Summary: Scraps of news about OpenSUSE, which is still looking for direction and organising an annual event
Greg Kroah-Hartman, allegedly one of the men behind OpenSUSE*, recently gave this talk at a LinuxCon 2010 conference in Tokyo. Kroah-Hartman has not been closely involved in OpenSUSE for several years and his talks too have nothing to do with it (this one is about “The Stable Linux Kernel Tree, Delivering a Stable Platform on a Constantly Moving Base”).
Just one week to go untill the openSUSE conference opens its doors. We moved all Birds of a Feather (Bof) sessions and workshops out of the conference tool into the wiki.
Members of the openSUSE board shall act on behalf of all openSUSE contributors in the best interest of the openSUSE project. Although board members may be affiliated with companies or organizations that have an interest in the success of openSUSE, they will not be considered representatives of the companies or organizations with which they are affiliated.
Jos Poortvliet too is trying to sort things out while contributors seemingly grow more scarce and the project decreasingly organised, still with some isolated contributions [1, 2] like this audiocast. Back in the days Novell did a lot of exciting work on SUSE, especially before selling out to Microsoft. Examples included the ‘start’ menus for KDE and GNOME and even Compiz. Not much has happened since then, but the subject is still being kicked around:
This is the third part of the series of articles that analyse the possibilities of start menus and new ideas to do for the openSUSE project.
Well, not much has changed for a long time. Novell did most of the work around 2006 (maybe 2005) and since then the major contributions probably came from Lancelot and maybe Raptor, which did not quite materialise. Then there’s GNOME Shell (which became more necessary when SUSE neglected its KDE tradition). █
___ * According to the OpenSUSE Web site, Kroah-Hartman is/was “the current maintainer of the 11.0 openSUSE kernel package.” Readers have told us that it’s him who came up with the idea of creating OpenSUSE about 5 years ago, but we cannot confirm this.
Microsoft’s development model is fundamentally broken
Summary: Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) helps show that Microsoft cannot keep up with the competition, to which it carries on losing market share
Microsoft has been looking for the cheapest workforce available and it ignored the value of code which is shared. Also, for the past few years it repeated some of the mistakes made by Adobe. Nobody should be shocked to learn that IE9 is a trainwreck with a lot of marketing in disguise, parts of its leadership jumping ship, and the offshoring of development taking its toll. It is now being shown that, even on Windows, IE9 performs a lot worse than its competition which is Free software (not just Chrome but Firefox too). The source of the benchmark is a Microsoft booster (thus little room for allegations of bias against Microsoft), who shows bar charts and concludes:
Chrome is the obvious winner in these tests. It has a such a significant lead that we doubt it’s going to be bumped out of the top spot anytime soon, especially if we take into consideration that the team wants to release a major version every six weeks. Still, competition in the browser market is only getting fiercer, so Chrome’s king-of-the-hill status may not last forever.
Microsoft’s development model (working in isolation) is too expensive and slow. It cannot keep up with the competition, even that which runs on Windows (in addition to other platforms). Things are not going to improve for Microsoft, which is why we track its moves a lot less extensively these days. The increased importance of the Web poses a challenge due to Fog Computing. █
Summary: Opposition to Google and to Apple is sponsored by Microsoft, as usual
ALMOST every time a company chooses Microsoft’s Bong [sic] over Google, it is not a case of sincere choice. Microsoft sometimes pays for it and sometimes it just buys parts of companies that do this. Facebook for example is partly owned by Microsoft (there was an attempt to require the whole company some years ago), so Mark Zuckerberg’s lip service to Bong [sic] is nothing but a case of playing for the bucks.
Slashdot and some other sites currently carry some of the latest Microsoft promotion, which Microsoft simply pays for by buying individuals or companies. Here is an example:
Microsoft advanced its partnership with Facebook this week, a move that could be the biggest threat to Google’s search standing yet.
Microsoft and Facebook announced that they’re teaming up to make Internet searching more social. Now when someone uses Bing’s search engine to look for a new car or a book, she can see which ones her friends liked. Searchers now are able to more easily get their friends’ take before they make their own decisions.
[...]
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at the press conference on the Microsoft campus Wednesday, said there was a specific reason he wanted to go with Bing.
“They really are the underdog here,” Zuckerberg said. “They’re incentivized to go out and innovate. They have all these smart people and are trying to do all these new things.”
But wait a second, IDG. Who is paying Zuckerberg? The article from Sharon Gaudin should state more clearly that Microsoft owns part of Facebook.
Likewise, Ina Fried (Microsoft booster masquerading as a journalist) is currently writing about some Apple boycott, conveniently not mentioning who pays for part of it:
Steve Jobs’ Email Enemy Is Now Sponsored by Microsoft
Isaacs says she’s boycotting Apple after the company’s PR department ignored her calls and Jobs told her to “leave us alone” in a heated email exchange over Isaac’s attempts to collect information on Apple for a journalism school assignment. Isaacs told CNET reporter Ina Fried, “I wouldn’t be comfortable giving [Apple] a dime. If that’s the way you treat consumers, that’s not right.” She added ” I hate Apple, but I don’t hate Apple,” and will be objective in covering the company.
Isaacs spoke from the New York launch of Windows Phone 7. The Long Island University student’s travel expenses to the event were paid by Microsoft after she won a contest sponsored by the software company, which issued the award after her spat with Jobs. Nevertheless, added CNET, “the group’s adviser told them to be tough and hold Microsoft’s feet to the fire while meeting with various company executives and learning about the company’s products.” Isaacs shouldn’t have much trouble with that, even if Microsoft’s top executives are a bit more email shy than Steve Jobs.
