Summary: As Windows sales continue to decline Microsoft pulls the plug (in some sense) on Vista and advocacy of the latest phones platform comes to a halt
“Vista” is a disallowed term in Microsoft’s marketing department, probably just like the KIN (and this is why we overuse the term). These are total embarrassments and Microsoft is now promoting Vista 7 and Vista Phony 7 instead. But there are clues in this news about Windows Vista support, suggesting of course that even Microsoft gives up on the operating system: [via]
SOFTWARE FLOGGER Microsoft has let slip that Windows Vista users won’t be able to run its upcoming Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) web browser.
This is what customers get for complying with Microsoft’s requests to upgrade to Vista, the best operating system ever (if Microsoft’s marketers are to be believed). What a total embarrassment. They lied. E-mails which were unsealed later on revealed that even Microsoft managers knew Vista was a disaster, well before it was released. But they deceived the public repeatedly and harmed customers. So now they need to purchase (and pay for) the bugfix version of Vista, called Vista 7. And what about Vista Phony 7? Those who bought Windows Mobile not too long ago or even developed for it are totally screwed. Microsoft abandons them just like KIN users and Tim explains that even the Microsoft “diehards” cannot defend Vista Phony 7:
There’s no real news on the Windows Phone 7 front, however WP7 does have particular interest with me. After the Kin debacle the “successes” of the Windows Phone 7 and the strategy with which Microsoft is trying to market it make for fascinating viewing. Just like the Kin, we are seeing plenty of attempts by “advocates” to champion the device, but we all know how the Kin turned out, don’t we?
I am still trying desperately to find anyone I know in my circle of friends who actually has one of these devices, but so far the quest has been akin (no pun intended) to that of looking for the Holy Grail.
Some of Microsoft’s marketers insisted that KIN, just like Vista, was just so wonderful. They lies through their teeth. It remains to be seen just how many of the other products also turn out to be a total disaster. Windows sales, for example, keep declining, which means that Vista 7 is not exactly a success. Far from it. Maybe it was a marketing success as we pointed out in last night's show/episode of TechBytes. And speaking of which, Tim is collecting questions to help remove FUD about Techrights and yours truly. It was his idea to do this and he wrote:
I extend the offer to anyone, if you don’t want to post the questions here, then please feel free to email or use any of my contact points. I will let this offer run for about 2 weeks before putting them to him on an audiocast which will hopefully be hosted at a neutral venue.
Over the weekend and just before that, Techrights came under dozens of verbal attacks — including lies — all coming from .NET and Microsoft boosters. This helps us realise that we’re on the right topic and that we are effective. █
Summary: OpenDocument Format (ODF) keeps spreading while OOXML shows patent complications
Somebody called ruslinux (in Twitter) writes: “Berita baik untuk semua pengguna program perkantoran, pemerintah akui OpenDocument Format sbg standar nasioal dg No. SNI ISO/IEC 26300:2011″
“Which I take to mean that ODF now approved as a national standard in Indonesia,” says Rob Weir from IBM.
The i4i caseis back in the news, showing OOXML’s legal problems. For those who cannot recall, Microsoft and its friends (like Alex Brown) lied about the patent status of OOXML in order to push it past ISO. It’s a good thing that nations do not adopt OOXML. The case is still ongoing (many appeals) and OOXML suffers as a result. In another case, Microsoft is appealing a decision regarding its abusive behaviour which Pogson explains as follows:
Duh… It’s not “double recovery”. The conspirators conspired to set up their criminal organization that way. Make them pay for it. That’s a judgment to be made in penalty phase, what portion of the overcharging was due to M$. Pathetic… criminals protected by the legal system.
When consumers complain they are told the competition does not protect them but businesses in competition. When businesses sue, they are kicked out because they did not buy direct from M$.
