05.30.10
Posted in Google, Patents at 2:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Google not only does “evil”; it patents it, too
Remember those defensive claims from Google that its Wi-Fi sniffin’ was all just an unfortunate accident/mistake? Well, it wasn’t. Google is being dishonest and there is a software patent to prove it. As Slashdot puts it:
“After mistakenly saying that it did not collect Wi-Fi payload data, Google had to reverse itself, saying ‘it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks.’ OK, mistakes happen. But, as Seinfeld might ask, then what’s the deal with the pending Google patent that describes capturing wireless data packets by operating a device — which ‘may be placed in a vehicle’ — in a ‘sniffer’ or ‘monitor’ mode and analyzing them on a server? Guess belated kudos are owed to the savvy Slashdot commenter who speculated back in January that the patent-pending technology might be useful inside a Google Street View vehicle. Google faces inquiries into its Wi-Fi packet sniffing practices by German and US authorities.”
Google should be commended for its more beneficial deeds (WebM/VP8 for example) but Google must always be denounced when it steps out of line. So what’s more “evil” here? The software patent or the intrusive sniffin’? Either way, Google should drop software patents [1, 2]. █
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Posted in Security, Windows at 2:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A few news items about security
• First human ‘infected with computer virus’ (another stupid article from the MSBBC, but other news sites fell for it too)
• Captain Cyborg Has A Virus-Infected Sidekick… But Nothing Can Stop A PR Campaign (rebutting the above)
The story is — as with all captain cyborg stories — a lot less than the headline suggests. Gasson wasn’t “infected with a computer virus.” He took a chip that had a computer virus and stuck it in his arm, just like Warwick has done n the past. The parallels to an actual virus are minimal, and the usefulness for anything is even less than that. Gasson presents this as useful for considering the implications for implanted technology such as pacemakers, but that’s nothing new. People have talked about potential technology issues from the wireless interface to pacemakers for years. Doing some sort of publicity stunt with an implanted computer chip doesn’t further that discussion along.
• Alleged $100M scareware sellers facing charges (Windows only)
Three men are facing federal fraud charges for allegedly raking in more than US$100 million while running an illegal “scareware” business that tricked victims into installing bogus software.
• Sality, the virus that turned into the ultimate malware
From an analysis performed with a “rogue P2P client” coded to become part of the malicious network, Symantec has determined that the Sality botnet covers something like 100.000 computers. It’s a bots figure below the one achieved by giants like Conficker but similar in size to other botnets as Storm, Pandex and Rustock. What remains clear is the demonstration of Sality’s unique threat, a malware floating around since seven years that shows no intention to quickly disappear from the net.
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Posted in Finance, Novell, Ron Hovsepian at 1:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Now that Novell is a dead company walking it’s time to say something about the tens of millions of dollars Ron Hovsepian made for his failure and betrayal of his suppliers
LAST week we wrote about Novell’s results (more here), emphasising that Novell is on its route to being acquired almost for sure. Here are some more new articles that agree with it:
• Novell’s Buyout Valuation Looks Promising – cbl
• No room for another ‘other’ OS choice
The news that Novell has thrown in the towel and is seeking as immediate a trade buy as it can suggests that ultimately there can only be one Linux game in town – and it wears a rouge cap, shall we say.
• Novell’s sales down as it prepares to sell up
The Wall Street Times newspaper reported earlier this month that Novell is in talks with as many as 20 potential acquirers, most of which are private equity firms. In March 2010, Novell rejected a bid from Elliott Associates, saying it undervalued the company.
• Novell struggles through Q2
Novell has reported a $12m drop in net income for the second quarter of 2010 from the same period last year. Novell reported net revenue of $204m for the quarter, compared with net revenue of $216m for the second fiscal quarter of 2009.
• Novell publishes second quarter figures
Novell’s CEO Ron Hovsepian has not an impressive scorecard. He should watch that someone who offered Ballmer "the egg treatment" for this type of failure [1, 2]. Hovsepian has earned a lot of money for himself (in excessive bonuses he did not deserve), but he is leaving Novell in the dust having sold GNU/Linux down the river. We are seeing Novell’s last months now and employees are probably brushing up their resumes.
Here is belated coverage of what was possibly Novell’s latest and very last public event where it pitched ‘clouds’ rather than “open source” or “Linux”.
Novell came back to Europe for the first time in five years to hold its BrainShare conference in Amsterdam last week. Besides the launch of the long-awaited version 4 of its Identity Manager (IM4) product line, Novell also clarified its approach to cloud computing.
Novell founder Drew Major moved on to other things (more here).
Move now lists its headquarters in Irvine, California, although it apparently still has operations in American Fork, Utah, where the firm has been based since its founding by Novell founder Drew Major.
What would he say about Novell today? Did Ron Hovsepian do his job well? the outcome suggests he didn’t. Hovsepian’s legacy is the destruction of Novell. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google at 1:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Apple’s strong grip on its devices is driving developers away to Linux, which is flourishing in phones and tablets
STEVE “Freedom from Porn” Jobs has turned out not only to be blocking pornography but also competition. We are reminded of this thanks to a new article from The Register:
Mozilla won’t submit a Firefox browser to Apple’s iPhone App Store. It has no intention of taking its browser where “it’s not wanted.” But the open source outfit is developing an iPhone incarnation of Firefox Sync, the browser bookmark-syncing service formerly known as Weave.