Today, as I was reading this post, I decided to pay Microsoft a visit and download a copy of their glittering Windows 7 Starter EULA. I read some requirements that unsettled me. Let me transcribe an excerpt of the Windows 7 Starter EULA to tell you why those conditions are simply outrageous:
“You may use the software as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. You may not
* work around any technical limitations in the software;
* customize the desktop background
* reverse engineer, decompile [...]
Certain features of other Windows 7 product editions, including Windows Aero and the ability to change the desktop background, are not included in this software.” (Microsoft Windows 7 Starter EULA)
On the other hand, you can’t legally make a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 and hand it to your friends. The terms of the license under which Microsoft Windows is distributed makes this illegal.
Mr. Valmers thought for a second. How could he prove that he did nothing wrong according to what he learned in those Windows courses he took? In spite of the fact that the expert had made it clear that such action was a pre-requisite for a secure Windows computer, no instructor had ever told him that he was supposed to disable autorun. Darn pedantic guy! But then, why was it that the stupid autorun feature was enabled by default in Windows if it was so dangerous? Mr. Valmers had done what he was told in four courses to be safe from malware: he bought an expensive antivirus (what a poor investment!), he had that software installed along with MS Security Essentials, and he made sure that the Windows firewall was on as he browsed the Web. Religiously, the man had downloaded antivirus updates and the traitor software never gave a warning of the infection that had him sitting as a fool in front of all those people that looked down on him.
“This is not fair,” he heard himself say, “if autorun is so dangerous, or Windows is insecure, I am not to be blamed. I did not do anything to make my computer any more vulnerable than it was when I bought it.”
How he wished that Microsoft’s CEO, that bad-tempered bald guy, had been there in his place! This guy was actually the one who was responsible for all computer infections…He was the careless person that approved the release of such a defective product for mass consumption!
Summary: A ruling in Canada jeopardises the county’s status when it comes to patent law; the FSFE publishes its rebuttal to the BSA’s software patents propaganda in Europe
“Amazon one click webshop patentable in Canada,” says Benjamin, the president of the FFII. “I predict an upswing of foreign filing activity in Canada,” argues Patrick Anderson, a graduate of MSU-Law, whom Benjamin cites. Here is a short analysis of the situation:
Blame Canada! Amazon Wins Argument at the CA Federal Court Over ‘One-Click’ Patent
After a decade-plus battle at the Canadian Patent Office and Patent Review Panel, the Canadian Federal Court made the following ruling on business method patents:
At its core, the question is whether a “business method” is patentable under Canadian law. For the reasons which follow, the Court concludes that a “business method” can be patented in appropriate circumstances.
We also alluded to this yesterday while covering the FSFE’s position. The FSFE was mentioned earlier in the week in relation to EU policy and BSA lobbying [1, 2]. Here is the refutation as text, starting with this introduction:
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is pressuring the European Commission to remove the last vestiges of support for Open Standards from the latest version of the EU’s interoperability recommendations, the European Interoperability Framework.
FSFE has obtained a copy of a letter sent to the Commission by the BSA last week. In the following paragraphs we analyse the BSA’s arguments and explain why their claims are false, and why Open Standards are key to interoperability and competition in the European software market. We have shared this analysis with the European Commission.
Europe must not repeat the mistakes made by the USPTO. Neither should Canada. There are research groups which repeatedly show that more patents can simply discourage progress and here is one recent study whose abstract states:
We offer description and analysis of the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey, summarizing the responses of 1,332 U.S.-based technology startups in the biotechnology, medical device, IT hardware, software, and Internet sectors. We discover that holding patents is more widespread among technology startups than has been previously reported, but that the patterns and drivers of holding patents are industry and context specific. Surprisingly, startup executives report in general that patents are providing relatively weak incentives for core activities in the innovation process. Our analysis uncovers that the drivers of startup patenting are often associated with capturing competitive advantage, and the associated goals of preventing technology copying, securing financing, and enhancing reputation – although again these and other motives depend on firm and industry factors. We also find substantial differences in the roles played by patents for startups in the biotechnology and medical device sectors – where patents are more commonly used and considered important – as compared to those operating in the software and Internet fields – where they are less useful. Interestingly, venture-backed IT hardware startups tend to resemble those in health-related fields in terms of their use of and motives for patenting. We generally find a wide disparity between the patenting behavior of venture-backed technology startups and those that are not funded with venture capital. We also discover that, when choosing not to patent major innovations, startups often cite to cost considerations, although again the motives to forgo patenting differ according to firm and industry characteristics. The respondents to our survey also generally report that checking the patent literature and licensing patents from others is reasonably common, although there too results differ according to the context. Other findings are discussed.
Canada seems to have become somewhat of an additional front for US conglomerates not just to export copyright law to; software patents too are becoming an issue worth tackling. The i4i case and 01 Communique show that it needs addressing. The sooner, the better. █
Alcatel-Lucent has switched from VxWorks to Linux for a new “intelligent” 10-gigabit Ethernet enterprise switch. The OmniSwitch 10K Modular LAN Chassis supports 5Tbps (terabit per second) performance over 256 10G Ethernet ports, and offers intelligent management features, such as flow-based quality of service with variable flow control, as well as virtual output queuing, says the company.
So our cost of PCs is minimal and they work far better than the same hardware running XP thanks to using them as thin clients and running Debian GNU/Linux.
Our terminal server is an old Xeon server with only 1gB or RAM. My first priority is to upgrade the RAM, if I had a budget. With 20 kids browsing, it begins to swap (FireFox).
