The sad thing is, the obvious answer the car industry is going to come up with is to encrypt the canbus and use DRM to control access to the bus. This will provide a (false) sense of security, while locking out those pesky people that want to mod their vehicles and add all those cheaper after market parts like remote starts. And in the end this is bad thing for all of us.

Sketchup Pro is not a Google product, so begging Google to release it for free is not likely to go anywhere. Now why Trimble bought Sketchup from Google in the first place I'll never know. Setting up Google Earth Pro to be free *before* Google sells it off is probably a good move for users. Too bad they didn't do that with Sketchup before they sold it.

Didn't Grooveshark lose a massive copyright infringement case recently? I notice they are still online had have a lot of music there, some of which I know is ripped because one album they have has never been released on any digital music service that I know of (and they still have Taylor Swift...). Why are they still around? I'm glad they are but I can't see how they can justify their existence.

Just to be clear, and responding to the NMEA comment, when it comes to mapping and field prescriptions, all the major systems will accept GPS from just about any receiver via a serial connection (NMEA or some other). It's the guidance part of the computer that is locked to vendor-specific receivers. There's no reason at all for this vendor lock except to guarantee you will be paying a subscription for correction signals from the vendor. In my mind this area is ripe for disruption. The sooner we can get cheap RTK GPS positioning the better. And even if it means replacing the hydraulic steering valve, if there's an open. hackable GPS guidance system out there, I and many farmers will move to it.

One guy using a laptop and arduino made his own GPS guidance system. Very cool stuff:
http://forum.arduino.cc/index....

So it's still possible to do incredibly cool hacks.

That said, the proprietary solutions do work very well and are well-integrated

Interoperability is increasing, but it's not being done in an open way in my opinion. Rather it's being done with cross-licensing of protocols, file formats, etc. Each major machinery company wants to get people into their ecosystem, their cloud. And for GPS each company wants to lock me into a subscription to their service, which I can't easily switch without changing out all the hardware. If you think proprietary software subscriptions are bad (office 365, etc), it's worse here!

There are some standards including ISO 11783 (known as IsoBus) that standardize the way implements talk to the tractor, to the mapping system, and to the variable rate systems (GPS is involved, but not in a guidance fashion). Though in practice, interoperability is somewhat hit and miss. The other day I plugged my air seeder cart (New Holland) into my John Deere tractor's isobus (we've been using a NH computer monitor added to our other John Deere tractor as an external display), but the Deere computer could only see one of the two devices the cart puts on the bus. Some kind of incompatibility. Pretty sure NH sells a little converter box to tweak the baud rate or something to make it work with Deere's monitor. So it's a bit of a crap shoot.

A couple of years ago I thought it would be nice to interface a device like a raspberry pi with isobus. There's a GPL library for implementing ISOBUS protocol on Linux. But accessing the ISO documents themselves cost a fair amount of money. Just trying to break into this world to get information seems very difficult. I'm still unsure of the exact nature of the electrical interface. It's a proprietary connector, and I think the signalling is j1939. It's hard to find out without buying expensive SDKs and such. Very frustrating.

I spent nearly 15 years in IT before returning to the family farm to work with my brothers. We farm several thousand acres of irrigated land with some large, expensive machines, so I have some experience in this. This article really hits home for me. Forgive some of the jargon, but this is slashdot; you can deal with it.

Coming from the open source world, computer technology in farming, both in the machines themselves, and the software farmers use, is like stepping back in time 20 years or more. Farm software is a niche market, and companies are pretty jealous of their profits. So mapping software is very expensive and interoperability is a bit difficult. Right now I can pull maps off my machines (Case, John Deere), but they each use different native formats so if I want to do any work in QGIS I have to use the company's individual software (which ironically enough is DRMd even though it comes for free with the machine) to export the data in SHAPE format. Software packages like the SMS mapper can read some manufacturers' data files directly because they licensed the formats. But there's very little info out there on hacking these formats and very few open source hackers know enough about farming and these systems to bring expertise to bear.

Even worse, all the companies are talking about cloud-based mapping solutions, but that's even more proprietary and closed.

Companies talk about "open standards" but what they really mean is they export SHAPE files from a computer program. It's really frustrating, but with interest in UAVs, perhaps people will finally crack this barrier.

As to the machines themselves, there are a number of issues. One is government regulations. Adjusting the timing as the farmer in the article wanted to do is extremely illegal and can get you a huge fine from the EPA if you are caught, which you will be. Because unlike in the automotive world, there aren't a any third-party repair shops with access to the parts, let alone diagnostic equipment. Apparently the EPA requires the manufacturer to report any deviations from the the approved program, and they levy fines. Sounds orwellian, but the EPA doesn't mess around when it comes to pollution regs (and I'm okay with that in theory). Suppose the manufacturers want to cover themselves.

Someone asked why a company can't spring up to develop hackable machines? There are efforts to this effect.

http://opensourceecology.org/

But for larger scale farming, it's harder. In the case of engines, the EPA would simply never allow them to market if the parameters that cause an engine to meet EPA regs are allowed to be changed. Regulatory capture has made modern diesels so expensive to develop now, including licensing patented pollution control technologies like the urea injection systems, that it's cheaper for companies to buy an existing engine than to develop their own. So even if I started a hackable tractor company I'd still need to use an engine with an extremely proprietary ECU, and would have to license canbus info to simply connect a transmission to the engine.

