With all due respect, Nokia totally blew it, with new firmware. Servers are DDOSed. People complain, share the files using own hostings, they use torrents (why would Nokia not establish own torrent?). And new exciting canola2 release does not improve the situation either… The new firmware rocks, I must admit. The IT organization is poor, that’s a very sad fact.
I guess, a number of people would find this report interesting and insightful…
Yesterday, there was a “tarballs due” date for 2.21.4. A day before I realized that wonderful layout printing code (kindly contributed by Ed Catmur, all my gratitude and respect) should be shared – it does not belong to g-c-c but should be generalized in libgnomekbd. So, yesterday night, an hour before the deadline, libgnomekbd 2.21.4.1 was released (there was libgnomekbd 2.21.4 a week ago) – with one new function in API. Now, both g-c-c and g-a in svn depend on libgnomekbd 2.21.4.1 (the last .1 is essential, hehe!). In return, they both offer layout printing functionality, isn’t it nice?
Installed OS2008 on n800. Really sexy interface. And it seems a bit faster than it was. Some minor issues (which are just matter of time to see resolved, I hope):
In general, it is pretty slick piece of software – and gives n800 a second life (and again, raises a question for any person going to buy n810 for a full price – why pay SO much more?).
Likewise, countless contributors’ first experience of the GNOME organization has been an attempt to have their blog added to the Planet GNOME page. The board has allowed Jeff Waugh total control over this, so their first experience is usually to be ignored, then to be accused of lying, and often to be abused. Some of them give up at the first stage, and I can’t blame them. You don’t hear their thanks.
Thanks, Murray
That was the book I learned the physics with, back in … well, long ago:). Quality Russian translation. Good hardcover edition. Big thanks to both the author and translators. But … it seems it is not available online (I looked for any English edition). Not published/updated since 80s. So the big question for me now is what would be equally good for my kids. Well written, easy for understanding (but not too easy – without cutting too many corners)… Swartz had a good sense of style, I think…
Thanks Nokia. I really do appreciate it.
The things got more interesting when I changed original nv 5200 fx to ati 9800 pro. First, the wrapping effect immediately disappeared (does it mean ati and nv drivers read DDC dirrefently)? Second, the output is now _deadly_ slow. Scrolling (one line!) in xchat window is visible (takes a good fraction of second!). Tried both XAA and EXA acceleration. It seems something important is missing… DRI is also a mistery – in Xorg.0.log it is said to be enabled but glxinfo clams it is not.
Looking for some repository with xorg 7.3 for gutsy – may be it would help.
Got brand new Dell 2407WFP-HC. Great stuff – great image, color, everything… The only thing which slightly annoys is that the image is horizontally wrapped (in Linux only, not in MacOS). Either DDC provides wrong info (no modelines in xorg.conf) or the adapter (or nv driver) are broken somehow…
There is information floating around that RMS is going to visit Russia in February or March 2008. The invitation is organized under patronage of well-known Russian politician Colonel Viktor Alksnis. Since my blog is aggregated on highly visible planet.gnome.org and planet.freedesktop.org I feel obliged to express my concerns about that coming event.
Before making any commitments, RMS should have checked the people who he deals with. Viktor Alksnis (nicknamed as “Black Colonel”) is a politician who became famous back in late 80s for his fight (including military methods) against the independence of the Baltic countries. Since that time he constantly and invariably represented so called “patriotic” (effectively meaning “imperial”) parties and forces in Russian politics. In his own words, his way of thinking was always imperial, and he always regrets about the empire he lost (USSR). Of course, most of the information about that person is in Russian, but still he is reasonably well described in Wikipedia.
These days, Col. Alksnis founded a movement for the creation of “National OS”. This is entirely within his patriotic political line. Once he discovered that GNU/Linux is free and available to anyone for modification and improvements (BTW initially Linux was not the only candidate), he evidently decided it would be a good idea to become a political leader and political face of Free Software in Russia. This is despite the fact there are companies and people in Russia who are involved into OSS for years and made huge contributions by code and real working projects.
The ideas of “National OS” are about patriotism, economical value and economical independence or Russia, rather than about freedom of software. The freedom is just a property of the software. That property provides “National OS” with the qualities it needs. That is where my main concern lies – Col Alksnis does not really share the ideas of FSF, he obuses them to implement his political agenda.
I am absolutely confident that a visit of RMS into Russia would be a great event, very useful for FOSS movement in our country, attracting a lot of attention and helping our communities. But I have serious doubts the company of Viktor Alksnis would be beneficial for the public view of such visit, RMS and FSF in general. There are many people (especially liberally-oriented intellectuals) who already have their brows highly raised while talking about that strange “friendship”. If RMS is really interested in getting into our big country, I’d strongly recommend him to deal only with the people who’ve already proved their commitment to the ideas of FOSS. For example, the companies which promote Linux for years (and which recently formed the Linux alliance). There are also universities which could organize invitations, there are computer-related media companies. I could help getting contacts, names etc (for the record, I am not affiliated with any of these companies:) That would be the proper company for RMS in Moscow, St.Petersburg and other parts of Russia. But please beware of Russian internal politics and politicians…
I hope that somehow the information I provided here would reach the eyes/ears of RMS and FSF – and they would think about it all.