03.14.10
Posted in Antitrust, Finance, GNU/Linux at 4:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft goes as far as paying companies just to avoid buying from the competition and choose Microsoft lock-in instead
Microsoft’s negative pricing is a subject we’ve covered a lot when exposing EDGI (HP still helps Microsoft in that regard). When the competition becomes too intense for the Microsoft monoculture to endure, then Microsoft starts dumping ‘free’ proprietary software or even bribes for people to accept it. When a company with a monopoly (especially an illegally-obtained monopoly) pays rather than charges customers to become trapped, then it becomes a violation of competition rules. In the case of GNU/Linux, EDGI E-mails reveal that the abusive company tracks what it calls “Linux infestations” and then escalates this to a department that secretly negotiates with the “dissenters” (those leaving Windows) to stop this. They use money games and they isolate decision makers from those whom they supposedly represent.
According to the following news report, Microsoft is paying businesses to dump NetSuite just as it’s paying/compensating nations to dump GNU/Linux. Microsoft tried this with Munich, using extremely considerable discounts. Microsoft reportedly pays Verizon half a billion dollars not to let customers use Google [1, 2], so it’s a general strategy everywhere.
Here is another report that gives away some numbers:
US-based companies could be paid up to $850 for every NetSuite user that makes a switcheroo to either Microsoft Dynamics GP, Dynamics NAV or Dynamics SL, said Redmond.
In order to compete, NetSuite needs to bribe as much as Microsoft, but can it afford to do this? To Microsoft, it’s about driving competition out of the market, then allowing price hikes that Canadians sue over at this moment. Robert X. Cringely wrote that Microsoft “have the deepest of pockets, unlimited ambition, and they are willing to lose money for years and years just to make sure that you don’t make any money, either. And they are mean, REALLY mean.”
When the world’s industry needs to fight a bribe using another bribe, where does it leave Free software or startups? Also in the news today we found: “Nvidia denies bribing developers”
GRAPHICS CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia has denied accusations that it has been paying game developers for implementing GPU-accelerated processing of physics effects using its PhysX code.
The accusations were made by Nvidia’s rival graphics vendor ATI, but it seems they are based on the fact that the Green Goblin has been helping out games developers.
A bribe is a bribe and a spade is a spade. It’s time for this type of practices to be regulated in the sense that there should be heavy fines. █
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Posted in America, Antitrust, Bill Gates, Courtroom, Microsoft at 4:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Canadians demand compensation after Microsoft illegally removed competition, but those Canadians may not know just how deep Bill Gates is inside their government
WE have not forgotten Microsoft’s dirty tricks in Canada (e.g. for OOXML) and exploitation of a Canadian company that ended up ruining OOXML.
Bloomberg and AP finally report on a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft Canada and the Canadian press covers it too:
1. “Microsoft to appeal B.C. court ruling on class action lawsuit
Microsoft Corp. plans to appeal a British Columbia court decision that certified a class-action lawsuit alleging the computer giant illegally got rid of its competition, then raised its prices.
In a ruling released this week, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Elliott Myers certified the action on behalf of “all persons in British Columbia who, on or after Jan. 1, 1994, indirectly acquired a licence for Microsoft operating systems and/or Microsoft applications software for their own use.”
That covers pretty well everyone who bought a personal computer, or Microsoft Word or Exel, in the province since 1994, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, J.J. Camp, of Camp Fiorante Matthews, said in an interview. That includes governments as well as banks and other organizations that would have bought thousands of computers, he said. “It’s a very substantial number.”
2. Class-action suit targets Microsoft software
A British Columbia judge has certified a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft that could affect hundreds of thousands of people who have bought personal computers containing Microsoft software over the past 16 years.
The representative plaintiffs — a small Richmond, B.C., computer-consultant company named Pro-Sys Consultants Ltd., and a Vancouver engineer named Neil Godfrey — allege that the software giant engaged in predatory, “anti-competitive” activity in virtually wiping out the competition.
And finally:
3. Judge certifies class-action lawsuit against Microsoft Canada
VANCOUVER, B.C. – A British Columbia judge has certified a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft that alleges the software giant engaged in anti-competitive behaviour that enabled it to charge higher prices for its products.
Justice E.M. Meyers concluded in a ruling released Monday that Vancouver-based Pro-Sys Consultants, which is leading the plaintiffs in the case, has met requirements for certification for the lawsuit to proceed as a class action.
The legal action against Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) was launched in 2006 on behalf of a number of indirect purchasers who acquired Microsoft software from resellers and from those who had Microsoft software pre-installed on their computers.
They argue they were forced to pay more for the software component of their purchase as a result of Microsoft’s anti-competitive actions.
Pro-Sys alleges that the indirect sellers suffered harm from paying prices that were artificially inflated by anti-competitive behaviour.
“This could be the start of cases like the ones the States,” says Chips B. Malroy. “Imagine how many countries, and or class action lawsuits there could be around the world wanting to happen,” he adds.
A Canadian GNU/Linux enthusiast wrote:
I love it. I tried to get the Competition Bureau to act years ago but they declined in deference to the US DOJ. Why surrender sovereignty?
What a lot of Canadians may not know is that Bill Gates invests over $1.5 billion in the Canadian government (it buys him influence). Too many people think that Gates is benign because of that foundation he set up to manage his money, conveniently forgetting Gates' long past of criminal activity. Will Hutton even published the following shocking article where he helps whitewash by claiming that Gates is among the ‘clean’ figures in the list of rich people.
Sixty-two of the 1,011 are Russian oligarchs. Twenty eight are Turkish oligarchs. Even Carlos Slim made his fortune from being the monopolist who controls 90% of Mexico’s telephone landlines and 80% of its mobile phone subscribers. The OECD notes that he charges among the highest usage fees in the world. But hey! He is a billionaire and what matters today are his riches – not the manner in which the money is made. He may have started out as a productive entrepreneur. Today he is using his power to expropriate wealth on a mega scale.
The contrast with his rival Bill Gates could hardly be greater. Microsoft may have had its head-to-head confrontation with the EU Commission over anti-competitive practices, but Gates built his company by innovating around one of the great historic general purpose technologies. Information and communication technology is like the railway, internal combustion engine or air travel – a technology with massive spill-overs and implications for society. It is a classic example of productive entrepreneurship. Gates may not deserve $53bn, he was lucky to be in the right place at the right time with a great university system around him, but he undoubtedly deserves to be rich. Both Gates and Slim are exploiting their market position to get above average profits, but one is more overtly political than the other. Put another way, Gates has grown the economic pie. Slim represents a tax on it.
This is ridiculous. It’s based on the assumption that Microsoft invented computing rather than crippled progress in computing. It merely reiterates PR campaigns and endless lies because anyone with a clue about history knows that Microsoft was taking other people’s ideas — sometimes illegally — and then breaking the law to destroy a once-competitive market, putting instead low-quality and overpriced software while bullying anyone who disagrees in all sorts of creative ways. This is more like a cartel and the reaction to competition includes racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and costs a lot more than crimes of the Russian mafia. The United States government finds him guilty, but one person who posts an article in the Observer/Guardian decides that he knows better. Hasn’t the Guardian done enough Microsoft PR already [1, 2, 3, 4]? █
“The advance planning and sense stimuli employed to capture a $10 million cigarette or soap market are nothing compared to the brainwashing and propaganda blitzes used to ensure control of the largest cash market in the world: the Executive Branch of the United States Government.”
–Phyllis Schlafly
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Posted in Apple, Bill Gates, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Patents, Ubuntu, Windows at 3:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Assorted new reports about how Microsoft abuses “open source” to gain control of it, change its direction and goals, or even to misuse the label to promote proprietary software that harms standards and promotes patenting of software
The following new post caught our attention because it attempts to portray Microsoft as one that’s engaging with the Free/open source software community; it plays right into the hands of Microsoft’s PR campaign, which strives for a fusion whereby Microsoft controls both sides of the competition and then derails the side which is less favourable to Microsoft. Microsoft has done that over and over again for many years and victims include giants like IBM and Apple.
Here is just part of this post which we disagree with:
However, it looks like Microsoft is slowly accepting that Linux and open source in general is both here to stay and a force to be reckoned with. Since 2006, Microsoft has been focusing its efforts toward interoperability rather than confrontation, for example via its collaboration with Novell.
No, it was a software patents deal; it’s an attack on GNU/Linux. Microsoft’s PR line used to be that Microsoft was ‘embracing’ Linux; yes, it was, like a python embraces a gazelle.
