I installed the Xorg 6.8 X server today. I changed over to Xorg from XFree a couple of days ago. All seemed to work fine — after all Xorg is just a fork of XFree — so I decided to upgrade from 6.7 to 6.8, a.k.a the Eye Candy Version.
Xorg 6.8 is more of a preview release than a fully stable release. The release adds new capabilities that many people want to try out, and so they decided to release 6.8 to sate peoples’ appetites. Importantly, 6.8 includes the Composite and XDamage extensions. Both of these are important improvements to the X server, especially for desktop usage.
Report from the field [Executive summary]:
Some things good, some things Very Very Bad.
/end
Important note : if you want to join the bluefunk hackers — yeah it’s we now! (details soon) — drop me an email. Project will probably be on sf.net when it’s nice enough.
Today theire have been some changes to gmail. One of note is that they now display the number of unread spam emails there are. I never really look in the spam mail folder, so all the messages in it are unread. Google deletes messages it’s marked as spam when they are thirty days old; thus the number of unread messages is pretty much the number of spam emails I recieve each month.
Tim Bray has a rather paranoia inducing piece on DRM. With DRM (digital rights management), however, I feel that a large dose of paranoia is justified. Most of the DRM that will appear in the near-future seems to be following the immature strategy of “we’re just going to make something up, uh, rather than actually sit down and think about it”. Very soon this will mean that if you don’t happen to want to run a piece of software, you can’t listen to your favourite new song. Spy-ware for songs, anyone?
I was sitting about thinking the other day about why Microsoft are so underhand on occasion when talking about Linux and other open-source software. (I’m thinking here of things like an advert that claimed running Windows on a thousand-dollar standard PC was cheaper than running Linux on a several thousand-dollar mainframe. Whilst true, you might as well say that buying Word is cheaper than hiring a full time secretary to type your letters. They’re completely different things.)