05.17.10
Posted in Courtroom, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 3:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: TiVo loses and Microsoft is losing in a major way after violations that it sometimes willfully commits; Microsoft’s patent attack on Android revisited
SEVERAL months ago Microsoft sued TiVo for patent infringement (TiVo is known for its use of Linux) after TiVo had resorted to patent aggression. According to Reuters, TiVo has just suffered a setback which TechDirt explains by saying that “Appeals Court Vacates TiVo’s Big Patent Win Over Echostar”:
Shares of TiVo fell as much as 42 percent on Friday after an appeals court set aside the company’s win in a patent battle over digital video recorders with rivals Dish and EchoStar.
TiVo’s lawsuit against EchoStar for patent infringement has been a mostly one-sided affair. TiVo appeared to win at every turn, to the point that there were stories suggesting EchoStar would have to start blocking the use of its own DVR. TiVo had celebrated these victories by suing others as well, and demanding ridiculous sums of money from EchoStar. Of course, it seemed odd to us that, while all of this was happening, the US Patent Office was admitting the patents might not be valid. Oops.
The more relevant news (to us) is probably about Microsoft though. Microsoft has just agreed to pay $200 million to settle its case with/against VirnetX.
“There’s a quote in Comes about MS don’t license other people’s patents,” told us a reader who mailed us with the latest news about VirnetX [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11].
Microsoft Corp will pay $200 million to VirnetX Holding Corp and obtain a patent license to settle litigation accusing it of infringing two patents for communicating over the Internet.
As we mentioned the other day, there are important developments in another patent case. Here is the press release about I4i vs Microsoft and a lot of coverage from Microsoft sites, the ‘Microsoft press’, and a variety of other sources with a lesser or greater degree of interest in Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. The Register summarises it as follows:
Microsoft’s request to have the patent claim it brought against Canadian software maker i4i examined has been thrown out by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
i4i said it was pleased that all the claims of US patent number 5,787,449 that belong to the company came out unscathed following a re-examination called for by Microsoft.
i4i has already told the British press that it would not settle with Microsoft. Will it change its mind? Was it playing hard to get? Microsoft sure does settle.
Again we emphasise that Microsoft is not the victim because it probably suffocates rivals to make billions of dollars using software patents (or the SCO case), which should not exist in the first place. Microsoft’s latest Linux-using victim is HTC (it was reported as a settlement, as opposed to an agreement). “HTC Will Pay Royalty To Microsoft For Using Android,” says this newer article.
The operating system of Microsoft is Windows. The license to use Windows on their cell phones many mobile manufacturers are being given the licence by Microsoft. Microsoft did not reveal what would be the amount of royalties that HTC is going to pay.
One prominent blogger asks, “Does Android Have a Target on its Back?”
Android is the hot smartphone platform currently, and that means the competition has it squarely in its sights. Apple fired the first salvo with its patent infringement claims against HTC. HTC is the largest maker of Android phones, so the suit is a shot across the bow of Android. Then we had HTC sign a deal with Microsoft that gives the handset maker protection over potential infringement of Redmond’s intellectual property (IP) for all Android handsets sold. No matter what you think about Apple’s claims, the HTC deal with Microsoft may have the biggest long-term impact on Android.
We will write about Apple’s case again HTC a little later. Basically, Linux/Android is doing very well, so all that Microsoft and Apple have left is litigation and intimidation (to settle without litigation).
Just how well is the Linux-based Android doing? We wrote about it in the morning (twice even [1, 2]). Watch how the 'Microsoft press' belittles it somewhat using NPD figures (there is a Microsoft connection). The following numbers are US-only, but the Microsoft sources do not state this. Moreover, they quote former Microsoft employee and current shill Michael Gartenberg without disclosure [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12].
The open source Android smartphhone market just hit a milestone of sorts: it surpassed the iPhone in popularity, moving into the second overall spot behind industry leader RIM OS (BlackBerry).
NPD numbers are worthless. The numbers worth paying attetion to are based on whole numbers as opposed to US-only extrapolation from friends of Microsoft, reported poorly with quotes from Microsoft boosters who receive money from Microsoft. That’s the sort of media corruption that we mentioned earlier today. █
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Posted in America, Europe, Law, Patents at 3:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Why the EBoA does not resolve Europe’s problem with software patents; the patent systems continue to favour monopolies with imaginary arsenals, not inventors with concrete ideas
THE EBoA decision has thus far been covered by us in [1, 2, 3, 4]. Here is the conclusion of one long comment from Groklaw.
Indeed, I fail to see anything positive in this ruling.
Gary Barnett has assessed this and he writes: “Sheesh – EPO’s decision not to conduct review is apalling! Software is STILL patentable in Europe, rules are STILL inconsistent”
A Swedish member of the FFII (see FFII.se) argues that the “European Patent Office bites its tail in order [to] blur what’s patentable – again”:
This week, we finally learned that the questions The European Patent Office (EPO) sent two year ago to clarify what can be patented where inadmissible by its own patent high court, The Extended Board of Appeals (EBA). Its all the usual mess from EPO with slippery and indecisive wordings creating endless loops without clarifications.
[...]
To put an extra spin on this mess, the EPO PR interpret this non decision as a win for software patents. Hilarious and said, since this is just right – leaving questions unanswered and matters diffused is just was has created this situation from the start.
