Summary: Microsoft is still trying to take its monopolies on algorithms internationally, but it uses front groups and lobbyists to hide its actions
IT IS difficult to take one’s eyes off Microsoft because the company is always up to no good. One of Microsoft’s lobbying groups (the main patent lobbyist in Europe, ACT) is being groomed in this Windows-based site which pushes Zuck’s views as news and pushes his agenda a lot, perhaps still not realising that it’s an imposter for very large businesses (which pay him), pretending to represent small ones. Other Microsoft lobbyists exist, but this one has been at it for over a decade (other kept their mask through plausible denial and hacks around disclosure rules) and yet they do not ban him:
The decision was welcomed by industry representatives. Jonathan Zuck, the president of the Association for Competitive Technology, said: “A strong intellectual property protection is essential if the European Union wants to remain competitive and achieve even greater innovation.
“A fragmented and over-complicated patent system does not have a place in today’s market.”
Europe desperately needs a single patent to boost litigation, validate software patents and favor the growth of trolls
The lawyers’ blog, IAM, paints this as a positive thing (it is for lawyers) and Microsoft’s role too gets revealed a little further:
Philips, Microsoft and DSM have come together to help fund a sustained campaign to promote the benefits of intellectual property to the global economy. The three have established a group called Ideas Matter; and according to a document seen by IAM, the idea behind it is “aimed at a need that most intellectual property based sectors have felt for a long time: expanding awareness of the positive value of intellectual property and improving the reputation of IP, in the face of widespread misunderstanding and criticism among opinion leaders, the press and the public.”
[...]
While Philips, Microsoft and DSM are the currently providing the funds, they are keen to recruit as many organisations as possible to take part.
Well, the lawyers want more damages because they take a cut off that. This Web site is said to have led to some backlash as:
EPO did not liked the unitary-patent.eu logo, asked for its removal
The thing about this “unitary” (a euphemism) plan is that it’s not for industry, it’s for patent lawyers and their clients (large businesses) to tax it along with the middlemen. While the news suggests that it’s inevitable (the corporations usually get what they want, eventually), it turns out that:
The extraordinary Competitiveness Council, meeting in Luxembourg on 27 June, put together the broad outlines of the future EU unitary patent. The 27 ministers agreed a general approach on the two draft regulations submitted by the European Commission implementing enhanced cooperation in this area by 25 member states (Italy and Spain are not participating given their opposition to the translation rules). The proposals concern: 1. the characteristics of and arrangements for issuing the future patent that confers identical protection in the participating member states; and 2. translation provisions.
The Hungarian EU Presidency was applauded for this compromise, which satisfies all the participating states and thus closes the first chapter of the legislative procedure. “The objective of common protection in the participating states is now achievable,” commented Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier. He hopes, together with the European Parliament, to consolidate this achievement so that the EU patent will become a reality within two years.
Mr. Barnier named in there. We wrote about him in manyolderpostsover the past year. He deserves a lot of backlash for doing this.
No further substantive patent law at the EU level should be created
Microsoft Florian mentions this too, in a positive context of course (he must be in favour) and based on another article, Wilcox is validating software patents not just with Peer to Patent [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] but also with endorsement of this “unitary” patent. To quote:
Baroness Wilcox, the UK’s intellectual property minister, said: “The creation of a single European patent and patent court is crucial for UK industry.
“We support a European patent system which gives real benefits for business, consumers and the economy. It is vital to offer businesses the same access to patent protection in their home market of Europe, as competitors in the US, China and Japan enjoy in theirs.”
“A unitary patent and court system will save businesses time and money whether they are patent holders or those seeking to challenge patents. The savings to UK business are likely to be around £20 million per year in translations costs alone.”
What a disgrace. Europe is in danger of becoming Microsoft prey in the sense that its laws may become just a mechanism for Microsoft to tax European companies that use Linux, for instance. See our page about software patents in Europe for chronology. █
Posted in Patents at 1:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The NZ patent system lacks clarity, leaving room for software patents from the back door while the multi-nationals ask for yet more leeway
The situation in New Zealand is one that we covered here before and according to a new report, “Don Christie of Catalyst IT, recommend putting the term explicitly in the guidelines, if not in the Bill itself, and either setting ICT industry representatives to work towards a definition of the term or taking on board existing definitions.”
