I believe Free Software in general including the Linux ecosystem, cannot realistically be treated as a New OS, but a whole new market of operating systems and applications which operates on somewhat different, more consumer friendly, assumptions and expectations. The markets function best when there is competition and when their actors act fully in their own self interest without coercing the others to act on it. Thus the insistence on integration and unification is harmful. Competition is a form of cooperation as well. The difference is that people cooperate on their own terms and for their own individual benefit rather than for a share benefit over which there may or may not be agreement. I'd say competition is actually the best form of cooperation there is.
The holiday season is approaching fast, but there is still time to buy a nice gift for the Linux geek in your life. Not sure what to give? Here are a couple of gift ideas.
Becta and the OGC must be shaking their heads, just how can schools get value for money from ICT procurement? Ironically, it seems, being (potentially) ripped off was seen as the safer option to trying something inherently less risky namely free, open source solutions.
Why less risky? Because the product does not 'belong' to the seller of the services. You can shop around and replace your ICT service providers if they fail to satisfy whilst keeping your systems and software.
Once schools and LAs were prepared to suffer the lock in of proprietary service and software providers in return for the latest shiny things, few questioned the superior wisdom and efficiency of the private sector. They might do soon.
Lane -- who blogs for Linux Journal on open source issues -- told the ARRL that the same day he posted "Open Source Ham -- Is That Like Free Range Chicken?"on his blog, he was chatting on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) with Linux Journal publisher Carlie Fairchild: "She said they were thinking of doing an Amateur Radio-focused issue -- what did I think? I said something to the effect of 'Did you see my post this morning?'"
This week: Lenovo ThinkPad X301 review, Black Screen of Death, Firefox dethrones IE in Germany, Palm target of GPL-infringement suit, lots of Google news and more…
In this episode: The Linux version of Google's Chrome browser is now officially in beta and Linux netbook share appears to be growing. Nokia releases Qt 4.6 and we ask whether Linux documentation could be improved and is Google's Chrome operating system a good thing?
Here is LWN's twelfth annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world for the year.
I took a trip down memory lane today, thinking back on all the changes that have happened this year and I’d like to review them with you. 2010 started off with a bang with every company waiting to release news that had brewed for the fourth quarter 2009. Cloud-computing still reigns as the big winner for newsworthy fodder for industry bloggers, insiders and sideliners. Larry King announced back in June that the recession had ended as quickly as it arrived and that hiring and growth were on the way. Mergers and rumors of mergers filled the air at every technical conference and trade show throughout the year, including the two big announcements at VMworld in San Francisco.
The Vostro starts at $449 with the Celeron processor and Ubuntu Linux.
Unlike phishing, malware is a Windows-only thing. What to do about it? How can you defend yourself, your computer, and your accounts? Opinions vary, but more than a few techies suggest not doing any online banking from a Windows computer.
I first argued this is August (Consider Linux for Secure Online Banking) and then again in October (Windows and Online Banking: A Dangerous Mix). Brian Krebs (author of the Security Fix articles) came to the same conclusion in October:
"An investigative series I've been writing about organized cyber crime gangs stealing millions of dollars from small to mid-sized businesses has generated more than a few responses from business owners who were concerned about how best to protect themselves from this type of fraud. The simplest, most cost-effective answer I know of? Don't use Microsoft Windows when accessing your bank account online. "
D-Link unveiled its soon-to-be-released “Boxee Box” at Boxee’s preview of Boxee Beta in New York last night. Few details have been disclosed other than that it runs Boxee on Linux,
D-Link is readying a Linux-based IP set-top box (STB) based on the open source Boxee home entertainment stack. The singularly styled "Boxee Box DM-380" incorporates WiFi, Ethernet, USB, and HDMI out, as well as analog and digital audio outputs, says the company.
Cisco is a top vendor in the networking arena and are fairly ubiquitous in enterprise environments. With the acquisition of Linksys, Cisco was able to enter into the consumer market to provide routing and switching for home networks with a proven brand.
"As the popularity of Linux-based computing clustering grows, so does the need for simplified and highly performing file management software that is able to function across many hardware platforms," said VP of Deep Computing at IBM, David Turek.
