Raw Matter

Luciano, you might be interested in how even good captchas can be processed automatically: just present them via some trojan to masses of unsuspecting users.

You should have written “w0e” and “a0s”. And I think Debian should secure itself a revenue stream by patenting this sophisticated text compression algorithm.

Is it a sign that Sam should post the next Bits? ;-)

I particularly like Marc's idea of a “liaison officer” to the other distributions in the Debian crowd. Can't say anything about that buildd and architecture issues, not knowing enough. Force-feeding the core teams more members is obviously a bad solution, but it's equally obvious that the current state of affairs should not continue. The “Vision of Debian” stuff should probably become a regular session at Debconf (based on the idea that face to face discussions are better than electronic ones, and that Debconf is truly the official meeting point for Debian, and that all important people should come to Debconf.)

Only losely related to how to deal with child projects: there are two solutions: lock them out or outrun them. (Somewhere I can't remember I read something like this.) Obviously, we don't want to lock them out. So ... I should get working. Gah. It always comes back to me not doing enough for Debian. Sorry, folks.

The Linux Foundation is running a survey on Linux use on the Desktop, some results of which are discussed in an article on Desktoplinux.

I have a small problem with this survey, though: While sync with mobile devices (PDA or smartphones) can be rated in question 16 and 17 (“What peripheral device support is required to meet your organization's desktop/client needs?” and “How important are the following potential issues to your organization's decision to migrate to Linux on the Desktop?”), I miss this category (and also the category PIM applications, independent of the sync issue) in the final question “Where should the Linux desktop community focus their efforts in 2008 to speed the adoption Linux on the desktop?“. Which is unfortunate, because fiddling with smartphones is the single biggest timewaster here.

Now I'm wondering: are we that leading edge to have people with smartphones who want them synced to the company groupware solution? Or are other groupware products so good that this simply is not an issue and we're just too stupid to notice?

Another omission in my opinion is in question 14 (“Which best represents your plans for running or replacing Windows applications on a Linux desktop/client?“): the use of terminal services ( Citrix and similar products.) can't be indicated. I see that only 3.5% picked, like me, “Other” as an answer, but I'm curious if that would be different were these tools given their own category. I know quite a few users of such solutions, so my intuitive feeling is that there's a number hiding....

Speaking of terminal services: is the Thin Client officially dead? Or is it just not interesting to the makers of this survey? While the questions do apply to both thin and thick client deployments, I am curious how many thin client deployments there are.

Since it's the topic of the day, apparently not only for me: Thanks to Michel Dänzer for filling in the missing link. Apparently this is one of the things that are so obvious when you're inside the git universe that the User's Manual (which is otherwise very good) didn't make it obvious to those who are not familiar with the subject matter yet. Thanks to madduck for elaborating a bit more on the subject, althoug I've figured out most of this stuff after Michel's hint for myself (but I had not discovered the --all switch to gitk yet.)

Summary: what I stumbled about was that the documentation is not explicit enough for me on how to track branches from several remote repos and that the error message is horrible if git can't resolve a ref. So the magic sequence of commands is “clone”, “remote add”, “fetch”, “checkout -b”, and I'm told explicit “--track” is not necessary for remote branches.

Logical, but very technical. I'm still not thrilled by the UI of this tool.

PostgreSQL 8.3 beta is out.

Remove CONVERT(argument USING conversion_name)
Although this syntax is required by the SQL standard, it's not clear what the standard expects it to do, except that it's most likely not what we were doing.

Intellectually, I mean. According to some Media outlets Ballmer (once again) declares war on the Free Software community. The technical “we are better” argument is apparently completely dropped (honesty, at last) and replaced by the pure “we have more money and patents”, this time not even thinly veiled in marketing speak.

But I don't think PJ is right when she sais that “FOSS can't survive in an IP regime such as Ballmer has laid before our eyes.”. We've all seen how successful the sue your own customers business model is. At this time, I think it's safe to say that most big Linux users are also big Microsoft customers because Linux in the enterprise still means primarily Linux on the Server, Windows on the Desktop, so going after the big Linux users will be exactly that. Going after the small Linux users is just not interesting. Going after hobbyist FOSS developers will not work because only using patented works commercially actually violates the patent, as far as I understand patent law. Going against the commercial Linux developers will work to some degree, so let's look at this closer: Software patents are strongest in the U.S., so in Europe it will be much harder for MS for one thing. And, Novell and Red Hat excluded (and IBM, who should be big enough to take on MS, especially since their lawyers by now have had extensive training in what Linux is abaut), the commercial Linux space is still dominated by small companies, so MS would have to overload the judges with thousands of small lawsuits all over the world, and since no two companies do exactly the same thing I doubt the lawsuit templating technique adapted by the RIAA for music downloads will work. And, finally, the nice thing about Open Source Software (using this term here on purpose): it's out in the open. So kill one company, its former employees will found three new ones because the former customers (even if they're scared and would like to get rid of their Free Software) will still need support because they can't all switch (back) to MS based environments immediately. And I haven't even talked about public opinion and what antitrust offices might have to say, because those are extremely hard to predict and their effects are uncertain.

So we finally need 64 bit CPUs in all our gadgets!

(After having seen OpenXchange's SyncML code fail horribly on dates that are beyond 2038, which is something you quickly arrive at if people enter birthdays as repeating appointments until infinity.)

Update: Neil Williams has some related information.