The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced a number of initiatives for its community members: these include LPIMall.com (http://www.lpimall.com) -- a webstore for LPI affinity products for Linux professionals, a survey of LPI alumni, and prizes for volunteer contributors from around the world who assist with LPI's exam development program.
Even though I won't be able to attend, I'm pretty excited about next week's LinuxCon--excuse me, LinuxCon North America 2010.
Last year's inaugural event in Portland (disclaimer: which I assisted with in my former tenure with the Linux Foundation) was a great success, in no small part to the organizers, with whom I was fortunate to assist. With one such show under their belts, I expect this year's offering to surpass the last one.
The keynotes include some of the usual suspects: Stormy Peters, Marcus Rex, Eben Moglen, and Wim Coekaerts, just to name a few. But there's some new blood in the speaker lineup that I will be very interested to hear from, such as Ravi Simhambhatla, VP and CIO of Virgin America. Virgin America is known for innovative business practices, so I will be interested in learning about how they integrate Linux and open source into their operations.
If you can’t join us in person this year, you might miss out on the social scene but you can still catch a select number of sessions via webcast.
Do you want to speak at the first MeeGo Conference in Dublin, Ireland on November 15 - 17? Now is your chance! The call for session proposals has started, and anyone who wants to speak at the conference must submit a proposal. Proposals from community members, Intel, Nokia, the Linux Foundation and others will all be given equal consideration.
This is your brain. This is your brain on Linux Desktop. It is a good thing.
To borrow and twist the old "brain on drugs" PSA, your brain on Linux Desktop could be one of the best things that could happen to you for your computer fix.
Linux Desktop continues its ascent into users' collective consciousness with great graphics, powerful applications, and seamless interfaces. Linux Desktop frees your brain to think about the work (or the fun) at hand. Imagine -- transparent computing, and it's free!
Peter Hutterer, one of the few X.Org input developers and the developer behind Multi-Pointer X when he was a student in Australia, has now published the first public draft of the multi-touch protocol specification. The multi-touch protocol specification is a low-level spec to be integrated with the X Input Extension for further enriching the multi-touch capabilities on Linux and other operating systems using the X.Org Server.
Contacts is Mozilla's nifty Labs project that compiles and manages all your web address books in Firefox, and now it's made the logical leap into Mozilla's email client, Thunderbird. It's a really convenient syncing tool for your desktop email.
BeagleBoard is a low-power, low-cost single-board computer (SBC) that integrates SoC, storage and GPU on one board of size 3” x 3”. It was designed with open source and hobbyists in mind. And there are numerous open source projects around. But before we jump into the software side, let’s dig deeper into the hardware. BeagleBoard-xM is a revision of the original BeagleBoard and has only just been launched (with pre-orders being taken on the website from 7 June 2010). The xM makes use of an OMAP35x SoC which is based around the ARM Cortex A8 CPU.
Wisotool currently supports about 145 games and/or benchmarks (see below). Please consider contributing support for your favorite game, its not (too) hard. Thanks to everyone who contributed changes for this release.
While we are discussing open source contributions to gaming projects (and just one gaming project, in this case), the buck need not stop there. This is all applicable to any open source project out there. So I encourage you to go out, find a project you are passionate about and find some way to contribute. It does not have to be a technical contribution. You can contribute documentation, translation, bug reporting or even marketing & advertising. Figure out what you're good at and contact the project lead(s) and ask how you can help out and share with them what areas your skills lie in. While my own open source contributions are super duper minor in the grand scheme of things, I really liked the way OpenOffice.org broke down the areas where you can contribute. More open source projects need to embrace solutions for allowing potential contributors easy access to the "low hanging fruit," if you will. To that end, there's a project called OpenHatch which is providing these very types of resources and one which I will be spotlighting in the very near future.
The ideas that go around different OS's and the way the represent highlighted and selected items differs greatly. Not to say that this is a problem. I believe it is rather a strength. OS's dare to be different and they seem to be more interesting to work with. Simplicity is something that I value, I believe that openSUSE does not have this simplicity yet. The KDE desktop features a few ideas that can be used across the whole platform. I am not saying either that OSX and Windows treat this better.
The GNOME Release Team have issued GNOME 2.31.6, the first development snapshot of what will eventually become version 2.32 of the GNOME desktop environment for Linux and Unix. According to the GNOME Project developers, the development preview is "looking great". It is of course aimed at early adopters and developers.