Separately, The Register writes a new rant about the hypePad which, as expected, serves vanity needs more than practical uses.
As the iPad goes on sale in the UK (and eight other countries), I’ve had my own “magical and revolutionary” Apple tablet for exactly 56 days. And I’m using it less and less each day.
My fading relationship with my iPad reminds me of a long-ago college fling with a young lovely. High anticipation, fervent consummation, growing familiarization, decreasing fascination, and the inevitable: “No, hon, it’s not you. It’s me.”
As shown in our latest bundle of news, there are many tablets out there as new ones appear every week. An increasing number of those will run Linux on ARM and there is only one tablet which runs Apple’s operation system. As for Vista 7, it’s being dumped for Linux, at least on tablets [1, 2, 3].
Apple did not invent tablets and luckily it won’t control this market. Linux will do to Apple on tablets what it’s already doing to Apple on phones. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Rapid growth of Linux into corporate and government IT environments is fueling the need for Linux certified professionals. CIOs and managers are eager to have Linux experts in their organizations. A training or certification provides a tangible mechanism for their hiring evaluation, as well as a means to market the prowess of organizations.
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Over the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of discussion surrounding Sony’s decision to remove Linux support from the PS3. Those inclined to sue over the removal of Other OS support say they purchased their PS3 because they could install Linux on it.
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Desktop
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A Los Angeles judge this week ordered Lindsay Lohan to wear an alcohol-detection ankle bracelet at all times, after the actress was convicted for driving under the influence. Last night, Ms. Lohan tweeted that she wished to bedazzle her Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor (SCRAM). The device isn’t pretty. Neither is alcoholism.
Snip from the Los Angeles Times:
“Can CHANEL please help me out by getting me some stickers to put on my scram bracelet so that I can at least wear a chic dress?! maybe!? x,” Lohan wrote.
But the maker of the ankle bracelet warns that anything that affects the alcohol-monitoring device could be considered a violation and could trigger its tampering mechanism. So adorning the lightweight monitor with sequins or stickers could be fraught with problems for the fashionable actress.
Guess that means you can’t install Ubuntu on it, either. Bummer.
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This post is a summary of a conversation I had the other day with an acquaintance of mine. It started out with him asking me what I do for a living and ended up with me having to choke back tears of laughter. I hope you have the same reaction although I realize that it might be one of those, “You had to be there” moments.
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Yesterday, I installed Linux Mint on my dad’s laptop. With the exception of a couple of bits of poorly supported hardware, the installation went without a hitch. I think my dad was genuinely pleased with his new Linux installation and he commented that it was definitely faster than the old Windows XP installation, he added that he thought it looked fairly easy to use too.
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These are just more trash statistics telling the world or at least anyone who wants to listen that GNU/Linux is not relevant. Real statistics with pedigree showed that GNU/Linux surpassed MacOS share back in 2003 and has not looked back.
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This also indicates that those who tried GNU/Linux are happy enough to keep using it and they do not value the need for support from Novell highly and more continue to ask for GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is simple, modular and reliable.
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During a quiet period my colleague and I happened to find ourselves comparing notes on our company-supplied laptops: Dell Latitude E6500s. My colleague, let’s call him Diglio, runs Windows 7 on his, and I am running Kubuntu 10.04. We were just sitting ourselves down in an empty conference room to take advantage of the CMU wireless to check our email.
Diglio opened his laptop, which had been suspended, and nothing happened. Well, sort of. The fan came on, but not the screen. Nothing he could do would turn the screen on, he had to reboot.
Watching that I said, “That happens to me sometimes too. I thought it was the Linux power management tools that were screwing up. Do you sometimes close the lid to suspend, stick the laptop back in your case only to find a very hot laptop a bit later when you realize that it didn’t suspend properly as well?”
“Yep”.
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HPC
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89% of the top 500 high performance clusters run GNU/Linux and 1% run that other OS. That will not change any time soon.
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SGI ProPack 7 is the latest version of SGI’s suite of tools and libraries that enable industry-leading application performance on standard Linux(R) distributions. SGI software products are designed and built on open standards supporting Linux distributions from Red Hat(R) and Novell(R). SGI also integrates and certifies leading third-party software tools to provide best-in-class open software stacks for customers’ most demanding workloads.
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Audiocasts
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Topics for this podcast:
*Licensing buzzes with Google, OSI, virtualization and the cloud
*Open source barometer Black Duck sees growth in mobile, healthcare, government
*New life for LinuxCare shows renewed vigor for Linux in clouds
*Apache Hadoop support old and new with IBM, Datameer
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History of IRC, the Peer-Directed Project Center, freenode and more.
Guest: Jonathan Simpson
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Ballnux
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As we reported here earlier this week, the Samsung i897 looks to be AT&T’s first serious attempt at releasing an Android phone. In terms of specs, it appears to be almost identical to the Galaxy S with its 4-inch AMOLED screen, Android 2.1, and 5-megapixel camera. Our source for a few hardware details just dropped a handful of pictures on our lap showing the future AT&T device looking ready for prime time.
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The Samsung I8330, thought to be Vodafone’s next 360 range handset has been revealed
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One of Samsung’s newest phones – the Samsung I8330 – is reported to be available shortly on the Vodafone network and under the name Vodafone 360 H2.
