04.25.10
Posted in Finance, Fraud, Microsoft at 7:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Even the Seattle Times, one of the local papers that sometimes seems to be Microsoft-sponsored propaganda, is starting to question what Microsoft is doing to Washington and how
THE PREVIOUS post showed that Microsoft has many reasons to avoid expenditures such as tax. To quote a key sentence, “Microsoft has a huge debt approaching a tenth of a trillion dollars.” Last week we added this Wiki page about Microsoft’s tax dodge and also evasion, for which it was found guilty in a court of law. Microsoft does not prioritise compliance with the law, so it’s probably a nonevent really.
A former Microsoft employee continues to expose the government cronyism that enables Microsoft to essentially legalise its evasion of tax (which can then no longer be labeled “evasion”). When former Microsoft managers write the law, why would the law paint Microsoft a “fraud”?
Struggling to close a $2.8 billion fiscal deficit, the Washington State Legislature ended its recent special session with two huge gifts for Microsoft:
1) It gave Microsoft an effective $100 million annual tax cut by revising the definition of the royalty tax. Under the old law, all of Microsoft’s $20.7 billion annual software licensing sales were taxable in Washington state at .484%. Under the new law, the royalty tax will be apportioned so that only the portion of sales to Washington State customers would be taxable, a tiny fraction of Microsoft’s taxable revenue.
2) It also gave Microsoft amnesty on an estimated $1.25 billion in unpaid taxes, interest and penalties that the company has avoided paying since 1997 by reporting this revenue from a small Reno, Nevada office. The state’s Department of Revenue has ignored this practice and refused to address precedents that call the legality of Microsoft’s accounting into question.
Most of the legislation was led by Chair of the Finance committee Rep. Ross Hunter, a 17 year veteran former employee of Microsoft.
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Given that the Seattle Times waited until almost the close of the special session to acknowledge the dispute about Microsoft’s Nevada tax practice, we imagine that Chairman Gates has greatly appreciated this blog’s investigative work of his company’s tax practices and the quiet effective accomplishments of Rep. Hunter.
Please help promote this in Slashdot. It deserves more attention.
The Seattle Times, which is probably the Seattle publication that’s deepest in Microsoft’s pocket (we have explained just why on numerous occasions), says that “Microsoft chooses key time to remind Olympia of its clout” (we covered this in [1, 2]).
Microsoft insists the timing is coincidental.
Yet it chose Friday to publicize a study showing its massive economic effect on the state.
Not any Friday, but the Friday before lawmakers huddled for a last push to decide what taxes Microsoft and everyone else must pay to keep the state afloat.
This is actually part of quite a scandal and it deserves the front page of local papers (at the least). We wrote about this in length 6 days ago. █
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Posted in Finance, Microsoft, Novell at 7:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
[Update: A reader points out that "the graph is of cumulative debt. Which equates with MSFT having around $6Bn debt from being debt free in Q2 2008."]
Microsoft’s debt exceeds even Madoff’s
Summary: Microsoft’s debt — like Novell’s debt — is a scarcely-explored subject in the media, but we’ve finally found the latest figures
OUR WIKI now contains this page about Microsoft’s financial situation. It is not what many people imagine it to be and last year we pointed out that Microsoft has debt. Yes, it’s true. We just couldn’t quite tell at the time how big the debt was, but now we have a clue. Here is some background reading:
Business Insider shows data from a reliable source, indicating that Microsoft’s debt is going through the roof (increasing faster than Microsoft can keep up with). Read the numbers. While Google and Apple have no debt, Microsoft has a huge debt approaching a tenth of a trillion dollars. Microsoft relies on shareholders to put their money in this pit.
Tech companies, which generally throw off tons of cash, added a healthy sum of debt to their balance sheets last year, the Wall Street Journal notes.
We are increasingly welcoming a world where companies with a sort of overdraft claim to be “cash rich”. It’s the same world where a country with 14+ trillion dollars in debt pretends the problem will just go away and asks Microsoft to create computer games to mitigate perception issues [1, 2].
“While Google and Apple have no debt, Microsoft has a huge debt approaching a tenth of a trillion dollars.”Microsoft’s debt is not so unusual, but it is far greater than the rest. Novell’s own debt is an issue we explored last year.
Many of Microsoft’s business units make no money. They just lose a lot of money, but people continue to think about Windows and Office, which are the exception, not the norm. These are cash cows whose revenue is actually declining (Office revenue is still going down). We mentioned this some days ago when we cited Joseph Tartakoff, but as Tartakoff later points out (regarding the same article of his that he tweeted about 4 times): “Microsoft’s online losses up to a staggering $713 million, from $411 million a year ago” (this is not surprising at all).
