Friday, May 28, 2004

Digital Camera and Linux -- 7:15 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

My wife and I took the plunge into digital photography today and bought a Canon PowerShot A80. It's a pretty nice little four-megapixel camera that will do everything automagically if you want, but it also allows a lot of manual control for the shutterbug set. Thankfully, I got it working pretty easily in Linux with the help of gPhoto. The big thing was just showing hotplug what to do with it (which would have been easy, if I had just read the FAQ first). I want to get a relatively big (~256M) and fast Compact Flash card and reader so I don't have to use gPhoto. It's not that gPhoto or any of the front ends are bad, it's just that the camera transfer speed is kind of slow and it eats up the batteries. Nice to know it works in a pinch though. In case you wonder why I chose the A80, this review should explain it.

ESR Responds to Samizdat -- 4:44 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Somebody with either an extraordinary sense of humor or a death wish at the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution sent Eric Raymond 92 pages of Kenneth Brown's Samizdat: And Other Issues Regarding the `Source' of Open Source Code, the book attacking Linus Torvalds and the open source movement in general. Naturally, ESR had to respond. The first sentence should tip you off as to what his opinion is:

Judging by these excerpts, this book is a disaster.

The more I hear from him, the more I like him. Thanks Slashdot.

J.t.Qbe comments: You must not have heard/read too much from ESR, then.

And while we're at it, Andy Tanenbaum posted an email he received from Alexey Toptygin, the man Brown hired to compare the Minix and Linux code bases. You can read his results for yourself. Much to Brown's chagrin, he found no evidence of stolen code. Surprise, surprise. The interesting thing in all of this is that all of these attacks are giving people the opportunity to really look at the Linux source and proclaim it clean. The enemies of Linux may be unintentionally becoming the ones who clear its name.

Next Xbox to Be Full PC? -- 9:26 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

From the "Gee, I never expected this" department, Microsoft is studying whether or not to make the Xbox 2 a full fledged PC. $599 is quite steep for a console but cheap for a gaming PC. I wonder how much DRM they would slap on this bad-boy to keep people from, say, running Linux on it. Seems to me that I predicted that this sort of thing might happen. Thanks Blue's News.

The Master comments: I was really surprised when they didn't release the "PC pack" for the XBox after some set period of time, so I guess I'm not surprised by this at all.

Flash 7 for Linux -- 9:19 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Macromedia has finally updated their Flash player for Linux to version 7. You can download it here. According to the press release, this version includes performance and security improvements. I had removed Flash 6 from my box since it was such a performance hog. I'll try it again for a while and see how it goes. It does seem to have improved some video/audio syncing issues. Thanks Slashdot.

Thursday, May 27, 2004

More Sun Schizophrenia -- 1:32 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Sun President Jonathan Schwartz goes on the warpath, proclaiming that Red Hat is proprietary while Java is better. *insert your own joke here* Thankfully, eWeek got Eric Raymond to answer these "arguments" in his own inimitable style. Here's my favorite ESR quote:

"So, in Mr. Schwartz's universe, the fact that I may have to type, 'configure; make; install' is a bigger anti-competitive barrier than binaries I can't see inside? In other breaking news, war is peace and freedom is slavery. Mr. Schwartz has a lucrative career waiting at Orwell's 'Ministry of Truth' after Sun goes belly-up, something I'm back to thinking it will do shortly with a mind like this at the helm."

It's good to know that as SCO is going down the tubes, we still have Sun to provide us with our technology entertainment. Thanks Linux Today.

ut2004@icculus.org FAQ Update -- 9:45 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I updated my unofficial ut2004@icculus.org FAQ with information on the 3204 patch for Unreal Tournament 2004 in Linux as well as other handy links for more information. I also want to thank Linux Games for their unsolicited plug for my FAQ. Thanks, guys!

Past Two Days' News

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