As someone who deals with Puppet quite a lot at work, I had the great pleasure of speaking to longtime open source pundit James Turnbull, who recently co-authored his latest book “Pro Puppet” through Apress Media with colleague Jeffrey McCune of Puppet Labs. This is his fifth technical book about open source software. “Pro Puppet” is an in-depth book about how to install, use, and develop Puppet, the popular open source systems management platform used by organizations including Twitter, Rackspace, Digg, Genentech and more.
Q&A with James Turnbull
1. What in your estimation is the number of servers (including virtual instances) that run Puppet at any level of capacity?
A: This is a question that I ponder every few months. Our largest installation is around 50,000 nodes and we have several more at the 25,000 to 50,000 node range. Given the size of the community, I think we’ve quite easily reached the million plus node mark.
“Given the size of the community, I think we’ve quite easily reached the million plus node mark.” –James Turnbull2. Throughout your work on the book, have you had a chance to
measure/survey the operating systems on which Puppet is deployed? Have you any insight regarding the distribution of usage?
A: Puppet Labs did a survey earlier in the year and gathered some data about usage. Based on that and interactions with the community I think we can pretty comfortably say that our core operating systems are Linux-based with Red Hat (and derivatives) and Ubuntu/Debian being the biggest platforms. The next largest block is Solaris with a smaller number of OSX, *BSD, HP UX and pSeries/AIX systems also being represented.
3. There is a common perception that Free/Open Source software suffers from deficient documentation and lack of support (despite this being the business model of many companies). How do you challenge these types of allegations?
A: This is a common perception that regularly makes me laugh. I usually respond that all software has deficient documentation and lacks support! It’s true some open source tools lack documentation but others, for example MySQL, have exemplary documentation. Some open source software communities are hard to get help from and others fall over themselves to help people out. I’m always immensely proud of how the Puppet community, which is largely made up of some of the busiest people in IT – sysadmins, goes out of its way to help newcomers and share knowledge.
Of course this same problem is present across enterprise and commercial software. Otherwise authors wouldn’t be able to sell books offering insights into using commercial software. It’s even perhaps somewhat worse for enterprise software where submitting a bug request can lack transparency and where examples of how others have solved issues can be hard to find or perceived as proprietary information.
4. How can your book address or assist a crowd of people with no prior knowledge of UNIX/Linux and how can it assist those who are familiar with everything but Puppet?
A: Pro Puppet is aimed at users with some Linux/Unix knowledge, albeit at a fairly basic level — a few friends and I created an earlier book called Pro Linux System Administration designed to teach someone with zero Linux knowledge how to be a Linux sysadmin. Pro Puppet is aimed at junior and mid-level sysadmins looking to get started with Puppet and take them through to advanced topics like scaling and extending Puppet.
5. What impact do you foresee the licensing changes from the GPL to the Apache licence as having?
A: Both the GPL and Apache licenses are free and open source licenses and we’re very much staying true to our open source roots. However where we are with Puppet now we need a license that people, for whatever reasons, consider easier to integrate with. In the open source world that license is Apache and we’re already starting to see Puppet being used heavily as an integrated tools in Cloud and Infrastructure/Platform as a service (IAAS, PAAS) offerings as a result.
6. Manual operators of Puppet seem to rely mostly on the initial setup. What proportion of the work would you say a Puppet expert needs to invest in setting up the software compared to the overall lifetime of a box and its operation?
A: With Puppet, the large proportion of the work you need to do to get started is up front. Once you’ve done that work setting up new boxes becomes a routine and easy task. Maintaining and managing them is also fast and simple. Indeed, one of the benefits of Puppet is that not only do you get fast and automated setup, but you can make sure they stay the way you configured them for as long as you need. That ability to stem the tide of configuration drift and limit the potential for human error and entropy causing issues is an enormous timesaver.
7. What is the most eccentric/fascinating/uncommon use of Puppet that you have come across?
A: One that fascinated me recently is the Deutsche Flugsicherung, the German air traffic control network, who use Puppet to ensure all the operator workstations and tower servers are up to date. They have a very strict and structured work flow and an interesting deployment model where any configuration drift is anathema. I also find Air Traffic Control really interesting (I’m a geek it’s true) so it was pretty exciting to see Puppet being used in such an interesting arena.
8. Puppet functionality lags behind in platforms such as Windows. What would you advise organisations that choose to run it on this platform?
A: We’re actively working on Microsoft Windows support but we’re not there yet. What we’d love to see is people telling us what they need. I’m not primarily a Windows guy so I actually don’t know what the pain points are for Windows sysadmins. If a few of them could tell us “If you automated these 4, 5, 10 things that would make my job easier!” then that would help us structure that future support.
9. How does Puppet compare to its proprietary counterparts?
A: I think the key difference is time to value or as I prefer “how long before I’m doing something useful”. Often when you install one of the larger proprietary tools it can take significant time and people to deliver value or to get things done. We find people can download Puppet, install it and be doing something useful in a matter of minutes or an hour rather than months.
“One of the new features in Puppet 2.6.0 though was a Ruby DSL for Puppet. This allows any developer (and sysadmins too) to write their Puppet manifests in Ruby.” –James Turnbull10. If one receives proper training or learns from your book, how would the difficulty of using Puppet compare to the difficulty of using other products that are out in the market?
A: I think Puppet is pretty easy to use (but I’m also biased!). It does have rough edges and things that are hard to get your head around though. One thing I think we do really well in the book is build on knowledge. You can start simple and grow into the more complex topics. I think having that sort of resource makes it really easy for people to learn how to use Puppet. The other resource I’m really excited about is a new section in the documentation called Learning Puppet (http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning/) that offers a similar “grow into using it” experience.
I think as a result of having the book plus documentation and training available that makes Puppet a lot less difficult to understand than some of the alternatives out there.
11. How would you say the Puppet learning curve compares if a programmer and non-programmer were both faced with the task of learning it?
A: I recently came to the conclusion that I now spend more time cutting code than I do being a sysadmin which is a big change in my life. As a result I’ve been thinking about how both groups approach learning and problems. I think for a lot of sysadmins Puppet is very easy to engage with. Puppet’s language is a logical extension for people use to dealing with configuration files and scripts.
For developers that’s perhaps not as natural a progression and some have struggled in the past with learning Puppet. One of the new features in Puppet 2.6.0 though was a Ruby DSL for Puppet. This allows any developer (and sysadmins too) to write their Puppet manifests in Ruby. This approach is something that may make more sense and make it easier for developers to learn Puppet.
