04.15.11
Posted in SCO, Site News at 10:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Although Techrights has been quiet by the appearance of the surface (especially in April and March), improvements are being made behind the scenes, so patience is required
TECHNOLOGY improves all the time and means of interaction advance accordingly. Techrights got involved in social networks and also fostered an IRC community because these work better than comments. Blogs in general are a poor form of CMS in which to organise data (reverse-chronological, no hierarchy, lacking structure), so we also added a wiki (for summaries/overviews which are concise for example, even regarding SCO) and recently we collaborated with OpenBytes to bring TechBytes to our readers. I was a smashing success with far more interest than we had ever expected.
If the site has been quiet recently, it’s because of BT and also because of maintenance work, undertaken to improve access to older articles. It’s an investment more than a waste of time. Tim and I spent 5 hours last night working to ensure that we can deliver future episodes of TechBytes also in video form (Ogg Theora and YouTube), in addition to 3 forms of audio.
“I code every day and I am aware of implementations of mine that violate one patent or another, e.g. the progress bars.”The other day we explained what the site is not, even though it gave visibility to some libelous claims which had been made against us (then rebutting them, without getting emotional or pointing fingers). Sadly, there is a lot of new libel against Groklaw; it keeps being spread right now (we only mention it in IRC, in order not to confuse regular readers). The funniest claims say that Pamela Jones is male, multiple people, or that she does not exist (contradicting the former claims, even from the same source!) or that she is paid by big corporations, which is of course a lie. The whole thing is comical at best. For what it’s worth, I do not need to be paid by anyone to oppose software patents and also write to the government or the EPO on the subject; I code every day and I am aware of implementations of mine that violate one patent or another, e.g. the progress bars. Groklaw is written from the eye of a paralegal, this site is not.
As a side note, the same source which slanders Groklaw has just brought to people’s attention this piece from ZDNet UK. I don’t know the author of this piece, but I appreciate what I consider to be a well summarised explanation of not just what was done to me, but also to Pamela Jones (even as far back 2003). It starts by stating:
From time to time, links will pop up on various Linux or open source related sites, pointing to articles written by Roy Schestowitz, mainly from techrights.org. The articles are very well written and all sources for the articles are documented. Sometimes the articles include references to highly confidential material. And so far everything I have read seems to be true with clearly documented evidence. The articles often involve controversial issues with open source, along with lawsuits and even happenings at Microsoft regarding its negative attitude towards open source. For instance, Roy has posted articles claiming to include internal memos within Microsoft that specifically state how they are targeting Linux head-on. When reading the articles and comparing to latest news, they actually coincide and make sense.
What I find more interesting though, is that there are posts and other articles written to try and defame or discredit him. And some use some very strong language. Simply doing a Google search for “Roy Schestowitz” comes up with some examples. What in the world is going on here, and why are people trying so hard to discredit him for his articles on techrights.org?
Well, they try to steer people away from the source of damning evidence by daemonising and defaming the messenger/platform; it’s a lot simpler than having to deny (in vain) leaked documents which highlight criminal behaviour and activities which Microsoft paid a lot of money (settlement out of court) to conceal.
One reader has suggested approaching or posting an “invite” on another forum to readers of Groklaw — an invitation which would describe the partial overlap between Techrights and Groklaw. There is a new article in Groklaw about the need to direct the community to some active forum where comments can be posted. Here is what Pamela wrote:
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Now that I’ve announced Groklaw articles will end in May, a number of lovely articles have appeared, and some beautiful comments have been posted here and elsewhere, not to mention a blizzard of emails I’ve received. Thank you, every one of you.
Some of you have asked me to figure out some place where the community can go to continue the work, even if I can’t carry this work load any longer. I can’t announce anything, but I will tell you that I’m trying to figure something out, and if it doesn’t work out, it won’t be because I haven’t heard your concerns. I see your point, and while I have to change things personally, I agree that it is important to have a place on the Internet where the law is explained to geeks and tech to lawyers.
We hardly have any lawyers amongst us at Techrights, but if any are willing to help, IRC is the best place to start. We can always change focus and maybe even create another IRC channel. What Groklaw has done was a provision of peepholes into legalese in the context of Free software. Journalists need that for reference. Groklaw was crucial. A lot of people do not know this, but Groklaw almost came to an end 2.5 years ago (this was not publicly stated). Pamela Jones came back in a big way though, much to the disdain of those whom she criticised, including Novell at times.