Posted in Patents at 1:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Signs that the bullies are gradually getting their way by removing small players from the market, using patent thickets
TO ANYBODY who is a programmer, software patents are a curse. It does not matter if one develops Free software or proprietary software, patents are not for the developers, they are for the managers and their lawyers. They are for corporations and those who wage their wars for them. Just watch what Walker is doing right now [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], suing the entire world like Traul Allen, a billionaire, did. Jim Besse spoke about “the Future of Software Patents” a few days ago:
Yesterday James Bessen spoke at Stanford University on “The Future of Software Patents.” Over a decade has passed since US court decisions opened the way for wholesale patenting of software, including patents on finance and methods of doing business. Mr. Bessen looks at what the effect has been on software innovators. He looks at the empirical evidence on how software startup firms use patents and on why firms now face a much greater risk of software patent lawsuits. Exploring the causes behind these trends, he discusses how recent court decisions and legislative proposals might affect the rapid growth in litigation.
Those software startup firms soon discover that to say software patents are a good thing is simply a myth. It is the type of myth which gets spread by patent lawyers and propaganda from lobbyists of companies like Microsoft. The president of the FFII, one of the most active campaigners against software patents worldwide, warns that “Travaux preperatoires of the EPC published by the EPO, many references to software patents” and he also warns about “New Zealand software patents through the backdoor: EU approach is protecting embedded software” (this comes from this patent lawyers’ hive which we wrote about before). It sometimes seems like we, developers, are outnumbered by vocal lawyers. Not enough developers seem to be taking a stance against software patents; instead there is reliance on volunteers. Large companies like Google are not doing enough — if anything at all — to defend the interests of such developers. Roberto Galoppini claims that “Groklaw gave up with software patents”, which is probably not entirely true. Here is what he wrote the other day:
Few days after my blog post about OSI’s possible future, OSI wrote a second statement on the CPTN transaction, somehow reaffirming my concerns about a maybe too narrowed view on software patents. Now that even Groklaw gave up with software patents – rightly in my opinion – leaving it to IT giants and patent-trolls, will OSI fight software patents as a whole?
Until and unless developers start getting involved in the software patents, bogus ‘IP experts’ and fake ‘developers’ (who only pretend to be that) will steer policy, bamboozle politicians, and continue to make life a lot more miserable for SMBs. This is not just a political and technical issue, it is also a class issue. It is the use of law to distort the market. █
Summary: Except the experimental bits about video, this show covered MeeGo, Angry Birds, FTAs, and much more
We attempted to make this the first episode with video, but due to technical issues it will probably have to wait until the next episode. Tim and I will have hopefully sorted out webcams over SIP by then. Update: show notes are published.
This is important because of people like Elop inside Nokia and many former Microsoft managers inside companies like Juniper, VMware, and Yahoo! At Nokia, there was “takeover” by Microsoft, according to a senior source from Nokia. A senior source from BT told us that this was “100% corrupt”. This harms Linux in a real way because hitherto Nokia has contributed a lot to Linux and it could also make a lot of phone owners Linux users, e.g. in the form of MeeGo which is more “Linux” than Android. Now that Nokia is hijacked by Microsoft (at almost no cost) MeeGo is passing to more hands, owing to its Free software nature. Intel sets up a MeeGo research center and the platform spreads as it’s still being put in demos. Here are some new MeeGo videos: (credit goes to TinyOgg for the video files).
According to Zorin, its PC has a rotatable touch screen display that is optimized for electronic note taking and drawing. Zorin tailored the hardware and software to work 100 percent with Linux and is available in three editions: Home, Educational, and Business.
I was directed to this great program from a random stranger on identi.ca. I had posted a dent asking thoughts on a good Linux OS to run on a live USB. One of the replies asked, “Why run just one? Check out MultiSystem.” A quick search revealed the MultiSystem web page. The page http://liveusb.info happens to be in French, but fortunately for me there is a Google translator gadget.
If you think about it, most of us have grown up using Linux. Linux was not how software was done, 20 years ago. There was only paid software, as Stallman so famously said in 1983 and went on to lay the foundation of the Free Software Foundation with the GNU Project that was compatible with all available software. However, the GNU took its time to evolve and had basic structures-compilers, text, Unix shell etc. but elements daemons, device drivers including the kernel were stuttering to completion.
