Linked by Dedoimedo on Thu 17th Mar 2011 23:17 UTC
Writing about Debian is not a simple thing. You know it's the giant that has spawned pretty
much every other distro out there. It's almost like a Roman Empire, almost a taboo.
Furthermore, it's not a desktop distro per se. It's more sort of a template you use to build
your platform. It's also a SOHO server distro, therefore it more fits into the business
category, comparable to CentOS and similar.
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RE[7]: Angry Rant Reviews present
by rr7.num7 on Fri 18th Mar 2011 18:00
in reply to "RE[6]: Angry Rant Reviews present"
Member since:2010-04-30
Funny how you complain that people don't read, but you don't take the time to do a little research? I just did a quick search in Google: RaLink RT2870 debian.
The first result links to a page with the explanation. The firmware was removed from kernel version 2.6.30, not because of a mysterious, weird reason, but because (according to Debian's standards) it contains non-free code. You may or may not agree with their politics, but there IS a reason, and that reason is what other people have been telling you since the beginning. It took me about less than 30 seconds to find it.
So, who's the "lazy" one?
RE[8]: Angry Rant Reviews present
by Morgan on Fri 18th Mar 2011 18:41
in reply to "RE[7]: Angry Rant Reviews present"
Member since:2005-06-29
Well this is odd, because according to cmchittom in reply to another of my posts, the RaLink chipset in question is fully GPL compatible. I quote him here:
My first thought was to respond with "open source" does not equal "free," and that the firmware probably failed to comply with the DFSG—lucky thing, I checked first (so as not to make myself look doubly foolish), and at least the first two[1] (I didn't check all of them) are licensed under the GPL v2 or later. So, I admit: mea culpa.
And his source is RaLink's website, which I also looked at and the firmware does comply with the GPL.
So who is right, him or you? Who knows? It looks like it won't be long before Debian won't accept code that isn't chiseled into a stone tablet on a holy mountain. Mean time, me and the rest of the realistic world will use tools that aren't broken by virtue of philosophic law.
Look, there is merit in wanting a fully open source based OS. I won't deny that at all. However, to say that even the holy GPL isn't free enough for them (the driver in question is GPL'ed and DFSG-blessed) is just crazy. Perhaps Debian needs to come up with a license of their own, more free (if possible) than any other OSS license, and only accept software that uses it. Let's see how far that gets them.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.More News »
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Member since:
2005-06-29
Okay since you don't want to bother scrolling up (or down, I'm replying from email so I don't know where in the comment stream this is): RaLink RT2870. For the fourth fucking time.