Here are some more Groklaw-related articles that we found in the news recently (but have not referenced yet):
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Jones chose to maintain a low profile but that is perfectly understandable and does not in any way diminish any credibility she had; she was subject to some nasty attacks by writers from the mainstream tech media in the US and thus one can understand her reluctance to come out in public and gain a profile for herself.
Much of the acceptance that Jones gained was because a great deal of the coverage of matters FOSS comes from groupies – people who exhibit uncritical acceptance of the genre and all that it involves. If is, of course, easy to argue that the attacks on FOSS justify this kind of coverage – in my book that would be tantamount to arguing that the terrorist attacks on the West justify the curtailing of fundamental freedoms.
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The venerable Unix computer operating system entered a new phase Monday with its sale by the bankrupt The SCO Group of Lindon to a group of investors who are pledging to spend millions to upgrade and expand it.
Unix was sold to UnXis Inc., a Nevada-based company formed by Stephen Norris Capital Partners and MerchantBridge Group to buy the system out of bankruptcy court in Delaware.
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Groklaw will stop publishing new articles May 16 — exactly eight years to the day after it was launched.
This is because its reason for existence is gone, according to founder Pamela Jones.
“In a simple sentence, the reason is this: The crisis SCO initiated over Linux is over, and Linux won,” Jones said in a blog post.
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If you’re a regular reader of The Standards Blog, there’s an excellent chance that you already know that Pamela Jones – “PJ” to one and all – announced on Saturday that she would post her last article at Groklaw on May 16. Certain aspects of the site will remain available indefinitely.
It’s difficult to know where to begin in saying “goodbye” to Groklaw. What PJ and her many cohorts accomplished there has been unique in my experience. In many ways, Groklaw exemplifies the transformational power that the Internet has brought to law, society, technology, and the advancement of all things open.
Consider just a few of the core attributes of Groklaw: there were never any fees to access the rich investigative data to be found there. There wasn’t even any advertising. Yet Groklaw was the “go to” source for professional journalists, initially on SCO. As PJ’s credibility grew, journalists didn’t bother to replicate the research that they knew they could find, often instantly, at PJ’s site. And everything PJ wrote was made available under a Creative Commons copyright license. In short, Groklaw has always been about sharing for the public good.
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For eight years, Groklaw was the center of the fight between Linux companies and interests and SCO’s efforts to build a licensing business on the back of open source. While Novell was legally the victor in the year-long legal fight by raising its hand and reminding everyone–including SCO, it seemed–that it was they, not SCO, who actually owned the UNIX copyrights.
Yeah, that was awkward. (But pretty funny.)
The not-really-surprised part comes from the fact that Jones herself hinted on Christmas Day that she was contemplating a change for her status on Groklaw. At the time, Jones seemed disillusioned that after all of the hard work performed on Groklaw by her and the über-dedicated group of volunteers, “Novell taking money from Microsoft and contractually agreeing to show up at Open XML standards meetings and events.”
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In an ideal world, Groklaw would have a business model, or at least funding, for a small team to continue its work. PJ says that one of the reasons Groklaw is over is because its work is done and Linux has won — look at the mobile world, look at enterprise computing. Ah, if only. Microsoft still claims — and actively litigates for — IP rights in Linux, and Lord only knows how the Java/Oracle fun will end. We’re still in the woods. Groklaw will be most sorely missed, and I hope very much that others will take up the challenge.
Needless to say, Groklaw has another month to go and it already explains why UnXis/SCO is (probably not “are”) up to. Articles include:
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Let me guess. UnXis doesn’t want Groklaw to retire?
Eric LeBlan says, “We foresee our software becoming a critical component of the new Internet highways currently being developed in the Middle and Far East, from Riyadh to Beijing.” New Internet highways? I hope they’re just kidding around. If not, don’t forget the tubes, guys. You need tubes for the Internets, y’all.
Well, maybe the plan is to sell where no one knows who SCO is and how they have historically treated customers.
