I always thought the same about managers. Companies are better off spending money on productive workers and the machines they need than with cushy managers who IMHO do work that is way less hard.
I think companies would see real productivity gains from having the programmers (or whatever type of worker) manage themselves... either by meeting together regularly, rotating the leadership position, or preferably a mixture of both.
This way the skills and competency of the workers are enhanced, the decisions are made those doing the work, they have a bigger stake in decisions that are made (because they helped make them) and they can divide that extra high management salary amongst themselves.
In my experience, in professional technical settings the supervised almost always have a better understanding of their worker than the supervisors. And the further up the further up the management train you go, the less likely you'll find anyone with a clue.
Not to mention, this idea of just throwing hardware at efficiency problems kinda bucks the trend of finder lower energy IT solutions.
The Openmoko isn't ready for prime time at all. It reminds me of using Linux in the nineties--lots of configuring stuff by hand--but at least back then when you got it working it was stable. I'm still getting lots of slowdowns and crashes. The GSM reception drops out every few minutes... sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse depending on the distro you're using and what updates you've applied. Even Qtextended (formerly Qtopia) crashes a lot. I don't think the GSM reception thing is hardware related because I've had it running perfectly before. There are also basic problems like how it doesn't always wake out of suspend when you have a call or a text message, but I think that's been mostly resolved.
Something I discovered the other day was that even if you leave the phone plugged into the wall charger all night you might wake up with a dead battery. Once the battery is charged it starts draining. The best part is that if the battery is completely drained you can't power up the device even when it's plugged in. You actually have to get a new battery if you ever let it completely drain... or have the tools and knowledge to resurrect a dead battery on your own. Thankfully my brother also has a Freerunner so I managed to power on with his battery then swap mine in after it booted.
Watching from the outside it seems like the Openmoko team really lacks leadership. They started working on a GTK+ based system and released it as 2007.2... that one was close to being functional but the GSM parts were unstable. So they started working on ASU (now called 2008.8 or.9) which is a mish-mash of Qtopia ported to X11, Enlightenment and PyGTK. That's what they're focused on right now. But they've also got the project called FreeSmartphone.org, so they have a third distro called FSO. FSO has its own phone stack instead of using the one from Qtopia. Eventually they'll bring the FSO phone stack to 2008.8.
They also just announced that they're going to stop developing the applications they've been working on and focus on stability and reliability of the basic phone functions and suspend/resume. That's the best news I've heard out of the team yet.
Of course there are also community distros. Rasterman releases some of his own experimental builds and so do a few others. There's a distro called Fat and Dirty Openmoko (FDOM) that is just 2008.8 with a bunch of apps installed and some fixes applied. And you can run Debian on it too, but I haven't tried that yet.
As far as applications go, I imagine you could port anything that runs on your Linux desktop to the phone as long as it's not to resource intensive. The phone has X11 and it's even got 3d acceleration.
Right now on my phone the address book, dialer, calendar and sms/email are from Qtopia. I have Pidgin, Pythm (an mplayer front end, untested), Navit and TangoGPS for GPS, Linphone for VoIP (haven't really used it yet). For browsing I've got Minimo 0.2 (it kinda sucks) and Midori (webkit based, just installed it today). And I have Duke Nukem 3d which is controlled by tilting the phone. Sounds like fun, but it's actually a little tiresome. I was thinking of installing Abiword but I don't know how much word processing I'll be doing with the touch screen keyboard.
So I guess to wrap things up you shouldn't get this phone unless you've got money to burn for a cool pocket linux gadget. I still use my cheap Nokia flip phone most days. But the Openmoko is fun to play with and it comes with a really nifty stylus/pen/laser pointer/flash light. Really.
I'll probably try Android on it, but only after someone else releases kernel and rootfs images so I don't have to do much work. I'm still much more interested in the Openmoko platform than in Android because the Openmoko is much closer to a familiar GNU/Linux system than Android ever will be.
One thing that would be nice though is if the market gets flooded with smart phones that boot Linux kernels with all devices working. Because I was thinking that down the line I might buy an Android phone so I can put Debian or an Openmoko derivative on it.
I didn't realize that any Nokia phones came with Python. Maybe you mean Python for S60, which sure you can download and put on a Nokia phone. That is pretty cool, but it's more a testament to the portability of Python than anything.
The Openmoko on the other hand comes with Python preinstalled (well.. at least 2008.8 does). One of the apps in the default install is actually written in Python. So what if it's just Sudoku. I guess what's cool about it for me is that having Python on my phone is a lot more similar to having it on any Linux computer. Not to mention that I can install PyGTK--or probably any GUI toolkit for X with Python bindings--and it'll work.
Now if only they can get it to the point where things Just Work.
I have a Freerunner with the hope that I'll be able to use it as a learning device. Right now I've got the Om2008.8 installed and it's barely usable.
I'm hoping Openmoko will be able to keep up a quick development pace. Since switching away from GTK and moving to Qtopia over X11 and Englightenment they've really come a long way. I have doubts that the Openmoko software will be stable and reliable any time soon, but hopefully a developer community will grow out of all the new Freerunner customers.
Another poster mentioned above that this phone is the closest you can get to a PC in a cell phone. Everybody's heard all the freedom related reasons behind Openmoko, but a big part of it for me is fun nerd stuff. There's actually a handful of Linux distributions that run on it, and I'm sure there's more to come. I really like how they're calling them distros and not firmwares. You can dual boot, or boot from the microSD card. The official 2008.8 distro is standard Linux+X11. You can install Debian into a chroot environment and then run any of your Debian apps right along side your Openmoko apps. My phone has Python on it, how cool is that?
