Summary: A so-called ‘conspiracy theory’ from the SD Times and further thoughts about Wizard Parent LLC as well as Microsoft’s small office in Nevada which helps avoid about a billion dollars in tax
FOR quite some time we have been criticising the SD Times for promoting Mono and removing criticism of it while also receiving money from Microsoft to advertise Microsoft products in the magazine. A new column from the SD Times, however, has this to say: [via Pamela Jones of Groklaw]
The bulk of the work on Mono, under the leadership of Miguel de Icaza, has been done by Novell employees. Shortly after Attachmate completed its acquisition of Novell, those employees were all laid off.
A key enabler of Attachmate’s purchase was Microsoft. We can safely assume that Microsoft doesn’t like the idea of .NET applications running on anything except Windows.
So: Open-source project goes after Microsoft’s crown jewels. Novell drives that project forward. Attachmate (a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner) buys Novell. Microsoft gives gobs of money to Attachmate. Attachmate whacks the Mono team.
As my teenage son would say, “Duh.”
Frankly, I was caught off guard by this sudden move. At the end of April, in “Novell is gone, and yes, it matters. Here’s why,” I wrote, “My prediction: Under Attachmate, SUSE will flourish, and Mono will whither. I expect Mono to suffer intentional neglect, rather than a bold stroke, until it weakens, loses relevance and fades away.”
How very, very disappointing.
In other findings from Pamela Jones, there are the following remarks about the Wizard Parent LLC revelation. She writes: “I just noticed that it says it’s not directly tied to any acquisition: “Is this offering being made in connection with a business combination transaction, such as a merger, acquisition or exchange offer?” and the answer checked is “no.”
“I also took a look at Elliott Associates, and they seem to be trying to muscle Iron Mountain, at the moment. But it is interesting to note this SEC Form D filing from a year or so ago, where $1,076,961,059 was raised, from 220 investors, and $112,942,893 represents “the amount of the gross proceeds of the offering that has been or is proposed to be used for payments to any of the persons required to be named as executive officers, directors or promoters in response to Item 3 above”, and number 3 is about Paul Singer. So there is the notation that the amount to be paid to executives “represents the amount paid to date. The Issuer allocates an annual special allocation to Mr. Singer, directly or indirectly”.”
NetIQ, a previously existing Attachmate division, will be in charge of the following product lines:
* Novell Identity Manager
* Novell Access Manager
* Novell Sentinel
* Novell Operations Center
* The PlateSpin product line
In short, all of Novell’s identity and access management, security and compliance management, and data center management products have all gone to NetIQ.
Novell proper is returning to its Utah roots. The company’s headquarters will be in Provo Utah. That’s not as good as it might sound though for veteran Novell staffers. Attachmate has already fired several hundred of Novell’s Utah employees.
Novell’s programs will include:
* Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES)/NetWare
* Novell GroupWise
* Novell ZENworks
* Novell File Management Suite
* Novell Vibe
AttachMSFT will not directly deal with Free/open source software. In fact, SUSE has been isolated and OpenSUSE is mum. Well, one person is still producing some news summaries (although not much of significance). SUSE might get sold.
The question on many people’s lips is, did Microsoft ever conspire with Singer and his thugs to force a sale of Novell? And why it is that a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner was Novell’s buyer? The Microsoft veterans-run VMware almost became the buyer, too. Why did Microsoft receive Novell’s patents in the process? Will Novell’s antitrust case against Microsoft still be pursued by a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner? There is a lot to wonder about. It is not unusual for Microsoft to use other entities as proxies, e.g. to fund SCO or to avoid paying tax. We already know that this was happening (there is undeniable proof), so not much of a leap of faith is required. Speaking of tax avoidance, a former Microsoft employee continues to slam Microsoft in his blog where he also chastises the company for “Pushing for Law to Disrupt International Trade”:
The irony of this of course is that from 1997 to 2010, Microsoft avoided paying approximately $757 million of Washington State’s Royalty Tax on software licenses by booking the sales in a small office in Nevada. With interest and penalties, the amount is over $1.25 billion.
Put it more simply, the Washington State Legislature is now poised to pass a bill that would allow Microsoft to interfere in the supply chain of Washington State companies simply for legally purchasing goods from foreign companies. Yet, despite facing a $5 billion budget shortfall, the Legislature has shown no interest in collecting back taxes on Microsoft’s unpaid royalty tax bill from its Nevada alter ego subsidiary.
