Alex Hudson

I’ve been waiting for litl to break cover for what seems like forever. The people seem to be all extremely smart, and it sounded like they had such a great idea, even if no-one knew what it was. However, engadget have seen some FCC information on a new “Easel” product from litl – and I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed, because it’s a netbook.

Of course, it almost certainly isn’t. The FCC photos take the extremely strange step of photographing it standing on the top screen edge: a position many netbooks wouldn’t be able to reach (some do, but not many). That, combined with a strange rubber insert along that top edge and a conveniently located power button make me think this thing is designed to spend much of it’s life in that position. Much like a photograph standing on the mantlepiece, this thing is probably designed to sit in your living space and “do stuff”. I could be wrong; the IR detector on the front of the keyboard is presumably needed for something, but there could be another built into the bezel somewhere (the FCC photos appear to show one). Interestingly, it’s designed by FIC apparently – the same people from whom OpenMoko spun out of.

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A horrible, horrible headline for an extremely interesting story: RMS is amongst one of those who has signed his name to a letter to the Commissioner for Competition and Director General Competition of the EU that the Oracle-Sun merger should not take place due to the harm that it would do to MySQL. I saw this via Joe Brockmeier’s posting on the subject, in which he reads the letter as essentially saying that the GPL is not good enough to protect MySQL – which I think is inferring the wrong idea from what’s written.

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Matt Asay has written another entertaining blog piece on his particular theories of open source economics, and Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann and he have engaged in what is superficially a bit of “Is not!” “Is too!“. Looking a bit deeper, though, it’s not really the pragmatics vs. the Stallmanites, even though that’s how Asay frames it.

Fundamentally, Tiemann is right on the money: a simplistic “supply and demand” view of how prices are set in a market place completely ignores the value that Red Hat offers to its customers. “Subscription” versus “box price” is not simply a semantic difference – indeed, that’s essentially labelling their customers as brand tarts unwilling to risk CentOS / Scientific Linux, and reduces the business decision to a simple money figure. That’s not how business works; the difference between “cheapest” and “best value” is huge.

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Let me start this by saying that I really, really want OpenMoko Inc. to be a raging success. With Android, Palm Pre and other “Linux phones” showing pretty how not to do things (jury’s out on N900 for me still), the properly free smartphone is an idea whose time is very definitely here. Sadly, with the freeping creaturism of the phone market and the need to develop both a hardware and software stack simultaneously, that didn’t seem to work out so well, so OM are now going to their backup plan: “WikiReader“.

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It’s difficult to tell apart the different factions of the people of Judea these days. On one hand, you have the Boycott Novellers, who post large amounts of “news” heavily rewritten to support their point of view, often with personal attacks on individuals and accompanied by Perez Hilton-style silly drawings. Sad, then, to see the new entrant – Boycott Boycott Novell – apparently chase after their namesakes with a personal attack on a free software developer and, of course, accompanying silly Hiltonesque.

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Apologies, but I couldn’t help but comment on this.

1. I don’t believe it’s broadcast delay. There is a delay there, but it’s of the order of seconds. His waffle at the end is about the same length. I don’t see what difference it would make – it could make the switch happen earlier (e.g., at 1:40 on the video above) but I don’t see any gain. With people analysing the video, it doesn’t really matter where it happens.
2. I don’t believe it’s split video. That’s horribly difficult to get right, I’m not sure anyone proposing it has actually tried it – particularly since they also broadcast this thing in HD. It’s also not very Derren Brown.
3. I don’t believe it’s a 55k take split. There’s no visible edit split – and there would have to be one, somewhere – and he knew he got all six at the end. The stuff Derren was saying about “sorry if I only get five right” – eh. This idea is plain nonsense.
4. I don’t believe it’s eInk etc. Not very Derren Brown. It’s certainly not projection or quickly stuck on numbers, either.
5. I don’t believe there is a hidden wall. The balls cast a shadow on Derren; if it’s a wall it’s exceptional.
6. I don’t believe there is anything dodgy about the stand. Looks like perspex to me, and the ball’s labels are pointed up and out.
7. I don’t believe the “last ball moved a bit” stuff. The last number out was the 2; which is actually the ball on the far right when they’re turned. If the balls had been replaced, the 2 would be the last in / labelled, so the ball on the far left as it’s turned around should be the one raised…
8. I don’t believe he predicted anything, or used statistics, or that the balls in the lottery were influenced.
9. I don’t believe he palmed the balls. Not enough time, not physically possible.
10. I don’t believe he’s holding anything in front of the balls. The labels are on the surface of the balls.
11. Finally, I don’t believe he’s actually going to give us any insight into how this trick was performed. The fact that people are hanging on the little ball moving or the video thing – clutching at straws. This was a good trick

However.. what I would say…

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That’s apparently what a group of UK inventors are asking for. On the face of it, their arguments are pretty hard to dismiss: if you have a patent, it is extremely costly to “enforce” it and essentially means it’s only open to the big boys.

Sadly, the article doesn’t really talk much about patent quality or the goals of the patent system, and although it brings up the problem of accidental infringement / independent invention, it doesn’t really explore any possible solutions. Certainly, we do seem to have a system which requires a severe overhaul at the moment, though.

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For various reasons, I’ve been playing with Clutter over the past week. Rather than the 1.0 release that was announced a little while ago, I’m still on 0.8 – for a number of reasons, but mainly because 1.0 isn’t really available in any distro yet, and because the various language bindings are not yet up to date. LWN has a pretty decent write-up of the 1.0 release (subscriber only for the next week).

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Recently, we changed the build system of Bongo – we’ve moved away from autotools. This isn’t to say that autotools is necessarily that deficient, but the new CMake system we’re using is a lot more suitable for our kind of project. This has brought some immediate benefits – much simpler build system, much quicker compiles and installations (‘make install’ in particular is now much faster), and a slightly simpler source tree. We can also now build binaries out-of-source, which is a huge boon.

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MJ Ray has some interesting thoughts on the recent discussion of BoycottNovell’s lash out at people criticising RMS’ GCDS keynote. For the sake of being open, my reaction to RMS’ speech (which I didn’t see) was that it sounded pretty distasteful: I don’t think there was any sexist intent, but the choice of words was pretty poor.

I think a key problem with BoycottNovell is that it left the lands of “corporate judo” a long time ago: motivating people to spend (or not) their money is one thing (to be applauded – it’s a basic tenet of capitalism, after all), and telling people why they shouldn’t buy a certain company’s products empowers them to make better choices. Rallying against individuals rather than the corporation, though, rather crosses that line.

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