In this episode: Ubuntu 10.10 has been released, and Microsoft attacks OpenOffice.org with a video. Discover our all-new challenge for the next episode, and we judge the level of anticipation for Panasonic’s Jungle.
DeadBeef, a lightweight music player I was telling you about in the Ubuntu Netbook Edition optimization tips post was updated to version 0.4.2 today which brings some minor but interesting new features…
Regardless which platform you are using, there’s bound to be a calculator included in the stock OS. For simple calculation, these calculators work fine, but if you want to do more complex calculation, like solving an algebraic expression, it won’t make the mark.
The game have lots of RPG elements. You can earn money by completing missions, buy new ships and equipments, upgrade your systems, talk to scientists, land on planets and can do much more as the game is highly open ended. It does not have best graphics but what makes it unique is its addictive gameplay. The sound effects and music is really good that matches well with the theme of the game.
Pandora project, the ultra-portable linux-based handled mobile gaming console that took on pre-orders in 2007, just shipped 900 more units. The makers of Pandora have been struggling with nubs, apparently its not easy to make a nub you know. The quality has to be just right, this led them to replace the first 150 sub-nub units that were sent out earlier in the year. Pandora went back to the drawing board not once, not twice, but three times to get the nubs just right; and after all that, the nubs are now fast and should last over 300k of actuations.
The KDE Development Platform is an attractive base for developers of Qt applications. At its core, the KDE libraries provide job APIs for asynchronous processing, transparent network access, caching and more. The KDE PIM Development Platform also provides libraries for common transport and storage standards such as POP3, IMAP, vCard, iCal, MIME messages (email) and more. With Akonadi, the KDE 4 Development Platform is a complete framework for creating full-featured PIM applications with modern modular design, extensibility and scalability.
Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has released version 3.2 of Tiny Core Linux. Based on the 2.6.33.3 Linux kernel, Tiny Core Linux 3.2 features version 1.17.2 of the BusyBox tool collection and features changes to System Stats and the AppBrowser.
Red Hat today announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.3, including updates to the product’s Messaging, Realtime and Grid technologies, which provide a key technology base for Red Hat Cloud Foundations, a solution set that offers a comprehensive set of tools to build and manage a private cloud.
Every list is subjective. Even this one. But if you knew my history with Ubuntu, you’d share my excitement with this latest Ubuntu 10.1o (Meerkat) release. It is really easy/fun to use. Makes me remember my PCLinux days, when things just worked. I really am surprised with how functional this Ubuntu really is. Currently, it is my favourite go-to distro. The following are a few features of the latest Ubuntu that I really like. I haven’t listed some others (like Ubuntu One) because I haven’t actually used them, or I haven’t really like it (like Ubuntu Broadcast). So anyway, in no particular order…
So which one would I choose? Chromium has convinced me of its capabilities with just 256 MB of RAM, and Ice just feels snappier than and doesn’t choke up as often as One. I think I’m going to go with Ice. In any case, bravo to the Peppermint OS developers, and keep up the excellent work!
All things Digital claims that Ari Jaaksi, the former Head of Meego and Maemo is joining Palm as Senior Vice President of webOS. He’s expected to start in November. Ari Jaaksi resigned from Nokia earlier this month for personal reasons. I guess now we know what those reasons are.
Google has released an updated version of its Gesture Search application, which allows users to turn the application on by flipping the phone to the side and then back, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.
First let’s get something straight, the interviewer says that the iPhone is “revolutionary” and that Apple invented the tablet. Both those statements are complete Apple hype. Microsoft had tablets before Apple did. Nor did Apple or Microsoft invent touchscreens. Touchscreens have been around for almost as long as the mouse, and they have always been used to lull computer users into thinking that they’re doing something “fundamentally different,” the same way Apple did in the eighties with their other invention, the WIMP GUI. Oh wait, Xerox invented that.
One of the most persistent myths surrounding Linux and other open source software is that there’s no easy way to get good support. Just this week, for instance, we saw this claim used in Microsoft’s anti-OpenOffice.org video, obviously with the hope of striking fear into business users’ hearts.
Panasonic39s security cameras at ASIS show innovation in i-PRO. ZoneMinder: Linux Home CCTV and Video Camera Security with Motion . ZoneMinder is a free video camera security application suite, designed for low cost DIY video security including commercial or home CCTV, theft prevention and child or family . WV-SP305 Megapixel Fixed Network Camera, an i -PRO SmartHD productPanasonic System Networks Company of America showcases its expanding line of i -PRO SmartHD products at ASIS 2010, highlighting. . Emphasising open systems interoperability at ASIS 2010, Panasonic will re-launch the expanded and enhanced Panasonic Solution Developer Network PSDN, which now covers a wider array of product lines and provides additional resources including a larger, more responsive .
Innovative, rapid and cost-effective development and market share expansion are leading an increasing number of software vendors to incorporate open source, both as a technology and a business strategy, into their organizations.
One question that I am often asked is “Why does a big software company like Adobe (or any other) release technologies to open source?”
The reasons for open source are widespread, but the basic reasons that a software company gets involved are:
1. Making revenue from selling a product or service that relies on OSS in some way
2. Reducing the cost of technology and time to market
3. Providing a community benefit
4. Enabling customer led innovation
One of the collaborative projects I’ve worked the most on is Subversion (a system for tracking changes — ”versions” — made to files and folders; hence the name). Subversion was started by my employer, CollabNet. They needed a better version control system for their customers, as part of a larger hosted online collaboration service, and realized that ubiquity and clear lack of lock-in would be strong assets. So CollabNet decided to release Subversion as open source software from the very beginning, and they knew, from past experience with open source projects, that they’d need to put some effort into drawing a community around the code and making it easy to collaborate on the project.
