Xen kernel developers have been busy re-writing and cleaning up the the dom0 support using the pvops framework. That work is now getting final/ready, and the Xen pvops dom0 patches will be sent to upstream Linux shortly.
Which is important when you're trying to convince someone to pay for a TV license on materials they can easily download online.
I don't think you understand what the phrase 'TV licence' means in the UK context. It's a compulsory fee (effectively a tax) charged by the government against *consumers* who own a device capable of receiving TV shows (ie. TVs, laptops, PCs etc.). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom
There is no 'convincing' anyone to pay for a TV licence, it's compulsory.
Given this it's pretty reasonable for consumers to expect the BBC to make this content available how they (the consumers) want it delivered. And I can assure you that consumers don't want shitty DRM that makes the content unwatchable on certain hardware (eg. media PCs).
Mandriva or OpenSuse. Avoid Kubuntu at all costs, even Ubuntu + Installing KDE would be better, but not as good as the aforementioned proper distros that support both desktop environments.
Maybe pedantic but still worth pointing out: *England* is not flirting with harsh internet laws, there is no Government of England, it's the government of the UK that's doing so. And any laws that result will affect people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as England.
Also it's not a given that European countries will 'fall into line' with the US on this. It requires specific laws at either the national level or the national and EU level to be enacted. This will be slightly more likely if the US does it, as it would provide a good example of a major nation seeing the benefit of net neutrality, but there's no mechanism where laws get passed from the US to Europe!
I don't use Ubuntu so can't say for sure but it looks like they do have packages for it, so I'd think if you used those packages it would keep current with the kernel (that seems to be how the Opensuse Nvidia packages work): https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia
They even recommend not to install manually, probably for this very reason: This is not the recommended way to install the NVIDIA drivers - please see BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia for the supported method. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaManual
I haven't had to do that for a few years now, modern distributions (Mandriva and OpenSuse for eg.) automatically setup DKMS or use some other mechanism to update the NVIDIA drivers automagically when a new kernel boots.
That said however it'd be better to have a working NVIDIA driver in the kernel, as these solutions are a bit hacky and potentially an open-source driver would have a faster pace of development (instead of being the poor cousin to the Windows drivers in NVIDIA's internal development priorities).
Agreed, Munich to Berlin is currently just under 6 hours on the ICE, which door-to-door is only just competitive with flights (it's a bit longer but less hassles and more comfortable).
If they upgraded all the tracks between here and there so the train could run at 250-300km/h all the time it would be down to under 3 hours, which would be fantastic - much better than flying when you consider all the extra time in airports etc. A Maglev would be really cool but might only reduce that to 2 hrs.
No, the Maglev train project here in Munich was cancelled. Mainly because the costs were horrendous and the duration of the trip (about 40km between Munich city centre and the airport) would only be a bit longer if they put in a (much cheaper) express S-Bahn (suburban train) instead.
The only commercial Maglev AFAIK is again in China, and just like the fast train mentioned above it was also entirely designed and built by German companies.
KDE 4.0 and 4.1 really sucked when they were released in the *normal release* versions of distros and pushed as being complete and up to scratch (hint: keep betas for dev versions and label them as such FFS!)
KDE4.2 was a major improvement and 4.3 is just about back up there with 3.5
Because most of the 'hate' for KDE4 was for the 4.0 and 4.1 releases. These were buggy and missing features - beta quality software masquerading as a release basically.
Since 4.2 (and recently 4.3) came out this is a thing of the past, hence no more reason to hate KDE4.
As long as the general viewpoint of the Linux community diametrically opposes that of the majority of commercial software vendors, you're not going to see any appreciable amount of native software for general sale. Most commercial software houses of any size are extremely loathe to release source for their products, and I'd bet that the majority of Linux users aren't going to be interested in purchasing a product that doesn't abide by their political views by including source code or otherwise abiding by the GPL.
Where does this fallacy come from? There is absolutely no requirement that software running on Linux be open-source. With the exception of a tiny monority of political idealists we all run Nvidia drivers, Adobe Reader, Skype, Flash Player, Wi-fi cards with BLOB firmware files etc. quite happily since it gets the job done.
So high is the demand for this demand for this software 'that doesn't abide by their political views' that distros bend over backwards to work out licencing to try to have these products included by default.
Do you know what I liked most in Amarok? The UI. A playlist, a file browser to drag stuff from, and a play button. That's it. I don't need a more complicated UI. I don't want one. Now there's a button for Wikipedia?