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Kernel Space
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The testing Phoronix does may have some use but it is not a reflection on Linux in general just the filesystems and hardware that Phoronix uses that are quite narrow. The code in question is just a tiny percentage of Linux.
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* Wim Coekaerts (Senior Vice President, Linux and Virtualization Engineering, at Oracle): Coekaerts will take a technical look at Linux at Oracle.
* Rob Chandhok (President of Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc.): Chandok will discuss the challenges in open source and mobile today.
* Markus Rex (Senior Vice President and General Manager of Open Platform Solutions at Novell): Rex will speak about the changing nature of IT workloads on Linux.
* Intel & Nokia: A joint keynote titled, “Freedom to Innovate: Can MeeGo’s Openness Change the Mobile Industry?”
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Graphics Stack
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The latest ATI graphics drivers are here to satisfy the needs of the Linux gamers out there. ATI Catalyst 10.5 comes with preliminary support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and Server 11 Service Pack 1. It also fixes quite a lot of Linux-specific issues and bugs. Other than that, it’s just a regular evolutionary update, nothing to write home about.
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Applications
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Upon loading DeVeDe you are presented with a screen which asks you what type of disk you are creating. In my instance it was DVD video, although there are offers of VideoCD, Super VideoCD, China VideoDisc and DivX/Mpeg-4 too. Next up you select the titles for your buttons on your menu screen and with a quick click to the adjacent box to select the files that are going to be played when this title is selected. This is where DeVeDe 3.16.8 really impresses and taking the worry of all those command line options away, it will automatically convert your files into DVD compliant format. After that its rinse and repeat for any other titles you want on your disk. NTSC and PAL are both catered for and there is a status bar to show you how much room you have left on the disk.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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The KDE Project developers have released a first beta for version 4.5 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC), a development preview of the next major release for the popular Linux and Unix desktop. According to the developers, the beta is aimed at “testers and those that would like to have an early look at what’s coming to their desktops and netbooks this summer”. The final version of KDE 4.5 is scheduled to be released in August, 2010.
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Good news for fans of KDE, the first beta of KDE SC 4.5 is now available for download. KDE has a history of introducing some of the most innovative features in each release. In KDE 4.4 we got tabbing support at the window manager level, making it possible for people to combine any two arbitrary windows from different applications, into one tabbed window.
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Highlights of KDE SC 4.5.0 Beta 1:
· Revamped notification area;
· Added KWin-Tiling effect, which automatically places windows next to each other;
· WebKit web browser engine can now be used in Konqueror;
· Improved overall stability of the software components in KDE SC 4.5;
· Many other amazing, new features!
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Every once in a while I write a post related to relations between lancelot and kmail or kopete.
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There were a lot of complaints when we decided to limit the size of icons placed on panels in plasma to 32×32 pixels.
The reasoning behind limiting the size were requests from users who use vertical panels – vertical panels are usually made wider then standard panels, and icons would grow to 300×300 pixels taking up most of the space on the panel.
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One of the most requested features after KDE Partition Manager’s initial release has been that users asked for a way to modify mount points from within the application. This came as a bit of a surprise to me because I would not have seen this feature to be in the immediate scope of a partition managing application. But, the user is king after all, and thus this will indeed be possible in KDE Partition Manager 1.1.
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This morning, while having my usual Cafe Latte (albeit this time in Berlin instead of at home sweet home in Nijmegen), I read about the Trinity project, which is an effort to revive KDE 3. I think this project nicely shows the advantages of Free Software. While the vast majority of KDE contributors agrees that KDE 3 is a dead end, technologically, these two guys (according to the somewhat sparse information on the website) are trying to continue to support and feature development on KDE3. Now I see a couple of real challenges for this project:
* Maintainance – KDE 3 is a large codebase. You need a good amount of people with domain knowledge of many different areas to effectively maintain a project like KDE. I see some of the first roadmap tasks for Trinity are updating the build system to deal with all the updated developer tools (e.g. newer autotools versions).
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Continuing on with the theme of measuring the popularity of Linux distros, today we’ll go for another method. Linux Tracker is a website that provides a bit torrent tracker for various Linux distros and related projects.
Another way of measuring popularity is to look at the number of seeders and leechers a torrent has (the number of people uploading/downloading the torrent at that moment) and the number of downloads it has had.
While the only takes a smaller fraction of the downloads, as most people prefer to use HTTP downloads. These will also cater to the slightly more technically aware, as downloading via bit torrent is not quite as simple as downloading via HTTP. Another issue is that it is possible (and encouraged) for one person to be seeding multiple torrents at once, so someone could be seeding every single Ubuntu torrent on the site, even though it is only 1 user. Conversely someone could have downloaded the disc straight and then not seeded it at all. Projects with lots of DVDs/CDs (such as Ubuntu and Debian) will have more seeders together than a project with only 1 or 2 CDs.
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Zenwalk
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Jean-Philippe Guillemin proudly announced last evening, May 27th, the immediate availability of the Zenwalk Linux 6.4 operating system. The new release is powered by Linux kernel 2.6.33.4, with the BFS scheduler, and the new XFCE 4.6.2 desktop environment. Cutting-edge packages and overall performance improvements are also present in this new release of the lightweight Zenwalk Linux distribution.
