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Submission + - Linus Torvalds derides Slashdot (twit.tv) 4

An anonymous reader writes: In an otherwise fine interview in the popular TWIT FLOSS Weekly podcast, Linus Torvalds criticized Slashdot for, among other things, group think and a religious attitude towards Open Source. The interview did throw some insights on the life and times of Linus in Finland and in USA.

Comment Re:Might I suggest (Score 2, Insightful) 155

Head of Gnome, right? Lead developer in bringing Microsoft .NET to Gnome, worked in Novell as vice president of development (which is partnered by Microsoft) and now is a director for Codeplex, Microsoft's new opensource foundation.

If that isn't unsettling enough, he's a /b/tard. Look at this post from his twitter:

"That last picture from @abock is photoshopped. I can tell because of the pixels and having seen a lot of shops' myself."

holy shit

I just think this guy is a massive troll. I can just picture him doing all this Microsoft shit with a troll face.

The entire development cycle of Gnome suddenly makes sense to me now.

Gnome developers: Look at all this cool stuff we can do for Gnome!!! We'll be way more awesome than Microsoft now with this stuff!
Miguel de Icaza: No. I want to keep Gnome stable and unimproving. *trollface*
Miguel de Icaza: But lets go ahead and bring .NET to Gnome. *trollface*

Another gem:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Sep-10.html

"I hope that I can last more on this foundation than I lasted at the FSF, where I was removed by RMS after refusing to be an active part of the campaign to rename Linux as GNU/Linux."

Comment hrm (Score 0, Troll) 342

First they came for the pedophiles, and I did not speak out, because I was not a pedophile.

Then, they came for the pirates, and I did not speak out because I was not a pirate.

Then they came for anonymous, and I did not speak out because I was not anonymous.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Comment My thoughts on free media. (Score 1) 358

Not all that long ago the things we traded in the free market were solid things. Actual solid products.

The free market regulates it's prices naturally with supply and demand. The times that we see the free market being thrown out of balance is when there are monopolies that can apply their own artificial scarcity to whatever they're a monopoly in (I.E, diamonds). They apply an artificial scarcity by assigning whatever price they want to it- this is possible because they're a monopoly.

When it comes to imaginary property (Selling ideas, concepts, bytes.) you HAVE to apply an artificial scarcity to it because the supply is unlimited. In mass this is a problem for the market, because it throws things off balance, the same as monopolies do.

I see the file sharing frontier as the market correcting this imbalance. It's restoring order. There is unlimited supply and as such the price must go down due to the natural cycle of the free market. This is exactly what is supposed to happen.

Furthermore.. Musicians do not need record labels anymore. They used to when we used vinyl, because no one could just make records in their house. How much of record sales goes to the record label? A lot. Most of it, I'm sure. If the artist did it themselves, they would make much more money. Does this mean they need to burn a bunch of CDs in their house? Does this mean they need to hire someone to burn a bunch of CDs? No, not really. No one uses CDs anymore. We all have mp3 players. The media that music is written on is different now, and in a form that's even easier for the artist themselves to create and distribute.

Without record labels, and even without CDs, what does that leave artists with? For starters, what do you think the profits of advertisments on a very popular musicians website are? Enough to support a small family I'm sure.

And then you have to take in account merchandise- Think about XKCD. This guy writes a short unartistic (though witty) comic three times a week, and he makes a LIVING off of merchandise, and doesn't even have any advertisements.

The combination of going on tours, advertisements, and merchandise is enough to make any independent 'free' artist a very nice living.

Will they be super millionaire idols? Living like kings like they are today? Probably not. But that's fine, isn't it? Why should musicians make more than our best engineers..?

Or a more logical approach: Why should musicians make more than any other type of artist??

I think the stand of musicians now is unnatural. They are manufactured by the media to fit demographics in bulk and then live like kings. This isn't the way it should be and it won't be like this forever.

Things are simply evening out. The big media corporations can try all they want to reverse the flow of technology, but in the end the free market and 'the balance' are boss.

Comment Boot time is better. (Score 5, Interesting) 38

A lot of new code (and old code reformed) was added to try and speed up the boot process, I know that for sure. I saw some of the work Arjan did in the bootfast tree-

fastboot: Asynchronous function calls to speed up kernel boot
fastboot: make scsi probes asynchronous
fastboot: make the libata port scan asynchronous
fastboot: make ACPI bus drivers probe asynchronous
fastboot: Make libata initialization even more async

I don't know for sure that all of this made it upstream for this release but I know some of it did. I think you have to pass the "fastboot" kernel line for it, however. So check your kernel configs and update your grubs!

Or LILOs, if you're weird...


Oh one more thing.. I think the introduction of the asynchronous probing and various other things are going to start a whole new wave of bootfast tricks. For example, before it tries mounting the root file system and continuing on, it waits for device probing to finish. A comment above that code states "Waiting for device probing to finish... This is known to cause long delays in boots, for example this can take 5 seconds for a laptop's touchpad to initialize". The comment was written by Arjan, who obviously has intention to speed things up. So I think what might happen is instead of waiting for EVERYTHING to finish probing (Even if it is async), it'll just wait for the filesystem to become available (Perhaps try after IDE probes, then try after SCSI probes, then after USB, and so on.)

I also remember there was a patch that didn't go upstream (I don't think so anyways) that added a function to be able to initialize things later on (After the boot was done). You changed the initialize() or whatever the function name was to initialize_later(), and then after you're done booting, whenever you want, you do a command and it then initializes anything you did the initialize_later() to. So you would be able to load up the webcam initialization or whatever else you know you don't use right when you boot.

Well, where I'm going with this is that I would like to see them incorporate more of that stuff into the kernel. More boot hacks, more power saving, more efficiency. These things are only going to improve.

Comment Awwww (Score 0, Offtopic) 626

FTA:
"She didn't call right away. It took her about 15 minutes to finally call me. When she did she didn't say anything for the first 15 seconds. When she finally did speak, it was obvious she was crying.
"Why did you throw me to the wolves like that?""

Did anyone else "D'awwww" at this as hard as I did?
We're sorry, Karen :(

Comment Re:Acid3 (Score 1) 258

Sigh, me neither.

Honestly I can deal with it not remembering what was open last time, but the segfaults.. fffff. I use it still though, for light browsing. I use Firefox for flash. Inconvenient but Midori is so much smoother/faster/nicer :/
United States

Suit Claims Diebold Voting Machines Violate GPL 252

An anonymous reader writes "Diebold Inc. and its subsidiary, Premier Election Solutions, is using Ghostscript in its electronic election systems even though Diebold and PES 'have not been granted a license to modify, copy, or distribute any of Artifex's copyrighted works,' Artifex claims in court papers filed late last month in US District Court for Northern California. The gs-devel list first brought up the possible GPL violation a year ago."

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