Florian comments about the Defensive Patent Licenses (DPL) which was brought up by a Microsoft writer just over a week ago [1, 2]. He still dislikes IBM’s stance on patents (rightly so) and writes: “How useful the DPL is going to be remains to be seen. Being better than IBM’s and similar pledges is a low hurdle and I’m quite confident the DPL will set a far higher standard in that regard. The toughest test, however, will be inhowfar such a initiative can affect not only the decisions of benevolent parties but also those of malicious aggressors. Only getting the “good guys” to contribute to a defense initiative isn’t enough to make a really noteworthy difference if there isn’t going to be a major impact on the “bad guys”. That will be a key criterion for gauging the potential effectiveness of the DPL.”
He also wrote to us to say:
It will still take weeks if not months before the Defensive Patent Licenses (DPL) is published. This is a first look into the issue, to the extent that it’s possible to comment prior to having seen the proposal. So far, no compelling reason for anyone to contribute patents is visible, but maybe the final thing will offer one if its authors figure out a way to achieve an increase in retaliatory potential for those who join. Even if it might end up being unable to make any noteworthy difference, it’s at least a sincere attempt to solve a problem in part, unlike the “pledges” made by IBM, Sun and others.
Concerning the state of the anti-swpat movement, I had explained to you in a recent email how hopeless the situation is with those SMBs. The post on the DPL doesn’t elaborate on it in such detail but explains that absent a forceful push for abolition, defensive approaches should at least be looked into constructively…
That part about SMBs is noteworthy. Florian used to consult for them and they know the headache of software patents.
Meanwhile, the president of the FFII says that “Patent Trolls seems to be a sector specific issue” and asks, “high correlation with software patents?” Here is the data (“Ranking of Operating Companies by Number of NPE Lawsuits”) and here is what Patently-O wrote some days ago about “Patenting by Small-Entities”:
The number of small-shop innovators continues to dwindle. In a sample of recently issued patents,* only 20% claim “small entity” status. Of those, 30% (6% of the total) are held by the original inventors.** According to the PTO Rules, large universities and non-profits still qualify as for the small entity price-break so long as the patents-in-question have not be assigned or licensed to a non-qualifying entity. At least 12% of the small entity patents are assigned to universities or non-profits. These small entities include multi-billion-dollar operations including Battelle Energy Alliance, California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and the Korean government funded ETRI. The remaining small entity patents are largely held by companies and partnerships such as Audible Magic, PixArt Imaging, and Alverix.
In other words, this confirms our long-standing allegation that the patent system serves large companies and harms the smaller ones. The system has lost sight of its original goals. Moreover, as we pointed out some days ago, this system is exceedingly tolerant of patent trolls and TechDirt provides yet more proof of that:
Court Won’t Move Patent Lawsuit Out Of East Texas, Despite Plaintiff’s ‘Ephemeral’ Connection To Texas
[...]
As has been discussed plenty of times, a disproportionate number of patent lawsuits are filed in East Texas, under the belief that the venue is the most friendly to patent holders (there is some debate lately about how accurate this is, but either way it remains, by far, the most popular place for patent lawsuits). This happened even in cases where there was clearly no reason for the case to be heard in Texas. My favorite is the story of two San Jose, California companies, whose offices were blocks away from each other… who ended up in an East Texas court to fight a patent battle. Two years ago, the Federal Circuit suggested courts should be more willing to transfer cases that don’t really belong in their district — a clear warning shot at East Texas.
This system favours lawyers/trolls and monopolies, not innovation. Unless evidence contradictory to this claim is presented (we have seen none), it seems pretty safe to establish it as truth. █
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Posted in ISO, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard at 2:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Crimes aside, the obvious technical pitfalls of OOXML are made more apparent, whereas ODF proves to be future-proof because of its reuse of existing standards
A FEW YEARS after Microsoft corrupted national bodies and corrupted ISO, the convicted monopolist begs for people to forget the past and actually believe that OOXML is a standard.
Not only is OOXML not a standard, it is hardly even a format because nobody has ever implemented it. It’s just some words on paper with errata weighing thousands of pages (and nobody bothering with them). OOXML is a great example… of why Microsoft is still a criminal company. Those who do not understand why this is so probably ought to look back because it’s well documented. There is nothing Microsoft won’t do for its stagnating cash cow, even if it’s lying, intimidating, throwing people out of their jobs, hiring AstroTurfers, and bribing many people.
Stéphane Rodriguez, who is intimately familiar with the mechanics of Microsoft Office, has published a long post titled “The OOXML interoperability scam,” wherein he gives detailed examples.
Every time the Microsoft Office team pushes a comment on the wire, there is another pledge for interoperability. It has been so common for the last few years that if you haven’t actually watched what it might mean, pretty much OOXML is synonym with interoperability.
Of course, it does not matter that the word interoperability alone does not mean anything. That is why Microsoft uses it so much. You can pretty much put an interoperability label to anything as long as it is not accurately defined. Does it mean document-level interoperability? Application-level interoperability? Or, perhaps is it just Microsoft-only interoperability (a good guess!)?
The pledge for interoperability cannot possibly mean document-level interoperability since we are not there : OOXML is full of non-XML streams, barely defined at all (the official papers lack everything related to international features, and that is just one example), so that ends any serious discussion precociously. In the remainder of his article, I’ll be taking a look at application-level interoperability, in case Microsoft means that.
[...]