The question is, among Elliot, Novell, and AttachMSFT, who might be an “alter ego subsidiary” (if anyone)? █
They described themselves simply as local teachers who favored school reform — one sympathetic state representative, Mary Ann Sullivan, said, “They seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers’ union lobbyists.” They were, but they were also recruits in a national organization, Teach Plus, financed significantly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
[...]
The foundation paid a New York philanthropic advisory firm $3.5 million “to mount and support public education and advocacy campaigns.” It also paid a string of universities to support pieces of the Gates agenda. Harvard, for instance, got $3.5 million to place “strategic data fellows” who could act as “entrepreneurial change agents” in school districts in Boston, Los Angeles and elsewhere. The foundation has given to the two national teachers’ unions — as well to groups whose mission seems to be to criticize them.
“It’s easier to name which groups Gates doesn’t support than to list all of those they do, because it’s just so overwhelming,” noted Ken Libby, a graduate student who has pored over the foundation’s tax filings as part of his academic work.
The article above is new, but it led us to the realisation that we must carry on tracking Gates’ continued harm to society, which he disguises by buying the press and pressuring journalists to become his PR agents (more on that later this week). So without further ado, we start by presenting articles from around January of this year (more to come soon). Given more time, we would have produced lengthy articles, but a lot of self-explanatory.
It’s true, as Dora as amply reported, there are some in Seattle who support this same privatizing, standardizing, commodifying agenda of Eli Broad, but they are businesspeople like Don Nielson, politicians with ambitions and organizations that are funded by privatizing ed reform foundations like the Gates Foundation. Though they may be powerful and wealthy, they do not represent us or our kids. The parents, teachers and children of Seattle’s Public Schools have not asked for this agenda and did not vote for it.
She then made friends, if she hadn’t already, with Don Nielson who hosted her, Patrick D’Amelio, Executive Director for the Alliance for Education (see Lines of Influence for that connection with Broad and Gates) and Kimberly Mitchell of the Gates Foundation who was the Senior Program Officer for the Gates’ Foundation’s “Education for Washington State” division, at a luncheon given by Harvard Business School Club of the Puget Sound. The topic for the day was The State of Public Education in Seattle: A dialogue with key leaders.
[...]
Mr. Neilson was also on the Board of Trustees for the Seattle Foundation, an organization that received $1M last year from the Gates Foundation and whose president, Norman Rice, wrote an op-ed piece that same year during the teachers’ contract negotiations, siding with the superintendent on demanding the acceptance of merit pay and the devaluation of seniority. He was part of a chorus of voices representing Gates funded and Broad backed organizations in Seattle at that time.
[...]
That same year, the NCTQ came to town hosted by the Alliance for Education. All you need to do is Google NCTQ to see that their arrival in towns and cities around the US is the first shot across the bow in terms of the introduction of ed reform to that school district or state. The NCTQ is about teacher evaluations and their reports become the basis for the introduction of evaluating teachers based on student performance also termed merit pay or performance pay. NCTQ receives money from Gates by way of TR3. That year NCTQ also received money from the Alliance for Education. NCTQ and TR3 refer to teachers as “Human Capitol”. That pretty much sums up how they, including Gates and Broad for that matter, view education and educators in general.
A lot of money was poured into the coffers of a few non-profits in Seattle by Gates and Broad to further their agenda. Our schools have now successfully been resegregated by our Broad-trained Superintendent and are now ripe for charter schools. Ed reform legislation was passed in the form of Bill 6696 that was pushed by none other than our own PTA among other organizations. Teach for America was railroaded through by the superintendent and the School Board Broad-trained President, Michael DeBell . We had pro-ed reform op-ed’s coming out of our ears from the same Broad backed, Gates funded organizations in the Seattle Times and a lot of press releases from the supe passed on as “reporting” by so-called “journalists” at the Seattle Times which as of now is our only major newspaper in Seattle.
[...]
1. That Community Values Statement that was used by the Broad backed, Gates funded Alliance for Education organization to co-opt well-meaning members of the community and organizations into unwittingly backing negotiations with the superintendent who wanted merit pay based on test scores. She won and the community lost on that one.
[...]
My last question to everyone this year is, if the Broads and Gates of this country thought that their ideas of ed reform were the perfect fit to the needs of our communities, why didn’t they just come out and present their ideas to a wide audience? They, instead, spent millions to create faux-roots organizations to carry their ideas to different communities, making it seem that it was a neighbor or another parent’s idea. They hired PR companies and think tanks to come up with reports and data to support their agenda and they created a need that is not really there as many corporations do to sell a product.