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UnXis, the entity that just bought SCO’s software assets, has a website up now, at unxisco.com, where its corporate page tells us what they say they will be doing. This is part of what they now are claiming:
UnXis has a proven “can-do” track record of over 30 years based on the heritage of The Santa Cruz Operation.
Considering that UnXis was just formed for this deal, I wonder at the grandiosity. It has no track record yet at all. Then again, that is for sure the SCO heritage. Remember Caldera changing its name to SCO Group and then saying it had been in business since the 1979, because Santa Cruz Operation started in that year? Well, here we go again.
We are already discussing this in IRC (morning and afternoon today). Ryan asks: “Why the hell would anyone buy SCO for their “UNIX business”? SCO UNIXWARE is laughably outdated. In fact, most proprietary UNIX systems are in that kind of shape, though maybe not as bad”
“[SCO's] “UNIX business” is “suing UNIX developers and users business””
–MinceRMinceR responds: “their “UNIX business” is “suing UNIX developers and users business” (well, more like “FUDding” than “suing” now, since everyone who matters knows they’re full of ****)”
Ryan responds with: “they claim the lawsuits remain with SCO and they only bought the UNIX business [...] anyone still using Unixware is doing it because they have legacy applications, not because they want to keep using it”
This discussion has carried on through the afternoon. To get involved, IRC channels should be considered the best route/channel for involvement. They are also logged to prevent information from getting lost. █
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Posted in Europe, Microsoft at 9:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Elop-led Nokia a headless chicken for Microsoft hardware
Summary: What Nokia did with Microsoft is worse than what Yahoo! and Novell did with Microsoft and patents have a lot to do with it, even hardware patents
According to this new report which “walterbyrd” brought to our attention last night (in IRC), sources inside Nokia said precisely the same thing Techrights said in its headline as soon as the Microsoft-Nokia deal was announced (our title was “Microsoft’s Nokia ‘Deal’ is More Like a Takeover, Patents Pose a Problem”).
A senior figure at Nokia has reportedly said: “This isn’t a deal between Nokia and Microsoft, this is a Microsoft take over.” That’s what the article from the British press says. Consider the second part of the title we used at the time (“Patents Pose a Problem”). Just days later it turned out that we were right because Nokia gave it away in interviews and only days ago we wrote about a new push for software patents (through the unitary patent, which is a euphemism) in Europe. This happened amid Bill Gates' lobbying in Europe and Nokia intervention under the leadership of Gates' employee, Microsoft President Elop.
The EPO seems delighted by the possibilities of this unitary patent, which means yet more patents (i.e. more patent monkey business, more money for bureaucrats, less productivity for everyone else). It summarises its gloating-fest as follows:
European Commission presents its draft regulations on unitary patent protection
“Cost of a single European patent set at €680 for protection in 25 member states” says this additional article which the president of the FFII alludes to by writing:
600EUR for an EU-wide patent, recipe for a disaster
Gun culture anyone? Bubble economies?
Michel Barnier, who lobbied for this mess on several occasions can be seen in the photos there. He is serving the interests of large corporations whether he admits this or not.
In other patent news, the Trend Micro patent lawsuit strategy against Free software and other entities suffers a blow:
Despite Trend Micro’s history of patent aggression, reliable sources are indicating that Trend’s patents at issue may be invalid which is a positive development for Fortinet.
In December 2010, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (US PTO) issued office actions on the two related Trend Micro patents (5,623,600 and 5,889,943), rejecting every claim as invalid. This finding is consistent with the opinion of the staff attorney at the International Trade Commission in the Barracuda Networks case that Trend’s ‘600 patent is invalid.
As we all ought to know, Barracuda is actually on the side that Free software favours (among these two). Its CEO, Dean Drako, said at the time: “I would much rather spend my time and money and energy finding ways to make the Internet safer and better than bickering over patents.” Companies like Microsoft can do nothing but bicker over patents because in crucial areas Microsoft’s products are a non-starter. The same goes for Nokia, which now aligns itself with Microsoft, as part of a virtual takeover. Unless Elop is sacked and the deal revoked, Nokia is no longer much of a spouse of convenience to Linux. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Ubuntu at 8:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The first release of Netrunner
Summary: A new Ubuntu alternative which totally omits Mono is released while Novell keeps pushing Microsoft software into the GNU/Linux community
A NEW release of Ubuntu is coming quite soon. It will contain more Mono than before (more than the direct predecessor, due to Banshee) and a project we wrote about before, Netrunner [1, 2], addresses the Mono issue as a matter of principle. It comes with the latest and greatest, including KDE 4.6.1, so go get it while it’s hot. From the announcement which the lead developer has just made: [via DistroWatch]
Our goal was to provide a slick yet beautiful KDE desktop as default,
while making Gnome/GTK+apps look well integrated.
