open source

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIrPHp0fydk&hl=en]

Video to promote Climate Camp Australia.

This video was made with Kdenlive. I have to say, I'd never enjoyed using a program that crashes every 5 minutes (including system crashes) before using Kdenlive. It's easy to use, and intuitive. Can't wait for version 1.0.

The following is a discussion from #swig on irc.freenode.org - the Semantic Web Interest Group. It's logged here if you don't believe me: http://chatlogs.planetrdf.com/swig/2008-04-15#T10-32-11. Edited slightly for clarity.

I think the semantic web is an extremely useful tool, but as I mention down the bottom, I probably would have agreed with Francis Bacon that cutting up animals in the name of science was a good thing at the time. Read more »

There's a huge wave of open-licensing sweeping the 'net, and it's starting to get into the real world. This is definitely a good thing - freedom of information is a great. The most common licenses, such as the GNU FDL, or the Creative Commons BY-SA stipulate that anyone can use the works, as long as they acknowledge the author, and that they keep it free (usually by using the same license). The last tactic has been called "viral" by numerous capitalists, and they are correct, it is. Eventually it will take over the world, or at least a large part of it. I can't wait.

Creative Commons, and perhaps a few other licences, give people the option to license their work with a "non-commercial" (NC) clause, This is strongly derided amongst the free software movement particularly, as economic exploitation by a creator is considered a freedom and a right. This is argued well on the Freedom Defined wiki.

There are two main arguments against using an NC license, the first is economic, the second in a matter of compatibility. A third minor argument against the CC-BY-NC-SA, is an argument against creative commons itself. I will deal with these in the above order. Read more »

I just deleted about 100 photos from an ext3 external hard drive that I really would have preferred to keep. With shift+delete (do not pass the trash, do not collect $200). So I went looking for an answer.

If you've looked around the 'net for a way to recover files from an ext3 partition, you've probably found lots of people saying "it can't be done, because the inodes get wiped". Well that's true. Read more »

Sharing your bookmarks and photos is all well and good. Discussing stuff on forums can be interesting. Editing Wiki pages is better - coming close to a collective conscious. Read more »

Richard Monson-Haefel's "Open Source Is Anarchy, Not Chaos" on Biosmagazine.co.uk is an interesting article, but it misses some major points, and gets one completely wrong:

Richard is quite right about open source being anarchistic, but is way off in his description of how.

Let's start with:
"All open source projects have a leader who is frequently, but not always, the founder of the project. This is well aligned with anarchy as defined above;"
Leadership is almost directly antonymic of anarchism. Read more »

I just upgraded from Ubuntu Feisty to Ubuntu Gutsy (which is still in beta). about 6 hours later, a couple of hiccups, and one or two fixes required for problems that I caused myself (and due to running out of hard drive space part way through), I'm running the new version. With all the same software still installed, and all my preferences and options exactly the same as before. Damn that's nice.

The really beautiful thing? Barely any thing's changed. Read more »

Originally posted on pushpullbar.com. there've been a lot of good follow ups. if you're interested, check it out: http://pushpullbar.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-2547.html Read more »

Your guide to internet media. It's free! (yes, both of them)

ned haughton

username: > opused

password: > ********

welcome to freeISP.org.au.

opused@freeISP.org.au: > GET http://www.opus.org.au

welcome to opus.org.au

Opus is a real voice for students, but one that is going to get fainter if we don't continue to fight. VSU is set in place, ready to be implemented in second semester, and this may be our last year of a reasonably well funded Student Newspaper. Read more »