• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• Mainframes Have a New Need for Speed

  The first is virtualization, which more IT organizations are starting to consolidate on faster servers. Virtual machines hunger for memory and the mainframe, most likely running Linux, provides an efficient shared memory architecture.

• IBM launching world’s fastest microprocessor

  Such workloads include data managed by DB2/IMS, and general Java performance on Linux, though we imagine the cards should fall about 60% faster as well when you beat solitaire.

• MokaFive outs bare-metal PC hypervisor

  MokaFive thinks the market does indeed want a bare-metal PC hypervisor, and so, according to Padmanabhan, the techies at MokaFive have grabbed a popular Linux distro – the company won’t say which one – and ripped out everything that was not necessary and locked it down to turn it into a hypervisor for running the Moka Player.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 2 Episode 16

  In this episode: Sony was legally allowed to remove the ‘Other OS’ feature from the Playstation 3, according to Australian lawmakers. Glibc is now really free and KSplice gets into Fedora. We report back from the mid-point of our games development challenge, and ask, what’s your favourite Linux improvement?

Applications

• What’s the best Linux BitTorrent app?

  Not all BitTorrent apps are made equal. Yes, there’s a big range of features such as support for encryption and random port access, but at the same there’s also a huge range of speeds – some BitTorrent apps are simply much faster than others. To save you the time of trying them all to find which one works best, we’ve done it for you: we’ve put the best BitTorrent apps through their paces, and tried to find which one offers the blend of features and speed that makes it stand out from the rest.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Using Spell Checking in Vim

  • The Cloud Server for Linux Training

  • Hack of the Day: commandlinefu – Linux Command Heaven

  • Using a Bamboo Tablet with Ubuntu 10.04

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat appoints Dirk Peter van Leeuwen as VP

    Van Leeuwen joined Red Hat in 2004 and was responsible for establishing Red Hat’s operations in Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg (Benelux). In 2006 he assumed responsibility for Central Europe and in 2008 added Eastern Europe. In Europe Van Leeuwen was responsible for the general management of 47 countries with a primary focus on Sales Management. Under the sales leadership of Van Leeuwen, Red Hat saw its European customer base grow.

  • Piper Jaffray Reiterates an ‘Overweight’ Rating on Red Hat (RHT); Survey Shows RHEL Increasingly Replacing Windows

    Piper analyst says, “Our survey of 45 RHT partners reveals that customers are more frequently using Red Hat in place of Microsoft Windows (Nasdaq: MSFT). Essentially half of the surveyed partners, including some of the largest OEMs, indicate their customers are increasingly using Red Hat for what would have otherwise been Windows Server workloads.”

  • Red Hat to Webcast Results for Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2011

  • Red Hat in talks to buy JBoss cloud fluffer Makara

  • Fedora

    • Ksplice for Fedora Linux now available for free

      Ksplice is of course available for other common distributions like Red Hat Enterprise, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, and others at a subscription of $3.95 per month.

Devices/Embedded

• TrygTech Announces Linux-based BSP for Topaz i.MX25 CPU Module

• Phones

  • Android

    • Motorola Defy: Android 2.1 goes rugged with water, dust and scratch resistance

      Remember the Motorola i1? Moto has just added its second rugged(ish) Android handset in the 3.7-inch Gorilla Glass-fronted Defy. It’s dust-, scratch-, impact-, and water-resistant. Matching up to the IP67 durability spec means it’s expected to resist being submersed in up to a meter of water for up to half an hour — making it a pretty awesome option for taking your Android to the beach, 854 x 480 is your screen resolution, backed up by an OMAP 3610 chip running at 800MHz (there had to be some tradeoffs, right?).

    • Motorola spins rugged Android phone and a new Milestone

      Motorola has long made ruggedized phones running Linux, but the Defy is only its second such Android model after the Motorola i1 was unveiled in March. The Defy offers a larger display and more features than the 3.1-inch i1, but it lacks the phone’s push-to-talk capability designed for Sprint’s iDEN-ready Nextel Direct Connect service.

• Sub-notebooks

  • HP netbooks get dual-core Atoms

    HP has revamped two of its 10.1-inch netbooks to include Intel’s recently announced, dual-core Atom N550 processor, along with optional Broadcom video accelerator chips. Both netbooks are available with Windows 7, but the Mini 210 also offers a Linux-based “QuickWeb” fast boot option, and the Mini 5103 is available with a full SUSE Linux installation.

• Tablets

  • Archos releases five budget Android tablets

    In terms of the individual models’ hardware, the information Archos has disclosed is sparse. To assess the devices’ suitability as internet tablets, such details as their display resolution and battery life would be helpful. In terms of software, Archos offers its own Android apps for rendering videos, photos and music.

  • Haptic technology targets Android tablets

    Immersion Corp. announced technology designed to enable touch feedback effects for tablets and other devices running either Android or Windows 7. The “TouchSense 2500″ solution has already been built into Toshiba’s dual-screen tablet, the Libretto W100, the company adds.

You can make money with open source. Literally.

This is an old story–two years old, to be specific. But it was new to me when I heard it at LinuxCon, and it was new to a lot of others in the room too. And it was a great story, so I wanted to share it further.

In 2008, the Dutch Ministry of Finance held a competition to design a coin that would honor the country’s architecture.

To briefly describe the coin, on one side is a portrait of Queen Beatrix. But on closer examination, the portrait is made of of the names of Dutch architects. The names aren’t all readable with the human eye, which the designer describes as a “compact disc” of information in the ancient format of a coin.

Open Source Problem-Solving Tool Helps FOSS Teams Stay Focused

If you’ve ever been gridlocked in a group decision-making process, you know how quickly things can go from frustrating to downright unwieldy. Even with a common goal in mind, it’s easy to get bogged down in data and competing opinions. Analysis of Competing Hypothesis (ACH) is an open source application that’s been helping the CIA with its research methodologies for years and it’s freely available to the public to help groups look at — and solve — problems objectively.