Simple tests like this leave me a bit speechless when you see that Microsoft Office is supposed to be the rolls royce of Office programs in the world, the de facto standard. And in fact it’s just crap. On the contrary OpenOffice, the free suite, is actually a more serious product when it comes to application-level interoperability. This had to be said…
Compare the proprietary mishmash that OOXML contains to something more elegant like ODF, which actually reuses international standards like SVG, MathML, and doesn’t have pseudo-leap years to contain one program’s bugs inside formal specifications. Here is a new post about that:
After a few posts around the net talking about the now 5 years of ODF. I want to talk about what I have lately been talking on what would this new web era can bring to ODF. For the most part of those 5 years I have heard and listen to talks about the future of ODF, it’s integration with semantic web. It’s advantages over security, digital signatures, third party applications and further development within OpenOffice.org.
We are now going into the era of HTML5 which is supposed to come with so much more advantages for the web and ODF would find a new niche were to grow and expand. So HTML5 have been talked about producing new technical advantages such as:
* Geodata
* Storage API
* Simple scripting (no namespaces)
* Audio and Video
* Interactivity like Drag and Drop
[...]
So why we keep comparing ODF and whatever happens on the web? Certainly ODF has always done this, with standards like Dublin-core, MathML, and other standards. Microformats, and Geo locational web can certainly be in that train of thought. If the applications support it or not, let’s be clear, ODF should mark the leadership, and the apps should follow, so is meant to be that the apps should catch up to ODF and not the other way around.
This ought to also address the CDF noise from the OpenDocument Foundation.
The links above were found in the blog of Rob Weir, who also included this link about Free/Open Source software in government [PDF] and an interview with himself.
Last month OASIS ODF Adoption TC member Rob Weir sat down with Svante Schubert at the Plugfest in Granada to discuss a range of topics, including ODF 1.2′s RDF-based metadata and Svante’s work on ODFDOM. You can listen to this interview in our first episode of the ODF Podcast.
IBM has done a lot to help ODF. It’s time for IBM to also bury software patents, not promote them. And we know, we know… it’s not Weir’s department, so to speak. Bob Sutor deletes comments that ask about it while others in IBM ignore E-mails that inquire about software patents. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Hardware, LG, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, Samsung, Windows at 1:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Novell and LG do the heavy lifting
Summary: Microsoft — like Novell — is hibernating a little and relies on Novell and LG to promote its products, having jointly signed patent deals that harm GNU/Linux and turn them into slaves/subsidiaries
MICROSOFT and Novell have a lot in common, not just in terms of projects. Both companies are failing to evolve for tomorrow’s world of IT, where mobility and Internet reign supreme; they both rest of their legacy and dread the future. Novell's future is very uncertain because it is up for sale and we find almost no news about this company anymore. It’s so seriously profound that we stopped the weekly summation of links about Novell, instead moving to a different format. There just wasn’t enough news (we call it "Novell news drought").
Things are not improving for Novell. One of the more widely used distributions of GNU/Linux is dropping F-Spot from different variants [1, 2]. Sooner or later, Novell’s and Microsoft’s dream of world domination with Mono and other useless clones of Microsoft’s patents-saturated stack is going to go up in flames along with Novell.
When we also look at impending doom that Novell is reported to be rushing towards, the future for the “gift to the world” is all rather in doubt.
“[G]ift to the world” is a token for Mono. On goes this post: ‘Except that arguably the leading Linux distro has stated its to remove one of them? Other distro’s are not including Mono either and in fact I think its fair to say there’s a lot of bad feeling around the whole subject. Is this the Mono “enthusiasm” they mean? Again, I’ll let you decide. Where will the “gift to the world” be without Novell sponsorship?”‘
“Microsoft’s ties with Novell are likely to ensure that projects inside Novell which are beneficial to Microsoft will not die any time soon.”Well, Microsoft pays Novell, so Mono sponsorship (in one form or another) can still be funneled into Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza and his fellow Ximian coders (who use a monkey as their mascot, go figure).
Microsoft’s ties with Novell are likely to ensure that projects inside Novell which are beneficial to Microsoft will not die any time soon. They might be relocated, but never abandoned unless all GNU/Linux users shun them, in which case the apologists will give up and do something more useful (to Microsoft).
There are other patent partners who sold out to Microsoft, decided to pay Microsoft for Linux, and then helped Microsoft in additional ways. Samsung has begun helping Microsoft DRM a little more aggressively and LG — another Korean company that sold GNU/Linux down the river — is now teaming up with Microsoft to promote the embattled Xbox 360. Here is some news coverage from days ago:
Does this seem like a company which is said to have embraced Linux? Surely not. It sells Ballnux and it helps Microsoft make money from Android. Those who look for an Android phone should avoid Samsung, LG, Kyocera Mita, and HTC.
“Those who look for an Android phone should avoid Samsung, LG, Kyocera Mita, and HTC.”Looking at Xbox 360 for a while, there has been no other significant news for Xbox 360, except the fact that the consoles/games business is slowing down (and Microsoft has already lost billions in there). Microsoft paid $75,000,000 to break an exclusivity deal, which harms customers anyway and this product in general seems to rely on contributions from the outside (unless it’s Datel, in which case Microsoft is blocking and suing [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]).
The real news about Microsoft is that there is hardly any news at all. The past week has been a very, very slow & scarce week, with apparently just one headline — and one headline alone — about “Zune”, no news headlines found this week with the word “Bing” in them, and only one about “Silverlight” (we use Google News for reference here). That’s pretty bad.