It's these things that set Openmoko apart from other Linux mobile initiatives. Openmoko selling Linux computers with integrated cell phones. From what I understand about Android and LiMo the Linux kernel is used but the rest of the stack is nothing like a familiar Linux system.
For software geared to writers, take a look at Celtx. I just found it the other day and it looks really interesting.
It looks like it's built using Mozilla's XUL. The license is Mozilla Public License with an attribution clause. I don't know how I feel about that, but the application itself looks very promising. It's available for Linux, Windows and Mac.
As far as Ubuntu adoption by the masses goes, I think marketing would definitely help. It seems as though Apple is currently reaping the benefits of Vista's failure and the ipod's success. Ipods have been hot and trendy for a bit longer than the current Mac fad, and there are probably a lot of ipod customers out there who appreciate its simplicity and looked to Apple to provide the same thing on the desktop.
People ask me all the time for advice about electronics and especially computers. I usually tell them that Mac OS X is a better option than Windows, but that Apple still isn't very good for reasons like DRM, not using ODF in iWorks and only having one mouse button.
Compiz is definitely a charmer though. I spent entirely too much time customizing it on my laptop, but the upshot is that when people watch me use my computer they start to get jealous and want some eye candy for themselves. So Shuttleworth is on to something... eye candy helps attract users who don't care about freedom and price. In a big way, the "marketing dept." for Free Software is nerds like me who raise awareness about GNU/Linux and apps. I probably spend more time encouraging people to use apps like Firefox and OpenOffice than I do trying to convince people to change their OS.
Something I'm really excited for is KDE 4 applications on Mac OS X and Windows. A huge body of free software is about to be made available to people using proprietary systems. While this obviously won't have a direct effect on GNU/Linux adoption, I hope it will raise awareness about free software in general.
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Batman Discussion
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Batman takes on the mob and is pursued by the police in Year One.. Catwoman is also in it. I enjoyed Year One almost as much as The Dark Knight Returns.
The Dark Knight Strikes Again (Miller's sequel to the The Dark Knight Returns) has Batman leading a group of other DC heroes against "the real criminals who've taken over the world while he spent his life fighting petty crooks" (paraphrased). It's definitely a good read, but I wouldn't put it in the same league as Miller's other Batman works.
As far as the movie goes, I just got home from watching it. Without having had much time to digest it all (it's a long movie and those were some good brownies) I gotta say that I enjoyed the film.
I really like Heath Ledger as the Joker, more than I like Christian Bale as Batman. He did at least a good a job as Jack Nicholson did
When I go to see a new Batman movie having read lots of the comics, I think of it as a sort of Elseworlds reinterpretation of Gotham City and all the characters. The Joker as played by Heath Ledger and directed by Christopher Nolan was very true to the Gotham City portrayed in Batman Begins.
The movie is an excellent action flick of a super hero dealing with a city thrown into crisis by a pyschopath super villain.
It's a little on the long side, and I thought it could have used a couple of scenes with Batman fighting some average joe type crooks or saving people from disasters. Maybe there'll be more of that in the sequel. With the money they'll make on this one, there's bound to be a sequel. Let's just hope they don't repeat history by releasing more campy shit after two good Batman films.
Maybe you didn't read my comment all that well... I said I would like to ban cars, but what I really wrote about is reducing the speed limit in cities.
You do raise a good point though. Our food comes from way too far away. I do my best to buy local food, but it's sometimes ridiculous how much more local food costs than food from halfway around the globe. Why do we do things this way? What are humans even doing living in places where they can't grow food nearby?
We'll undoubtedly continue global trade for quite some time, but there's a big difference between using fossil fuels to bring a train full of food to a city versus everybody in the city using cars to get everywhere they need to go.
People even drive to the gym so they can ride stationary bikes! It's madness!
You don't think it's risky to ride a bike with all the cars on the road. A major source of my hostility to cars is all the near death experiences I have thanks to cars every day. So if we can't get rid of cars all together, why not make them drive at a speed that doesn't put others in danger? I think that 50 km/h is way to fast for people, especially on their cell phones, still waking up, playing with the GPS etc.
Why should I have to deal with the risks taken by selfish car drivers? If I get hit by a car while I'm on my bike I'm the one who will be messed up or dead, not the driver.
And besides, wouldn't our cities be so much nicer if we prioritized non-offensive traffic?
I would love it if we could ban cars, but setting the speed limit at 35 km/h is good enough for me.
The reason you would have to ride for so long to get to work is because of cars. Without cars, our cities wouldn't be so spread out. Without a car, you would live closer to work.
I'm also all for public transportation too. Even car sharing programs are cool, where you have access to a car for when you've got to cart stuff around. But driving cars everywhere? For minor conveniences, we're destroying the ecosystem AND painting ourselves into a corner, energy wise. The price of gas is getting to expensive for the economy to function normally, and we don't have anything to replace it in time.
If the speed limit for cars were 35 km/h, it would remove the incentive to drive a car everywhere. Bikes would be just as fast, or faster when you consider the short cuts that bikes can take.