Open Source, Low Cost GSM Cell Service Offered at Burning Man

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Drumbeat: what’s next?

    But, the fact of the matter is, Mozilla isn’t naturally good at this. We’re more often than not too earnest about the web. We need to develop or lighter sexier side. Especially if we want millions of people across the web to join and support our cause. In terms of Drumbeat next steps, this is a major area we need to work on.

SaaS

• CloudBees Launches Hudson as a Service

  The vision of CloudBees is to offer a Java Platform as a Service. This is cool, but the market will take time to evolve. The interesting twist that CloudBees has come up with is to offer real services to the Java community as a Cloud based service (kind of like how SalesForce is useful to sales teams, CloudBees will initially be very useful to development teams).

• Skygone Cloud Powers Open Source Web Mapping Suite – OpenGeo Cloud Edition

  Skygone Inc., a leader in geospatial cloud computing, today announces the launch of OpenGeo Cloud Edition; the first fully-supported, open source web-mapping software suite delivered to users via cloud computing.

• How Facebook Scales with Open Source

  As Facebook has grown, the company has worked to develop a number of tools to handle this data, both in terms of the storage and the delivery of content, and it has open sourced many of these. Facebook has been built from the beginning on open source technologies, according to David Recordon, Facebook’s Open Source Programs Manager. But Facebook’s use of open source goes far beyond the LAMP stack (or even, beyond the LAMP stack plus Memcached). The company has also created and released several open source projects and participates heavily in others, most notably perhaps, Hadoop.

• Have we reached a tipping point for cloud-based VoIP?

  Given the expectation that most people have now of being able to reach anyone, at any time by e-mail, IM or voice, that would seem to be the case. And by building upon the open source base, that will happen even faster.

• “Open Standards Of Cloud Computing, Key Challenge To Open Source”

CMS

• Version 4 of Plone CMS released

  The Plone developers have released version 4.0 of their open source content management system (CMS). The developers have improved performance, included a new theme, reduced the system’s memory requirements and implemented an improved user and group management feature.

• Vividwireless goes social, open source to attract uni students

  Like the Unwired site before it, vividwireless’ website has gone the open source route and is based entirely on the Drupal content management system; a second local win for the community after the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) also launched its Drupal site last week. The company charged with building the site, PreviousNext, has continued to work with the ABC in using Drupal to launch social networking initiatives as well as whole sites including the Hungry Beast, ABC Digital Radio and the forthcoming ABC Music site revamp.

• ‘Diaspora’ – open source Facebook alternative launches September 15th

Education

• Kitsap Regional Library Catalog System Ailing

  King County libraries have based their software development on Evergreen, an open-source integrated library software system developed by a group of up-and-coming IT geeks for Georgia’s statewide library system.

Business

• Openmind Goes with Open Source BI from JasperSoft

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Software Freedom Day 2010

• Ohio LinuxFest 2010: sudo install freedom

  The eighth annual Ohio LinuxFest is September 10-12 in lovely Columbus, Ohio. As always, this is a free event chock full of interesting hands-on Linux and free software solutions. Register at the Supporter level for $65 and you’ll get lunch, one of the gorgeous t-shirts pictured here, and that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from supporting an event like this.

Project Releases

• Mahara: Who’d Have Thought?

  One of the things that warms the cockles of my heart is the widening ripple of open source. Starting, as it did, with core system software, it is now moving ever further into more specialised areas.

Licensing

• Open Contact with Open Compliance Officers

Openness/Sharing

• What would scholarly communications look like if we invented it today?

  I’ve largely stolen the title of this post from Daniel Mietchen because I it helped me to frame the issues. I’m giving an informal talk this afternoon and will, as I frequently do, use this to think through what I want to say. Needless to say this whole post is built to a very large extent on the contributions and ideas of others that are not adequately credited in the text here.

• Open Hardware

  • Apertus Open Source Hardware and Software Targets HD Video Cam Market

    The success of a consumer-grade open-source HD video camcorder may not sound as appealing today due the declining costs and prices of consumer camcorders from Canon, Panasonic, Sony, JVC, and others over the years, but the prospect of a geek-oriented model makes the Apertus stand out in the crowd. The Apertus camera uses the open source Elphel software along with an open source hardware reference design, combining the Aptina CMOS sensor to accommodate C-mount and CS-lenses and a range of shooting modes, including RAW image files.

Programming

• GitHub launches “Pull Requests 2.0″

  GitHub has announced “Pull Requests 2.0″, a revamping of the Git pull request system which enhances the system’s collaborative capabilities. GitHub provides hosted repositories for Git, the distributed revision control system developed by Linus Torvalds, enhancing the system in its own web front end and tools. GitHub has become one of the most active venues for open source developers to share, discuss and develop their code, building on Git’s ability to allow developers to clone a code repository and work with the code without having to coordinate pushing changes back.

Standards/Consortia

• Web versus Apps: what is missing in HTML5

  3D gaming: There is at the moment no way to create something like the Epic Citadel demo, or Carmack’s RAGE engine on iOS. The only potential alternative is WebGL, that is (like the previous links) based on OpenGL 2.0 ES, and paints on the HTML5 canvas (that, in the presence of proper support for hardware compositing, should allow for complex interfaces and effects). The problem is that browser support is still immature – most browsers are still experimenting in an accelerated compositing pipeline right now, and there are still lots of problems that need to be solved before the platform can be considered stable. However, after the basic infrastructure is done, there is no reason for not seeing things like the current state of the art demos on the web; modern in-browser Javascript JIT are good enough for action and scripting, web workers and web sockets are stable enough to create complex, asynchronous event models. It will take an additional year, probably, until the 3D support is good enough to see something like WoW inside a browser.

The Tweet Paywall

I encountered for the first time today in accessing Steve Daniels’ book about Kenyan craftsmen, Making Do. Tweeting about the book (with my own verbiage) got me a digital copy of the beautifully illustrated book for free.

