fafner

I really hope SMC succeeds. Sage is pretty awesome and probably the closest thing we have as a free software alternative to things like Mathematica. But Sage still needs a lot of work. E.g., the packaging is simply bad. It's just one giant source tree containing almost every dependency including GCC and Python. That's just ridiculous.

That does make sense. But it still leaves me a bit wondering what the state of KDE5 is. I mean when can it be considered as released and ready for production? Will Kubuntu ship Plasma5/KF5 next release (14.10) even if the applications are not yet ready?

I think KDE is doing the right steps with KDE5 technology-wise. But I'm still very confused by the way KDE split up the project and started to do separate releases. Now we have Plasma5 and I think there is a 5 version of the frameworks but not of KWin etc. I mean sure it will help them get the projects released and tested. But I'd love to hear a "KDE 5 released" announcement and install it. Instead of "One part of KDE 5 was released" announcement every once in a while.

And yeah Breeze looks awesome. Can't wait to use it.

Red Hat is working on ksplice and SuSE on kGraft. And unlike Ksplice they try to merge it into the mainline kernel.

Of course it closes down the market. There won't even be a market. There is not going to be a plugin interface (except for Firefox) to provide a different Restriction module.

I sadly don't think that's true any more. Not that I want to promote piracy or am sad about the decline. But I fear that the upcoming generation of DRM will be good enough not to annoy the users. And that was really the issue with most DRM in the past. E.g., music is more commonly shared and copied to different devices. DRM there really had an impact. Flash/Silverlight are horrible plugins and they impact the viewing pleasure. But now that Restriction is integrated on top of the regular HTML5 stack in the top three proprietary browsers it will be as flawless as watching a HTML5 video for most users. Sure they can't save the video. But most users don't know how to do that even if the video doesn't have DRM. And as long as the business model of the content hosts is decent enough they won't feel bothered by the DRM. And unlike music where sharing and copying to different devices is what users expected long before MP3s, for videos the renting model is widely accepted and common since before computer video.

And that's one of the big issues with the EME proposal. It will ensure that DRM remains on video for a long time. It will make it impossible to view legal content in a complete free software stack. It will make the web depend on proprietary binary blobs from the three companies which are already controlling the majority web browser, operating system, and mobile device market share. Which means it will be hard to impossible to innovate in those areas if it's against the interests of those companies. This will have really damaging consequences.

You are completely wrong here. Please note that the EME proposal does _not_ specify a plugin interface for the Restriction module! It only specifies how the Restriction module is exposed to JavaScript. How the Restriction module is implemented or connected to the browser is up to the browser developer. Both Google and Microsoft are involved in the creation of the spec and Apple is also supporting it. All three companies make up a large share of the web browser market. And all three companies have their existing DRM solutions which they are using for their EME implementation. None of them have announced a plugin interface to allow other companies to provide a DRM module.

The only browser vendor who wants to implement EME via a plugin is Mozilla. Simply because there can't be a free software Restriction module implementation (and consequently due to the W3C's efforts there defacto can't be a fully free software web implementation). And Mozilla already made a deal with Adobe to provide the Restriction module.

So no, there won't be a market. It will actually close down the market. Content providers will have to support those four DRM solutions if they want to offer their content on all those platforms. They won't have any choice.

The DRM mechanism can't really be open source. You could simply change it to write the unencrypted video data to the disk if it were.

A plugin DRM module will also have to do all of the video rendering and displaying. Because if it just hands the unencrypted stream back to the browser then you could change the browser to simply write it to disk.

The relevant DRM mechanisms will come from Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Adobe. Both Apple and Microsoft have no interest in supporting GNU/Linux. You won't get their DRM on GNU/Linux no matter how simple it is. Google seems to ship their DRM now on the GNU/Linux version of Chrome. But I don't know if the license allows using it in other browsers. Which would be hindered by the fact that Google uses their own unspecified PAPPI. Adobe wants to provide a DRM module for Firefox EME mechanism. But we all know from enough bad experience how well Adobe does GNU/Linux support. Flash on GNU/Linux was even worse than on any other system until they simply stopped it. They recently even stopped distributing Acrobat Reader for GNU/Linux. So yeah, great hope there. Even if they compile the module for GNU/Linux because Mozilla asks them to then we can expect the typical Adobe software safety and quality... Remember HTML5 was supposed to rid the world of Flash, Silverlight, and such things. Not force those binary blobs into the spec.

I think blaming the W3C is absolutely correct here as well. The W3C has a principle to defend: The open web. And they are simply throwing it overboard by allowing this. TimBL even made a statement in favour of it. Yes, refusing to accept the standard won't change the reality because Google, Microsoft, and Apple are in favour of DRM and they'll do it no matter what the W3C will say. But at least the W3C would stay true to the principles of an open web.

The question is how well it is regulated. I don't know anything about the business. But I'd assume that with the right kind of regulations it can be controlled. E.g., require prostitutes to register. Registering should include a short course about basic rights and hygiene. They should have to go to regular health checks (maybe once a week), which should also provide access to social and legal counselling. The brothels should be required to keep track of anyone who works there and make sure that anyone working there has done those checks. This should be _regularly_ checked by the authority. Violations should be harshly punished.

Of course there is a risk if you over regulate it that there will still be black market prostitution happening. Especially if those regulations result in a price increase. Which regular health checks and access to social/legal counselling would certainly do.

What they mean is that the "Digital Restriction Management in HTML5" proposal is pushed by Google, Microsoft, and Netflix into the W3C spec. Apple has simply followed the proposal and implemented it as well. AFAIK Chrome, IE, Safari ship with it. Firefox will follow suite by adding a Restriction Module from Adobe (given Adobe's track record it will certainly be an amazingly fast, flexible, beautiful, efficient, and nice way of viewing videos...).