Earlier this week Sapphire launched the Radeon HD 5830 Extreme using the well-supported “Cypress LE” graphics processor at a very competitive price relative to the NVIDIA competition and the Radeon HD 5830 graphics cards from other AMD partners. With it being part of the HD 5000 series and not one of the newer HD 6000 series graphics processors, the Linux support is already spot-on for both the official Catalyst Linux driver and within the open-source stack. In this article are the open-source Gallium3D benchmarks for the Radeon HD 5830 along with other recent ATI/AMD GPUs to show where the latest Mesa/Gallium3D code is at today.
So, let’s explore the 6 MAC/RBAC tools at hand. For each tool we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.
Angry Birds works on iOS, Maemo, Android, and Windows – yet they refuse to make a general Linux installer. Now I could see if they only had an Android client why there might be some hold up, but the game runs on Maemo – which is a full Linux OS. Thats right – the game already compiles and runs on an ARM Linux platform. If the pile of FOS applications that have been ported to the N900 are any indication this means that getting the code to run on an x86 or 64bit version of Linux is just a recompile away. Yet still no Linux client for Angry Birds!
Over the April 1st – 3rd weekend, the first Calligra sprint took place at the KDAB office in Berlin. With a total of 31 people from 14 nations, the room was crowded to the bursting point! It was a very successful sprint, and the first KDE sprint for many of the attendees.
While hacking continued unabated at all times, a sprint is primarily an opportunity to meet face to face, create new bonds, and discuss current and future issues. As usual, Friday was free-form, with hacking and chatting until it was time to go out to dinner. After dinner we crashed the breakfast room of the hotel because the lobby was too small, and continued hacking.
Would you believe that at NCHC 41 computers cloned 5.6 GB simultaneously in 10 minutes? Multicasting or what? Clonezilla is a new age multicasting and unicasting solution from OpenSource Clone system for massive and large-scale cloning.
Cloning content is an essential process of computing where contents from one computer hard disk need to be transferred/imaged/cloned to another or multiple computer hard disks. Rebooting, restoring, new computer provisioning, hard disk upgrades, full system backup , system recovery and transfer to other users are some of the main areas/reasons where cloning is used.
Red Hat thinks so, and today submitted a new request to the Java Community Process (JCP) to push their data caching ideas forward into Java EE 7. The JCP approved JSR 342 last month, getting the ball rolling for the full creation of the Java EE 7 specifications.
“The themes of Java EE 7 are all about continuing to ease development and making Java cloud ready,” Craig Muzilla, vice president of Red Hat’s Middleware Business Unit told InternetNews.com.
Muzilla noted that the new data caching specification is being submitted in the same spirit of cloud enablement that is at the core of Java EE 7. He exp
Red Hat engineer Gavin King, the creator of Hibernate, is developing a new programming language for enterprise software development. His team at Red Hat has apparently been working on the grammar in secrecy for two years and is finally opening it up for scrutiny.
The new language, which is called Ceylon, is intended to remedy what King views as fundamental shortcomings of the Java programming language. It’s more succinct and expressive but is designed to be easy to read and learn. It will run on existing Java virtual machines and draws on many of Java strengths while addressing some key limitations.
MontaVista Software announced that MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) 6.0 has been registered as compliant to the Linux Foundation’s Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) 5.0 specification. MontaVista appears to be the first Linux distro to have registered for CGL 5.0, which was announced at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit last week, offering advancements in everything from streaming media to security.
Habey announced an EPIC-format SBC (single board computer) that features a 1.1GHz Intel Atom Z510P processor, 512MB of onboard memory, plus PC/104, PCI, and Mini PCI expansion. The EMB-4650 also includes CompactFlash and SD slots, dual video outputs, and eight USB 2.0 ports, according to the company.
T3 Motion announced a two-passenger electric vehicle that comes complete with a detachable Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet in its dashboard. The Galaxy Tab will act as the in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) computer for the three-wheeled R3 series plug-ins, offering navigation, entertainment, and vehicle diagnostic monitoring, says the company.
MIPS Technologies has launched a developer community website designed for Android and Linux developers working on MIPS-based hardware, including handsets and tablets. Developer.mips.com features open access to MIPS-tailored Android and Linux source code, an Android native development kit, debug and development tools including MIPS Navigator, plus resources including tutorials and support forums, says the company.