Also, I ride my bike to work. I don't need a shower before I get there... I need 10 minutes to cool down then I'm good to go. It might sound like that 10 minutes would add up over a year, but it's nothing compared to the extra hours I would have to work to be able to afford a car. I read once that Ivan Illich added up all the cost and determined that the average North American worker could work one day less per week and maintain their lifestyle if they gave up driving. Looking at it that way, cars add an extra 8 hours a week to a person's transportation time. Hardly efficient at all.
We should just ban cars. Or make the speed limit in the cities 35 km/h (if you're healthy, you can easily maintain this speed on a good bicycle.) Cell phones are cool though. I can text while walking, but I can't text while riding my bike. And even if I did hit someone on my bike, the worst that's going to happen is some bruises.
That people drive cars at all (or text while driving even when they know it's dangerous) just confirms for me that most people are selfish, stupid slobs.
Cars make cities suck: bad smelling, nerve wracking, sprawled all over the place. Who the hell actually likes parking lots?
Which is not to mention that cars are KILLING THE FUTURE. If you drive a car and have kids, you are fucking your kids over real good. And when your grand kids ask through their face masks "Why didn't you stop driving?" answering "We didn't know" will be a lie.
Anarchism is not the abolishment of all laws. It's the abolishment of leaders, or more specifically the removal of unfair hierarchies of power.
Under anarchism, laws obviously wouldn't be written and enforced as we know them today. But not having rulers has nothing to do with not having rules.
As for comparing it to free software, one of the common ideas in anarchism (which is very diverse) is that property is theft. That to own a piece of land (or the means of production) and prevent others from using it without a good reason is effectively stealing it. In other words you should own your house because you live there and not have to pay rent to a landlord. But you'd better play nice with your neighbours, because you'll likely depend on them to help you keep your land.
I see a lot of similarity between this and free software, where licenses like the GPL prevent "landlords" from taking a piece of "property" and charging "rent" for anyone to use it.
The other major similarity between free software and anarchism is that there is no one hierarchy that controls it. The power in free software is distributed between many different projects in complex networks of mutual interdependency. Even if the leadership of a particular project does something unfavourable to its user base, the only thing preventing a fork is lack of will... for example XFree86->X.org or what's happening with Pidgin right now.
It was my anarchistic distrust of concentrated power that got me using GNU/Linux even before I identified as an anarchist.
I think society would be best served by city planning that makes it easier and quicker to get around by walking, biking and mass transit than by car. Making it easier to drive around isn't the answer. In my city, the city council solves all transportation issues by widening roads to make room for more cars and adding new parking lots.
Cities should be layed out so that nobody lives outside of walking distance from places to play, shop or catch a bus. Reduce the need for cars, and our neighbourhoods can have less pavement and more green space. Downtown the parking lots can be built up and reclaimed as productive spaces or turned into parks to play and relax.
Cities with fewer cars would also be safer. I ride my bicycle every day, and almost every day I feel in danger from cars. Drunk drivers, drivers on their cell phones and hot shots that drive too fast can easily wipe me out with the smallest mistake. It should be safe for our children and pets to run around in the streets.
Cars are ridiculous in general. Using machines with triple digit horsepower that weigh tonnes to move 100-200 pound people around. It's like using a jack hammer on finishing nails.
And it's not as if anyone can claim ignorance to the impact of cars on the environment these days. We all know what's happening, and still so many of us place our hopes in hybrids and new fuel sources. The type of transition it would take to get all cars off of fossil fuels would take years, possibly decades. But just about every house has a bike in the basement or garage, and a decent brand new bike can be purchased for under $500.
Myself, I'm all for reducing the speed limit inside cities. Make it 30 km/h. It would be foolish to get rid of all cars. They're still useful for moving stuff around in. But most of the driving these days is just for moving people and no stuff. Mostly single people driving the same routes every day to and from work.
I don't have kids, but I don't understand how people can reconcile caring about their children's futures and driving their cars.
Ubuntu as of 7.04 (feisty) will offer to install all of the restricted codecs the first time a user tries to play one. It doesn't "just work", but it only takes 30 seconds (on broadband) to get it working fairly automatically. The user only has to do this once.
The process goes like this: user clicks on an.mp3 file. A dialog comes up explaining that Ubuntu can't include the software for playing some media formats as part of the default install, but would you like to install them now? Click yes, enter password, some packages download, and a few seconds later the file is playing. This doesn't just install support for mp3, but also divx and just about every codec you'd need. You only have to do this once, and you don't have to know anything about Ubuntu, packages, apt or the command line to do it.
I haven't tried 8.04 (hardy) beta yet, but 7.10 (gutsy) didn't install the dvd css decoder as part of that process if I remember correctly. The instructions for that I found in the help, and were also very straight forward and easy. Perhaps the MPAA is more intimidating than Fraunhofer.
The thing about Ubuntu is that it "just works" almost all of the time. But when say, a piece of hardware doesn't work it can be difficult to find the right instructions especially if you're new. My number one piece of advice for when people ask me about hardware purchases is to make sure that it works with Linux before they buy. I tell them that even if they use Windows so that they always have the option of switching.
Wow... I'm guessing you're really young and naive perhaps? Maybe you're just not aware what a hateful message it is you've just posted.
If a law were passed requiring business owners to install wheel-chair accessible ramps, does that count as the economy being dragged down? What about accessible bathrooms? Making websites accessible should be a lot easier than making mortar and brick spaces, so I don't really see what the big deal is.
And what exactly do you mean by purged? Asphyxiation trucks.. or left to die on their own?
