Hacker News Reader

timonovicion Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria: The Tragedy of Google Books

Couldn't they have proposed a neutral party that would store and manage all the books? Just like the Books Rights Registry was going to handle most of the money. I suppose that Google didn't expect all that backlash. And, now that I think about, that was out of the scope of the lawsuit as well... In the words of an American president: "Sad!"

timonovicion Vivaldi makes History

While I rarely looked at the code behind a browser (mostly webkit, to debug some weird stuff with capybara-webkit), it is highly uncomfortable to me to use a non-free browser... Does it track my behavior, do they sell that information - I don't have time to mess around with Wireshark and see what it does;

On the "history" upgrade idea - that's a really cool one; It's quite often that I'm looking for that page I accessed last year, or that youtube video somebody sent me a few months ago, and I forgot it's name - hopefully chromium/firefox steal this idea and improve upon it;

timonovicion Libreboot: Open Letter to the Free Software Community

It's a bit nuanced, but I guess you're right. There's the librecore thing - but AFAIK they didn't reach out to coop the other developers, they didn't publish their own builds, and the inertia was lost. What could be the straw that breaks the camel's back - would be for Leah to piss off Paul Kocialkowski, as he's the guy who wrote a big chunk of libreboot (especially the newer parts of the system, with the chromebooks); But time will tell.

timonovicion Libreboot: Open Letter to the Free Software Community

While the present may look grim, I keep my fingers crossed for that lowRISC processor - they should be out this year, optimistically. On the other hand, X200 is good enough for my laptop needs, and while I don't have one yet, an ASUS KGPE-D16 workstation is one hell of a beast - 32 cores, up to 256 GB or RAM.

timonovicion StarCraft: Remastered to be released Summer 2017

hehe, 0 A.D. is a really polished game by comparison. This stuff barely works.

timonovicion Libreboot: Open Letter to the Free Software Community

Asus Chromebook C100 Flip, but with a wifi dongle - if you want something new.

If something refurbished is okay, go for a X200; they are pretty good machines. Here's the best part - a Chromebook, without the proprietary Mali drivers, it slow as a piece of shit; an X200 - I can watch a tear-free full-HD movie while compiling something in the background, with both cores at 100%.

Libiquity, Tehnoetic and Vikings still sell those laptops. Or flash one yourself, it's not that hard, and you need like.. 100$ worth of equipment.

timonovicion Libreboot: Open Letter to the Free Software Community

There were actually enough pissed off core members to pull off a fork - what was missing was a leader.

We'll see how all this ends up - but given Leah track record - the whole "leaving the GNU project", the allegations, her aggressive behavior towards competition - don't instill me a lot of confidence that the dust is settled for good.

Look at this for example - censorship happened just 3 days ago - they only reverted the issue after community backlash https://trisquel.info/en/forum/libreboot-issues-open-letter-...

timonovicion Libreboot: Open Letter to the Free Software Community

They did - librecore; but not much work was done on it. Libreboot is a build system more than anything else - and to be honest, that jungle of bash scripts - I'd rather see it rewriten from scratch, rather than forked. To answer your question - they kinda forked it, and kinda not.

timonovicion Libreboot: Open Letter to the Free Software Community

Of course they do - you'd think that they would just lag behind, while Intel is implementing it's malware, and selling it to corporations? It's called AMD PSP

timonovicion StarCraft: Remastered to be released Summer 2017

There's a clone of StarCraft as well, but as far as I know it doesn't have feature parity with the original game; http://stargus.stratagus.com/

timonovicion Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platforms (2016)

Take sample processors, uncap them, x-ray them, compare the designed circuitry with the x-rayed one. That would be a way.

timonovicion Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platforms (2016)

1. The motherboad has a ARC chip, that loads a firmware included in the flash chip. That ARC chip is supposedly inside the PCH (Platform Controller Hub, a north bridge on steroids) - it's efectively in the silicon, you can't remove it.