We updated to the latest KDE 4.6.1, FF4, integrated dolphin as the default file manager and switched wine to experimental 1.3.12.
Underneath the hood, everything ought to work just like Ubuntu. By downloading Ubuntu 11.04 and then removing Novell’s Banshee we still allow Canonical to create the impression that there is demand for Novell’s Mono, so arguments along the lines of freedom/choice by negation (e.g. removing Mono after it’s installed by default, unnecessarily) evade the possibility of just supporting the good team which brought us Netrunner (the classic Linux Mint still has too much Mono). Here is some more Mono advertising which neglects to mention the Mono dependency [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. It’s becoming a nameless risk factor, a quiet Trojan horse, one might say. This is dangerous due to API domination, not just patents. API is control, it might as well stand for “Absolute Power through Interfaces”.
“This is dangerous due to API domination, not just patents.”Novell is falling into line with Microsoft (soon enough even Novell’s patents will be Microsoft’s, not OIN’s), so it’s time to take a step away from anything Novell, including Moonlight (emulating/mimicking virtually abandoned software from Microsoft). Novell is still promoting Moonlight in Planet GNOME. This promoter also defames me, but that’s another story and we would rather stick to the issues, not personal gossip.
Novell is quite a dead company in the sense that it has no direction which makes it future-proof. It just reaches out to Microsoft in the same way that Nokia did (more on that in a later post) and it brags about one of those phony awards which glorify its proprietary software legacy. The reality is, “SUSE Linux shops await Novell deal completion” in the sense that they become cautious. They too realise that Novell is under the guillotine and the new report says:
Suse Linux shops are still anxiously awaiting completion of Attachmate’s buyout of Novell so they can get on with their lives.
The $2.2 billion deal was expected to close by the end of March but was delayed at least in part by regulatory issues over a side deal in which a Microsoft-led consortium was to buy some Novell patents.
These shops are better off moving to Debian, CentOS, or even RHEL. There is nothing in SLE* which is really unique (except perhaps the patent royalties which get paid to Microsoft). As for OpenSUSE? Well, it’s hard to find news about it these days. There are some HOWTOs, e.g. [1, 2], but hardly any news. Many community members abandoned the project and they do not trust AttachMSFT, which provided no substantial assurance to their community.
The bottom line is, Novell is a dead duck and its products are too. Mono is developed along with Microsoft (Mono also contains Microsoft code with Microsoft licences), so if it lives on, guess who may take the lead? Canonical’s management should listen more carefully to the CTO. █
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04.14.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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63% use Debian, 18% are found to use an assortment of other Linux Desktop, closely followed by 15%using Fedora / Red Hat
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Desktop
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An email arrived earlier today announcing the new Zorin PC. Just as it sounds, it’s a computer shipping with Zorin OS. Kyrill Zorin said, “Zorin OS is our Linux distro that aims to be the gateway to Linux for Windows users to grow the popularity of Linux. We have recently launched the Zorin PC’s website and are now taking pre-orders.”
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I started my Linux Adventure a bit late in life. I’ve always had an interest in all things technical. My career for the majority of my working life was as an electronics technician (component level repair). I had aspirations at one time of gaining an engineering degree in electronics; other paths were taken, though.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This episode is a recording of Karen’s talk, Sign on the Dotted Line: NDAs, Employment Agreements and Free and Open Source Software from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit.
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Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Randi Harper
Selenium is a suite of tools used to automate web app testing across many platforms.
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Kernel Space
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The addition of ipset support makes it easier to run a firewall, as it means that only one table needs to be modified in order to block a specific IP address. The situation with regard to drivers for WLAN chips continues to improve, with Ralink and Realtek now actively involved in developing the Linux kernel drivers.
