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• Desktop Porn

  
  
  Tue Jul 8

• Propaganda

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  Protect your freedom!

  
  
  
  

• Small print in big fat letters

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

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Today I learned that Linspire and Canonical have just announced a significant partnership. Both companies produce a Debian-based desktop distribution, but they approach the problem of bringing Linux to the masses differently. Ubuntu proclaims to be first and foremost a Free Software distribution, while Linspire boasts with its proprietary drivers and codecs to make all the evil file formats and mystery hardware work out of the box.

A combination of both would be ideal from the user’s point of view, wouldn’t it? Free OS for humans who just wants stuff to work. This deal could bring such an OS closer to Ubuntu users. Here’s the shortest possible version of the FAQ issued by the companies:

• In the future, Linspire will be based on Ubuntu rather than directly on Debian
• Linspire’s Click-N-Run service will be available on Ubuntu so that users can easily get proprietary drivers multimedia codecs and applications on their systems

I don’t know enough about Linspire to be able to say much about what this means to them. It might well be easier for them to build desktop-only systems on Ubuntu and have some of the Humanization work already done for them.

For Ubuntu, the integration of CNR could solve one of the most pressing problems: the Evil Proprietary Driver and Codec problem.

• Canonical can ship a 100% free distribution and users will know their operating system is not evil when they install it
• Users can, if they wish, easily install whatever proprietary stuff they need / want and purchase appropriate licenses for them (if Click-N-Run lives up to its name, it must be easy). No more system and upgrade breakage after newbies try to find and install their “essential” flash plugin or WMA codec.

So, all in all this is probably a good deal for both distributions and companies, and the users of both.

I’ts fun enough to let machines translate a piece of text to another language and then back again, to see what happens to the meaning.

I hope not too many english speakers die laughing when they get their hands on this Revenge of the Sith DVD.

(19:04:49) Vuen: Chewbacca is made with curly brackets
(19:04:50) Vuen: omfg
(19:04:53) Vuen: i’m loling my ass off
(19:07:04) topyli: this is too nerdy. watching ascii star wars over telnet, with another nerd on irc
(19:07:10) Vuen: hahaha
(19:07:21) Vuen: yep this is up there with the nerdiest things i’ve ever done
(19:07:56) sharperguy: i want some e-corn

You can watch the ASCII Star Wars by telnetting to towel.blinkenlights.nl

North Korea’s nuclear experiment has effects on the Internet too, of course. I think this GIF was inevitable. Leaders really should take more responsibility of their actions. Don’t they see that whenever they’re acting stupid, the Interweb will place sanctions immediately, and the sanctions have a devastating effect on netizens’ productivity!

Thanks to tigert for the discovery.

I never post jokes on my blog (being the serious fellow I am,) but I have to make an exception for the Best Blonde Joke Ever!

Tony Mobily wrote a controversial editorial for the latest Free Software Magazine, envisioning Red Hat’s demise in front of the rise of Ubuntu Linux. This is suppposed to happen because Red Hat has abandoned desktop users, who often are also systems administrators, who in turn have some say in which server OS they want to run and maintain. Given that Ubuntu now has a very nice server system to offer as well, Mobily sees Red Hat’s user base and business slipping to Ubuntu in the future.

While Ubuntu may well be “the first desktop GNU/Linux done right,” and they now have “Ubuntu Server, which—again, guess what?—is a GNU/Linux server system done right,” I don’t see Red Hat going away any time soon. It’s still the biggest enterprise Linux, and that’s exactly what Ubuntu is not and, if Ubuntu SABDFL Mark Shuttleworth’s rebuttal is to be believed (if it is, we don’t know for sure,) is not trying to produce in the near future:

My own view is that Red Hat will continue to do well in the specific areas that they have targeted - they are extremely well established in the high-availability enterprise Linux server market, and it will take some years before Ubuntu can make the same claim.

Our focus is different to that of Red Hat - we want to ensure that there are free (in both FSF and economic senses) platforms for commodity requirements, like desktops and typical web or email of HPC servers, where the existing free software stack does everything that people typically want.

There are of course the “some years” after Ubuntu may well be able to claim to be “well established in the high-availability server market” in the above quote, but personally I don’t think Ubuntu is going to eat Red Hat’s server market share very much. A well supported Debian-based server is very much needed, but I doubt this need exists so much among the current Red Hat clients.

If you can read this, thank your sysadmin!

Today is the Systems Administrator Appreciation day. So let’s all remember and thank all the hard working sysadmins who have dedicated their professional lives to maintaining and improving our networks and systems. "Sometimes we don’t know our System Administrators as well as they know us." That alone is reason enough to be nice to them ;-)

MetaFilter reports on the neatest hack I’ve heard about for a while. A BBC systems architect wrote a Last.fm plugin that submitted all the songs played on BBC’s 6radio channel to a Last.fm account called Sekrit.  Not only can you see what kind of "musical taste" BBC’s player robots have, but you can also check out what kind of friends the channel has. Judging from these statistics, I just might try this channel myself and see if I like it :)
 

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