The report from IDG is about the push from multi-nationals versus the locals, who clearly do not want software patents, not even from the back doors (e.g. masquerading software as hardware). To quote the article:
Most submissions on the guidelines formulated by the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ) on patentability of software suggest the guidelines have not achieved the desired clarification of proposed legislation and may have served further to muddy the question of what software is or is not patentable.
Section 15 (3A) of the Patents Bill – currently awaiting its second reading in Parliament – simply states “a computer program is not a patentable invention”. This clause was inserted by the Commerce Select Committee, on the strength of a number of submissions.
Further debate has seen the Ministry of Economic Development suggest that the committee did not intend to exclude “embedded” software – that is, in broad terms, software that controls a machine, achieving a physical effect outside the realm of pure computation.
The IPONZ guidelines attempt to achieve something like that qualification, while studiously avoiding using the term “embedded”. Several submissions, such as those from Fisher & Paykel Appliances and from John Rankin of Affinity and Don Christie of Catalyst IT, recommend putting the term explicitly in the guidelines, if not in the Bill itself, and either setting ICT industry representatives to work towards a definition of the term or taking on board existing definitions.
The NZ situation is important to keep an eye on internationally. If the multi-nationals can make this domino brick fall over and collapse, then other countries (domino bricks) will be targeted in turn, just like with DMCA.
The United States is where most such laws come from and the lobbying power of companies there is astounding. They can afford to have lobbyists and minions in other countries, they even use fake journalists to push agenda. We saw and showed evidence of this beforehand. Microsoft probably does the same with Microsoft Florian to push its spin and smears. Watch how Florian boosts people who serve as Microsoft PR agents pushing Linux smears that Microsoft writes. See this tweet for example. It’s not the exception, but he always has excuses. In a later post we will show Microsoft’s lobbying for software patents in Europe. Those who know who’s who can detect this immediately. █
Summary: Windows’ security weaknesses as a chance to sanitise people’s PCs (removing proprietary operating systems)
THE most suitable time to ‘convert’ Windows users into GNU/Linux users is when Windows betrays them, usually with viruses or malware. The Registersays that Microsoft advises users to reinstall Windows in such a circumstance:
Microsoft is advising users to reinstall Windows if they happen to be unfortunate enough to get hit by a particularly vicious rootkit.
The Popureb Trojan sticks its tendrils so deep into the operating system that the best option is to nuke from orbit return machines to their original configuration. Any files that aren’t backed up will be lost in the process.
As Mr. pogson points out, this is actually a valuable opportunity to adopt GNU/Linux;
If you have to reinstall the OS of your PC to keep it running, consider installing GNU/Linux to stop the foolishness.
Summary: What the .NET boosters from Novell are up to and why they should be resisted
MICROSOFT’S .NET is not doing well [1, 2, 3]. Developers are upset, Microsoft has unrest, and even those who emulated .NET have all lost their job following the Novell takeover. Novell’s Microsoft MVP and his colleagues have created a new company dedicated to Mono, headed by a former Microsoft employee. They seemingly impose Microsoft assimilation on the competition of Windows, as the MVP himself puts it:
Specially as we are developing as fast as we can not one, but two products: .NET for iPhone and .NET for Android.
We have alreay explained why both products are dangerous and we especially worry for Android [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16], not Apple's platform (Apple and Microsoft cross-license).
There is some link that many sites included this week — one to Tomboy tips in essence — leading to responses such as this one:
Gnote is far better than Tomboy, DOES NOT use Mono,or C#, and keeps you clear of potential Software Patent problems from Mickey$oft!!!
Attachmate has dumped Mono and it’s developers. However, Miguel de Icaza, has not seen the writing on the wall. Perhaps he has “MONOnucleosis”? ;^)
I always insure that no Mono libs or apps are running on any of my systems, and I recommend others to follow my example.
While a bit rude, it does capture how many people feel about Mono. █
Debate over Linux’s viability on the desktop may rage unabated in light of the recent changes made to Canonical’s Ubuntu, in particular, but there’s no questioning the operating system’s strength in the server and mobile arenas.
Sony CEO Howard Stringer told shareholders that his company was the target of hacker attacks in April “because we tried to protect our IP (intellectual property), our content, in this case videogames.”
In April Sony was forced to take its PlayStation Network (PSN) offline for several weeks after hackers broke in and stole information from more than 70 million user accounts, finally relaunching it in May. A similar attack also affected Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) servers, which control Sony’s online role-playing games. Combined, more than 100 million user accounts were affected.