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SJVN: “What’s Linux real birthday?” You’re the proud papa, when do you think it was? When you sent out the newsgroup post to the Minix newsgroup? When you sent out the 0.01 release to a few friends?
LT: I think both of them are valid birthdays.
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Graphics Stack
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The NVIDIA crew working on their proprietary Linux driver have just pre-released a new build, NVIDIA 270.41.03. This Linux driver update mainly adds support for a number of new GeForce / Quadro GPUs.
The list of newly supported hardware is huge: GeForce GT 520, GeForce GT 525M, GeForce GT 520M, GeForce GT 445M, GeForce GT 530, GeForce 405, GeForce GTX 590, GeForce GTX 550 Ti, GeForce GT 420, GeForce GT 440, GeForce GTX 470M, GeForce GTX 485M, GeForce GT 550M, GeForce GT 555M, NVS 4200M, Quadro 1000M, and Quadro 2000M.
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Applications
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After using and covering the Linux operating system for more than a decade, I have seen plenty of applications come and go. Many of the applications that go are those that wind up either too broken to work or that lack the features users need. The applications that stay are solid, reliable, up to date, and offer plenty of user-friendly features. And user-friendliness is the key for modern Linux — especially on the desktop.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I travel a lot with my laptop, and it can contain private information that shouldn’t get disclosed if it’s ever lost or stolen. For this reason, I’ve been using various types of disk encryption over the years, such as Ubuntu’s encrypted home directory feature, to reasonably assure that my data remains private.
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Games
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One of the most addictive online shooter for Linux, ‘Teeworlds’ 0.6.0 has been released that brings many new features and fixes.
Teeworlds is a retro, cartoon-themed shooter where up to 16 players fight each other online. The game have huge fan following with hundreds of players playing the game daily.
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Hammerware has released a demo version of their game family Farm for Linux. They have said the release date will be April 15th for the final product. Family farm is currently available to pre-order with 20% off at €11.99.
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The number of truly free and open source games available for download is small in general, but in terms of genre, first-person shooters (FPS) have plenty of representation. This is largely due to the 3D engines that have been released into the free software community, which lend themselves well to FPS games. The Cube Engine 2 is one such 3D system, and Red Eclipse is the latest FPS to utilize it. Version 1.0 of Red Eclipse was just released a few weeks ago, and I decided to give it a try. It is free to download for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and Windows
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Desktop Environments
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This post is not intended to represent complete ideas or possible solutions. It is rather a post relating to the thoughts that I have had concerning the upcoming changes in Gnome 3, Ubuntu Unity and KDE 4.6.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Finally, for the first time I’ll meet in person with Nuno in a couple of days, and we’ll take this opportunity to revisit (and hopefully improve) the last few UI elements with which he is not so happy today. In the process of doing so, we will notably incorporate some quite useful input from Dolphin dev, Peter Penz.
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Sometimes the number of choices the Linux operating system provides can be overwhelming. I am starting to look at other options for my preferred desktop environment as GNOME 3 and KDE 4 go in directions that might be unsettling to my computing routine. One obscure yet interesting replacement candidate is Bluetile.
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This is the third in a series of five daily blog entries covering the various tracks in the Plasma Active initiative. Today we’ll be looking at a concept we call “Active Apps”. Where Plasma Quick is mostly (though not entirely) about infrastructure and Contour is a project with a Plan(tm), Active Apps is where we are really looking to the broader community of developers, designers and dreamers to help Plasma Active achieve its full potential.
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If you are unsure if your app is “ready” for Plasma Active, it won’t hurt to ask for feedback and start a discussion. We have many months, several sprints and conferences and a major KDE release day in the summer between now and the first Plasma Active release.
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Well, Camp KDE 2011 has come and gone. Some of you attended in person. Others may have listened to the live audio stream in Amarok. Maybe you missed it completely, but fear not! Because while time travel is not yet feasible, all of the talks were recorded and are posted for your viewing and listening pleasure. In addition, we have a bunch of interviews with the organizers, speakers, and attendees.
