In this episode: Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu 10.04, is nearly here. And Valve might be porting Steam to Linux. Discover how we coped with two weeks of Z shell and what we think is the biggest threat to Linux.
A quick bit of history: Suse Studio was released in July of 2009, and has a variety of web-based customized Linux build options. It uses Kiwi to build and customize virtual appliances. SUSE Studio also has its own mascot, named Dister.
If the default doesn’t work for you, how do you find the best replacement? How do you know if it will work in your favorite desktop environment? In this guide we’ll cover many of the most popular file managers for Linux and include the details to help you decide which one is right for you.
It happened to me again yesterday. That moment everyone talks about, when a GUI program is suddenly inconvenient and obtrusive, and you realize that the console alternative is just plain faster and easier than clicking buttons and waiting for an interface to accomplish the same task.
Do you own a Mac? I use both MacOS and Linux everyday, and found myself with a problem. Before I found Shutter taking screenshots in Linux felt like a PITA. In MacOS you can take region screenshots by pressing Cmd-Shift-4. And I missed this feature in Linux, until I cared enough to look for a solution.
Shutter was the answer, an open source screenshot grabber that fills my needs, and probably yours too. Installing is relatively simple, if you have an updated version of Ubuntu. If not, you'll have to manually add the launchpad repositories. All instructions are on Shutter's homepage.
Hulu is one of the most popular video sites on the web. You can watch all kinds of different television shows and movies right in your browser. But there's also another way to watch Hulu and that's to download the Hulu Desktop application for Linux.
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The Hulu Desktop for Linux interface is really geared toward using a remote control for navigation (obviously that's the main reason they created this application in the first place). If you've ever used Apple TV or Boxee, you'll know what I mean. You can certainly use a mouse or a trackball but it feels weird as you have to move up or down through the interface to choose a category, subcategory and then the program or movie you want to watch.
The distro includes 34 of the most popular, fun, free and open source games that run natively in Linux. Most, if not all, of them can be found and installed from your regular distro's repositories once you are back in the friendly confines of your distro of choice. You can find a complete list of games and download links at live.linux-gamers.net. Every single game played great -- a few even had cool soundtracks -- and while I was very familiar with many of the games, there were some I had never heard of.
It is important to note that building everything from source code can take a long time, especially if you do not have a very fast computer. For instance, building OpenOffice.org from source code (probably the largest program you will build) can take a day on some systems, although it can be compiled within a few hours on most modern processors. Fortunately, with Gentoo's Package Management System, just about everything will build cleanly the first time (including any and all dependecies).
1. DSL (Damn Small Linux): As the name suggests, this is one compact operating system. Debian-based DSL requires only 50 MB of available storage space yet still includes an image viewer, a web browser, a text editor, an MP3 player, an email client, a PDF reader, and more. You can actually run it off a 64 MB USB drive (but you won’t have much room for storage). Now that is damn small!
Head on over to http://www.pendrivelinux.com/ for all things pendrive related.
I highly recommend using either of these 2 applications to install linux, or to have a portable OS in your pocket. Plus it's a few less CD's in our landfills, which is always a good thing.
Few days ago PCLinux2010 was released, the new version comes with many new features and improvements, the Gnome version comes with a Full Gnome 2.30.0 Desktop, Kernel 2.6.32.11-bfs kernel for maximum desktop performance, Nvidia and ATI fglrx driver support...
My brother casts light and shadows for a living and we have been talking about a little project for a while. The release of Ubuntu 10.04 (aka Lucid Lynx) this week was the perfect opportunity to put the plan into action.
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long-Term Support). This release incorporates the Desktop Edition and the Server Edition. The Server Edition can be used on physical servers, on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), and on Amazon’s EC2 public cloud. Codenamed "Lucid Lynx", 10.04 LTS continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.
Still, Asay concedes that Canonical faces challenges. Roughly 300 of the company’s 330 employees are engineers — meaning that Canonical still needs to ramp up its marketing and sales efforts more aggressively. But “because the company didn’t focus on money so long, the opportunities to make money are just sitting there.”