MIPS Technologies has launched a developer community for software developers working with the Android platform.
The online community will also be relevant for anyone developing Linux operating system based applications on MIPS-based hardware.
“This new community demonstrates our ongoing commitment to the vibrant open source effort around the MIPS cores and architecture,” said Art Swift, v-p of marketing and business development at MIPS Technologies.
Intel is establishing a joint innovation center with Tencent, one of China’s largest Internet firms, to develop products and services around the chip maker’s MeeGo mobile operating system and devices using its Atom processors.
The new partnership could help Intel to promote MeeGo in China, along with its Atom-based microprocessors, both of which have yet to be widely adopted.
As if to back up the contention by Google’s Android boss that the tablet version of Android isn’t being penned in so Google can keep control, PC-maker Asus released part of the source code yesterday.
Asus posted a link on the product page for its Eee Pad Transformer tablet that lets readers download a 97MB file with the source code for v8.2.2.6 of the Android kernel.
Google released the software developers kit for Android v3 in February, but only to a few OEMs and selected other partners.
Doing its part to fight Android fragmentation, Cyanogen and his band of mobile hackers have released a modified version of Android 2.3.3 optimized for some 30 devices still awaiting carrier updates. CyanogenMod 7 (CM7) adds to Gingerbread with power-user features found in the previous Froyo version (CM6), and supports its first two tablets: the ViewSonic G-Tablet and Barnes & Noble Nook Color.
Motorola is reportedly preparing a ruggedized, seven-inch Android tablet, while an Archos division in China has tipped the Archos 7c Home Tablet and an updated capacitive version of the Archos Arnova 10 — both running Android on the ARM Cortex-A8 Rockhip RK2918 processor. Meanwhile, Amazon is offering a 10-inch, $500 Viewsonic gTablet in a “deal of the day.”
Intel is planning to pay a $10-per-device subsidy to encourage the creation of Android tablets using its “Oak Trail” Atom processor, a DigiTimes report has claimed. And a relevant port of Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) will be available later this year, a company executive has been quoted as saying.
The Apr. 14 DigiTimes report by Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai says Intel wil “pay a subsidy of $10 for each Intel CPU-based tablet PC to attract first-tier notebook vendors.” It will promote the Android 3.0 platform “to save costs from Windows licensing fees for downstream vendors,” the story further adds.
VMware is accelerating its cloud efforts today with the announcement of its new Cloud Foundry project. Cloud Foundry is an open source application platform for the cloud.
“Cloud Foundry is about expanding a PaaS engine across multiple clouds, frameworks and application services,” Jerry Chen and his title is Senior Director of Cloud and Application Services at VMware told InternetNews.com.
Chen noted that with Cloud Foundry, VMware (NYSE: VMW) is aiming to lower the barriers to adoption for the cloud.
The new Turnkey Linux Hub 1.0 web service provides flexible Amazon cloud hosting and backup capabilities for web application software appliances, says this eWEEK review. The Ubuntu-based software is said to offer an “excellent” backup and restore utility that makes it easy to migrate appliance instances.
Flock Web Browser was once a darling of the web. It was among my favorite web browsers out there until a few years ago. But then Google Chrome happened which raised the bar much higher eventually changing the whole internet space once and for all. Mozilla Firefox suddenly became *old* and had to re invent itself to survive[read Firefox 4.0]. Unfortunately, that was not the case with Flock ‘Social Media’ Browser.
The recent announcements of Facebook’s Open Compute and VMware’s Cloud Foundry address the hardware architecture and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) layers, respectively.
Deploying a MySQL database today to meet modern infrastructure demands isn’t as easy as it used to be.
In an effort to help enterprises deploy the open source database, MySQL services vendor SkySQL is launching a new MySQL reference architecture that includes services and components. A decade ago, MySQL was typically deployed as part of the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack, but that’s not enough anymore.
Back in February, I wrote about Instructure’s risky move open-sourcing their Canvas LMS. The product was great, an easy-to-use, robust LMS with solid social features and a spectacular user interface. It was highly scalable and suddenly anybody (or at least anyone with a bit of Ruby on Rails experience) could fire it up on their own server. The question was, would anybody pay for Instructure’s hosting and support when they could host the LMS themselves?