Microsoft hasn’t actually changed its tune, it’s still actively attacking Free software [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and trying to abolish GNU/Linux while promoting Windows and other proprietary software as though they are complementary to Free software, which they are not (history teaches). It’s PR nonsense and Microsoft is good at PR.
Just as another new example, two weeks ago we wrote about Microsoft's fake “choice” campaign, reminding ourselves that Microsoft is still lying about the meaning of choice. Dana Blankenhorn has just written about it too.
Microsoft offers a Sophie’s Choice
[...]
Open source is completely orthogonal to the choice discussion, Kazun writes, pointing to Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative as proof.
But here’s my problem with that, and here is why open source is not orthogonal at all, but part of the same dimension.
You get one choice. You buy Microsoft and you’re locked into Microsoft. You can’t go back.
In Microsoft’s world its formats and open source are the two children, and you get to make one choice. Then you have to move on.
Microsoft is only stripping choice from products that it buys, such as Photosynth and FAST, which abandoned their GNU/Linux roots after Microsoft had bought them.
To top it all off, the programming scam around Silver Lie is back. Microsoft is yet again trying to associate Silverlight with “open source” [1, 2] (Novell helps Microsoft in that regard), even though it’s a patent menace, a lock-in on several levels, and attack on web standards.
“Ubuntu too is suffering from this problem because Canonical hires from Microsoft and Novell.”Last week we wrote about SourceForge/Geeknet falling into the hands of former Microsoft employees who are using SourceForge to promote Windows. Microsoft booster Marius Oiaga makes use of that new case of entryism while others mostly choose to ignore or forget (SYS-CON warning) that Microsoft is taking over from the inside, by changing employees and thus changing the agenda, too. This is a defeat, not a victory.
It’s not just a problem that SourceForge is having by the way. Ubuntu too is suffering from this problem because Canonical hires from Microsoft and Novell. One reader showed us last night that Canonical’s David Siegel wrote: “If I could only follow one person on all of twitter, without hesitation it would be @migueldeicaza”
“I hope this isn’t a trend with canonical employees,” said our reader.
Miguel de Icaza is not just a Novell employee; he is a Microsoft MVP whose focus is promotion of Microsoft everything. We now learn that Novell will go to OSBC, which Microsoft sponsors and uses to promote itself (and redefine “open source”). Here is another new gem from a SUSE developer:
Commercial open source
…sponsored by Microsoft, tommorow at 18h. I decided to take a look, so there will be some fun 
. [And I guess I can always run away when it gets too bad.]
Microsoft loves injecting the word "commercial" and then demand acceptance of software patents. That’s just malicious, but not as malicious as SYS-CON [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], which smears opponents of Microsoft. Speaking of SYS-CON, Novell will also speak at an event that it sponsors, even though it’s SYS-CON (Novell is paying SYS-CON, which in turn smears Groklaw). How tactless. If Free software (or “open source”) does not expel champions of proprietary software that obviously want to impose software patents and Windows upon others, then it will simply allow itself to be manipulated to death.
To Microsoft, source code just means something to lift and to exploit. If this is true, then Microsoft may have just ‘pulled a Plurk’ [1, 2, 3, 4] again.
So what has Microsoft done this time? Are we in for a repeat of the Plurk incident? Well nearly, you see Microsoft is alleged to have been lifting code again. This time though at least the lifting of code wasn’t alleged unauthorised or unlawful.
Since its early days, Microsoft has used source code of others in order to build its products, without giving anything back. █
“The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.”
–Bill Gates
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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AAAGGGHHHHHH!!! I let that other OS do it to me again. Yesterday I was giving my second lecture for my computer science course. I was using an XP machine on a cart as a terminal via RDP to my GNU/Linux terminal server.
I started up Impressive with a PDF slide show and some images to finish it off. I had set Impressive to show my progress bar for 20 minutes side to side. I had just got into it when a pop-up from the underlying OS intervened. It warned me that it would re-re-reboot in 14 minutes. “Cancel” was greyed out. I minimized my terminal window and it was still greyed-out. I didn’t want to interrupt my flow so I checked the time and decided I could finish in the time left. I dragged the pop-up to the side while roundly cursing that other OS.
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As a longtime Linux user, this seems to me to be a perfectly sensible idea; after all, it is essentially what is provided as part of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, for example. I subscribe to a security bulletin E-mail list; but there is also an automatic background process that runs daily and notifies me of any updates to the 25,295 packages that Ubuntu knows about. It makes keeping things up to date pretty painless. In the next few days, I’ll post an article here explaining how it works, which I think might clarify what Secunia is proposing to do.
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A mix of operating systems keeps me in tune with latest on each platform. I use open source whenever possible because there’s no reason to spend money if there’s a free solution that works perfectly well. The open-source tools I use also free me from vendor lock-in:
* Ubuntu 9.10 on the office computer, Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro, Ubuntu 10.4 Beta on the home computer.
* On Mac, Tunnelblick gets me through the Great Firewall of China, Adium keeps me in touch and IMKQIM replaces Apple’s poor Chinese input method.
* On Ubuntu, I use Pidgin for chat and Banshee for tunes.
* All machines have Netbeans for prototyping new features in Ruby on Rails and I make extensive use of the command line across all platforms. When Google Docs won’t suffice, we use OpenOffice to meet our needs.
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Google
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I am considering pushing this out to my XP clients. I may convert my XP clients to GNU/Linux at the same time. Some consultation is in order. I have set up a backup server so staff can backup their files properly.
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Kernel Space
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Today we launched a new initiative at the Linux Foundation: a merchandise store on Linux.com. These aren’t logo Ts that you get at every trade show (and probably use to dry your car.) The T-shirts, mugs, stickers and babies gear in the Linux.com store are truly unique and hopefully capture the irreverence, wit and attitude of Linux and free software. My personal favorites:
* FSCK the establishment
* Free Your Code
* and Fresh Kernels
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Applications
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Hugin Panorama Creator Software for Linux: I’ve been looking for a Panorama creator application for my Linux box and bumped into Hugin. It’s a free and open-source graphical user interface (GUI) for Panorama tools that’s simple, easy-to-use, and gets the job done. Using Hugin, you can put together mosaic of photographs and turn them into a complete immersive panorama. You can also stitch any series of overlapping pictures and much more.
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In order to be fully buzzword compliant, all conference type gatherings in this web 2.0 social media age now have a compulsory twitter tag and live twitter projected display. Oggcamp (which, I would just like to mention, The Open Learning Centre is sponsoring) is no exception to this rule, but being all about Free culture needs to incorporate identi.ca (or status.net) dents alongside the tweets. The best way to do this is to leverage (I have a buzzword for every situation) the existing technology and make Gwibber fit for the purpose of projecting a continuous stream following a hash tag at a conference. The first thing it needs is a full screen mode. I have hacked one in, but it needs a bit of improvement, some more bits really need to be hidden when in presentation mode. The next thing I wanted to do was give each of the various hashtag pipelines (or “hash pipes” as I like to call them) it’s own theme. This bit was tricky as the search query isn’t currently available to the theme engine. I asked the upstream developers for a bit of guidance at this point and within 15 minutes of me explaining what I wanted to do I was given a new patch by segphault that exposes the search query to the theme.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Congratulations to S2 Games for winning the Independent Games Festival Audience Award for their DoTA-inspired multiplayer game Heroes of Newerth:
S2 Games’ Heroes Of Newerth won the Audience Award, after receiving the largest share of thousands of public votes cast at IGF.com in recent weeks.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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After a short hiatus, the Amarok team is happy to announce that the Amarok Insider is back. This time we have prepared many interesting bits for you, straight from the developers. We also give you an exclusive sneak preview for the upcoming Amarok 2.3. Enjoy an insider look into Amarok development!
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GNOME Desktop
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Some reasons I love the Gentoo Linux Distribution:
* Fast. Wow is it fast.
* Packages are up to date.
* FreeBSD-ish ports system. Compile everything from scratch.
* Awesome for home uses and personal stuff.
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Wolvix is a desktop oriented GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware. It features the Xfce desktop environment and a comprehensive selection of development, graphics, multimedia, network and office applications.
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It’s always a good time to review Arch Linux since it features a rolling release model. This means frequent upgrades, with no release dates. In other words, Arch is always in its latest version, constantly being updated in small intervals of time. That makes it perfect for reviewing, since it’s fresh whenever it’s being taken for a spin.