Tomtom has packed the Go Live 1000 with a Webkit based browser interface, apparently in the hope that customers will mistake it for a smartphone. The firm says that it has optimised the unit for "rapid integration of third party applications", meaning it has finally caught on to the fact that smartphones are destroying its business. To run these third party applications, the Go Live 1000 features a 500MHz ARM 11 based chip.
Cayman Islands/April 28, 2010/Business Wire — Garmin-Asus, a co-branded alliance between Garmin€® Ltd. (NASDAQ: GRMN), and ASUSTeK€® Computer Inc. (TAIEX: 2357), today announced the Garmin-Asus A10, a touchscreen smartphone running on the Androidâ⢠platform that is optimized for pedestrian navigation. The A10 is expected to be available in mid-2010 in Europe and Asia-Pacific.
If we know you at all (and we think we know you pretty well) you'll probably be amused and titillated to learn that Vodafone has announced that its first Vodafone-branded Android phone will be available this May.
Announced months back, it now looks like Rogers will soon be releasing the Acer Liquid E. There is no exact release date known yet but we will be sure to let you know as soon as we do! It isn't the prettiest Android phone, but we have seen that with Android it's usually the less eye-appealing ones that get all the brains and brawn.
The rugged machines - which are designed specifically for children in the developing world and run both Linux and Microsoft Windows - are now offered in single units for around $200 each.
Granted, Buytaert does cite nearly $700,000 in expenses related to the conference, but he also estimates $1,004,470 in revenues. DrupalCon makes clear why open source conferences continue to flourish. There are organic reasons why they do well, of course. Among those, open source projects are by nature community driven, and members of communities like to mingle and share ideas.
The videos were recorded at 720x480 resolution and where transcoded with a combination of Handbrake and ffmpeg2theora... with the final results being in Ogg Theora (.ogv) format.
The videos were uploaded to archive.org and are streaming (and downloadable) from there.
Mozilla's Firefox is a pretty good browser. But, thanks to a number of add-ons, it can also be an essential research tool for anyone working online. We look at some of the best add-ons available for improving Firefox's research capabilities.
The Account Manager makes it incredibly easy for users to create new accounts with optional randomly generated passwords, and log into and out of them with just a click. As a web developer, adding support for this feature could take as little as fifteen minutes of hacking (in fact, we’ll mention the first 5 people to add support – read below to learn more.).
No one likes this term. Attempting to describe something by what it isn’t typically doesn’t work — and, to make matters worse, this is about data-store relationships and not about SQL at all. Yet NoSQL databases have significant advantages, including:
* Seemingly infinite scalability (Facebook is using Cassandra to store and query 50TB of user inbox data). * Extraordinary fault tolerance. * High availability. * A design-friendly lack of schema. * Integration of both RESTful and cloud computing technologies.
Georg Greve has been awarded the German Medal of Honour for his contributions to open standards and free software. Born in 1973, the physicist founded Free Software Foundation Europe in 2001 and served as its president up to last year.
A proprietary vendor supplied us with their code and details of performance for one of our teams to integrate with our existing systems. No news there, happens every day across the enterprise. However, as the implementation scaled it exposed fatal flaws in the proprietary code when under load - bringing everything to a grinding halt.
As KXStitch grew, so did Allewell’s skill as a developer. “I originally started the development process with KDevelop using KDE2/Qt, as I was new to developing graphics applications and new to developing on Linux. I found KDevelop was easy to use and provided a wealth of tools to aid the development process. Since then I have moved away from KDevelop and just maintain my own build files as I have gained more knowledge of Linux and the development process.”
The votes are in, and Comcast has won Consumerist's uncoveted "Worst Company in America" award.
This has to be the best detail from the emails published as exhibits for the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations hearing on Goldman Sachs. (The “Timberwolf C.D.O. squared” refers to a hybrid cash/synthetic collateralized debt obligation Goldman Sachs derived from other mortgage-backed securities, naturally.)