On the Web browsers front, we mostly learn that Microsoft is losing and losing every month. The vocation of Explorer and Windows might as well be similar despite or because the two are tightly linked to each other. From the Financial Express:
It’s no secret that Internet Explorer’s (IE’s) share of the browser market has been declining steadily for years, but when it dropped by over 10% in the past 10 months to below 60% for the first time in its history, everybody took notice. While IE remains the single most used browser in the world, most experts believe that this is not a lead that it can maintain for long.
[...]
As monopolies often do, this had the unfortunate effect of virtually ensuring that Microsoft didn’t really bother putting out a good product. IE was famously buggy, had numerous security flaws and vulnerabilities, and was a system resource hog. And, when you think about it, Microsoft had to work really hard to push a product that was completely free. It was so bad; they couldn’t even give it away.
Only 4 headlines (or clusters thereof) about Vista 7 were found in one week. That’s just embarrassing as that’s approximately one in two days, only half a year after the launch of this muchly-hyped product. Has Microsoft run out of the huge marketing budget for it? Just 4 items including advertisements from Mary Jo Foley is not much at all. Vista is history and the the biggest news for Windows seems to be the death of XP Service Pack 2. Here is some coverage:
The pro-Microsoft monopoly blogs seem happy to suggest that “Microsoft [is] pushing XP users to upgrade” (because one of Microsoft’s liars for hire from Forrester Research chooses to wave this claim around the Internet and pressure companies to buy Vista 7).
“Is it news or is it just more PR disguised as news (like an estimated 60% of so-called ‘news’)?”The latter article explains that businesses will be better off using another Web browser (not Internet Explorer) or another operating system which is also offering respect and security to the user. Daniel Nations at least has the brains to analyse this properly.
In the previous post we wrote about how Microsoft controls segments of the press, so we were not shocked to find more Microsoft spin from the unofficial ‘Microsoft press’, which is supporting and covering up Microsoft’s position on silent patches, which we last mentioned some days ago. Shame on them. Is it news or is it just more PR disguised as news (like an estimated 60% of so-called ‘news’)? It comes from the network of “Redmond”-labeled sites that are deeper in Microsoft’s pocket than even NBC is (or ever was).
Microsoft’s bad behaviour in Malaysia, where we frequently see the press (the English version of it at least) used as a marketing vehicle for dumping of proprietary software in a country with richer and broader use of Free software, is at it again. Why don’t they properly cover BizSpark [1, 2, 3, 4] and explain that it’s a lock-in trap? Why don’t they ignore mere PR? █
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Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 12:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft is broadcasting its messages to the world via NBC, its new advertising partner (not just ‘news’ partner); the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is reportedly working with Microsoft again, months after its executive Steven VanRoekel was named managing director of the FCC
Microsoft and NBC: Decoupling Couple
IT HAS BEEN a long time since we last wrote about MSNBC's manipulation of stories in Microsoft's favour. Yes, Microsoft is also in the news business, reporting about itself in collaboration with NBC’s reputation. There are some other examples of channels that Microsoft and Gates partly control through investments, but we leave those aside today.
The news starts with a press release which says that “NBC Taps Microsoft Advertising” and it is celebrated by only two sources we could find, namely Microsoft Nick and another very familiar Microsoft booster.
NBC has tapped Microsoft Advertising to do a broad, multiplatform campaign for promoting the network’s fall television lineup, the companies announced Thursday.
We later found another site that covered it, but that’s about it. This hardly matters, but it received congratulatory coverage.
Is anyone surprised by these moves? This pair is already working very closely together. Is this the best Microsoft can do? Use existing partners to pretend to have ‘won’ a contract?
aQuantive
Also in the Microsoft Web sites:
Record aQuantive deal slow to produce results for Microsoft
Three years after Microsoft agreed to buy Seattle-based digital advertising company aQuantive, the Redmond company’s ad revenues have barely budged, its online losses have deepened, many of aQuantive’s top executives have left, and one of aQuantive’s biggest units has been sold.
Microsoft sold part of the company (after rumours), shedding off over 2,000 workers in the process. Microsoft actually laid off many more and lost many managers, including many aQuantive heads. Since their acquisition they have left Microsoft. We kept track of them because it matters where they end up influencing, often connecting the new employer with the former (Microsoft). This leads us to the next report.
FCC Managing Director and Microsoft
We are actually a lot more interested in what Microsoft does with the regulators of media/network and broadcast. Recall what happened to the FCC after it had hired a Microsoft executive for a top position [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. It happened after Microsoft had been trying to get into the core of the system and this push is back again. (more from John Letzing in the Wall Street Journal)
U.S. Federal Communications Commission officials have visited Microsoft Corp.’s Redmond, Wash., campus to examine an experimental network relying on unused TV airwaves the company hopes will help lead to expanded Internet access, according to a public filing.
Is the FCC giving Microsoft an opportunity to also control networks now? Is Microsoft not getting enough with the media layer just yet? Eben Moglen recently explained why this is dangerous.█
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Do systems break less with easier resolutions due to package managers? Does it mean that the new user of today won’t be as experienced as the old user of yesterday?
I think it might.
Users in the past had to chip away and reassemble with less documentation and no package manager. This meant that the user of yesterday ripped apart systems and packages to discover how they worked and which cogs fit where.
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But there is a bigger issue at hand for Linux – than just the stigma of its past. With regards to society at large, on a grand-scheme scale, most people don’t even know what Linux is. So to the masses Linux would be completely foreign. And those are the people the Linux distributions should be focusing on.