Arch is inspired by CRUX, a simple and lightweight distribution which is inspired by BSD. Arch Linux first appeared in 2002. Although it shares some ideas with CRUX, Arch was developed from scratch, with no legacy from any other distribution. Arch Linux today has a devoted community, which stays close to its founding principles. According to DistroWatch’s distribution ranking, Arch is doing better than ever, making it to the top ten in 2009, where it remains so far this year.
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Carlie: You’re the author of Billix, dubbed a “system administrator’s swiss army knife”. Tell us a bit about it.
Bill: Billix actually came out of one of the hacking sessions Kyle started. We were working together and he was working on a PXE boot server for our server environment, and I had a need to have a version of that environment on a non-connected medium. I read the docs for SYSLINUX and PXELINUX, and realized that the stuff he’d done was directly connected to what I wanted to do. So I lifted his menu file (that’s why I thank “greenfly” in the menu of Billix) and started modifying it to do what I wanted. So as a result, the world can thank Kyle Rankin for seeding the idea for Billix.
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Red Hat Family
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Evans and Alexandre join Axial Advisors Jose Marie Griffith, Professor of Library Science, University of North Carolina, Mark Webbink, former General Counsel of Red Hat and Visiting Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Center for Patent Innovations at New York Law School, Joe Velk,Principal of Contender Capital and Nadine Rubin, CEO of Adam-Bryce Inc., a leader in retained Executive Search.
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Ubuntu
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…that this part of my desktop could feel so sleek:
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One of Benjamin Humphrey’s “16 things to improve in Ubuntu 10.04″ concerned Lucid’s new-look sound applet – a small, square, inconsistent little box.
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If there had been some sordid attempt to try and push Draper out of the Ubuntu community, the group which has congregated around the most widely used GNU/Linux distribution, then it was worth a story. But a little digging came up with something entirely different.
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With the familiar brown tones of Ubuntu of yore being replaced with vibrant purple hues in the recent re-branding, the ‘purplification’ of the default icon set had to occur sooner or later.
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Now, NPC runs three tc Server instances in an Ubuntu Linux VM, where each VM is configured with just 2 GB or 3 GB of RAM. When performance is a problem, “there is no limit, you just add another VMware box,” Brisbin said, adding that “the more I spread out the load, the more users I can support.”
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Among the other improvements, tweaks, and retoolings headed to Ubuntu 10.04, the Ubiquity installer slideshow appears set for an update.
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Variants
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They worked quite fine, both suspend and hibernate. Suspend worked great in the live session, too. This is nice, considering MoonOS 3 roots (Jaunty), which used to misbehave a little on my test machines when it comes to laptop modes.
Using MoonOS
After you settle in, you can start using MoonOS, pretty much like any other Ubuntu-based distribution. It’s fairly simple and comes down to basic demands, style, taste, as well as your level of expertise. Enlightenment desktop makes less sense for new users, but it may compensate with visual appeal. Plus, you have the bugs and quirks to account for.
Other than that, you’re really into a rather standard Ubuntu environment.
[...]
Conclusion
MoonOS is a decent distribution. Fairly standard. But it has nothing new, revolutionary or exciting. In fact, it balances the would-be thrills of the Enlightenment desktop with clutter and a scattering of rather annoying bugs that smell of amateur work. Samba, for one.
The fonts are too small, the desktop has an asymmetric cheap-expensive feel with no middle ground, something that has been done with much more grace in gOS, for example. The overall integration is missing. The mediocre sheen makes the whole story unremarkable, although bit by bit, MoonOS is quite all right. But as a whole, it misses the point.
If you’re into adding some color to your Ubuntu, you can do that without trying a whole new distro. If you like order and simplicity, then you should avoid Enlightenment altogether, as it takes a great deal of effort to tame into submission, with a faint promise of greatness at the far end. Then, Samba sharing makes for very disappointed cross-platform users. Most of these glitches do not exist on the parent distro and have been introduced by a not-so-tight integration of new elements onto the base core.
MoonOS won’t blow your mind away. It’s a Ubuntu fork. And the fact the homepage is missing does not inspire one bit. You are probably better off downloading extra windows managers and all sorts of packages to your Ubuntu than starting fresh.
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Embedded computing is not always glamorous. The big brands are hardly household names. Yet, 90 percent or more of the world’s computing systems are in fact not PCs or servers, but instead are embedded devices. That, in turn, creates employment opportunities not lost on today’s computer science students.
Thus, on the last day of EW, about 700 students were bussed in for “Student Day.” With interest like that, device computing is likely to keep amazing us, and making our lives better, for many years to come. Along with an overview of exhibiting companies, the students attended a lecture on neural networks called “Building Brains with Embedded Technology,” by Professor Matthias Sturm.
The Embedded World tradeshow first began in 2003. Since then, it has doubled in size. Next to the arrival of low-cost 32-bit system-on-chip processors, the emergence of Linux and open source software as viable embedded technologies has certainly contributed to the growth not only of this show, but of the device computing world overall. Today, whether they know it or not, virtually everyone is a Linux user.
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Network-attached Storage
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Qnap Systems is readying two 1U network-attached storage (NAS) devices targeting everything from small businesses to enterprises. The Linux-based TS-459U-RP and TS-459U-SP incorporate the dual-core Intel Atom D510 processor, offer up to 8TB of storage via four bays, and are compatible with VMware’s vSphere4 (ESX 4.0) virtualization platform, says the company.
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Both are VMware-ready and are unified storage systems powered by the Linux-based ReadyNAS RAIDiator operating system.
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Phones
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The Nokia N900 is a special device. It’s the first phone running on the Maemo 5 OS. Geeks love the N900. It’s the power of Linux in the palm of your hands. The device like a hacker’s tool, it’s not perfect , but does somethings wonderfully well – web browsing for instance. Presenting an exclusive photo gallery comparing the N900 to some popular devices in the market !
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The guys over at XDA-Developers have managed to do it again, and run Ubuntu on devices such as the HTC Touch Pro2, and the XPERIA X1. What’s most interesting about this story is that everything appears to run normally as it would if you were running it on a netbook, laptop or desktop, the only difference being that there are some things that may or may not work.
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Android
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Opera Software unveiled on Thursday a version of its Mini mobile browser for use on cellphones running on Google’s Android software.
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Ok, so maybe you like the stock Android browser but aren’t necessarily in love with it. Good thing for you the platform is flexible and you’re not stuck with just one option! Hot on the heels of January’s 4.2, Opera has just released their Mini 5 beta browser into the Android Market.
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Innocomm Technology, a young smartphone developer, plans to launch its first handset with Google’s Android mobile operating system and an analog TV receiver in the middle of this year, a company representative said Tuesday.
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Motorola HS1001 is being released at CeBIT 2010, it features a very customized version of Android 1.6 running on its 2.8″ QVGA touch screen display. This cordless phone will be sold for 99€ in Europe and $149 in the USA. It supports 2h of cordless phone calling on the battery, comes with a MicroSD card reader.
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Google has teamed up with Dish Network to offer a set-top box based on the Android operating system, the Wall Street Journal reports. The box is said to be operated via a keyboard and will serve YouTube videos straight to a TV set.
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AT&T has finally added the Google Android platform to its portfolio of mobile devices with the launch of the Motorola Backflip. AT&T, the exclusive provider of the Apple iPhone in the United States, now offers business professionals a more diverse array of choices–expanding even further later this year with the expected addition of devices based on Palm’s WebOS.
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Apple, if they needed a reason to go after HTC, and by proxy Google, may have had it in marketshare numbers. Android’s growth has been pretty spectacular over the past few quarters highlighted by the graphs below from Quantcast, a web analytics firm.
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We’ve been slipped some additional information on Motorola’s imminent Android-powered i1 for iDEN networks today — actually, one correction and one interesting note.
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The HTC Incredible has been seen in the wild, yet again, leading us to believe the handset has been prepped and readied for a CTIA announcement. Dressed in Verizon black and red, this super phone has an awful lot going on under the hood. If you look at the bottom right of the battery cover you will see the Verizon logo silk-screened in the corner. We’d be very surprised if CTIA comes and goes without a word from anyone.
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Sub-notebooks
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Interestingly enough, Pioneer is shipping the DreamBook Lite with either Windows 7 or Ubuntu 9.10, which is great for the open-source movement. A lot of netbook manufacturers have said publicly that although Linux-based operating sytems may be better for netbooks, they’re afraid about poor sales if they put a non-Windows operating system on a low-price product.
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Tablets
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Previously Dell had revealed that the device would be 3G-enabled, run Android, and have a 5-inch screen.