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Zenwalk 6.4 provides many enhancements at system and application levels, while confirming the maturity and features stability of Zenwalk. The brand new 2.6.33.4 kernel is featuring the new BFS scheduler, designed for the best desktop interactivity on multi-core CPUs while taking the most of lower spec machines. You’ll notice better responsiveness of graphical applications, better realtime performance of sound applications (very low latency), and efficiency of niced commands (compilation tasks can really be niced in a way they don’t disturb other applications). Like its predecessor, Zenwalk 6.4 features EXT4 as main filesystem, and latest versions of most applications and desktop environments.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring’s development planning is on track. Latest release helped to fix many bugs and improve quality of your favorite distribution.
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Red Hat Family
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Here is the statement a Red Hat spokesperson sent me, in full:
“The Fedora Project and the engineers and developers that are part of it always keep tabs on technology trends in open source. We included KVM early in Fedora distributions because its developers did the work necessary to have it included in the Linux kernel. We predicted KVM’s inclusion in the kernel would make it the best virtualization solution going forward, and we’ve been proved right. Over time we deprecated Xen hypervisor support in Fedora, while KVM has continued to flourish and grow in features and adoption.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This month:
* Command and Conquer.
* How-To : Program in Python – Part 11, Adding Screenlets, and Streaming Media.
* Review – Lubuntu.
* MOTU Interview – Stefan Lesicnik.
* Top 5 – Tiling Window Managers.
* plus: Ubuntu Women, Ubuntu Games, My Opinion, My Story, and all the usual goodness!
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Variants
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A new version of the Software Manager is available in the repository. You can use the Update Manager to upgrade to it.
The Software Manager was rewritten from scratch in Linux Mint 9. It’s a very complex application, and it can be improved in many ways. Today we tackled the time it takes for the application to start. Basically it needs to process some 30,000 packages, a growing number of comments (we’re receiving about 200 comments per day at the moment) and match all that in categories and do some other fancy processing… Because of all this, it’s far from being immediate.
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Although Pandora is promoted as “the most powerful gaming handheld,” the specs lean more towards an ultra-portable, pocket-sized PC. This portable rig can surf the Internet thanks to a built-in Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g wireless adapter, allow users to compose email using its 43-button QWERTY keyboard, and perhaps even export high-quality video to a TV thanks to its S-Video output jack. The Pandora sports a battery with a 10+ hour duration.
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Nokia
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According to an earlier Reuters report based on Gartner figures, Nokia only managed to sell less than 100,000 top-of-the-range N900 smartphones in its first five months on the market.
However, Nokia has since told The INQUIRER that the original figure quoted by Reuters was incorrect, and that it actually sold more than 100,000 Nokia N900s in the first five weeks.
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Meego is facing stiff competition from Google’s Android and Chrome operating systems, Canonical’s Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Microsoft’s Windows 7 Starter Edition. Like Canonical’s and Google’s products, Meego is based on the open source Linux kernel.
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Android
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More than 4 billion TV users exist in the world. Americans watch an average of five hours of TV per day.
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Instead of Android being the best that Linux will ever get on a portable device, it’s actually the first step into having open systems on mobile platforms. As Android gets into the netbook and tablet market, it will only get better for Linux users. People will learn to trust these open platforms and find out that these work out just as well as other types of platforms. The flexibility felt with these will be superior to other platforms that are more closed and controlled where users can’t make personal choices.
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“The open operating system offered by Google doesn’t necessarily translate to openness for users,” Hazelton said. “In some cases when you lock down a smartphone, it’s almost like running around the Internet on AOL. It’s just like going back to the ‘walled garden’ on feature phones.”
The idea of openness may have gotten away from Google with regard to Android, he said. Initially, the goal for Android was to create a mobile platform that would spotlight Google’s features — maps, search, cloud-based applications. The Nexus One is Google’s attempt to create just that phone, even though the versions of Android phones sold by other handset makers may not live up to the Googleplex’s ideal for a smartphone.
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While we’ve got no way to confirm at the moment, here’s some proverbial food for thought. A friendly reader last night published in our comment thread for the two rumored Verizon-bound Motorola devices with the above picture (subtitles added by us), claiming the bottom image is the Droid 2′s upgraded QWERTY keyboard. The story goes that his friend had one but no other information is currently available — the font on the keys is identical, and the mic icon on the bottom left is distinctively Android. If it’s legit, we gotta say we’re hopeful; the keys look to have a more protruding center à la the CLIQ, which should make typing on the little guy much easier than before. And if it’s not the Droid successor, well, it’s still something we haven’t seen. Could this be the updated QWERTY-fied Android solution we’ve been waiting for? Time will tell.
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There is always the option of building your own brand of Linux but Android has most of the advantages of this and much more.
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CEO Sanjay Jha tells investors Motorola is concentrating on the convergence of mobility and the home and ‘nearly all’ of his focus is on Android.
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Tablets
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While VIA is helping to produce a line of devices that come in at the $100-$150 range, Marvell’s teaming up with the organization to keep their tablets at a maximum price of $99.99 to help less-fortunate children and families get computing devices that will help them with their education and everyday life.
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Realease (no, that is not a typo) has rolled out a new 10″ tablet device which runs on the Linux operating system, with a choice of Freescale i.MX37 (ARM11) and i.MX51 (ARM Cortex A8) processors within.