The number of crimes solved by the Metropolitan Police using CCTV has fallen by more than a half in five years.
Transport for London has awarded a 10-year, €£22.6 million contract to Easynet Global Services to provide digital telecommunications network services for its CCTV system upgrade.
Today that fear has been confirmed as - for at the least the second year running - the NHS has topped the list of UK organisations subject to the highest number of data breaches. As reported by the Health Service Journal:More serious data breaches have taken place within the NHS than any other UK organisation, according to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).
A total of 2897 breaches were reported, accounting for more than 30% of the total number, deputy commissioner David Smith told the Infosec security conference.
The NHS, which is currently introducing digital patient records, said that 113 incidents occurred due to stolen data or hardware, with a further 82 cases of lost data or hardware.
Eyewitness News 4 has uncovered documentation that indicates some police officers have been mandated to write a certain number tickets per month or face possible punishment.
With political pressure mounting, Senate Republicans relented on Wednesday and agreed to let Democrats open debate on legislation that would impose the most far-reaching overhaul of the nation’s financial regulatory system since the aftermath of the Depression.
If all three were confirmed, the Fed would have its first full slate of seven governors in four years. There are currently two vacant Fed positions, for which Raskin and Diamond are to be nominated, and Fed Vice Chairman Donald L. Kohn plans to retire in June, to be replaced by Yellen.
Prior to joining CIGNA Insurance, he held various positions in the areas of IT, engineering, marketing and general business management at Monsanto, Quaker Oats, General Dynamics, and Shell Oil Company.
A major source of revenue for big banks may ultimately be exempt from new regulations under financial reform legislation in Congress.
Lawmakers are looking to crack down on the multitrillion-dollar derivatives market that some blame for worsening the financial crisis.
The Greek debt crisis sent a shudder through global financial markets and served as a dramatic reminder of how vulnerable the world economy remains to the threat of a fast-spreading financial panic.
When Mr. Trichet (head of the European Central Bank, ECB) and Mr. Strauss-Kahn (head of the International Monetary Fund, IMF) rushed to Berlin this week to meet Prime Minister Angela Merkel and the German parliament, the moment was eerily reminiscent of September 2008 – when Hank Paulson stormed up to the US Congress, demanding for $700bn in relief for the largest US banks. Remember the aftermath of that debacle: despite the Treasury argument that this would be enough, much more money was eventually needed, and Mr. Paulson left office a few months later under a cloud.
This is about the “arc of the fraud”. The financial system committed fraud during the boom (liar loans and misrepresentation to customers of all kinds); fraud during the bailout (“if you ruffle our feathers, we will collapse”); and now fraud during the serious attempts at reform (e.g., the astroturf/fake grassroots nonsense.)
But now, faced with fraud charges, investigations, a firestorm of criticism and a regulatory overhaul bill that could seriously damage its profitability, the venerable Wall Street firm is assembling a team of veteran lobbyists, well-connected former Hill staffers and top public relations strategists to confront what is arguably the most traumatic moment in its 140-year history.
Activists are expecting 10,000 people to vent their rage Thursday against the giants of the financial system from within the belly of the beast -- on Wall Street itself -- while another 8,000 will participate virtually.
The Goldman-Paulson fraud suit threatens to throw a spotlight on a realm of Wall Street that has escaped most scrutiny throughout the financial crisis: the hedge fund industry. Top hedge fund managers profit from Wall Street’s business model of fraud and collusion more than any CEO at the big banks, but tend to evade accountability because of the opacity of their industry and their extraordinary power.
Will Goldman Sachs (GS) settle the now-famous civil fraud case over its disclosures (or lack thereof) to a German bank that bought from the firm a batch of toxic investments?
Yes, of course. There's not a person on Wall Street, including at the senior levels of Goldman, who isn't predicting a settlement.
That destination is likely to be a negotiated truce. In the hearing before the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Chairman Carl Levin punishingly interrogated Goldman traders and top executives over the morality of their actions. Senate Republicans, possibly seeing political peril in siding with Wall Street, the next day stopped blocking floor debate on the financial regulatory overhaul bill.