The answer turned out to be an overwhelming yes. As Devin Knighton, Instructure PR Director told me, “Instead of the hundreds of leads their sales team was expecting from the announcement, we received thousands.” See, Oracle? You can make money from open source!
You can read the announcement on Groklaw. I personally read the site regularly to help keep abreast of legal news related to free software. PJ’s especially good about posting articles that may not directly discuss the latest issue, but provide useful context for the more focused material. And the site’s collaborative research has been so helpful to free software developers that Groklaw won the FSF’s Award for Projects of Social Benefit in 2007.
After several years of redesign and development work, the Blender Foundation and its associated online developer community have announced the arrival of version 2.57 of their open source 3D content creation suite, the first stable release in the 2.5 series. According to the developers, this major milestone is not only stable because it’s “mostly feature complete, but especially thanks to the 1,000s of fixes and feature updates we did since the 2.5 beta versions were published.”
In my last blog entry, How Effective Is Your Software Development, I discussed the three pillars of development effectiveness: Process Optimization, Quality Optimization and Technology Optimization, including architecture, leveraging the cloud, social media, smart devices, etc. This post will focus on Process Optimization.
The media’s telling of the Japan story has been inexcusably bad. I can’t count the number of pieces about confinement breaches and radiation surges; where they are not information-free they are wrong, and where they are not wrong, they bypass what matters. Here are a few specifics.
* The real story in Japan, by any objective measure, is the sustained post-tsunami desperation among those whose lives were swept away, and the narrative about the rescue and cleanup workers all over the Northeast. Read much of that? Me neither.
* Bloggers and other flavors of lone wolf are publishing heart-wrenching photo-essays from the front line of the recovery effort. Newspapers and TV networks? They’re writing about the temperature of the water in some part (they don’t specify which) of some damaged reactor, illustrating it with video screen grabs of machinery they don’t understand enough to explain.
* People across oceans from Japan should fear radiation? Um, what was the half-life of 131I again?
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – the BRICS group of fastest growing economies – Thursday signed an agreement to use their own currencies instead of the predominant US dollar in issuing credit or grants to each other.
The agreement, the first-of-its-kind, was signed at the 3rd BRICS summit here attended by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, China’s Hu Jintao, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev and South Africa’s Jacob Zuma.
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. appears to think technology gadgets — including tablet computers like the iPad — are the reason this country is shedding jobs. Really? The Illinois Congressman went on one of the more outrageous anti-technology rants on Friday on the floor of Congress. We transcribed the remarks below, since we couldn’t really believe what we were hearing.
With a list of controversies like that you start to wonder how they survived. Well, very easy: by having a very good PR department. Whenever a controversy pops up WWF acts like a turtle. It minimizes communication as much as possible and hopes the whole thing blows over. It tries to silence, marginalize or intimidate its critics, but in such a clever way that it doesn’t make too many waves. Disputes between its chapters are kept indoors as much as possible. Bluntly lying – if required – is an accepted practice.
Being one of the opponents in their latest controversy – the infamous WWF format – I experienced these tactics first hand. This is my story.
A problem with monopoly laws, such as the copyright monopoly and patent monopoly, is that their text is usually written by the lawyers that maintain them. This creates a vicious circle with circular proof that the laws work as intended.
On a rational basis, the music industry’s concerns would be dwarfed by those of the computer world, which is not just far larger, but vastly more important in strategic terms. But instead, the former gets to make all kinds of hyperbolic claims about the alleged “damage” inflicted by piracy on its income, even though these simply don’t stand up to analysis.
But that throwaway comment also raises another interesting idea: how about if Google *did* buy the music industry? That would solve its licensing problems at a stroke. Of course, the anti-trust authorities around the world would definitely have something to say about this, so it might be necessary to tweak the idea a little.
How about if a consortium of leading Internet companies – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Baidu, Amazon etc. – jointly bought the entire music industry, and promised to license its content to anyone on a non-discriminatory basis?