That’s the loss in just one quarter and one business unit! It used to be over $2 billion in losses per year, now it’s around $3 billion in losses per year, assuming this new pace of losses carries on.
More information about Microsoft’s real financial performance is coming soon. We are going through reports and interpreting them. It doesn’t look too good.
Microsoft keeps taking on debt, whereas some of its biggest competitors remain debt free. Terry Porter writes: “It’s interesting that Google and Apple both deploy Unix and are debt free, so perhaps using Unix must be good for business?” █
“Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company, declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of outstanding options, is deducted, the firm made a loss of $18 billion, according to Smithers.”
–The Economist, 1999
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Posted in Boycott Novell, Novell, Site News at 6:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Clarification about the site’s current scope as far as Novell is concerned
TO repeat an important point that was missed by some readers (who still inquire), this Web site was not rebranded; Boycott Novell is still on and it is part of the scope of Techrights. Boycott Novell was all along covering a variety of issues beyond Novell.
If anything, now that weekly news summaries are gone, we expect to have more posts about Novell, not less. Novell issues will be addressed as soon as they come. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, SLES/SLED at 6:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: IBM missed an opportunity to reward the father of GNU/Linux appliances, which is also not paying Microsoft for Linux
IBM, which loves to portray itself as an innovative company even decades after it helped invent some fundamentals of computing, has been getting close to Novell recently [1, 2]. But IBM merely rewards an imitator and possibly pretends that Novell has something to do with appliances. Sutor writes about “Appliances and Linux”, claiming that “This can be done manually or more easily via a tool like Novell’s SUSE Studio.” (we too had our SUSE appliance)
Had IBM cared about originators, it would then go to the source. Novell has a history of just copying other people’s ideas (sometimes even partners like Astrum) and then mass-marketing the copycats, pretty much like Microsoft does. IBM could have gone with rPath developers, whom Novell simply copied while shamelessly and falsely claiming credit for their ideas. █
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Posted in Boycott Novell, Microsoft, Security, Servers, Vista 7, Windows at 6:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Latest Windows Update can actually create holes rather than close them; Vista 7 is disliked by another business, which may dump it for another operation system (or XP)
MICROSOFT IS not so good at patching those serious flaws which it deliberately hides; every now and then we find a story about Microsoft delivering bad patches that break Windows rather than fix it (sometimes even breaking mathematics in Office). Microsoft then issues a patch to fix the damage caused by the first patch, assuming that Windows can boot at all or connect to the network after the first patch.
According to this report, Microsoft has just done that again and it’s retracting the patch (a little too late though).
Microsoft has withdrawn an update for Windows Server because the patch, issued eight days ago, does not treat the root cause of the problem it was meant to fix.
This is why so many users — including businesses — refuse to accept Windows patches, at least immediately (some take a wait-and-see approach). They have no confidence in them.
As Terry Porter put it, “Windows Server fix pulled after failing to patch flaws.” He cites this interesting article which goes further than the above.
Windows Server fix pulled after failing to patch flaws.
Microsoft has taken down a recent security patch for Windows 2000 Server.
The company said that it would be working on an update for the MS10-025 patch, released last week as part of the monthly ‘Patch Tuesday’ update package.
The update was taken down amidst reports that the fix Microsoft had released was not properly patching vulnerabilities in the Windows Media Services component for Windows 200 Server.
The company has the vulnerabilities rated as ‘critical,’ and a successful update could allow an attacker to remotely execute code on a targeted system. No attacks targeting the flaw have been reported in the wild, however.
Be sure to read that last part again. It says that “a successful update could allow an attacker to remotely execute code on a targeted system.”
Gotta love Windows, eh?
“Business is far too important to entrust to Windows, get a clue and look at GNU/Linux TODAY!”
–Terry PorterPorter has actually shared another anecdote, quoting what he titled “Windows 7 described as a disaster by small business owner, may switch to another OS!”
“This business user had Autocad,” he explains, “and MS Word compatibility problems, no printer drivers for a hp DeskJet 5850 (which is supported under Linux), and describes his Windows 7 purchase as a “disaster”.
“Business is far too important to entrust to Windows, get a clue and look at GNU/Linux TODAY!”