Not only did Goldman Sachs profit on betting against CDOs they designed to fail; more importantly, they insured them through AIG which led to a $182 billion taxpayer bailout.
The doomed deal at the heart of the government's civil fraud suit against Goldman, Sachs & Co. was designed for sophisticated investors.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. trader Josh Birnbaum had recommended betting against the stock of Bear Stearns Cos. in July 2007, just four months after his colleagues sold a $300 million piece of “one shitty deal” to hedge funds controlled by Bear Stearns, according to e-mails obtained by the Senate through a subpoena.
In one sense, Goldman Sachs is no different from other investment banks. Junior employees are expendable. Like goldfish, investment banks eat their young when brand-protection and self-interest make cannibalism seem rationale.
This was a very painful event to watch, not just because death is tragic and not because this death was intentional rather than accidental.
Running a gambling casino is actually a pretty simple, straightforward and honest business. You're closely regulated by the state gambling commission who would throw you in prison if you were caught loading the dice, stacking the deck or making side bets for your own account against your customers. All your customers know that you skew the odds slightly in favor of the house, so that cumulatively the house always wins and you make healthy profits on the margin by which the odds are slightly skewed in your favor.
Most people in Las Vegas would “take offense” at being compared with Wall Street, according to the Nevada senator who represents the gambling capital.
Political theatrics are plentiful on two quite different fronts today: Arizona’s new immigration law and Goldman Sachs’ performance leading up to the economic meltdown of 2008.
H-1B workers in Arizona that can't immediately prove they're working in the U.S. legally may find themselves detained by police or even jailed under the state's new immigration law.
At a 10-hour congressional hearing this week, senators pointed to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. employees’ self-evaluations, which included boasts about making “extraordinary profits” by betting against the subprime market, as proof the company misled investors into a mortgage-linked investment.
His messages left lawyers asking: What was he thinking?
“It is shocking how people are oblivious to the fact that e-mails are a treasure trove for lawyers,” said Jacob Frenkel, a partner at Shulman Rogers Gandal Pordy & Eckerin in Potomac, Maryland. “It’s a combination of not thinking, ignorance and arrogance.”
Fabrice Tourre, who calls himself Fabulous Fab, is not so much.
Actually, the 31-year-old Frenchman of the racy e-mails came across like a weenie when he appeared before a Senate subcommittee to be grilled about Goldman Sachs' role in a deal the SEC says wasn't kosher.
There he was in his Stanford school tie along with his Goldman Sachs colleagues, ducking, dodging and looking none too comfortable as politician after politician teed off on the giant investment bank.
Fabrice Tourre, the Goldman Sachs (GS) executive accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of making misleading statements about toxic investments, had a grandiose view of his own position in the financial system, according to emails the SEC said he wrote.
Senator Carl Levin and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Financial Officer David Viniar agreed on at least one thing during his testimony today before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations: Investment bankers shouldn’t call the securities they sell “crap.”
Levin asked what Viniar felt when he read e-mails in which Goldman Sachs employees described mortgage-linked securities as “crap” or “shitty.”
Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Senate grilling may be the start of a series of inquiries into banks in the wake of the global crisis, said Pippa Malmgren, George W. Bush’s former chief financial-markets adviser.
The e-mails, including communications from Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein, show that employees discussed how to “arm” salespeople to shed bonds the firm found too risky to hold. The e-mails were released yesterday by Senator Carl Levin in connection with a hearing where current and former managers testified about the firm’s role in the financial crisis.
Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, grilled the executives about the firm’s bets against the housing market and its disclosure to clients.
Former eBay CEO and current candidate for governor of California Meg Whitman now regrets participating in a now-banned transaction several years ago when she served on the board of disgraced Goldman Sachs.
The law firm that won Enron investors $7.2 billion in what was one of the largest class action suits in the history of securities law filed charges against Goldman Sachs on Monday.
