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Comment Re:What about our software freedom? (Score 2, Insightful) 296

You are most certainly wrong here. From what I heard, they will use nVidia Terga GPUs, for which it will be pretty easy to have a driver.

Yeah, I must be wrong. Surely. That's why nVidia GPUs are fully supported by Free Software, and I wouldn't have to loose my rights to nVidias's proprietary software licensing. NOT! On all accounts. Nouveaux isn't really Free Software (it still carries blobs), and nVidias's drivers are as proprietary as it can get.

Besides: What is all that talk about “software freedom”?

It's my rights to run the software for any purpose, study, modify and distribute it. Software licensing that forbids any of these actions is just plain immoral and I can't accept it's terms and conditions.

It’s just a driver. If you really thought that to the end, you would have to only use hardware with all the specs available!

Just a driver, hey? Well, that just only hides that you have a horribly slow interface, perhaps not so energy efficient, without any bells and whistles! Is it still just? Not important at all?

And which are buildable with openly available tools, whose specs are available too, etc, etc, etc. Basically the ability do dig stuff out of the earth, to build machines with it, that build machines, that build your laptop, where you can put your free software on.

Please tell me where I can legally get nVidia's, PowerVR's etc... as Free Software so I can build it with openly available tools. Oh, heck... I don't need code, just get us those specs which are available as well...

Everything else is just ignorance.

And to say the best about you, you must be an ignorant.

Comment Re:Christ, AGAIN!? (Score 1) 296

Here's one (and I have the SmartQ7 model): http://www.smartdevices.com.cn/

Where to purchase: http://en.smartdevices.com.cn/Buy/

I'm not in China, Singapore, or "Hongkong".

Sorry. I should have specified "in the US." How about this: when I can get one at Best Buy, THEN post the story.

If you had cared to search before you posted... http://www.allpmp.com/

Comment What about our software freedom? (Score 4, Insightful) 296

Most (if not all) of those ARM devices have proprietary graphics cards, so the only way to maintain our software freedom is to use framebuffer (when possible at all).

It'll mean nothing [to dominate the ARM devices market] if our software freedom has bow before the shackles of a few companies.

XBox (Games)

Modded Xbox Bans Prompt EFF Warning About Terms of Service 254

Last month we discussed news that Microsoft had banned hundreds of thousands of Xbox users for using modified consoles. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has now pointed to this round of bans as a prime example of the power given to providers of online services through 'Terms of Service' and other usage agreements. "No matter how much we rely on them to get on with our everyday lives, access to online services — like email, social networking sites, and (wait for it) online gaming — can never be guaranteed. ... he who writes the TOS makes the rules, and when it comes to enforcing them, the service provider often behaves as though it is also the judge, jury and executioner. ... While the mass ban provides a useful illustration of their danger, these terms can be found in nearly all TOS agreements for all kinds of services. There have been virtually no legal challenges to these kinds of arbitrary termination clauses, but we imagine this will be a growth area for lawyers."

Comment Business problem, not tech problem (Score 2, Insightful) 362

This is not a technology problem. This is a business problem. If you are running a shopfront, online or offline, in a competitive marketplace, you need to make it as accessible as possible to all the customers you want. For eBay, that is "everyone" (for a hot-dog stand, it is also "everyone"; for a Rolex dealer, it's only people who can afford a Rolex). The higher you make the barrier to entry, the fewer customers you will have.
Now if you're a person wanting a partner to sell your stuff with, do you want the stupid partner, or the smart one?
If you're a customer wanting to buy, do you use the easy website that works, or the one that doesn't work right? What incentive is there for you to use the hard-to-use site?
eBay thinks they have incentives (product range, large base of existing users, etc) to overcome these things. They may be right. They could be wrong. It's their business choice to make it work less well for some people. If they are unable to make it both work better for some people and well enough for others, they may have a serious business problem; if they choose to make it better for some people and worse for others, that's a courageous business choice. If it makes them, or their sellers, less money, it's stupid.

Patents

Submission + - IBM says software patents drive OSS development (zoobab.com) 2

zoobab writes: "In its Amicus Brief to the US Supreme Court on the Bilski case, IBM is arguing that "patent protection has promoted the free sharing of source code [...] which has fueled the explosive growth of open source software development." IBM also argue that the machine-or-tranformation test allow software to be patented, and that "software patent protection provides significant economic, technological, and societal benefits". IBM also "finds alarming decisions in the wake of Bilski concluding that software is excluded from patentable subject matter" making references to the BPAI decisions on Ex Parte Altman. IBM also says thet are "committed to ensuring that such technology [software] is and remains patentable"."
Data Storage

What Data Recovery Tools Do the Pros Use? 399

Life2Death writes "I've been working with computers for a long time, and every once and a while someone close to me has a drive go belly up on them. I know there are big, expensive recovery houses that specialize in mission-critical data recovery, like if your house blew up and you have millions of files you need or something, but for the local IT group, what do you guys use? Given that most people are on NTFS (Windows XP) by the numbers, what would you use? I found a ton of tools when I googled, and everyone and their brother suggests something else, so I want to know what software 'just works' on most recoveries of bad, but partially working hard drives. Free software always has a warm spot in my heart."

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