ParAccel - one of the many upstarts that is chasing the data warehousing and analytics dollars these days - has tweaked its ParAccel Analytic Database 2.0 software and its underlying homegrown Linux operating system so that the x64 nodes on which it runs can be equipped with flash-based drives. And that, the company says, will boost query performance.
As we reported earlier, a Twitter user Hexxeh has brewed a version of Chromium that boots a Windows, Linux or Mac computer from a USB drive. The latest build requires an empty USB flash drive (installing Chromium will wipe it) with a capacity of as little as 1GB.
VMware is preparing to propose that its "vmwgfx" DRM kernel driver be pushed into the mainline DRM tree and in turn will then be pulled into the mainline Linux kernel -- as soon as the Linux 2.6.33 kernel. VMware's Jakob Bornecrantz (formerly of Tungsten Graphics) is calling for comments on the two patches that introduce the vmwgfx C header file and then the Direct Rendering Manager code itself. This code will initially be put into the kernel's staging tree and then in a release or two should be found within the main DRM directory.
While NVIDIA and ATI/AMD have OpenCL support within their binary drivers, the open-source Mesa / Gallium3D stack is still lacking open-source support for the Open Computing Language on Linux. But the discussion surrounding OpenCL in Gallium3D has been renewed on the mailing list today.
David Airlie has just called upon Linus Torvalds to pull in the latest DRM patches for inclusion into the Linux 2.6.33 kernel. The Direct Rendering Manager improvements in this next kernel release will be particularly interesting and are perhaps as significant as earlier kernels that had introduced kernel mode-setting support for Intel and ATI/AMD hardware along with in-kernel memory management. The changes that the Linux 2.6.33 kernel will bring are aplenty and will impact almost all of those using an open-source graphics driver stack.
It took decades of writing, but I’ve come to a realisation: word processors do way more than what I need. Programs like Microsoft Office and Open Office are intended for laying out content visually to be printed on sheets of paper. You can use them to format text in your desired font, to add tables and even graphics.
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For my day to day writing needs I use PyRoom. This isn’t to say I’m not impressed with WriteRoom’s feature set – it’s just that PyRoom is GTK based and I’m a Gnome user. The fact that there’s a solid option for both major desktops is great, though–that sort of choice is no small part of why I’m a Linux user in the first place.
I like TreeLine for having a polished interface and a structured feel to it, but neither it nor beeswax (or Agenda, to be honest) is likely to dethrone hnb for me any time soon. TreeLine is clever and attractive, but seems unnecessarily mouse-driven, or overcomplicated for things like checklists. And like I said, beeswax doesn’t really feel like it’s finished.
So hnb by comparison is just too fast and easy. Right arrow makes a new branch. Start typing and a new item is added. You can embed checklists in standard hierarchies. Copy and paste throughout the tree. Export into several different formats, including HTML.
I’ve long considered Handbrake on of the best DVD ripping applications available, and after a year long wait, it’s finally been upgraded to version 0.9.4, complete with over a whopping thousand changes.
NiVi Games (www.nivigames.com ) announced that BentBend is now available for Linux.
After many months of development, and massive amounts of input from the public, we are proud to present you with the new release of Blood Frontier, v0.85 (Beta 2). This new version totally redefines and improves the game in many ways, creating a whole new style that makes it almost nothing like its predecessor.
Following shortly after the release of KDE SC 4.3.4 for Linux and similar platforms, the KDE Windows team is pleased to announce the release of the latest KDE software for the Windows platform.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that, in an effort to openly collaborate with partners to drive the future of virtualization, it has open sourced its SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environment) hosted virtual desktop protocol.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it will present the second online Open Source Cloud Computing Forum on Wednesday, February 10, 2010, hosted by Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens.
The time has come to bite the bullet and move Fedora's package source control on from CVS. CVS has done is well, and although it is a decaying source control, it handled our needs rather well for many years. However nothing is a constant, and over time more and more cracks have shown up in our source control. The time to move on is now, and I feel pretty confident in the plan we are exploring.
Red Hat acquired SPICE in 2008 when it purchased Qumranet. Qumranet used SPICE for its own commercial desktop-virtualization product, called SolidIce.
Overall it was a great event. I almost felt like I was at what I've imagined a Red Hat Summit to be. The service they used worked well and was easy to navigate and explore around... like you'd do at a real conference. If you missed it (or not), I recommend you login to the system and "replay" any content you are interested in.