Apparently the controversies about the accuracy and motivations of Davis Guggenheim’s pro-charter, teacher-bashing “documentary” caught up with it, resulting in no Oscar nomination.
It’s not enough to issue so many press releases that they could cover all of the airport bathroom walls from Seattle to Singapore, or is it Finland (?), now Gates needs to ensure that the press gets the story “right”.
The billionaire bullies are at it again, this time Gates and the Waltons, will have their eyes on the press in the form of the The Bull Pen more accurately described as the “bully pen”.
Hopefully the New York Times will heed its own reporters and not follow the shameful lead of the L.A. Times, which published the names of thousands of Los Angeles Public Schools teachers it had ranked using an algorithm it had created (with $15,000 in backing from the Gates-funded Hechinger Report).
During the attempted takeover of McKinley Elementary School by Ben Austin using the Parent Trigger law recently approved in California to create a charter school, Gabe Rose and Ben Austin, both of the Gates backed Parents’ Revolution, according to Daily Censored, “created a fake group called “McKinley Parents for Change” created a flyer full of falsehoods… and then placed a paid Parent Revolution organizer’s phone number on the bottom of the flyer”!
The report was waved around in front of the press and community leaders by the faux roots ed reform organizations that were spawned by Gates and Broad causing many community organizations to sign onto a Community Values Statement.
[...]
It is also enlightening to see who is on the NCTQ Advisory Board, people who will benefit from cheap labor in the form of Teach for America recruits who are staffing charter schools throughout the country. The people on the board include Michael Feinberg, Founder of The KIPP Foundation , a charter franchise, Michael Goldstein, CEO and Founder of The Match (Charter) School in Massachusetts, Paul T. Hill, Director, Center for Reinventing Public Education which supports charter schools and is a recipient of Gates’ money, Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder of Teach For America, Michelle Rhee, Board of Directors for the Broad Foundation, a proponent of charter schools, Stefanie Sanford, Senior Policy Officer with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, another major proponent of charter schools, Laura Schwedes, KIPP charter schools and Deborah McGriff, Partner, the New Schools Venture Fund.
A report on teacher evaluations recently released by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been refuted by one of the nation’s leading economists, who found the widely published report to be seriously flawed.
The Gates Foundation last month released the first report of its “Measures of Effective Teaching” (MET) project, which aims to develop a reliable method for evaluating teachers. The report was thoroughly reviewed for the Think Twice think tank review project by University of California at Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. Rothstein, who is also former senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, found the Gates Foundation’s MET report to be based on flawed research and predetermined conclusions.
The review was produced by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado at Boulder School of Education, with funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
Last month, a Gates Foundation study was released and said to be evidence of the validity of “value-added” measures to evaluate the effectiveness of teachers by using students’ standardized test scores. But a new analysis of that report concludes that the substance of the report doesn’t support its conclusions.
The report released last month was called “Learning About Teaching: Initial Findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project,” by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation officials Thomas J. Kane and Steven Cantrell.
[...]
The MET report considered this exact issue and concluded that “Teachers with high value-added on state tests tend to promote deeper conceptual understanding as well.” But what does “tend to” really mean?
Rothstein’s reanalysis of the MET report’s results found that over 40 percent of those whose state exam scores place them in the bottom quarter of effectiveness are in the top half on the alternative assessment.
Give the entire article a read as it gives some more specific examples of what was learned. Sounds like Gates is willing to admit what has gone wrong and where they have improved. Think we can convince Bill to write a failure report? Could he host TEDxFail next year?
Posted in Patents, Videos at 3:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Big Think explains why software patents are bad and the European Patent Office grooms people who want new laws that would bring such patents into Europe
Just as it recently did its propaganda with Vincent Van Quickenborne [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13], the EPO propaganda machine is latching onto Barnier, who is like Vincent Van Quickenborne when it comes to software patenting loopholes [1, 2, 3, 4]. Days ago it wrote:
Interview with EU-Commissioner Michel Barnier, right after the 2011 European Inventor Award ceremony. http://ow.ly/4Z7IZ
This links to their YouTube channel, which almost nobody subscribed to in 3 years. Apparently there is not much interest in EPO’s agenda. The EPO just wants more and more patents, which are equivalent to more EPO business. █
I’ll admit, I’m somewhat interested in Google’s Chromebook concept. The Chromebook is Google’s spin on the “netbook”. Announced in May last year, Chromebook goes on sale in mid-June.