As a result of this Ruby interface (which we cover in the book too) I think the learning curve for both non-developers and developers is rapidly approaching parity.
Conclusion:
We would like to thank James for being available for this interchange of insights and we hope his literature will spread Puppet to more and more companies, aiding the spread of Free/open source in systems management. Puppet sure helps the company that I work for. █
Summary: The European Commission makes strategic mistakes that weaken Europe and give more power to its rivals across the Atlantic, especially gruesome software monopolists
TECHRIGHTS has a lot of respect for Neelie Kroes and the Commission, but if the current agenda is to pay American companies for the privilege of running systems with American back doors (e.g. FBI access), then the European Digital Agenda (note capitalisation) is a bit of a farce. It also puts the continent at great risk in case of a future war.
A couple of years ago we showed how the Commission had been manipulated by lobbyists, then we also showed dubious appointments that made the Commission somewhat hostile towards Free software, and arguably European SMEs too. See for instance some of the following posts:
In the video above, Neelie speaks not in her mother’s tongue and she actually maintains an interesting YouTube channel a lot of which is in Dutch. She did a better job in the Commission than some of her successors, whom we recently showed to be supportive of RAND (with software patents). They are being stuffed by lobbyists and the following new comments berates them for it. The European commenter writes:
If I am not mistaken Oracle is an American company and Mingorance a lobbyist of an American rightsholder organisation. I can’t see how views from American lobbyists are relevant for a European Digital Agenda, other than that we have to break free from our US lock-ins in the digital markets. In other words, let’s do what hurts them most. Small companies from Europe, companies which actually pay their taxes in Europe, are excluded here. What had the Commission in mind?
In the past, back when the Commission did some laudable work with the likes of Neelie in the right chair, telling off the Commission would seem unreasonably disrespectful. But things have changed. Right now, for example, even the FSFE criticises the Commission by showing that it sets a bad example for others to follow. To quote:
In the Commission’s answer to Staes, EC Vice-President Maros Sefcovic argues that “[t]he Commission does not rely on (or is locked into) one single software vendor”, citing the fact that the Commission’s IT infrastructure uses software from many different vendors.
[...]
While lock-in is a problem that troubles many organisations, our next concern is quite specific to this case: We believe that the European Commission should have put out a public call for tender when it wanted a new software platform. Instead, the EC simply declares that the move to Windows 7 is just an “upgrade” – just a newer version of the same product.
If “it’s just an upgrade” becomes acceptable as an excuse to ignore the competition and cozy up to a single supplier, then Europe’s market is in trouble; and not just the one for software. Imagine a local administration that decides to have the town’s main street repaved by the same company that built it in the first place, saying that they’re just “upgrading” the road surface. No new competitor would ever get a foot in the door. Public bodies would hardly ever have to hold competitive bidding procedures for any type of product or service they’ve bought before. This simply cannot be right.
The foundation of Europe’s procurement rules, Directive 2004/18/EC, says that those rules are intended to guarantee the opening-up of public procurement to competition. But it looks like in this instance, the EC has found a way to sidestep that goal, letting inertia (let’s be kind here, ok?) take precedence over competition and long-term value for Europe’s citizens. The Commission itself feels the need to emphasise that “it always complies with public procurement legislation”. We’d certainly hope so.
It doesn’t help that the EC is obviously confused on the commercial nature of Free Software when it uses “open source” as the opposite of “commercial software”. Some people in the Commission seem to believe that there is no money to be made with Free Software. The many companies that have built their business on software freedom would certainly argue otherwise.
This is not the first such complaint from the FSFE.
Whatever happened to the European Commission, it is now in danger of earning notoriety just like NATO or the UN. If it allows itself to be steered by lobbyists and monopolies, then there is no longer need for it. Taxpayers just do not receive what they paid for, not even fines imposed on Microsoft for breaking the law [1, 2] (which has cost European citizens a lot of money over the years). We need the ‘old’ Neelie back — the assertive one, not the softened one. █
Summary: Microsoft and pet trolls want to carve out a profit from every desktop, tablet, phone etc. even if it does not run Windows; Rick Falkvinge, who used to work for Microosft, calls for the abolishment of all patents
THE ridiculous patent system in the United States is under growing pressure to be scraped or radically reformed. It has become an international laughing stock and at times a national embarrassment. Not every idea deserves a monopoly and some would say that not a single idea deserves a monopoly enforced by the government. According to this new report, Linux-based devices from Motorola are going to be taxed because of some terrible patent:
A Motorola Inc. unit on Tuesday became the latest electronics maker to settle a patent holder’s Texas infringement suit over the double-clicking technology used in the Droid and Droid X smartphones and other popular mobile devices.
To provide some context and background, it is the infamous “Double-Click Lawsuit”, which is hinged on a patent from a Microsoft Gold Partner, namelypatent #7,171,625: “Double-clicking a point-and-click user interface apparatus to enable a new interaction with content represented by.”
While the USPTO continues to granted stupid software patents, patent trolls will get hold of these and tax the market at the expense of every buyer and developer. In a sane system, patent trolls should have no right to exist; they are parasites that are also sometimes used as litigation proxies for larger entities. They are like the mafia mob.
I’m going to take a break today from visiting obscure search systems (and writing long 2-part posts) to share with you a delightful patent application that I hold very close to my heart. I usually don’t spend my spare time reading the image file wrappers of US patent applications in PAIR, but I will openly admit that I spent a solid two hours one Saturday morning reading the entire file for US Application No. 11/161,345.
Guess what it’s all about?
No wonder people wish not to even bother reviewing patents. This whole system is ripe for abuse and it empowers abusers.
If it was up to Rick Falkvinge of Pirate Party fame (the original one, in Sweden), there would be no patents at all (software or otherwise). He quotes startup Investors as saying that “Patents are a cancer” and reiterates his points that he made in his talks before (we shared them back in 2009):
One oft-questioned objective of the Pirate Parties is the dismantlement of the patent system, as in scrapping the concept altogether. Patents are a remnant from the guild era that has never served to advance the rate of innovations, but always to brake it in favor of incumbent industries. It should have been killed when free enterprise laws were enacted worldwide in mid-1850s, but wasn’t.
The patent system delayed the Industrial Revolution by 30 years, broadcast radio by five to ten years, powered flight by 25 years… I could go on and on. And today, it’s no different. The situation certainly isn’t helped by clueless politicians who measure “innovation” as “number of filed patent applications”, which is about as useful as measuring “economic growth” as “number of smashed windows”. It’s not just unrelated, the correlation is strongly negative.