`Top Gear’ Driver `Stig’ Named as Ben Collins After BBC Loses Court Ruling

News Corp.’s HarperCollins revealed the identity of the “Stig,” a test driver who appears on the television show “Top Gear,” after the British Broadcasting Corp. lost a ruling to keep his identity secret.

The publisher said racing driver Ben Collins is the masked man who tests the performance of cars on one of the U.K.’s most popular television shows. The announcement came after High Court Judge Paul Morgan in London refused a request from the BBC to keep the character’s identity secret. HarperCollins plans to publish the driver’s autobiography on Sept. 16.

In Defense of Links, part three: In links we trust

The history of Web linking has been a long chronicle of controversies we didn’t need to have: irrelevant debates over issues like so-called deep linking (if you really don’t want to be linked to, why are you on the public Web?) or the notion of a power-law-driven A-list in blogging (if you want to become a celebrity, other media are far more efficient). To this list, we can now add the “delinkification” dustup.

It’s hard to imagine the benefit for ourselves, or for the Web, of a general retreat from linking. Writing on the Web without linking is like making a movie without cutting. Sure, it can be done; there might even be a few situations where it makes sense. But most of the time, it’s just head-scratchingly self-limiting. To choose not to link is to abandon the medium’s most powerful tool — the thing that makes the Web a web.

A long time ago, I wrote a column titled Fear of Links about the then-burgeoning movement of webloggers. I urged professional writers to stop looking down their noses at links and those who make them: “A journalist who today disdains the very notion of providing links to readers may tomorrow find himself without a job.”

That was 1999. Today, we live in that piece’s “tomorrow.”

Science

• God did not create Universe: Hawking

  God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the Universe due to a series of developments in physics, British scientist Stephen Hawking said in extracts published Thursday from a new book.

Security/Aggression

• Compromising Twitter’s OAuth security system

  Twitter officially disabled Basic authentication this week, the final step in the company’s transition to mandatory OAuth authentication. Sadly, Twitter’s extremely poor implementation of the OAuth standard offers a textbook example of how to do it wrong. This article will explore some of the problems with Twitter’s OAuth implementation and some potential pitfalls inherent to the standard. I will also show you how I managed to compromise the secret OAuth key in Twitter’s very own official client application for Android.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• German Military Study Warns of Potential Energy Crisis

  This week a study on peak oil by a German military think tank was leaked on the Internet. The document shows that the German government is closely studying the issue of peak oil, and is aware of the potential for serious consequences as oil production declines. The study is reminiscent of the Hirsch Report, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, that warned of the risks posed by peak oil.

• Friends of the Earth urges end to ‘land grab’ for biofuels

  European Union countries must drop their biofuels targets or else risk plunging more Africans into hunger and raising carbon emissions, according to Friends of the Earth (FoE).

  In a campaign launching today, the charity accuses European companies of land-grabbing throughout Africa to grow biofuel crops that directly compete with food crops. Biofuel companies counter that they consult with local governments, bring investment and jobs, and often produce fuels for the local market.

• Tokyo Two: Online March for Justice

  Greenpeace anti-whaling activists Toru Suzuki and Junichi Sato (the “Tokyo Two”) have been facing trial for nearly two years in Japan and now a verdict will be announced on Monday September 6th.

• Gulf oil rig explodes off La. coast

  An offshore oil rig has exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, west of the site of the April blast that caused the massive oil spill.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• Amazon Locks You Out Of Kindle Account, Ignores You For A Month

• Reminder: You Don’t Own Your Ebooks; Amazon Locks Customer Out And Doesn’t Respond To Help Requests

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Lawyer Offers Self Help To Sued BitTorrent Users

    In recent months thousands of US BitTorrent users have been sued for allegedly having shared movies such as The Hurt Locker and Far Cry. Because the settlement amount proposed by the copyright holders is less than hiring a defense lawyer, many defendants have not sought legal representation. Acknowledging this injustice, attorney Graham Syfert is now offering a cheap solution to the problem.

  • ACTA

    • The Truth about Fakes (and Piracy)

      My reading of this is that whatever the industries concerned might say about how awful, deceptive and damaging fakes and piracy are to the economy, ordinary people – and the newspapers that try to mirror their views – know that the true picture is rather different. It also means that ACTA is even more wrong-headed than even I thought.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

This was the year of desktop Linux

Desktop Linux is the same sort of deal. Linux believers always assume that next year will be the year of desktop Linux. Windows followers often chide those who seek Linux with that belief, both here and elsewhere.

Before anyone starts thinking this Catholic boy has changed his stripes, my point is simply that, in the case of desktop Linux, Jerusalem is here.

This is the year.

This is also the year where the definition of a desktop has changed. Apple changed it with the iPhone and, now, the iPad. Microsoft has failed to deliver in both these key areas. Linux has not.

Google gets the credit for that. As I noted yesterday Google Android has soaked up the excess demand for Internet hand-held devices that the iPhone left on the floor. My guess is that, once Chromium comes out, you’ll have the same experience there.

[Linux Gazette] September 2010 (#178)

Open source PS3 hack code posted

The real bad news for Sony is that the software is being realised under an open source licence for free.

Desktop

• 7 Providers of Pre Installed Linux Laptops/PC’s

  If I missed out on any major providers of Linux pre installed laptops and PC’s, please do share in the comments below.

• Eight Linux Tech Tips for Beginners

  7.) Linux is not Windows. If you are trying it with the expectation that it is a “Free version of Windows” you are going to be in for a world of frustration and disappointment. You should want to use Linux because it is a better operating system than Windows, not because it is cheaper.

Kernel Space

• LinuxCertified Aids Development and Testing of Linux Device Drivers

  LinuxCertified, Inc., a provider of Linux training and services, revealed the dates and venue of its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class. The class will be held from Sept. 20 – 22, 2010 in South Bay, Calif.

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa 7.9 Planned For Release In September

    Mesa 7.9 has shaped up to be one hell of a release with many new features and improvements throughout this open-source graphics software stack. For those that have been waiting for this to be officially released, there’s good news and that is Mesa 7.9 should be released by the end of September.

