09.30.09

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Ohio Linuxfest 2009 Review

  There was also opportunities to get some free training all day Friday as well as paid training. One of the classes ($250) walked you through building your own PC, installing Linux and then you got to keep the computer at the end of the session.

• Dropbox hits two million Windows, Mac and Linux users

  Earlier this month cloud storage startup Dropbox celebrated its first anniversary, and has now hit another milestone with its two millionth user. Dropbox is a solid example of how the cloud can bring efficiencies in this modern ultra-connected world. It’s also a service that has genuinely changed my life for the better.

• Why Software is not treated fairly

  Most people have become familiar with the computer world within this proprietary software industry so they never got to know what freedoms they are entitled to and so they never ask for them. This article is not about free software, although many ideas in this article are similar. This article is about the rights and respect that the computer user deserves, and have been taken away from him without even knowing it.

  You should always seek your freedom or it will be taken away and you will not even notice that it is missing.

• 40 years of Unix

  Looking ahead, I see Unix continuing as far as I can see. We may not call it Unix; we may not think of it at Unix. But if our children ever fly real spacecraft across the solar system, I expect the computers that will make that happen will be running code that can be tracked back to Thompson and Ritchie’s game.

• An interview with Patryk Rządziński, head of IT at OSTC Poland.

  Global Financial Derivative trading company, OSTC Poland, uses Gentoo Linux in significant sectors of its IT infrastructure. We spoke with long time Gentoo user and head of OSTC Poland’s IT department, Patryk Rządziński, to learn more about how and where Gentoo is used. We discovered, as you will read in the full interview, that Gentoo, and more generally open source software, serves well in the commercial world.

• Roundtable – The Linux Kernel: Straight From the Source

  Linus Torvalds, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Chris Wright, Jonathan Corbet, J.E.J. Bottomley, Ted Ts’o

• OSMO: Your friendly personal organizer

  Although integration has become widespread, there are instances when you might want a separate tool for organizing your life. Say, for instance, your company requires you use Zimbra, eGroupware, or Outlook for company calendaring and contacts. What if you want something on your machine to organize your life – that doesn’t require an online connection, is simple to use, and has a tiny footprint. If that’s you, OSMO is the tool you’ve been looking for.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • WebOS upgraded as Palm tips more carriers

      Palm announced WebOS 1.2 for the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi, featuring a new App Catalog, LinkedIn support, Amazon MP3 downloads, and numerous fixes and enhancements. Palm also announced that more carriers will offer the Pre smartphone late next year, according to an industry report.

    • Two Linux smartphones set for October release in U.S.

      AT&T announced it will offer the Garmin-Asus G60 Nuvifone in the U.S. next week. In other Linux smartphone news, T-Mobile announced pricing and availability for its Android-based Motorola Cliq, and Android developers are protesting Google’s shutdown of an open source version of Google Apps by well-known “modder” Cyanogen, says eWEEK.

    • Google Clarifies Open Aspects Of Android

      The search giant has halted distribution of the Cyanogen custom Android build with proprietary apps like Gmail and Google Maps.

  • Portables

    • Sharp NetWalker PC-Z1 mini-laptop unboxed

      What’s a bit astonishing is that this tiny laptop running Ubuntu Linux isn’t the smallest clamshell device out there. Jenn also takes the time to compare the NetWalker with the UMID mBook M1 which is even smaller and looks more like a smartphone with a larger-than-average keyboard tacked on. The NetWalker dwards the UMID, but it’s still miniscule compared with a typical netbook and my guess is that touch-typing is going to be out of the question.

    • Lighthouse SQ7: A Tablet that Shouts at Twitter

      The 7-inch (800×480) tablet runs Ubuntu and a browser based upon WebKit. The light footprint software allows its 667MHz ARM processor with 128MB of RAM (ick!), 1GB of RAM storage to browse the internet, Facebook and Twitter. (Given that we’re talking Ubuntu, there’s a world of other software you could run, too…if you can find the space))

Free Software/Open Source

• Why Open Source is not Magic Pixie Dust, Part 284

  The move was widely reported, and led to the ideas behind free software being introduced to many people for the first time. But the initial hopes of that announcement were not realised. Turning Netscape’s Communicator program – the name used for the expanded version of Netscape Navigator, including extra functionality like email – into Mozilla, as the new code was baptised, proved much harder than expected.

• Open Content

  • Flickr adds support for OpenStreetMap machine tags

  • Wikimedia CTO Departs for Open-Source Microblogging Startup

    Brion Vibber, CTO of Wikimedia and lead developer for Wikipedia and MediaWiki, announced today that he’s leaving the company to work for StatusNet (formerly Laconica) as their chief architect.

  • Sen. Durbin Proposes $15 Million in Grants for Open Textbook Creators

    Grant-eligible teaching materials must be both “free as in freedom” and “free as in beer.” S. 1714 provides that the “full and complete digital content of each open textbook” must be “made available free of charge to, and may be downloaded, redistributed, changed, revised, or otherwise altered by, any member of the general public.”

