding) speak the doublespeak of communism.
We haven't had a good president since 1988.
Who cares?
This is probably the least important thing the EFF could be doing with donation money. Scratch that. The silly Flash cartoon game that shows users how to fileswap without breaking copyright law is the least important. But this is the least important fight they needed to take up.
I also find this indicative of the types of cases that the EFF takes up. If you look over the cases that they've litigated over the past several years, all the cases are essentially prima facie decideable on the side that the EFF takes up. They never fight the fight on the side that looks to lose. There are hundreds of people getting squeezed by the RIAA for filesharing and the EFF all of a sudden has short arms to match their deep pockets.
I wish I could believe that the EFF was fighting for electronic rights, but they are nothing more than tag-a-long lawyers ready to jump into a winning battle than dedicated visionaries ready to fight the good fight.
I realized that right after I hit submit. I was hoping it would pass undetected. :-)
I remember when these consoles took up a whole shelf in the TV cabinet. These days miniaturization is making the same hardware tiny.
One question, will the snail maze game be included?
They sold off their x86 Geode platform to AMD a year or so back.
The Geode is in plenty of consumer devices, if you care to tear them open to take a look.
The Mafia doesn't offer you your day in court if you would rather not pay your protection money.
The RIAA is suing those whom they think are guilty of file sharing. If you are not guilty, you have the absolute right to demand your day in court.
I'm not trying to absolve the RIAA for their heinous practices, but there is nothing illegal about what they are doing.
form -> from
seams -> seems
I don't know anything about the project, but from the information on the website it seems that it is an extension of SGI's source code. How did the author get the source code in the first place to extend? Why would he expect, other than verbal assurances from sources inside SGI, that he would be licensed to release the code.
Likewise, if he intends to release the code under the GPL, he is essentially forcing SGI to release their code under GPL because he would not be able to relicense the code otherwise.
But can someone explain what this project is all about? There is a myriad of things that seem to be going on, but it is hard to nail down what the project in its entirety is about.
I mentioned that the level of technical depth required for this QA group is much shallower than my original QA group. This is a result of the project completion schedules. The projects which I work on now are on the order of 3 months at a maximum and I've been on some projects that have lasted no more than a week. It would be impossible to do much more than run already existing tests which take several days in and of themselves. Compound this with the fact that several projects are running at once, so QA is running tests on a variety of projects all the time. There simply isn't time to write new tests or do much more than finetune existing tests. I was lucky that I got a chance in Japan to spend a significant amount of time developing tests as well as fixing existing tests while the QA engineers already on the team ran the tests.
My original QA team, in contrast, had projects lasting years. These were product-related, so the QA effort was much more important as we were the last line of defense before the product hit the shelves. We started from nothing and built our test environments from there.
Both teams had technically excellent people, the home company never hired anyone who couldn't pass a technical interview. The ones that I know that remain feel quite underused and that their skills are slowly diminishing, but all of them have BSCS at a minimum. I'm glad to have worked with them, as they have been my support while I have been in Japan.
I am about to face unemployment starting next Monday and have something similar on my resume.
I had 2 years of QA experience with increasingly technical and detailed responsibilities followed by a move into development for a year, then I transferred to the Japanese office to provide technical assistance here. I was placed in the QA department and essentially became the technical backbone of a technically inept QA group. As QA is very low priority in Japan, these groups are typically staffed with people who may not have any technical experience. Also, the QA procedural requirements in this group (company-wide) is not as technically deep as the QA group in which I performed the first two years of my employment.
As the years passed, I eventually moved into the role of QA manager, but QA manager is still considered to be far below the rank of even a beginning junior developer. This means that in my future job search, I have to prove that not only am I not technically stymied by my QA label, nor am I to be pigeonholed into a QA management role. I am interested in moving back into development or even an FAE-type role interfacing with customers.
I'm doing what I can, passing the Level-2 Japanese Language Proficiency Test and brushing up on my assembly programming, not to mention setting up a heterogeneous wireless 802.11g network consisting of a Win2000, Linux, and FreeBSD machines.
In interviews I try to highlight these technical things. But I also try to start out the interview by asking the interviewers what they are looking for and write down those points. I then repeat those requirements back to them with a description of my experience that is appropriate to the requirement.
Over on Fark there is a debate going on about parental discipline vs. child abuse. The running theme is that parents who are consistent and firm with their children turn out well-adjusted kids whereas parents who are inconsistent and abusive turn out some really fucked up gems.
It seems to me that a parent who would take the time and effort to fall in the first category would also be the kind of parent who spent 5 seconds looking at the video game and deciding whether the kid should be allowed to play it or not.
OTOH, parents who do not put that time and effort in to raising their kids would be the type to just shell out 40 dollars to shut the kid up for a week.
It's no wonder that kids who play these violent and sexually explicit games turn into the freaks they are. It isn't the games, it's the parents.
Wait until 2.6.4 when that code has been removed.
Thanks.