Applications

• 2 Smart Backup Apps Show You the Way to Go Home

  In my dumber days when I ran Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows, I was more concerned with backup programs. After I moved into the Linux desktop, I became much less paranoid about system failures. The Linux environment just never crashed.

  That does not mean that I never make backup copies of my critical data files. It’s just that I do not worry about the Linux OS crashing to the point that I have to reinstall everything from scratch. That was the nudge with Windows that pushed me to migrating to Linux.

• Photography with Open Source / Linux

• The 5 Best Instant Messengef Client for Ubuntu: Pidgin, aMSN, Galaxium, Emesene and Empathy.

• PC File Manager: Another light weight file manager

  In the seemingly never-ending quest to find the perfect, light weight graphical file manager, I have gone through just about every one I can find. So far my favorite has been Thunar (see Thunar content on Ghacks for more information) which comes standard with a few distributions. PC File Manger can be found in the LXDE desktop environment and was totally rewritten by the creator (Hong Jen Yee) to resolve some on-going bugs.

• Top 10 Applications For Linux

  1. Google Chrome 2. gtk-recordMyDesktop 3. OpenShot Video Editor 4. TeamViewer 5. OpenOffice…

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Newsbeuter, Mutt and Google

  • How To Use Squid Proxy Cache Server To Control Internet Access

  • How to: Find the model and serial number of a Linux server

  • Use Ubuntu/GNOME Desktop as Alarm Clock

  • How to install PC-BSD on an encrypted ZFS file system

  • [HOWTO] Install hardware sensors for avant-window-navigator (awn) applets

  • Restore, Recover Deleted Ubuntu Top Panel

  • Rename a file based on inode

  • How to fix AVR-SIZE on Ubuntu 10.04

  • Dual Boot openSUSE USB Stick Installer

  • How to solve the PHP XCache error: /dev/zero: No space left on device

  • Tech tip #7: Browse Amarok’s embedded MySQL database.

  • OMG! 5! – Five ways to make Wine apps feel native in Ubuntu

  • Unix How-To: Checking Responses with ckyorn

  • How to Install Apps With Ubuntu Software Center

  • Best Practices with sudo on Linux

• Games

  • Unigine Announces Its OilRush Game For Linux

    Back in July we reported that Unigine Corp, the company behind the advanced Unigine gaming/3D engine, was working on its own strategy game. This game was supposed to be announced by the end of July, then in private we were told it got pushed back to the middle of August, but to start off September we finally have the announcement for this new game. Unigine OilRush is the game title and it will be available for Linux. Will this be the best Linux native game we see in 2010?

  • Valve is Looking For Someone Who Can “Port Windows Games to Linux”

    Valve is all too familiar with gaming folks out there. They are the guys behind the awesome STEAM online gaming platform. They were in a bit of controversy recently when they denied all reports of a Linux version of their famous online gaming platform. But once again, Valve is in the news.

  • A snapshot of a Lan party.

Desktop Environments

• When warmistas attack

  Well, you filthy readers, see what happens when we don’t acquiesce? In case you haven’t heard by now, A gunman named James Lee, an Asian man with a years-long vendetta against the Discovery Channel cable network has entered the building and got an armed hostage taking situation going on right now.

  [...]

  I want Discovery Communications to broadcast on their channels to the world their new program lineup and I want proof they are doing so. I want the new shows started by asking the public for inventive solution ideas to save the planet and the remaining wildlife on it.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • How to Use KDE Plasma Activities

    The concept of activities is a new feature introduced with KDE 4. In the old desktop model of KDE 3, the desktop was a program called “kdesktop”, which gave users the ability to have a number of virtual desktops. Although other tools like Superkaramba could be used to add more features, the essential KDE desktop ended there.

    When activities were introduced into KDE 4, they did not make much sense in isolation. In addition to having virtual desktops, there were activities, which the user could create and configure to have different wallpapers and different widgets. Much of the virtual desktop functionality of KDE 3 was absent and not directly connected to Plasma activities.

  • KDE and the Masters of the Universe – 2010-09-01

  • Release: KDE Partition Manager Live CD 1.0.3

    Hard on the heels of the release of KDE Partition Manager 1.0.3 follows the new version of the KDE Partition Manager Live CD, now also featuring version 1.0.3.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Announcing this week’s Bug Day target – Empathy! – Thursday, 2 September 2010!

  • Should I get involved?

  • Grilo: Integrating Multimedia Content in Your Application

  • Behind the Scenes with Joanmarie Diggs

  • Writing simple, real-time games for GNOME

  • Gorgeous Elementary Firefox skin is coming soon

  • Ubuntu 10.10 Opera 10.70 skins – Opera has never felt this native!

  • Elegant Gnome Theme Pack 0.7 Released With Automatic Firefox Theme Installation, Lots More

    Elegant Gnome Theme Pack, one of the best dark themes was updated today and it now automatically installs a Firefox theme to match Elegant Gnome. But that’s not all, there are a lot of changes in the latest Elegant Gnome Pack 0.7:

    * New GTK+ theme version

    [...]

Distributions

• Larry The Cow Graphics Contest

  The top 3 contestants will receive three t-shirts in their design, donated by the Gentoo Foundation. The judging panel includes Dawid Węgliński, Alex Legler, and your host David Abbott.

• The trouble with Linux: there’s too much choice

  Recently, the Fedora distribution decided to dump its long-standing photo manager application, F-Spot, in favour of an upstart called Shotwell. Shotwell doesn’t have anywhere near the features, stability or stature of its precursor. But it doesn’t use Mono either – the .NET-inspired framework that many people love to hate thanks to its third-party association with Microsoft.

• Reviews

  • Lightweight Distro Roundup: Day 10 – Linux Mint XFCE

    Tonight the second of our Reader Voted Lightweight Distros. Linux Mint XFCE, the second Mint to grace this series.

    I couldn’t wait to check out this one. Linux mint has again become a favorite of ours, and the XFCE version of it promised to deliver.