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The folks over at ARMDevices have posted an exclusive look (via YouTube video – see below) at the Realease Shogo tablet. Sporting a 10.1 inch capacitive touchscreen, the Shogo comes built with a Freescale i.MX37 (ARM11) or i.MX51 (ARM Cortex A8) processor inside and is completely open with Linux as the OS.
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In the high-stakes competition to grasp Apple Inc.’s hit iPad, the Android operating system that Google Inc. made popular in cellphones is promising to be a front-runner.
Tablet-style computers, a declining hardware category until the iPad began generating buzz previously this year, which are anticipated to be a huge topic at next week’s Computex trade show, which is a major topic of discussion for product announcements by creators of personal computers.
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A pair of the most-anticipated mobile computers from this year’s CES show were Lenovo’s U1 Hybrid and Skylight smartbook. Both ran a custom widget-based Linux OS (sometimes also called Skylight), and were powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU. But since then, both devices seem to have fallen off the map, and now we think we know why. Both systems are getting a software overhaul, jumping to the Android platform in search of better performance and more usability.
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Switching to Google Android would benefit Lenovo in the long run. They would not have to spend too many resources on developing the core OS for their products. Android would also provide a massive support for third party apps that are available from the official market operated by Google.
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Lenovo settled questions around its ultra-mobile PCs on Friday by planing a switch in OS for the Skylight smartbook and the IdeaPad U1 detachable tablet. The two will drop Lenovo’s in-house Linux OS for Android in what’s treated as a reaction to “market conditions and user feedback.” Future plans now involve creating an entire ecosystem of Android devices that would include devices like the LePhone.
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New Pentaho sponsored report from Mark Madsen conducts price comparison of commercial open source and top five proprietary vendors
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Two years ago many companies were skeptical of Open Source, but after living two years through tough times during a recession, many companies have a better handle on what Open Source is all about and are enthusiastically embracing its potential. And the new mind shift among customers is forcing many vendors to change. They’re changing the way that they sell. And they’re changing the way that they develop with and support their software purchases.
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In theory, open source should win hands down. The open environment allows a cooperative ecosystem to evolve, guaranteeing a rate of innovation simply not possible in closed system. But I think it depends on where we are in the maturity of the market. Open source allows for more innovation, but it’s also an open invitation for more things to go wrong. This can be deadly as you try to push along market adoption.
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Mozilla
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Today marks 10 years of continuous full-time employment working on Mozilla.
I still can’t believe I get to work with so many amazing people. It’s pretty much the best job ever.
Thank you to all the Mozillians that have made this such a wonderful decade.
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The Mozilla developers have issued a first release candidate for version 3.1 of their open source Thunderbird email and news client, code named “Lanikai”. According to the developers, the development preview is considered to be stable, addressing 57 bugs from the previous beta, and is “intended for developers and members of our testing community to use for early evaluation and feedback.”
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The numerous bug-fixes include preventing specific, popular add-ons such as Gmail Conversation View from crashing the e-mail client, saving drafts when written in offline mode, and several critical stability fixes.
According to Mozilla’s calendar, Lanikai remains on schedule for a June 1st release barring bugs discovered in the release candidate. The full change log for the release candidate can be read here.
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The email client release is considered stable by the developers but it still aims largely at developers and testers and not general users who are asked to wait until the final version of Thunderbird 3.1 is released before they migrate to the new client.
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For some reason that is completely unfathomable to me, the URL that’s shown as hilighted in firefox’s URL window can get out of sync with options that show up in the drop down menu of possible alternatives, yet firefox gives preference to the drop down menu when you hit the TAB key to complete.
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Opera, ever scrappy in its effort to promote its browser over larger rivals, is poking fun at Google’s recent video boasting about the speed of its Chrome browser.
“The Opera browser is much faster than a potato,” concludes Opera’s low-budget video, which features herring-obsessed caricatured Scandinavians rolling the tubers into a pot of water at the same time Opera loads a Web page.
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Databases
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VoltDB, a new open-source database for large-scale transaction processing, emerged from beta on Tuesday.
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It is open source and available from the project website under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
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Oracle
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OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 Release Candidate 2 is not yet available from the usual download website but on many mirrors. So, just download from your favorite mirror next to you. Please note that currently a few Windows builds are not yet ready, these files need a bit more time to be available.
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Although Oracle will continue to support the GlassFish 2 customers through its commercial support, plans are for the team to focus on the Version 3 roadmap.
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CMS
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Welcome to the June installment of our what’s coming from the open source projects in the next month.
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Education
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Cheers to ReadWriteWeb for the heads up on this, and kudos to Google for releasing more open-source code.
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Healthcare
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Given the collaborative roots of VistA and all the third-party development that’s been done on top of it, in use in hospitals all over the nation, it makes sense to make this a full-fledged open source project, engaging the best coders and developers out there to build the best system for our veterans. And with the federal government moving toward electronic record-keeping for all healthcare, this gold standard could be applied across the board.
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Business
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How much does BI software and ongoing support actually cost? The report pulled real numbers from public sources and direct from the vendors revealing and comparing BI software and support costs for Pentaho, IBM (Cognos), MicroStrategy, Oracle and SAP (Business Objects).
