V sredo, 2. marca ob 17.00 v Kiberpipi (Kersnikova 6, Ljubljana) bo potekala okrogla miza z naslovom : Izzivi soodločanja Slovenije v EU - direktiva o računalniških patentih

V omizju bodo sodelovali udeleženci, ki se jih direktiva dotika vsakega na svoj način: Urad za intelektualno lastnino, sekcija slovenskih proizvajalcev programske opreme - Koda.si, Ministrstvo za gospodarstvo, Inštitut za intelektualno lastnino, strokovnjak s FDV, ki se ukvarja s procesi odločanja v EU. Tokrat prvič enakopravno soočenje stališč za skupno mizo.

Ne bo se razpravljalo le o vsebini zloglasne direktive, temveč tudi o njenem sprejemanju, lobijih, procesih odločanja doma in v EU. Besedo pa bo seveda dobila tudi publika. Vabljeni!

DODATEK: Videoposnetek okrogle mize o programskih patentih si lahko prenesete od tukajle.

The second, March 2005, issue of Free Software Magazine is out. In this issue you can read the following articles:

• Your part-time job
• The history and future of SMTP
• Filtering spam with Postfix
• Mail servers: resolving the identity crisis
• Poking at iTunes
• Why free IT management tools are gaining traction
• Case study: Mythic Beasts
• Interview with Bernhard Reiter at aKademy
• Hard passwords made easy
• The FUD-based Encyclopedia
• Guerrilla marketing
• A law for free software
• The Libre Culture Manifesto
• Richard Stallman’s blog

The whole magazine can be downloaded as a PDF file. ED2K links for eMule, aMule and similar clients are available here.

The final release of KDE 3.4.0 is not far away. In order to find and fix the last remaining bugs Release Candidate 1 was just released. You can download the source code and compile it yourself or you can use Konstruct to help you through the whole process. Stephan Binner has also updated Klax Live-CD (ED2K download link is available here) so you can simply burn the ISO image and boot right into Linux with KDE 3.4.0 RC1. Can’t get much easier then this. And don’t forget to report any bug you find!

UPDATE: OSDir.com was very quick to publish 52 screenshots of KDE 3.4.0 RC1 on their page.

I few days ago I have decided to do my own little benchmark of recently released 64-bit Windows XP Professional x64 Edition RC2 (build 1433, free download). I compared it to 32-bit Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2 installed. My system has the following configuration:

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ socket 754
• Motherboard: MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R (BIOS 2.0)
• Memory: 1 GiB Corsair TwinX-1024 3200LL
• Graphics: Leadtek WinFast A400 TDH (nVidia GeForce 6800)
• Hard disk: Hitachi 7K250 160 GiB with 8 MiB cache PATA
• Sound: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

Before benchmarking in 32-bit and 64-bit mode I have installed Windows XP Professional on fresh and installed all the latest official drivers that were available at that time. Every benchmark was run three times and then I calculated the average values which are listed in the tables below.

My first benchmark was in Sisoftware Sandra Lite. The version I used was 2005.2.10.50. I used 32-bit Sandra on 32-bit Windows and 64-bit Sandra on 64-bit Windows. Here are the results (higher is better):

Then I tried some encoding of music into Ogg Vorbis (lossy) and FLAC (lossless) formats. Ogg Vorbis was version 1.1.0 and FLAC was 1.1.2. Since I couldn’t find any 64-bit optimized binaries I used 32-bit ones in both Windows editions. Here are the results (lower is better):

I also started the benchmark that is included in WinRAR 3.42 (higher is better):

I also checked the CPU time for 5 results for Einstein@Home project computed in each edition of Windows (lower is better):

What can I say. Quite good for a beta version of Windows without optimized drivers. But I guess these don’t play such a big role in these tests. It is a bigger problem with games and until we get good 64-bit drivers it is just not worth to upgrade to 64-bit Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Games will run quite a bit slower until then. On the other hand it looks like other applications mostly just get additional performance on 64-bit CPU like AMD Athlon 64 and using 64-bit OS. Even if the apps are only 32-bit. I can’t wait for final release of Windows XP x64 Edition sometime in April and to see more 64-bit apps/drivers optimized for AMD64. Then Windows platform will catch the great support for AMD64 we now get with Linux distributions like Gentoo Linux.

UPDATE: This is what SiSoftware says about the unusually low CPU Multimedia Integer benchmark:

As you know (E)MMX mode is not supported in Windows x64 thus the test in 64-bit mode uses SSE2. If you look at the bar in 64-bit mode (or results) you’ll see x16 SSE2 not x4 EMMX/SSE.

This is a known issue with the K8 (Athlon/Opteron) which is why we use EMMX and not SSE2 in 32-bit mode. But we cannot use this in 64-bit mode.

If you disable “optimisation over-ride” you’ll see that the SSE2 score in 32-bit is worse than EMMX and less than in 64-bit. Thus there is nothing wrong, the SSE2 code is faster in 64-bit than 32-bit but not faster than EMMX.

I will have to check out if this is true later. But judging from other results I am sure this one is also faster in 64-bit mode.

A new version of currently the best web browser is out. In version 1.0.1 of Mozilla Firefox they have improved stability and implemented several security bugfixes. Firefox now displays Unicode international domain name (IDN) addresses in punycode to prevent phishing. If you would still like to use Unicode to display them, go to “about:config” and set “network.IDN_show_punycode” to “false”. To download Firefox click here.