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A lot of people, including me, want one but will a true Linux Pad computer ever exist? I’ve seen some intriguing prototypes over the years and none more interesting than the Freescale Smartbook but will any of them ever go into mass production? Freescale has the best chance of any that I’ve seen so far but should it go into production, will it pose any real competition for Apple’s iPad? I also have said that I didn’t think Apple would ever produce such an animal and, if they did, it would be too expensive for your typical consumer. With the consumer release of the Apple iPad just a breath away, I have to admit that I was wrong about the Apple one. A Linux Pad is, however, a different story.
I want a Linux Pad.
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What GIMP 2.6.6 offers that Photoshop CS4 does not:
* You can open and edit several formats in GIMP 2.6.6 which includes support for PSD files. But Photoshop CS4 does not extend the same support to XCD files which the native file format for GIMP.
* You can open a layered image as a flat file without merging the layers in GIMP directly from the ‘File’ menu, which is not possible in Photoshop CS4. Even after you open a file without layers in GIMP, the original properties are intact, unless you edit and save the file.
* There are several plug-ins features which are not usually used. This reduced system resources effectively.
Being an open source application, it supports a large number of add-ons and plug-ins to give you real time software updates. What’s more you have complete check on your system resources as you will download only those functionalities that you need!
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As with BroadbandCensus.com and the FCC, among M-Lab’s core goals is to advance network research by actively promoting openness and transparency: research tools on M-Lab must publicly publish their source code.
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The panelists:
• Tiffany Farriss, president and strategist at Palantir.net Inc. and member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors.
• Jeff Eaton, software architect for Lullabot Consulting and a core developer for the Drupal project.
• Evan Prodromou, founder and CEO of StatusNet Inc, the Open Source microblogging company.
• Eric Gundersen, president and co-founder of Development Seed.
• Brad Fitzpatrick, “member of the technical staff” at Google and founder of LiveJournal.
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Open source software can offer huge benefits to small and medium-sized businesses, it has been suggested.
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When Simon Phipps says people have been critical of the Open Source Initiative, I’m pretty sure I’m one of the critics to which he’s referring.
The OSI has been one of those organizations that seemed to fall short of its true potential, which is always a source of frustration; you want them to succeed, and don’t understand when things go awry. It’s particularly difficult to stand by and watch it happen to people whom you genuinely respect, like Michael Tiemann, Danese Cooper, and Phipps himself, who has this week has been elected to the Board of Directors, effective April 1. They, and other members of the OSI board, are individually very smart and more than capable of spearheading the open source governance body.
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Mozilla
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Just how do you go about introducing Mitch Kapor? Designer of Lotus 1-2-3, founder of the Open Source Applications Foundation, first chair of the Mozilla Foundation, current chair of OneWebDay.. oh, blah, let’s leave it up to his Twitter bio. “Tech entrepreneur, startup investor, activist philanthropist.”
Mitch Kapor, Born in Brooklyn and now residing in San Francisco, is a mogul of many colors–although mostly green. The Lotus Development Corporation, Mozilla Foundation and Open Source Applications Foundation are all doing good work for the world thanks to him–and he took over the chair of OneWebDay after its founder, Susan P. Crawford, went to work for President Obama. If you could draw a simple venn diagram to show the overlap between technology and doing good, Mitch would be at its heart.
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Mozilla has begun shepherding Firefox fans through the browser door marked 3.6, in a move to encourage users to upgrade to the open source outfit’s latest surfing tool.
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Mozilla yesterday began offering Firefox 3.6 to users running older versions of the open-source browser.
Thursday’s offer was the first coordinated invitation to Firefox 3.6 that Mozilla has displayed to users of 2008′s Firefox 3.0 and mid-2009′s Firefox 3.5.
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Oracle
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The decade-old OpenOffice was the Free and Open Source riposte to Microsoft’s Office that has entrenched itself in the office productivity suite segment.
Originally a proprietary software application that was open-sourced by Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice has come a long way, with the release of its new-improved version 3.2. Today, having crossed 300 million downloads — a third of this over the last year — this community project is among the most successful stand-alone Open Source products.
Data legacy and incompatibility issues, as a majority of office software was already using proprietary applications, and widespread piracy, retarded early growth. Constantly competing with MS Office, it got better with successive iterations, though it has not quite caught up. The latest version, Office 2010, is due for release and offers browser versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, across the PC, mobile phone and browser.
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DATABASE OUTFIT ORACLE spent the morning trying to convince customers and partners that it will be business as usual for Sun, following the recently completed acquisition of the company.
During an event in London today the company stressed that none of Sun’s product lines were being halted, but that in fact billions was being poured into the continued development of Sun hardware and software.
According to the Sun/Oracle presenters the combined company can now address the entire stack from the applications, through the middleware, operating system and virtualisation layer right through to the bare metal hardware and storage disks.
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CMS
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You can very easily discuss U.S. politics over a cup of tea or now, coffee. The much popular Sarah Palin ‘hand reading’ capabilities triggered Americans to find an alternative to the Tea Party. The alternative is the Coffee Party. I can’t comment much on the goals or agenda’s behind the two new political ‘movements’ on the US political scene, however, there is some indirect connection between the Coffee Party and Free Software (Muktware) or Open Source. The Coffee Party uses Drupal as their CMS, the same CMS which The White House Uses.
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Our company Automattic is distributed, and I’m ready to sing the praises of running a business in this way. BTW, I think distributed (“evenly spread throughout an area”) is a better description than the more commonly used virtual (“nearly real or simulated to be real”) for a company that has people working from all over the place instead of a centralized office. In Automattic’s case, we currently have over 50 employees spread across 12 US states and 10 countries.
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TikiWiki 4 includes features not found in the 3.x series and has an improved user interface. Further additions in the update include a fix for IE7 login bar positioning, additional Russian translation and hundreds of other tiny improvements to make the whole experience better.
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MediaCore is ramping up towards v1.0, offering a free video and podcast management tool for digital delivery and encouraging social content.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU
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March 19th, 20th and 21st at the Harvard Science Center, Cambridge, MA.
The annual free software conference LibrePlanet is the place for the free software community — from old school hackers to brand new users — to come together and further the collective goals of the free software movement.
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Government
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The Bucharest-based Research and Development Institute for Informatics (ICI) took part in the framework programme 7 European project, named Romulus, on domain driven design, based on Open Source for pragmatic, reliable and secure, Web software development.
[...]
„The software created as part of the project is especially meant for people who want to work with open-source, which makes it possible for them to create their own pages on the Internet,” explained Laura Ciocoiu, ICI researcher.
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India
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Open Source and Linux as a platform is gaining acceptance in the government, especially at the state level. Should there be a progressive move to adopt open source software in the government?
I think technology choices have to be made as appropriate for each project
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As expected, with such big e-governance projects in the horizon, the old debate of open source versus proprietary software is getting resurrected. But despite Nilekani’s overwhelming engagement with proprietary software—Infosys has a lot of business with Microsoft—the open source lobby is quite enthusiastic at his arrival in the policy lounge. Says corporate affairs director, Red Hat, Venkatesh Hariharan: “I am hopeful that, as a veteran technologist, Nandan can bring some of these best practices to the world of e-government.” This optimism comes from Nilekani’s hard bargain for open source software in a 2006 report as chairman of a special group on e-governance under the Knowledge Commission. Advocating the case for open source software, the report had said: “Because of the enormous size and scope of e-governance effort in India…we must actively encourage, wherever possible, open source software implementations and open standards.”
But open source evangelists warn, “There could be political pressure if he openly favours open source software for government projects because of the monetary and political muscle of proprietary software companies”. And that is where Nilekani’s skills and strength as an administrator would be tested.
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Openness
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There’s now open-source car design, open-source medicine, open-source credit and even open-source cola – among many other mind-warping open-source endeavours. Completely unregulated and unpaid, open source is the most powerful new business model of the 21st century. And what motivates the contributors? What did Lennon and McCartney say was the only thing we needed?
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The open-source Arduino electronics platform has received a ton of attention from the hardware enthusiast community. And one more follower is joining the fray–Mario himself. The mustachioed plumber of console video game fame has been converted into an eight-by-eight LED matrix by Carnegie Mellon University student Chloe Fan. And, yes, she’s even made a separate Arduino device to give her side-scrolling adventure the classic Mario theme.
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Standards/Consortia
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Opera 10.50 has now been released on Windows, and it supports the HTML5 video and audio elements. But how do you use them? Introduction to HTML5 video covers a general introduction but doesn’t go into the details; Accessible HTML5 Video with JavaScripted captions shows how captions can be implemented until the spec gains proper support for captions; and (re-)Introducing <video> has some information on Opera’s implementation. I recommend reading all three!