The other part of machines that is jealously guarded is the main canbus that links everything on the tractor. We're talking engine control, transmission control, hydraulic remotes, cab systems, and most importantly, the GPS receiver, guidance computer, and steering valve. The commands that flow on this bus are not yet encrypted (they will be soon, starting in cars I predict), but they are highly proprietary and protected by NDAs. You'd think that with a modern tractor I could take anyone's GPS receiver, mate it with anyone's guidance computer, and control any tractor's steering. Well it's not like that. On John Deere, for example, if I want to use anything other than GreenStar for GPS and guidance (a $10-$20k touch by the way, plus yearly fees for RTK), I have to physically replace the steering valve system with one that the 3rd party system is compatible with. There was a company that reverse-engineered JD's canbus commands for the GPS, and they make their own RTK GPS receiver that spoofs the original receiver to give you cheaper, more accurate positioning (maybe $5k instead of $10k). Pretty ingenious, I thought. They were sued by John Deere, but I'm not sure what happened. So far as I know they are still in business. So it is possible to route around the damage somewhat.

Physically, though, farmers are able to do a lot of repairs on machines still. On a combine, for example there are a lot of bearings, belts, hydraulic hoses, pumps, filters, and valves, all of which I can work on. So it's not all bad. Despite the computer being locked down, most of the problems I have on machines I can repair myself because they are the same problems that have happened for the last hundred years. Moving parts break and need to be welded or replaced. I've certainly done my fair share of that and saved thousands of dollars in dealer costs. Dealer charges around $200 an hour I think.

My bad. The X200 is a much older laptop. The X220 is what I have and it's practically identical to the X230, which is the latest shipping version that has the chicklet keyboard that I can't stand.

I have an X200 and specwise it's hardly any different from the current X220. Same processor (i5), same speed, same memory options. I bought it only last year specifically because it had a real keyboard. So, no the X200 is still a great laptop. And $700 is a good price, about par with used X200s.

When I got the X200, I wiped it and put Linux on it. Now months later, I was fiddling with the BIOS and discovered that the Lojack stuff is activated, and cannot be deactivated (fortunately it does nothing on Linux, so far as I've been able to read). In order to deactivate it I need to contact the company who makes the malware and provide them with proof of purchase, and they'll give ma code to deactivate it, provided of course it's not been reported stolen (always a risk when buying used laptops, even on reputable sites). The catch is that I have to be running Windows to deactivate it. Sigh. So my ears perked up when the article mentions they've replaced the firmware. Wonder if that can be done to existing laptops without too much trouble.

No idea what you're talking about. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, and StarOffice before it are all written in C++. Java is used as a glue between certain components, such as database part. It's also used in some import filters. But it's certainly not required for LO or OO, and hasn't been a requirement ever as far as I know. Guess you haven't ever used LO or OOo.

LibreOffice is the least of my concerns, UI-wise (I refuse to use the "experience" term; it's an interface, not an experience). I'm much more concerned about apps I use every day that suck UI-wise, like Firefox. Or Chrome. I'm stuck at Firefox 24 (and Palemoon) as that's the last version that the GTK native theme works with. Most of the UI is somewhat GTK-ish, but the tabs have always been out of place. GTK native theme fixes that and gives me an app that looks and feels right at home on my Mate desktop. GTK3, well, that's another story.

That's okay though. Most of these idiots that buy and fly these things can't fly in manual mode anyway. They aren't really pilots. Kind of like script kiddies vs hackers. So it's a silly solution, but it might have the desired effect for a short while.

The whole regulation issue is such a sticky one. Obviously we don't want idiots flying these things in crowded city areas, over people, or near airports. Before technology advanced and made park fliers and quadcopters possible and easy, the hobby was rather self-regulating. And the hobby still is for the most part. But the trouble is now we have a lot of people who aren't really part of the hobby (they just want to play with a toy) buying and using these devices. They aren't being safe or smart. And regulation is likely not to reach them anyway as they wouldn't know or care about the regs. Just the people and companies who are interested and vested in model aircraft operation will even understand the regs, and they are the people who are already trying to be safe and smart. The regs will just burden them unduly.

Though it may not be using mp4, but rather webm, if you install the wonderful YouTube central add-on in Firefox, you can have it force HTML5 player. Seems to work but playback doesn't seem as smooth as with flash, ironically.

Android 4.4 isn't really an update for me. Broken SD support is a deal breaker.

Wonder if cyanogenmod will backport the fix? Or is it time to switch from Dolphin to Firefox?

Sounds like you're not aware of what Qt actually is. Qt is one of the oldest, most capable, most portable GUI libraries ever made. It's a little too C++-ish for my tastes, but it's certainly not hipster or craptastic or buggy. It's been around for over 20 years but still feels modern (Qt 5 QtQuick is a game changer), and forms the basis for more than a few large-scale commercial applications. In my mind, particularly if you use C++, it's the only game in town. The only downside is it's hampered by being written in C++. It's really hard to get good up-to-date bindings for other languages that aren't as popular, such as FreePascal, as you have to thunk between the object systems.

As for your Pascal arguments, I use Python for the same reasons. Use what works for you.

The story about the water fountain sign reminds me of the sign at the Foucault pendulum at the uni where I studied. They had problems with people touching the pendulum, stopping it, etc. So they put up a sign that said, "Danger, do not touch! 10,000 ohms." Haven't had problems with people messing with it in many years!