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GNOME Desktop
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Wow, I’m dazed with geek-pleasure right now. I just saw the latest screenshots of GNOME 3 Linux Desktop emailed by my brother-in-law in Europe. He is a certified linuxhead and he was the first one to inform me that GNOME 3 is now finally available for download. He raved and showed me his new GNOME 3-draped Ubuntu 10.4 laptop and I can only say – Wow, this new Gnome 3 update looks like an iPad 2 iOS screen! I might as well post my Gnome 3 review after testing this new Linux desktop environment, I said to myself so here it is (plus new features).
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For a while Foresight Linux users had no graphical interface for managing their systems packages and/or updates, mainly because the development for the conary backend fell out of scope and our radar (this is a nicer way to say that we didn’t have someone to maintain it). But thanks to the work of zodman, jesse and others PackageKit is making its way back to our desktop.
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Reviews
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Zenwalk is a desktop-oriented Linux distribution originally based on Slackware. The latest stable release is Zenwalk 7. It was made available for download on March 25, 2011, roughly ten months from the last prior stable release – Zenwalk 6.4. The Zenwalk project makes four editions available – The Standard Edition, Core Edition, GNOME Edition, and the Openbox Edition. This article presents a detailed review of the Standard Edition.
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New Releases
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Parted Magic 6.0 has been released. The latest update gets a new major version number, due to some underlying, structural changes, and comes with a number of updated, as well as downgraded, packages.
Several changes have been implemented which should make booting significantly more reliable. Many booting issues should be fixed now, though, since this is a new system, others may have creeped in.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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However, to resurrect this blog with something fancy, why not posting a screenshot of how my Mandriva 2011 desktop currently looks like?
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is developing a new Java Virtual Machine-based programming language intended to overcome the limitations of Java itself. Unveiled earlier this week by lead developer Gavin King at a conference in China, the effort is known as Project Ceylon.
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Because of its nature, it is very clear that CentOS is mostly oriented to server market. But CentOS can also be used on desktop computers and laptops.
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Fedora
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Fedora Core 5′s Bordeaux — a wine region in France, but also a comic book character — begat Fedora Core 6′s Zod, another comic book character. One of my favorites is Fedora 11′s Leonidas — which comes from Fedora 10′s Cambridge (Cambridge is a ship in the Navy, and so is Leonidas) — because it allowed some fun with the name with “300″ memes. Ubuntu? THIS! IS! FEDORA!
As an aside, it’s unfortunate that Barona was not chosen as the Fedora 16 name, which would lend itself to rewriting the lyrics to The Knack’s “My Sharona.” Such are the things that go into consideration in Fedora circles regarding what name to choose in the ranked voting.
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Debian Family
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All my notebooks till today have been ThinkPads from the T series, sadly Lenovo decided (or, maybe, were persuaded) to go with nVidia GPUs for their current designs (T5xx). That’s sad, because nVidia doesn’t cooperate with the FLOSS world. I still wanted a ThinkPad with up-to-date parts. That left me with the Edge series, which is designed to be the bridge between consumer and business models. After some searching I settled on the NVLJ6GE model (the last two letters just indicate, that this is the “German” variant). The key specs are Intel Core i5-480M, 4096 MB RAM, AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5145, Intel WLAN module and a non-glare display.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We have recently created a few bits of public documentation that I wanted to share with you. The first is a general guide to the certification programme. It explains what we are aiming to achieve and what our processes are. This can be found at:
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Flavours and Variants
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Turnkey Linux Hub 1.0 provides cloud hosting and backup capabilities for the Web application software appliances offered by the Turnkey Linux project.
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Turnkey Linux is an excellent option for individuals or organizations looking to test drive and deploy open-source Web applications covered by the project. It would serve well as a platform for building Web applications atop popular open-source stacks: There are appliances available for generic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl), Ruby on Rails and Django stacks, among others.
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Looking for a beautiful, functional operating system? Check out the first Elementary Jupiter OS. This Linux-based operating system is designed from the ground up to stay out of your way so you can simply use your computer. Whether you’re a long-time Linux user or a complete beginner to open source operating systems, Elementary’s elegance is impressive and more than worth checking out.
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Phones
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It is common knowledge amongst my friends that I am a Linux gadget freak, especially in regards to mobile phones. I have been using Linux-based mobile phones for nearly 6 years now. I was an early fan of the Motorola Linux phones owning 4 of them along the way. I have owned 2 iPhones in the past before selling them and one Windows Mobile-based phone as well. None of them equalled to my love affair with Linux phones.