We've already taken the time to do an Ubuntu 9.10 review as well as Kubuntu and Xubuntu but these were all the desktop editions. Today, we decided to try something different and take a look at Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition and see how easy it would be to setup and configure a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) server.
Linux Mint 8 OS is a great OS for those who want to enjoy near flawless out-of-box experience. It has all the necessary apps built from DVD burning app to Internet browser to office suit, it has it all.
Devon IT announced a thin-client notebook computer based on Dell's Latitude E5400. The SafeBook E5400X includes a 2.2GHz Intel Celeron CPU, a 14.1-inch display, 1GB of RAM, and will "soon" be offered with its Linux-based DeTOS operating system, says the company.
This is kind of exciting — in a geeky sort of way. The open source Pandora handheld is just about ready to launch judging by the latest demo videos posted on the project’s blog. I always knew the Pandora guys were basing the gaming device on Linux and using emulation software, but I had no idea that they were going to also provide a full desktop environment as well. You could say… it’s more of a pocketsize netbook now (about the size of a Nintendo DS). Expected MSRP is $330.
Verizon’s Motorola Droid is a brand-new phone today. Like many smartphones before it, the Droid has been rooted so that owners of the Android 2.0-based smartphone can install multitouch support (including pinch-to-zoom gestures), enhanced themes and other previously forbidden goodies.
I can say that Linux on netbook is gaining momentum right now contrary to what others believe. Just take a look at the growing number of Linux distributions that are optimized for netbooks so that you will know what I mean.
My third major consideration was System76, which also deals solely in Linux machines. Its netbook option, the Starling, can be configured with 2 gigabytes of memory, a 6-cell battery and a webcam for $359. Unfortunately, an SSD drive is not an option, which is a major disappointment. Nonetheless, the price is not bad for a Linux-oriented vendor that will likely offer better support to Ubuntu users than Dell.
The idea behind ChromeOS is really that consumers should have a full laptop or desktop as their main computers and purchase a ChromeOS device as a companion to use when on the road. This is close to the idea of the original EEPC 701. The problem is that in places where mobile bandwidth is still selling at premium prices and access points are rare ChromeOS devices may end up being either very expensive to keep connected or very useless as soon as the user's leave the range of their home's wifi network. Add to that the fact that a lot of online video content (like Hulu) is only available in the US and the usefulness of the machine as a source of multimedia is very compromised when you consider the international market. ChromeOS is a good idea in places where you have the network infrastructure and online media content to support the model. Unfortunately this is not the case in most countries beside the US.
My first impression was how incredibly easy it is to obtain and install on your memory stick. Fedora has released a flash installation tool that handles downloading and imaging the flash drive on Windows systems. (There are installation instructions for other operating systems as well.) Not only is this tool available for use to install Sugar on a Stick, but you can also test drive other Fedora Linux distributions. The tool also allows you to partition off some space to save your documents to when in the Linux environment. Keep in mind that when you run this utility you will wipe anything on the memory stick.
Sugar Labs has revised the LiveUSB version of its education-focused "Sugar" Linux distribution. "Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry" offers simpler navigation, improved wireless networking, streamlined activities updating, better Gnash support for Adobe Flash, and activities designed for reading electronic books (ebooks), says the non-profit organization.
It is a difficult problem but I will not give up. I will continue to pass out copies of The OpenDisc to Windows users without ever knowing if people will throw the disks in the trash. There is a possibility that people think I am trying to give them a virus because I do not use professionally pressed media. That is under consideration although it would be time consuming and expensive. I am als considering switching to DVD-RW as well, that way the new owner of the OpenDisc may choose to keep it since it has a little more value. Ideally, I would like to find a bunch of other folks who will also help distribute the OpenDisc upon professionaly pressed media.
Thunderbird 3.0 comes packed with fantastic new features, including a new tabbed interface à la Firefox and other web browsers, a beautiful and powerful new search and filtering tool that lets you pinpoint any email, and a totally streamlined email setup tool that'll get your Gmail or other accounts up and running with Thunderbird in a jiffy.