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As you might have guessed, I have a lot of Linux-based T-shirts….a LOT of them. And I enjoy wearing those T-shirts. From time to time wearing the image of Tux encourages strangers who would normally never say anything to strike up a conversation. The number of security people at the airport that know about Linux and Free Software, for instance, is fairly amazing.
On the other hand, I have fewer outer garments that have Tux or “Linux” on them, and often Tux is not visible as I travel.
[...]
On the airplane returning from a recent trip to Brazil I sat beside a woman about my age. She saw my Tux T-shirt and said something about Linux. It turns out that she was a former employee of Sun Microsystems in the USA that had moved to Salvador, Brazil. She had (of course) used Unix, programmed in “C”, JAVA, used MySQL and used other FOSS programs. We exchanged email addresses.
Make Tux a bit more visible in your life and you may find a lot of new FOSS friends….or just find your suitcase easier.
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Terminals
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One of the most interesting features of Linux is its versatility. Being able to make complicated configurations out-of-the box. You do not need to buy the ultimate hyper business version to have the ability to set up a complex client / server system with dumb terminals and a remote application server.
Creating a client / server network is relatively easy, since the multi-task / multi-user architecture is a native feature of Linux.
But in order to understand this process, it is necessary to work with some theory, where we will see what is a client / server network with remote dumb terminals, what are its advantages, in which cases it can be used and in what ways it can be implemented on Linux.
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LanBr is a manager software that helps to control and manage of Lan Houses and Cyber Cafes powered by Linux, in order to ease the operations of daily life in an internet cafe/ lan house environment.
The system is constantly evolving and has many features to achieve a good management of Lan Houses or Cyber Cafes in Linux.
There are times when you feel you do not belong to the Ubuntu community for your lack of coding knowledge. But is that really true? Do you have to necessarily be a coding geek to contribute to the development of the most popular Linux distro around? The Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon (who I hear likes bacon) talks to Amber Granner about that and more in this video.
[...]
It is a project of Wilson Pinto Junior with help of volunteers and has as main objective to provide a complete and easy LAN Manager for Cyber Cafes and Lan Houses. The Program is all written in Python using Gtk and GNOME Human Guidelines “to an intuitive interface and ease to use”.
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Google
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Chrome OS — Google’s lightning quick operating system that’s based entirely on the Chrome browser — is due out the second half of this year (check out our report earlier this evening on its progress). We’ve seen some demos of it in action, and even tried out an early version ourselves, but there are still plenty of question marks as far as how people will actually use this thing. After all, while the browser will be able to accomplish most tasks, users are going to want some degree of multitasking, and there’s also the question of how users will be navigating Chrome OS’s basic file structure.
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Ballnux
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Kernel Space
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The annual Linux.com Planning meeting took place at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit last month. It was a great opportunity to meet face-to-face with some of the most active Linux.com community members and to understand what kinds of things are working and not working on the site. We even had some hard-core contributors who dialed in for the four-hour session!
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Part of the problem that we face in providing Linux hardware support is that we’re lucky if there’s a spec, and even if there’s a spec there almost certainly isn’t a test suite. Linux still isn’t high on the list of things that vendors test with, so as a result hardware and firmware tend to be written to work with Windows rather than some more ideal notion of what a spec actually says.
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-Frederic Weisbecker posted perf fixes for 2.6.34, James Bottomley came up with SCSI fixes for -rc6, Paul E. McKenney had some RCU fixes for 2.6.35; perf fixes came also from Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo.
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Applications
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Decibel Audio Player is a lightweight (and simple) GTK+ based audio player. Although it has existed since 2007, it has been updated again.
This player is made for speed usage, not for looks, so this is very fast, even on low-end netbooks/pcs.
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Over the past 2 or so weeks, I’ve gotten some phenomenal amounts of input varying from quirks, crash reports and other problems which I probably wouldn’t have spotted otherwise.
[...]
Over the past 2 or so days, I did some refactoring of the buildsystem so that plugins do not need to use ‘rpath’ in order to link to libraries such as libcompizconfig and libdecoration. This means that we can finally build RPM and Debian packages. Hopefully a PPA for Ubuntu will be coming soon, and we might even see Compiz 0.9.2~ in Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat if we’re lucky 
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Varlec is working on some cosmetic changes for the next version of prll. “I will also try to make prll POSIX-compliant. Most of the work has already been done by a helpful user, but I have yet to check it, merge it with the latest version, and see if I can maintain it in the long run. I’m also considering some internal utilities to be made available to the functions being executed. For example, I’d like to provide a locking mechanism to users, further expanding the usefulness of prll. But I want to keep prll as simple as possible.
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Synfig is an authoring tool designed from the ground up to do smooth animation without drawing multiple frames in between the key frames, a process called “tweening,” meaning that the number of artists required to complete a major project is significantly reduced. The artist defines the position of the objects in two keyframes, chooses a path for the movement, and assigns filters or deformations, and the result is computer generated. I understand that normal anime has very few tween frames and limits motion on the screen to limit the amount of work artists have to do. Synfig’s method means a smoother-looking movie with thirty frames per second and the ability to add more animated movement.
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After several months of development, it is finally time to introduce the world to WriteType. WriteType is an application designed to aid young students in writing and typing on the computer. It offers text completion to make touch typing more efficient. It also will read back the document with one of the four implemented text-to-speech engines, enable teachers to easily highlight areas for review, and more.
