Aaron Seigo on free vs proprietary software

Aaron Seigo, a prominent KDE hacker was recently interviewed about the difference between free software and proprietary software. He comments on the interview himself here. Open standards are very important in my opinion and Aaron Seigo have some really good insight into the problems you are likely to experience when using proprietary standards. You can see the interview in the link to his blog above.

How much is 6000 pages?

6000 pages is what Microsofts OOXML specification fills and some Czech guy decided to cut down a forest or two and print it all out!

BTW - with the help of Dan, Jirka and Filip, we were able to "print" the complete OOXML specification, bind it in six volumes (1000 sheets per volume) and we brought it with us to the workshop. It was a bit heavy, but I was lucky enough to find parking place in very short distance to ČNI offices (without the knowledge of where the offices exactly are, in the centre of Prague, I still can't believe it ;-) - have you ever seen 75 cm tall "tower" from paper? We have many photos from the workshop and will publish them as soon as possible, so you'll be able to see it soon.

[...]

I have read approx. 200 pages of the specification and I decided to stop, because it is dangerous. The ideas presented in various parts of the specification (like two ways to represent the date - one of them representing dates between 1900 and 20000 and another one to represent dates between 1904 and 20000 where the second one is a complete subset of the first one!) are dangerous to the mental health of the reader. The innovative method of storing the language code (e.g. the decimal integer 58380 into two digit hexadecimal number) is also worth a world-wide patent...

I simply can't believe that developers and or TC45 members from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress actually read the final document. I can't believe it. If I ever write such document, I surely won't sign it by my name. Why?

Powermanagement in Linux

Here I am, running Kubuntu on my Thinkpad laptop and it works pretty well. One thing I'm not too impressed with though is powermanagement but I did know it was being worked and the latest kernel had some improvements in that regard. It seems this is a focus area for the next release of Ubuntu and the improvements in the kernel is certainly helping:

Tickless kernel. The new dynticks and hi-res timers make a *huge* difference. Ben Collins mentioned 30 - 40 minutes of extra battery life with dynticks and hi-res timers enabled. This stuff is new in 2.6.21, and already in the Gutsy kernel. dynticks also make it possible for the CPU to sleep much more. Another thing that's important in that respect is HPET, basically doing something similar, but less effective. Every bit helps, however.

Read the rest of Sebastian Küglers post.

Oh...I almost forgot, but I want to repeat what is said in that post: Avoid ATI (now AMD) graphics cards/chips - their support for Linux sucks bigtime! It seems they simply just don't care. Vote with your wallet guys - buy Intel, they provide proper open source drivers!

The Remains of Kursk Submarine

Via PHK's blog I just found these pictures of the Kursk Submarine. I'm amazed at how big that thing is (was?). I have been inside the German U-505 from the WW2 which can been seen at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Compared to that, Kursk is *huge* - no doubt a very impressive piece of engineering (except for the part that made it sink).

Yet another post about why open standards matter

What was one of the major reasons why the web became a succes? Easy: Everything you needed was freely available and it has made the web into what it is today. Of course there are problems but nothing is perfect. One of the major problems is proprietary code and formats. The major one currently is Adobe Flash. It wasn't until recently that Adobe released Flash version 9 for Linux which for most people might be good enough, but it is only available for 32bit so 64 bit users are out of luck. Of course you could argue that they are the lucky ones ;)

Now it seems the fight has increased since both Adobe and Microsoft have released various web stuff of which some of it is open source, but it is far from ideal which is very nicely summed up by Mark Pilgrim on his blog:

Springtime means conference time, which means it’s silly season on the web again. Adobe introduced Apollo, their latest attempt to recreate the web in their own image. Apollo is based on Adobe’s own markup language, Adobe’s own runtime, Adobe’s own graphics and animation framework, Adobe’s own video and audio codecs, and Adobe’s own developer tools. You can do many things with it, but “you may not sublicense or distribute the Software. … You may not modify, adapt, translate or create derivative works based upon the Software. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software. … You may not install or use the Software on any non-PC device or with any embedded or device version of any operating system.” It requires at least Windows XP SP 2 or Mac OS X 10.4.

Microsoft is using more or less the same restrictions, but I recommend reading the rest of his blog post/rant. The advice: Stay far away from these products. I totally agree.