Here is the word directly from the source:
We [purchased] a new fully loaded HP desktop (three months ago) with all the goodies,” they wrote. “We are experiencing to many problems to list but here are some; video very unstable, incompatibility problems with ACAD 14, MS Word 2003, Macromedia drivers, Easy Innkeeper etc., etc. not working at all or unstable, Microsoft Outlook 8 irregular load failures and no drivers for hp DeskJet 5850 (it will only work as a network printer).
We are small business owners and this is a disaster of a purchase we
made.
We replaced our older HP Pavilion f1905 running XP pro/service pack 3 (hard drive problems) with an E154 running on Windows 7 Pro. They (MS) still do not get it – we do not have an IT department and service calls are getting expense. HP service technicians have been of very little help. We will be seriously looking at switching to brand X or go back to XP.
Why does Microsoft keep saying that everyone loves Vista 7 when obviously that’s not true? █
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04.24.10
Posted in News Roundup at 8:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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He had been listening to Clark Howard, and Clark had mentioned Linux on his show. This peaked the man’s interest. His thought was “if I can run my computer without Microsoft’s products, that’s what I want to do.” I then had the pleasure of telling him that I am both the Linux and Macintosh departments of the business. I proceeded to tell the man what the differences are and he became even more thrilled. No viruses? Really? No cost, really? Over 10,000 programs free for download? Oh boy! So, I pulled out the Mandriva 2010 disc, and went to town. In one hour, he was ready to go. He has told many people about the system, and the phone doesn’t seem to stop ringing. Awesome for me, and for my boss. Their revenues saw a slight rise, and I now have some reasonable job security. How cool is that?
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Recently we had a Linux consulting opportunity to install and configure a Postfix mail server for a small company. The company wanted “secure” email for their users. One aspect of the request was to create an encrypted login and communication from the client to the mail server for IMAP using Squirrelmail and providing secure connections to the local client Thunderbird or Outlook. This process is straightforward however there is an issue with the word “secure”.
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With over 1,200 students participating, the conference exhibited the language of free software while not losing sight of the purely technical aspects of GNU/Linux. Coding sessions, handled by experts in GNU/Linux-based programming, exposed students to the free software culture that thrives in the Linux User Groups – popularly called Lugs, these form the basic units of the free software movement – in academic institutions and among software professionals across the country.
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Audiocasts
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This week on Linux Outlaws: Ash clouds, new DPL elected, Google doing good things for Linux and open source, Apache attacked, Microsoft’s new phone and Fab is annyoing everyone with hockey talk again…
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Kernel Space
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With the bottom dropping out of the magnetic disk market and SSD prices still over $3/GB, I want to know if there is a way to to get the best of both worlds. Ideally, a caching algorithm would store frequently used sectors, or sectors used during boot or application launches (hot sectors), to the SSD.
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Version 2.6.34 of the Linux kernel will be the first to support the Ceph and LogFS file systems. A number of changes to the Btrfs and XFS code promise improved performance. The kernel should now be better at working with drives with 4 KB logical sectors.
On Tuesday morning, Linus Torvalds released the fifth pre-release version of Linux 2.6.34. One feature highlighted in Torvalds’ release e-mail was a fix for a problem in the ACPI subsystem which had afflicted several testers.
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Applications
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Applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org get all the glory. They’re highly visible as cornerstone applications of the free desktop. But what about the background apps that do the grunt work and sit silently in the background, ignored unless we run into a bug? One of the vital, yet unsung, applications Linux users depend on is NetworkManager.
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I try to dogfood as much as possible. I try to use the actual applications Ubuntu ships by default for everyday things like web browsing, email and IM. I believe this is the best way for applications to get tested properly, fixed, and improved. If developers don’t use the default applications because they are buggy, or don’t contain necessary features, how can we expect them to be appropriate for regular users?
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RoxBird is a Advanced and Graphical download manager written in Python and C based GTK+ GUI.. It can accelerate your download speed upto 40% then normal. This is my first personal project for Linux and also in PC softwares.
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This reminds me of other developers who developed AstroMenace, the GNU/Linux version is free and the source code is available under the GPLv2, but the Windows version costs money.
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Minitube
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The developer of Minitube, a Linux and Mac OS X YouTube player that doesn’t require flash is working on another project called Minitunes – a music player.
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Wine
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We’re getting ahead of ouseselves a little here: while it’s good to know that things will still work, you’ll find that maintaining Windows compatibility becomes less of an issue as you get used to the new set of tools that Linux offers.