2. Depends on the motherboard and the BIOS written in the flash chip

3. No. They are already signed.

4. If somebody controls them and ask them to do so. All that's necesary is a LAN connection (or wifi, but only with Intel chips) and power. The HDD is completely irrelevant, as is the OS.

timonovicion Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platforms (2016)

Management of "corporate" computers. Installing Windows on hundreds of machines at once, remotely wiping stolend laptops with corporate secrets. But the cancer has spread to all computers, regardless of domain of activity.

timonovicion Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platforms (2016)

I'm a software engineer myself - but I can't even contribute to projects such as lowRISC - is way beyond my abilities. Right now I'm learning to program microcontrollers, and I want to learn about FPGA's as the next step.

I also work at a company that has exactly this focus - to sell, and eventually produce devices that can be run with free software from top to bottom - but I don't see ourselves producing our own devices in the next 5 years, even if we would become wildly sucessful.

The hope seems to lie with ARM for the moment - C100 / C201 have even the Embedded Controller (EC) code avaiable - but they do have plans to implement something simillar to ME, AFAIK.

timonovicion Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platforms (2016)

The issue is not widely known, silicon is very costly to manufacture, and most people frankly don't care, as long that spying is unobtrusive (and hell it is so).

Also, most people already are living with the thought that their computers are cracked/hacked/virused the moment they are connected to the internet - all my friends and relatives ask me to check their computer for viruses - almost none trust their computers or phones (especially Android phones, it seems). For such people, where this is the natural state of the world, it's very hard to imagine that they can change anything about it - and telling them that there are backdoors from the moment the laptop is assembled, doesn't help much.

timonovicion Chrome Widevine DRM can no longer be disabled

I need images, tabs, tabgroups. The developer tools are nice to have. And I'm just used to it. It sits just below 500M of RAM, with about a hundred tabs. I can deal with that.

timonovicion GIMP developer looking for funding

GPU is quite the silver bullet, IMHO. It's a chip specifically designed for graphics, it's a Graphical Processing Unit. You can't expect the performance of a general purpose unit to be even anywhere close.

There are cases where coding for performance from the get-go is the way to go - think the_silver_searcher vs ack; there are cases where "computer power will eventually catch up" - the GNU coreutils did just that, they where coded for a system where a large amount of RAM was available(even if at the moment, in the '70's it wasn't), and removed many limitation that the proprietary tools had at those times.

But in a large program, that aims to grow even larger as features add up, performance is not your primary concern. If you have good abstractions, and you optimize at pixel conversion layer by 50% (say babl), all those optimization will add up. If you write your code in assembler, for speed's sake, you'll never surpass the complexity of MS Paint.

I worked on a web application that was a bit over 100k lines of code (at least the subsystems I had access to) - some bad architetural decisions made progress stall, and features were delayed by as much as half a year. Every change at deeper levels broke all kind of things at the UI level. Those were some shitty days, trust me.

timonovicion Chrome Widevine DRM can no longer be disabled

I currently use Firefox with JS disabled, for casual browsing, and Min for anything with video or JS https://minbrowser.github.io/min/ - finally, after years, I can use a system with less than 8G of RAM.

This browser is based on Electron - does Electron also bundle this abomination of DRM plugin?

timonovicion Black market Blackphones get sent a kill message that bricks them

Replicant got rid of all the binary blobs (for the main OS, that is), is not just aiming. The effects are of course that you can't use wifi, unless you're using a USB dongle. Not only that, but Replicant is only ported to devices where the GSM chip can be securely turned off (in other words, it's a separate chip, under the control of the main proccesor); Also, the GSM and GPS chips should be separate. The baseband OS if ofcourse still proprietary, but it can be considered an acceptable tradeof, given that it's only connected to the main processor via a USB-like connection (HSIC).

Shameless plug: we sell preinstalled Replicant phones at https://tehnoetic.com/

timonovicion Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

Putting polical corectness aside, it's important to have as a varied crowd as possible using your software, to figure out what's still missing, where you still fall short.