Angered at Righthaven’s behavior, a Las Vegas federal judge unsealed the company’s heretofore confidential agreement with the Las Vegas Review-Journal late on Friday. The contract reveals that the controversial copyright-enforcement company and LV R-J parent company Stephens Media are splitting their net earnings from suing hundreds of bloggers on a 50-50 basis. It also shows that the LV R-J is still largely in control of Righthaven’s litigation strategy—a fact that could end up being ruinous for Righthaven’s campaign of copyright lawsuits.
One of the key aspects of the latter has been its support for open source, which has been at the heart of Google’s infrastructure from the earliest days. Its adoption of free software played an important part in allowing the company to offer a range of free services – search, email, video content etc. – that could scale globally, Something that would have been much harder for a startup to achieve with traditional licensed software, where costs would have risen far more steeply.
A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about how I may build an advanced search utility for my own email archive. One way to make complex queries on the archive seemed to be to put it all into a relational database. Since the Dbmail system stores email in that way, I asked its developers and Harald Reindl (an email administrator at The Lounge who already uses Dbmail: I found him in the PostFix Mailing list archives) if Dbmail could be used in that way.
Following last week’s release of the stable Wine 1.2.3, it’s now time for a new development snapshot of Wine 1.3. The Wine 1.3.18 is a particularly interesting release since it finally takes advantage of raw mouse events with X Input 2.
At the beginning of January, TransGaming rolled out GameTree Linux. GameTree Linux is basically the successor to their Cedega Technology that in turn formerly was known as WineX and was based upon an early X11-licensed version of Wine. Cedega hasn’t been updated in a long time prior to this announcement and its support has fallen behind that of CodeWeaver’s CrossOver software and upstream Wine in many regards, but unfortunately, GameTree Linux hasn’t yet improved the situation at all.
The ability to talk with the Frozenbyte developers via the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle chat has granted me another mini interview and a few insights of things to come…
Here is another mini interview I’ve made with Niina from Frozenbyte…
It looks like Garry’s Mod, the sandbox physics game built atop the Source Engine that began as a Half-Life 2 mod, is working on Linux. Garry Newman himself explicitly mentions the Linux code is now compiling.
Humble Bundle is back with its collection of Indie games once again. The latest Humble Frozenbyte Bundle comes with 5 indie games with the usual pay what you want offer which means, you can purchase the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle for the price you decide. Not only that, you can even choose exactly how your purchase is divided: Between Frozenbyte, the Electronic Frontier Foundation(EFF), or the Child’s Play Charity.
This is the final entry in a series of five posts covering the various tracks in the Plasma Active initiative. In this closing article, we look at the track that aims to help bring out work to actual hardware.
On Monday, I will be writing a quick overview of some of the “big picture” goals and aspirations represented in Plasma Active, and on Friday of next week I will be sharing a preview of a new interaction feature that I’ve only referred to cryptically as “SLC” so far. Today, however, I hope you enjoy the outline of the fifth track in Plasma Active: Vendor Interaction.
As KDE developers continue to build the device-independent Plasma Active Linux environment, other pieces of the UI puzzle are falling into place as well. Pieces like Contour, which the team bills as a “context-sensitive user interface that adapts to…current activities and behavioral patterns of the user.”
As you can see in the screenshot, part of what Contour does is recommend additional actions based upon what it thinks you’re doing at any given time. By taking a look at a number of different sources of data — like GPS coordinates, accelerometer data, time and date, ambient sound and light, recently accessed files, and recent user actions, Contour will attempt to adjust the device’s UI to automatically meet a user’s needs.
I’ve been keeping up with the virtualization related developments in the upcoming Fedora 15… but even if I weren’t… Fedora offers a fedora-virt-preview repository that makes it easy to ckeck out the new stuff on Fedora 14.
Adding SPICE support to virt-manager is one of the upcoming features in Fedora 15 and as of 2011-03-28 it appears to be 100% done. I decided to use the fedora-virt-preview repository to check it out on my Fedora 14 workstation.
SimplyMepis 11.0 RC 2 was released last week and the annoying thing about that project is that their release announcements say nothing about the release. So, if one wants to keep up they have to download each developmental release and test it. So, I did.