Prentice Hall are happy to send each and every approved LoCo team one free copy of The Official Ubuntu Book and one free copy of The Official Ubuntu Server book. To be entirely clear: this is one copy of each book per team. This will be a great addition to each team’s library of Ubuntu books!
Well, it looks like Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat is getting better and better everyday. According to Jasev from UbuntuForums, Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat supports Apple’s Magic Mouse out-of-the-box.
It will be built with two cameras, one for taking photos and the other facing the user for video conferencing.
Motorola, Google and Verizon declined to comment.
According to a report from AndroLib, Google's Android Market for mobile applications has surpassed 100,000 applications. The AndroLib team say they're confident that "at least 100,000 applications have been submitted to the Android market since its creation", but also point out that not all of them are active apps. They estimate the active number to be closer to 83,000.
Yeah, it may look like the Dell Aero when peeking it head-on, but Motorola's Glam is apt to be far more sophisticated that the self-proclaimed "world's lightest Android phone."
Google has published an updated breakdown of the number of active devices running a given version of its Android mobile operating system platform. According to the Platform Versions device dashboard on the Android Developer portal, nearly 60% of all Android devices in circulation are now running version 2.1 of the OS – up almost 10% compared to mid-June (50%). Android 1.5 and 1.6 devices now make up 15.3% and 20.3% of devices respectively, while only 0.2% of devices are running obsolete versions, including version 1.1, 2.0 and 2.0.1.
For one thing, there's a new Metasploit version on the way that sports new features, including improved social engineering testing tools. But there's also the transition from a purely open source project to an effort that must balance the needs of its open source community with the commercial requirements of its new Metasploit Express proprietary product.
At the center of these transitions is HD Moore, the researcher who founded the Metasploit project.
Between 10 percent and 15 percent of the serious security bugs reported since Mozilla launched its bug bounty program have been provided free of charge, according to Mozilla. "A lot of people would say, 'Don't worry about it. Donate it to the EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] or just send me a T-shirt,'" said Johnathan Nightingale, the director of Firefox development, in a recent interview.
Firefox, a free Web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation, is used by an estimated 270 million people worldwide. To maintain and improve the Firefox browser, Mozilla depends not only on its team of professional programmers and managers but also on a network of volunteer technologists and enthusiasts—free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) developers—who contribute their expertise. This kind of peer production is unique, not only for its vast scale but also for its combination of structured, hierarchical management and open, collaborative volunteer participation. In this MacArthur Foundation Report, David Booth examines the Mozilla Foundation’s success at organizing large-scale participation in the development of its software and considers whether Mozilla's approach can be transferred to government and civil society.
Analyst Charles King said reassuring Sun customers should be Oracle's first goal.
As for OpenSolaris and the whole idea of having an open source, cutting-edge version of an enterprise OS -- like Red Hat has with Fedora and Novell has with OpenSUSE -- well, that might be the way Red Hat and Novell like to develop their enterprise Linux OSes, but it's not the way Oracle is used to developing its proprietary and highly profitable software offerings. Never has been, and probably never will be.
So it's hardly surprising Oracle is not a happy place for Solaris engineers to be right now. Although the company appears to be studiously ignoring the OpenSolaris community in the apparent hope it will eventually go away, it may well get its wish -- some OpenSolaris community developers have started a new project, and a fork in the code looks imminent.
When we discuss terms like open textbook, open courseware, and open source, a common theme emerges: sharing content that might otherwise be protected under intellectual property laws. The use of open materials by faculty is something of a continuum, with those who closely guard their intellectual property and privacy on one end, with faculty who seek out and use open content and technologies in the middle, and with those who actively contribute to open content on the other end. However, to say that concerns over intellectual property or privacy are the defining characteristics of open faculty would be a mistake.
The future of the "open student" is directly related to the willingness of those of us in both secondary and higher education to openly discuss these questions. Finding the answers will allow us to jump these hurdles to the future of learning. These are a few of the questions. Which people and organizations will answer them?
VMware's SpringSource division this week is launching a new version of its Hyperic system management and monitoring technology. The new Hyperic 4.4 release provides improvements to users of VMware virtualized environments enabling more granular monitoring control.
So what is the state of the Hurd? Is it vaporware, like Duke Nukem Forever? Fortunately not: the code exists, there is still work going on (for instance as part of Google Summer of Code), and there are even some relatively functional Hurd distributions. Let's look first at the code and the current architecture, and then at the Hurd distributions.