To me this seems to be the perfect combination, you can use all free software out there in your Linux computer (or partition) and also run that special software you really need on the Mac computer (or partition), and at the same time you can forget about the blue screen, you can forget about the poorly done operating system that Windows is.
The German city of Munich’s migration to a vendor independent IT infrastructure is “in time, in budget and on track”, says one of the external consultants involved in the project. The city aims to migrate about 80 percent of all the city’s fifteen thousand desktop PCs to Ubuntu Linux.
That 20 percent of the city administration’s PCs will remain locked-in to a proprietary operating system has been foreseen from the start, says Andreas Heinrich, a consultant at IBM closely involved in the project, dispelling rumours that the project is missing its target.
“The project scope is to migrate 80 percent of PCs in the administration. From the onset, it was foreseen that there will be financial or technical constraints where a move to open source is not beneficial.”
The German city of Munich’s migration to a vendor independent IT infrastructure is “in time, in budget and on track”, says one of the external consultants involved in the project. The city aims to migrate about 80 percent of all the city’s fifteen thousand desktop PCs to Ubuntu Linux.
That 20 percent of the city administration’s PCs will remain locked-in to a proprietary operating system has been foreseen from the start, says Andreas Heinrich, a consultant at IBM closely involved in the project, dispelling rumours that the project is missing its target.
The most noteworthy thing may be that only about a quarter of the
changes are in drivers, filesystem changes actually account for more
(40%): btrfs, cifs, ext4, jbd2, nfs are all present and accounted for.
On the driver side, there’s some gpu updates, infiniband, mmc, sound
and some SCSI target fixes.
And the normal random smattering of changes all around. Like some
long-standing compile failure (admittedly you need to enable some
esoteric resource counting options and disable NUMA to trigger it, but
still). I think there’s a few more lurking in staging, with fixes yet
to be merged.
In case you missed it, Linux is turning 3. Well, really, it’s turning 20. 20 years of Linux have come and gone, and yet, until recently, we’ve been stuck in 2.6.x kernel hell. The kernel has been in the 2.6 phase for almost half of that 20 years, in fact. This has caused endless annoyances for developers and distribution managers, sadly.
You see, because my laptop runs kernel 2.6.32, it is relatively up to date. It includes the Completely Fair Scheduler, and a host of other major improvements over, say, a machine running 2.6.20. One might even suggest that two machines running kernels that far apart are essentially running completely different Linuxes. It’s like the difference between Windows XP and Windows 7.
We have featured a few Terminal emulators before and introduced you to applications like CLI Companion that makes you more familiar with command line in Linux. Now, we want to take it to a whole new level. A collection of really good Terminal emulator apps for Linux.
By far the biggest challenge in making art for FOSS games is that projects will have artists come and go, and because of that it’s difficult to maintain consistency between pieces of art. It’s possible to have a bunch of art elements that are all individually excellent but have a game that looks horrible because the art elements don’t go together well.
Putting things together
Half a year ago there was a thread on the kde-core-devel mailing list with the topic “why kdelibs?”. I gave a potential answer and this resulted in a series of great discussions. While these discussions were very constructive, it was pretty clear, that we would need an in-person meeting to finally answer the question about the future of the KDE platform.
Eugeni Dodonov announced the release of Mandriva 2011 RC1 earlier, but I’m still waiting for it to hit mirrors. He did actually said it was “coming,” so his announcement could be considered a big ole tease. In fact, I hate it when a release is announced and we have to keep checking the mirrors for it to actually become available. But they do this every time.
Anyway, he said, “The images are built and are undergoing an internal testing right now, and unless any critical issues are discovered, they will be pushed to the mirrors in the coming hours! Those additional testings for RC1 images before their release to the mirrors was intended in order to certify that the final changes for the RC-stage of Mandriva 2011 release, containing the (almost) final UI and Desktop experience, do not result in any unexpected issues.”
The Debian project is pleased to announce the second update of its stable distribution Debian 6.0 (codename “squeeze”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments to serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.
AndersDX has introduced an ARM-based industrial net-top computer based around NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 chip. The tiny (130x94x15mm) computer is a version of CompuLab’s Trim Slice, through a joint venture between the firms, writes Steve Bush.