    [...]

    We are nearing the end of this series. I am surprised to find so many good things to say about all the lightweight distros we tried so far. Linux Mint XFCE is a definite option if you are looking for a lightweight yet powerful distro.

  • ArtistX 0.9 Screenshots

    ArtistX is an Ubuntu GNU/Linux-based live DVD that includes a pretty big lineup of free multimedia applications. The most recent version, ArtistX 0.9 is based on Ubuntu 9.10 and features the 2.6.31 Linux kernel, GNOME 2.28, KDE 4.3.5, Compiz Fusion, Ubiquity Installer, and more.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat @ Year Highs

    Red Hat is currently trading 4.23% versus its previous trading session close, and it has calculated support and resistance at $30.29 and $35.27 respectively. Clearly with this action this range has been penetrated, and traders will be reviewing price action to establish a new tradable range

  • Stocks Hitting 52-Week Highs: CRM, MCD, RHT, PGN, NHP

    Shares of the company touched a new 52-week high of $36.44 on Wednesday. Red Hat, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides open source software solutions to enterprises worldwide.

  • Fedora

    • Linux machines with no rebooting…? Is this what we want?

      The other day, I caught a message that KSplice was available for Fedora. I thought I’d be a wiseguy and I replied “Yeah, great. Call me in 20 years when it’s available for for RHEL”. Well, as several people pointed out, it turns out the joke is on me.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Involvement

    This is my first step in the process of becoming a Debian Developer, so I hope to share the progress

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu In Clouds?

      Would you like to find out about how Ubuntu is being deployed in the cloud space? Would you like to see how KnowledgeTree uses Ubuntu for its SaaS offering? If so, please join KnowledgeTree and Canonical on Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 11 am Pacific (2 pm Eastern) for a joint webinar.

    • Happy Beta day everyone!

      Happy Beta day everyone!

    • An Ubuntu social network

      I will, however, leave you with a link that you might find interesting or useful: My Ubuntu Network, which is a social networking site with Ubuntu as its locus.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Kiwi Linux 10.08 released with Chromium, Shotwell and more

        Finally, after a hiatus of over a year, the Ubuntu derivative tailored for Romanian and Hungarian Linux beginners is having a new release! Of course English is still available on the CD

Devices/Embedded

• Daughter cards expand I/O for TI’s programmable ARM9 SoCs

  Mistral announced two Linux-ready daughtercards for Texas Instruments (TI) evaluation modules (EVMs), the latter already available with the chipmaker’s ARM9-based Sitara AM1x and OMAP-L1x SoCs (system-on-chips) on board. The UART Expansion Module offers interfaces for soft UART, hard UART, and soft DIR, while the CAN Expansion Module provides soft CAN, and hard CAN bus interfaces.

• Pogoplug ships simple business Linux server

  Pogoplug has begun shipping the business version of its Linux-based home media server, which allows people to securely access their files and media from any internet connection.

  In a blog post on Tuesday, Pogoplug said it is now selling its Pogoplug Biz device and its new Pogoplug Wireless Extender in the US. The Wireless Extender is a dongle that makes it possible to place the media server anywhere within Wi-Fi range of an internet connection, rather than having to hook it up to an Ethernet cable.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Here Comes Motorola MILESTONE 2

      Motorola has introduced MILESTONE 2 enhanced with MOTOBLUR. Android 2.2 powered device offers more speed, more connectivity, more messaging, more storage, more web with Adobe Flash Player 10.1, more multimedia and more personalisation than the original MILESTONE.

    • China’s popular Ming phones get Android makeover

      Motorola announced three Android versions of its popular “Ming” family of flip-phones, again aimed at the Chinese market. The new low- to mid-range Ming line-up includes the Android 2.1-based XT806 for China Telecom’s CDMA-2000 network, the Android 1.6-based A1680 for China Unicom’s WCDMA, and the MT810 for China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA, running the Android-based OPhone.

• Tablets

  • Froyo tablet touted for Tegra 2, eight-hour battery

    Hannspree announced a 10.1-inch, Nvidia Tegra 2-based tablet running Android 2.2, aimed at a European audience. The Hannspree Tablet offers 16GB of flash, HDMI output, 802.11/b/g/n, and claimed eight-hour battery life, and also supplies one key feature so far missing from many Android tablets: Android Market access.

  • Android tablets tipped from Toshiba, Samsung, and KT

    Toshiba’s is prepping a “Folio 100″ tablet that will run Android 2.2 on an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and offer a 10.1-inch, WSVGA display, says a report. Meanwhile, the Tegra 2 scored strongly in benchmarks, the Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab is tipped for a Thursday release, and Korea’s KT announced an “Identity Tab” Android tablet, say reports.

  • Five Archos Android tablets range from 2.8 to 10.1 inches

    Archos announced five new Android-based tablets running Android 2.2 on 800MHz to 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processors, all offering 720p HD video playback and 802.11n Wi-Fi. Shipping this fall, the tablets include the 2.8-inch Archos 28, the 3.2-inch Archos 32, the 4.3-inch Archos 43, the seven-inch Archos 70, and the 10.1-inch Archos 101, says the company.

Choosing an Open Source Systems Management Solution

The Little 4 may be smaller in terms of their bottom lines, but in terms of systems management capabilities, there’s nothing little about the open source offerings from Zenoss, Hyperic, GroundWork Open Source, and The OpenNMS Group.

Events

• Nomination period open for Nordic Free Software Award

  The Nordic Free Software Award given to people, projects or organisations in the Nordic countries that have made a prominent contribution to the advancement of Free Software. The award will be announced during FSCONS 2010 in Gothenburg.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • The Death of Firefox 3.5

    According to the download page for Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has already killed off this browser version.