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Are you thinking about setting up a cloud for deployment in your business or enterprise? Have you planned it out yet? If so, how far have you gotten with it? If you haven’t begun the setup process, check out this list of things to consider before you start deploying that cloud. It might confirm your belief that you’re on the right track — but it could persuade you otherwise.
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By helping the general public, the average person, the you’s and me’s, have a better life without the cost. And your favorite store does not want you to have that better life, unless you buy it from them for 1000% markup.
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Newspapers
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This resulted in some investigations, with venture capitalist Tim Oren pointing out that this appeared to be the work of a company called Perfect Market, a well-funded startup (funded, in part, by the Tribune Company), who had partnered with various newspaper sites to game Google’s search results. As Oren notes:
The keyword and ad-stuffed dead end pages apparently produced by Perfect Markets’s technology are isomorphic, from a search company’s point of view, to those created by more questionable tactics such as scraping. The intent is the same: to spam the index. This is the behavior that routinely gets questionable sites shoved to Google’s back pages, or banished altogether. One has to wonder just how long this type of abuse will be tolerated, simply because it’s being practiced by a recognized media outlet.
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Except, of course, the whole story has since fallen apart. What he describes in the article is not even possible on Facebook. If you create an account of a 14-year-old, you’re limited in who you can talk to, and it’s not easy to just start chatting with random people that you don’t know on the site. As people began pointing out that the claims in the article made no sense at all, and were unlikely to be true, the BBC’s Rory Cellan Jones contacted the author and found out that the whole thing was basically made up:
I contacted Mr Williams-Thomas to check a few facts, and he confirmed that the story had indeed been “ghosted” by a Mail reporter. He says he got back to the paper with a number of changes before publication, but although they acknowledged receipt of his alterations, they were not acted on.
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Just a couple of months ago, I wrote about something that I thought was really impressive by Thomson Reuters. A Reuters blogger wrote a blog post on his official Reuters blog questioning Reuters itself after rumors started spreading that the company had spiked an article after pressure from the article’s subject. Now, the two stories might cancel each other out in some way. Spiking a story based on pressure from the subject is bad, but allowing an employee to publicly question the action on a company blog shows an openness that I thought was impressive.
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Science
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Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) yesterday introduced a bill that would undo NASA’s plans to retire its aging space shuttle fleet later this year. The bill would also require that NASA continue on with its Constellation program, which calls for building rockets and spacecraft to carry astronauts to the International Space Station and further into space.
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Sunday’s announcement of the upcoming summit came after some members of Congress had voiced strong opposition to the federal budget proposal, which would end NASA’s plan to return humans to the moon by 2020.
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Security
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A former Barclays Bank programmer received 46 months in prison for helping TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez launder as much as $800,000, according to news reports.
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United Airlines ordered tech writer John Battelle to stop video chatting with his daughters because “maybe I could communicate with a terrorist on the ground.”
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“To beat a hacker, you need to think like one,” said Jay Bavisi, co-founder and president of the International Council of Electronic Commerce Consultants, or EC-Council. His company was chosen by the Pentagon to oversee training of Department of Defense employees who work in computer security-related jobs and certify them when the training is complete.
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Those who do not wish to have their details on the £11 billion computer system are supposed to be able to opt out by informing health authorities.
But doctors have accused the Government of rushing the project through, meaning that patients have had their details uploaded to the database before they have had a chance to object.
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COUNCIL chiefs said ‘big brother’ campaigners who leave anti-CCTV stickers on camera poles could be prosecuted.
Wycombe District Council commented after the Big Brother Watch group published a photograph of one of its stickers on a pole in Frogmoor.
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A GOVERNMENT minister has said identity cards for young people could be one way of keeping children safe on the internet.
However, Meg Hillier MP said it was also very important for parents and teenagers to be aware of the risks they take when using social networking sites.
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This anonymous office building on a business park near Heathrow Airport is where the Government has begun monitoring millions of British holidaymakers using its controversial new ‘terrorist detector’ database.
The top-secret computer system – tied into the airlines’ ticketing network – makes judgments about travel habits and passengers’ friends and family to decide if they are a security risk.
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Paul Winston was issued with the £60 ticket after stopping in a bus stop in north London when the bee started attacking him in his vehicle last July.
He veered into the bus lane and opened his window – shooing the bee out to stop it from stinging him.
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ONE-HUNDRED CCTV “spy” cameras that have been switched back on after a 12-month blackout should be targeted at catching criminals, City Hall opposition leaders say.
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Teacher-in-classroom A few weeks ago I wrote about Edinburgh Council’s decision to start training their social workers to look for anything vaguely ‘terroristy’ – to the general consternation of many.
But this week Cornwall Council has taken the Minority Report approach to combating terrorism one step further.
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For nearly two centuries, runners and spectators have gathered on a steep Cotswolds hill for the Whitsun cheese rolling.
The rough and tumble spectacle sees daredevil competitors chase a 7lb wheel of Double Gloucester down the 200-yard incline in one of Britain’s most eccentric traditions.
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Environment
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Wind power provides a fifth of Denmark’s electricity, most of it generated by giant wind farms built on land and in the country’s coastal waters.
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Every bit of fully synthetic plastic that’s ever been produced over the past 100 years is somewhere on our planet, a leading environmentalist, David de Rothschild, said Tuesday.
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We hear so often about extinction, however is there new life being formed? Specifically are there any new mammals, or higher order animals? I believe there are new viruses and microbes all the time.
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Finance
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Greece CDS is quoted at 350 bips this morning and accusing fingers are pointing to hedge funds. So it seems Paulson and GS went one CDS too far by shorting government debt and are now attracting the political ire of regulators.
I find the article doesn’t go far enough in analysis and just skims the reasons why they are nefarious. The biggest one being that when a CDS triggers they are a liquidity drain. You have to come up with a cash settlement for large sums of money. I remain convinced that the panic of aug 2007 can be directly linked to a liquidity drain triggered by naked CDS on subprime. There was a 4:1 naked to non-naked ratio…
Of note, Goldman Sachs (GS) and many others were in the business of selling the short side of these securities to speculators (and themselves) and marketing the long side to investors with AAA ratings. “Abacus”, for example, was built from naked CDS. When subprime blew up those CDS blew up and with a lever of 4:1. AIG was at the end of the line, meaning the government… Ouch… GS will be investigated in conjunction with AIG and these securities is my guess.
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“The profitability impact is devastating for a lot of the banks,” JPMorgan analyst Carla Antunes da Silva said at a banking conference in Milan today. “For the U.K. banks in particular, you would have no earnings left by the time you have done all this.”
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Cindy Fulawka, who worked for Scotiabank for about 20 years, says she was required to work overtime every day without extra pay.
Financial firms are facing class actions over unpaid overtime, and if plaintiffs succeed, other companies may have to pay up, too
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Bank-owned sales–or “REO,” real-estate owned, in industry parlance—are expected to account for between 39% and 50% of home sales in Phoenix in the fourth quarter of 2012, up from 37% at the end of last year. The REO share of sales in San Diego, where one-quarter of sales at the end of last year were REO, is projected between 24% and 31% three years out.
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Sir, It is interesting that Robert Reoch (Letters, March 
tries to give me a lesson on the importance of market intermediaries, using the example of the wheat market. You see, I started my – rather successful – career as a wheat trader in 1974. I used derivatives and complex structured products involving both commodities and currencies long before the team at JPMorgan – that “created” the credit default swaps market – graduated from college.
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One thing that we all learned from the financial crisis is that Goldman Sachs is a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” — its name to be spat aloud with an expletive to ward off evil spirits and succubi. But that’s why the good people at Goldman have undertaken a long and artful campaign to convince America that they’re not the rapacious dicks they’ve been made out to be. Part of that charm offensive is “a $500 million pro bono project last November called 10,000 Small Businesses,” which is “intended to kick-start small businesses, especially in inner cities, by providing applicants with mentoring, scholarships and — through grants to community development institutions — investment capital.”
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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An annual report by the US State Department has found dictators and repressive governments around the world are making sure they have as much control over their citizens when they’re online as they do the rest of the time.
The United States annual report on human rights might include a look at internet access and censorship but its real focus is good old-fashioned torture, wrongful arrest, censorship and police brutality. Not that the US has done anything to promote or make such behaviour acceptable of course.
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House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman, D-Calif., said Thursday that he is working on his own legislation aimed at bolstering global Internet freedom.