Android’s daily activations are on the rise, fulfilling Google’s hopes for building a massive base of users to view its mobile ads. “Eric Schmidt once commented that ‘scale was a key to making Android a big profit center,’” recalled ABI analyst Michael Morgan. “Schmidt said, ‘If we have a billion people using Android, you think we can’t make money from that? All it would take is $10 per user per year.’”
Mozilla on Tuesday made available the official download of Thunderbird 5.0, the company’s email client software that hasn’t seen a major release update in nearly 18 months.
The free download is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems and promises faster startup times, tabs that can be reordered and even dragged into new windows and attachment sizes displayed on the program.
Enterprise PHP vendor Zend is now testing a new version of its Zend Server in an effort to improve PHP application deployment automation.
Zend Server 5.5 will be the first major update to the PHP middleware platform since the 5.0 release in October of 2009. The Zend Server 5.5 release has a key focus on helping to improve automated PHP app deployment.
When I first heard ridiculous-sounding terms like smurf attack, fraggle attack, Tribal Flood Network (TFN), Trinoo, TFN2K, and stacheldraht, I didn’t take them too seriously for a couple of reasons — I worked mainly on non-Internet facing systems and I was never a victim. I thought it was primarily a network or application administrator’s problem.
I am not too proud to admit that I was completely wrong. The truth is that I only had a grasp of the impact of such attacks but I didn’t know anything about the methods and the things that can and should be done at the operating system level.
The Competition Bureau announced today that Bell Canada has agreed to stop making what the Bureau had concluded were misleading representations about the prices offered for its services. Under the terms of a consent agreement filed with the Competition Tribunal, Bell is also required to pay an administrative monetary penalty of $10 million, the maximum amount allowed under the Competition Act.
Facebook spent $230,000 lobbying the federal government in the first quarter on issues such as online privacy, rules that aim for equitable Internet access and other issues, according to a disclosure report.
That’s up from $130,000 Facebook spent in the fourth quarter and nearly six times the $41,390 that it spent in the first quarter of last year.
The CRTC vertical integration hearing continues today, following several full days last week in which the Commissioners repeatedly asked whether companies such as Rogers, Bell, and Shaw should be required to offer a “skinny basic” service – a cheaper television package with limited programming. The introduction of skinny basic appears to be one of the CRTC’s preferred responses to the issue, since it is concerned that vertically integrated companies will use their broadcast distribution services to require subscribers to subscribe to their broadcast properties. The major integrated providers have opposed the idea, arguing consumers aren’t interested.
Imagine that, because you’re pressed for time, you take a cab to the library. The cab driver is obliged by law to install a device that will monitor where he takes you. While in the cab, you call your friend to talk about your day. The phone company is obliged to track whom you talk to and for how long.
The OECD is meeting this week in Paris for a meeting on the Internet economy. The meeting features many government leaders and is expected to conclude with a Communiqué on Principles for Internet Policy-Making. This builds on the June 2008 OECD meeting in Seoul, Korea that not only placed the spotlight on Internet economy issues, but opened the door to participation of civil society groups in OECD policy making. That was a big step forward, but today there was a major step back as the civil society groups – now representing over 80 organizations from around the world under the name CSISAC – announced that it was withdrawing its name from support of the draft OECD communique.
Hidden deep within the federal government’s comprehensive bundle of crime legislation lies a bill that opponents claim will rob Canadians their right to online privacy as well as their cash.
During the last federal election campaign, Prime Minister Stephen Harper vowed to combine 11 separate crime bills into one omnibus piece of legislation and pass it within 100 days of taking power should his Conservative Party win a majority.
It’s been an interesting week for Universal Music. The company was outed for their secret war on various hiphop blogs, including some of the sites of their own artists, such as 50 Cent, whose personal site was declared a “pirate” site on a list that Universal helped put together. Now, super popular Universal artist Drake is lashing out at Universal for issuing takedowns over his own music. Apparently, like many artists who value the promotion, he’s been leaking his own tracks to the various hiphop sites and blogs that Universal has declared evil. And Universal has been taking them down, leading Drake to tell them to stop…
Unfortunately, while the AUCC correctly diagnosed some of the problems, it asks to Board to prescribe the wrong remedy. I am not persuaded that amending the Interim Tariff to require Access Copyright to grant transactional licenses on a per copy basis—as the AUCC requests—is the optimal remedy for these issues. In fact, I am concerned that ordering Access Copyright to grant transactional licenses might actually—under some circumstances—aggravate the problem. While I am confident that this was not the AUCC’s intention, I believe that the remedy that it proposes could inadvertently backfire and serve the interests of Access Copyright to the detriment of Canadian academic institutions.