The basic look and feel hasn’t changed since my last test. It’s possible it could receive an update before final. What I did notice soon after boot was that the graphic driver setup assistant is gone. It was inoperative my last test, but it’s completely gone now. Instructions in the Mepis Manual have the user going back to the old-fashioned manual procedure. This isn’t a big deal for most of us old goats, but for a distribution known for being “user-friendly,” this isn’t a plus. Will it be back before final?
Fortunately, I didn’t have to play around with any settings or boot flags to get a graphical desktop. The boot to blank locked-up screen was somewhat fixed last test, but I did have to talk it into a graphical interface.
Yesterday I upgraded my personal laptop (well, one of them) from Ubuntu 10.10 to Ubuntu 11.4 beta 2. I have a knack for finding bugs, but this time the upgrade was smooth sailing. I was reminded of what my friend said when I first installed Ubuntu for her: This feels like a really expensive system.
With Natty Beta2, the Ubuntu 11.04 Server Installer received a little bit of the same aubergine love that the Ubuntu Desktop has enjoyed now for the last few releases. Moving away from that 1980s MSDOS/PCDOS VGA blue look, the our Server installer now sports a distinctively Ubuntu color scheme!
In a previous post I described the certification release of Ubuntu pre-install for the Dell Latitude 2120. This post seems to have drawn some interest on the process from both internally in Canonical and externally. I decided that I needed to experience myself what a user buying a Certified “Pre-Installed only” system would go through from buying the system to getting the bespoke image from the manufacturer and ultimately upgrading to the latest “stock” Ubuntu release. The Dell Latitude 2120 seemed like a good companion for this adventure.
Hopefully the final release of Kubuntu 11.04 is as good as it is in its current beta. Since I used to be a huge fan of Kubuntu before its downward spiral that caused it to become bland, I’m actually quite happy to say that this release is shaping up to be the best in over two and a half years. Considering that all of my hardware is detected and works great, the developers must have tweaked something to make this happen. I would really like to know what it was they did, though my guess is they probably included the next generation of Intel drivers into the current kernel. Good job!
Technology firms such as LG Electronics are moving toward adopting the Linux-based MeeGo operating system after Nokia abandoned it, one of the project’s leaders said.
In order to better understand how people are using tablets we ran a survey of over 1,400 tablet users and found that:
* 68% of tablet users spend at least 1 hour a day on their tablet
* 77% of respondents report that their desktop/laptop usage decreased after they started using a tablet
* 82% of respondents said they primarily use their tablet at home
CSV (plain text) files are a popular way of exchanging data with a broad range different programs. But whereever different programs are involved, there’s some disagreement about the details. One such detail is the presence of quotes (text delimiter character) around fields. The usual consensus (spelled out, for example, in RFC 4180) is that fields “may or may not” be enclosed in quotes.
As long as the field delimiter doesn’t occur in numbers (for example as decimal separator), it can be useful to quote all text content, so the distinction between text and numbers is preserved. See issue 37856 for an example. This is what Calc CSV export has always done, and with the new import options in 3.3, we can optionally make use of that distinction when importing.
If you thought Wikipedia had seen its heyday, you’d have thought wrong. A small study performed by Wikipedia staff and published today found that new Editors are signing up and making edits to the site at a far greater rate than they were years ago. A slight majority of their first edits are acceptable or better.
America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we’re broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year’s retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.
Goldman Sachs misled clients and Congress about the firm’s bets on securities tied to the housing market, the chairman of the U.S. Senate panel that investigated the causes of the financial crisis said.
The big banks look to be setting up for another weak day, after a Senate panel divulged salty emails from employees at Goldman Sachs (GS) and other top financial institutions detailing their efforts to dump doomed mortgage securities in the laps of investors.
A Senate panel released a damning report accusing the likes of Goldman Sachs of engaging in massive conflicts of interest, contaminating the U.S. financial system with toxic mortgages and undermining public trust in U.S. markets in the months leading up to the financial crisis.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. misled clients and Congress about the firm’s bets on securities tied to the housing market, the chairman of the U.S. Senate panel that investigated the causes of the financial crisis said.