Now to go load these guys on all the computers at Best Buy!
It's not that it isn't big enough to accomodate extra astronauts. The problem is that it is not attached to the moon or tethered to the Earth.
A moon base or space elevator would be infinitely more useful than a space station.
Thanks to the tireless people at Groklaw for doing this, and thanks to SCO for finally telling us what they are on about.
Is the code SCO's? Yeah, probably.
The question is whether or not they ever gave explicit or implicit go ahead to release the code under GPL. They can probably claim that the license to which IBM agreed may have been generous but at the time of drafting it could not be foreseen that IBM would put the code effectually in the public domain. Such a move would essentially neuter SCO's copyright, something to which they could never have accepted nor meant as a licensing condition.
My guess is that the 2.4 kernel will probably be done away with altogether unless some enterprising coder took it upon himself to rewrite all those portions. 2.6 is out now without those infringements, so I expect that most people will simply migrate towards that instead of using the older 2.4 kernel.
Heh, this may even give Debian some incentive to bring themselves up to date with the rest of the Linux community.
Yes, the RIAA is out of control and really should stop to think about what they are doing to their reputation by suing all these people. That is a given.
However, they are well within their rights to be doing what they are doing. It is the music traders who decided that copyright did not apply to them who took the first step in breaking the law, and it is they who ultimately hold responsibility for their actions.
I remember back when the RIAA started out shutting down P2P sites like Napster that people were screaming about how Napster wasn't at fault, it was the individual members of the file sharing community who were responsible for violating copyrights. The thought went, "if the RIAA wants to sue anyone it should be those users individually, and it would be unfeasible for the RIAA to do such a thing because how much could they really gain by suing kids in their basements? Happy days!" Well, now the RIAA is doing exactly that. It's kind of ironic how those users who thought they could hide in anonymity behind the crowds of file sharers are now finding that there is no hiding because the RIAA is just going to catch everyone with a wide net.
I don't think the RIAA is going about this the right way, but I can't see how they are overstepping their legal bounds.
Rambus, long an innovator in memory designs has been virtually sued to death by JEDEC members over their IP rights to the RDRAM designs. With this ruling finally telling those JEDEC members to pay up the licensing fees to the Bus, Rambus now stands to gain a better foothold in the memory design space. More money should allow them more room to invent and innovate further, pushing the limits of memory speed past all bounds.
But! Now we have a new design by Intel which seeks to dethrone the Rambus design as speed king. I don't know too much about the new design, but it is exciting to finally see someone come up with a design that isn't a cheap kludge on top of slow SDRAM. Hopefully this extra competition will allow the entire memory market not only more room to grow but also bring prices down for high end memory like RDRAM and the new Intel DRAM.
I'm sure that having a second monitor to provide extra game info is probably way cool, especially with games like flight sims and driving sims. But how many people really have two monitors?
:-(
My desk is not that big and because I care about resolution and sharpness I run a large 19" CRT. There simply isn't room on the desk for a second CRT.
Not to mention that extra monitors are quite pricey. I love games and gaming, but I can't see myself forking over several hundred dollars for the purpose of playing a game. At least if I were a graphic designer I could make money with the second screen, but gaming is only a money pit.
No second screen for me, I guess, no matter how cool it would be.
If the Mars rover is wont to go off on its own accord to discover and analyze things instead of following the directions given to it by mission control, could this possibly have disastrous side effects?
What if there were an impending rock-slide and instead of maneuvering out of the way as mission control told it to, it decided to look at the shiny rocks instead and got crushed in the process?
A little 'intelligence' is important for these things to figure out how to move around correctly, but artificial 'curiosity' seems to be problematic.
Less carriers means less competition means higher prices.
In the end, it's the consumers who will lose out with this consolidation of mobile providers.
One other aspect of growing up, besides losing interest in childish things, is moving out on your own. Preferably somewhere where your mom won't be able to give you sage advice so easily.
I remember when I first heard that movies are filmed at a very slow 24fps. Compared to tv which changes the display at 60fps, the 24fps is very slow. However it is a result of the high resolution as well as the movement of the actors (as opposed to multiple still-lifes) which makes the movie indistinguishable from normal movement.
Now take digital with its ability to blit high resolution graphics at very high framerates compared to traditional film. As good as these systems are, the loss in resolution due to compression is a killer. Though we may have all been agog at the CG used in the Star Wars prequels as well as the LoTR trilogy, much of the compression artifacts were still clearly visible. I don't think digital is ready for widespread usage yet. MHO, of course.
In Brazil, it fascinates me that there are movie theaters where there are no roads.
Funny you mention OPM. I actually didn't have any idea WTF all that proxy voting was about or what DeVito's character was so hated for or what he planned to do with the assets of the company until I saw Wall Street.
If, as DeVito said in his shareholders meeting speech, that the wire company was obsolete, I couldn't figure out what he wanted to do with it in that case. Wall Street really made it clear what Larry the Liquidator was up to, which wasn't quite clear in OPM.