Great news for the Open Source/Free Software community is that Nokia is basically giving patent indemnity to any potential patent infringements that the Linux kernel developers may have committed.
I always had a good feeling about Nokia, and this just adds to the warm fuzziness. Now they really need to focus on building better phones, especially a Linux based phone…
Just to add to our woes as described on Cherryflava’s site, Cherry managed to miss the fact that the Musica download site, on top of being hugely incompatible with the target market for music downloads, is also hosted in the United Kingdom – fat lot of good that does for us international-bandwidth restricted suckers in South Africa.
Wednesday saw me writing my level 2 LPI exams at LinuxWorld in Sandton, Johannesburg, which gave me the perfect opportunity to dash around the expo (the conference was, unfortunately, outside of my budget).
So we’ll start with the Futurex portion…
Boring. Boring. Boring. I don’t think that barcode printers or scanners are the future. I don’t think that Telkom is the future – their stand was particularly intimidating. I don’t think that iBurst capped 3gig wireless internet is the future. I don’t think that CD-labelling is the future. In fact, CD-Labelling has lost its market completely to the magic marker, with the exception of a few special cases (e.g. burnt pirate copies etc). No, Futurex was not the future.
On to LinuxWorld…
Here it seemed the guys were a bit cramped for space if anything – the Novell pavilion was jam packed with many different partners providing various Linux services, but there was little structure, and I don’t consider a distro running on a laptop to be any sort of demo. Unfortunately I did not manage to get my hands on a Novell Desktop CD, although those who were there earlier got copies.
My loot for the day turned out to be ImpiLinux (a distro I cannot install because doing so violates the GPL), an IBM presentation CD and one other arbitrary CD. I did however manage to get a Shuttleworth Foundation ‘build your own tux’, an Obsidian Systems executive propeller-toy, and if I’d had CDs on me could have burnt to my hearts content on the Freedom Toaster. Ok yes, to tell the truth I was practically in-your-face-take-it-or-die’d by the Impi guy – a bit of an aggressive marketer I guess. I walked away a little shaken.
I think the most interesting thing for me was how many Linux startups are now pushing to create another bubble. Time will tell how many survive, but these guys are leading the pack, which is not a bad thing. I guess another part of my attitude is that being halfway through LPI level 2, there isn’t much these guys can do to excite me in the Free Software space – I’ve excited myself enough, and blogs and sourceforge do the rest.
Ultimately I went to do what I aimed to do – I wrote my Level 2 LPI exams and time will soon tell how successful that was.
When RFC1149 was originally published on April 1 1990, it seemed that the entry barrier to implementing this method of encapsulation was too high. But as always in technology, time has seen change and it took a mere 11 years for a working implementation of TCP IP over Avian Carriers to surface.
Now with the advent of higher speed technologies such as ADSL, experiments in optimisation have been conducted on this protocol. The result: Carrier Pigeon is FASTER than ADSL!
Further biological carrier experiments were conducted a year later, with the discovery that even snails are faster than ADSL. Now that is progress far superceding even the likes of Moore’s law, I believe.
So according to the Spamhaus project, whose spam realtime blacklists I have just implemented, SAIX.net has at least five listings for hosting spam relays.
See them here.
I’m not going to bypass these blacklists for the sake of one or two adsl clients that use my mail servers, they must complain to Telkom. It is not my problem.
Good old Telkom hard at work again…