For me, a mobile phone must be able to take good pictures, and recently, make some good video shots including night scenes. My mobile phones have helped me come up with the content for many of my postings at SaigonNezumi.com.
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It seems like only yesterday that Palm announced its brand new Linux-based WebOS and Palm Pre, ready to shake up the world with awesomeness and Linux in a little package. They matched that announcement up with a nifty little SDK that emulated the entire OS in VirtualBox, and was released as a .deb package for Ubuntu. Someone even posted a HOWTO on the Linux Journal web site about it!
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Android
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Sony Ericsson created a minor controversy on Wednesday with the launch of its own brand-specific channel in Android Market. The category both includes official apps but also recommended titles and occasional exclusives. It will also be used as a sales pitch area and will be a “highlighted market space” for chosen developers’ apps.
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Here’s the most typical scenario. You fight a fierce battle, and migrate your entire organisation to FOSS. After a few initial hiccups, you’ve got all systems and people humming along just fine. One fine day, you decide it’s time to move on in your career. Once you’re out of the organisation, it takes just a few seconds for everyone to gleefully reformat everything and go back to their slavery under proprietary software. You just shrug your shoulders and try not to think about it.
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Events
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We had a great time and the discussion was vigorous! The last year has continued the expansion of open source use, confirmed recently by Laurie Wurster’s March 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=619. In particular, Android has been spectacularly successful and was a significant factor in Nokia’s recent failures in the handset market. The new Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, described Nokia as being on a “burning platform” and identified Android as one of the major sources of their problems.
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Leaders of the technology industry will come together in Boston next month for the 2011 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), a leading provider of open source solutions, says customers, partners, visionary thinkers, technologists and open source enthusiasts will take part in a series of discussions to learn, network and explore open source. The full agenda is available here.
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A few years back, Argentina’s government looked at mandating the use of all open-source software in its offices, largely to save on software costs.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The Creative team here at Mozilla has been growing rapidly lately, so it feels like a good time to share a quick update on who we are and what we’re doing.
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The group includes two veteran Mozillians…
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Mozilla has taken the first major step in its new browser release schedule and transitioned Firefox 5 from its initial mozilla-central to the new aurora channel where the browser will be brought up to beta status.
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Since, its an experimental prototype of an upcoming firefox feature(Yep! this is what it says under the developer comments 
), I shouldn’t expect much. But this comment seems to be a few months old. I wonder why it wasn’t included in Firefox 4 but it indeed deservers to be an integral feature.
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Many of the mockups of Firefox’s new interface, dating all the way back to August 2009, have featured a small home tab. But up until now, I haven’t had a chance to explain the various ideas surrounding Home, elaborate how it fits into our broader cross platform and cross device strategy, and answer some really basic questions, like what will happen if the user has already customized their home page.
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Firefox 5 has been moved into the aurora release channel, the second of a total of four release stages. Firefox 6 alpha 1 has been moved to mozilla-central and is available for download.
Mozilla currently labels the Aurora releases in fact as “Aurora” browsers with a new logo and the mozilla-central versions as “Nightlies”, also with a new logo. The transitions appear to be mainly testing the new rapid release cycle procedure and there isn’t much to see for Firefox users yet. Firefox 4 will get the 4.0.1 (Macaw) security update in May before we will see any changes in the preview releases of Firefox 5. Among the key changes will apparently be the integration of the Home button, which will be built into Firefox as an app tab that will hide the Home desktop application for Firefox.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Long story short, the proprietary Adobe Flash was blacklisted in the GNOME 3.x releases of Epiphany because it uses Gtk+ 2.x (or 1.x) while Epiphany uses Gtk+ 3.x. An unwanted side effect of this is that it also disables Gnash, depriving me of my daily dosage of Youtube, Rebecca Black and crappy, obscure Bollywood songs.
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Government
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Another suggestion is to spend more time explaining the benefits of open source. “A desktop refresh doesn’t have to mean a Windows upgrade,” Silber says. Ovum analyst Laurent Lachal agrees that education is key. “There is still a perception that Linux isn’t ready for frontline use. This is nonsense. Linux is ready. It’s the project managers who are not,” he says.