This is important: the patent system hasn’t derailed just recently. It was always a retardant on innovation. It’s just that the pace of ideas has picked up, and so this fact has become much more apparent — and much more damaging.
This truthful statement is somewhat of a taboo in the circles of patent lawyers, who are wagging this dog (USPTO) by its tail. Time for reform or reboot, no? █
Summary: Firms with Microsoft roots do a disservice to FOSS and a favour to the Microsoft agenda
THE SUBJECT of Microsoft veterans turning to the FUD business was addressed here thricerecently.
This is a serious issue that definitely deserves more attention. One journalist who used to edit the Linux Today Web site (Brian Proffitt) writes about the latest from Black Duck:
I pulled a thread today, and found a little FUD that turned out to be a marketing pitch.
The headline on my newsreader read “Legal Challenges in Android Development,” with a byline on Law.com. This sounded like another legal expert taking potshots at Android, so I clicked the link to see what was what.
What I found was an article that, while not as harsh as some I have seen, seemed to single out Android development as more potentially hazardous to a developer’s legal health than other open source projects.
Imagine, then, my surprise when I noted that the article’s author was Mark F. Radcliffe, who currently acts as the General Counsel for the Open Source Initiative.
The article, in and of itself, wasn’t too far afield of any other kind of licensing article a lawyer might put together. Know your license, know what you’re getting into, and execute plans accordingly. Open source fans may get jumpy about such advice, because we tend to get defensive, but in truth it’s no different than any advice about any license, proprietary or otherwise. “Respect the License” is solid advice no matter the license.
And on it goes.
Black Duck was in fact delivering FOSS FUD for quite a while. Its support of software patents (by action) does not contribute much to its credibility and it is one thing that they have in common with Microsoft Florian. the headline in Linux Today was “Is Black Duck spreading FUD about Android for profit?”
Aptly titled. It’s a rhetorical question. But Black Duck is not the only for-profit entity which is doing it. There are also many corruptible analysts whom Microsoft pays to parrot its own nonsense and consultant whom Microsoft hires (i.e. pays money to) for bias, or at least for self-censorship. Some of these analysts eventually receive a wage from Microsoft, but not before they manage to also pollute the minds of journalists who receive free trips to the US, funded by Microsoft. Recall what we wrote about the standards debate after Winterford had accepted a bribe from Microsoft [1, 2] (and brainwash from a so-called ‘analyst’,Peter O’Kelly, who would later get a job from Microsoft). Sadly enough, this is how the industry works and to be blind to it or unaware of it leads to bafflement.
Interestingly enough, years after the embarrassing incident Winterford highlights the situation with Silverlight, whose adopters are being abandoned by Microsoft like weshowed earlier this month (the same goes for Moonlight developers, who helped ‘openwash’ Silverlight and merely pretend it was cross-platform). He notes that:
Thousands of Silverlight developers converged on Microsoft’s forum pages to ask why there was no mention of Silverlight or .Net in the vendor’s brief video preview of the upcoming operating system.
Developers expressed fears Microsoft might let their investment in skills “die on the vine” as Redmond finally embraces open standards.
The same goes for those who went with OOXML, which even Microsoft did not follow (it was just about getting a rubber stamp). Well, maybe it’s for the better because OOXML is a patent infringement and Microsoft has just lost the case over this in SCOTUS. The following news is just in:
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Microsoft Corp. must pay a $290 million judgment awarded to a small Toronto software company for infringing on one of its patents inside its popular Microsoft Word program.
The high court unanimously refused to throw out the judgment against the world’s largest software maker.
Toronto-based i4i sued Microsoft in 2007, saying it owned the technology behind a tool used in Microsoft Word. The technology in question gave Word 2003 and Word 2007 users an improved way to edit XML, which is computer code that tells the program how to interpret and display a document’s contents.
The lower courts say Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft willfully infringed on the patent, and ordered the world’s largest software maker to pay i4i $290 million and stop selling versions of Word containing the infringing technology.
We are going to write about this later. Time to end software patents, right? Well, Microsoft would not like that. To Microsoft, “bad” patents are only those that are used against it. █
Google has discontinued its specialised Linux and BSD search pages. The services at google.com/linux and google.com/bsd offered search which was limited to a specific topic by searching only relevant web sites, message boards, blogs and other hand-selected sources of information. Users are instead now redirected to google.com/webhp, a standard search page.
While Canada’s Internet experience is, at present, nothing like the filtered and monitored mess you’d get in say, China, there are some troubling signs ahead. Chief among them is the looming spectre of “lawful access” — explained here by Dr. Michael Geist and the subject of this recent episode of Jesse Brown‘s Search Engine podcast.
Fortunately, if you’re a Linux user like me there’s no shortage of options to protect your anonymity on the ‘net — hell, there’s an entire distribution dedicated to keeping your online affairs private.
Supercomputing group iVEC has invited its first applications from researchers seeking access to its $5 million Linux cluster at Murdoch University.
The so-called Epic@Murdoch was officially launched by Innovation Minister Kim Carr and State Science and Innovation Minister John Day yesterday, after some five months’ use by ‘early adopters’.
Unless you build your own PC (or get one made from your local PC store), or you want a high-end gaming machine, it’s pretty uncommon to find PC towers on the market. But online retailer Millennius has bucked that trend, launch five new tower PCs, all of them running Ubuntu.
The Btrfs file-system has various “shiny” features like support for copy-on-write snapshots, cloning, transactions, sub-volumes, SSD optimizations, transparent LZO/Zlib compression, and many other advanced features by Linux file-system standards. The problem with Btrfs is that the next-generation file-system is still in development and hasn’t yet been proven via years of use and testing yet as being a stable and reliable solution. Most Linux distributions continue using the EXT4 file-system by default, but now there may be snapshot support coming back to EXT4.
This shouldn’t be news for anyone who has followed the Phoronix articles for Ubuntu 11.10, particularly from the UDS Budapest event, but here’s the official X.Org plans for this next Ubuntu Linux release.
NVIDIA’s Linux/Unix engineering team has issued a new Linux beta driver in the 275.xx series. To succeed the first 275.xx Linux beta that was put out a few weeks back, NVIDIA has released the 275.09.04 Beta. There’s only a few changes in this beta released today, but among them is support for the GL_EXT_x11_sync_object extension.