So Web-Restrictions is kinda unstoppable now. Instead of having a plugin-free future with HTML5 we have an even worse situation.

Here are some slides for Cauldron2014 talks. https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/cauldron2014

There are some pretty cool things going on it seems, like the compile/inject stuff for GDB or libgccjit.

Awesome: GNU Guile scripting support. GDB already has Python scripting support. But it seems most people are unaware of it. GNU Make also recently added support for GNU Guile.

A pretty good talk about GDB from FOSDEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwDA3oIOtWw

I really wonder where this attitude from Adobe comes from. I mean in the past they seemed always close with Apple. That could have explained the attitude. But then Apple refused to ship Flash and released alternatives to Adobe products. It really seems like a bad business attitude from Adobe.

I absolutely dislike the pdf viewer in Chrome. It fails at even the basic things a pdf reader should support. E.g., it lacks a concept of pages. You can't jump to a certain page. You can't even know the total number of pages. It doesn't support the pdf's TOC. For any pdf which contains more than one page it is therefore useless. I can't understand how the Google folks ever thought this was a good idea.

I prefer Okular or Evince for Desktop viewing and pdf.js for in browser viewing. pdf.js is a bit slow when loading the pdf. But the user interface is quite nice in my opinion.

I think there recently was a proposal for reallocarray in glibc. Not sure what happened to it though.

Michael Meeks' (LibreOffice developer) response https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2014-06-25-openxmlsdk...

I like that KDE avoided the trend to dumb down the tools. E.g., Dolphin has an integrated terminal (F4). Which is extremely handy. I don't think that this is something the Gnome folks would ever add to their file manager. That's why I prefer KDE.

I think KDE's biggest problem is that it lacks developers and other resources. And the few resources they have are regularly wasted on rewriting code, adapting KDE for failed tablet projects, and well moving KMail (once the best mail client) to a system (Akonadi) that uses MySQL and some RDF database. Which is like the most useless combination.

Why would anyone think that using MySQL to locally store metadata for emails would be a good idea? It constantly eats your battery. And I highly doubt that any individual person receives enough mails per minute to require MySQL to handle the metadata. Which Akonadi couldn't even do anyway because the RDF database just absolutely kills scalability. I've tried to delete a few hundred mails and the RDF database went berserk. So why even bother with MySQL then? They've now replaced the RDF database with a simpler replacement they've wrote. So maybe it scales a bit better now. And maybe in a few years they'll figure out that the whole MySQL thing was a stupid idea and replace that with a simpler backend.

(Oh, and it doesn't seem to properly support IMAP IDLE, at least I can't tell KMail which folders to watch...)

LXDE - the ultra light weight DE - is switching from GTK+ to Qt. I think Canonical is switching Unity from GTK+ to Qt as well.

They are out of service in the British forces though. That should make reactivating them a bit more difficult.

You mean during Desert Storm? Stealth was very new (I think the F117 had been used in Panama for the first time though). 8 years later the Serbs were able to track and shoot down an F117. The Russians and Chinese and probably every other defence company aren't sitting still.

Afghanistan had no serious air defence network anyway. The Iraqi air defence network was heavily outdated and under sanctions for over 10 years in 2003. The Libyan air defences hadn't been updated since the 80s when the US managed to bomb Libya with the loss of one aircraft.

The Israelis managed time and time again to overcome the Syrian air defence network. Which is, although not build to its full capacity due to Russia holding back the S300 and now heavily impacted by the civil war, more modern and better designed than anything the US encountered in her recent conflicts. And the Israelis have no stealth aircraft and used their F-15.

I think you Brits are stuck with the F-35 because of the new carriers. Both are designed for VTOL aircraft. There were plans to build at least the second one with a CATOBAR configuration. But this was turned down due to the high costs. So if the F-35 fails the two new carriers wouldn't have any fixed wing aircraft and require expensive changes.

(Not a weapons expert by any means. So please correct me if I'm wrong)

The F/A-18 is designed by Boeing. The F-35 as well as the F-22 are designed by Lockheed.

To see how corrupt and defective the whole military acquisition is in the US just look at the US Congress forcing the US army to buy tanks... https://news.yahoo.com/army-says-no-more-tanks-115434897.htm...

RFC7238 is still marked as experimental.

If you care about privacy don't use a closed source browser especially not from Google...

Talk about this:

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maBOorEfOOk (audio kinda broken)

slides: http://cr.yp.to/talks/2014.05.13/slides-dan+tanja-20140513-4...

SystemTap is a tracing framework for GNU/Linux without such license issues and available on several distributions: https://sourceware.org/systemtap/

As the article mentions most image hosts simply don't scale to the reddit user base and once an image gets too popular they either pull it or break down under the load. And more importantly many other image hosts add aggressive advertisement and don't allow direct linking. (Imgur recently started to redirect direct image links to the normal image view which has ads for referrals not from reddit though.)

I think the other image hoster which is similar is http://minus.com/. (And min.us, unlike imgur, does not downscale images or force convert PNG to JPEG or increases JPEG compression. Although I think you can prevent imgur from doing this with a "premium account".)

edit: Someone also mentioned https://mediacru.sh/ which is open source.

Ah, the wonders of XML. Somehow somebody decided to use XML to store some text data. Because after all you already have a parser for this in the approved tools. So why bother using something different?! And look it does all the cool stuff like namespaces and validation and amazingly it can even fetch remote DTDs by loading IE...