One feature that isn't included is the calendaring add-on, Lightning. Originally, Mozilla had planned to bake the extension into the program, but decided back in February 2009 to change course and leave it up to users to download. Although Thunderbird natively comes with Microsoft Exchange support, there's no calendar and therefore no meeting support in the default Thunderbird installation. Along with Lightning, there's an essential Google Calendar add-on for Lightning that gives Google users calendar support in Lightning.
Mozilla has announced the availability of version 3 of its popular open source Thunderbird email and news client for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The long-awaited major release is based on the Gecko 1.9.1.5 platform, including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, web compatibility, and code simplification and sustainability.
Mozilla Messaging has announced the official release of Thunderbird 3. Ars takes a hands-on look at the improvements in the new version—including tabbed messaging and enhanced search—and finds a lot to be excited about.
Analyst report points to growing interest in open source alternatives to traditional business intelligence tools
The impact of the financial crisis has been to force companies to cut costs while also increasing competition for fewer customers. Against this backdrop, analyst Gartner has reported that interest in open source alternatives to traditional proprietary business intelligence (BI) tools has been steadily growing.
Richard Stallman's free software organization seeks to assemble a loose and open group of supporters on a voluntary basis to distribute information on the Web and promote free software.
Focus of the new version are the extensions of the reporting and analysis functions in the CRM module and improved calendar functions. Moreover, many users are likely to be positively assessed, that Tine 2.0 now can operate as an OpenId Provider. In total the Changelog lists over 150 new features and improvements.
With this notice, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) within the Executive Office of the President, requests input from the community regarding enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from research funded by Federal science and technology agencies. This RFI will be active from December 10, 2009 to January 7, 2010. Respondents are invited to respond online via the Public Access Policy Forum at http://www.whitehouse.gov/open, or may submit responses via electronic mail. Responses will be re-posted on the online forum. Instructions and a timetable for daily blog topics during this period are described at http://www.whitehouse.gov/open.
Tasktop Technologies and ThoughtWorks Studios have announced availability of the ThoughtWorks Studios Mingle Mylyn Connector. The connector integrates development activities performed in the Eclipse IDE with project management in Mingle 3.0.
All this wouldn’t be possible without that little scripting language created some fifteen years ago to spike up web pages. Yes, that’s Javascript. Some people hate it, some people love it, but the world definitely needs it. Google, with Google Chrome OS, is betting a lot on it. Visual Environments like Lily are starting to pop up — and you can bet there will be more and more.
We live in an online world, and Javascript is the new world’s engine. It’s open, it’s free, it’s powerful, and it’s managed to reshape the computer world.
Whoever bet on it was definitely in the right place at the right time. Would you have ever imagined?
I have a feature on asset forfeiture coming in the February 2010 issue of Reason. Forfeiture critics I interviewed for the article say there’s good reason to think laws that send forfeiture proceeds back to prosecutor offices may be unconstitutional. Whereas police only make the initial seizure, prosecutors actually make the policy decision of determining which cases to take. Dicta in prior U.S. Supreme Court cases indicates the Court may find due process problems with those same offices then materially benefiting from those decisions.
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Taking property from poor people without due process of law in order to enrich local police departments. Seems like the sort of thing Barack Obama might have fought to change in his days as a community organizer.
Google is a technological powerhouse that’s reshaping the Internet, the way we use it, and our overall relationship with technology.
THE WORLD'S FIRST museum gallery showcasing the technology of the Internet opened recently at The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) and the interactive exhibit tells the story of the pioneering British boffins without whom the World Wide Web could have been a very different place.
The gallery was opened on December 4th in the presence of the world's press and as lively a gang of OAPs as your ever likely to encounter, many of whom were former employees of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), one of the UK's leading science and research centres, and the birthplace of packet switching, the technology that underpins just about every element of the Internet.
Attempts have been made to break into the offices of one of Canada's leading climate scientists, it was revealed yesterday. The victim was Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and a key contributor to the work of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In one incident, an old computer was stolen and papers were disturbed.
Gordon Brown raises the bar for climate change negotiations, urging world leaders to give their promises at Copenhagen the full weight of international law within six months.
To avert potential and catastrophic effects on both humans and ecosystems, we must prevent global temperatures from rising by more than 2ۼ Celsius above pre-industrial levels.(1)
The IPCC indicates that temperatures have increased 0.74ۼC in the last 100 years. (2) Therefore, we must not allow more than another 1.26ۼC rise in the average global temperature.
