I’m making up an aspirational list of people I would like to invite to keynote at GUADEC, and I’m interested in hearing about past experiences.
Who is the best speaker you have ever seen at a technical conference (not necessarily a technical presentation, mind), and what was the subject?
Answers in comments please, the winner gets a big sloppy kiss next GUADEC from someone of my choosing. Maybe Aq.
“Knowingly relying” means you have actual knowledge that, but for the patent license, your conveying the covered work in a country, or your recipient’s use of the covered work in a country, would infringe one or more identifiable patents in that country that you have reason to believe are valid.
(Updated) GPL v3, section 11
In certain domains, essential technologies are patented (specifically, audio & video codecs), so if you want to interoperate with existing technologies as free software, you need to have free software implementations of the patented technologies. And the patent holders typically aren’t very friendly and don’t make grants that cut off their revenue streams.
Some standards bodies (MPEG, IETF, ITU) standardise codecs which are legally encumbered, usually dictating that “Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory” conditions must apply for implementations of the standard. However, these terms usually exclude free software implementations by requiring a patent fee, and are thus pretty unreasonable to me.
What if I deliberately write software which I know will infringe a patent, without a patent grant or licence, and release it under the GPL?
First, may I do so, under the terms of the GPL? I don’t see why not.
Second, if I do, what penalties am I leaving myself open to? A C&D letter? A hefty law-suit which will leave my family eating oatmeal out of garbage cans for the foreseeable future?
From what I can tell, this is still current affairs. Looking at the ffmpeg FAQ, it seems like the developers are not particularly committed to API stability or any kind of release management.
Macintosh Operating System 10.3.x or earlier will only recognize FAT32 partitions that are smaller than 128-gigabytes. Multiple FAT32 partitions smaller than 128-gigabytes will need to be created in order for Macintosh Operating System 10.3.x or earlier to recognize the partitions.
Following on from my previous call for help on back-ups, anyone know of a filesystem I can use which is supported read-write by Linux, Windows and Mac OS X 10.3, and which will give me access to all of a 500GB disk?
Otherwise, out comes the partition editor…
Am I the only one bothered by the habit people in the free software community have to always use “females” or “female developers” when talking about women?
I can’t remember the last time I actually said “female” in conversation – it feels kind of like talking about one’s gluteus maximus instead of saying “arse” or “bum” – vaguely medical, and a little sterile.
If anyone wants to run a book on the FreeFA rematch, I figure that the odds on the various teams are (updated after news about Dodji):
The Red team from last year ran the blue team very close, and should probably have won their semi-final – they’ve kept most of their players from last year, and should be a force to reckon with. Zaheer Merali, Glynn Foster and Dodji Seketeli in particular played their socks off, and they’ll be up for it again this year.
Update: Dodji went to get a visa for GUADEC, and was given an appointment at the embassy on the 5th of September – so he won’t be in GUADEC. This sucks in so many ways – and it’s incredibly frustrating to see bureaucracy keep one of our community away from the conference.
The Black team made the final last year, and have some good talent on there (footie mad Bastien Nocera, in spite of being a bad loser ;-), stands out, as does Daniel Glassey, a rock in defense).
The Blue team have lost a few players from last year, including their inspirational defender (no, not me) Alvaro Del Castillo. They still have the extraordinary Fernando San Martin Woerner in goal, and with the likes of Alberto Ruiz, Rodrigo Moya and Juanjo Sanchez Penas, they will play well. They may make the final, but don’t expect them to win this year.
And finally the white team – completely renovated from last year – will be the dark horse, but as the unknown quantity, must figure as the underdog.
So – who’ll put me down for a tenner on the Red team?
I’m looking for a back-up solution which is easy to use. Ideally, I don’t want to have to decide what I need to back up and what I don’t – disk space is not an issue.
My dream app would be a graphical application which has back-up profiles – system configuration, personal data, application settings, media files, and maybe user-installed applications.
Ideally, I would be able to do incremental back-ups (à la rsync) where the weekly back-up will only be saving the new email, files and pr0n, and not the 30GB that was backed up first time round.
Also, a restore facility would be nice. In the past, when I have backed up files and had to restore, I have had issues because the user files were backed up for uid 501, and the corresponding account after installing the system anew was 502 (or something like that). I don’t want to have to think about user rights – I want to, as root, restore the system, and have user accounts, files, configuration all recreated as they were at the last back-up.
Anyone know of an easy one-click solution for Linux for the man who wants back-ups, but doesn’t want to have to think about them?
Update: I should probably mention that the back-ups will be to an external USB disk, and will be on-demand. I don’t want to leave the disk plugged in all the time, and I don’t want to have to think about plugging it in on Thursday evening to have the back-up done on Friday morning. Also, I’ll be backing up 3 different systems – including 2 on one double-boot machine. So ssh + rsync via a cron job is probably not the idel solution (but many thanks for the many people proposing it).