  • Firefox 4 vs. Firefox 3 — Visible Differences

Databases

• PostgreSQL 9.0′s first release candidate arrives

  The first release candidate for version 9.0 of the PostgreSQL open source database has been released after four months in beta. The developers expect no changes in commands, interfaces or APIs between the release candidate and the final release, though there may be more release candidates before then, depending on bug reports. The most prominent feature in the new release is integrated replication using “Hot Standby” and “Streaming Replication” while other features include full support for 64-bit Windows, improved reporting queries, SQL standard per-column triggers, enhanced Perl and Python integrations and easier database permission management.

Oracle

• The end of OpenSolaris?

  Sun aspired to be central to the next network-inspired boom, and it was understood that to do that, you had to be promiscuous, available, familiar, and easy-to-acquire. Hence open source, and hence OpenSolaris, and hence creating an OpenSolaris distribution (rather than just offer the source).

• The State of Oracle/Sun Grid Engine

  Let’s take a look at the good news. According to DanT’s Grid Blog Oracle has plans for Grid Engine. As Dan mentions, Grid Engine does not compete with any Oracle product and like other resource managers has applications outside of HPC, which probably means Cloud based solutions.

Education

• Open Source Goes to High School

Semi-Open Source

• Comment: The hype is over

  However, it didn’t quite work out that way: Commercial open source software, it turns out, is just the same as any other commercial software; the only difference is that one gets to take a peek at the source code (and often only certain portions of the code, see The H Open feature “Open core, closed heart?”) and can download a free trial version with varying degrees of functional restrictions from the internet.

  But what about vendor independence? There is only one company that can offer vendor support for SugarCRM. Lower costs? Commercial open source vendors need to cover their development costs just like every other software vendor. Low entry requirements? Not least because of the competition from the open source community, more and more proprietary applications now also offer free trial or community versions. And don’t you dare mess with the code if you wish to have vendor support.

  The “commercial open source” model, it seems to me, has outlived itself. Sure enough, vendors such as Alfresco or SugarCRM have established themselves in the market – because their products stand up to those of their proprietary competitors. Not because their software is open source, however – this “only” gave them an added edge compared to other start-ups. However, this effect is now gone, and companies who develop open source software are no longer considered extraordinary.

• Open source 4.0: excellent for dancing

  By commercializing open source projects indirectly, through complementary products and services, multiple vendors are able to seize a commercial advantage and run with it without endangering the core open source project. As long as they continue to collaborate on the non-differentiating code, the project should benefit from being stretched in multiple directions.

  There will inevitably be some vendors that want to have their cake and it eat – benefiting from the work of others without sharing – but that is an inherent risk with community-developed open source, and I would argue that most have learned that they stand to gain more from collaborating than they do from forking and that it is in their own commercial interests to contribute to the common good.

BSD

• FreeBSD Will Continue Supporting ZFS

  Pawel Jakub Dawidek has announced he has prepared a port of the ZFS v28 file-system for FreeBSD, which is a newer revision of this advanced Sun/Oracle file-system than what is currently available in FreeBSD 8.1. This updated ZFS file-system brings a number of new features to FreeBSD-ZFS users including data de-duplication support, triple parity RAIDZ (RAIDZ3), ZFS DIFF, Zpool Split, snapshot holds, forced Zpool imports, and the ability to import a pool in a read-only mode.

• ZFS Support Will Continue In FreeBSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry (August 2010)

  This month we welcome Jose Marchesi as maintainer of the new package recutils, Mike Gran as maintainer of the new package guile-ncurses, and long-time maintainers Bruno Haible, Jim Meyering, and Simon Josefsson adding the new package vc-changelog to their duties.

• Software Freedom Day to be marked in Melbourne

  Software Freedom Day, a day observed worldwide to spread the message of free and open source software, will be marked in Melbourne on September 18 from 10am to 4pm at the State Library of Victoria.

Government

• Can councils rise to the Open Source challenge? Should they?

  There was an interesting little piece in the Guardian few days ago suggesting that local authorities could save £51 million by moving some council employees to Open Office* and ODF**, and away from Microsoft Office and their document format, with the total savings rocketing to £200 million if every council employee in the country moved over.

  This sensible proposal came from Cllr Liam Maxwell who’s reponsible for IT in the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead, and I’m sure Cllr Maxwell would be the first to acknowledge it’s not a new suggestion. The office suite – as a commodity piece of software – has long been seen as one of the easiest ways to get open source onto people’s desktops and save money in the process.

  I’m certain Cllr Maxwell also appreciates that there are issues, some of which are mentioned in the Guardian, but they’re not made very clear and it’s worth expanding on them.

Licensing

• Could this Lawsuit Undermine the GNU GPL?

  As Welte says, this really is outrageous: it’s GPL’d code, and the embedded system manufacturer is somehow trying to claim that it has the right to stop someone else from using and modifying that code on those devices – as if the hardware made any difference. But the whole point of the GPL is that others must be able to take software distributed under it and use it as they wish.

  I suspect that with some careful explanation from Welte (and others), the company will see that it doesn’t have a case, and the court action will be quietly dropped. On the other hand, if the case were to go forward and resulted in a win for the company concerned, it would represent a major problem for the GPL. Stay tuned…

• More GPL enforcement work again.. and a very surreal but important case

  Right now I’m facing what I’d consider the most outrageous case that I’ve been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software. None of the proprietary userspace programs are touched! None of the proprietary programs are ever distributed either.

Openness/Sharing

• The Sharing Economy

  Sharing. It’s one of the first things most children are urged to do.

  Few children, though, have the presence-of-mind to ask their parents when they last shared their weed-eater, their water blaster or even their car.

  The fact that virtually every garage has one of each of the above suggests the concept of sharing has some way to go in the adult world.

  Yet if dwindling resources and growing population is the biggest issue of our times, this will need to change. Everyone with one item of everything is not a sustainable thought.

• The Case For Open-Source Design: Can Design By Committee Work?

  The following is an investigation into the difficulties of extending the open-source collaboration model from coding to its next logical step: interface design. While we’ll dive deep into the practical difference between these two professional fields, the article might also serve as a note of caution to think before rushing to declare the rise of “open-source architecture,” “open-source university,” “open-source democracy” and so on.