The current architecture of the Hurd is a set of "servers" running on top of the GNU Mach microkernel. These servers implement file systems, network protocols, authentication, processes, terminals, and other features that traditional monolithic kernels implement in the kernel itself. The Hurd servers implement clear protocols that formalize how the different components of the Hurd kernel interact, which is designed to reduce mutual trust between components. To transfer information to each other, the servers use Mach's interprocess communication (IPC) system. Collectively, these loosely coupled servers implement the POSIX API, with each individual server implementing its part of the specification.
The framework has primarily been developed by employees from 1&1 web hosting company in Germany. qooxdoo is available under a dual licence, allowing users to choose either the LGPL (Lesser General Public License) or the EPL (Eclipse Public License) depending on project requirements.
When a contribution is made to an open source project, there is an implicit assumption (and sometimes explicit consent) that the contribution (code, translation, artwork, etc) may be incorporated into the project and distributed under the license the project is using. However, many conditions of the contribution are not explicitly called out. The purpose of Contributor Agreements is to make the terms under which contributions are made explicit, thereby protecting the project, the users of the software and often also the contributors.
I am coming up on 20 years in Information Technology, and closer to 30 years of being exposed to it (my dad was big in IT as well), and over those years, with a few exceptions, the business of IT like all aspects of business, has gone around in a circle. Here in 2010 we are talking about the current big deal thing: cloud computing. To make cloud computing a reality, you need things like virtualization, and software as a service and …insert sound of needle being scrapped across a record
While the cloud is taking the data center by storm few are noticing the thunderhead rolling in over mobile management. Perhaps since IT has successfully mastered mobile evolution to this point, it presumes "mobile-in-the-cloud" is just more of the same. To a degree, that presumption is understandable as the cloud does move smartphones closer to functioning like laptops -- a device IT has years of experience in managing. This creates a false sense of security, however, as the cloud will change far more than that in mobile.
The annual report by the trustees who oversee Medicare and Social Security, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, gives backers of the new health care law evidence of a positive impact on government entitlement programs, but it also undercuts the findings with a host of caveats.
The Pentagon has demanded that WikiLeaks immediately erase the huge cache of secret US military files about the Afghan war it has posted online and hand over another 15,000 classified records in its possession.
There's a reason Wikileaks exists, and it's not because it's a criminal syndicate, but because the folks behind it believe that there are serious problems in the way certain types of secrets are used to abuse power. So it represents a more efficient (if blunt) way of solving that. The same is true of the RIAA and Napster (and its descendants). The folks behind file sharing programs felt there were serious problems and inefficiencies with how industry gatekeepers used their gatekeeper role for abuse, rather than in the best interests of the market.
It won't happen (it never does), but Khatchadourian is spot on in noting that the Pentagon really should be recognizing that it's traveling down the same mistaken path as the RIAA, rather than just copying the same types of moves.
The private sector created 71,000 jobs, the government said. However, both figures were worse than expected.
Despite the overall fall in job numbers, the unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.5%.
Companies showed a lack of confidence about hiring for a third straight month in July, making it likely the economy will grow more slowly the rest of the year. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.5 percent.
In seven simple lines buried in this year’s financial overhaul bill, lawmakers swept away one of the last vestiges of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that held sway over markets for decades.
The Depression-era bill is best known for separating commercial and investment banking — a wall that was effectively repealed in the late 1990s. Liberal Democrats, consumer advocates and a few Republicans pushed unsuccessfully this year to draw that line once more as part of the Wall Street bill.
The second half of the year is off to a slow start for retailers, who reported Thursday that sales at stores open at least a year were weaker than expected in July, increasing 2.9 percent from July of last year, according to a tally by Thomson Reuters.
A few years ago, the securities markets financed hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgages without any government guarantee. Now, those markets are virtually closed to such financing.
Though it feels like a cultural violation to talk about any television shown in contest with “Mad Men,” our national homage to past depravities, it is merely one of two series about a good-looking divorced white man in conflict with his virility that is offered on Sunday nights at 10. The other series is “Hung,” a comedy that, although it has not given birth to a single trend, expression or style of tie, has distinguished itself as the most topical fictional programming on television. As it’s moved into its second season on HBO, “Hung” has become an even more finely drawn satire of the Great Recession.
Fannie Mae reported Thursday that its loss in the second quarter shrank dramatically and that the company had put away enough money to cover most of the losses it expects in the future, likely reducing -- but not eliminating -- the need for additional taxpayer aid.