Berman said he is still working out the details and plans to work with Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., on the legislation. Smith has introduced his own bill, known as the Global Online Freedom Act, which would require the State Department to set up an Office of Global Internet Freedom and compile an annual list of Internet-restricting countries. The measure also would require U.S. information technology and communications firms to store personally identifiable information outside of Internet-restricting countries and report when countries ask them to censor, block or restrict access to information.
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Tech Liberty is also concerned by the expansion of government powers that thefilter represents. It entrenches the principle that the government can set up a new censorship scheme and block material with no reference to existing law. Worse, the filter list stays secret, in contrast to the censorship regime that operates in respect of other media, where the Chief Censor must publish decisions banning offensive material.
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The mandatory Internet filtering scheme could sway votes against the Rudd Government when the IT industry hits the polling booths at the Federal election.
Results from Whirlpool’s 2009 Australian Broadband Survey of 23,683 verified responses found 92.6 per cent of respondents do not support the Federal Government’s mandatory Internet content filtering scheme, citing concerns that it will block legitimate information, create a false sense that the Internet is safe among parents, and the possibly be abused by future governments.
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The International Telecommunication Union has given broad support to the Rudd Government’s telecommunications policy of funding the NBN in parallel with a tightening of regulation, in a wide-ranging report looking at telecommunications regulatory reform worldwide.
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An online activist group will use a flash mob on April Fools Day to raise its concerns about the Internet content filter to the general public.
The Sydney Anti-Filter Coalition, one of many splinter groups opposed to the Federal Government’s plans to provide a mandatory ISP-level internet filter, is urging its supporters to gather in Sydney’s central business district for a flash mob event. Participants will wear gags and hand out information to the general public.
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Shadow treasurer Joe Hockey has slammed the Federal Government’s proposal for mandatory ISP-level filtering.
In a presentation at Melbourne’s Grattan Institute, Hockey said the proposal opened the possibility of function-creep whereby future governments could censor additional material once the filter infrastructure was in place.
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Electronic Frontiers Australia has welcomed remarks made by Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey concerning proposed mandatory Internet filtering.
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An outspoken defendant of free speech, Esra’a has in the past been subjected to threats and harassment. As such she has asked CNN not to publish her image.
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“A lot of this data that people would like to make available, they wouldn’t necessarily want to make available to everyone,” said Jack Moffitt, chief technical officer for Collecta, a search engine that aims to give real-time results. “I think we’ll be wrestling with privacy issues around real-time data for a long time.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Google, Yahoo, eBay, Facebook, Orange, Talk Talk and BT have singed an open letter to the Financial Times condemning a bill in parliament that they say “threatens freedom of speech and the open internet”.
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Text added to digital economy bill that could block sites such as YouTube echoes almost word for word a suggestion from the BPI
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Pirate Party UK leader Andrew Robinson said, “The choices being made by parliament will not stop future generations downloading music, they will simply decide if future generation consider the law and the political process to be their enemy or not. One-sided laws written by record companies will simply strengthen people’s resolve to fight for what they believe is right.”
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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With real property, even if there are ownership disputes, they don’t get as ridiculously complicated as this. They don’t go on for years with multiple people all believing they own the property only to find out later they might not. They don’t involve people just declaring they own a piece of property with no one realizing they might not. These are all arguments over “imaginary” property, which isn’t property at all. At what point do people realize just how ridiculous this whole structure is?
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For me, trying to make money off of scores is just a dubious proposition. The amount I might make seems trivial compared to the wider distribution I get from having interested musicians be able to check out my works whenever they want. There’s also a certain resentment of the music publishing industry involved, since no publisher is likely to accept any music as commercially unprofitable as mine, and my understanding (from Philip Glass and many others) is that, even if a publisher takes your work, the most likely result is that they will print a few copies, keep them in boxes in warehouses as a tax write-off, tie up the copyright, and make your music more difficult to obtain even for those willing to buy it. Of all the friends whose music I write about, the few whose music is officially published are the ones whose scores I have a devil of a time trying to get. When the scores are available for perusal only, I sometimes can’t get access to them at all. I’m also conditioned by my score-starved youth: so many of the scores I desperately needed to see when I was a young, studying composer couldn’t be had under any circumstances. If young composers are burning with interest to see how my music works, I’m happy to satisfy them, and without giving them the hurdle of having to contact me personally. I wish Boulez, Pousseur, Glass, and co. had done the same for me. I bought a ton of scores and would have bought many more i was curious about, but many were impossible to get. I’m just not convinced that the music publishing industry, in its current form, deserves to survive. [UPDATE: I should add, though, that I know some fine, dedicated people in the music publishing business who put their heart and soul into meticulously editing scores by famous dead composers. I guess we still need the business around for that, but they'll never do all that for me, and I can do it for myself.]
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The Motion Picture Association of America issued its annual report on the movie business yesterday — and to hear the MPAA say it, things have never been better for Hollywood.
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In this leaked, six-page email, Richard Mollet, the Director of Public Affairs for the British Phonographic Institute (the UK’s record-industry lobbyists), sets out the BPI’s strategy for ramming through the Digital Economy Bill, a sweeping, backwards reform to UK copyright law that will further sacrifice privacy and due process in the name of preserving copyright, without actually preserving copyright.
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Video games are becoming more like movies every day, so it’s not surprising to see publishers facing the same kinds of idea theft lawsuits that frequently irritate Hollywood.
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ACTA
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While supporting efforts to protect intellectual property rights through an international anti-counterfeiting agreement, MEPs insist that the European Parliament must be kept abreast of the negotiations and that data protection and privacy rights of citizens must be safeguarded. They would also rule out the introduction of a “three strikes” internet disconnection as a penalty for three online copyright infringements.
Fixing Broken Images in OpenOffice
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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03.13.10
Posted in IRC Logs at 8:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Amahi, the home web server that lets you efficiently manage and backup of all the computers, game consoles and other devices in your network.
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In a previous column, I bemoaned the state of HPC Software. This column was actually a prelude to my column on nVidia CUDA computing. I was particularly impressed at how fast CUDA has gained traction in HPC and other areas. The CUDA wave has definitely hit the beach and I’ll have more on nVidia as the Fermi GPU begins to filter into the HPC trenches. In this column I want to talk about the other GPU language: OpenCL.
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Google
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking at a conference in Abu Dhabi this week, confirmed that the Chrome OS operating system is on track for delivery in the second half of this year. While we already know that it’s headed for netbooks, there are new reasons to believe that its brightest future may be as an adjunct OS on netbooks and tablets.
Google is taking several big gambles with its upcoming OS, not the least of which is that it will require users to work with all data in the cloud. That will rule out countless applications and utilities that are, in some cases, beloved to users, and there is a good chance that Google’s cloud-only gamble could backfire.
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Kernel Space
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For high-frequency threaded operations, the Linux® kernel provides tasklets and work queues. Tasklets and work queues implement deferrable functionality and replace the older bottom-half mechanism for drivers. This article explores the use of tasklets and work queues in the kernel and shows you how to build deferrable functions with these APIs.
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Do you want to remove bloat from your Linux installation? Are you looking to enable extra features that aren’t provided by your distro? Fancy trying some of the cutting-edge patches doing the rounds? You’ll need to recompile your kernel, and while it might look like black magic if you’ve never done it before, it’s actually pretty straightforward. Read on for everything you need to know…
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Graphics Stack
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Now that David Airlie’s vga_switcheroo has went upstream in the Linux 2.6.34 kernel that provides hybrid graphics support and delayed GPU switching, David went on to look for something new to work on in his downtime when not busy with tasks at Red Hat. This new work is on GPU offloading / multi-GPU rendering.
Last month NVIDIA introduced Optimus as a way for dual-GPU notebooks to seamlessly switch between the two GPUs but also to offload the rendering workload to the other graphics processor. This is somewhat similar to NVIDIA’s SLI and ATI/AMD’s CrossFire for splitting the rendering workload across multiple GPUs, but it has its differences. David ended up developing a proof-of-concept similar to NVIDIA’s Optimus that he is calling “Prime” and it works with Intel and ATI GPUs.
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Applications
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The Zero Install Injector makes it easy for users to install software without needing root privileges. It takes the URL of a program and runs it (downloading it first if necessary). Any dependencies of the program are fetched in the same way. The user controls which version of the program and its dependencies to use.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Run, jump, drag, shove and laser your way up that mountain, get back those underpants!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Berlin, probably one of the most frequented KDE hacking locations in the world, saw another hack sprint from 13th to 21st of February. This time four of the KDevelop and five of the Kate developers shared a week of very productive programming. Additionally team members from Okteta and KDE on Windows joined the meeting.