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Instructionals
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Games
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For those still not believing the situation and thinking this is just some hacked-up client in a back-room at Valve Corporation, their Steam Linux libraries were just updated in the past hours. From their Steam Linux client file that hosts the checksums, their Linux libraries file was bumped from bins_linux.zip.dc36f31374267ad4a740762a6cf1925ed30bcab9 to bins_linux.zip.232c70b3e732009cab1858499ca4f1c92ffd7367. Running a strings check against the shared objects on the two versions, there are multiple string changes to be found (particularly within linux32/steamclient.so). In other words, the Steam Linux client is still actively being worked on. This is Linux-specific work and not generic Steam platform bits, which are hosted in other files.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Thanks to Apachelogger, the KaudioCreator package is now available at https://edge.launchpad.net/~kubuntu-ppa/+archive/beta. This is the BEST cd-ripper I’ve ever used, and I hope the wonderfulness came across to KDE4.
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For those who don’t want to worry about the reasonings behind Gluon and such, you can go straight to the download page and grab yourself a copy, and start playing around 
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GNOME Desktop
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Nautilus-Elementary developer – and by developer I mean super hard working superhero developer – ammonkey has just pushed Nautilus-Elementary 2.30 into the Nautilus-Elementary PPA.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Overall, the PCLinuxOS 2010 KDE and Gnome versions are a very good choice, but I would not call them ‘radically simple’. It’s bloated with too many programs I will never use. New users should definitely avoid the KDE version and opt first for Gnome.
My thanks go to PCLinuxOS for allowing us all the opportunity to make our own decision about their software. I am thankful to the Linux community at large for supplying such a wealth of distributions.
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Red Hat Family
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Open-source software is likely to remain in certain niches, former Red Hat VP Erik Troan says, but open source is increasingly becoming a necessary foundation.
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What people are really paying for in open source is editing, said Troan, channeling his grandfather, who was a newspaper editor for decades. They’re relying on other people to pick out the bits of code and pieces of software that do what they need to get done once they’re put together.
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I started to read with a bipartisan mindset about “Xen and Theory of RHEL-evance” posted in the Citrix community blog by Simon Crosby. What appears to be a great title at first seems to be mostly FUD on why KVM is doomed for failure especially in the enterprise marketplace and Red Hat will drown with it. It did not have enough facts, just FUD most of the time. I would to counter his so called “facts” here as its been a long time anyway since I last updated my blog.
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Fedora
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Per Paul’s announcement on Elections, Fedora will be holding Elections for FESCo and the Fedora Board starting with nominations opening tomorrow.
I am going to throw my hat back in the ring for FESCo again. I hope folks will consider voting for me.
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Debian Family
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Wow! the 900 developers and friends of Debian GNU/Linux are really eating up the bugs. They are down below 700 bugs now and they are not yet at package-freeze. If they keep this up, they will release this year.
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Ubuntu
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Ubuntu’s Lucid Lynx release is one step away from final release.
Lucid Lynx, otherwise known as Ubuntu 10.04, is now in the final stretch.
Yesterday the Ubuntu Developers announced the Release Candidate, the penultimate release before its final April 29 release.
The desktop version of the release includes cloud computing updates, Music Store improvements and tighter social networking integration. Changes to the server version of the release are mostly focused on improving its cloud computing capabilities.
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I recently suggested that, given Apple and Adobe’s growing war over iPad and iPhone applications, it would make sense for Adobe to move not only its end-user applications, but its Creative Suite development stack, to Linux. While I don’t know if Adobe is considering it, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, would welcome Adobe.
Canonical marketing manager Gerry Carr told me that “in a recent survey we did of the Ubuntu User base where we got 32,000 plus responses, Adobe Photoshop as a potential application for Ubuntu got a 3.52 rating out of 5 being the second most popular potential app after Skype.”
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Recently I read that Ubuntu devs are were debating about desktop color scheme, and someone was arguing that in the meantime Fedora devs are debating about update policy. I’d like to get your opinion about what is important at Ubuntu, and why.
Jono, what are key issues at Ubuntu nowadays?
Ubuntu as project invests it’s time and effort in a wide and diverse range of area including documentation, translations, development, testing, advocacy and more. In each of these areas we have sought to build a strong a vibrant community to help volunteers be productive and have fun at the same time.
One particular focus we have been growing has been in the area of design. We are keen to apply the same ethos to the design community as the rest of the community: rewarding good work with great reputation, and looking to our top contributors to help guide and contribute to Ubuntu.
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Ubuntu, the open source operating system, is ditching the system tray, the bar at the bottom of most browsers that is supposed to act as a notification area. The rationale for the change, according to Matthew Paul Thomas, an Ubuntu contributor, was “its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior.”
