taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Dublin: Sorry to the non-Dublin readership, I’m sure you all are getting quite bored of this by now. But anyway…

According to jd on the discussion page, the new owner of the Stag’s Head is Louis Fitzgerald, who picked it up for EUR 5.8 million.

Reportedly, he’s ‘the biggest publican in Dublin’ (sic), and owns The Quays in Temple Bar, The Palmerstown House in Palmerstown, The Big Tree on Dorset Street and The Poitin Stil in Rathcoole — and Kehoe’s on South Anne Street. Quite an empire.

I’ll have to leave the speculation on Fitzgerald’s pros and cons to more recent residents of Dublin, but I agree with jd’s comment: ‘hope he does half a good as job as the Shaffrys, and the bicycles are left outside rather than on the ceiling,’ Amen to that.

Tags: discussion, dublin, fitzgerald, head, louis, non, owner, page, palmerstown, readership, stag

Linux: Everyone who’s used a non-MS system will have learned – typically the hard way — that not all hardware is equal. Not just in terms of specs, flexibility and power, but also in terms of whether or not it can be used at all.

Most hardware vendors consider their specification and interface documentation to be their crown jewels; giving access to these without a signed NDA is impossible. On the other hand, for free software developers, signing an NDA makes life quite difficult — it can be done, but nobody else can help you maintain it further without signing an NDA, the resulting code may ‘disclose’ too much of the ‘IP’, and so on. In a lot of cases, the vendor isn’t interested in giving access to the specs, even with an NDA — it’s their IP and why isn’t the customer just using Windows?

The end result: lots of hardware with crappy support on non-MS operating systems.

Things aren’t as bad as they used to be, though — since nowadays the high-end hardware is more likely to support standards, and Linux is a top choice on embedded hardware (set-top boxes for example), so it has a much higher profile. But cheap, end-user oriented PCs still wind up with components from vendors who couldn’t be bothered with non-Windows customers, and that can mean using a hacked-up, reverse-engineered driver and hoping it works. (That’s not to denigrate reverse-engineered drivers. some of them work great. But fundamentally, the vendors are making a mistake here.)

So it’s pretty impressive to see that LaCie are now sponsoring development of k3b, the CD/DVD burning application for KDE!

Good timing too, I was about to buy a DVD burner ;)

Tags: access, dvd, everyone, flexibility, hardware, linux, nda, non, system, way, windows

‘It’s the Latency, Stupid!’, a fantastic article explaining why latency is sometimes more important than simple bandwidth.

This was found via Karl Jeacle’s comments on eircom’s DSL, which are very illuminating in themselves – although probably not too interesting for non-Irish folks ;). But the relevant part is the explanation of why they enabled interleaving on eircom’s DSL network (summary: to get more reach, as far as I can see).

Tags: article, bandwidth, dsl, eircom, explanation, latency, network, non, part, stupid

If you’re wondering what happens to non-US-resident programmers when they run afoul of the US’s ludicrous copyright laws (namely the DMCA), take a look at Danny O’Brien’s blog entry from the Elcomsoft trial, covering Dmitry Sklyarov’s evidence.

Tags: afoul, blog, copyright, dmca, elcomsoft, entry, look, non, trial, us-resident