[...]
Apparently, the school had been purchasing these $400-500 devices because they offered word completion. These devices, vaguely reminiscent of the infamous AlphaSmart series, were anything but ergonomic or easy to use. Word completion was the killer feature that made paying $500 to type on a itsy-bitsy LED screen seem like an attractive offer. It would seem that a feature included by default in most cell phones would have at least one desktop implementation, however a little bit of research showed that this awkward brand of “computer” was indeed the only way to make use of auto-completion while typing documents.
The shock effect alone was enough to motivate me to spend the weekend hacking up an initial version. I sent out some early versions a local elementary school to be tested. But as time went on, I began hearing from other people as well. If a program that achieves such a feat was in such high demand, it is quite amazing that no proprietary software company has made any attempt to capitalize on the needs of schools. Of course, readers of my blog understand how I feel about greedy educational companies who claim to want what is best for education but really just want to be filthy rich. Because of these beliefs, I had no choice but to release WriteType as free software.
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Will Linux suffer if Nightingale fails? No. Would Linux better for having Nightingale? Of course. Should the Linux community reach out to the Nightingale project and ensure it doesn’t fail? Hard to say. If given the choice between more rapid development and features for the current standards (Rhythmbox, Banshee, Amarock) or including Nightingale in the mix (and slowing down development of the others), I would happily say forget Nightingale. But given that Linux needs as many familiar tools as it can get, Nightingale could (and should) be a very important project.
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Instructionals
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GIMP
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00:20 My trip to England
02:00 My photographic output – the image to process
03:20 Bill’s workflow guide
03:50 Copy the original layer
04:30 Perspective correction
05:15 Rotate (two attempts)
10:00 Crop, inside out
12:30 Cloning and healing
14:30 Contrast correction with a curve
15:05 Dodge and burn
19:00 Scaling
22:20 Sharpening and flattening the image
24:00 Saving for the Web
24:20 Scaling discussed
26:30 How to license the workflow guide
27:30 Creative Commons License
32:45 Creative Commons for images
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Games
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For those of you bored out of your minds at this, I’ll get back to my regular content eventually. But hey, it is sometimes also important to show that, yes, Linux can be an enjoyable gaming platform, and Linux geeks can enjoy ourselves like normal human beings once in a while.
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Frictional Games are the second company to release the source code of their game and engine because of the Humble Indie Bundle success.
The game and engine were released under few different licenses depending on the tools, game parts : GPLv3, Creative Commons 3 and zlib
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Desktop Environments
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If you’re running Ubuntu you can probably just install Fluxbox and then force dpkg to install those deb files and start it up. If you’re using Arch, grab the deb2targz tool out of the repositories, transmogrify each one of those debs into tar.gz files, then extract them to your root directory — the file structure will drop them perfectly into place. Probably most other distros could follow that same route, and get these same results.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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We are at the Akonadi meeting at the KDAB offices in Berlin right now, which was quite nice so far. We had the first round of API review of new methods in KDEPIMLIBS for 4.5, and already cleaned up quite a bit. Having multiple eyes look at the API is a nice way to improve the overall quality of the API. We met with Andrey Moiseenko and Alvaro Manera of Nokia, who work on calendaring for the next Meego phone from Nokia. They use our KCal library, which they have forked/extended for some special requirements they have. We’re now making plans with them to integrate their changes back to our version of KCal, so that both sides will profit from changes and have a single point of maintenance.
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KDE SC 4.5 is coming up around the bend and I’m posting about some of the new exciting (to somebody I hope) features for KRDC. For KRDC 4.4 we introduced a new gui layout. I have been away from the keyboard for awhile and finally have been able to hammer out some bugfixes (1,2,3,4) for those new features as well as some older bugs to both 4.5 and 4.4.3 (for the most part).
Well what are these new features I’m talking about? Well for starters I’ve taken that drab list of connections in the center of KRDC and made it much more useful by adding statistics and other information. You can sort your list by these different pieces of information and it will save your sort column/order for the next time you open it so you can keep it sorted the way you like.
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As some of you may know, I stared a new podcast called KDE and the Masters of the Universe (KDEMU for short). It is an *all* KDE podcast that will cover a wide range of KDE topics, releases, interviews with developers, etc. Our premier episode with Aaron Seigo and has just been released Today!
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From KDE SC 4.5, you’ll be able to fire up KRunner or Lancelot, search for some plasma widget and drag it to the desktop.
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TouchFreeze is a special software for Linux system that will disable the mouse click while you are typing. This is a useful utility for Linux built using QT4 and Xeview header. TouchFreeze docks in your system tray (KDE/Gnome) and disables button click events while typing.
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Reviews
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Number of Linux distributions do not make us confused to select the distro. Limitations of the Internet connection is also not stopped our desire to learn Linux. Still afraid of installing linux? do not worry, there’s a many distribution with live cd base. With the live cd you can try to use Linux without having to install to the hard disk. There are various Linux distributions that use the livecd, but this time I am just going to try livecd of ubuntu and PCLinuxOS distro.
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Debian Family
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I’ve always found Debian Stable+Backports to be more stable than the latest Ubuntu. What’s more, with backports configured you can get the latest versions of popular packages.
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VideoLink is available in Debian from version 5.0 ‘lenny’. If you don’t run Debian, get the source tarball (tar.gz file) and build from that.