The Chromebook runs Google’s Chrome OS, which is based on Gentoo Linux. While Linux has appeared on netbooks in the past (and were the only option on the very first netbooks) this is another example of the flexibility of Linux. You can use Linux as a base for almost any computing platform – it’s small, fast, and supports a variety of hardware.
Both my desktop and my laptop started working more slowly a few weeks ago. This indicated that something about the operating system (some version of Ubuntu Linux) changed in a bad way. Or, perhaps, since the slowness was mostly noticed in the web browser, the newer version of Firefox was somehow borked. It turns out that the latter is true to some extent because the developers of Firefox left Linux out in the cold with hardware acceleration (and despite the excuses for that I’m still annoyed … had the same issues applied to, say Windows, they would not have left Windows out in the cold). But that is a digression. It turns out that the cause was related to something I had installed that was related to the system. This little problem has been solved, but it brings up another issue, which has also been addressed on the blog Linux in Exile. This is what I wanted to talk about.
Linux is for everyone. While Linux based distributions like Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Fedora are developed with the non-technical user in mind, Slackware and others appeal to the more geeky ones. Believe it or not, installing Ubuntu is actually easier than a Windows installation , and using it requires no special skills.
Myth 2 : Linux can’t handle Excel, Word, Powerpoint
Linux can handle all the major file formats when it comes to documents as it comes with a powerful opensource Office suite called Openoffice.org (soon to be replaced by Libreoffice). So, apart from doing all the spreadsheets, presentations, and word processing out of the box, Linux can do tasks like publishing, image editing using only free and open source applications.
That didn’t take long. A manufacturer plans to release a small desktop PC with Chromium OS in July. It’s Xi3 and their modular PC. One of the modules will be a Chromium OS…
My previous plea for help worked out very well. The resulting video of the talk can be seen here, with one of the highlights being the phrase, “It is cheaper to work upstream in the kernel” from Dirk Hohndel who works at Intel. There’s a summary of the talk on lwn.net over here if you don’t want to sit through the whole video.
So what’s the verdict? It certainly is relatively user-friendly, and much more so than Slackware. It’s stable, and it definitely minimizes package redundancy. That said, it isn’t as fast as advertised, and the French and Japanese issues were annoying, considering that I thought I was downloading an English live medium (and I thought there would be different live media for different languages). Those are minor issues, though, and while I wouldn’t recommend it for a newbie, I would recommend it for anyone who wants the stability of Slackware without the hassle. Zenwalk isn’t the only kid in town, though; other Slackware-based user-friendly distributions with Xfce include Wolvix, Salix OS, and Vector Linux, so please do check those out too. You can the download Zenwalk install CD from here or the live CD from here.
Have you ever installed a sound theme in Ubuntu? No? Well you wouldn’t be alone. Finding extra sound themes for Ubuntu is a task and half in and of itself, and that’s before the rather archaic installation process.
CyanogenMod is one of the biggest hacks to ever hit the Android mobile platform.
It’s got an estimated 500,000 users. Many Android programmers use it as a starting point for their own coding projects. And according to the project’s founder, a number of Google employees have it installed on their Android devices.
Essentially, CyanogenMod is a tricked-out version of the software you’re already running on your Android phone.
Every Android-powered device comes running a version of the operating system, from 1.5 (Cupcake) all the way up to 3.1 (Honeycomb).
Huang made very clear that he thinks Android tablets have to come in at lower price points, emphasizing Wi-Fi over 3G for connections. Meanwhile, there are also strong concerns being voiced over the marketing of Android tablets, or rather, the lack of any unified marketing for them.
That hasn’t stopped powerful new players from entering the Android tablet space, though. Dell has announced plans for an Android tablet, among several other hardware makers.
The Android platform tops the list in sales of smartphone operating systems for the first quarter of 2011, according to a report by market researcher Gartner (NYSE: IT).
Total smartphone sales accounted for 23.6 percent of global handset units overall, and various phones sporting Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android OS took 36 percent of that market. They sold more than 36.3 million units in the quarter. Next in line was Symbian, taking 27.4 percent of the market share. Following were Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) iOS platform with 16.8 percent and Research In Motion’s (Nasdaq: RIMM) BlackBerry platform at 12.9 percent.
As we showed you yesterday, recent prerelease builds of Chrome 13 have an experimental new user interface option that allows users to hide the navigation bar. But Google isn’t the only browser vendor trying to shed toolbar pixels. Mozilla Labs has published an add-on that brings a similarly svelte design to the Firefox Web browser.
“I really am horrified,” said Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It’s quite staggering and it seems to be part of the pattern of the EPA trying to make sure that there are no measurements that could cause people to be concerned.”