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For those running XP, not impressed with either buying a new OS for a couple of hundred or buying a new PC, Ubuntu is an option. But you will want to make sure you buy a book like Ubuntu for non-Geeks before taking the plunge. This will save you a lot of confusion as this is NOT Windows.
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The benefit of this kind of community is that it would provide a home for those people who desire more configurability of Ubuntu beyond it’s default installation, and provide a fantastic way of supporting this community of users.
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More details about the Canonical Identity Provider can be found on the project’s Launchpad page (login required). Canonical Identity Provider code is released under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3).
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Server
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The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) has been available since the Jaunty Jackalope release in April 2009. UEC is now poised to be included for the first time in next week’s Long Term Support (LTS) release with Lucid, which could further improve Ubuntu’s cloud position.
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Next Thursday, Canonical will open the internet floodgates and allow end user downloads of Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition, the latest and perhaps most significant release for servers in the British company’s six year history.
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Variants
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So just for giggles I got the newest version of Seamonkey and installed it. Hey! The mail client is almost exactly like Thunderbird 2.0, and the browser, omygoodness – it’s faster than Firefox! Heheh. I got a bonus! I’m a happy boy again, and my inner geek can just find something else to go do with himself. I dunno, go watch Star Trek or something. I got a life to live, and an operating system that fits the bill.
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Clement Lefebvre proudly announced two days ago (April 21st) the plans for the artwork of the upcoming Linux Mint 9 operating system. Dubbed Isadora, Linux Mint 9 will be based on the unreleased Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system and will include some new and beautiful artwork. The most important thing to mention is the fact that the window buttons in the title bar will remain on the right side!
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Android
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This is what I was looking for, an E-reader with a E-ink screen so it’s easy on the eyes, but also a full color 3.5” touchscreen LCD screen ideal for web browsing. The 6” EPD screen displays like a printed page and text is adjustable for easy extended reading.
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Dell’s first attempt at an Android smartphone never made it out of the gate, according to one analyst, after the phones failed to impress the wireless carriers. But the second time may prove the charm as Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) has some stylish new Android phones in the works.
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Dell is planning to release a bevy of ARM-based mobile devices, according to what Engadget says are leaked company documents.
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One Android feature that our readers have been asking for is the ability to update all applications and games to the latest release. It’s not uncommon for the average user to see 15 or more notifications a day indicating new versions of downloaded apps.
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Androidpolice.com is reporting that with the recent huge push from Adobe, application and game developers are having a breeze of a time porting over their Air and Flash apps to Android. Most of the feedback of the process has been positive from devs, some even saying that their apps are porting over in 10 minutes!
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For all I know Google has been going around secretly working to bring some Adobe applications to Android. Whether that involves giving away free phones or not is hard to say. I’d like to think that some of these developers would love nothing more than a chance to stand on stage at Google I/O and demonstrate their apps and games to the thousands in attendance.
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Sub-notebooks
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Stop: How do the hackfest meetings work?
Bernie: The participants have different software programming skills and the teaching method is very informal. Right now I have about ten students from 12 to 50 years old, and only two of them speak english. As you can imagine we have some problem to communicate with each other, but everybody’s enthusiasm overcomes the limits of my uncertain spanish. The best students right now are Benedicto one of the Scratcheros, who’s only 12 years old, and two older guys, Kenny Meyer and Gabriel. Kenny already knows well Python and Linux and also fixed a bug in one of our programs. Gabriel is very serious and motivated, wants to learn about everything and could help us with reporting bugs from the field.
Stop: It looks like the OLPC in Paraguay isn’t helping just the younger children. The project can also offer an excellent opportunity to older boys and girls to use ICT to do something useful for their peers (sometimes it also happens in Italy, as Stop! readers know from our JumPC and ITIS Linux stories). Congratulations to Bernie and we wish to him and all his teen hackers success!
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Tablets
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To compete against Apple’s iPad, Asustek has strengthened the Eee Pad’s industrial design and has cooperated with Google to adopt its Android platform. Asustek will also add features that iPad currently does not support such as USB, integrated webcam, and Adobe Flash, Shih noted.
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You may never get to manage in the major leagues, but with NetStats Baseball, you can get an idea of what it’s like. NetStats is a simulation of Major League Baseball that uses statistics from players and games from 1901 through 2009 as input to gameplay. You can play a game between any two MLB teams from those years, create your own teams from real-life players across various years, play a whole season game by game, or watch AI managers play an entire season in seconds.
