Raw Matter

Does anybody have any connections to Sybase? If so, could you nudge the developers to fix their JDBC driver, please? Returning bogus metadata is stupid, especially since Oo.org respects the metadata it gets fromt he JDBC driver...

Apparently it's the time for me to strengthen my dislike of some technologies by reading rants from other people with similar opinions...

Many artists use the problems of current society for inspiration. I am therefore optimistic in the sense that if artists are seeing freedom as a serious problem in the post 9/11 world, others outside of tech-oriented circles will finally notice as well. Bruce Schneier pointed out TSA Gangstaz a few weeks ago and now Frontalot's Secrets From The Future (the latter is even offered as an Ogg file, and the lyrics shows surprisingly deep technical understanding, so these guys seem to really care about this issue.)

Anybody working on art related to patent or copyright law? (Not a rethorical question, this blog does have a comments feature!)

Notwithstanding my recent nod to a sceptical article about Linux on the average user's desktop, I think that Linux has already won the “war” where it's important, namely in the minds of many people. (Yes, this is a response to Russel's posting with the same title.)

Why? Because, first, many people do indeed see it as a war where there has to be a winner and a loser, and second, when I talk with people who never have seen Linux, or with people who'd never seriously consider switching to Linux (in business or for their home needs), most of them talk about not having tried it yet or it not being ripe yet. So the general expectation is that they'll only stick with (expensive, buggy, hated, ...) Microsoft software until they feel confident about switching. So the task is not to convince them that they should try Linux, but that they might want to try it now. Or at least that they might want to try Oo.org, the Mozilla family of programs, the Gimp etc. on Windows, so that they have an easy time when it's time to change the chassis underneath (is there a Windows port of Digikam?)

Hats off to Bruce Schneier for this funny title. Some of the comments are quite funny as well.

Somebody called Pigeon has posted a truly outstanding contribution to the debate on what kind of content is adequate for packaging as a Debian package to the debian-curiosa mailing list (this time the debate apparently is if Dopewars is ok, in other instances, the debate was about other games or the text of the Bible.)

Another week has been spent in a repetition course in the military. Readers of my blog will know that this means playing poker (I lost about CHF 7 this week — we just play for fun at CHF 5 for 50 chips) and watching movies. Tron and Kill Bill Vol. 1 from my collection, and the extremely funny Adams æbler which I didn't know before. The story centers around a neo-nazi serving some time in some kind of rehab in a church where, it is soon discovered, the priest in charge of the whole thing is not that much in charge, even of himself. I'm told that I also should watch I Kina spiser de hunde by the Danish Anders Thomas Jensen (writer and director of Adams æbler, writer of In China they eat dogs.)

Also recently watched Casino Royale (the recent Bond movie. I haven't seen the 1967 one yet.) and The Gold Rush: the 1942 version with added spoken narrative and music by Chaplin. The DVD does contain the original 1925 silent movie, too, where especially the ending is a bit different. And finally lots of episodes of Ну, погоди! (Nu, pogodi!), which was the Soviet equivalent to Tom and Jerry (not a clone, it is entirely different.) I can highly recommend this to everybody who likes cartoons.

Apparently (newspaper article is in german, Tagesanzeiger from today) somebody couldn't wait another few hours. He escaped from prison in Belgrade on the last day of his sentence. With him, another guy who had one week to go and one who had one month left also tried to escape but were caught. One wonders ...

I think that Matt Hartley is spot on on his Top 10 Linux Desktop Hurdles. Commented:

1. Regression testing is hard. Assuring that hardware that worked will still work in the next version of the distribution is where many Linux distributions fall down. At least I think Debian here does better than some others.
2. Mobile devices. I've written about this already some months ago. I want to just plug in my smartphone and sync it with my calendar application. I don't think this is too much to ask.
3. Software compatibility. I don't do video editing and I'm comfortable with the Gimp, but I witness people having difficulties with OpenOffice.org all day. Mostly, it's because either they were MS Office power users and stuff like form letters are different between the packages, or it is because the state issues silly form/macro based MS Office documents.
4. Wireless. Hmm. I haven't had real problems with Wireless in quite some time. But then, I know that I need to watch what kind of hardware I buy, so YMMV.
5. Hardware compatibility lists. Debian doesn't have one, so that's apparently a good starting point ;-)
6. Compiling drivers. I don't understand this complaint. The user should never even come to the point where he needs to compile a driver. But I think here Debian with module-assistant is quite good.
7. The Patent Trap a.k.a. I Want To Watch DVDs. This is a serious issue, and will probably not be going away unless some heavy duty political stuff is happening. Organisations like PubPat and the new End Software Patents initiative will help. In my opinion, though, these are not taking it far enough. Patents are monopolies granted by the state — in all other areas (post, railways, telecommunications), it has been agreed that monopolies are bad, so why not just abolish the broken idea of patents, too?
8. Off the Shelf Software. Hmm. My clientele is not the lone Linux user at home but the business user who has an IT support dept, so I don't see this issue for me.

Issues #9 and #10 is just “the community sucks” in nicer words. He's not wrong as such, but I think Matt's view is pessimistic on these.