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) mortgage traders tried to manipulate prices of derivatives linked to subprime home loans in May 2007 for their own benefit, according to a U.S. Senate report.
Company documents show traders led by Michael J. Swenson sought to encourage a “short squeeze” by putting artificially low prices on derivatives that would gain in value as mortgage securities fell, according to the report yesterday by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The idea, abandoned after market conditions worsened, was to drive holders of such credit-default swaps to sell and help Goldman Sachs traders buy at reduced prices, according to the report.
Apparently, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi will not rest until some Goldman Sachs executives are behind bars. He will not rest until the tarnished company’s reputation lies in tatters on the floor. These goals are admirable. Give Taibbi an ‘A’ for effort. Unfortunately, these noble goals, as much as we might hope for their fulfillment, are unachievable.
Got a chance to meet Josh Rosner (co-author, with Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson, of the new book Reckless Endangerment) last night during an appearance on Eliot Spitzer’s In the Arena. We were brought in to talk about the new investigation of the banks that apparently is being launched by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, which looks like it might be the first for-real attempt at a prosecution of the systemic corruption that led to the financial crisis.
Schneiderman’s probe, news of which came out yesterday in this piece by Morgenson, reportedly targets the banks’ mortgage securitization process during the bubble years. Morgenson reported that Schneiderman is focused on at least three companies: Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and old friend Goldman, Sachs.
Hautala’s draft report on public access to documents for the years 2009-2010 has been published. The report concerns implementation of the regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 on public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents.
Lisbon Treaty introduced a new constitutional framework of EU institutional transparency by establishing a firm fundamental right of access to documents of EU institutions. Now the Regulation does not only cover the Parliament, the Council and the Commission, but also all other EU institutions and agencies.
shame on the newspapers for ruining everything. … Look what these newspapers want to charge you to read an article that didn’t cost even half that if anything at all at the time. … $2.95 to read one single article. Imagine you are some not exactly rich researcher and you are trying to find out what happened to write a book. You can’t afford to do it. … $359.95 for a year’s pass to read anything for 90 days. They call it Pay-per-View. And Google did the digitization for them.
Watching British politicians engage with technology companies is a bit like listening to maiden aunts wondering if they would look better in thongs. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, to name just two such aunts, fantasised that Microsoft was cool, and spent years trying to associate themselves (and New Labour) with Bill Gates – even going to the lengths of making the Microsoft boss an honorary knight. Then we had the equally ludicrous spectacle of Cameron and co believing that Google is cool, which is why its CEO, Eric Schmidt – who for these purposes is the Google Guys’ representative on Earth – was an honoured guest at Cameron’s first party conference as leader. Given that, it’s only a matter of time before Ed Miliband discovers that Facebook is the new cool. And so it will go on.
Posted in Site News at 11:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
TECHBYTES has had to do some research into recording shows with Free software. It was actually our intention since the early days of the show (November 2010) to look into a pipeline which is entirely Free software based. Because of convenience or laziness, we settled for and ended up recording the show under Skype, then doing the rest with Free software. We actually started by experimenting with SIP to some extent while simultaneously looking into a recorder which was compatible with Skype for GNU/Linux. As the show involved many guests (especially at the start) we needed to facilitate Skype access and curtailed the pursuit for a SIP replacement until more recently. Then came the time to record with Richard Stallman, which coincided with the disturbing rumour that Facebook would buy Skype. Eventually it was Microsoft, which can be seen as equally bad.
This post summarises my findings and to some extent Tim’s observations too. We spent many long hours researching the subject, testing many packages, testing the process inside many calls, and making a lot of test recordings, then refining them and adjusting parameters including volume levels. Some listeners provided valuable advice. Some gave application recommendations and here is what was found after a fairly thorough exploration.
The user ordered a serial Express Card for use to control some hardware that needs a serial connection. He said the serial control is not something that is a critical need, just desirable. This needs to work from within the Windows 7 Professional VirtualBox virtual machine. The serial express card is working just fine from Linux. I connected a MultiTech 56k MultiModem to the serial port and used minicom to send AT commands to the modem. I was able to control the modem from minicom. Unfortunately I could not get Windows 7 in the VirtualBox virtual machine to use the serial port. I tried every permutation of serial configuration over a period of about two days and never got Windows 7 to “see” the serial port. The client is going to keep the Express Card so we can keep trying to get it working with remote support. This is in the “iffy” section because it may work in the future even if it is not working now.