Open Source Ohio, which recently went live, is an effort to connect displaced workers, students and recent graduates in programming and software development — and those who want to change careers — with companies and organizations that need work performed on smaller, unfunded projects.
Here’s how it works: companies submit their needs to see if they meet certain criteria, then those projects are posted at opensourceohio.net. Those displaced workers and other developers volunteer to tailor open source software to complete the projects.
I have to confess that I went to the Open World Forum expecting to find some pompous, self-referential, corporate driven marketing show. Luckily, that wasn’t the case, and this is what I’ll try to show here. The pounding, rave-style music at the beginning of each session was really depressing. A few talks by some politicians were not among the highest moments of the Forum (Glyn already explained why and I agree with him). This said, the Forum agenda was quite balanced and diverse. Personally I found it an interesting, useful event, one I would have been glad to attend even if I had not had to present my work. The Forum explored many sides of openness, not just the commercial one of Open Source software. Here are just a couple of examples.
Open Source sustainability is rare at best among EU-funded projects, basically because projects’ partners tend to loose any interest in the project when funds are over. As a matter of fact most of them close their websites hosting software, documentation, etc.
When Google first announced Chrome OS, a cloud-focused operating system back in July last year, it all seemed a little too vague. Everyone knew that Google could do exactly this, if it wanted to, but the question was why they would want to. The company also said it was aiming to release Chrome OS by the end of 2010.
Now it looks as if this could indeed be happening. According to Chrome developer forums the current version of Chrome OS is labelled as a release candidate and a final version looks likely to be released by year-end.
In a statement published on the TechCrunch site Google said: “We are very happy with the progress of Google Chrome OS and expect devices will be available later this year. We’ll have more details to share at launch.”
Mozilla has missed the scheduled date for releasing Firefox 4 Beta 7. The update was originally due in the last two weeks of September, but did not appear then or later. At Mozilla’s most recent developer meeting, there were 17 blockers, problems which could be a reason for delaying a release, for the beta 7 release and an overall total of 901 blockers in the queue for the eventual Firefox 4 release.
From a technical implementation perspective, Fog is a Ruby library that can be used by any Ruby project or Ruby on Rails application. Beary noted that some of the API decisions for Fog were made to make it feel familiar with the way that Ruby on Rails applications are written.
Engine Yard now formally supports fog, the leading cloud computing library for Ruby applications and a component in the Engine Yard application platform. Specifically, Wesley Beary the creator of fog and engineer at Engine Yard has transitioned to a new role where he will lead the project and manage its community of contributors full-time.
SkySQL Ab, the alternative source for software, services and support for the MySQL database, today formally launched operations with the release of SkySQL™ Enterprise. The company, which is founded by former MySQL AB executives, personnel, and investors, is committed to furthering the future development of MySQL database technologies, while delivering cost-effective database solutions and exceptional customer service.
The open source NoSQL and Big Data database Apache Cassandra has been updated to version 0.6.6 and now allows users to tune performance. The changes that have been made are based on real world experience with customers and users. They include the ability to adjust Cassandras’s indexing interval to make it more memory efficient with large amounts of small rows with “cold data” and the ability to control when the JVM should trigger garbage collection to avoid the database being paused for several seconds.
A recently released OpenOffice.org marketing video from Microsoft tries to highlight prospective issues for companies considering alternatives to Microsoft Office. Although the video suggests OpenOffice.org is increasingly becoming a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, the video also presents insights into Microsoft’s business growth strategy.
The title of the video, “A few perspectives on OpenOffice.org,” might suggest a balanced view from OpenOffice.org users. However, the quotes are far from balanced and indicate a subtle attempt to dismiss OpenOffice in the guise of a fair discussion.
Promoting OpenOffice.org nationally was hard in 2003. Lobbing with some Italian free software organizations – namely Assoli and the Italian chapter of the FSFE – I brought the Director of the information system of our Minister of Education to think that Italian schools needed to know more also about OpenOffice.org.
Stephen Colebourne correctly pointed out in his blog this morning that when the Java 7 JSR is proposed to the JCP Executive Committee, that the Eclipse Foundation will vote “yes”. I think that it would be helpful to explain why that is the case.
I am writing this letter to all for a request to create a task force to advocate FOSS in schools. If we fail to advocate Linux in schools then we will be failed everywhere.
Most of the computer users like me are using computer from Last 5-6 year or less. They learned everything in college only. Also at our time computer was a costly device. We have not faced much difficult in migrating from Windows to Linux. Now we love Linux based distro and advocate for open curriculum, content , no-patents, no-DRM etc.
The Veterans Affairs Department will adopt an open source model to modernize its legacy electronic health records system, the department’s chief information officer said at a Senate hearing Oct. 6.
The Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) runs on an archaic program language called MUMPS, which experts said must be modernized to properly serve the 8 million veterans who receive care at VA health facilities.
OSSCube has served 50+ industry leaders including Intel, Google, Yahoo, Trend Micro, LinkedIn, Bigadda.com across four continents. Some of the solutions developed by them include Enterprise Products, Web 2.0 applications, Social Networking sites.
SugarCRM, the world’s fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced it achieved record growth in customer and revenue momentum in the third quarter 2010, highlighted by a 60 percent increase in revenue.