Having "no respect whatsoever for those who just whine and try and get everyone to change to fit them" is a lot like saying that our society is perfect as it is and the criticism of those you perceive as weaker is invalid. Did you consider for a minute that the disabled you'd like to purge might have so much else to offer that even with the expense of accessibility factored in they bring a net benefit?
I sorta see corporations as part of the governing establishment already, if not part of the government per se. They hold the real power in our society. They control all the wealth, they decide where the jobs go, they decide the products that we can buy. Sure, they're regulated by the government but even that's becoming less and less true. Even the regulations that are in place were hard won over many years.
It's pretty easy to see that governments predominately act in the interests of corporations. The crappy thing is that it's harder and harder for working folks like me to "vote with our dollars" as places like Walmart are often the only place a family can afford the things they need.
As hard as it's going to be, I find myself looking forward to the oncoming economic collapse. Maybe this time enough people will get angry and organized to change things from being complete bullshit.
Mormons do expect a tithing (10% of your earnings). Last time I was at a Mormon church (15 years ago) they had little forms in the lobby to report your earnings and staple to your cheque.
Still, I was just a kid. I have no idea what kind of pressure is applied to people who don't give their 10%. I imagine in some locations it's not a big deal, other locations you probably get ostracized by other church members.
And it's not a direct transaction--money for teachings--as it is in Scientology.
I'm not all that interested in this particular show, but I'll probably download and seed it in hopes that CBC (and others) will do more of this.
CBC is owned by the Canadian people. I think all the stuff they produce on their own should be under a Creative Commons license so regular folk like me can use some of their footage too.
Hopefully this means that Bell and Rogers will both have to stop throttling Bittorrent downloads. Some days on rogers I would get faster downloads on dialup.
Perhaps you'd want to learn the CLI because you're a true nerd who can't resist getting at least a basic knowledge of a compelling technology you've been exposed to?
It's not like the Linux command line basics are hard to learn. It's more intuitive than DOS. And there's advantages to using the command line when doing tech support over a forum or wiki. The text for the commands can be copied and pasted into a terminal, and the results can be copied and pasted back into a response form. Not to mention instructions get concise.
Knowing the command line will also dramatically speed up your remote file management if you do any sort of web hosting on a Linux server. Sure, you could drag and drop files around in an FTP client.. but I bet you can type faster than you can mouse.
I had always hoped that Dijjer would take off. It's peer to peer, and really easy to use (you just have to append "http://dijjer.net/get" to the beginning of any url). It also starts from the beginning of the file, so it could be used for streaming.
Unfortunately it doesn't even seem as though the website works at all now. The front page is there, but none of the links work.
Using something like Dijjer could dramatically reduce the costs of doing something like stage6.
My point was that the homeless "problem" has nothing to do with economics.
I used to work with the homeless, served on the board of the coalition of groups dealing with homelessness in my city and did media representation for several demonstrations on homelessness issues here as well. I know first hand that there are a lot of people on the streets dealing with mental health issues. Especially addiction issues.
But to suggest that economics have nothing to do with homelessness and that it's all because of mental illnesses is just plain ignorant and wrong.
The lack of affordable housing is the main reason for homelessness. There just aren't enough cheap housing units for all the people working minimum wage or unemployed. For example, in 2004 nearly 20,000 tenants (that's a mix of families and individuals) in this city of 350,000 paid more than 50% of their income towards rent. More than half of what you make towards rent, imagine that. Your child is sick, do you pay for medicine (or in the US, seeing a doctor at all) or do you pay rent? You fuck up and lose all your money gambling or on a bender.. do you deserve to be homeless? Your car breaks down, do you pay to have it fixed so you can keep working, or do you pay rent?
If you ask me, landlords are parasites. They collect money on the threat of eviction from those unable to own their own land. If it were up to me a house would belong to you simply because you live there, and communities would work together to make sure that everyone had sufficient housing. That's a much different world than the one we live in, but I still somehow, sometimes have enough faith in humanity that we could live like this. If we get rid of the parasites that is.
I have a lot of respect for Debian, and I wish they would get much more time in the spotlight than they do. I use Debian on servers, but for desktops I use Ubuntu because it's easy and they do a good job. That might change though, because I'm getting tired of Gnome, want to switch back to KDE and Kubuntu just isn't polished to the same level as Ubuntu.
Back when Xandros was first released my father was really excited about it. It was the first GNU/Linux distro he'd managed to install and configure by himself, and he loved how easy everything was. I tried talking him out of using it because I didn't like how they wouldn't release the source to their file manager (XFM?) which I thought was counter to the spirit of Free Software even if it didn't break technically break the rules. 6 months later he got a Mac.
I don't really like how Canonical won't release the code to Launchpad, but I see it as a different situation because Launchpad isn't a core component of their distro. With Xandros, their file manager was proprietary. With Ubuntu, they use a proprietary portal for development and bug reporting for their distro but the entire distro itself is free and/or open source. Except for the restricted drivers, but I like how they implemented that by making it optional.
P.S. I looked at that thread on ubuntuforums.org and it definitely is laughable. I also replied to it with instructions on what I'd do. Good luck!
Maybe people will (continue to) do things for incentives other than wealth? I like to think that when we finally get rid of capitalism, people will be more likely to pursue their actual interests and talents and not just what can get them the most cash.
But if more cash is really your thing, there's a system called Participatory Economics (Parecon) that gives more to those who contribute more.
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I always thought the same about managers. Companies are better off spending money on productive workers and the machines they need than with cushy managers who IMHO do work that is way less hard.