The good. Everything else I was able to test works. The sound is working. The wireless NIC connected to our wireless router and pulled an IP address from the wireless router after I entered the WPA2 security information. The wired NIC, when connected to our LAN switch, pulled an IP address from our Linux internet gateway. The DVDRW drive is working to read and write DVDRW discs. USB ports are working. The external headphone and microphone jacks work. I do not have any eSATA hardware, so could not test the eSATA port. As already reported above, the Express Card port works. Even the 1.3 Megapixel Web Camera works. I started Kopete and ran the video configuration to test this.
There of course, is no problem with competition. However, with the rise in the consumption of smartphones and tablet computers, the importance of desktop is slowly waning. Linux on the other hand, is just starting out on its quest for world domination. Will Linux be able to match these new and ‘viral’ trends in technology? Or, will it go down as an operating system that was never meant for normal users? If you ask me, I think Linux has a fair chance of beating the hell out of these tablets and smartphones. Here’s my side of the argument:
This time on Linux Outlaws: More PSN troubles, Microsoft buys Skype, more controversial stuff from Shuttleworth, Miguel de Icaza tries to save Mono, Google adopts Arduino and much, much more…
As soon as the new stable kernel has been released by Linus Torvalds, i downloaded them and install it on my workstation few days ago. It was a nice release, and one thing i would like to test is the new EXT 4 SMP scalability and also further performance improvements after they removed the BKL (Big Kernel Lock) and many other patches from the kernel developers. At that time, i didn’t install it on my desktop first, since i’m not really sure whether the current NVidia driver already supported this new kernel or not.
One of the Clutter tool-kit developers has announced a tiny Wayland compositor that was written and it provides support for multiple display emulation. This Wayland compositor is capable of emulating four displays and for now basically serves as a technical example.
NVIDIA’s Optimus technology allows laptops with the latest Intel chips and NVIDIA graphics cards to automatically switch between Intel’s integrated graphics and NVIDIA’s higher performance graphics depending on what programs you’re running. This allows you to get better battery life when you don’t need bleeding edge graphics, while giving you the ability to play high performance video games without rebooting your computer to manually switch graphics cards.
I don’t know if I should really call darkstat a console program or not. For what I saw, there was very little that it did at the console, with most of the attention going to its web-style output.
Hopefully, some of you may find the compilation useful. If nothing else, it gives you an insight into how I think and work, which might not be that bad of a model for emulating, after all. More importantly, though, it exposes a wealth of resources, including tutorials and reviews, which could help you get around your Linux.
Usually i never open Ubuntu software center, i use aptitude or apt-get, casually the other day i opened it and i noticed that in the what’s new area there were some proprietary games.
Rather than sticking to the UK, about which I know little except for some history and my ancestors escape from the place 150 years ago, consider the world. It is hard to find numbers about one country but M$ files these wonderful summaries about the world…
It’s been a really really long time since I played on my system last. Actually, it’s been a very long time since I played a PC game at all. I used to be an avid gamer a few years back, and Counterstrike and Age of Empires were my favourites.
Phil Hassey author of the Galcon Fusion games has releases his Ludum Dare Game Jam competition entry, which is free to download on the following platforms Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and IOS.
One of the things I had time to try, but didn’t have time to write about, was a revisit to someone else’s idea. I do that quite often, now that I think about it.
This time it was urukrama’s tabbed desktop from a couple of years ago. Things like that tend to roll around in my mind, and then bubble up after a while.
When we look at the thread, we can distinguish three groups of people participating:
1. Users – they either like or dislike the behavior
2. Application developers – they consider the behavior as a bug which breaks their application. They want the behavior either weakened or disabled by default
3. Workspace developers – they consider the behavior as a feature provided by the workspace. It is not a bug that the window can be dragged. No application gets broken by it; in the worst case it’s an annoying, but very consistent behavior.
Last week, in my blog on the Maturity Level List and in the previous week’s Maturity Levels, I left some indications of what would be expected of a maintainer of a portion of the Qt codebase. In this blog I’d like to explain a bit more what’s expected of people working via the Qt Open Governance, what roles will exist and what responsibilities will each have.
this short video shows the new ui for the configuration of an activity: right now you can configure the activity name and wallpaper, probably more options to come (even tough it will remain as simple as possible). It is accessed by a button on the activity switcher weel or from the activity itself (if the used Plasma containment provides a config button)
In between demoing his comic art and joining in the discussions during the meeting, an artist’s hands are never idle! So Animtim prepared this little collection of Krita hackers and artists… Only he himself is missing! So meet the gang, rendered by the Sketch brush!