The Gnuaccounting developers have released version 0.7.8 of their free open-source Java accounting application that embeds OpenOffice and utilises MySQL or OpenOffice’s HSQLDB to create and administrate invoices, credit memos, delivery notes, bills etc. The program is intended for use by small and medium-sized companies and now for the first time supports the deferment of VAT prepayment in countries where VAT is estimated and collected in advance.
I came back from the British Library and Imperial War Museum (I’ll tell you why later) on Thursday on the 1615. One of the privilege of the 1615 is that if you get there after 1605 you have to stand or sit on the floor among the folding bicycles. Because I wanted to hack I sat on the floor. I overheard a conversation between two hackers and have caught most of it. They were talking about a book, which I think was about software but I couldn’t see it.
She: “That looks an interesting book”
He: “Yes, it’s written by one of the great software gurus”
She: “What’s it’s called?”
He: “I can’t tell you?”
She: “Why not?”
He: “It’s copyright”
She: “Yes, I know the book is copyright, but I just want to know the title”
If you would rather look at the full text of my message to the amazing staff of Telecentre Europe, for their summit in Budapest this week, then read on.
On 1 October the Equality Act 2010 became law. Its stated intention is to end discrimination in the workplace. The likely result is it will poison relationships between colleagues and employer-employee. It urges us all to view ourselves as victims in need of state intervention to police our working lives.
Still the OEMs are forced to ship Wintel. They are reluctant customers. Why can they not be allowed to produce what the consumer wants, small cheap computers?
At the recent ASPO conference in Washington, DC I found myself in a lunchtime conversation discussing the contributions Nuclear and Hydro were making to world energy supply. It’s worth noting that Hydropower did experience an uptick in global use in the past five years. Nuclear meanwhile, which has seen a slowing rate of consumption since the 1980′s, leveled off and fell during the same period. While these two energy sources are worth discussing, they pale in comparison to oil and coal use globally, as the second chart shows.
Pension funds and other investors who have suffered losses on mortgage-backed securities could have a “strong legal basis” to call into question the very securitized mortgages they purchased stakes in, increasing the pressure facing large Wall Street firms that packaged these securities during the housing boom, a prominent mortgage bond analyst said Thursday.
In June 2009, the S.E.C. filed civil fraud and insider trading charges against Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide. The agency also sued two of his top lieutenants: David Sambol, the company’s former president, and Eric Sieracki, the former chief financial officer.
We aren’t supposed to use the word “lie” in Washington, probably because the practice is so common, but let’s just use normal English for a moment. NYT Roger Cohen devotes his column to a tirade against the French for their opposition to raising the retirement age. This opposition has taken the form of a general strike that has seriously disrupted the economy.
After scratching their heads for weeks over how much the foreclosure mess will hurt banks’ bottom lines, investors got out their calculators Thursday to tally the potential costs — and sent bank stocks plunging.
Analyst estimates of the possible toll varied widely, but the fear was evident in the stock market. The share price of Bank of America fell 5.2 percent, while shares of JPMorgan Chase sank almost 2.8 percent.
The House will vote in November on a bill to provide $250 payments to Social Security recipients to make up for the lack of a cost-of-living increase for next year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday.
The Social Security Administration is expected to announce Friday that more than 58 million retirees and disabled Americans will go a second consecutive year without an increase in benefits.
Judges in Florida are under pressure to clear their foreclosure dockets; the state’s crippled real estate market and its lagging economy cannot recover until cases work their way through the courts. Earlier this year, Florida’s legislature allocated $9.6 million to help speed up the processing of foreclosures. Much of that money went to pay retired judges and case managers to help shoulder the load and quickly dispose of cases in special foreclosure courts.
PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: Nielsen Co., the privately held New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online “buzz” for clients, including major drug makers, which buy data gleaned from the Web to get insight from consumers about their products, Nielsen says.
“I felt totally violated,” says Bilal Ahmed, a 33-year-old resident of Sydney, Australia, who used PatientsLikeMe to connect with other people suffering from depression. He used a pseudonym on the message boards, but his PatientsLikeMe profile linked to his blog, which contains his real name.
On this evidence teenagers also have a much clearer understanding of the meaning of privacy than government policy makers, who have just decided that the NHS Summary Care Records system can continue to be built by the sort of inertia selling that would be illegal for a commercial organisation. In future they will put an opt-out form in the envelope. Big deal. You will still be assumed irrevocably to have consented, regardless of your understanding of what you are being asked, if you fail to use it – on behalf of yourself and your children.
Of course, the MPAA and the BSA apparently disagreed, with the BSA saying copyright should definitely be opt-out rather than opt-in. That said, it is nice to see the MPAA come out in favor of flexible fair use policies, though I’m sure that’s as an alternative to actually improving copyright law.
I’ve asked the RIAA for comment (updated below) on whether or not this represents a change of position for them, and whether the group would now support an opt-in copyright system that only gives copyright to works that are formally registered (as we had for many, many years). If true, this would really be a huge deal. While an opt-in system has many problems, if set up properly, it’s a lot better than the current opt-out system, which obliterated the public domain. An opt-in system at least makes it much easier to feed the public domain.
Update: The RIAA responded to my request as to whether or not this was a policy change, in response, I was told:
His basic point (and I’m quoting from his remarks) was that “we need better ways to distinguish when copyright is a beneficial property right, and when copyright is a meaningless and unwanted right.” He was later asked what he meant by this, and he responded that it may be time for creators to affirmatively assert copyright, rather than have it automatically granted to them whether they want it or not. He also explained that this was a personal view, not an RIAA position.