In a sign of the topsy-turvy world Fannie Mae now lives in, the company also said it would ask the government for another $1.5 billion to cover losses even as it was paying the government $1.9 billion in dividends on rescue funds it provided earlier.
"True transparency and no anonymity", he says, is the way forward - and there's nothing we can do to prevent it.
According to a report on tech blog ReadWriteWeb, Eric Schmidt revealed the size of the Internet information boom yesterday at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe.
"There was five exabytes [five billion gigabytes] of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003," he said. "But that much information is now created every two days, and the pace is increasing... People aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them.
EFF International Rights Director, Katitza Rodriguez will be moderating the open dialogue on privacy at the Third Latin American Preparatory Meeting for the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which will take place on 3-5 August 2010 in the city of Quito, Ecuador.
In the meantime, someone forwarded me a report from a DC think tank complaining that my last post on this subject represented a "new low" for Techdirt, because everyone knows the FCC has really been taken over by "leftist" consumer advocates. I find it ridiculous when anyone take an issue and pins "left wing" or "right wing" to the sides when the real issue is about neither. That's a weak attempt at dismissing important arguments by focusing on the politicization of it, rather than the substance. But, part of that complaint was that having the companies involved work out a deal is much better than having "a small handful of elite, 'consumer advocates,' impervious to reason, debate or the sunlight of opposing viewpoints" make the decisions.
The emergence of the Internet and the digital world has changed the way people access, produce and share information and knowledge. Yet people in Africa face challenges in accessing scholarly publications, journals and learning materials in general. At the heart of these challenges, and solutions to them, is copyright, the branch of intellectual property rights that covers written and related works.
This book gives the reader an understanding of the legal and practical constraints posed by copyright for access to learning materials in Africa, and identifies the relevant lessons, best policies and best practices that would broaden and deepen this access.
The book reflects and showcases the outputs and findings of the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) research project, LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand, launched in late 2007 as a network of researchers committed to probing the relationship between copyright and learning materials access in eight African countries: Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda.
Of course, we've seen some examples of this already. Earlier this year, we talked about a Swedish band that was releasing its latest album as a magazine. Last year, Mos Def tried releasing his latest album as a t-shirt with a download code. And, we just wrote about Kristin Hersh's latest album being released as a book. The idea, of course, is to give fans a real reason to buy beyond just the music -- which is effectively free for many people. But providing scarce value can really do amazing things.
Of course, considering it sounds like the Sub Pop folks are still thinking about this, they might want to consider that selling scarcities can also expand a bit beyond just selling tangible goods. There are intangible scarcities that go well with music as well -- including things like access and attention. Either way, it's great to see such an iconic label realizing that there could be serious value in embracing (rather than complaining) about "free" within a business model, and looking at opportunities to use it to their own advantage.
THREsq has an interesting story about how the guy, Louie Psihoyos, who won an Oscar for best documentary this year for The Cove, apparently has a pretty quick legal trigger finger against anyone using a photograph he took 15 years ago. He's sued a bunch of companies over the years, and the latest is the BBC and CBS.
The introduction of long-awaited copyright reform legislation has generated considerable discussion among Canadians about whether the latest bill strikes the right balance. While concern over Bill C-32's digital lock rules has garnered the lion share of attention with expressions of concern from all opposition parties and a wide range of stakeholders, the other major issue in the bill is the extension of fair dealing - Canada’s version of fair use - to cover education, parody, and satire.
[...]
The case highlights that Canadian fair dealing analysis involves a two-part test. First, does the use (or dealing) qualify for one of the fair dealing exceptions. Second, if it does qualify, is the use itself fair. In this particular case, the court affirmed that the copying in question qualified under the first part of the test (ie. for research or private study), but that it did not meet the six-part test for fairness and thus was not fair dealing.
We've covered the ongoing debates in New Zealand over the proposed three strikes law in the latest copyright reform bill. There are many, many people who are quite concerned about any sort of three strikes law -- which is why the earlier version was scrapped and the process was restarted. However, there are still some who think that it doesn't even go far enough.
The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill, which allows for large fines and six month Internet suspensions, has already passed its first reading in the New Zealand Parliament. However, according to copyright advocates, it doesn’t go far enough. Instead of simply disconnecting repeat infringers, they are calling for a heavier punishment that would take people’s right to Internet access away.
Judge Napolitano: The Plain Truth - The Government Lies to You!! Freedom Watch 7/31/2010