• Open Data

  • The ABCD of Open Scholarship

    We had a wonderful meeting yesterday with Dave Flanders (JISC) David Shotton’s (Oxford) group (#jiscopencite) and our #jiscopenbib (Cambridge/OKF) – more details later. We really believe these projects can make a major change to Open Scholarship. We came up – almost by chance with the ABCD of Open Scholarship:

    * Open Access
    * Open Bibliography
    * Open Citations
    * Open Data

• Open Hardware

  • Arduino Projects: Getting Started

    Anyone who has ever hacked around in their PC will have been hit with an urge to take their tinkering to the next level and create a custom-built device, but few actually try – believing such things to be far too complicated. At least, until the Arduino appeared on the scene.

    Originally developed in Italy in 2005 as a tool for students building interactive design projects, the Arduino is a microcontroller-based prototyping board – but one that pretty much removes the barriers to entry that previous electronic prototyping systems had.

Programming

• September Project of the Month: GPL Ghostscript

  The end of the year is right around the corner (already!) but we’re not quite done showcasing projects that have been with us for 10 years or more. September’s Project of the Month is GPL Ghostscript, a complete set of page description language interpreters including PDF, PostScript, PCL5, PCLXL, and XPS.

Standards/Consortia

• Google now indexes SVG

  You can now use Google search to find SVG documents. SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements. We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step.

• 21 Ridiculously Impressive HTML5 Canvas Experiments

Bill would let repeat offenders hide record

Six state senators want to give a break to ex-convicts who might be haunted by their criminal records when they attempt to land jobs.

Senate Bill 291 would remove court and police records from public view by allowing nonviolent criminals with multiple convictions to apply to seal records documenting their offenses after five years of clean conduct.

Northern Ky. teacher wins $11 million judgment against gossip Web site

A gossip Web site has been hit with an $11 million judgment for libel and slander after posting false accusations that a Northern Kentucky teacher who works on the side as a Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader was exposed to two venereal diseases.

Perhaps Avoiding Links Is Really A Way To Get People Not To Read The Details Of The Studies You’re Misrepresenting

Earlier this year, as part of a discussion about Nick Carr’s most recent book we pointed to some reports that noted Carr appeared to misrepresent the scientific research to support his point. It appears that others are finding more examples of this as well. There was a little web-hubbub that I ignored earlier this year when Carr declared that links in documents were bad, and he was shifting all his links to the end. This was apparently based on some research, Carr claimed, that showed links in text are really distracting. Personally, I found that premise to be laughable, as I think after my second week online I stopped being distracted by links and quickly learned to use them effectively.

Still, without having a chance to dig into the research, I didn’t have much to say on the subject. However, Scott Rosenberg is digging in and finding that, once again, it appears that Carr is conveniently misrepresenting the studies he relies on to support his anti-link thesis. T

The new banana republic

All governments need to be watched. You never know when one of them will slip in a nasty tax on the quiet or pass a seemingly simple notification that can be the undoing of entire communities or of the environment. That is the nature of the beast. But how vigilant can people be with a government that will try to alter the entire complexion of a critical law-in-the-making by sneakily replacing a clear-cut ‘or’ with a lethal ‘and’—under the very noses of the MPs opposed to legislation?

Why our jobs are getting worse

And all this was enabled by technology. The modern supermarket – with its electronic scanning and inventory controls and price reductions decided by a software program run out of head office – is probably more hi-tech than any web-design firm. The result is that the man or woman in charge of your typical supermarket (or other chain shop) now has little to do with the selling or arrangement of goods: nowadays they concentrate on driving their staff to meet the targets set by head office. Their job is not so much retail-management as rowing cox.

Science

• Ancient brewers tapped antibiotic secrets

  of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, was common practice nearly 2,000 years ago.

  The research, led by Emory anthropologist George Armelagos and medicinal chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Security/Aggression

• Special constable jailed for Wigan ex-soldier attack

  A Greater Manchester Police special constable convicted of assaulting an off-duty soldier and lying about the attack has been jailed for three years.

  Peter Lightfoot, 40, was filmed hitting Mark Aspinall while attempting to arrest him after he had been thrown out of a Wigan club last July.

• After Katrina, New Orleans Cops Were Told They Could Shoot Looters

  In the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina, an order circulated among New Orleans police authorizing officers to shoot looters, according to present and former members of the department.

• Vladimir Putin says ‘unsanctioned’ protesters can expect police brutality

  Vladimir Putin today angrily dismissed protests against his regime as “provocations” and said anyone who took part in unsanctioned street rallies against the Kremlin should expect a “whack on the bonce”.

• Hay-what?

  So, in essence, the outside public – including Iranians – are asked to believe that a) Haystack software exists b) Haystack software works c) Haystack software rocks d) the Iranian government doesn’t yet have a copy of it, nor do they know that Haystack rocks & works. (And who could fault them for not reading Newsweek? I certainly can’t). For someone with my Eastern European sensibilities, that’s a lot of stuff to believe in. Even Santa – we call him Ded Moroz – appears more plausible in comparison.

• Andy Coulson discussed phone hacking at News of the World, report claims

  The prime minister’s media adviser, Andy Coulson, freely discussed the use of unlawful news-gathering techniques while editor of the News of the World and “actively encouraged” a named reporter to engage in the illegal interception of voicemail messages, according to allegations published by the New York Times.

• Blair Almost Ordered London Plane Shot Down On 9/11

  Those who were in London on 11 September 2001 may recall the wild speculation flying around about potential attacks on our own city. Several hijacked planes were heading for London, the whole of Canary Wharf was being evacuated…anything might happen. Fortunately, we were hit by nothing more than rumour. But a new revelation from Tony Blair’s memoirs reveals how close we came to accidental tragedy.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• ‘Phantom’ oil slick was a smear against Climate Camp

  What’s ironic about all this is that the big news on the Guardian’s website isn’t an investigation into whether or not the police deliberately misled the public by duping lazy newspapers into regurgitating a fake smear story. Rather, some journalists think that it’s the Climate Camp who are the ones supposedly controlling the media.