We’ve already covered how the EU Parliament is skeptical of ACTA. Ditto the Mexican Senate. In the US, which will undoubtedly sign the agreement, at least some politicians are asking questions about the document. Now news is coming out in a few other countries as well. Down in Australia, unlike in the US, they’re planning to go through a full scrutiny process involving the Parliament and the public. On the flipside, it sounds like Singapore can’t sign the document fast enough.
The final draft of the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been released to the public (unlike previous drafts, which were leaked). Previously we had looked at the possible changes that the agreement would bring to UK copyright law. I am happy to say that at least the worst case scenario did not materialise, but there is still some room for concern.
Alexander Alvaro (ALDE) has asked 9 questions about ACTA, including 3 strikes and transparency, or the access by the INTA committee to the drafts documents. He is also asking about changes to substantive patent law (read software patents here).
Since July we have been testing a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook under Linux and have already published a variety of Linux benchmarks. This Lenovo notebook boasts an Intel Core i7 720QM CPU, 4GB of system memory, a 320GB SATA HDD, and NVIDIA Quadro FX880M graphics. In this review we are taking a closer look at the ThinkPad W510 notebook and have more Ubuntu Linux benchmarks comparing its performance to the ZaReason Verix and an older ThinkPad T61.
Users of the Hotot twitter application’s Daily Builds PPA are in for a treat with the latest alpha build coming with access to the indenti.ca microblogging service added as well as multi-profile support.
Wine 1.2.1 arrived last week as a bug-fix release for Wine 1.2 that was introduced back in July, but for those living with the bi-weekly development snapshots to leverage new features already in Wine 1.3 like ARM support for winelib, Wine 1.3.5 is out with more feature activity.
At the start of September we reported on Unigine’s OilRush game, which will have a native Linux client and really be the first title to make its debut that’s powered by this advanced OpenGL (and DirectX) engine (after Primal Carnage abandoned Unigine) that up until now has just really been seen by gamers and consumers with some amazing tech demos. The OilRush game is still expected to be released this quarter, but some new screenshots for now are available.
Although not one of my main desktop environments any longer, I have been keeping track of KDE development now and then and feel it has improved a great deal. Ever since the 4.4 releases it actually seems stable and light enough to use and while not all features and functions present in KDE 3.5 may have been replicated (at least Kwikdisk and Kdiskfree are back), the 4.4 series has marked the point where KDE has finally become usable again. I have to admit, it looks good too. I actually enjoy booting into the new KDE.
Linux is all around us. From phones to firewalls, from Macs to PCs, it’s getting hard to find electronics that don’t run Linux. Over the years, there have been many distributions (normally called distros) of Linux. Some are full-featured, others are very small, some are general purpose, and others are designed for specific tasks. Love it or hate it, Linux is here to stay.
Below is a list of 6 distros that were milestones for Linux adoption. Enjoy.
Federated marketing of Linux, federated support of it, and more organized community-driven resources for Linux platforms are the next steps. It’s not so easy to get these kinds of federated initiatives going, though, especially as myths about Linux continue. Perhaps the impetus for more progress in this area will come from smart entrepeneurs who see that Linux is fragmenting less, succeeding more outside of the desktop, and represents a free, malleable platform opportunity to leverage.
If you have done some homework, you might already who Mark Shuttleworth aka SABDFL is.
As the founder of Ubuntu ,it becomes necessary to interact with the community, however Mark is busy man so it is only limited to an 1 hour IRC session after release.
This week two exciting things happened in the open source world. Drupal 7 beta was released for testing and Ubuntu 10.10 was delivered. It just so happens that the timing couldn’t have been better, because Canonical debuted a new feature that lets you test Ubuntu Server Edition in the cloud free for one hour.
Looking for an alternative operating system besides Windows or Mac OS? There’s always Ubuntu Linux. The latest version of Ubuntu called Ubuntu 10.10 or the Maverick Meerkat was unveiled on Sunday in time for the 10/10/10 date. Checking out the updated Ubuntu version will definitely be worth your while since it has several exciting new features.
Ubuntu 10.10 has several editions, one of them is Ubuntu Netbook Edition which has an improved user interface called Unity that enables netbook users to open their frequently-used applications. Also, it helps make the screen more organized. In addition, Ubuntu 10.10 has the Software Center that provides convenient access to numerous open-source and free apps.
For a kick off Andrea, a community member who has worked with us on the enhancements to the theme in the new release, has been hard at work thinking about the future of the Murrine theme engine. This engine is the beating heart of our gorgeous default themes and before we’ve even really started on Natty he’s upgraded it to work with the latest version of GTK. As we’re not sure what’s going into the next release just yet we can’t say for certain if all this work will make it in but what we can say is that if you’re a brave and heardy soul you can head over to his blog and get it for yourself.
Not even a week has passed since the release of Ubuntu 10.10, but developers are now free to start committing package changes for the next release, Ubuntu 11.04, which is codenamed Natty Narwhal. Matthias Klose has announced that the Ubuntu Natty repository is now open for business.
Ubuntu Privacy Remix 10.04r1 has been released, the first stable version of the Ubuntu-based distro. Ubuntu Privacy Remix (UPR) is a specialized Linux distribution for handling highly sensitive data. The latest release comes with several updated packages as well as some custom software.
After a very large number of Palm employees headed to Nokia to work on Meego, perhaps its only fitting that somebody from Nokia heads to Palm. So reports John Paczkowski of All Things D, who writes that that Nokia’s head of the Meego division, Ari Jaaski, will move to the bay area and become the new Senior Vice President of webOS for Palm / HP.