I saw that happening time and time again - something I didn't consider important at all, was essential for other folks. One example - if no blind people use your software, you'll never know how hard or easy it is for them - hence you'll never get a blind person to be your contributor, since it's unusable to them.

timonovicion GIMP developer looking for funding

It's not that performance it's not a priority, it's just that it you can achieve it later by optimizations. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" said once a wise man (was it Dijkstra?);

Anyway, GIMP is getting faster - with 2.9 you can already use GPU accelerated operations and plugins, if that is your concern.

What you don't want is a program that crashes all the time, or one that is so convoluted (because "performance"), that nobody is able to develop it further, since nobody can wrap his head around of all the implication of a modification.

timonovicion GIMP developer looking for funding

There's one artist that uses FLOSS to draw and make a living out of it, David Revoy.

He's using Krita as his main painting tool, but: "Gcolor2 is a colorpicker, Inkscape my favorite vector editor, Gimp for manipulating images and Shutter for taking advanced screenshots."

https://www.davidrevoy.com/article316/ubuntu-16-04-for-my-di...

I don't see why we shouldn't support the development of both programs. I personally like GIMP better, maybe just because I'm used with the interface, and I don't do paintings, only image manipulations.

timonovicion GIMP developer looking for funding

GEGL supports acceleration via OpenCL, so it's unfair to claim they haven't thought of performance at all. And AFAIK most plugins are already ported to GEGL, and the core seems to be done. I do agree that it took a lot of time, but I find it surprising that the project made any progress at all - whitout a few developers hired full time, aren't we too entitled to ask for such advanced features, and have them shipped quick as well?

There are very few sustainable free/open source projects, which have corporate or some other kind of backing - GNOME (redhat), Linux (linux foundation) and Blender (blender institute) are the only one that come to my mind.

timonovicion GIMP developer looking for funding

The only thing I can truly complain is the slow speed at which the versions are being released - but then again - the program never crashed on me - which speaks of the high quality of the code behind it - and quality takes time. I think the blame for the speed lies in the lack of developers resources.

But this time I can address this issue: I commited $8/month, and I'm promoting the campaign heavily.

timonovicion GIMP developer looking for funding

http://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap

I don't see the port to GTK3 as being such high priority. It's not even on the roadmap to 2.10; The roadmap seem sane to me.

I don't think the program was intented specifically for painters, but it did include the MyPaint brush engine. And I find the program easier to use with every new version.

http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/GIMP_UI_Redesign#product_visio...

timonovicion GIMP developer looking for funding

Cool. I just went with the $8 tier. Go go GIMP!

timonovicion GIMP developer looking for funding

I just picked the $8 tier :) I advice you do the same :)

timonovicion GIMP developer looking for funding

GIMP had some very serious progress lately (v 2.8) . I found myself using the Cage tool a lot, for example, and the new brush size selector is quite nice. As for the 8 bit stuff - you do know that they are transitioning to babl and GEGL, right?

I don't know much about those highly qualified graphics programmers - but every good project has a pace and a development plan - GIMP definitely has a roadmap in place, that can't and shouldn't be turned 180 degrees everytime someone comes with an idea; and I've seen quite a few people who see the rigors and the standards set in place as "abrasiveness"

Could you point us to some mailing list messages that would support the claim though? I don't follow the mailing list closely, mainly the news announcements.

timonovicion GIMP developer looking for funding

I have heard about Pippin before, and he and Mitch (another well known GIMP developer) confirmed on IRC that the campaign is legit.

The campaign is also listed here http://pippin.gimp.org/ - in the header.

timonovicion GIMP developer looking for funding

Sincerity of course. There's so much work to do on GIMP, especially with GEGL integration and non-destructive editing, and too few hands to work on it. It would actually deserve 5-10 full-time developers given the project size, but 1 for the moment is good enough.

If you ever tried slipping a few line of code for a side-project or a free/open source one, you know how hard it is to focus when you have such limited time and energy.