Another screencast preview of the new Mandriva Application Manager (the name may be changed to Mandriva Package Manager or else, once we plan to have a web version, more focused on applications) has been published at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHKDpl8UKMQ . It maintains some features from the original design but is more native oriented. One of the main difference is that now instead of Get,
I’ve been watching the Ubuntu “power users” group set up with enormous interest. Although Ubuntu has aimed squarely at being easy to use, I’ve never seen it as being particularly unfriendly toward power users, and the idea of needing a specific area in which people can talk about power user issues seems somewhat odd. However – judging from the activity, it seems to have hit a real nerve. Whether or not it is a good idea in the long term remains to be seen: I’m firmly of the opinion that splitting communities into factions is a bad idea, so how they will overcome that in time will be a challenge, but clearly it’s meeting a real need.
[...] the need for Fedora to be open and welcoming is more important now than ever.
Package management and the repositories of software in distributions like Debian GNU/Linux are one of the great features of GNU/Linux. For most individuals and organizations, installing and updating packages from the repositories will be the best way to manage IT. Most of the work is done by the package managers and the end-user can do periodic or instant updates according to his needs.
The state of MA, whose IT is run by that other OS even fell prey to this thing and, for weeks, account information and access to accounts was given to a band of thieves. The malware hid itself and used multiple APIs of that other OS to infect PCs on the LAN and every USB drive inserted. Isn’t it time for this nonsense to end? Use Debian GNU/Linux and take control of your PC.
Psensor 0.6.2.8 has been released and is now available in its unstable repository. Psensor is a graphical temperature monitoring tool for Linux. Psensor has already been added to Ubuntu 11.10 archives so it will be available to download from software center in Oneiric.
Gnome 3 stack is steadily landing into Oneiric. Work is also being done to port default themes Ambiance and Radiance to GTK3.
Light themes in Oneiric will most likely use Unico theme engine and not Murrine as some style guidelines for GTK3 themes have changed. Unico was actively developed in past but the work stopped as the new overlay scrollbars in Natty took precedence. Unico engine is already present in Official Ubuntu 11.04 repositories but that should be only meant for testing purposes as it is far from being finished. However, the development has resumed now.
I’ve been sick. Or, as our British-speaking readers might say, I’ve been ill. Just about as ill as you can be and still manage to drag yourself in to work. Congestion, fever, sore throat, ugly disgusting gunk ejected in huge heaving coughing fits. Lost my voice, too, more or less. Not completely, but enough that I sound like a bullfrog. Ill.
This is to explain the stasis.
But to break the stasis, I bring you soaring praise of Linux Mint 10.
As regular readers may remember, I switched my laptop to Mint 10 two weeks ago. The more I use it, the happier I am with it. It has been absolutely rock stable, no interface glitches whatsoever. It boots fast, it looks great (although part of that is my doing, from tweaking the fonts and themes and adding Docky and such). I’ve grown fond of the Mint menu and am starting to prefer it over the default Gnome menu. Applications look great and come up fast. KDE apps work and look fine too. It never crashes, never locks up. Nothing breaks it. Even the shutdown splash – traditionally a crapshoot in Ubuntu-based distros since they adopted Plymouth – works consistently.
T-Mobile has an aggressive lineup of predominantly Android-based smartphones planned for this summer, starting with the 4.3-inch HTC Sensation 4G on Jun 8, followed later by a slider version of the MyTouch 4G, according to a leaked roadmap. Meanwhile, Android continued to make gains in the latest Millennial Media and Gartner studies, with Gartner pegging Android’s global 1Q smartphone share at a dominating 36 percent.
Dell is set to roll out its long-rumored, 10.1-inch Streak Pro tablet in June with Android 3.0, according to an industry report. The business-focused tablet is said to run on an Nvidia Tegra 2, and offers dual cameras and up to a 64GB solid state drive (SSD).
We asked if open-source software had a part to play in increasing technological innovation in the UK. It seems that for a nation with such a great engineering heritage, we have too easily passed the tech leadership flag over to the US and to the emerging economies.
Steve George from Canonical speculated that open-source software could inspire more people to engage with technology, and that the UK’s firmly closed-source infrastructure could be stifling innovation, making us less competitive on the global stage.
And then you, the beloved readers of El Reg, joined the fray.
Most people seem to agree that the UK could be doing better. Oliver Jones offers the following: “In computing terms, I have long thought of the UK as being a ‘read-only’ nation. They love shiny Apple products and Sony PlayStations, but have zero interest in learning how to make something better.