Paczkowski also notes that Palm is pulling in Victoria Coleman from Samsung R&D to oversee platform and app development as well as a few execs from within HP to run product marketing, sales organization, and product management.
The marriage of low-cost netbooks and open-source technologies to create 1-to-1 computing programs is a relatively new development. Open-source technologies, which evolve when individuals voluntarily contribute their creativity and knowledge to online networks of innovation, were once thought to be too free-wheeling and untested for schools. But that is now changing as schools look for more creative and cost-effective ways to use technology.
As flavors of Linux go, Ubuntu has been pretty popular over the years. The open source operating system can be installed on a wide range of computer hardware, and there’s even a version called Ubuntu Netbook that’s specially made to optimize the relatively tight 1024×600 screen resolution found on many of today’s netbooks.
ApacheCon, one of the biggest open source conferences of the year, is coming up in Atlanta November 1st through 5th, sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Of course, from Hadoop to the web server, Apache software platforms have become enormously influential. Ross Gardler, VP of Community at the foundation, provided OStatic with a guest post–one of a series we’ll be doing in conjunction with ApacheCon–on how the Apache Software Foundation approaches open source. Here it is.
If you’re a Thunderbird contributor and you haven’t already done so, please help us understand how we can make the Thunderbird community and contribution process more enjoyable and rewarding by taking a short, 7-question survey at http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/376585/Thunderbird-Participation-Survey by this Sunday.
Of course, it’s possible that Microsoft sees something the wider market doesn’t yet see: momentum building for Office defections. The Register’s Kelly Fiveash suggests: “By declaring such a threat, it would seem that Microsoft just admitted that it’s worried about losing market share in an area where it has been unshakeable for years.”
If true, it would seem that the last thing Microsoft would want to do would be to dignify its competition with a formal campaign. Remember its “Get the Facts” campaign against Linux? That one worked wonders for Linux, putting the upstart operating system on the radar screen of a huge swath of CIOs who probably hadn’t given Linux much thought up until that point.
When it first appeared, I simply ignored the video. After seeing all the buzz around it and reading two articles that explain some of its weaknesss (1), I gave up and watched it. The first view proved the objections made in those articles, but also made me uneasy. I could feel that there was something more serious, but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. So I watched the video again, and a flash of understanding came.
What Microsoft published is not really a video about office productivity. A good part of that video is about drug addiction and nothing more. It says “we already fell addicted to this specific drug, it feels good and we see no way out. So you should take it too”. This is what I was feeling. Several of those quotes really sound like statements from people who tried to free themselves of cocaine or some other equally destructive substance and failed, simply because they misunderstood their situation or didn’t really care to succeed.
“I am lucky enough to be able to code, and only have a limited time on this earth, so I want as much of my work as possible to benefit humanity. Having my output be freely available under the GPL is one of the best ways to make the world just a little bit better and more open with every line I write.
Also, as an anecdote, every good thing that has happened in my life was because I gave something away first, be it time, money, or code. I see no reason to change that now. It’s just good karma.
Open source business intelligence company Pentaho unveiled BI and data integration tools for Hadoop this week, but they aren’t available to users of the free community edition of Pentaho.
This more public kind of lab has been spreading, albeit slowly: we have Mozilla Labs, Apache Labs, Eclipse Labs, the just-announced LinkedIn Labs, as well as the rumoured Facebook Labs and Twitter Labs. I predict we will see many more; indeed, I fully expect every self-respecting software company to set one up.
His background is electrical engineering and computer science–he completed his Master’s at ICU Engineering in Korea. He works on things like satellites and sophisticated machines designed to avert war.
And actually, that’s the real story here. The quantifiable contribution ratio — 3-to-1, 2-to-1, 4-to-1, whatever — might vary based on a lot of factors. The true “RoI of open” usually shows itself before a given piece of code makes it into the project. Many times one of us, the CollabNet-salaried developers, would post a proposal for a feature design, or even post a concrete implementation, and the non-CollabNet community would find bugs and potential improvements in it. They would also contribute new features themselves, in some cases quite major ones
The era of ‘big science’ in the United States began in the 1930s. Nobody exemplified this spirit more than Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley whose cyclotrons smashed subatomic particles together to reveal nature’s deepest secrets. Lawrence was one of the first true scientist-entrepreneurs. He paid his way through college selling all kinds of things as a door-to-door salesman. He brought the same persuasive power a decade later to sell his ideas about particle accelerators to wealthy businessmen and philanthropists. Sparks flying off his big machines, his ‘boys’ frantically running around to fix miscellaneous leaks and shorts, Lawrence would proudly display his Nobel Prize winning invention to millionaires as if it were his own child. The philanthropists’ funding paid off in at least one practical respect; it was Lawrence’s modified cyclotrons that produced the uranium used in the Hiroshima bomb.
It’s critical to distinguish “open licenses” from “public licenses” when discussing IP licensing, especially online — mostly because Creative Commons is so popular and as a result has muddied the waters a bit.
As part of its ongoing drive to make Government more accountable and more transparent than ever before, the Cabinet Office is publishing new details about civil servants working at the heart of government.
While first attempts were mainly directed towards libraries and other public institutions we decided to broaden the principle’s scope by amalgamating it with Peter Murray-Rust’s draft publisher guidelines. The results can be seen below. We ask anyone to review these principles, discuss the text and suggest improvements.
Since 2005, Heise has been involved in a protracted legal dispute with the music industry. In late 2008, the Higher Regional Court in Munich upheld a ban on Heise placing a specific link. Judges at the German Appeals Court have now found in favour of Heise Zeitschriften Verlag (publisher of heise online and The H’s parent company).
