Category Archives: Poison

Which of these two can make calls?

So, can you guess which of the following two phones, a Tizen dev phone and an Openmoko Neo Freerunner (in practice a dev phone too) can make and receive calls?

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The one on the right has been able to make calls since I received it in 2008 (albeit without buzz only after one year after a hardware patch performed by my heroes at TuxBrain at DebConf 9), while the one on the left, doesn’t even detect the SIM card.

The one on the left is made by a very successful phone maker with deep pockets, Samsung, while the one on the right was made in 2008 by a small company that had more will than capacity to do a great phone, OpenMoko, and still today carries my personal SIM with which I call and get calls from people, using a truly community built distribution based on OpenEmbedded called SHR.

This was my first #facepalm moment with this device with which I was very excited and had lots of expectations.

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Why I’m not buying the Raspberry Pi

Some people will claim it’s “pragmatic” to accept proprietary firmware in order to get your fabulous 3D and 2D acceleration out of your graphics card.

So what has been the result of accepting that so called “pragmatism”?

Now you can’t even boot a computer because they put the 1st stage bootloader in the GPU firmware…

Is there a GPU binary?
Yes. The GPU binary also contains the first stage bootloader.

This is fishy, and it may be a first attempt at trying to circunvent software freedom, after all, if you accepted the firmware for the graphics card, surely you’ll accept the firmware to boot.

Sure you can probably boot any OS from the SD card, but it may very well be running under an hypervisor… you may be in your own little VM and someday, that might bite you when you least expect it.

Maybe this doomsday scenario is not happenening with the Raspberry Pi, but it seems, to me, like the proverbial slippery slope in action. You ceded, now you have to cede a bit more, and when you notice, you can’t go back up again.

This is why I won’t buy a Raspberry Pi.

This so called “pragmatism” has resulted in an even worse situation than before and I won’t support that, no matter how cheap the device is.

Ai pombinha…

Sra. Maria Henriques que anda por aí a denegrir o meu bom nome…

Está a ser cúmplice de um ato de mancha do bom nome mas que não me belisca.

Você e os seus cúmplices cúmplices fingem que respondem com surpresa a palavras e expressões que nunca foram ditas por mim. Estão com isso a indiretamente “colocar palavras na minha boca” sugerindo um diálogo que não existe nem nunca existiu, onde as suas respostas e as dos seus cúmplices parecem demonstrar surpresa com alegadas declarações minhas que nunca existiram exceto no vosso plano.

A única coisa que vos salva de um processo crime é que eu defendo a liberdade de expressão, preferindo por isso acusá-la aqui de demonstrada má fé.

Poison

I’m a Portuguese blogger who usually writes in Portuguese. However, I’ve come to feel the need to vent out some latent poison, and this need is international :) . I really try to contain it, but sometimes I don’t vent out soon enough and then it happens in places where more restraint would prove to have been better.

As such, I’m dedicating a Category on this blog, where I will vent out my worst angers, and I do fore warn you, dear reader:

  • it may taste like the sour poison it is,
  • it may make a tourette syndrome victim blush,
  • it may even perchance make you hate me…

…but that is your prerogative. This is my space, not yours. You can turn away, you can even ignore this Category on your blog subscription, just add “&cat=-36” from the feed URL, or click here to update your subscription (note: apparently it isn’t working, so I’m using the advanced category excluder extension to prevent it from going into the feed reader unexpectedly).

Don’t take the contents personally. If you do, please analyze why you did so. Did you lack restraint yourself when referring to me? Would it not have been saner if you hadn’t, and had instead chosen another path?

Anyway, be warned. Read at your own discretion. I promise to have a softer approach in the first paragraph just before the “More” meta-tag, maybe that’ll give time to skip to the next item on your feed reader.

I need this venting out.