Now’s the perfect time to run over and submit your favourite “nordic” free software person and have him/her get some of the appreciation he/she deserves.
Ah you can in fact also nominate teams or projects for this award as well, as last year the Skolelinux was awarded the price. I’m actually not really sure that I like that. I think the price should either be for single persons or for teams and projects.
If you rather be in the jury for the awards, the guys are also looking for such people!
So someone pointed out this IEBlog entry for me, and I find it so hilarious I felt a need to share the fun. See the “MIME-Handling: Sniffing Opt-Out” paragraph towards the end.
Apparently Internet Explorer 7 and earlier just don’t care much for the Content-Type: header that servers reply, but they instead scan the body and guess what type it is. Thus “knowing better” than the content provider what content it truly is.
So in IE8 they’re (according to that blog entry) introducing a new attribute to the Content-Type header. If the site also sets “authoritative=true” it means it really means the type and the browser will then actually believe the site. I can’t stop giggling.
And yeah, some of the other craziness on that page is also good reading and they truly make you wonder what they are smoking during their brain storm meetings.
It find it sad since I’ve considered this show to be one of the best Linux and open source related ones and I’ve been a fan for quite some time by now.
I hope this encourages others to step up and fill out the hole these guys are leaving.
As it has become somewhat of a little tradition of mine, I’ve put up a little summary of devcon 2008 page to round up the previous very intense weekend we spent in Berlin. And I just feel a need to include the tower picture here as well:
This evening we collected all the different targets we have represented here at the Rockbox devcon and made little picture of them. We managed to pull together 24 different models for it. All these devices run Rockbox, although some of them are not really mature ports. 9 different models didn’t make it to the picture since they failed the runs-Rockbox test! 😉
The beers happen to show some the liquids we’ve been enjoying here!
You just have to go there to watch the biggest Tower of Rockbox yet. I’m sure it’ll pop up in the tower of rockbox wiki page on the rockbox site soonish.
For you people living on a continent more to the west, keep your eyes open for DevconWest2008, probably taking place August 22nd to the 23rd somewhere in the US.
There have been so many open source initiatives for mobile phones in recent years it’s not even funny (limo, openmoko, Android to name some of the possibly biggest ones). The amount of actual phones on the market using one of them have been very very limited. Apparently there are some Motorola phones running Linux and you can get the Linux-based Nokia N800 tablets but they’re not even phones!
Obviously something has happened in the market though. Perhaps all those initiatives have pushed the big ones into thinking in more open source ways. The most interesting part of today’s news about Nokia buying the entire Symbian is their stated intension to open source it. (they’ve even already chosen the Eclipse Public License for it). It’ll be intereseting to see if there’s any interesting synergies coming up from Nokia’s previous purchase of Trolltech.
Of course, even Symbian has but a small fraction of the entire phone market as they sold 18.5 millions units in Q1 2008. IDC says 291 million phones were sold in the world during Q1 2008, which thus should position Symbian on roughly 6% of the phones that are sold today in the world!
I’m also curious if this will mean that Nokia will use Symbian on a larger scale on their own phones, as currently they seem to use Symbian only on a very small portion of their high-end phones. With Nokia owning the whole thing, they might see a bigger motivation to consolidate their own use of operating systems.
As previous years, Haxx is sponsoring the Rockbox team with a set of tshirts for Devcon this upcoming weekend.
If you intend to show up in Berlin and join us, do tell me (on IRC or email) your preferred tshirt size, M, L or XL, so that we can bring along the suitable amount of shirts of proper sizes.