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The Open Source Channel Alliance will potentially reach roughly 15,000 Synnex resellers — many of whom are managed service providers targeting mid-market customers.
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Ben Golub is new to the storage industry, having served previously as CEO of Plaxo (now part of Comcast) and in the upper management of VeriSign (which recently sold a security division to Symantec Corp.) before taking over as CEO of Gluster earlier this month. Golub and other executives from the open source clustered NAS software vendor recently sat down with SearchStorage.com to discuss the state of the enterprise data storage industry, building an open source business model, and what’s coming in new releases of their product.
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Project Releases
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Terracotta has upgraded the distributed caching open source code it acquired last year, Ehcache 2.1, for the fourth time in 10 months. The pace of upgrades reflects how making use of pooled server memories governed by a distributed cache has become a hot method for scaling up Web applications.
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A technology leader in cross-platform collaborative editing and shared media storage, has announced the Lightworks Open Source Beta Programme.
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When we talk about server virtualization, we often mention the resources behind the technology, such as the memory, CPU, and disk. We do so because at least one of these resources will ultimately become the bottleneck somewhere down the road on our path to consolidation. But what about the network? Remember the network — that thing that everyone used to point the finger at and assign blame to when something went wrong in the data center?
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Government/Licensing
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The Spanish Police, Spanish Mint and Portugal’s Agency for Administrative Modernisation have been heckled by developers of OpenSC, open source software for smart cards. The developers found that the public administrations use their software libraries, but have not made available this open source code, one of the terms of their licence.
The Portuguese Agency for Administrative Modernisation corrected the error last week, the open source developers report.
According to one of them, Martin Paljak, the Portuguese agency had overlooked the emails sent by OpenSC at first. “A few weeks ago we tried again, and then they replied and began fixing the mistake.”
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The decision on Tuesday by the administration of the Bolzano region to renew the proprietary software licences for it’s servers, will be challenged by Associazione per il Software Libero (Assoli), an advocacy group on free and open source. The group says the region should have investigated alternatives and should have issued a call for tender.
The Bolzano administration on 25 May decided to spend 2.2 million Euro to renew proprietary licences for the next three years. In its decision, the administration admits it is forced to renew the licence contract: “There are no alternatives for the development of the IT system. Changing these essential and central servers would be irresponsible. The administration fails the resources and expertise for such a change.”
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Open Hardware
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Robotics company Willow Garage has started a two-year project to work with institutions from around the world on new applications for its robot: the PR2. Each of 11 teams will work on their own projects, but will share their code with each other and the rest of the world. Everything created will be open-source, meaning others can use the code for their own endeavors. (The PR2 runs on a software platform called Robot Open Source, also developed by Willow Garage.)
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VP8
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One week after Google open sourced its $124.6m VP8 video codec, Mozilla and Opera have called for its inclusion in the still-gestating HTML5 specification.
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Google has the resources to fight any industry consortium in court, and it might just get the chance, as the company has declared that it will make all of YouTube available in VP8. But, as John Paczkowski pointed out, unless it’s ready to indemnify everyone else who uses the standard against future licensing or legal fees, its claim that VP8 is not only open source but free to use may prove meaningless.
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An Arkansas woman who locked her son out of his Facebook account and posted her own items there was convicted Thursday of misdemeanor harassment and ordered not to have contact with the teenager.
Clark County District Judge Randy Hill ordered Denise New, of Arkadelphia, to pay a $435 fine and complete anger-management and parenting classes. He said he would consider allowing her to see her 17-year-old son, Lane New, who lives with his grandmother, if Denise New takes the two courses.
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Security/Aggression
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Former home secretary David Blunkett said today he was considering suing the Government for the £30 cost of his ID card, after it was announced that holders of the documents will not be compensated when they are abolished.
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In any other situation, Jason Wilde might have been flattered to be thought of as a decade younger.
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A new show called Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera opens at Tate Modern this week. It features images made surreptitiously or without the explicit permission of the subject. It is the history of spying with a lens in just over 250 photographs.
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Companies that operate critical infrastructures and do not voluntarily allow the federal government to install monitoring software on their networks to detect possible cyberattacks would face the “wild” internet on their own and place us all at risk, a top Pentagon official seemed to say Wednesday.
Defense Deputy Secretary William Lynn III, speaking at the Strategic Command Cyber Symposium in Nebraska, said we need to think imaginatively about how to use the National Security Agency’s Einstein monitoring systems on critical private-sector networks — such as those in the financial, utility and communication industries — in order to protect us.
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Finance
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After completing an elaborate sting operation, the FBI arrested a Disney employee and her boyfriend Wednesday for trying to sell corporate secrets to hedge fund managers and other Wall Street traders.
The FBI and other federal regulators said the plot was dependent on the ability of Bonnie Hoxie to covertly exploit her position as an assistant to Zenia Mucha, Disney’s head of corporate communications.
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The House of Representatives passed a bill today that would raise the taxes that venture capitalists and other investment managers pay on carried interest — their share of the profits from a successful start-up investment.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Fighting PC game piracy with restrictive copy protection is “a losing battle”, Blizzard has said.
In recent months some publishers have begun using digital rights management (DRM) that requires players have an active internet connection at all times.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A cease and desist order sent to Google on behalf of The Tetris Company LLC has resulted in 35 Tetris clones being pulled from the Android Market. The developer behind FallingBlocks was among the first to feel the fallout as they took to Slashdot to air their complaint.