CHIPMAKER Intel has announced that it will release the source code for its Distributed Scene Graph 3D Internet technology.
Intel has been pushing Opensim, an open source virtual world simulator for education, social networking and of course gaming. Intel’s work has been concentrated on how to increase the number of people, known as avatars, that can inhabit a virtual world from hundreds to thousands.
Though not without its faults, Audio Tag Tool is a basic but proficient audio file tag editor. It’s an easy and accessible way to modify individual tags on music file and manage songs’ information fields with its mass tag and mass rename features. You can also apply tags to multiple files but modify them with different tag content.
There are increasing numbers of pro-grade photo tools available for the Linux platform. This article explains just what you need to perform your complete photo workflow using the world’s most popular free operating system.
Popular puzzle game ‘Braid’ is the newest addition to Ubuntu Software Center, available in purchase section. First released for XBox Live in 2008, Braid has been highly rated by game reviewers and was also the part of Humble Indie Bundle 2.
A number of days ago we showed the first screenshot of Desura running natively on Linux. Now there’s more details about the state of the Linux implementation of this Steam-like client for digital games distribution.
There’s a Desura.com Linux update. The Desura development team created a basic Linux boot-loader for the main executable, the user-interface is now rendering, Chromium Embedded was ported to Linux for support with GTK and WxWidgets, and various other milestones hit.
Together, GNOME 3, KDE, and Unity probably account for at least two-thirds of Linux desktops. However, each of the three offers a desktop experience that differs strongly from the other two, and nowhere is that difference stronger than in the use of virtual desktops. In fact, few other features show so clearly the design philosophies behind the three desktops.
Virtual desktops go by a variety of names. Unity and the GNOME 2 series of releases call them workspaces, while GNOME 3 calls them activities. KDE offers activities, each of which can be divided into separate virtual desktops. However, all the names refer to the same basic concept: additional spaces that you can use to reduce the clutter on your screen and organize your open windows.
This weekend a group of KDE hackers met in a small mountain village, Randa, in Switzerland to discuss the future of the KDE Frameworks. I was not present, but started on Saturday an endevour for the future of the KDE Plasma Workspaces. Yesterday evening I arrived in the new world:
Gnome Shell Extension notify you for how long you been setting since you activate the toggle timer extensions so you can take a break of whatever you are doing or start working on other stuff.
By Default Pomodoro extensions change number of cycle every 25 minutes and the cycle start counting by one.
After spending a little time with it, I have to say it’s a very nice first effort from the Mageia team, and I look forward to spending some more time with it. Lots of very up-to-date software, lots of desktop environments available, and, of course, the drakeconf tools.
A few months ago DEX was introduced to work with the Debian Front Desk to aid Linux developers in contributing back upstream to Debian. The Front Desk provides resources such as documentation, contacts, and a discussion forum in this goal, but DEX goes a step further by organizing developers from Debian and Debian derivatives to monitor and merge changes into the Debian development tree. They hoped this would make the contributing back process easier for those derivatives to better the Debian codebase.
Today we got our first update on their progress. Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu and Debian developer (among many other things), has blogged that their first goal has been reached.
’m very happy with Ubuntu as a desktop operating system. I’ve used it for years with no significant issues. In fact, Ubuntu excels where other disributions fail. Even Linux arch rival Windows, is often left in the last century compared to the innovations perpetrated by the Canonical group. But what about Natty Narwhal? Is the hype worth the effort? I’d have to say, “Yes.” Although, I’m not 100 percent sold on Unity, I’m impressed with its boot speed, shutdown speed, and snappy performance. Oh, and there’s that little matter of The Launcher.
“Ubuntu has many good points, not the least of which are kick-starting serious effort in making a really good desktop Linux, making inroads into the commercial computer market, genuinely welcoming new contributors, and inspiring hosts of respins and derivatives. Think back to the pre-Ubuntu days– Debian releases were stretching out ever longer (over three years!), Mandriva is perennially in crisis, Red Hat is uninterested in the consumer market….hmmm, methinks I spy an article in this subject.” (emphasis added)
So I’ll take a bow for contributing to the inspiration behind Carla writing this article, which is outstanding. Its outstanding nature outshines the fact that there are a couple of minuscule glitches in the article itself — one is that while Red Hat may not care about the desktop market, it established Fedora Core and the Fedora Project at the same time it “went enterprise” (not terribly clear in the article), and Fedora started roughly a year before Ubuntu came along. Also, for all the great things it rightfully says about Ubuntu — let me repeat that, for all the great things it rightfully says about Ubuntu — it still doesn’t address the community’s lack of technical contributions back to the greater FOSS community, for starters.
If you’re interested in testing out this on a WeTab, you’ll need the accelerometer driver in the kernel, udev git (or udev 172 when it’s released) and gnome-settings-daemon master.
Paula Hunter is the executive director of the Outercurve Foundation. With over two decades of open source experience, she has served in leadership roles at organizations such as Open Source Development Labs and United Linux. Follow her on Twitter @huntermkt.
Free and open source software (FOSS) is at the root of the most innovative products, technologies and services of our time. The Social Network may have taken some Hollywood liberties, but there’s still a big story to tell about today’s colleges as the hotbeds of innovation, much of it driven by FOSS.
Think of the kind of financial services firms that populate Wall Street and the City of London. The sort of collaborative ethos that surrounds open source does not immediately come to mind. Rather we see images of cut throat competition and a boundless desire to create a competitive edge, any way, any how.
I recently read a mail on the KDE core-devel mailinglist by Eike Hein. It was quite a good description of the value of opinions and ideas for a FOSS project – something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately.
I will let other people debate Oracle’s motivations, Apache vs. The Document Foundation (TDF), etc. but here are a few interesting facts: OpenOffice is one of the most successful and vast open source projects in the world (1.2 million downloads a week and 135 million known distributions). OpenOffice.org gets 10x the number of unique visitors as the Apache.org homepage itself, according to Compete. By measures of downloads and web traffic, OpenOffice is as relevant as ever.
There’s the OpenOffice.org handoff — or as some would put it, the OO.o drop kick — to the Apache Foundation by Oracle. This comes as no surprise. If Oracle were a good FOSS citizen, they’d have given it to the Document Foundation and LibreOffice would be its rightful heir. But this is Oracle we’re talking about, right? With Oracle finally washing their hands of OO.o, it remains to be seen what becomes of it. But since the barn door has been open for quite some time and the LibreOffice horse is at home out in the pasture, I am not sure if keeping OO.o around would be worth it.