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Epidemic is a desktop-oriented, KDE, Debian-based (GNU/Linux) distribution developed in Brazil. Epidemic 3.1, the latest edition, features a number of custom tools and improvements. One of those tools is EInstaller, the graphical installation program. It is supposed to be easy to use, but if you have are not familiar with disk partitioning under Linux, you’ll find that it’s not so easy to use. This tutorial provides an installation guide for Epidemic 3.1, with emphasis on the disk partitioning aspect.
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Ubuntu
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There are over ten million users of Ubuntu world wide. That means that there are ten million people who have made a conscious decision to install Ubuntu on their computer. If these ten million people weren’t here, then we wouldn’t exist. We serve the end user, and because we serve them, we want to keep them happy by providing what they want.
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At any rate, the point I wanted to make was simply that people need to complain and need to rant about things, if you want them to be good. So please don’t take my rants always as negative, I do rant, and sometimes I rant a lot but I usually do that because I want to improve the situation.
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One of my many jobs in the community is to bring you lovely Ubuntu planet readers some of the wonderful art works that are created using Ubuntu and the FOSS tools we have in the repositories, all these works come from the Ubuntu deviantArt group.
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OK, so as an ardent GUI Designer and general fan of winning computer interface design, I took a strong interest in Canonical’s recent announcement about their new Ubuntu branding, complete with two new default themes set to appear in the upcoming “Lucid Lynx” LTS release in April – named “Ambience” and “Radiance”.
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The Ubuntu Ubiquity Slideshow is a project which uses Webkit that provides a slideshow when you install Ubuntu.
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Variants
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There’s no doubt that Ubuntu has transformed the Linux landscape since its introduction six years ago. It has modified a few key technologies to ensure generally demanding tasks under Linux, simpler for even early computer users. Although, Ubuntu was a debian-based distro, it is a popular framework for several other distros.
Although you can take a basic Ubuntu source code and make it into almost anything, derivatives are quite popular because they eliminate the need for custom configurations. The huge number of distros testifies to that!
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There’s a lot Linux can not do(yet) but you’ll be suprised what it’s already being used for. Look at this: a microwave running Linux (yes we can!) and a washing machine also.
It may not be available to us right away but the revolution is coming. While much more devices will be powered up with more complex functionality more manufacturers will discover reinventing the wheel is not Cool. Linux is! And I will start doing household chores happily, like hacking my washing machine. I envision a future where I can install any Linux distribution of choice to my household appliances.
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Android
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The CE Linux Forum (CELF) has opened registration and announced speakers for its Embedded Linux Conference on Apr. 12-14 in San Francisco. The event will feature keynote speakers Greg Kroah-Hartman and Matt Asay, and offer over 50 sessions on embedded Linux topics including flash file-systems, RT-Preempt, security, Moorestown, and Android.
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Sub-notebooks
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Advanced Micro Devices plans to release a processor in its “Fusion” line that will be positioned for the netbook market, putting it in competition with the Intel Atom, and, to a lesser degree, the ARM processor.
The “Fusion” program is AMD’s (NYSE: AMD) long-term project to integrate its CPU cores with graphics processor cores from ATI, which it acquired in 2006. The first Fusion processors are expected some time early next year. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has its own integrated processors, the Westmere family of Core i5/i7 chips, which feature integrated graphics in dual-core CPUs.
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It’s a telling shift in the market, however, that open-source companies don’t seem to be appending their corporate names with “source” anymore as open source goes mainstream.
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When Urs Fleisch needed a utility to edit the tags of MP3 files in 2002, none of the existing programs available on Linux suited his needs. At first he tried to enhance TkTag, a Perl application, but he soon realized that he had to write his own application to get what he really wanted. Fleisch created Kid3, an audio tag editor that follows the Unix philosophy of “do one thing and do it well.”
Kid3 originally ran on KDE, but nowadays it runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. It handles not only ID3 tags in MP3 files, but also tags in Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC, MPC, MP4/AAC, MP2, Speex, TrueAudio, WavPack, WMA, WAV, and AIFF files, and it lets you edit all tags in a file, not just a selected subset.
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Open source technologies are making significant inroads in governments around the world, avers Gopi Ganapathy, President & CEO, Essentia, US (www.essentia-corp.com). This is as a result of open source providing significant benefits such as low cost, flexibility of use and modification, lack of vendor lock-in, and most important of all the ability to create drive a vibrant local economy of solution providers in innovation, development, deployment, training and support, adds Gopi, during a recent interaction with Business Line.
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Things look bad for Toyota. There was yet another unintended acceleration incident involving a Toyota yesterday. A Prius in New York on its way to the dealership to have its gas-pedal checked out crashed into a stone wall.
Toyota has always maintained that its unintended acceleration problems are mechanical in nature. If it wasn’t a bunched-up floor mat it’s a sticky gas pedal. Customers and regulators have their own theories however. They suspect the electronic throttle control, or ECT.
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Mozilla
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Firefox is arguably one of the most successful open source software projects. Mozilla celebrated last year when Firefox surpassed 1 billion total downloads. The current number of active daily users is said to be over 350 million.
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The Firefox developers have released a new preview version of Firefox 3.7 which includes many of the features planned for Firefox 4.0. The preview release includes special protection against rogue third-party processes that could crash the browser.
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Want to take full keyboard control of Firefox? Tired of having to mouse around the Web? Firefox has a good set of shortcuts by default, but if you want to go completely keyboard-driven, take a look at Vim-inspired extension Vimperator.
Vimperator is an amazingly complete add-on for Firefox that gives you access to almost all of Firefox’s features from the keyboard. It takes its inspiration from the popular vi-clone Vim, so many of the keybindings will already be familiar to you if you’re a Vim user. Even if not, Vimperator provides a great way to ditch the mouse and control Firefox from the keyboard.
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Oracle
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Oracle to succeed where Sun Microsystems failed – i.e. engaging with the community and turning open source investments into profits – needs to define and implement viable open source strategies for those projects. I believe they can, let’s see how Oracle will move forward in the future.
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CMS
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And the answer to yesterday’s “Eye grow Drupal” question is: Druplipets. Hundreds of cute little Druplipets, your friendly Druplicon chia pet. Druplipet is the newest member of the Acquia and Drupal Gardens family and will be making appearances at industry events this year. It is making its first appearance at SXSW along with a fun contest. Needless to say, Drupal chia pets are fun and powerful stuff!
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A federal judge Thursday ordered ex-East Chicago Mayor Robert Pastrick and two former aides to pay $108 million in civil damages in an alleged sidewalks-for-votes scheme.
Mr. Pastrick was never charged criminally, though other members of the so-called Sidewalk Six were sentenced to prison. A phone rang unanswered at the office of Mr. Patrick’s attorney, Michael Bosch, when the Associated Press called seeking comment.
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A new bill in the state Assembly would ruin restaurant food and baked goods as we know them.
In a deeply misguided gesture that is also an abuse of the legislative process, a New York City Assemblyman is pushing a nanny-state bill that would ban the use of all forms of salt in the preparation and cooking of all restaurant food.
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Science
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Deforestation has revealed what could be a giant impact crater in Central Africa, scientists say.
The 36-46km-wide feature, identified in DR Congo, may be one of the largest such structures discovered in the last decade.
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Security
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This is the lede, verbatim, from a story that appeared in The Hill yesterday: “The Internet allowed extremists to contact, recruit, train and equip the suspect responsible for the attempted Flight 253 bombing on Christmas Day ‘within weeks,’ a top Pentagon official told lawmakers Wednesday.” What’s the implication, that because someone used the Internet to plan something, something bad, we should get rid of it? Fine by me, believe me.
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Let’s say you’re doing a penetration test. What kind of information about a target can you find out by using Google?
Anything connected to the web, is indexed by Google. Even administrator’s portals of devices connected to the web, such as printers and webcams are crawled and discovered by Google. You’ll be surprised by how many unprotected webcams are connected to the internet, streaming live video from people’s living rooms, or university dormitories.
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Environment
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Japanese tuna brokers protested today after the EU decided to support a worldwide trade ban on Atlantic bluefin tuna. EU governments indicated that they would back a complete international ban on the species to allow the bluefin to recover from years of over-fishing.
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Companies across Europe are hoarding permits to produce greenhouse gas emissions worth hundreds of millions of pounds, the Guardian can reveal.
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The Japanese coastguard has arrested an activist from New Zealand for illegally boarding a whaling ship last month.
Peter Bethune, a member of the US-based group Sea Shepherd, is accused of jumping aboard the vessel from a jetski in the Southern Ocean, where Japan was conducting its annual whale hunt.
