Shared links for 2007-12-31

• Steal This Film, Part II: the Internet makes us into copiers
  Awesome, features interviews with Eben Moglen, Yochai Benkler, Brewster Kahle (founder of The Internet Archive), Seth Schoen and Fred von Lohmann (EFF) and many others. Many of the themes covered in the movie can also be found in Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture if you're interested.
• Nintendo Wii hacked -- homebrew games ahoy!
  Had to happen sooner or later.

Quote

Linus on the value of documentation:

You seem to put a lot of trust in a piece of documentation.

Do you realize how those pieces of paper are written? They are written by people who have absolutely *nothing* to do with the actual implementation, and whose job it is to write documentation. And while the people who actually do the programming etc are supposed to help them, the two parties generally detest each other.

Technical writers hate the "real engineers" for not helping them, and the "real engineers" tend to dislike having to be pestered to explain their stuff and have to read through some document that isn't meant for them, but that they need to sign off on.

In other words: please do *not* expect that the documentation actually matches reality. You seem to think that the documentation came first and/or is quite accurate. That's not at all likely to be true.

(link)

Lessig

Awesome as always.

Shared links for 2007-12-09

• We've Got Your Number, Europe
  Hmm...
• The Best Way to Deflect an Asteroid
  (see also my previous post on the same subject)
• Hope Can Be Worse Than Hopelessness

Note to self #233

To avoid having ugly fonts on a brand new Debian install:

• dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config and answer No to the question about bitmapped fonts.
• Install ttf-bitstream-vera.

(In related news, installing Debian on the Dell XPS M1330 is totally boring, because everything just works. Even the remote control.)

Shared links for 2007-12-04

• Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management
• Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean?
• BMW uses Internet Protocol (IP) to network automotive controllers
  Still experimental, but it's pretty cool and it makes a lot of sense!
• Not Unexpected

More Vcs-* statistics

Expanding on my previous post, this time with a graph:

The first package to add a Vcs field was amule on June 7th, 2006. And it was Bzr.