Try Banshee http://banshee-project.org/, I've recently switched from Amarok 1.4 to it (as my distro dropped 1.4 support) and it's worked great so far
Very true, I was able to play 'clueless non-technical user' when I bought my HP All-in-One thing: * I plugged the USB cable of my HP into my laptop (my laptop runs Mandriva Linux but me being non-technical user I neither know or care) * It popped up a dialog asking if I wanted to install the software to make the thing work, I said Ok * It did 'some stuff' then popped up another dialog suggesting I install some more software (XSane etc. but again I didn't 'know' that) * It worked
It's always the same problem with anything science and tech related in Australia. Politicians, and maybe even the wider population in general, have no real interest in science, technology, startup companys, innovation etc. as it's far easier and simpler to just sell food and natural resources and buy everything we need from North America and Europe.
Do they ever wonder why so many young Aussies live in Europe (or even the US) or why our trade deficit is always so huge, no matter how well the economy is going? Then the same politicians etc. lament that Australia has almost no home manufacturing industries besides mining and agriculture.
The German Piratenpartei (Pirate Party) actually has quite a full list of policies they're presenting for the EU elections: http://wiki.piratenpartei.de/EU-Wahlprogramm_2009 Sorry there's no English version but it covers some quite broad areas such as: * Nationalisation of all infrastructure where there's a natural monopoly (it mentions telecoms and the power grid) * EU-wide health insurance * Expansion of nuclear power * Expansion of public transport * A ban on GM food crops * A reduction in the powers of the EU (in favour of national governments)
Depends on how you define 'casual piracy': DRM may be a disincentive to copying game DVDs between a few friends, but it's clearly no disincentive to the equally 'casual' (in that its easily acheived) copying of games on a vast scale through P2P.
And this is where the locks analogy proves false - once one person has cracked the DRM 'lock' then everybody can have access to the game, easily, with no need to crack the 'lock' themselves. With physical locks there may be some people who can pick a lock in 5 minutes, but this skill doesn't easily transfer to the vast majority of people who can't, and who'd require quite a lot of effort and practice to do so.
No, all the high-speed trains in Europe are electric only (Eurostar, TGV, ICE, Italian 'Pendolino' trains) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe The same is true for most of the slower mainline and commuter trains - they are purely electric. Certainly you can still find lots of diesel-electric systems around, but they're hardly the majority. So no you're not leapfrogging anything, just catching up with other parts of the world.
IMHO, to technologically leapfrog other countries where trains are concerned, would actually take a much smaller step... Running high-voltage power along the full length of the tracks. Then, you can completely eliminate the ultra-massive diesel engine in the locomotives, AND as an added bonus, dynamic braking (which all trains use) can dump all that energy back into the grid, rather than wasting it as heat. Think of it as an ultra-giant electric car, where no batteries on earth are large enough...
It's a good idea but you wouldn't be 'leapfrogging' anybody, electrified lines and electric high-speed trains have been operating in Europe for decades.
Ok, so how about bikes and walking for any one in good health. Buses and trains to augment the bikes and to provide transportation for those who can't ride. And lastly cars for stuff like picking up furniture or wood from lows.
Well this is exactly how it works in cities in Germany and many other European countries. For eg. Munich is covered in bike lanes, has buses, subway trains, suburban trains *and* trams as well as plenty of wide 'ring' roads in the city/suburbs and the autobahns outside it.
I agree completely about people in general buying what they can't afford. But if anything the leaders of a country should be trying to set a good example first, after all if they're not smart with money the consequences affect everyone.
Agreed. I don't understand all these posts about how it's the fault of fractional reserve banking, or that the large amount of debt doesn't really matter. Australia practices FBR as well yet we've been completely debt free for almost 2 budget years now:http://www.budget.gov.au/2006-07/overview/html/overview_06.htm
To me it just sounds like bad fiscal management by the US govt. - spend what you don't have but by doing so you're just digging a hole for the future. A hole that's being filled by taxpayers right now through interest payments to service all that debt.
Why would the rest of the world want the USA to suddenly pay back this debt when they (their creditors) are making hundreds of billions in interest off them each year? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget) Despite the current problems the USA is still the largest economy in the world and will be for a long time, meaning that American taxpayers will still have the capability to fund their government exporting vast amounts of money in interest payments for many years to come.
As for the US govt. defaulting on the debt that would have effects as bad for them as it would for the rest of us.
Their website, mailing lists, documentation and most of the forums on the Mandriva club site are all in English. There are some French forums on the Mandriva club site (along side the English ones) but that's about it. There're also plenty of 3rd-party English speaking sites, eg. http://mandrivausers.org/ I don't speak or read a word of French and I've never had a problem.
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Xen kernel developers have been busy re-writing and cleaning up the the dom0 support using the pvops framework. That work is now getting final/ready, and the Xen pvops dom0 patches will be sent to upstream Linux shortly.