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Ubuntu
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Users of the Chromium browser daily builds for Ubuntu may be surprised to find their window controls ‘doing a Lucid’ and switching from the right to the left.
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There are times when you feel you do not belong to the Ubuntu community for your lack of coding knowledge. But is that really true? Do you have to necessarily be a coding geek to contribute to the development of the most popular Linux distro around? The Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon (who I hear likes bacon) talks to Amber Granner about that and more in this video.
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Ubuntu 10.04 was released last month, and comes with some breath taking design enhancements, and has some fabulous art work integrated into it. We’ve put together a collection of wallpapers to make it more customized.
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Just like last year Zeitgeist developers were present at UDS…
It was amazing I will write about the UDS exprience in another blogpost.
I think my favorite moment was Mark announcing Unity and using Zeitgeist for file management on the desktop. Although Mikkel knew about it (he works for Canonical), it took the rest of the team by surprise. It is very nice to feel appreciated. And I think i speak on behalf of the whole team when I say “Thank you Ubuntu and Canonical for giving us a chance”.
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Bottom line: There is missing a clear path how to replace older Linux, be it Ubuntu or whatever else. Something fast, clear, nice for lame user without selecting / partition in advanced mode (not that complicated, but still). One question: “Do you really want to replace this BlaBla Linux? All data on that partition will be lost. Your Windows XP will not be affected. Proceed?” That is the thing I’m missing as an upgrade option.
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Variants
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Ultimately it all falls to preference, and we’re back to the most important idea: Freedom to change and choose. So if Peppermint appeals to you because you believe you’re sparing your netbook the effort of thrashing through the Gnome desktop, and at the same time undercutting the system requirements of Lubuntu … well, you are always welcome to use it.
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Peppermint OS is a very nice project with a fresh and very interesting approach to how Linux should shape up for modern users. Far from the extremely minimalistic approach taken by Google with Google Chrome OS, Peppermint OS actually keeps enough local weight to keep your attention when you can’t go online.
In fact, one thing I specially like about Peppermint’s approach is that it provides lots of flexibility. On the one hand, you may choose to go minimalistic, going for an OS that can take as little as 512MB of hard drive space. Nothing would prevent you from installing many of the applications available and beefing up the local catalog though, consequently getting closer to a standard desktop OS.
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The Litl box will run an open Linux-based OS, the same used in the Webbook, making it easier to encourage users to create web apps due to the open OS. litl will also be releasing an Adobe Flash 10.1-based Software Development Kit (SDK) at this weekend’s Flash and the City developers conference.
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There are a number of great netbooks on the market, and a bunch more great netbook operating systems worth trying out. I’ve only highlighted a few of the pack leaders worth checking out, but there’s a lot more beneath the surface if you’re willing to dig.
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A Linux distribution is a carefully culled collection of software from these upstream projects which makes a complete operating system and even includes a lot of application software. This collection of software is tested and prepared to run securely and maintainably together. Debian is built upon this model.
Some distributions of Linux use Debian as a source project unto itself. There are a number of Linux distributions based on Debian, including the popular KNOPPIX and Ubuntu distributions. Being “based on Debian” can mean several things, but it primarily means they draw from the software repository at some point in the release cycle, and they use the Advanced Packaging Tool (apt) to manage this software. In these cases Debian is an intermediary between the original FOSS project and the “children” distributions which may also pull from original software projects to expand upon what Debian provides to target their particular focus.
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Mozilla
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A new build of Firefox 3.6.4 has been released and is currently distributed to users who have a previous build of the upcoming Firefox version installed on their computer system. The update check in the browser will recognize the new build and download it automatically to the computer so that the browser can be updated.
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Google Chrome has now eclipsed Mozilla Firefox in the speed category. However, I still use Firefox as my main web browser because it is still better than Chrome in certain areas.
But just recently, I tried a few tweaks that significantly improved the speed of Firefox making it a little bit snappier than the latest version of Google Chrome when loading webpages.
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Databases
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Project Releases
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I plan to push out Pidgin 2.7.1 in a couple weeks to resolve these, and hopefully more, problems.
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Government
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The State Services Commission has raised eyebrows after specifying that open source software be part of its revamped website.
The commission has told potential suppliers that the website’s content management system, which will let it update and manage the site, must use open source software rather than proprietary software – such as that supplied by Microsoft.
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Security/Aggression
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Bangkok’s commercial district was turned into a battlefield with troops firing teargas, rubber bullets and live rounds at protesters, who returned fire with stones and homemade rockets on roads surrounding the shopping district.
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Police chief says militants planned to assassinate officials, kill foreigners in Mumbai-style attacks and set up Islamic state
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Finance
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Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou declared he is not ruling out taking legal action against U.S. investment banks for their role in creating the spiraling Greek debt crisis.
Both the Greek government and its citizens have blamed international banks for fanning the flames of the debt crisis with comments about Greece’s likely default, actions that are causing the country’s borrowing costs to soar.
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THE risk of a double-dip recession hasn’t abated, even after news of the huge European bailout in response to the Greek debt crisis.
World markets soared initially on the announcement of the nearly $1 trillion rescue plan, and then declined. But as the economist John Maynard Keynes cautioned long ago, such market reactions are basically a “beauty contest” — with investors trying to predict the short-term reaction that other investors think still other investors will have.
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After a brief respite following the announcement last week of a nearly $1 trillion bailout plan for Europe, fear in the financial markets is building again, this time over worries that the Continent’s biggest banks face strains that will hobble European economies.