We can’t say we’re surprised that a Senate report released yesterday, that details what caused the financial crisis, focuses on Goldman Sachs. A lot.
The findings of a two-year analysis “trains much of its ire on Goldman Sachs, which Sen. Levin said deceived some clients by betting against home loans in 2006 and 2007, while simultaneously selling mortgage securities,” the WSJ reported.
On Tuesday, Senators John McCain and John Kerry introduced the long-awaited Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights, a sweeping bill that covers online and offline data collection, retention, use, and dissemination practices. Unfortunately, the bill may fall short of what’s needed to protect our privacy.
This bill fails to address many of the issues surrounding pervasive online tracking that have been raised by privacy advocates, explored in the Wall Street Journal’s What They Know series, and highlighted by the FTC’s recent Privacy Report. The bill’s most glaring defect is its emphasis on regulation of information use and sharing, rather than on the collection of data in the first place. For example, the bill would allow a user to opt out of third-party ad targeting based on tracking – but not third-party tracking. The consumer choice provisions in Section 202 apply only to data use—not collection—unless that data is both “sensitive” and “personally identifiable.” Moreover, Part III of the bill, which imposes lax limits on collection, cannot be enforced by state Attorneys General. This is backwards: the privacy risk is not in consumers seeing targeted advertisements, but in the unchecked accumulation and storage of data about consumers’ online activities. Collecting and retaining data on consumers can create a rich repository of information – which leaves consumer data vulnerable to a data breach as well as creating an unnecessary enticement for government investigators, civil litigants and even malicious hackers.
IN THE odd way these things work in China, word has trickled out that on April 7th an appeal court in Zhejiang, a famously entrepreneurial coastal province, conducted a five-hour hearing on a death sentence handed down to Wu Ying, a prominent 29-year-old businesswoman, on fraud charges. Before her arrest Ms Wu had seemed to personify the miraculous business success that could be achieved by people from even the most humble background in modern China.
While America’s heartland is being wired for 3Mbps DSL service, residents in Pakistan are getting ready for speeds up to 50Mbps thanks to a major broadband expansion in the country.
Pakistan’s PTCL, the country’s state-controlled phone company, is working on a major upgrade to bonded VDSL2, the next generation of DSL, which can deliver more than five times the top speed of the country’s highest level of service, at a construction cost of just $200-300 per home passed.
Facebook has filed a few different trademark lawsuits against sites it doesn’t approve of, like Teachbook and humor site Lamebook. Some of those cases might be considered close calls legally, and both of those sites are still up. But now a much bigger company is messing with Facebook’s name: adult social networking company FriendFinder Networks, which has launched a (very NSFW) website called FacebookOfSex.com.
Remember the Cliff Richard directive proposal for a copyright extention of sound recordings also known as 2008/0157(COD)? The extention was fiercely debated in the European Parliament and by consumer groups. Our MEPs adopted a plenary report and then… Then our EU-Council with all the member states at the table went into wait-and-see mode. They noticed that the Commission proposition was quite a bit over the top. Meanwhile we have a new parliament, the Lisbon Treaty regime, a new Council. Now it’s back on the agenda, just before the children born when the Commission started to draft its proposal enter school, rumours say Hungary suddenly changed its mind in the Council, we learn from an alarmist Boingboing call to action, that we, the people are asked by science fiction writer Cory Doctorow to
Google Inc.’s online video behemoth YouTube toughened its enforcement of copyright laws, requiring violators to attend “copyright school” and pass a test before they can resume uploading videos to the site.
The changes come amid calls — both in Hollywood and in Congress — that YouTube do more to combat piracy. Google General Counsel Kent Walker recently defended the search giant’s commitment to content protection in testimony this month before the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on intellectual property.
It seems that the original licensing deals which enabled Spotify to get off the ground a couple of years ago are coming to an end – and some of the labels in some European countries are getting restless about how much of their content is being given away for free, with minimal fees in return. Yes, 15% of Spotify’s users are now paying customers, but as the service grows, millions of tracks are being played for nothing.
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