About bloody time too! :)
Just looking at http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenDom0Kernels shows what a mess Xen Dom0 is and how hard it is to get working.
Which is important when you're trying to convince someone to pay for a TV license on materials they can easily download online.
I don't think you understand what the phrase 'TV licence' means in the UK context. It's a compulsory fee (effectively a tax) charged by the government against *consumers* who own a device capable of receiving TV shows (ie. TVs, laptops, PCs etc.).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom
There is no 'convincing' anyone to pay for a TV licence, it's compulsory.
Given this it's pretty reasonable for consumers to expect the BBC to make this content available how they (the consumers) want it delivered. And I can assure you that consumers don't want shitty DRM that makes the content unwatchable on certain hardware (eg. media PCs).
Actually x86_64 Linux scales up to 255 CPUs at least:
http://www.redhat.com/rhel/compare/
And Redhat is using older kernels (with *some* new features backported), so more modern kernels might be even more.
We have a 48-core machine here used as a VM host.
Mandriva or OpenSuse. Avoid Kubuntu at all costs, even Ubuntu + Installing KDE would be better, but not as good as the aforementioned proper distros that support both desktop environments.
Maybe pedantic but still worth pointing out: *England* is not flirting with harsh internet laws, there is no Government of England, it's the government of the UK that's doing so. And any laws that result will affect people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as England.
Also it's not a given that European countries will 'fall into line' with the US on this. It requires specific laws at either the national level or the national and EU level to be enacted. This will be slightly more likely if the US does it, as it would provide a good example of a major nation seeing the benefit of net neutrality, but there's no mechanism where laws get passed from the US to Europe!
I don't use Ubuntu so can't say for sure but it looks like they do have packages for it, so I'd think if you used those packages it would keep current with the kernel (that seems to be how the Opensuse Nvidia packages work):
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia
They even recommend not to install manually, probably for this very reason:
This is not the recommended way to install the NVIDIA drivers - please see BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia for the supported method.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaManual
I haven't had to do that for a few years now, modern distributions (Mandriva and OpenSuse for eg.) automatically setup DKMS or use some other mechanism to update the NVIDIA drivers automagically when a new kernel boots.
That said however it'd be better to have a working NVIDIA driver in the kernel, as these solutions are a bit hacky and potentially an open-source driver would have a faster pace of development (instead of being the poor cousin to the Windows drivers in NVIDIA's internal development priorities).
Agreed, Munich to Berlin is currently just under 6 hours on the ICE, which door-to-door is only just competitive with flights (it's a bit longer but less hassles and more comfortable).
If they upgraded all the tracks between here and there so the train could run at 250-300km/h all the time it would be down to under 3 hours, which would be fantastic - much better than flying when you consider all the extra time in airports etc. A Maglev would be really cool but might only reduce that to 2 hrs.
No, the Maglev train project here in Munich was cancelled. Mainly because the costs were horrendous and the duration of the trip (about 40km between Munich city centre and the airport) would only be a bit longer if they put in a (much cheaper) express S-Bahn (suburban train) instead.
The only commercial Maglev AFAIK is again in China, and just like the fast train mentioned above it was also entirely designed and built by German companies.
KDE 4.0 and 4.1 really sucked when they were released in the *normal release* versions of distros and pushed as being complete and up to scratch (hint: keep betas for dev versions and label them as such FFS!)
KDE4.2 was a major improvement and 4.3 is just about back up there with 3.5
and drinking alcohol in public (including parks and public transport)
Because most of the 'hate' for KDE4 was for the 4.0 and 4.1 releases. These were buggy and missing features - beta quality software masquerading as a release basically.
Since 4.2 (and recently 4.3) came out this is a thing of the past, hence no more reason to hate KDE4.
As long as the general viewpoint of the Linux community diametrically opposes that of the majority of commercial software vendors, you're not going to see any appreciable amount of native software for general sale. Most commercial software houses of any size are extremely loathe to release source for their products, and I'd bet that the majority of Linux users aren't going to be interested in purchasing a product that doesn't abide by their political views by including source code or otherwise abiding by the GPL.
Where does this fallacy come from? There is absolutely no requirement that software running on Linux be open-source. With the exception of a tiny monority of political idealists we all run Nvidia drivers, Adobe Reader, Skype, Flash Player, Wi-fi cards with BLOB firmware files etc. quite happily since it gets the job done.
So high is the demand for this demand for this software 'that doesn't abide by their political views' that distros bend over backwards to work out licencing to try to have these products included by default.
Do you know what I liked most in Amarok? The UI. A playlist, a file browser to drag stuff from, and a play button. That's it. I don't need a more complicated UI. I don't want one. Now there's a button for Wikipedia?