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Artists are being ripped off by copyright rules applied by the federal government’s latest tourism campaign, arts groups claim.
Tourism Australia has been sourcing images and photographs from the public free of charge for use in its latest Nothing Like Australia campaign.
The government agency has previously sourced artwork from commissioned and library-stock photographs, generating income for the copyright holders.
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Copyrights
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One thing though this news must be good news for FACT, because P2P tech threatens to take away the pirate DVD market stall if the new “code of practice” makes it “too hot” for P2P users then I would expect those not frightened to take the risk will be raking in profit as they sell the copied titles on the street. So for FACT the revitalised industry of pirate DVD sales will make the work flood in….happy times ahead Im sure.
I get fed up with saying it, copyright infringement can be greatly reduced. This is not the way to do it. But who cares if it doesn’t work? You are paying for the experiment….theres always next year.
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Michael Scott points us to one of the best summaries I’ve seen of the state of the music business today — published in the ABA Journal. It’s an incredibly balanced piece, that really does carefully present both sides of the story on a variety of issues, and presents actual evidence, which suggests the RIAA is blowing smoke on a lot of its claims. The piece kicks off by highlighting that the music industry appears to be thriving, and then noting that it’s not the same as the recording industry, which has been struggling.
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It’s official. “Hurt Locker” producer Voltage Pictures has declared war on 5,000 unidentified people who allegedly pirated the Oscar-winning film. The lawsuit was filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
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A proposed class action was commenced yesterday, May 25, 2010, against Thomson Reuters Corporation and Thomson Reuters Canada Limited on behalf of a class of Canadian lawyers and law firms. The Statement of Claim (which has not been proven in Court) alleges that Thomson Reuters breaches copyright by making available original lawyer created legal documents for fee or subscription without permission from, or compensation to, the authors of the documents.
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More than 2 years ago the IFPI and other copyright groups brought action against Danish ISP Telenor demanding that it should block its subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay. Following a hearing which began a week ago, the Supreme Court in Denmark has just ruled that The Pirate Bay must continue to be blocked, upholding previous rulings by lower courts.
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One evening this week, fitness instructor Michael Montgomery tried to spur four dozen exercisers through a frenetic routine of lunges and jumping jacks by applying a tried-and-true prod—a Britney Spears tune.
“Gimme gimme more, gimme more, gimme gimme more,” rang the lyrics of the 2007 song, which is called “Gimme More.”
The words, however, weren’t sung by Ms. Spears, but by an almost-but-not-quite soundalike cover artist identified as Mandy Brewer.
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A case testing the meaning of the so-called “innocent infringer’s” defense to the Copyright Act’s minimum $750-per-music-track fine has landed at the U.S. Supreme Court.
The case the justices were asked to review Wednesday concerns a federal appeals court’s February decision ordering a university student to pay the Recording Industry Association of America $27,750 ($750 a track) for file sharing 37 songs when she was a high school cheerleader. That decision reversed a Texas federal judge who had ordered defendant Whitney Harper to pay $7,400 ($200 per song).
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The internet was created to share and distribute data. It’s the whole reason the world wide web exists.
Of course some of that data is going to be copyright-protected work. If it can be digitized, it can, and will, be shared.
What continues to amaze me is how freaked-out authors are by this. The thought that someone is sharing their work–without paying for it–seems to evoke the same reaction as having someone hack your bank account and drain your life savings.
[...]
And yet, I’m not worried. I’m currently selling 220 ebooks per day, and that rate shows no signs of slowing down.
So everyone needs to take a big, collective breath, let it out slow, and stop worrying about illegal file sharing. Here are some reasons why.
1. Copyright is unenforceable in a digital world. Period. Exclamation point. At no time in history has any individual, company, or industry been able to stop file sharing. No country or law has been able to stop it. No technology has been able to stop it. Which brings us to…
NASA Connect – PSA – Microgravity (1/22/2004)
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Posted in Hardware, Microsoft at 9:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: XBMC finally hangs up on Microsoft’s Xbox, leaving the monopolistic company in more of an embarrassing state amid departure of chiefs
Not only Microsoft is abandoning Xbox, whose leadership is still leaving Microsoft in droves. XBMC too is dropping Xbox like a hot plate, whereas other platforms — Free/libre ones included — will still be supported.
The XBMC developers have announced that they are dropping support for XBOX consoles. Although the popular open source media centre started as a program for modified XBOX consoles, the developers say that the “XBOX has hard limits for what it can handle” and that “it is a popular misconception that official XBOX development is still taking place by the team”.
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XBMC has been forked into a number of other programs, including, for example, Boxee and Plex. The latest release of XBMC is version 9.11 from the end of December, 2009. XBMC is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Here is the original message from XBMC:
XBMC (XBMP really) started as a program for modified XBOX consoles. In the following years, XBMC has grown into a multi-platform, multi-architecture media center that runs on most standard hardware. The hardware and legal limitations of the XBOX were always a concern and the Team has instead focused on running on the hardware that most people already have.
The last official release for the XBOX by the XBMC team was Atlantis, over 18 months ago. Since then, one brave soul (Arnova) has been merging code from the main codebase into the XBOX branch in our repository. Because there were many users out there that took advantage of these updates, we had no problem with this.