As a software developer for federal agencies, our company might have reason to be afraid of a new trend — giving away software products for free. Sounds like a losing business model, doesn’t it?
But, in fact, we think it’s a great idea for government and our company.
The team at embedded Linux site Free Electrons have published videos from this year’s Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) and Embedded Linux Conference (ELC). The eleventh annual FOSDEM event took place on 5 and 6 February in Brussels, Belgium, and the Embedded Linux Conference was held on 13 and 14 April at the Hotel Kabuki, San Francisco.
I was traveling last week to attend two events: Solutions Linux in Paris and LinuxTag in Berlin. It was a bit unfortunate that they happened during the same week, as they conflicted for two days — which means I missed some days for both events. And on top of that, the Ubuntu Developer Summit was also last week, which resulted in some people missing the events…
Compared to last year, both events had a quite visible difference in terms of number of visitors. I’m not exactly sure why this is so; it could be because there were conflicts with other events, or also because they moved to first half of May, which is different from previous years.
What was most amazing, however, was to be present at booths just one month after the GNOME 3.0 release. For both events, we had tons of GNOME 3 PromoDVDs (kindly offered on behalf of the openSUSE project) to give away, and that was a big success: I think we gave around 600 of them at Solutions Linux and probably a similar amount, if not more, at LinuxTag (Tobias would know better than me here).
Being able to type the address of a website is one of the most essential features we expect from web browsers today. Yet it is the URL bar and its purpose that is now being reconsidered by both Google as well as Mozilla for Chrome and Firefox. The next major revision of web browsers will include options to hide the URL bar. Further down the road, it is inevitable that the URL bar will become what it is supposed to be: A tool – not more and not less.
Mozilla has released the first Firefox beta under its new rapid-release model: a program designed to ensure more frequent updates to the browser at the expense of huge, sweeping changes between new Firefox versions.
Case in point—the company just sent Firefox 5 from the newly designed Aurora development channel to the public-facing Beta channel. That means that it’s available for public consumption and feedback. However, the list of new features might seem a bit scant at first, especially if one takes into account the historical jumps that have previously occurred between Firefox version numbers.
“The shift to a rapid release development cycle delivers cutting edge Firefox features, performance enhancements, security updates and stability improvements to users faster,” reads the blog post announcing the Firefox 5 beta release.
A lot of the recent “scores” I’ve listed on this site have been from serious institutions: ING, Investor.gov, The U.S. Small Business Administration, and The World Economic Forum.
But don’t think for a moment that Drupal’s losing any ground in other areas. I was in NYC recently, the mecca of the media and entertainment industry, and Drupal is about to get really big there — that’s food for another blog post that I’m planning to write.
Summary: A British journalist explains how, based on his sources, Novell was used by those who conspired to wage anti-competitive wars
JOURNALIST/COLUMNIST Eric Doyle has a couple of interesting posts about Novell, and about SUSE in particular. Now that AttachMSFT separates SUSE from itself, Doyle’s well-researched commentary suggests that “Novell’s bright hopes for SuSE failed to shine, but a chance encounter in a London bar may explain how the downhill run started…”
Be sure to read the part after the encounter is described. “Not quite an “apres-ski binge” but, nonetheless, an alcohol-fuelled encounter around 10pm in a London hotel bar during an Infosecurity conference” he explains. “I fell into conversation with a fellow delegate who claimed to be a pig farmer involved in RFID tests. Given my agricultural background, he had picked the wrong journalist to con and I soon blew his cover. After around four hours of elusive badinage about his real identity, he eventually cracked and confessed to being a former Novell employee.”
“After around four hours of elusive badinage about his real identity, he eventually cracked and confessed to being a former Novell employee.” –Eric DoyleNotice how he uses our picture of Steve Ballmer riding SUSE’s mascot. We made this picture for “Boycott Novell” and what he says about the conspiracy to unseat competition only further validates our suspicions. There is also an accompanying article from Doyle. Excellent work and a case of real journalism. It says that “Four divisions will house Attachmate’s products and those gained through its purchase of Novell” (Novell sliced down and reorganised itself about a year and a half ago).
Be sure to read the part after the encounter is described. “Not quite an “apres-ski binge” but, nonetheless, an alcohol-fuelled encounter around 10pm in a London hotel bar during an Infosecurity conference” he explains. “I fell into conversation with a fellow delegate who claimed to be a pig farmer involved in RFID tests. Given my agricultural background, he had picked the wrong journalist to con and I soon blew his cover. After around four hours of elusive badinage about his real identity, he eventually cracked and confessed to being a former Novell employee.”