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What I found interesting about Cfengine is that Burgess originally started Cfengine as a scientific research project, and even though he founded a commercial company in 2008 to develop and support commercial extensions for Cfengine, that same level of academic rigor still pervades through the project. Burgess still does research on systems management, and has developed the Promise Theory, “model of voluntary cooperation between individual, autonomous actors or agents who publish their intentions to one another in the form of promises,” from his work on Cfengine.
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The Neufbox4 is a BRCM63xx based DSL router the french ISP SFR (www.sfr.fr) provides to its customers, and more than 3 million units are currently in use. The device is developed by Efixo (www.efixo.net) and the OpenWrt based sources are available through a subversion repository and documentation is placed in a Trac wiki (http://dev.efixo.net).
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The Metasploit Framework is an open source vulnerability testing framework and is currently at version 3.3. Rapid7, the lead vendor supporting Metasploit, is now aiming to make Metasploit easier to use and manage — and that’s where Metasploit Express, set for release in May, fits in.
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Mozilla
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On his blog, Matthew Gregan reports that there has been some success in shifting the major part of the processing load caused by decoding Theora videos into the DSP (Digital Signal Processor) core of Texas Instruments’ OMAP 3 processor. This family of processors is used in the Motorola Droid, Nokia N900 and Palm Pre smartphones as well as the Beagle Board. Gregan is employed by Mozilla and is currently working on improving video and audio support in Firefox. It is not currently known when the development work previewed will be incorporated into a future release of Mozilla’s mobile browser.
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Databases
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CMS
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BSD
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Currently FreeBSD uses GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) as its system compiler. Since the GCC project has moved to the GPLv3 license, the FreeBSD Project is forced to use version 4.2.1 or earlier.
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Daniel Gerzo with the FreeBSD project has issued a status report concerning work going on within FreeBSD and related projects for the first quarter of this year. Catching our interest in particular were the updates surrounding LLVM/Clang as the compiler for FreeBSD’s base, the Chromium web browser porting efforts to FreeBSD, and ZFS file-system enhancements.
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Dru and Will talk about her new book, The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD, and also about the new BSD Professional Certification exam.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GCC on the other hand tends to have a higher standard with regard to code quality and documentation with requiring patches comply with the GNU style.
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So too do both facets of the word “free” apply to the open source world. GNU.org maintains a definition of free software that begins by taking the distinction on directly as follows: Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.
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The phrase ‘Free Software’ is used by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in its older meaning: it’s software that comes with no restrictions for you to modify it and distribute it.
The FSF defines these freedoms as: the freedom to run the program for any purpose, commercial or otherwise; the freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do something else the freedom to redistribute copies; the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements.
That much makes sense: we share our software and everyone benefits. But it does confuse many people because you are quite within your rights to sell that software if you want it – Free Software can have a non-free price tag.
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Releases
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Version 1.0.6 (part of the ‘Goldeneye’ branch) of the free media player and streamer – VLC media player – eliminates nine security vulnerabilities and offers increased stability. The vulnerabilities were discovered by the developers while working on the code for the upcoming version 1.1.0 and include heap overflows in the audio decoders for DTS, MPEG and A/52, and memory access errors in the AVI, ASF and Matroska demultiplexers.
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Europe
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The Obama White House is releasing custom open source code that it developed itself back to the Drupal community.
The White House said that by releasing some of its code it will get the benefit of more people reviewing and improving it.
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EU governments should use open standards and interoperable systems to deliver electronic government services, EU ministers and the European Commission agreed earlier this week. They also stated they would promote the reuse of public sector information.
The ministers declared to “embed innovation and cost effectiveness into eGovernment through the systematic promotion of open standards and interoperable systems, development of EU wide e-authentication schemes and proactive development of e-invoicing, e-procurement and pre-commercial procurement.”
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Using open source is a key element for delivering electronic government services, argues Cenatic, Spain’s national competence centre on open source. In a paper published on 5 April, the centre lists nine other reasons why public administrations should be using open source.
According to Cenatic, open source software conforms to European rules and recommendations in interoperability. “The European Union and the Spanish Government have decided that the use of open source software is a key element for the development of e-government and open government.”
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The final version of the Procurement and Open Source Software Guideline has been published on OSOR.eu. The study, commissioned by the European Commission as part of the “Dissemination of good practice in Open Source Software (GPOSS)” measure under the IDABC programme, gives guidelines for public administration on how and why publicly acquire open source software.