FreeNAS is a popular FreeBSD-based operating system for network-attached storage (NAS). Thanks to the easy-to-use web interface, you don’t have to know anything about the FreeBSD base under the hood to share your files…
Enthusiasm for eBooks seems to know no bounds these days, with Amazon even noting that its eBook sales are outpacing sales of hardback and paperback books. Free software pundit Richard Stallman isn’t having any of the trend, though. In an article titled “The Dangers of eBooks,” highlighted by PC Pro, Stallman builds a case against eBooks. His rant is not dissimilar to the one he recently supplied against smartphones, where he even noted that he doesn’t carry a cell phone. When it comes to eBooks, Stallman has some particularly notable objections.
Stallman claims that eBooks “don’t respect our freedom,” and points to the DRM that comes with eBooks downloaded from Amazon (DRM is also built into many eBooks from other suppliers). He also notes that “Amazon requires users to identify themselves to get an eBook.”
Free software guru Richard Stallman has called on consumers to reject eBooks until they “respect our freedom”.
In an article entitled The Dangers of eBooks (PDF), the founder of the Free Software Foundation warns that “technologies that could have empowered us are used to chain us instead”.
He highlights the DRM embedded in eBooks sold by Amazon as an example of such restrictions, citing the infamous case of Amazon wiping copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from users’ Kindles without permission.
Skype has been in the news a lot lately: Microsoft agreed to buy the company, their network has gone down twice recently, and they’re threatening to take unspecified action against developers who try to write free software to make calls on their system. This all merely adds insult to injury; the software has always been nonfree, and that’s why a free software replacement for Skype has been on our High Priority Projects list since October 2008. Lots of people use software like Ekiga and Twinkle to make simple VoIP calls, but they’re still missing some features, and that prevents people from making the switch to using free software. Thankfully, a couple of new projects aim to close this gap, and both have made some promising progress over the last month.
Of the many supporters of a single-payer health care system in the United States, some of the most ardent are small business owners who have struggled to continue offering coverage to their workers.
Among them are David Steil, a small business owner and former Republican state legislator in Pennsylvania who earlier this year became president of the advocacy group Health Care 4 All PA.
Another supporter is Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, who last Thursday signed a bill that sets the stage for the country’s first single-payer plan. If all goes as Shumlin and the bill’s many backers hope, all 620,000 Vermonters will eventually be enrolled in a state-run plan to replace Blue Cross, CIGNA and other private insurers whose business practices have contributed to the number of Vermonters without coverage — approximately 60,000 and growing.
A new report by some top scientists has nailed it down, and Monsanto isn’t going to be happy. The Agri-giant has built its entire business model, including genetically modified (GMO) crops that dominate the US market, around its Roundup brand herbicide.
They last thing they want to admit is that it causes birth defects.
But that’s just what a group of scientists from a diverse group – including Cambridge University, the King’s College London School of Medicine, and the Institute of Biology, UNICAMP, São Paulo, Brazil – have found.
But it’s not like Americans haven’t tried to reduce their use of the primary energy source–oil. In the chart below, we can see that US consumption of oil, expressed in BTU, has fallen dramatically from the highs of mid-decade. While the US consumption of coal and natural gas—and also wind and solar power—has rebounded more strongly since the 2009 lows, US consumption of oil is still down nearly 11.00% from peak. This aspect of the story contains both good news and bad news, which I will explain below. | see: US Annual Petroleum Consumption in Quadrillion BTU 1995-2010.
The latest BP Statistical Review was published in London this morning, and following a theme presented for years at Gregor.us, global growth in coal consumption continues to soar. Now that global oil production is flat, and is no longer able to fund new industrial expansion, coal remains the cheap BTU and of course the preferred energy source of the Developing World (non-OECD).
Former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold led the march from Madison Fire Station 1 toward the Capitol. Feingold was born in Janesville, Wisconsin, and marched up to the Capitol with Rock County AFSCME member past the standing “Walkerville” tent encampment, whose friendly inhabitants set up refreshment tables to help crowds battle the crushing heat. Feingold refused to address speculation that he might oppose Scott Walker in the next election, but signs, T-shirts and chants of “Russ for Governor” indicated mounting support for his candidacy.
A 14-year-old girl from Russia was so scared of the May 21 doomsday and rapture prediction made by Harold Camping that she committed suicide the same day, investigators said Wednesday. The teenager wanted to choose death rather than be among the ones suffering on earth after the rapture.
North Carolina has some of the most stringent consumer protection rules in the country against predatory lending. In 2010, lending groups ramped up campaign contributions [pdf] to elect lawmakers more hospitable to their interests, and are now pushing a bill that would allow lenders to raise the interest rates they charge on consumer loans — and reaching out to African-American voters who would be among those most affected by the measure.
Yes, it may be available for free if you want to download it yourself and install it, but as you note, for Wall Street that doesn’t necessarily tend to be a big selling issue. No, the big thing about open source is how it makes everybody be in control of their own destiny. … it’s why so many technical people are happy about Linux too. Even when they don’t necessarily personally get involved with the development, they know that they could … , you really can tailor things (or pay others to tailor it for you)
I get nauseated when people use obfuscation cloaked in science to confuse people about issues that relate directly to their health. This morning when I read the testimony of a consultant to industry who is using a Senate committee hearing to attack EPA’s regulations on clean air, I felt that familiar nausea.
The analysis found that guests opposed EPA regulations 76 percent of the time, with only 18 percent in favor of stricter rules. It also found that in 17 months of coverage, only one guest who appeared to discuss the issue was an actual climate scientist — and that was Patrick Michaels, a Virginia-based climatologist who has come under fire from his mainstream colleagues for spreading misinformation and for being heavily funded by fossil fuel interests.
A 2007 study by the economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes contended that the reduction in gasoline lead produced more than half of the decline in violent crime during the 1990s in the U.S. and might bring about greater declines in the future. Another economist, Rick Nevin, has made the same argument for other nations. …
[MRI research now demonstrates that] exposure to lead as a child was linked with a significant loss of brain volume in adulthood, particularly in men. Furthermore, there was a “dose-response” effect, in which the greatest brain volume loss was seen in participants with the greatest lead exposure. What’s especially tragic is that the loss of volume was concentrated in the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain closely associated with executive function and impulse control.
The tagging is still done by your friends, not by Facebook, but rather creepily Facebook is now pushing your friends to go ahead and tag you. Remember, Facebook does not give you any right to pre-approve tags. Instead the onus is on you to untag yourself in any photo a friend has tagged you in. After the fact.