More:
Blogs for Firefox - The Best Just Got Stronger!
Spread Firefox - Security Update to Firefox Now Available
Mozilla.org - Mozilla Foundation Announces Update to Firefox

UPDATE: You can use BitTorrent client (like Azureus) to download Firefox 1.0.1 from this page. Or you can use ED2K client (like eMule) to download it from this page.

Mandrakesoft is a well known European Linux company. Mandrakelinux distribution is especially popular among novice Linux users for its ease of use and friendliness. But their products are also used by more advanced users, companies and governments across the world. Conectiva is a major company providing Linux operating system to people in Latin America. It is recognised by highly adaptive and custom built Linux distributions. Today both companies have announced that they will merge and work together to provide even better Linux products and services. We’ll see how this turns out for the average Mandrakelinux user like my sister and my cousin.

Most of us have powerful computers at home with fast processors. But for most of the time they are just idling or are used very little. So why wouldn’t we donate all this excess and otherwise unused computational power to science and help it advance more rapidly. Today new distributed computing project, Einstein@Home, was officially launched. If you decide to help then your computer will search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors. Help science and join us now! Oh, by the way, if you didn’t know, this year is international year of physics.

On 15th February the number of Mozilla Firefox 1.0 downloads reached 25 million. This is after only 99 days since the official release. And this number doesn’t even include downloads from web pages other then Mozilla’s, downloads from filesharing networks like ED2K or BitTorrent and people who got it from a CD that came with some magazine. And the users keep on switching to Firefox at incredible rate. To read more about this awesome achievement click on the image below:

For the last couple of days I was having a flu and I’m still not 100% well today. In the meantime Microsoft has announced that they will release Internet Explorer 7 before the release of Longhorn. They say it is because they are listening to their customers. Yeah right. They are just afraid of loosing their market share and money because they can see so many smart people switching to safer, faster and more advanced browsers like Firefox and Opera. Read the article titled Microsoft pretends to care on Heretic’s linkblog of fun and you will see what the real truth is. I doubt they will catch Firefox and Opera when they release IE7. And by the time it is released Firefox and Opera will again be far ahead and once more leave Internet Explorer in the dust.

Our fragile planet Earth is more and more endangered by industrial nations polluting it so much. And if we do nothing about it then no anti-terrorism war will help our children. Luckily almost all nations have agreed to do something, at least about global warming. This is why they signed the Kyoto protocol, an international treaty that came into effect yesterday. Unfortunately some countries (like USA, Australia which are one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases) are lead by stupid men who just can’t see (read: don’t want to see) the big problem of their wrong doing and have not yet ratified the important document. I hope United Nations will pose some harsh sanctions on countries that don’t care about Earth and endanger all people, animals and plants that live here.

The new ESA’s workhorse for lifting heavy payloads (up to 10 tonnes) into space, Ariane 5 ECA, has successfully completed its initial qualification flight. Now the commercial production of the enhanced version, which will replace the current Ariane 5 Generic, can begin. On this flight the launcher carried three payloads: a 3600-kg commercial X-band communication satellite XTAR-EUR, a 129-kg Sloshsat FLEVO minisatellite and a 3500-kg Maqsat B2 to simulate commercial satellite payloads. The second flight is scheduled for mid-year.

More info here:
Enhanced Ariane 5 demonstrates heavy-lift capability

It looks like that during my studying period Microsoft released a second release candidate (RC2, build 1433) of 64-bit Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. If you are lucky enough to be a beta tester (and have compatible 64-bit CPU) you can download it from here. The rest of us will have to live with RC1 (build 1289) which is available as a free download from Customer Preview Program web page. Luckily the release date for final version is not far away. We can expect it somewhere in April.

UPDATE: It looks like Microsoft has updated the free download of Windows XP x64 Edition on CPP webpage to version RC2, build 1433. Or at least the file name suggests that: w2k3sp1_1433_usa_x64fre_pro.iso

During the last couple of days the second beta version of the upcoming KDE 3.4 has been released. It is called “Keinstein” and is the first release after the feature freeze. So, if you would like to see all the new features that will come with KDE 3.4 and help beta testing or translating it, this is one of your last chances. In the upper right corner of this post you can also see the new KDE logo which is on the K button and in some other places in the new KDE.

You can download the source code from one of the mirrors listed here, or use Konstruct to help you set it up. Thanks to Stephan Binner you can also download a special ISO image (373 MiB) of bootable Klax Live-CD, with KDE 3.4 beta 2 on it. Just burn the image to a CD and boot your computer from this CD and you are ready to enjoy the new KDE and find and report bugs.

I didn’t have much time to blog in the last couple of days as I had to study. Yesterday I finally passed my chemistry exams. It’s finally over! All those chemistry formulae are just not for me. I don’t find them interesting and they are hard to remember. Back to translating and beta testing KDE 3.4 now. And blogging of course

ESA’s Mars Express is currently orbiting around the red planet Mars. The European Space Agency has recently given the green light for deployment of MARSIS radar on board of Mars Express sometime in the first week of May 2005. The radar will then start the search for water reservoirs under the surface and also begin studies of the Martian ionosphere. You can read the full story here.