I think companies would see real productivity gains from having the programmers (or whatever type of worker) manage themselves... either by meeting together regularly, rotating the leadership position, or preferably a mixture of both.
This way the skills and competency of the workers are enhanced, the decisions are made those doing the work, they have a bigger stake in decisions that are made (because they helped make them) and they can divide that extra high management salary amongst themselves.
In my experience, in professional technical settings the supervised almost always have a better understanding of their worker than the supervisors. And the further up the further up the management train you go, the less likely you'll find anyone with a clue.
Not to mention, this idea of just throwing hardware at efficiency problems kinda bucks the trend of finder lower energy IT solutions.
What a fucking douche-bag.
The Openmoko isn't ready for prime time at all. It reminds me of using Linux in the nineties--lots of configuring stuff by hand--but at least back then when you got it working it was stable. I'm still getting lots of slowdowns and crashes. The GSM reception drops out every few minutes... sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse depending on the distro you're using and what updates you've applied. Even Qtextended (formerly Qtopia) crashes a lot. I don't think the GSM reception thing is hardware related because I've had it running perfectly before. There are also basic problems like how it doesn't always wake out of suspend when you have a call or a text message, but I think that's been mostly resolved.
Something I discovered the other day was that even if you leave the phone plugged into the wall charger all night you might wake up with a dead battery. Once the battery is charged it starts draining. The best part is that if the battery is completely drained you can't power up the device even when it's plugged in. You actually have to get a new battery if you ever let it completely drain... or have the tools and knowledge to resurrect a dead battery on your own. Thankfully my brother also has a Freerunner so I managed to power on with his battery then swap mine in after it booted.
Watching from the outside it seems like the Openmoko team really lacks leadership. They started working on a GTK+ based system and released it as 2007.2... that one was close to being functional but the GSM parts were unstable. So they started working on ASU (now called 2008.8 or .9) which is a mish-mash of Qtopia ported to X11, Enlightenment and PyGTK. That's what they're focused on right now. But they've also got the project called FreeSmartphone.org, so they have a third distro called FSO. FSO has its own phone stack instead of using the one from Qtopia. Eventually they'll bring the FSO phone stack to 2008.8.
They also just announced that they're going to stop developing the applications they've been working on and focus on stability and reliability of the basic phone functions and suspend/resume. That's the best news I've heard out of the team yet.
Of course there are also community distros. Rasterman releases some of his own experimental builds and so do a few others. There's a distro called Fat and Dirty Openmoko (FDOM) that is just 2008.8 with a bunch of apps installed and some fixes applied. And you can run Debian on it too, but I haven't tried that yet.
As far as applications go, I imagine you could port anything that runs on your Linux desktop to the phone as long as it's not to resource intensive. The phone has X11 and it's even got 3d acceleration.
Right now on my phone the address book, dialer, calendar and sms/email are from Qtopia. I have Pidgin, Pythm (an mplayer front end, untested), Navit and TangoGPS for GPS, Linphone for VoIP (haven't really used it yet). For browsing I've got Minimo 0.2 (it kinda sucks) and Midori (webkit based, just installed it today). And I have Duke Nukem 3d which is controlled by tilting the phone. Sounds like fun, but it's actually a little tiresome. I was thinking of installing Abiword but I don't know how much word processing I'll be doing with the touch screen keyboard.
So I guess to wrap things up you shouldn't get this phone unless you've got money to burn for a cool pocket linux gadget. I still use my cheap Nokia flip phone most days. But the Openmoko is fun to play with and it comes with a really nifty stylus/pen/laser pointer/flash light. Really.
I'll probably try Android on it, but only after someone else releases kernel and rootfs images so I don't have to do much work. I'm still much more interested in the Openmoko platform than in Android because the Openmoko is much closer to a familiar GNU/Linux system than Android ever will be.
One thing that would be nice though is if the market gets flooded with smart phones that boot Linux kernels with all devices working. Because I was thinking that down the line I might buy an Android phone so I can put Debian or an Openmoko derivative on it.
I didn't realize that any Nokia phones came with Python. Maybe you mean Python for S60, which sure you can download and put on a Nokia phone. That is pretty cool, but it's more a testament to the portability of Python than anything.
The Openmoko on the other hand comes with Python preinstalled (well.. at least 2008.8 does). One of the apps in the default install is actually written in Python. So what if it's just Sudoku. I guess what's cool about it for me is that having Python on my phone is a lot more similar to having it on any Linux computer. Not to mention that I can install PyGTK--or probably any GUI toolkit for X with Python bindings--and it'll work.
Now if only they can get it to the point where things Just Work.
I have a Freerunner with the hope that I'll be able to use it as a learning device. Right now I've got the Om2008.8 installed and it's barely usable.
I'm hoping Openmoko will be able to keep up a quick development pace. Since switching away from GTK and moving to Qtopia over X11 and Englightenment they've really come a long way. I have doubts that the Openmoko software will be stable and reliable any time soon, but hopefully a developer community will grow out of all the new Freerunner customers.
Another poster mentioned above that this phone is the closest you can get to a PC in a cell phone. Everybody's heard all the freedom related reasons behind Openmoko, but a big part of it for me is fun nerd stuff. There's actually a handful of Linux distributions that run on it, and I'm sure there's more to come. I really like how they're calling them distros and not firmwares. You can dual boot, or boot from the microSD card. The official 2008.8 distro is standard Linux+X11. You can install Debian into a chroot environment and then run any of your Debian apps right along side your Openmoko apps. My phone has Python on it, how cool is that?