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Licensing
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The Sabayon Foundation has just had an official sub-license granted for our use of Linux(R) as part of “Sabayon Linux” & “SabayonLinux”, covering goods and services on every corner of the planet (including Antarctica!).
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Programming
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Finance
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According to Cnet, one US Senator is preparing to introduce legislation that would radically alter online commerce. The bill would end the ability of Americans to buy goods from online retailers free from state sales tax. Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois is expected to present the bill shortly after the Easter recess.
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Civil Rights
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Mike Lazaridis the co-CEO of Research In Motion, the Canadian firm behind the Blackberry, refuses to answer a question about problems the company has had in India and the Middle East.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
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Nearly 18 months since the CRTC adopted its Internet traffic management practices (ITMP) policy, industry experts are divided on its effectiveness in securing net neutrality.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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It was supported by all parties except the Greens and independent MPs Chris Carter and Hone Harawira.
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Arch Linux Installation Tutorial Part 1: Initial Installation
Arch Linux Installation Tutorial Part 2: Setting up Xorg, Gnome and Pulseaudio
Arch Linux Installation Tutorial Part 3: The Arch User Repository
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in Site News at 4:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Techrights made a little more accessible
Not many new posts were published yesterday, due to site maintenance. We added and improved ‘static’ pages (they are actually dynamic, but they stick as top-level pages). The most important improvement is site archives. Basically, the site grew to the point where generating archives that can be navigated easily became hard. About 4 plug-ins that we tried yesterday simply time out and we have had this problem since 2007 when the site approached 2,000 posts. Even cache would not help. We now have over 13,000 posts, so even attempts to generate a cache lead to timeouts. Eventually, using jQuery, we managed to create 2 archival pages, one for posts and one for pages. Both were added and both are JavaScript-dependent in order to load content dynamically, in smaller chunks.
several enhancements to search were added too; for example, search phrases are highlighted in yellow when arriving from search engines and highlight also accompanies standard results pages. See advanced search, which got added to the search page as well. Linkage in the side bar and in empty results pages appears where suitable. Like many of the additions to this site, both improvements were proposed by a reader/contributor. Please keep suggestions coming. █
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04.13.11
Posted in Apple, Bill Gates, Google, Patents at 5:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: When patents cost people their lives more pundits are willing to publicly admit that the patent system is unethical
MORE PEOPLE are speaking out against patents. The Atlantic, an influential publication by all measures, is seemingly fed up with some patents:
In a closely-watched oral argument Monday at a federal courthouse in Washington, the core questions of the case read like scripts from a college philosophy exam: are isolated human genes and the subsequent comparisons of their sequences patentable? Can one company own a monopoly on such genes without violating the rights of others? They are multi-billion dollar questions, the judicially-sanctioned answers to which will have enormous ramifications for the worlds of medicine, science, law, business, politics and religion.
Tell this to Bill Gates, who happens to promote companies of these sorts by giving them investment money, by lobbying for them, and also by hiring their staff to join and administer the Gates Foundation. Maybe when Gates meets Alzheimer he will change his mind, but never mind, Gates can afford to license some absurd patent to save his life. Others can’t. Mike Masnick is the latest to complain about this patent:
We keep hearing stories of important healthcare research being disrupted by patents, and the latest, as pointed out by Slashdot, involves an organization called the Alzheimer’s Institute of America… which happened to buy some patents on a DNA sequence, and is now suing or threatening to sue a ton of researchers in the space. Amusingly, AIA presents itself as an organization committed to supporting Alzheimer’s research, when it appears the organization is more focused on shaking down researchers.
More patent rants by Mike Masnick can be found in [1, 2]. He speaks about the patent problem wrt Google’s dilemma and the Hubris-ridden Apple, which also happens to be hurt by them recently (although not sufficiently). Google too is named: “A lawsuit filed by H-W Technology earlier this week in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas Dallas Division claims Apple, Research In Motion, Google, and 29 other major technology companies are infringing on a patent it was granted in April 2009.”
We all know by now that the Northern District of Texas is a breeding ground for patent trolls. When will the USPTO get rebooted? █
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