Try Banshee http://banshee-project.org/, I've recently switched from Amarok 1.4 to it (as my distro dropped 1.4 support) and it's worked great so far
Very true, I was able to play 'clueless non-technical user' when I bought my HP All-in-One thing:
* I plugged the USB cable of my HP into my laptop (my laptop runs Mandriva Linux but me being non-technical user I neither know or care)
* It popped up a dialog asking if I wanted to install the software to make the thing work, I said Ok
* It did 'some stuff' then popped up another dialog suggesting I install some more software (XSane etc. but again I didn't 'know' that)
* It worked
It's always the same problem with anything science and tech related in Australia. Politicians, and maybe even the wider population in general, have no real interest in science, technology, startup companys, innovation etc. as it's far easier and simpler to just sell food and natural resources and buy everything we need from North America and Europe.
Do they ever wonder why so many young Aussies live in Europe (or even the US) or why our trade deficit is always so huge, no matter how well the economy is going? Then the same politicians etc. lament that Australia has almost no home manufacturing industries besides mining and agriculture.
The German Piratenpartei (Pirate Party) actually has quite a full list of policies they're presenting for the EU elections:
http://wiki.piratenpartei.de/EU-Wahlprogramm_2009
Sorry there's no English version but it covers some quite broad areas such as:
* Nationalisation of all infrastructure where there's a natural monopoly (it mentions telecoms and the power grid)
* EU-wide health insurance
* Expansion of nuclear power
* Expansion of public transport
* A ban on GM food crops
* A reduction in the powers of the EU (in favour of national governments)
Depends on how you define 'casual piracy': DRM may be a disincentive to copying game DVDs between a few friends, but it's clearly no disincentive to the equally 'casual' (in that its easily acheived) copying of games on a vast scale through P2P.
And this is where the locks analogy proves false - once one person has cracked the DRM 'lock' then everybody can have access to the game, easily, with no need to crack the 'lock' themselves. With physical locks there may be some people who can pick a lock in 5 minutes, but this skill doesn't easily transfer to the vast majority of people who can't, and who'd require quite a lot of effort and practice to do so.
No, all the high-speed trains in Europe are electric only (Eurostar, TGV, ICE, Italian 'Pendolino' trains) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe
The same is true for most of the slower mainline and commuter trains - they are purely electric. Certainly you can still find lots of diesel-electric systems around, but they're hardly the majority. So no you're not leapfrogging anything, just catching up with other parts of the world.
IMHO, to technologically leapfrog other countries where trains are concerned, would actually take a much smaller step... Running high-voltage power along the full length of the tracks. Then, you can completely eliminate the ultra-massive diesel engine in the locomotives, AND as an added bonus, dynamic braking (which all trains use) can dump all that energy back into the grid, rather than wasting it as heat. Think of it as an ultra-giant electric car, where no batteries on earth are large enough...
It's a good idea but you wouldn't be 'leapfrogging' anybody, electrified lines and electric high-speed trains have been operating in Europe for decades.
Ok, so how about bikes and walking for any one in good health. Buses and trains to augment the bikes and to provide transportation for those who can't ride. And lastly cars for stuff like picking up furniture or wood from lows.
Well this is exactly how it works in cities in Germany and many other European countries. For eg. Munich is covered in bike lanes, has buses, subway trains, suburban trains *and* trams as well as plenty of wide 'ring' roads in the city/suburbs and the autobahns outside it.
I agree completely about people in general buying what they can't afford. But if anything the leaders of a country should be trying to set a good example first, after all if they're not smart with money the consequences affect everyone.
Agreed. I don't understand all these posts about how it's the fault of fractional reserve banking, or that the large amount of debt doesn't really matter. Australia practices FBR as well yet we've been completely debt free for almost 2 budget years now:http://www.budget.gov.au/2006-07/overview/html/overview_06.htm
To me it just sounds like bad fiscal management by the US govt. - spend what you don't have but by doing so you're just digging a hole for the future. A hole that's being filled by taxpayers right now through interest payments to service all that debt.
Why would the rest of the world want the USA to suddenly pay back this debt when they (their creditors) are making hundreds of billions in interest off them each year? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget)
Despite the current problems the USA is still the largest economy in the world and will be for a long time, meaning that American taxpayers will still have the capability to fund their government exporting vast amounts of money in interest payments for many years to come.
As for the US govt. defaulting on the debt that would have effects as bad for them as it would for the rest of us.
Their website, mailing lists, documentation and most of the forums on the Mandriva club site are all in English. There are some French forums on the Mandriva club site (along side the English ones) but that's about it. There're also plenty of 3rd-party English speaking sites, eg. http://mandrivausers.org/
I don't speak or read a word of French and I've never had a problem.