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Finance
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1. Bold government action staved off a Depression, saving or creating 1.5 million jobs.
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2. “No one wants banks making the kinds of risky loans that got us into this situation in the first place.”
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3. The economic crisis is a “subprime crisis.”
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4. Ben Bernanke is a heroic leader.
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5. The worst is behind us.
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By a conservative estimate, there may be 3 million to 4 million foreclosed homes coming onto the market in the next few years. This is the inevitable, and salubrious, reaction to many years of real estate inflation, and it will continue to happen no matter how hard the government pretends it can control economic outcomes. See Lie No. 1.
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A court-appointed US bankruptcy examiner has concluded that there are grounds for legal claims against top Lehman Brothers bosses and auditor Ernst & Young for signing off misleading accounting statements in the run-up to the collapse of the Wall Street bank in 2008 which sparked the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
A judge last night unsealed a 2,200-page forensic report by expert Anton Valukas into Lehman’s collapse, which includes scathing criticism of accounting “gimmicks” used by the failing bank to buy itself time. These included a contentious technique known as “repo 105″, which temporarily boosted the bank’s balance sheet by as much as $50bn (£33bn).
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Financial reform in the Senate is at a critical juncture, as Senate Democrats attempt to achieve a bipartisan bill. Conservative Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) appears to be in the driver’s seat. Corker is an advocate of putting the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) into the Federal Reserve, an institution almost as unpopular with the public as the IRS.
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Negotiators have failed to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, or effectively cap their size. Worse, the draft continues to exempt the most complex derivatives — including foreign currency swaps and credit-default swaps — from the requirement that they be regulated and traded on an open exchange. You remember credit default swaps. They allow parties with no insurable interest in an underlying asset (i.e., your house) take out insurance on whether or not your house will burn down. This of course gives them an incentive to torch the place. These “financial weapons of mass destruction” played a key role in the collapse of AIG and the global economy, and are now being used by big American banks to torch Greece.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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As state and local governments consider taxing soda and sugary drinks to raise money and address the national obesity epidemic, manufacturers of sugary drinks — like countless other industries — are taking PR cues from the tobacco industry to defeat the initiatives. The PR tactics they are using are starting to be old hat. By now, everyone should be able to spot them, but just in case you’re not up to speed on your corporate PR literacy, here’s what to look for:
Step One: Position your product as the solution, not the problem
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Step Two: Broaden the issue to take attention off your products
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Step Three: Claim it will cost jobs and tank the economy
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For a few days last fall, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood celebrated a big victory: the tiny advocacy group had successfully pushed the Walt Disney Company to offer full refunds to everyone who had bought the company’s popular Baby Einstein videos from June 2004 to September 2009.
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In 2006, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood complained to the Federal Trade Commission about Disney’s educational claims about the videos. As a result, Disney dropped the word “educational” from their marketing materials for the videos, but that wasn’t enough.
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In all, the Board has passed over 100 amendments to curriculum since the beginning of the year. According to the New York Times, “no historians, sociologists or economists” were consulted during the Board’s meetings on these right-wing changes, which were spearheaded by board member and dentist Don McLeroy, who claimed expertise in a host of serious educational matters not involving tooth decay. In the “highlights” of this Texas-sized historical spin, the Board:
* Required that students learn positive things about “Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Supplementing other measures to improve the browser’s reputation for data protection, in a white paper on Chrome data protection, Google has announced that it will in future delete the token once Google Chrome runs and checks for updates the first time. From version 4.1, the allegedly anonymous ID will only be used to report successful installation of the browser to Google.
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World Day Against Cyber Censorship logoTomorrow (12th March) Reporters Without Borders will be celebrating World Day Against Cyber Censorship. While the UK is not on Reporters Without Borders’ list of “Enemies of the Internet,” we should not be complacent.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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The other day I heard a music publisher inveigh against composers who post their scores for free as PDFs on their web pages. I am one of that tribe. His argument, which was new to me and interested me, was that those composers pose unfair competition to the composers whose scores are published, and thus cost money.
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Pink Floyd prevailed Thursday in a legal brawl with its label when a British judge ordered EMI to stop selling individual downloads of the acid-inspired group’s songs without permission.
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ACTA
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The result was a massive landslide in favour of open government and internet freedom. 636 MEPs were on the side of freedom, and just 10 voted in favour of ACTA.
I can now name and shame those 10, people who were elected to represent us, but who want us to be governed by a secret worldwide clique where the RIAA call the shots and politicians are too scared to tell the public what they are signing us up to. The list in full is:
* Nigel Farage (United Kingdom, UKIP)
* Marta Andreasen (United Kingdom, UKIP)
* Stuart Agnew (United Kingdom, UKIP)
* Gerard Batten (United Kingdom, UKIP)
* John Bufton (United Kingdom, UKIP)
* Trevor Colman (United Kingdom, UKIP)
* The Earl of Dartmouth (United Kingdom, UKIP)
* Mike Nattrass (United Kingdom, UKIP)
* Paul Nuttall (United Kingdom, UKIP)
* Nicole Sinclaire (United Kingdom, UKIP)
Just 16 politicians couldn’t make their minds up and abstained. They include:
* Diane Dodds (Northern Ireland, Democratic Unionist Party)
* Nick Griffin (United Kingdom, BNP)
* Andrew Henry William Brons (United Kingdom, BNP)
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Posted in Finance, Google, Interview, Mail, Marketing, Novell, Ron Hovsepian, Videos, Virtualisation at 2:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Salt Lake Valley
Summary: Novell’s proprietary business assets and what they have been up to in the past week
NOVELL news coverage has recently been overwhelmed by the big bid [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Novell’s PR team has been very active despite all of this and it hardly even mentioned the bid, instead choosing to focus on fluff like SaaS and a survey that Novell was conducting itself in order to support its position, apparently.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Linspire, Microsoft, Novell, Samsung, SLES/SLED, Xandros at 12:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News and coverage concerning the distributions which joined Microsoft’s patent racket against GNU/Linux
SUSE (SLES/SLED)
GroundWork continues to favour SLES for some reason and there is a new press release about it.
GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (GWOS http://www.gwos.com), the leader in commercial open source systems and network management software, today announced it will conclude the GWOS barCAMP Deux sessions with an exclusive release of a SUSE powered Virtual Appliance package that integrates GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.1 with Zendesk (www.zendesk.com).
At the high end, IBM deploys SLES for some large companies with mission-critical systems.
Implementing an IBM System z10 Enterprise Linux Server helps EFiS EDI Finance Service AG save money and the environment
Here is some guidance for anyone who wants SLED 11 installed on this HP hardware:
However, we still tested the stock version and came away impressed. For the vast majority of computing tasks – using Evolution to check your POP mail, burning a DVD disc using LightScribe (included with this SLED build) and even playing games or watching movies – the Elite 7000 is up to the task. Where we noticed a performance degradation is when we compared Linux-to-Linux between this system and a home-built PC that uses an SSD drive, an Nvidia Quadro CX graphics card and has 6GB of RAM. There was no comparison, of course – the home-built system was snappier even for popping up Firefox, copying files and running simulations with a program like Autodesk Revit Architecture (which normally prefers a workstation PC).
That’s about it when it comes to SLE*.
Xandros/Linspire
Another distribution that we name “Ballnux” would have to be Xandros because Linspire and Turbolinux are more or less history. Here is a little new rant about Xandros:
Linpus and Xandros aren’t looking quite so exciting. Of course, that could change as smartbooks with ARM-based processors start to hit the market, since they’re not capable of running Windows.
Not looking like Windows does not make something deficient. People don’t need Windows, they just need something that works. But anyway, Lindows, which was bought by Xandros in its “Linspire” form, is now being called one of the “worst products ever”.
9. Lindows
The hype was palpable surrounding Lindows: it was going to be a Linux operating system that provided full compatibility with Windows. Microsoft didn’t take kindly to this and even sued, unsuccessfully, saying that Lindows was infringing its Windows copyright. The court case just added to the excitement.
Xandros never did anything substantial with Linspire, not even with CNR.
Samsung
Microsoft is also extorting Linux phones and Samsung lets Microsoft get its way. Here is a new discussion about Samsung’s Android phones and about Bada:
Many people think of it as a poor thought, but Samsung has made it clear that Samsung Bada is being launched to make smartphones accessible to everyone. The smartphone market is still in its growing phase and Bada platform aims at improving the current situation.
Bada is mostly a layer and the platform that’s underneath benefits Microsoft if people buy their phones from Samsung. █
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