Top Goldman executives misled investors in complex mortgage securities that became toxic, investigators for a Senate panel allege. They point to e-mails and other Goldman documents obtained in an 18-month investigation. Excerpts from the documents were released Monday, a day before a hearing that will bring CEO Lloyd Blankfein and other top Goldman executives before Congress.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. received a 100 percent payout on its collateral from American International Group Inc. because “it was what they owed us,” Chief Financial Officer David Viniar said.
Democrats blasted Goldman Sachs Sunday for conflicts of interest after internal emails showed company officials cheering the crash of the housing market that devastated the lives of millions of Americans.
Bloomberg Markets breaks some major news today in a magazine profile of TARP Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky, who says his investigation of New York Federal Reserve, then headed by Tim Geithner, “could result in criminal or civil charges”...
A class action complaint has been filed on behalf of investors for failure to fully disclose the facts relating to ABACUS 2007-AC1 transaction, even after receiving notice from the SEC about the deal. If you wish to serve as a lead plaintiff in this case you must move the court by June 25, 2010. A lead plaintiff is a class member who acts on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. Your ability to share in any recovery is not affected by the decision to serve as a lead plaintiff.
Nearly every pension fund and 401k, every college fund in America dropped dramatically because of these fraudulent and unethical acts. Millions of Americans will have to work into their 70s and 80s because of Goldman Sachs, work if they can still find jobs. Goldman Sachs helped take those away too. Not just major employers but governments, cities and states, all can no longer pay the pensions they have guaranteed their workers. The money is gone. It was taken, and not without alot of help.
If we are to take Lloyd Blankfein’s word for it, and that’s always a big if, then there must be a lot worse behavior by Goldman Sachs that has yet to be discovered, beyond what was publicly unearthed at this week’s Senate hearing.
As it was making those deals, Goldman was taking a far more negative view of the mortgage markets. So the issue is, what did Sparks know and when did he know it? More precisely, did he—could he—really expect these deals to do well when Goldman was peddling them to customers?
For some bizarre reason, the WSJ has this filed under “Politics.” (I guess this means the Foxification of the WSJ is continuing apace).
Goldman Sachs Group is in talks over a possible settlement with an Australian fund that said it became defunct after it bought into a $1 billion subprime mortgaged-linked security, the FT reported on Thursday.
A group of 62 House lawmakers is asking the Justice Department to conduct a criminal investigation of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Facebook's latest privacy policy update has once again gotten the company in hot water, this time with four US senators. Senators Al Franken, Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, and Mark Begich wrote an open letter to Facebook on Tuesday, urging the company to take "swift and productive steps" to make user information more private and warning that the Federal Trade Commission may get involved if certain concerns aren't addressed soon.
Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kurt Opsahl has gone spelunking in the history of Facebook's privacy policies over the past five years, presenting a timeline that starts with something fairly moderate and reasonable in 2005 and moves to the current 2010 version which basically says, "By using Facebook, you agree to let us film your life 24/7, sell it to advertisers, ridicule it, or make a reality show from it."
I’d like to remind Michael that there was more agreement than disagreement that blacks were an inferior species in North America late into the 1900s, and that there is still a strong belief that Native Canadians are inferior in parts of Canada even today. Just because there is some agreement on something doesn’t mean that it’s right.
Why am I doing this? Easy. It’s called documentation. I’ve dealt with government departments a lot in the past. Before my body gave out, and I was no longer capable of working, I was fairly well known in Washington DC, and also in Sacramento. Part of my work involved dealing with the large American law firms, firms far larger than McCarthy Tetrault or Stikeman Elliot. I’ve given testimony to government agencies in the United States in the past, and probably will again, once my surgery is complete.
The report is a joke, based on a series of faulty assumptions. Tragically, the US Chamber of Commerce still gets attention, despite the fact that its claims pushing for stronger IP laws would do a lot more harm than good for most US business and innovation.
Yesterday was World Intellectual Property Day. Though not usually thought of as a gift-giving holiday, the US did take the opportunity to give something to IP rightsholders: 35 new federal officials focused on domestic and international IP crimes.