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Licensing
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The widespread creation and reuse of open source software by commercial companies has introduced a whole new level of complexity to the legal challenges related to software licenses. Companies distributing open source software must draft or choose an appropriate license for their original code and they must understand and comply with the license obligations imposed on them with the use of third-party code, including open source. Deciding what open source license to distribute software is a key element in building an ecosystem of users, partners, supporters, and advocates.
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Whether an author or business model demands restrictive or permissive licensing terms, there is likely to be an OSI-approved license that supports the goals of the individual or organization. So you may not need to create your own license or pay an attorney to create one for you. Authors need to weigh their objectives against the various types and popularity of licenses. Users need to understand the license obligations of open source software they are considering, evaluate them for their particular use case, and be sure they can abide by them. There is an abundance of open source available. It’s a valuable and powerful resource that many companies employ to improve the efficiency and speed of their development process.
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Open Access/Content
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Since everything’s open source, if someone else has a good idea of something to do with all this tree-info, they’re free to go ahead and build their project. “The data, the software source code, and the website html/css code are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL)”
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Standards/Consortia
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Until recently web-based video relied on Flash, Adobe’s rich media language. But HTML could put an end to that with its own native video tag. In HTML 5 it is not only as easy to embed a video in a website as it has been to embed an image – using just one tag – but it also opens the way for a host of additional features. Using the HTML5 video tag developers can embed videos without third-party codes and manipulate the videos in real-time. A demonstration of HTML5′s video capabilities can be found here.
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The biggest worry in the transition was my wife’s school-work. She’s working on some degrees right now, and she has to write an awful lot of papers. She also has to read a lot of .doc files. As a former Ubuntu user, she also had some old ODF files lying around.
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After Amazon notices rubbishing peers’ work were spotted, esteemed Russianist initially denied all connection, then said his wife had written them. He has now conceded the ‘foolish errors’ were his own
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It’s Google’s Internet, we just use it. Well, maybe not, but some days it seems that way. Google’s gone from searching the Internet to being a big chunk of it. The latest moves from Mountain View include adding OAuth and contextual gadgets to email. Good on the surface for Google users, but what do they mean for everybody else?
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Security/Aggression
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Eric Rachner sits in the back of a police car the night he was arrested for obstructing an officer. This image is taken from video footage recorded by a camera inside the vehicle — footage that Seattle police long maintained had been erased.
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If you’re the kind of person who worries about the security of computer networks, you should know that the National Security Agency is worrying about it too.
Since Tuesday, the NSA has been conducting its 10th annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a competition that pits students from a series of military academies against each other–and against the competition’s leaders at NSA–in a bid to see who has the best cyberdefense skills. The idea? To “build and defend computer networks against simulated intrusions by the National Security Agency/Central Security Services Red Team.”
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Environment
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Climate modeller Andrew Weaver launches libel action in Canada for publishing ‘grossly irresponsible falsehoods’
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Voluntary carbon offsets are a ‘Wild West’ market ripe for fraud, exaggeration, and poorly run projects that probably do little to ease global warming.
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Finance
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If the financial crisis has taught us anything, it’s that the system is NOT self-correcting. And it takes more than just rules. It takes regulators who are willing to regulate.
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It is payback time for the banks. Widely blamed for causing the worst recession in the global economy since the 1930s, castigated for using taxpayer bailouts to fund big bonuses, and accused of starving businesses and households of credit, the message from the International Monetary Fund is clear: the day of reckoning is at hand.
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More than that, reform actually should hurt the bankers. A growing body of analysis suggests that an oversized financial industry is hurting the broader economy. Shrinking that oversized industry won’t make Wall Street happy, but what’s bad for Wall Street would be good for America.
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Much of the discussion around the Securities and Exchange Commission case against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has focused on the legal issues. To the extent there has been analysis of the political dimensions, the focus has been mostly on how this may affect the fate of Senator Christopher Dodd’s financial overhaul bill.
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Goldman Sachs Group (GS.N) may have used a subprime mortgage-linked security that is the focus of a U.S. civil fraud lawsuit against the bank to unload other complex bonds it created, according to a deal document obtained by Reuters.
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According to the Wall Street Journal article, federal prosecutors notified Goldman director Rajat Gupta in a letter that they had intercepted his phone conversations with Rajaratnam.
The founder of Galleon Group hedge fund was arrested last October 16. He is fighting criminal charges, based largely on wiretap evidence, that he traded illegally in 12 stocks. He is free on bail.
