Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral. A little obvious but I couldn't let this one pass.
( See here if you missed the entertainment as it happened. )
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Biography
Ryan Cartwright heads up Equitas IT Solutions who offer fair, quality and free software based solutions to the voluntary and community (non-profit) and SME sectors in the UK. He is a long-term free software user, developer and advocate. You can find him on Twitter and Identi.ca.
Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.
TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?
DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.
Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.
I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels
A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was "Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for". His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of entertainers in Perth, a company set to use Drupal to take over the world with Entertainers.Biz.
Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!
More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.
When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.
Sure, anybody can buy laptops, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But... is that the full story?
It dawned on me the other day, as I was shopping for the dozens of gifts it seems I have to buy every December, that Santa Claus is the most successful open source project in history. (Bridget @ Illiterarty would agree with that). Santa Claus is essentially a marketing development that is embodied by everyone who stuffs a sock, gives a gift, hosts a dinner or wishes Merry Christmas over the holiday season.
When I first started thinking about Free Software Magazine, I was feeling enthusiastic about the dream. I had Dave, Gianluca, and Alan willing to help me, I had established members of the free software community willing to help me out, I had writers volunteering their time and energy for free, and I had a generous offer from OpenHosting for servers, all before I'd proved myself. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I could make this work.
Comments
Cheap
This is, and I think that this is the case with several of these stripes, an extremely cheap shot.
If we were to contrast this with all the times that an X server died, we would not be particularly proud.
The previous cartoon where he stashes a live CD in the computer when he returns it was great, though.
__
FSF member no. 6426
Of course it is
Hi,
you are right that it's a cheap shot but it's cartoon humour (well it's supposed to be) and it's about the battle of words between these two particular fanboys. This kind of "cheap shot" jibe happens quite a bit between me and my Windows using friends - in Britain we call it banter. As it happens most of my Windows using friends thought the Olympics BSOD was hilarious and one of them sent me the link to the image as I missed it.
Yes I could cite several situations where my X-server has died unceremoniously but I can't honestly think of a three panel strip to write about them. Also I don't know of any so public as this which was probably the "entertaining" bit. It could be said that the previous strip was a cheap shot at Debian users as well.
I'm aware that the strips so far are a little one-sided but this is Free Software Magazine after all. Also I am planning to redress the balance a little as I did in strip 17.
thanks for your feedback though.
Ryan
Debian?
Did you mean "against SuSE users"?
Otherwise, the Debian slam just went right over my head.
Of course this was a cheap shot, but what else are political cartoons for?
Based on the link you posted though, it was unclear to me whether this BSOD thing at the Olympics really happened or not. An awful lot of the posters on that site seemed to think it was faked. OTOH, some claimed to have "confirmed" it. Unfortunately, I have no idea whether to trust any of their opinions.
It is kind of scary how "photographic documentary evidence" just isn't as trustworthy as it used to be. I mean I understand it would be hard to fake something like this -- but then, I could probably do it if I really wanted to. Once upon a time we accepted a photo as nearly absolute proof. Not anymore!
No I meant Debian
What I meant was that it could be considered to be a cheap shot at the fact that most Debian users value the freedom it gives and thus would consider it an outrage to have their machine "infected" by SuSE. Personally I don't know any Debian users who would react that strongly - but caricature is a basic cartoon device.
But my real point was that I wasn't being that deep. It was just supposed to be that the sheep found a good way to get back at the dog. Similarly this strip wasn't directly being some political comment on how often or publicly Windows gives the BSOD, it was just banter between a Windows and Debian user. If I wanted to make a political statment about Windows I wouldn't choose BSOD.
WRT the photo, yes it is true that we can no longer trust photo as authentic but that's been the case for many years. I refer you to the case of the Cottingley Fairies in 1917 but true it is a great deal more prevalent now. Can I guarantee this isn't a fake photo? no. Does it really matter in relation to this dialog in a cartoon? I don't think so as there have been several very public BSODs about which the Dog could make the same statement.
cheers
Ryan
did it happen?
A bit of googling turned up this blogger who claims to have been there and took photo's.
http://rivercoolcool.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D6F05428A2B8CB48!1570.entry
Again it comes down to trust - the EXiF on at least one of the photos has the correct date and time but can EXiF be faked??? Perhaps we should get him to have his photo's signed by a CA (oops was that another cheap shot? ;-) )
cheers
Ryan