When pressing Congress to ratchet up the legal screws on infringers, copyright holders are fond of touting apocalyptic reports about how piracy is destroying their industries—and the US economy.
Last year, we had written about how the CCIA had taken the same methodology used by entertainment industry lobbyists to claim how "big" the "copyright industry" was and applied it to the "fair use" industry, to show that it was actually much bigger than the copyright industry. Both numbers are clearly bogus -- which is effectively the point that CCIA was making. The point that is clear, however, is that if you accept the methodology that claims that "copyright" brings $1.52 trillion into the economy, then weaker copyright/exceptions to copyright (such as fair use) bring in $2.2 trillion. Lots of folks have been submitting the news that the CCIA just recently updated the report to show that we're now talking about $4.7 trillion contributed by the "fair use industries." Again, this number is bogus -- but it's main point is to show just how silly the copyright lobbyist's argument that copyright contributes $1.52 trillion to the economy is, because it uses the same methodology -- a point recently confirmed by the GAO.
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And guess who one of the biggest abusers of this bogus $1.52 trillion number is? You guessed it! It's Patrick Ross! He tosses the number around like it's going out of style and is regularly quoted in the press using that number as well.
After publicly staking a claim to the right to publish electronic versions of books that already have a long history in print, Random House appears to be letting go of digital rights to several works by one prominent author without a fight, potentially opening the way for other authors to take their e-books away from traditional publishers.
Where to start on the mess here? First, let's start with AFP. This is the same organization that once sued Google for merely linking to AFP stories with the AFP's headline in Google News. So for the AFP to pretend it's on the moral high road here for blatantly using a photo without licensing it is pretty damn hypocritical, even if you believe it had the right to do so. Given its own actions on copyright issues, the AFP seems to think that any use is infringing.
Of course, those filters don't actually work, and using them to force entire sites to be blocked, despite them having a relatively tiny proportion of such content isn't just dishonest and underhanded, but dangerous. We're all in favor of trying to stop child porn, but you do that by focusing on the source, not by putting up filters willy-nilly in a misguided attempt to get politicians to also protect your business model.
Either way, it's incredibly disgusting to have anyone claim that child porn is "great," just because it can be improperly exploited for the sake of protecting another industry's business model. That he's basically admitting that he doesn't remotely care about stopping child pornography, but prefers to use it to his advantage is downright sickening.
Of course, what the IFPI totally ignores (not surprisingly, since they only represent record labels) is that while the sales of music directly may have declined in some markets, the overall market for music grew tremendously. In other words, the decline in sales of recorded music has not done harm to the music industry, but just to a few record labels.
The latest mystery in Shanghai, complete with sliding bookshelves, secret passageways and contraband goods, is this: Why are all the popular DVDs and CDs missing from this city’s shops?
On the other hand: I already paid for these books legitimately. They're my books. The shoplifting analogy is specious, because in that case, I'm depriving the rightful owner -- the owner of the bookstore -- of their copy of the book. If I download a copy of the e-book, nobody else is deprived of their copy.
Richard is using the term ‘modchip distributors’ in a perjorative manner. He’s deliberately trying to inflame the discussion, to try and prevent the members of the CCER and those who used the CCER’s form letter from being heard. Now this might be allowed in a court of law, but it is frowned on in the court of public opinion.
The metaphorical 'season-finale' of the ACTA negotiations, after relentless calls for transparency and public consultation, revealed the much awaited official draft text of the agreement, generating significant issues for not only participating nations but also developing countries that have been curiously overlooked during the discussions. In this post, I intend to bring out the political and diplomatic factors for such exclusion, and the impact of the substantive provisions contained in the draft text on developing countries, including India.
The "copyright" industry consisting of a technologically obsolete Hollywood studios; music recording companies; and publishers of books is minuscule . To protect this pipsqueak industry, the Obama administration proposes both through the Department of Justice and the ACTA to impose draconian steps that will threaten many other not so pipsqueak industries, including the IT industry. Michele and I have pointed out the problem before.