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Basically what happened is that Friedman suddenly more than doubled his personal stake in Goldman in the middle of the financial crisis.
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Prosecution of Goldman Sachs and Regulation of the Financial Industry is not evidence of “Big Government,” “Socialism,” or more “Washington Take-over.”
It is an appropriate – and overdue – safeguard against Fraud and Theft, which, the last time I looked, was not antithetical to the principles of liberals, moderates, conservatives, or libertarians.
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In the wake of the historic fraud suit against Goldman Sachs, it was unclear whether the bank would have any presence at President Obama’s financial reform speech yesterday. But CEO Lloyd Blankfein chose to attend, along with his number two, Gary Cohn. Why? The President invited them. Instead of getting a tongue-lashing for their fraudulent ways, the President asked them to join him in the fight for financial reform.
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Campaign contributions from Goldman have become toxic in a contentious campaign cycle that focuses on Wall Street and bailouts.
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The relationship between the government and Goldman is fluid and open. Frank’s staff, for one, is a training ground for big-banking lobbyists, and Goldman remains a soft landing spot for supportive ex-officials and former policymakers. Peter Roberson, who worked on the Boston congressman’s capital-markets team, recently left the House Finance Committee’s staff to join the world’s top clearinghouse for over-the-counter derivatives. Frank himself admits that the revolving door is unseemly. After Roberson quit, Frank publicly criticized him, a little tantrum to hide bigger problems.
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Goldman Sachs is the Blackwater of finance, the latest in a long line of companies you love to hate, like AIG and the Dallas Cowboys.
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Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that if Goldman Sachs Group Inc. broke the law then compensation will be owed to British banks and the U.K. government.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Existential Wombat was one of several readers to note that Cox Communcations customers have been put on notice that their Usenet access will soon dry up, unless they want to pay a monthly surcharge for it.
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Facebook’s notable announcements this week range from a holistic vision of a seamless, semantically-enabled Web of human relationships, to a simple “Like” button, which will soon be omnipresent on the Internet. The moves are ambitious, giving even fast-moving rivals like Twitter reason to worry. Still, the simple fact that gets lost in the rush towards ubiquitous social connectivity is that Facebook users still don’t know what they are sharing, with whom, or why it matters. In short: Facebook remains a privacy minefield.
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Thxa Soe’s music gives country’s youth a focus for dissatisfaction with the junta despite strict censorship
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A British curator has accused France’s most prestigious art school of “unambiguous censorship” after a work satirising one of Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign slogans was taken down hours after going on display.
Clare Carolin, a senior tutor at the Royal College of Art in London, who was working on the ill-fated project at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, condemned the decision to remove the work, which was deemed “too explosive”.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Sita Sings the Blues has a few Endorsed DVD distributors. In addition to QuestionCopyright.org and myself, there’s FilmKaravan, a distribution collective that handles “downstream” deals with VistaIndia and IndiePix. Their distributions are on amazon.com (I get a much smaller percentage from those than from my DVDs, but they reach a much wider market) and Netflix.
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In the last few years DRM has grown increasingly pervasive, with little-to-no press coverage. Consumers passively accept it, as proven by Apple’s new “everything-DRM” device, the iPad.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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India’s copyright office website is “best viewed in 1024 x 768 true colors, Internet Explorer version 6.0 or above.”
That might sound a bit dated, but it has nothing on the country’s copyright law, which was last overhauled completely in 1957. Although it was updated five times in the 1980s and 1990s, the law does not comply with numerous international treaties such as the WIPO Internet Treaties of 1996.
On April 19, another major set of Copyright Act amendments (PDF) was introduced with the explicit goal of bringing India into compliance “with the provisions of the two WIPO Internet Treaties, to the extent considered necessary and desirable.” (Note that final clause; we’ll return to it in a bit.)
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The US has these laws in place already, and these provisions are also being pushed as part of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which hopes to bring the wonder of $1.92 million statutory judgments against individual file-sharers to the rest of the world.
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ACTA and Digital Economy Bill
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I looked through all the major party manifestos and found almost no mention of:
* the Digital Economy Act and its consequences for WiFi availability and internet filtering,
* the consequences of widespread data triangulation precipitated by surveillance,
* the need for open data formats and not just “open data”,
* the reasons why the publication of the ACTA draft doesn’t clear up many concerns despite the people behind it claiming there are no problems.
Glaciers Spur Alaskan Earthquakes (8/3/2004)
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Posted in Videos at 4:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Simple reminder of how copyright works; pass it on
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