A group of privacy watchdogs drawn from the EU’s 27 nations will study the measure for possible rule violations, said Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. Authorities in the U.K. and Ireland said they are also looking into the photo-tagging function on the world’s most popular social-networking service.
There’s not much to study about this violation, so “studdies” may be a delaying tactic. It is clear that Facebook intends to sell authoritative facial recognition services or databases to government and business. Customers will be “served”, critics and dissidents neutralized.
[under the expanded cable theft bill it is] a crime to use a friend’s login – even with permission – to listen to songs or watch movies from services such as Netflix or Rhapsody. … services that believe they are getting ripped off can go to law enforcement authorities and press charges. … Stealing $500 or less of entertainment would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of $2,500. Theft with a higher price tag would be a felony, with heavier penalties.
Copyright infringement is not theft. The values attributed to these non crimes are as ridiculous as the law itself. Using an otherwise unused service is no more copyright infringement than lending a book to someone. The concept of “blatant offenders” is foolish for many reasons and laws should be written with more precision.
The consumer group Free Press has filed a complaint with the FCC saying that Verizon is violating open access provisions by banning third-party tethering apps. Unbeknownst to this paying subscriber until now, Verizon has silently asked Google to remove third-party apps from the Android Market that allows users to unofficially tether their Android smartphone without subscribing to Verizon’s Mobile Broadband Connect plan
From April 7 through 9 I attended Beyond, a series of lectures, workshops, and concerts promoted by the DISIS group at Virginia Tech – a.k.a. VTech – in Blacksburg VA. The festivities included presentations from Professor Brad Garton and Create Digital Music’s Peter Kirn, plus some incidental ramblings from yours truly. The concerts featured performances by VTech’s own Linux Laptop Orchestra, accompanied at times by percussionist extraordinaire Ron Coulter and a group from the Boys And Girls Club of Roanoke. Other performances included improvisations with some unique hardware controllers (more about those performances below) and original works composed by the participants.
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I’ve just begun to look into similar programming environments for the Android and the existing audio APIs.
Linux doesn’t live in the one size fits all world of the proprietary operating system(s). As a matter of fact, I see Linux on the desktop offering better compatibility than their proprietary OS cousins thanks to its diversity. Each distribution is able to offer a customized kernel calibrated best for the given tasks at hand.
I have been frequenting Linux message boards and chat rooms for several years now. During my time spent in these places I would estimate that 95% of the issues I have helped people with (and seen posted) are related to the installation and setup of the operating system. This comes largely from the fact that most of the computers you can buy come with Windows by default. The experienced Linux user knows that they need to research their hardware before forking out their hard earned money for something that might not work too well with their favorite operating system.
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One of the reasons I like BluSphere (and am giving them this small plug) is because they give 5% of the profits on every notebook they sell back to open source projects.
How about in the long term? Yes! The monopoly dies with “8″. How would you feel if M$ sold its PCs without “the tax” and “the tax” was larger than your margin??? Expect to see a lot more PCs shipping with Linux and expect to see a lot more PCs on retail shelves with Linux.
Embedded GPUs on Linux are a big mess due to their lack of fully open-source drivers, memory management complications, and other technical issues. However, there is some good news to report today and that’s on the emergence of a new open-source KMS driver.
At the moment my favourite way to do (simple) elaborations and conversions of multimedia file is FFMPEG. But i understand that is not exactly the most user-friendly tool around, so if you don’t want to open the terminal and read the man page of FFMPEG perhaps you could take a look at Yakito.
Skype’s code has been hacked and its innards published on the Web by Efim Bushmanov, a self-described freelance researcher in the tiny Komi Republic, about 870 miles from Moscow.
His aim, he said, was to make Skype open source.
Another goal: to find “friends who can spend many hours for completely reverse it” because he hadn’t finished the task.
The move has Skype fuming.
“We are taking all necessary steps to prevent or defeat nefarious attempts to subvert Skype’s experience,” said spokesperson Sravanthi Agrawal.
“Skype takes its users’ safety and security seriously, and we work tirelessly to ensure each individual has the best possible experience,” Agrawal continued.
Well if you have a yen for puzzles and Physics is of particular interest to you, then World of Goo is something that you should never miss exploring. The other is a true-blood MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) called Vendetta online.
New extensions for the gnome shell appears by the day. Today its a ‘musicplayers’ extension. This new gnome shell extension will add a new menu to the gnome shell top panel and allows you to control various aspects of the allow you to control different music players through the menu.
Back when I used to write full-length distribution reviews for a living, I always kept my eyes open for unique offerings. Unique distros were few and far between, but when those jewels were found – fun followed. Well, one of those gems of the Linux world appeared on my radar this evening. Zenix GNU/Linux is a Debian-based distribution that uses Openbox and Awesome WM to create something that’s just a little different.
According to the Website, Zenix is designed to be lightweight, yet not light in features or applications. Not that it comes with lots of software, but its developers’ choices aren’t necessarily those little known or commandline versions. To quote the Website, “The goal of Zenix is to provide a light weight “base” without sacrificing functionality expected of a Desktop.”
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Zenix is currently on Distrowatch.com’s waiting list…
“Enough”, told I myself.
I know now that Sabayon Linux is better than I though about it earlier. Some of the issues I had last time are solved.
But Sabayon still requires more tweaking than I would like to make. And it behaves itself quite strange way sometimes.
Does it mean I dump Sabayon? Not necessarily. I may come back to it later, but most likely with different desktop environment. KDE? GNOME? Guess or suggest!
One of key problems in PMS Test Suite is getting actual test results. With the whole complexity of build process, including privilege dropping, sandbox, collision protection, auto-pretending it is not that easy to check whether a particular test succeeded without risking a lot of false positives.
Red Hat Inc. rules the “enterprise” Linux market with their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product line. Novell Inc. (now owned by The Attachmate Group) is second with their SUSE Enterprise Linux product line. To the best of my knowledge, there aren’t any free SUSE Enterprise Linux clones but there are a number of free RHEL clones. CentOS is the most well known RHEL clone but with the seeming unending delay of the 6.0 release (July 11th is my guess), CentOS has received quite a bit of criticism leading some users to investigate alternatives. As a result, Scientific Linux is getting a lot of long overdue attention given the fact that it too is a solid enterprise clone… that has been around for a long time… that has a lot of support behind it.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Dnshosting.it, the advanced Internet solutions developer located in Italy, has migrated its Cloud Server offering from VMware to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in order to remain competitive in the Italian market and gain the advantages of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology.
