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Things that went through my head while watching Troy:

  • That’s a bloody awful lot of ships.
  • OK, so where’s Cassandra in all this?
  • Gee, the way they’re portraying Agamemnon, I’m glad his wife is going to kill him when he gets home.
  • That’s odd, the computer-generated orc army looked more realistic than the computer-generated Greeks.
  • Ah, political context. They’re right, it doesn’t make sense to send that many soldiers just to avenge one man’s honor. There’s usually something else going on.
  • Where the hell is Cassandra?
  • Wait, wasn’t this supposed to take 10 years?
  • Aeneas, eh? Nice throw-away line!
  • Wow, this Agamemnon really is a bastard. I wish I could remember what happens to Brise– uh, waitaminute.
  • Uh, what happened to Cassandra?

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Yahoo has finally released its specification for its DomainKeys email authentication scheme. Included is the following patent license (emphasis added):

Yahoo! will grant a royalty-free, worldwide, non-exclusive license under any Yahoo! patent claims that are essential to implement or use any Implementations so that licensees can make, use, sell, offer for sale, import, or yodel Implementations; provided that the licensee agrees not to assert against Yahoo!, or any other Yahoo! licensees of Implementations, any patent claims of licensee that are essential to implement or use any Implementations.

Yodel?

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I was about to post this over at my LiveJournal, when I discovered my journal was offline due to a massive server outage. Nice timing, as you’ll see:

Well, the phone’s acting up again. Oddly enough, DSL is working most of the time, even though we can’t get a dial tone. An SBC tech is scheduled to come out tomorrow afternoon, but the guy I spoke with had some suggestions for self-troubleshooting (since if it turns out to be a problem with our equipment, we get charged.

So now that we’ve moved the full-height bookshelf out of the way of the phone jack, I’m about to disconnect the last phone line and see what I can find out. Whee.

On the other hand, now that the shelf is out of the way, I can try rearranging cables to see if it gives us the full DSL speed. We’re supposed to get about 600K, but only ever get half of that, and I suspect it’s the ancient 20-foot phone cable. If I move the modem closer to the jack and use a short phone cord and a long network cable, it might speed things up.

Mood: Resigned.

Update 9:32 PM

Well, that was a colossal waste of time and effort. After disconnecting everything, rearranging the DSL/network structure while I waited, then hooking phones back up one at a time, it seemed everything was working. Same old DSL speed, but at least we had a dial tone on each phone. So I canceled the call forwarding, and called SBC to cancel the dispatch. Then it occurred to me I’d better try to make an incoming call. Half a ring, and suddenly there’s static (and nothing else) on both lines.

So it’s disconnect everything again, wait 5+ minutes again, and this time… nothing. Static, and only static. At least the DSL came back up. That would have really ticked me off. And another call into SBC to reinstate the tech dispatch. Fun, fun, fun! (Grumble.)

Anyway, we’re back to square one. I can only hope anyone who needs to call us before tomorrow afternoon tries one of our cell phones instead.

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A long-standing challenge for advocates of Free and Open Source Software (a.k.a. FOSS) has been explaining just what the term Free Software means, because in English,* the word “free” has several unrelated meanings. The classic explanation has been to compare “free speech” and “free beer.”

You see, when the average person hears the phrase “free software,” they generally assume it means the same kind of thing as “free beer.” But it’s really about the software being unencumbered – it’s about your ability to use, study, learn from, and improve the software. It’s not about the price tag.

The problem with the “free speech” label is that the phrase has its own very specific meaning and political overtones. As a result, people tend to focus on the ideas inherent in freedom of speech, dealing with software as a form of expression and focusing on issues like censorship. These are valid issues, but not the heart of what “free software” means.

Today I read a post on Groklaw describing it in terms of “free as in coffee” vs. “free as in liberty” – primarily because he didn’t like the association with beer – but I liked the use of liberty (edit: or just freedom if you want to keep the phrasing consistent) rather than speech, because it conveys the meaning without bringing in other issues.

(Ironically, the FSF page explaining the phrase links to a list of confusing words and phrases that are worth avoiding… that doesn’t include “free!” Update: These days it lists “for free,” “freely available” and “freeware”…but that still doesn’t solve the confusion of “free.”)

*In other languages, the meanings are more distinct. There’s no confusion between software libre and software gratis.

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It looks like it wasn’t quite the perfect time I thought to order a PowerBook. I received confirmation today from TerraSoft that the delay is due to the changes in the PowerBook line (which were half the reason I chose now to order it). It seems they’re still waiting for a shipment from Apple!

Presumably they had some in stock when they updated their store, in which case this is probably a good thing: it means not only are the new PowerBooks selling faster than expected, but they’re selling well through a Linux shop!

That said, if I have to wait too long I may just cancel this order and drive down to the Apple store. Of course, then I’d have to deal with repartitioning and trying to set up dual booting myself, and not only is it more complicated than dual-booting a PC*, there’s a lot less information available.

Ah, well.

* In particular, I don’t know of any utilities like Partition Magic or Parted that will allow you to resize an active Mac OS filesystem, so I would have to wipe the disk and reinstall Mac OS along with installing Linux.