We might write some more about this at a later stage, after more investigation into the reasons and the consequences. What this basically shows is that at Microsoft, the hardware unit/products in general are dying. Here is some advice from IDG [via]. Quitting this entire hardware market is named as a possibility. Microsoft has been losing billions of dollars there. Apple and IBM are hardware companies; Microsoft — just a wannabe. █
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Posted in Courtroom, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, SCO at 9:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“On the same day that CA blasted SCO, Open Source evangelist Eric Raymond revealed a leaked email from SCO’s strategic consultant Mike Anderer to their management. The email details how, surprise surprise, Microsoft has arranged virtually all of SCO’s financing, hiding behind intermediaries like Baystar Capital.”
–Bruce Perens
Summary: How Pequot Capital made money through a former Microsoft employee it hired (David Zilkha) and helped fund SCO litigation against Linux shortly later
IT IS hard to tell whether we stepped in a scandal or not, but putting the evidence out there is almost certainly worthwhile. Last night we wrote about Pequot's inside trading that involved Microsoft shares. This was not the first time that we wrote about the Pequot fiasco [1, 2, 3].
Having done some research, we found the claim that months after the SCO lawsuit had been filed ‘”Integral Capital Management” and “Pequot Ventures / Pequot Capital Management” have been buying huge chunks of SCO stock. There’s a pretty short version of those degrees-of-separation chains leading back to MSFT if you’re a conspiracy theorist.’
Could Microsoft be investing in unsubstantiated claims and bogus allegations not just through Baystar Capital? Could there be more parties involved? Right now we have an everlasting frivolous lawsuit and SCO never seems to run out of money, not even this week. It wants a new trial which it can fund with rather mysterious funding that we wrote about before.
I know some of you wondered if SCO had given up and faced reality and wasn’t going to file. Hah! Nevah happen. The full title of the document is “SCO’s Reply Memorandum in Support of Its Renewed Motion for Judgment as a Matter of Law or, in the Alternative, for a New Trial”.
Looking plainly at the surface, there is nothing which connected Pequot Capital to Microsoft back in 2003. Groklaw however points out “Pequot’s mention in the SCO saga” when showing the following list from SCO:
VSpring Capital (SCO)
Vector Capital (SCO)
IDG Ventures (Broadmark)
Group Atlantic Partners, LLC (Broadmark)
Paladin Capital Group (Broadmark)
Pequot Capital (Broadmark)
Technology Crossover Ventures (Broadmark)
Ram Capital Resources, LLC (Impact Capital)
Crestview Capital Fund (Impact Capital)
Here is a new report about how Pequot Capital profited from Microsoft (just as Acacia did earlier this month):
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in January resumed a probe into whether Samberg’s funds illegally profited in 2001 by trading on inside information about Microsoft Corp., people familiar with the matter said at the time. That was about a year after the agency told Samberg and Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer John Mack they wouldn’t be accused of wrongdoing related to insider trading.
Here is the most revealing new article so far. It turns out that there are Microsoft roots, misconduct, and other abnormalities inside Pequot Capital. The key person moved from Microsoft to Pequot Capital not so long before the SCO case, just as Microsoft staff moved from Microsoft to Acacia only weeks before Acacia sued Linux (Red Hat and Novell).
Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz played key roles brokering a $28 million settlement that resolves a long-simmering allegation that Pequot Capital Management, the Westport-based hedge fund, committed insider trading in Microsoft securities in 2001, according to SEC officials.
The SEC filed suit against Pequot and its chairman, Arthur Samberg, today and announced at the same time that Pequot and Samberg agreed to pay $28 million combined in disgorged profits and penalties to settle the case. (They did not admit or deny guilt.) Federal investigators had been looking into the allegations since at least 2005 but closed early investigations after failing to find enough evidence to bring a case, according to our prior reporting. But then something happened that didn’t help Pequot: The employee at the center of the case got divorced, and e-mails implicating the employee, David Zilkha, in the insider trading scheme came to light in filings. Zilkha joined Pequot in 2001 after working for Microsoft, and he used his contacts at Microsoft to tip Pequot to the fact that Microsoft was about to release a better-than-expected earnings report in the spring of 2001. Pequot then made $14 million on trades of Microsoft securities, according to the SEC’s complaint.
Separately, in another context, Groklaw has stated: “Perhaps Microsoft could adopt a new slogan: Don’t Look Evil.” (“If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good,” Bill Gates famously said.)
This statement from Groklaw was said in reference to this meeting. Groklaw also points out another new case of inside trading:
Feds Charge Two In Insider-Trading Plot Involving Disney
Wowza. Folks out at Disney’s HQ in Burbank, Calif., are probably doing a bit of glassy-eyed headshaking on Wednesday, in wake of a criminal complaint filed a few hours ago.
The complaint, filed by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, has alleged that a former administrative assistant to Disney’s head of communications and her boyfriend tried to sell advance access to the company’s second-quarter earnings reports. Click here for the WSJ story; here for the criminal complaint.
Wanna know who else got caught inside trading (but never charged)? Robbie Bach, the Microsoft president who has just fled the company. █
“Like any dictatorship, when things start to get tough Microsoft is going to discover that it has lots of allies, but very few friends.”
–Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury
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