Adoption of open source systems in the South African enterprise is continuing unabated, with the country’s leading open source enterprise implementer, Obsidian, reporting a staggering 37% growth in Red Hat implementations in the past year. This is almost double the 21% global growth reported by Red Hat, the frontrunner in Linux-based enterprise systems.
“I think it’s fair to say that open source adoption in South Africa has matured, but is still a long way from reaching saturation point,” says Muggie van Staden, Obsidian CEO. “The question is less ‘who is using it’ than ‘who isn’t using it’, with a great number of large corporates running mission-critical systems on Red Hat.”
Have you heard of Ensemble? Are you excited about Cloud/Service Orchestration? What? Ok you’re not alone if you are scratching your head.
Ensemble is an implementation of a new idea that has been taking shape the last couple of years. Ever since Amazon hooked up a remote API to thousands of machines to provide access to their virtual infrastructure (and called it macaroni? err.. AWS), people have been dreaming up ways to take advantage of what is basically a robotic “NOC guy”. No longer do you have to pre-rack servers or call your vendor frantically to get servers sent next-day to your colo. Right?
Naturally, the system administrators that would normally be in charge of racking servers, applied their existing tools to the job, to mixed success. Config management is really good at modelling identical hosts. But with virtual hosts instantly available, this left those thinking at a higher level wanting more. Chef in particular implemented a nice set of tools and functionality to allow this high level “service” definition with their knife tools and simple ruby API.
Sprint will ship the 4.3-inch HTC Evo 3D 4G smartphone and seven-inch HTC Evo View 4G tablet on June 24 for $200 and $400, respectively. Both devices run Android 2.3, and offer the latest Sense UI layer — which is now supported with a new HTCdev developer site and an OpenSense SDK to tap the Evo 3D 4G’s 3D capabilities and the Evo View 4G’s Scribe pen technology.
Recently, I predicted that the future of the PC may not be powered by the x86 processor architecture.
With ARM chips assimilating everything from smartphones to cars, and companies like Nvidia working on high performance CPUs based on the ARM architecture, the assumption that x86 will continue to dominate the PC no longer looks iron-clad.
One of the key catalysts for that realisation was Microsoft’s announcement that Windows 8 would support x86 and ARM. If Microsoft is picking up on a trend, you know it has momentum.
The thing is, if it makes sense to question one half of the Wintel alliance, surely it makes sense to question the other. If today’s PCs largely run Windows on x86 processors, could tomorrow’s be Android on ARM?
ViewSonic announced a new ViewBook tablet line, starting with a Android 2.2-powered, seven-inch ViewBook 730 with a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, all for $250. At Computex last week, the company also tipped a more powerful Nvidia Tegra 2-based seven-inch tablet called the ViewPad 7x, running Android 3.x.
FreeNAS is an open source operating system based on FreeBSD and, as its name implies, designed for networked storage. The project recently celebrated the release of FreeNAS 8, which racked up some 43,000 downloads in the first 48 hours after its release.
Techworld Australia caught up with Josh Paetzel, director of IT at iXsystems and project manager for FreeNAS 8, to talk about the current state of the OS, what lies ahead for it, and the relationship to FreeNAS 0.7.
Ideology #2: Open source project should all play nice together
When Oracle announced their proposal to bring Hudson to Eclipse, a number of people complained to me and others why didn’t Eclipse Foundation force Oracle to work with Jenkins. There is a similar conversation going on with Oracle participating with LibreOffice. It seems people believe Apache should have rejected the project proposal, so Oracle would be forced to work with LibreOffice.
At Eclipse, we talk a lot about community. Developing a community is an important part of being an open source project. It is from a community of users, adopters, and contributors that a project draws strength and longevity. Without a community, an open source project is just a bunch of code that might as well buried on a server behind a firewall somewhere in parts unknown.
Improving Your Java development with Maven 3 and Hudson – Attend this webinar to learn about the advantages of upgrading to Apache Maven 3, including improved speed, greater stability and increased compatibility. Jason will also talk about the greatly improved support for Maven 3 within Hudson that is easy to configure and supports complex build scenarios with ease. We will cover the Eclipse IDE integration for both Maven and Hudson that improves developer productivity.
The Google Chrome developers at Google proudly announced last evening (June 7th) the stable release and immediate availability for download of the Google Chrome 12 web browser for Linux, Windows, Macintosh and Chrome Frame platforms.
The new Google Chrome 12 web browser includes various interesting new features, such as the highly anticipated hardware accelerated 3D CSS support and a brand-new Safe Browsing mode.
Mozilla Labs is generating a lot of buzz with its announcement of Webian Shell, which, as Digitizor notes, “basically consists of a browser which will replace the traditional desktop, and where the web applications are given more importance than the native applications.” You can download the early version of Webian Shell for Windows, Mac OS and Linux, but be warned that it exists in a very early version at this point. You can get a look at it here. Is Webian Shell an answer to Google’s Chrome OS?
Is 3D the future of web video? A few months ago, when Google announced its WebM video format, based on technology it acquired from On2, with its VP8 video codec, many people interpreted the move as an effort to undercut entrenched video standards, such as H.264. Could 3D video have been the actual brass ring that Google had its eyes on, though? Both Mozilla and Google are making moves to support 3D video in browsers, and Google’s YouTube web video juggernaut is increasingly supporting 3D videos. This blog post from Mozilla illustrates the focus that it has on 3D and Google’s efforts to make YouTube a haven for 3D videos. You can also find a good discussion of WebM and 3D video here.
CloudBees, the Java PaaS innovation leader, today announced a for-pay offering for its RUN@cloud Java Platform as a Service (PaaS). Developers can now decide, per application, whether they’d like to utilize a free plan (with limited memory and computing resources) or benefit from increased memory, more computing capacity and/or additional features through a pay-as-you go pricing scheme.
TDF proudly boasts that the latest LibreOffice “incorporates the contributions of over 120 developers (six times as many as the first beta released on the launch date).” And, that, “The majority of these contributors have started to hack LibreOffice code less than eight months ago, and this is an incredible achievement if one recalls that the OOo [OpenOffice.org] project has attracted a lower number of contributors in ten years.”
