Like Eating Glass

Well, in a follow up to my previous post, I guess if I am going to admonish the bad, I must praise the good as well. So, fortunately, this story posted on news.com is a decent description of the situation and not some sensational scare peace. Joris Evers, should be commended for writing up such a concise and non-FUD spreading piece. Kudos!

People are Stupid, Yet Again

People, especially so called "journalist" need to learn to calm the fuck down. Earlier today Mauricio points out to me this story about Jon Johansen "hacking" Google Video. For God's sakes, all he did was remove 5 lines of code, which might I add, are freely available , as in open source, on google's code site. To add insult to injury, the google video player is nothing but a bunch of patches to VLC, which Jon works on already anyway. Oooh, an open source hacker modifying his own code! Quick someone call the US Department of Justice and Interpol. This is horse shit.

Ryan Naraine, you my man are truly an idiot and worthy of the title "Connecticut People." This article is nothing less than sensational journalism which should be retracted immediately. People should not be allowed to write misleading stories like this.

Providence and Anti-Providence

So last week Joe basically all but dragged me to the state of Rhode Island to go this "awesome" mall in Providence. Well let me just say that my list of states that suck has just grown by one. I decided to go because I needed a large picture frame to house my digital picture frame project and I figured an "awesome" mall would most likely have at least one place to buy a picture frame. Boy, was I wrong. The mall sucked so badly. It was really big with lots of room, but no good stores whatsoever. It also took a century to walk from one side of the mall to the other, which was exacerbated by the fact that you need to pass 5 Abercrombie and Fitch stores and listen to the blazing really really bad music. Not to mention that they had elevators that only go up one floor, when there are like 4 in the mall. Smart, real smart.

Also, Connecticut, you are not alone. People in Rhode Island seem to not know how to drive either, as Melissa can attest to. This has led me to the conclusion that pretty much ever state in New England has inept drivers. They insist on driving at 45mph in the left lane, not yielding, and subsequently screaming, honking, and yelling at you when you cut them off. Connecticut is by far the worst offender and I have therefore coined the term, "Connecticut People," henceforth to refer to people who are bungling, clumsy and incompetent.

Lastly, I must say that I am extremely sad today. Maybe more on that to follow, Maybe not.

FUDConIII Call for Locations

We are currently researching the possibility of having a third FUDCon take place around the time of LinuxWorld San Fran, Aug 8-11. Therefore, we are looking for institutions in the area, and there are many, who would be interested in possibly hosting us. The only main prerequisites are as follows:

1. We prefer it to be an academic institution if at all possible.
2. That it be reasonably close to San Francisco proper, although exceptions might be made if there are sufficient transportation options.
3. The institution and/or it's constituents are involved in some way, shape, or form with Linux, Open Source and obviously, preferably Fedora.

If you think your place fits the above criteria and would be willing to host a FUDCon please click here to send email to both myself and fedora-marketing-list and let us know.

The Endian of an Era

So obviously there is much controversy all over the computing world about Apple's announcement, as well there should be. It seems as though Apple has finally decided it should be targeting mass markets, too, since Jobs said they plan on having more offerings like the Mac Mini. Personally, I think Apple did the right thing. Hopefully the PPC architecture will still live on somewhere other than XBOX 360 and handhelds.

Also, John C. Dvorak, here, made it a point to mention that he now thinks Linux will be hit significantly harder than any other operating systems due to Apple's shift. He predicts that many developers will forgo writing and distributing open source software for Linux since they can now do it for Mac and they have better user interfaces and more intuitive design. He also says that some never really cared much for open source and now can develop for OS X and sell their code for profit. Well, I disagree completely. People who write open source software do so for many more reasons other than eye candy, ideology or profit. I'm not going to get into it but great organizations doing great things, similar to Summer of Code, will ensure that there is a healthy stream of high quality FOSS developers for years to come.

Dvorak's final comment was that he sees this as a major threat to Red Hat and it's business. Now, I've been a Dvorak fan for quite some time, but I must say, this is pure crack. Anyone who knows anything about Red Hat's business model would surely know that the markets for RHEL and OS X are so completely different, they shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence. What Dvorak fails to see is that many more people are replacing UNIX with Linux and not Windows with Linux. So barring Apple allowing installation of their server offering on stock hardware, I really don't see why Red Hat or any other Linux centric product distributor should be worried. Apple is still way to closed minded to begin thinking about expanding to the mainstream server or embedded markets.

Otherwise, haven't been up to much lately. Working on getting some python/xmlrpclib foo to work with some graphing foo to make some pretty pictures of things. Also, spent a fair bit of time trying to troubleshoot broken hardware today. As Warren mentioned in a post a few days ago, broken hardware sucks, it took forever trying millions of combinations of hardware to finally figure out what was wrong. What's even worse than broken hardware is when manufacturers decide to change specs mid production without changing revisions. This makes problems significantly harder than they need to be.

Oh well, fun fun fun.