This is the opinion piece that I promised on Goldman Sachs research and product sales. I want it to be clear that I have absolutely nothing against Goldman Sachs, and if I worked there I would want $19 billion of bonuses too, despite the fact that I just got bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of over $50 billion and still have middle class taxpayer funded government subsidies intact. The fact of the matter is that I don't work for Goldman Sachs, and the reverence that they receive is illogical and borderline sickening, not to mention having nothing to do with the reality of the situation.
The National Aviation and Transport Services (NATS) is threatening legal action against Wikileaks because the website has published a recording of the crashing of BA flight 038, call sign Speedbird 38, which came down just short of the Heathrow runway in 2008.
davebarnes alerts us to a story of just such a situation involving an anonymous blogger in Oregon, who had heard about some "embarrassing" videos involving some local TV anchors. In looking for the videos, the blogger discovered the YouTube account in question had been closed, and sent out a Twitter message asking if anyone had seen the videos before the account was closed. In response, the blogger received a legal threat from the news director of the TV station demanding the removal of the Twitter message (which simply asked if anyone had seen the video and linked to a shuttered YouTube account).
His first impulse was to dismiss the ominous email as a prank, says a young Iranian-American named Koosha. It warned the 29-year-old engineering student that his relatives in Tehran would be harmed if he didn't stop criticizing Iran on Facebook.
Two days later, his mom called. Security agents had arrested his father in his home in Tehran and threatened him by saying his son could no longer safely return to Iran.
"When they arrested my father, I realized the email was no joke," said Koosha, who asked that his full name not be used.
Sega's Aliens vs. Predator reboot is too gory for Australia's ratings board, which has denied it classification, effectively blocking its release in the region.
Mini music label Blue Destiny Records has sued both Google and Microsoft for allegedly "facilitating and enabling" the illegal distribution of copyrighted songs.
Its being reported today that Microsoft and Google are both being sued by Blue Destiny Records over facilitating and enabling copyright material on their service. In my previous coverage of file sharing, I made the point that if TPB and other tracker sites were being faced with takedown notices, shouldn’t at the very least the same be applied to search engines and their respective results since there appear to be (in some cases) a relationship between some of the sites and search engines. (IMO)
By selling people who grab games digitally — without paying for them — post-release downloadable content.
From the rest of the article, it sounds like he wants a do over. He says that he wants to have a new trial where he'll make a brand new argument: that Tenenbaum's use was fair use because when he did the file sharing, there was no legal way to purchase that music digitally. As far as I can tell, that's a misreading of what Gertner said might possibly work as a limited fair use claim, but there's no indication that this is actually true in Tenenbaum's case, and none of that addresses the basic procedural mistakes that Nesson made.
Tenenbaum was only the second person in the nation to be sued by the RIAA for file sharing and to take the case all the way to jury trial, making it a closely watched case. It’s not surprising he lost, given that he admitted to sharing 30 songs on Kazaa and Limewire. But a few commentators have decided that Tenenbaum’s lawyer, Harvard’s Charles Nesson, is to blame for failing to offer the nuanced “fair use” defense invited by the judge.
All in all, it really helped solidify the idea that the claim that "artists just need to be artists" and shouldn't be concerned about business models or talking to fans is really just a line used by record labels to try to gain more control over artists, at their own expense. That doesn't mean that artists shouldn't try to find that "5th Beatle," to help them when it becomes necessary, but that they should make sure that whoever that 5th Beatle is, he or she is really aligned with their thinking in where they want to go with their career.
We've seen the ridiculous pressure that lobbyists and diplomats have been putting on Canada to put in place significantly more draconian copyright law, without any evidence that it's needed and even though it's opposed by the vast majority of Canadian citizens.
Indie rockers Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte are pioneers in the new VideoSong movement, soon to hit a computer near you. The Stanford University graduates formed the band Pomplamoose in the summer of 2008, recording high-energy video covers of popular tunes like Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” (which was just nominated for a Song of the Year Grammy Award) and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” Filmed and recorded out of Conte’s childhood bedroom (his old blankets double as sound dampeners on the wall), the videos make use of clever editing and split screens to show off Dawn on vocals and Conte playing one of the two-dozen instruments lying around the room.