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Medicine

Study Links Personal Music Players To Hearing Loss 405

Posted by CmdrTaco from the time-for-this-again dept.
fprintf writes "A recent NY Times article discusses links between personal music players and hearing loss. This is not anything new; personally, I have hearing loss from listening to my Sony Walkman cassette player many years ago. However, given the widespread use of the personal music players, I see people using earbuds everywhere; is there a technical solution to the potential danger?"
Censorship

Project Gutenberg Volunteers Partial IMSLP Hosting 100

Posted by kdawson from the stepping-forward dept.
bbc writes "Project Gutenberg has volunteered to host all it legally can of the IMSLP's catalog. The Canadian provider of free public domain music recently caved to legal threats from an Austrian sheet music seller. On the Book People mailing list, Project Gutenberg's founder Michael Hart wrote: 'Project Gutenberg has volunteered to keep as much of the IMSL Project online as is legally possible, including a few of the items that were demanded to be withdrawn, as well as, when legal, to provide a backup of the entire site, for when the legalities have finally been worked out.'"
GNU is Not Unix

Richard Stallman Proclaims Don't Follow Linus Torvalds 965

Posted by CmdrTaco from the was-he-wearing-the-hat-at-the-time dept.
StonyandCher writes "Here is an interview with Richard Stallman about a range of free software topics including GPLv3 and comment on the Microsoft patent issue. Stallman has a go at Linus Torvalds even suggesting that if people want to keep their freedom they better not follow Torvalds. From the interview 'Stallman: The fact that Torvalds says "open source" instead of "free software" shows where he is coming from. I wrote the GNU GPL to defend freedom for all users of all versions of a program. I developed version 3 to do that job better and protect against new threats. Torvalds says he rejects this goal; that's probably why he doesn't appreciate GPL version 3. I respect his right to express his views, even though I think they are foolish. However, if you don't want to lose your freedom, you had better not follow him.'"

Tolkien Enterprises To Film Hobbit With Jackson? 152

Posted by CmdrTaco from the rumors-keep-milling dept.
cyclomedia writes "TheOneRing.Net has a new scoop on the ongoing Hobbit Movie saga, sourced from elbenwald.de. Apparently the rights to make the Hobbit film fall back to Saul Zaentz 'next year.' He claims that, under their stewardship, The Hobbit will 'definitely be shot by Peter Jackson.' For the whippersnappers amongst you: Mr. Zaentz is the head honcho of Tolkien Enterprises, which originally acquired exclusive rights to productions of the LOTR and Hobbit material in 1976, prior to overseeing the Bakshi animated version of LOTR."

Kansas Soil Yields Massive Meteorite 172

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the that-rocks dept.
ROMRIX writes "The Discovery Channel is reporting that Scientists have unearthed a 154 pound meteorite from a Kansas field using ground penetrating radar. The article also states that this type of radar may someday be used on Mars to locate water in a future mission."

Comment Paradigm shift. (Score 1) 944

by Bollie (#13981894) Attached to: Should Linux Have a Binary Kernel Driver Layer?
First off, a short comment on legality: Linus views binary drivers as legal ONLY IF they were "ported" to Linux. His view is, if they were written for the kernel from scratch, they're derivative work. Otherwise they don't derive from GPL code and (though undesired) are considered legal. Note that this "Linus" I am referring to may have no actual relation to the "Linus Torvalds" person who wrote Linux, it's just what I think I remember him saying.

Now that's out of the way, the first curveball that hit me after Win32 world was the idea of no stable ABI. First let's get some misconceptions out of the way:

1) Windows doesn't have a stable driver ABI.
Ask NVidia. Ask Intel. Every service pack that can potentially break a driver means that the ABI has changed! How many times did you have to update a driver after a service pack? How many times did a driver "require" a new service pack to install? Yeah, I thought so.
2) Distributions have "stablish" driver ABIs.
SLES and RHEL have got reference kernels with stable ABI calls that's well documented AND YOU HAVE THE SOURCE. It's much simpler to update drivers for Linux than for a new Windows service pack since the Enterprise versions normally stick to the ultra-stable stuff.

But, noooooo! I hear. Screw this stable stuff, stable stuff is old! And that's the crux of it. On a desktop, you don't necessarily want 99.9999% availability, you'd rather have 20 more features, but a non-serious hang once a month. The difference between the Windows model and the Linux model is: YOU NEVER GET WINDOWS KERNEL FEATURE UPDATES! You have to pay for them! And wait years and years... Yah, the service packs add features, but to most people they are considered bugfixes ;-)

So that's why the kernel shouldn't have a stable API (let alone ABI) for drivers. It prevents big architectural decisions from being taken at the opportune moment. With the kernel under git management, it's even easier to maintain out-of-tree drivers (case in point: alsa). What developers who clamour for a stable ABI don't understand is that there _is_ one! Any fork of Linux they make can be as stable as they want it to be. If they want to benefit from continual improvement, they _have_ to make some sacrifices.

Second-to-lastly, the guys biting of the short stick here are the distro maintainers. Again, there are many options: follow the source route like Gentoo, allow only free hardware like Debian, rely on the user base to spin driver packages like Fedora, Ubuntu and OpenSuSE, or go the stable route like SLES and RHEL. If they really want a stable video ABI so NVIDIA's drivers are even easier to install, get THEM to work together on it. If it's good, it'll get in to the kernel. If not, it won't.

Lastly, try the following experiment. Buy a shiny new Windows XP Home (or Pro, for that matter) CD, and install it on your brand-spanking-new hardware. Now, try to write a USB driver using only software that you don't need to pay for, and for which you'd own the binaries after you'd written it. Finding it difficult? If you got it right, PLEASE TELL ME FREAKING HOW, SINCE I DON'T KNOW! Next step, PCI driver... but hey, Rome wasn't built in a day!

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