  • What is the Right to Read Campaign?

    To solve this problem the law in question i.e. the Indian Copyright Act, 1957 should be amended to permit persons with print impairment to convert materials into accessible formats.

• FSF/GNU

  • 25 years of GNU – support software freedom!

    Tomorrow we mark the end of our year-long celebration of the 25th anniversary of the GNU Project—a celebration that we kicked off in September 2008 with a wonderful video from author and comedian Stephen Fry.

Leftovers

• Goldman Sachs In The News…On Video

  There is so much more in this interview like Goldman Sachs in 2008 paid a total of $14 million dollars in taxes. Taibbi says this amount is about one third of what CEO Blankstein made in compensation that year. The reason for this he says is that Goldman moved most all their revenues to foreign countries with lower taxes. All this while they were receiving billions of dollars of little people’s tax dollars, paid themselves handsomely with no care or consideration to the hardships those “working” people were enduring whose money they took.

• AstroTurf

  • Sex, clean coal, and 16 tons of GE nuttiness

    Using a parade of hunky guys and sultry gals — all looking like they’re just one step away from throwing down their pickaxes and engaging in a mass orgy on the spot — to sell greenhouse gas “emissions reducing technology” is stupid and offensive but not, ultimately, too surprising. But to employ as a soundtrack for the minute-long ad the most famous song ever recorded about the miserable exploitation of coal miners — “Sixteen Tons” — is a descent into ironic nihilism so deep that one truly has to ask: Have you completely lost your mind, GE?

• Rights

  • Restraining Orders

    Today, an important shift in the balance of power between the individual and the state will take place. More people should know about it.

    Section 12 of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 comes into force. The section amends section 5 the Protection of Harassment Act 1997 – the section that provides for restraining orders.

  • Thanks for Keeping us in the Picture

    Although e-petitions don’t often accomplish much (the apology for Alan Turing being a notable exception), they do have the virtue of forcing the UK government to say something. In response to this:

    “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to remove new restrictions on photography in public places.”

  • Gordon Brown’s back door to compulsory ID cards

    Something the PM forgot to mention: if you apply for a passport, or renew one, you will be registered on the national identity database

  • UK Government Admits Traffic Accident Figures Miscounted

    The report admits that traffic calming devices designed to force motorists to reduce their speed in some cases caused accidents. Speed bumps and chicanes killed six motorists and caused 176 accidents, according to DfT figures (page 44).

• Net Neutrality

  • Mark Cuban on net neutrality: ‘Flat out wrong’

    He was talking about recent remarks from Mark Cuban who apparently believes the net will slow to a pinful crawl if net neutrality becomes the accepted norm.

  • Alcatel Boosts Fiber Speed to 100 Petabits in Lab

    Alcatel-Lucent today said that scientists at Bell Labs have set an optical transmission record that could deliver data about 10 times faster than current undersea cables, resulting in speeds of more than 100 Petabits per second.kilometer. A petawhat? This translates to the equivalent of about 100 million Gigabits per second.kilometer or sending about 400 DVDs per second over 7,000 kilometers, roughly the distance between Paris and Chicago.

  • Netflix Everywhere: Sorry Cable, You’re History

    Today, nearly 3 million users access Netflix’s instant streaming service, watching an estimated 5 million movies and TV shows every week on their PCs or living room sets.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Hadopi 2 – The Relapse

    But notwithstanding the continuing climate of unreason, history obstinately refuses to be repealed: users continue to share massive amounts of files and introduce new material into the networks.

    Joseph Steglitz put it well in an op-ed in Liberation on September 16th, questioning the logic behind reliance on intellectual property perspectives and remarked:

    “Those producers whose business consists in delivering music from artists to consumers have no reason to exist today. It’s like trying to save the coach and horse industry in the age of the automobile.” (3)

  • Pirate Party Books Moderate Success In German Elections

    The German Federal elections took place this Sunday and the Pirate Party, hoping to gain a seat or two, ramped up the pressure. Despite strong showings in the local council elections a week or two earlier, they failed to win a seat in the Parliament, getting only 2% of the vote, falling short of the required 5% minimum.

  • Spotify Connection Disqualifies Pirate Bay Appeal Judge

    The Pirate Bay appeal is coming up in November and just as with the initial trial there is a lot of controversy surrounding the background of the various judges. Today the Appeal Court has decided to disqualify one of its lay judges because of his involvement with the music industry.

  • BPI Decries ISP Inaction Against 100K Music Pirates

    A UK music industry group claims that it has given an ISP evidence that thousands of its customers are pirating music but it has done nothing to stop them. Since February the BPI has harvested the IP addresses of 100,000 BT Broadband customers but is now labeling the ISP’s lack of action against them as “shameful.”