It's these things that set Openmoko apart from other Linux mobile initiatives. Openmoko selling Linux computers with integrated cell phones. From what I understand about Android and LiMo the Linux kernel is used but the rest of the stack is nothing like a familiar Linux system.
For software geared to writers, take a look at Celtx. I just found it the other day and it looks really interesting.
It looks like it's built using Mozilla's XUL. The license is Mozilla Public License with an attribution clause. I don't know how I feel about that, but the application itself looks very promising. It's available for Linux, Windows and Mac.
As far as Ubuntu adoption by the masses goes, I think marketing would definitely help. It seems as though Apple is currently reaping the benefits of Vista's failure and the ipod's success. Ipods have been hot and trendy for a bit longer than the current Mac fad, and there are probably a lot of ipod customers out there who appreciate its simplicity and looked to Apple to provide the same thing on the desktop.
People ask me all the time for advice about electronics and especially computers. I usually tell them that Mac OS X is a better option than Windows, but that Apple still isn't very good for reasons like DRM, not using ODF in iWorks and only having one mouse button.
Compiz is definitely a charmer though. I spent entirely too much time customizing it on my laptop, but the upshot is that when people watch me use my computer they start to get jealous and want some eye candy for themselves. So Shuttleworth is on to something... eye candy helps attract users who don't care about freedom and price. In a big way, the "marketing dept." for Free Software is nerds like me who raise awareness about GNU/Linux and apps. I probably spend more time encouraging people to use apps like Firefox and OpenOffice than I do trying to convince people to change their OS.
Something I'm really excited for is KDE 4 applications on Mac OS X and Windows. A huge body of free software is about to be made available to people using proprietary systems. While this obviously won't have a direct effect on GNU/Linux adoption, I hope it will raise awareness about free software in general.
Batman takes on the mob and is pursued by the police in Year One.. Catwoman is also in it. I enjoyed Year One almost as much as The Dark Knight Returns.
The Dark Knight Strikes Again (Miller's sequel to the The Dark Knight Returns) has Batman leading a group of other DC heroes against "the real criminals who've taken over the world while he spent his life fighting petty crooks" (paraphrased). It's definitely a good read, but I wouldn't put it in the same league as Miller's other Batman works.
As far as the movie goes, I just got home from watching it. Without having had much time to digest it all (it's a long movie and those were some good brownies) I gotta say that I enjoyed the film.
I really like Heath Ledger as the Joker, more than I like Christian Bale as Batman. He did at least a good a job as Jack Nicholson did
When I go to see a new Batman movie having read lots of the comics, I think of it as a sort of Elseworlds reinterpretation of Gotham City and all the characters. The Joker as played by Heath Ledger and directed by Christopher Nolan was very true to the Gotham City portrayed in Batman Begins.
The movie is an excellent action flick of a super hero dealing with a city thrown into crisis by a pyschopath super villain.
It's a little on the long side, and I thought it could have used a couple of scenes with Batman fighting some average joe type crooks or saving people from disasters. Maybe there'll be more of that in the sequel. With the money they'll make on this one, there's bound to be a sequel. Let's just hope they don't repeat history by releasing more campy shit after two good Batman films.
Maybe you didn't read my comment all that well... I said I would like to ban cars, but what I really wrote about is reducing the speed limit in cities.
You do raise a good point though. Our food comes from way too far away. I do my best to buy local food, but it's sometimes ridiculous how much more local food costs than food from halfway around the globe. Why do we do things this way? What are humans even doing living in places where they can't grow food nearby?
We'll undoubtedly continue global trade for quite some time, but there's a big difference between using fossil fuels to bring a train full of food to a city versus everybody in the city using cars to get everywhere they need to go.
People even drive to the gym so they can ride stationary bikes! It's madness!
You don't think it's risky to ride a bike with all the cars on the road. A major source of my hostility to cars is all the near death experiences I have thanks to cars every day. So if we can't get rid of cars all together, why not make them drive at a speed that doesn't put others in danger? I think that 50 km/h is way to fast for people, especially on their cell phones, still waking up, playing with the GPS etc.
Why should I have to deal with the risks taken by selfish car drivers? If I get hit by a car while I'm on my bike I'm the one who will be messed up or dead, not the driver.
And besides, wouldn't our cities be so much nicer if we prioritized non-offensive traffic?
I would love it if we could ban cars, but setting the speed limit at 35 km/h is good enough for me.
The reason you would have to ride for so long to get to work is because of cars. Without cars, our cities wouldn't be so spread out. Without a car, you would live closer to work.
I'm also all for public transportation too. Even car sharing programs are cool, where you have access to a car for when you've got to cart stuff around. But driving cars everywhere? For minor conveniences, we're destroying the ecosystem AND painting ourselves into a corner, energy wise. The price of gas is getting to expensive for the economy to function normally, and we don't have anything to replace it in time.
If the speed limit for cars were 35 km/h, it would remove the incentive to drive a car everywhere. Bikes would be just as fast, or faster when you consider the short cuts that bikes can take.
Also, I ride my bike to work. I don't need a shower before I get there... I need 10 minutes to cool down then I'm good to go. It might sound like that 10 minutes would add up over a year, but it's nothing compared to the extra hours I would have to work to be able to afford a car. I read once that Ivan Illich added up all the cost and determined that the average North American worker could work one day less per week and maintain their lifestyle if they gave up driving. Looking at it that way, cars add an extra 8 hours a week to a person's transportation time. Hardly efficient at all.