The order to adopt the paywall came directly from Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp, which owns the Times’ parent company News International. Murdoch has been extremely vocal about the importance of implementing paid online content both for financial and principled reasons since spring 2009. But Whitwell explained that the thinking at the paper has suggested for some time that this could be the right move to take.
So, please, can somebody do this. Is a simple hack, but I am not a programmer. Nowadays to have two mice attached to the computer is easy. Just connect them to two usb ports, but them they will share the same pointer. That would be no good. The idea is to have a pointer for each mouse. Then will mouse typing speed will soar!
Joan Siefert Rose is the president of CED, a 25-year-old organization with 5,500 active members who promote and work to accelerate the entrepreneurial culture in North Carolina and the Research Triangle area in particular. She gave a talk at today’s TEDx Raleigh event outlining the six symptoms of what she called the “Insanity of Entrepreneurship.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that agriculture accounts for 10-12 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. This figure does not include land conversion effects; taking those into account, the number jumps to almost thirty percent, and livestock production accounts for the bulk of these emissions. Rearing livestock also uses a great deal of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which goes into the animals’ feedstock.
A new analysis of the carbon and nitrogen cycles suggests that livestock production is on a path to unsustainability, and that it will push us beyond Earth’s safe operating limits by the middle of the century.
IMHO, the experiment was a brilliant success. It highlighted the amazing range of things that the police service is called upon to do, and made that point more forcefully than any official speech by a senior officer or Home Secretary could do.
On October 14th, the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department relaxed their total news blackout around Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Major online news portals, including Netease and Sina, seem to have been instructed to prominently position a pair of Xinhua Daily articles that respond to the Nobel announcement.
The two articles, physically positioned high up on the news portal websites, are titled “From the Dalai Lama to Liu Xiaobo: What the Nobel Peace Prize Tells Us” and “Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo was an Especially Big Mistake.”
Following days of media blackout, the strong push behind the two articles suggests that the Party’s propaganda apparatus is finally gearing up to ‘lead public opinion,’ a media control strategy used by the Party since 2005. Before 2005, the Party typically responded to negative events by suppressing all related news stories. Over the last five years, however, the Party’s more common reaction to politically sensitive news has been to temporarily block all reports, craft an official version of events, and order media outlets to publish only the official version.
This week, global attention will be focussed on hopes to find solutions to give the world a better chance to reduce the loss of biodiversity and reach agreement on an international instrument ensuring benefits are being shared. Intellectual Property Watch will be in Nagoya, Japan to report on the negotiations.
The 10th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) will take place in Nagoya from 18-29 October. Two intense weeks during which member states of the convention will have to agree on the next 2011-2020 strategic plan for the CBD, and finalise a binding international instrument on access and benefit sharing (ABS) of the commercial benefits derived from biological resources, and the prevention of biopiracy.
The price of music albums should be slashed to around £1, a former major record label boss has suggested.
Rob Dickins, who ran Warner Music in the UK for 15 years, said “radically” lowering prices would help beat piracy and lead to an exponential sales rise.
Rob Dickens, former head of Warner Music in the UK, proposes a “micro-economy” in which album sale prices are “radically” reduced, and in which the resulting increase in sales volume more than makes up for the drop in prices.
‘The Copyright Amendment Bill 2010 contains better provisions to deal with technology issues by extending protection of copyright material in India over digital networks related to literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, films and sound recordings,’ said Amit Khare, joint secretary in the ministry of Human Resource Development, Friday.
A site run by the MPAA has become the most recent victim of cyber attacks being carried out by Anonymous. CopyProtected.com, a site used to inform on copy protection and DRM on DVD and Blu-ray movie discs, now displays a missive from the anarchic group . After a few seconds it redirects visitors to the homepage of The Pirate Bay.
The administration’s “IP czar” (more technically, the “Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator”), Victoria Espinel, recently gave a talk at the Future of Music Coalition event in Washington DC, and while I had seen various reports about her speech, and had a few submissions asking me to comment, I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Espinel basically said the same things she’s been saying all along. Her job is to “protect the creativity of US citizens.” And, to her credit, she doesn’t just define that as big companies. While reports of her pressuring ISPs, payment processors and registrars to voluntarily block or disable accounts of infringers is… troubling, she is always careful to try to “balance” things. This was evident in the IP Strategic Plan she released a few months back. While it makes some suggestions that clearly makes industry interests happy, at the same time, it tosses some breadcrumbs to those concerned about how over-aggressive IP laws can actually hinder quite a lot of creativity.
“Remix,” in the sense the competition intended, means a creative work that builds upon the creative work of others. That doesn’t mean simply grabbing or using the work of others. It means using the work of others in a way that is transformative, or critical. The rules of the competition expressly required that every entry “recombine[] and modif[y] existing digital works to create a new transformative work.” The recombined or modified work must, the rules specified, be either original with the remixer, in the public domain, or “created under the protection of fair use.” Every entry that I reviewed had a strong, almost certain argument that it satisfied the requirements of “fair use.”
The Minister of Culture and the Hadopi itself have been prompt to announce the launch of the Hadopi’s operations: here we are, no later than the end of the summer, the Hadopi would ready to send its first mail to Internet users who have been caught in Trident Media Gard’s nets, the private society empowered by rights holders representatives3 to scan file sharing on peer-to-peer networks. However, analysis of enacted laws and decrees calls for more caution on this potential threat. The Hadopi might be unable to impose penalties, but it could be that the Hadopi should not even be authorized to send any warning without prior judicial ruling.