A third Oracle in-house lawyer has been granted limited access to Attorneys’ Eyes Only materials. You will recall in an earlier ruling the magistrate denied Attorneys’ Eyes Only rights to Dorian Daley, Oracle general counsel, and limited the rights of Deborah Miller and Matthew Sarboraria, but the status of Andrew C. Temkin was left for further determination based on supplemental filings.
Experts are hired by the parties. The parties hire them to say helpful things. There are all kinds of experts, some more reliable and independent than others. Do you remember when one of SCO’s proposed experts came to Groklaw and in a comment admitted that he took on the assignment to get paid and hopefully to attract more such work? So courts are not as much in awe of experts as the title might lead one to believe.
This is easy – Oracle off-loads OpenOffice.org, for which it has no further use, without damaging its relationship with IBM and other commercial OOo partners. They lose any revenues involved, but apparently they were resigned to losing those anyway. So for Oracle this is all up-side.
From time to time TDF is required to engage in private correspondence with parties, yet we are committed in our bylaws after a suitable period to make this content public.
Acquia, the leading provider of commercial solutions for Drupal, today announced plans to partner with Engine Yard, the leading Ruby on Rails development and deployment platform for the cloud, to offer a fully managed cloud solution for Drupal and Ruby on Rails (RoR). This new partnership will accelerate development of social websites and custom web applications for professionals who use Drupal and RoR.
The Naev devteam is proud to announce the release of Naev 0.5.0! This release is the result of over a year of hard work done by nearly 30 committers. This release is just a step in the path for ultimate greatness and a major step forward in the maturity of Naev. It has many major gameplay changes and signifies the coming of age of Naev, which has now exceeded the tag of Escape Velocity clone.
Due to the size of the 0.5.0 ndata, downloads shall from now on be hosted at Sourceforge instead of Google Code due to the latter’s arbitrary size limits.The rest of the project infrastructure will remain unchanged.
ast September, an ambitious code-sharing initiative named Civic Commons was launched at the Gov 2.0 Summit in a bid to help city governments use information technology better. This week, Civic Commons took a big step forward with a new management team in place and $250,000 of funding from Omidyar Network.
Former White House deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin will be the first executive director and Nick Grossman, former director of Civic Works at nonprofit Open Plans, will be its first managing director. Grossman was one of the lead architects of Civic Commons from its inception.
Informatica (NASDAQ: INFA) says it has unleashed the business potential of “big data” by offering support for social media data and Hadoop in the new Informatica 9.1 open data integration platform.
Google has released a research paper closely comparing the performance of C++, Java, Scala, and its own Go programming language.
According to Google’s tests (PDF), C++ offers the fastest runtime of the four languages. But, the paper says, it also requires more extensive “tuning efforts, many of which were done at a level of sophistication that would not be available to the average programmer.”
What is OSCON Java? It’s a good question. There are many Java conferences on every continent except Antarctica. Why is O’Reilly throwing its hat in the ring?
The Java community has always been a broad, fractious, interesting mess, capable of doing surprising things with little warning, and that’s precisely why we’re attracted to it. It’s undeniable that Java is huge; it’s been in one of the top two slots on Tiobe’s Programming Community Index since Tiobe started in 2002. It’s always been one of the largest components of the technical book market. Java’s 2010 book sales represent a resurgence since 2008, but even in its weakest years, Java has always been one of the largest components of the book market. Beyond being huge, Java is one of the key languages of the open source movement. While there has been plenty of discussion over the years of the JDK’s status as open source software, there has been no shortage of open source projects. SourceForge lists more than 25,000 Java projects, more than any other language.
I started blogging at the urging of colleagues at IBM. In the Spring of 2005 the company was getting ready to launch a major blogging initiative to encourage its employees to participate in the rapidly growing blogosphere. My colleagues felt that as someone closely associated with IBM’s Internet strategy, it was important that I personally become an active blogger.
Biological systems have caught the attention of computer scientists, who have been turning everything from RNA molecules to entire bacterial colonies into logic gates. So far, however, these systems have been relatively small-scale, with only a handful of gates linked up in a series. Today’s issue of Science leapfrogs past the small-scale demonstrations, and shows that a form of DNA computing can perform a calculation with up to 130 different types of DNA molecules involved. The system is so flexible that it’s also possible to use compilers and include debugging circuitry.
RSA has finally admitted publicly that the March breach into its systems has resulted in the compromise of their SecurID two-factor authentication tokens.
But would that really be true? Does building a more flexible, more modern copyright law really mean a lack of respect for copyright? Why wouldn’t it mean a healthy respect for building a system that matches better with the times — rather than the industry’s kneejerk reaction to just keep ratcheting up the punishments, enforcements and coverage of copyright?
The most detailed part of the communiqué1 is that on copyright. It calls for an increased private censorship to prevent the sharing of culture online2, like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), just after the EU Commission announced its strategy to take on infringements “at the source” and after the U.S Protect IP Act was passed unanimously a committee vote in the Senate.
A report on Internet policy by the UN Special Rapporteur on the protection of freedom of opinion and expression will be presented today. The report’s guidelines aimed at protecting fundamental freedoms clash radically with the course set by governments of the G8. This report will be essential to help citizens hold their governments accountable for policies undermining online freedoms.
Of course, virtually every report you’ll read on this in the mainstream media has the facts wrong. This isn’t about cucumbers being dangerous, because e.coli does not grow on cucumbers. E.coli is an intestinal strain of bacteria that only grows inside the guts of animals (and people). Thus, the source of all this e.coli is ANIMAL, not vegetable. …
The call says the bill is essential for “hometown lenders” and to increase credit access for “small business and families.” But nowhere does it mention why financial interests are pushing it: because it increases from 25 percent to 36 percent the amount of interest lenders can charge consumers on small loans, allows for new fees, and other measures that boost lender profits.
“When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said, “they will be stunned and they will be angry.”
[under the expanded cable theft bill it is] a crime to use a friend’s login — even with permission — to listen to songs or watch movies from services such as Netflix or Rhapsody. … services that believe they are getting ripped off can go to law enforcement authorities and press charges. … Stealing $500 or less of entertainment would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of $2,500. Theft with a higher price tag would be a felony, with heavier penalties.
Copyright infringement is not theft. The values attributed to these non crimes are as ridiculous as the law itself. Using an otherwise unused service is no more copyright infringement than lending a book to someone. The concept of “blatant offenders” is foolish for many reasons and laws should be written with more precision.
It’s even perhaps somewhat worse for enterprise software where submitting a bug request can lack transparency and where examples of how others have solved issues can be hard to find or perceived as proprietary information.