We should just ban cars. Or make the speed limit in the cities 35 km/h (if you're healthy, you can easily maintain this speed on a good bicycle.) Cell phones are cool though. I can text while walking, but I can't text while riding my bike. And even if I did hit someone on my bike, the worst that's going to happen is some bruises.
That people drive cars at all (or text while driving even when they know it's dangerous) just confirms for me that most people are selfish, stupid slobs.
Cars make cities suck: bad smelling, nerve wracking, sprawled all over the place. Who the hell actually likes parking lots?
Which is not to mention that cars are KILLING THE FUTURE. If you drive a car and have kids, you are fucking your kids over real good. And when your grand kids ask through their face masks "Why didn't you stop driving?" answering "We didn't know" will be a lie.
Anarchism is not the abolishment of all laws. It's the abolishment of leaders, or more specifically the removal of unfair hierarchies of power.
Under anarchism, laws obviously wouldn't be written and enforced as we know them today. But not having rulers has nothing to do with not having rules.
As for comparing it to free software, one of the common ideas in anarchism (which is very diverse) is that property is theft. That to own a piece of land (or the means of production) and prevent others from using it without a good reason is effectively stealing it. In other words you should own your house because you live there and not have to pay rent to a landlord. But you'd better play nice with your neighbours, because you'll likely depend on them to help you keep your land.
I see a lot of similarity between this and free software, where licenses like the GPL prevent "landlords" from taking a piece of "property" and charging "rent" for anyone to use it.
The other major similarity between free software and anarchism is that there is no one hierarchy that controls it. The power in free software is distributed between many different projects in complex networks of mutual interdependency. Even if the leadership of a particular project does something unfavourable to its user base, the only thing preventing a fork is lack of will... for example XFree86->X.org or what's happening with Pidgin right now.
It was my anarchistic distrust of concentrated power that got me using GNU/Linux even before I identified as an anarchist.
I think society would be best served by city planning that makes it easier and quicker to get around by walking, biking and mass transit than by car. Making it easier to drive around isn't the answer. In my city, the city council solves all transportation issues by widening roads to make room for more cars and adding new parking lots. Cities should be layed out so that nobody lives outside of walking distance from places to play, shop or catch a bus. Reduce the need for cars, and our neighbourhoods can have less pavement and more green space. Downtown the parking lots can be built up and reclaimed as productive spaces or turned into parks to play and relax. Cities with fewer cars would also be safer. I ride my bicycle every day, and almost every day I feel in danger from cars. Drunk drivers, drivers on their cell phones and hot shots that drive too fast can easily wipe me out with the smallest mistake. It should be safe for our children and pets to run around in the streets. Cars are ridiculous in general. Using machines with triple digit horsepower that weigh tonnes to move 100-200 pound people around. It's like using a jack hammer on finishing nails. And it's not as if anyone can claim ignorance to the impact of cars on the environment these days. We all know what's happening, and still so many of us place our hopes in hybrids and new fuel sources. The type of transition it would take to get all cars off of fossil fuels would take years, possibly decades. But just about every house has a bike in the basement or garage, and a decent brand new bike can be purchased for under $500. Myself, I'm all for reducing the speed limit inside cities. Make it 30 km/h. It would be foolish to get rid of all cars. They're still useful for moving stuff around in. But most of the driving these days is just for moving people and no stuff. Mostly single people driving the same routes every day to and from work. I don't have kids, but I don't understand how people can reconcile caring about their children's futures and driving their cars.
Ubuntu as of 7.04 (feisty) will offer to install all of the restricted codecs the first time a user tries to play one. It doesn't "just work", but it only takes 30 seconds (on broadband) to get it working fairly automatically. The user only has to do this once. The process goes like this: user clicks on an .mp3 file. A dialog comes up explaining that Ubuntu can't include the software for playing some media formats as part of the default install, but would you like to install them now? Click yes, enter password, some packages download, and a few seconds later the file is playing. This doesn't just install support for mp3, but also divx and just about every codec you'd need. You only have to do this once, and you don't have to know anything about Ubuntu, packages, apt or the command line to do it.
I haven't tried 8.04 (hardy) beta yet, but 7.10 (gutsy) didn't install the dvd css decoder as part of that process if I remember correctly. The instructions for that I found in the help, and were also very straight forward and easy. Perhaps the MPAA is more intimidating than Fraunhofer.
The thing about Ubuntu is that it "just works" almost all of the time. But when say, a piece of hardware doesn't work it can be difficult to find the right instructions especially if you're new. My number one piece of advice for when people ask me about hardware purchases is to make sure that it works with Linux before they buy. I tell them that even if they use Windows so that they always have the option of switching.
Wow... I'm guessing you're really young and naive perhaps? Maybe you're just not aware what a hateful message it is you've just posted.
If a law were passed requiring business owners to install wheel-chair accessible ramps, does that count as the economy being dragged down? What about accessible bathrooms? Making websites accessible should be a lot easier than making mortar and brick spaces, so I don't really see what the big deal is.
And what exactly do you mean by purged? Asphyxiation trucks.. or left to die on their own?