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The Wall Street reform bill is taking that rarest of paths through the Senate — actually gaining tougher provisions against the industry as it proceeds, not being watered down to win votes as health care reform was.
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As the debate over how to overhaul financial regulation heated up last year, there was one thing Democrats and Republicans seemed to agree on: that the Federal Reserve had made major mistakes that contributed to the financial crisis and needed to have its wings clipped.
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Passage of a 1,400-page bill to overhaul the nation’s financial regulations would come just two months after Obama signed a landmark health-care overhaul. But in the case of financial regulation, much more so than with health care, the Senate bill largely reflects the administration’s initial blueprint, despite the fervent efforts of lobbyists and lawmakers of all stripes to alter it.
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Thus the study of financial fraud received little attention. Practically no research institutes exist; collaboration between economists and criminologists is rare; in the leading departments there are few specialists and very few students. Economists have soft- pedaled the role of fraud in every crisis they examined, including the Savings & Loan debacle, the Russian transition, the Asian meltdown and the dot.com bubble. They continue to do so now. At a conference sponsored by the Levy Economics Institute in New York on April 17, the closest a former Under Secretary of the Treasury, Peter Fisher, got to this question was to use the word “naughtiness.” This was on the day that the SEC charged Goldman Sachs with fraud.
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Inquiry into bid to find whether banks cheated in hunt for high credit ratings includes Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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According to The Age, Assange had his passport taken away on his arrival at Melbourne airport last week. While it was returned 15 minutes later, Assange said he was told it would be cancelled.
While Assange has made himself particularly unpopular with the US military by publishing video of attacks on civilians in Iraq, he’s been something of a thorn in the side for the Australian government too.
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Between government policy and deliberate vulnerabilities in the technology, citizens of most countries can be monitored online
NASA Connect – HASB – Sun Basics (1/3/2002)
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Posted in Europe, Finance, Microsoft at 6:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How Microsoft gets away with crimes that it managed to legalise along with other companies that exploit worldwide populations for the enrichment of very few
LEGALISED tax evasion is working out pretty well for Microsoft. We won’t bore people with Microsoft’s financial situation, but it is unacceptable that Microsoft pays virtually no tax in Europe and in the United States.
From a new report in Ireland’s Herald:
It sent half a billion euro back to its US parent company after paying no dividend at all the previous year, accounts just filed with the Companies Office show.
India’s laws are apparently ahead of EU and US laws because Microsoft was found guilty of tax evasion in India a couple of years ago. Unless people demand change, it won’t come. Microsoft and Gates have armies of lobbyists who rub their backs, so Microsoft robs people in more than one way (even those who don’t buy anything from Microsoft). █
“Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.”
–Napoleon Bonaparte
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, Windows at 6:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Disdain of Microsoft and its products statistically explained; why disagreement is a crucial part of advancing software freedom
MICROSOFT and Windows are not the same thing. One is a corporation and one is a product (Jim Zemlin seemingly mixes the two). But whether we talk about Microsoft or about Windows, there is great disdain out there. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and Windows is an inferior operating system which is only ubiquitous because of Microsoft’s monopolistic tactics and occasional crimes like bribery.
According to What Will We Use, people like neither Microsoft nor its products.
As of right now, 77% of people do not like Microsoft as a company or their products.
Why are we ‘bashing’ Microsoft like this, some people wonder. We have been described as “abrasive” by someone not just because of criticism of Microsoft but also criticism of Novell, Mono, and Moonlight. We criticise issues and behaviours, not brand/company names. Microsoft just happens to be by far the biggest offender, although Apple too is starting to compete when it comes to assaults on people’s freedom (more on that later today).
Grahame Morrison from Tux Radar (a mostly "pragmatist" site of a “pragmatist” magazine called Linux [sic] Format with a history of FSF disagreement) has a new piece calling for end of feuds and rivalries in Free/open source software.
We humbly disagree with Morrison.
“This is where diversity and fierce competition make GNU/Linux a lot stronger.”What if everyone embraced SUSE, which was probably the best GNU/Linux distribution at a time when Novell’s/Microsoft’s patent deal got signed (I used SUSE on all my machines at the time)? Then all of us would have to pay and endorse Microsoft ‘patent tax’ on GNU/Linux. This is where diversity and fierce competition make GNU/Linux a lot stronger. There is always choice, so everyone is happy. Eventually, *Ubuntu gained at SUSE’s expense.
It is an ongoing debate and it is polite. We always try to stick to facts and we back them up with as many references as possible (depending on how many are available and when we cross-reference there is a route to external articles, including from pro-Microsoft Web sites).
Our reader Tim wrote a long response to Morrison and it starts as follows:
I read an interesting article by Grahame Morrison entitled “Feuds and rivalries are damaging open source” (where all the quotes are taken from) which I start (and not beat around the bush) by saying is complete rubbish in the humble opinion of this writer.
After digesting his discourse I came to the conclusion that either he doesn’t understand the concept of different opinions being productive or simply wants to join in on some imagined “damaging” conflict in order to attract readers. The article is not what I would expect TechRadar to publish and to be honest, its slightly cheapened Techradar credibility for me.
For a community that’s supposed to rally under the noble banners of freedom, fairness and fraternity, the world of free software is chockfull of disagreement, feuds and simmering rivalries.
By the way, those who enjoy Techrights will probably enjoy OpenBytes too (the covered topics are similar). █
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
–Charles Darwin
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