Finance

• Goldman feels heat in suit vs. Dollar Thrifty

  The investment bank, which is still trying to burnish its reputation after settling fraud charges brought this year by the Securities and Exchange Commission, stands accused in a lawsuit of using information it gleaned from one client to win business from another.

• Ex-Lehman CEO says regulators refused to save firm

  The former chief of Lehman Brothers told a panel investigating the financial crisis that the Wall Street firm could have been rescued, but regulators’ refused to help – even though they later bailed out other big banks.

  Richard S. Fuld Jr. told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission at a hearing that Lehman did everything it could to limit its risks and save itself in the fall of 2008.

• No holiday for labor unions

  Labor Day this year comes draped in mourning. More than half of all workers have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours, been forced to go part-time or seen other such problems during and after the Great Recession.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party

  Another weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• William Gibson jacks into Google’s cool menace

  I don’t like William Gibson’s Op-Ed piece on Google in today’s New York Times merely because, barely a week after I went all Jeremy Bentham Panopticonic on the cat bin lady, he writes that “Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google.” Even though it’s kind of a put-down (perennial!), still, great minds think almost alike, right?

• India lifts threat of block on BlackBerrys

  Stepping back from the brink of a crackdown, India’s ministry of home affairs said RIM had made “certain proposals for lawful access by law enforcement agencies and these would be operationalised immediately”. It did not offer any detail on these concessions and RIM, which is based in Toronto, declined to comment.

• Sneaky Senate Trying To Slip Internet Kill Switch Past Us

  Sensing Senators don’t have the stomach to try and pass a stand-alone bill in broad daylight that would give the President the power to shut down the Internet in a national emergency, the Senate is considering attaching the Internet Kill Switch bill as a rider to other legislation that would have bi-partisan support.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• AT&T: Net rules must allow ‘paid prioritization’

  AT&T said Tuesday that any Net neutrality plan restricting its ability to engage in “paid prioritization” of network traffic would be harmful and contrary to the fundamental principles of the Internet.

  Telecommunications providers need the ability to set different prices for different forms of Internet service, AT&T said, adding that it already has “hundreds” of customers who have paid extra for higher-priority services.

• AT&T calls net neutrality advocate a conspiracy theorist

  In a letter to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), AT&T tried to rubbish points made by the group, calling them “not exactly true”. The argument revolves around the notion of “paid prioritisation” of Internet connectivity, something that net neutrality activists are fiercely against.

  AT&T claims that the Free Press, in supporting Diffserv, is in direct contradiction to its support of equal packet rights. Diffserv is one of a number of mechanisms proposed to provide differing quality of service (QoS), though typically it is run on customers’ routers.

  The telecom behemoth argues that paid prioritisation will not create an Internet ‘rich club’, saying that small to medium businesses voluntarily take AT&T up on the offer. However the fact that a few firms purchase managed connectivity from AT&T doesn’t really change the fact that applying such policies at the network core is something that will concern the majority of users. Judging by the lengths to which AT&T goes to promote it, those fears won’t be allayed any time soon.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Mixing it up without IP

  Intellectual property exists to promote progress. Its purpose is not to ensure that no one’s ideas are stolen or that creative people can earn a living, unless those things are needed to promote progress in a field. The granting of temporary monopolies in the form of patents and copyrights is the price we pay for progress, not a goal in itself.

  It might be completely true that bartenders are shamelessly stealing from each other, and that’s certainly something we should condemn, but we probably shouldn’t get the law involved unless we can show that this theft is causing mixology to stagnate. Along with fashion, cooking, and even magic, we’re in an industry that’s arguably better off with weak IP. This decade’s boom in craft cocktails is a sign that we’re doing OK without stricter protections, and I’d be worried that additional threats of lawsuits would have a chilling effect on the sharing of new techniques and recipes.

• Copyrights

  • Indian gov’t issues music royalty directive

    A long-standing issue over revenue terms between private FM radio stations and music labels here saw the Copyright Board issuing a directive Wednesday laying out a revenue-sharing model instead of the earlier fixed-cost structure.

    The Copyright Board, part of the Ministry of Human Resources Development, has been mediating a bitter dispute over the last couple of years between FM stations and music labels over establishing a revenue model between both parties. Private stations launched here over five years ago after the government auctioned licenses inviting private players in radio broadcasting.

  • Consumer survey on copyright access barriers

    Access to Knowledge: Reports of Campaigns and Research 2008-2010The biggest barriers that consumers face in accessing copyrighti works are those created by copyright law. Even so, consumers around the world will choose original copyright works over pirated copies, provided that they are available at an affordable price.

  • ZeroPaid Interviews Russell McOrmond 2 – Canadian Bill C-32 (Part 2 of 3)

    A law closer to the language of the WIPO treaties wouldn’t protect this practice. In the short term even the USA DMCA doesn’t protect this practise. Bill C-32 would legally protect this practise, given circumventing access control technical measures and even providing tools to change the locks on what we own are being made illegal.

  • Foreworld as Foretaste

    That is, piracy isn’t a real problem if you *out-innovate* the pirates, making your paid-for offering better than their free one. Indeed, if you do, pirated copies become like tasters, encouraging people to upgrade and pay for the full, latest version. Similarly, by the sound of it, part of the strength of this project will be the interweaving of other elements into the text – again, something that pirates can’t offer.

  • Compartilhamento legal! – Brazil is putting an end to the ‘war on copying,’ at R$ 3,00 per month

    An overlapping constellation of civil society and art actors focussed their submission on a single issue: file-sharing. Under the slogan “Compartilhamento legal! R$3,00 de todos para tudo,” this network is proposing to legalize non-commercial file-sharing in exchange for a levy on broadband Internet access. The idea is nearly as old as peer-to-peer file-sharing itself. It has been tested in technology and in law making a few times. Here and now in Brazil, it feels like it might actually become a reality.