Having "no respect whatsoever for those who just whine and try and get everyone to change to fit them" is a lot like saying that our society is perfect as it is and the criticism of those you perceive as weaker is invalid. Did you consider for a minute that the disabled you'd like to purge might have so much else to offer that even with the expense of accessibility factored in they bring a net benefit?
I sorta see corporations as part of the governing establishment already, if not part of the government per se. They hold the real power in our society. They control all the wealth, they decide where the jobs go, they decide the products that we can buy. Sure, they're regulated by the government but even that's becoming less and less true. Even the regulations that are in place were hard won over many years.
It's pretty easy to see that governments predominately act in the interests of corporations. The crappy thing is that it's harder and harder for working folks like me to "vote with our dollars" as places like Walmart are often the only place a family can afford the things they need.
As hard as it's going to be, I find myself looking forward to the oncoming economic collapse. Maybe this time enough people will get angry and organized to change things from being complete bullshit.
Mormons do expect a tithing (10% of your earnings). Last time I was at a Mormon church (15 years ago) they had little forms in the lobby to report your earnings and staple to your cheque.
Still, I was just a kid. I have no idea what kind of pressure is applied to people who don't give their 10%. I imagine in some locations it's not a big deal, other locations you probably get ostracized by other church members.
And it's not a direct transaction--money for teachings--as it is in Scientology.
I'm not all that interested in this particular show, but I'll probably download and seed it in hopes that CBC (and others) will do more of this.
CBC is owned by the Canadian people. I think all the stuff they produce on their own should be under a Creative Commons license so regular folk like me can use some of their footage too.
Hopefully this means that Bell and Rogers will both have to stop throttling Bittorrent downloads. Some days on rogers I would get faster downloads on dialup.
Perhaps you'd want to learn the CLI because you're a true nerd who can't resist getting at least a basic knowledge of a compelling technology you've been exposed to?
It's not like the Linux command line basics are hard to learn. It's more intuitive than DOS. And there's advantages to using the command line when doing tech support over a forum or wiki. The text for the commands can be copied and pasted into a terminal, and the results can be copied and pasted back into a response form. Not to mention instructions get concise.
Knowing the command line will also dramatically speed up your remote file management if you do any sort of web hosting on a Linux server. Sure, you could drag and drop files around in an FTP client.. but I bet you can type faster than you can mouse.
I had always hoped that Dijjer would take off. It's peer to peer, and really easy to use (you just have to append "http://dijjer.net/get" to the beginning of any url). It also starts from the beginning of the file, so it could be used for streaming.
Unfortunately it doesn't even seem as though the website works at all now. The front page is there, but none of the links work.
Using something like Dijjer could dramatically reduce the costs of doing something like stage6.
I used to work with the homeless, served on the board of the coalition of groups dealing with homelessness in my city and did media representation for several demonstrations on homelessness issues here as well. I know first hand that there are a lot of people on the streets dealing with mental health issues. Especially addiction issues.
But to suggest that economics have nothing to do with homelessness and that it's all because of mental illnesses is just plain ignorant and wrong.
The lack of affordable housing is the main reason for homelessness. There just aren't enough cheap housing units for all the people working minimum wage or unemployed. For example, in 2004 nearly 20,000 tenants (that's a mix of families and individuals) in this city of 350,000 paid more than 50% of their income towards rent. More than half of what you make towards rent, imagine that. Your child is sick, do you pay for medicine (or in the US, seeing a doctor at all) or do you pay rent? You fuck up and lose all your money gambling or on a bender.. do you deserve to be homeless? Your car breaks down, do you pay to have it fixed so you can keep working, or do you pay rent?
If you ask me, landlords are parasites. They collect money on the threat of eviction from those unable to own their own land. If it were up to me a house would belong to you simply because you live there, and communities would work together to make sure that everyone had sufficient housing. That's a much different world than the one we live in, but I still somehow, sometimes have enough faith in humanity that we could live like this. If we get rid of the parasites that is.
I have a lot of respect for Debian, and I wish they would get much more time in the spotlight than they do. I use Debian on servers, but for desktops I use Ubuntu because it's easy and they do a good job. That might change though, because I'm getting tired of Gnome, want to switch back to KDE and Kubuntu just isn't polished to the same level as Ubuntu.
Back when Xandros was first released my father was really excited about it. It was the first GNU/Linux distro he'd managed to install and configure by himself, and he loved how easy everything was. I tried talking him out of using it because I didn't like how they wouldn't release the source to their file manager (XFM?) which I thought was counter to the spirit of Free Software even if it didn't break technically break the rules. 6 months later he got a Mac.
I don't really like how Canonical won't release the code to Launchpad, but I see it as a different situation because Launchpad isn't a core component of their distro. With Xandros, their file manager was proprietary. With Ubuntu, they use a proprietary portal for development and bug reporting for their distro but the entire distro itself is free and/or open source. Except for the restricted drivers, but I like how they implemented that by making it optional.
P.S. I looked at that thread on ubuntuforums.org and it definitely is laughable. I also replied to it with instructions on what I'd do. Good luck!
Or some sort of bizarro "You've Got Mail" situation could be happening, and you too are already falling in love.
"You've Got Flames" maybe? "You've Got Replies On Slashdot" doesn't seem to work.
Maybe people will (continue to) do things for incentives other than wealth? I like to think that when we finally get rid of capitalism, people will be more likely to pursue their actual interests and talents and not just what can get them the most cash.
But if more cash is really your thing, there's a system called Participatory Economics (Parecon) that gives more to those who contribute more.
I didn't say I was pirating, did I?