Summary: A commentary on whether or not Linux and Free software are winning
THIS is not an episode of TechBytes Video but more of a test, the final one of its kind. This video was done as an audio test amid some problems with the software’s compression phase (thus the audio cutoff).
Linux is winning in Android form as it spreads faster than Windows (replaces itself). Android enjoys a “growth rate of [...] growth [at] 4.4% per week,” which is amazing. Meanwhile, Apple targets those who are willing to pay too much for something more primitive and restrictive.
Since version 2.6.38, kernels have used more power because, in certain situations, they disable the power-saving ASPM feature. New stable and long-term kernels offer corrections; however, one of them is conspicuously lagging behind.
In April, the Phoronix web site reported that some systems require more power with Linux 2.6.35 and 2.6.38 than they did with the previous versions. Phoronix says it has now found the reason for the increased power consumption in 2.6.38.
Jon Masters marks the 20th anniversary of the Linux kernel with a reflection on 20 years of Linux kernel history and a look ahead to Linux 3.0…
Twenty years ago, in April of 1991, a young Finnish computer science student at the University of Helsinki began work on a piece of software that would fundamentally change the computer industry. Linus Torvalds had just recently acquired an Intel 80836 microprocessor-powered PC system and wanted to exploit its support for ‘Protected Mode’ paged virtual memory (the ability for the processor to isolate individual programs from one another and give each an entire memory address space of its own to work with), and in the process learn about how such features worked. At the time, contemporary consumer operating systems such as Microsoft’s Windows 3.0 had only very limited support for the advanced features of the new Intel processor, and commercial UNIX-based alternatives were extremely expensive propositions, while open source operating systems such as Minix used alternative (older) techniques like memory segmentation, which had been in older Intel CPUs.
In one of the first articles of Linuxaria i’ve posted a complete how to in how to make a DVD slideshow with Linux and the main program to do this was Imagination, a software that i really like for his simplicity of use.
…the GIMP developers are going to great lengths to remove useful functionality left and right, like they are aiming for inclusion into GNOME… newsflash for them: ain’t gonna happen, these GNOME is not aimed at such advanced users like those able to edit pictures.
Okay so here is the first part of the interview I have done with Keith Poole one of the Linux engineers over at DesuraNET about porting over Desura to Linux.
Gaming on GNU/Linux is still getting a bad rap. Obviously there aren’t as many titles to choose from and you’ll be hard pressed to go into your local Game and find Linux support advertised on the jewel case. However, no big deal. There are plenty of games out there that will keep you busy, and how much can one person play, honestly, unless you’re unemployed and up 24/7 living on coffee and coke, and still have mum to do your laundry? I never understood how come when you join a server there are guys that have memorized every key combination and every trick in the book to give them the edge, and this is probably not the only one they’re playing either.
So here are a few options, including commercial ones. Staples of the free software world such as Wesnoth and Freeciv are not going to be mentioned because frankly, the graphics just suck. I’m also more of a FPS guy, but the same is true for Urban Terror and Assaultcube. Being multi-player shooters only the game play is also rather limited. Even Soldier of Fortune back in the day was more fun and still looks decent, and you’re not gong to convince people Linux is a viable gaming platform offering them pre-1998 graphics or kiddie games like Blobwars or Frozenbubble (although that one was fun for a while). And who doesn’t mind spending money on games for other platforms should not have a problem shelling some out for a Linux version. Most of the time you won’t have to, though.
MyGaming takes a look at some of the great games out there for Linux and Ubuntu gamers
So you’ve installed one of the popular Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, and you’ve activated your graphics drivers; now what? While mainstream gaming has not quite found it’s way onto Ubuntu there are a number of worthy titles to keep you from booting up that old Windows partition. This article was written with Ubuntu users in mind, but it may be possible to get these games running under other Linux distros. All prices displayed below are approximate conversions from other currencies. All the games (and crossover) can be bought online and downloaded.
Awoken icon set has been ported to KDE thanks to great work done by alecive who created the original icon set as well. The icon pack is called kAwoKen and will have all the same features including a customization script.
Nord is a new glassy GNOME Shell theme based on Zukitwo, created by WebUpd8 reader rAX.
The theme is currently in beta and there are some known bugs but it already looks great, featuring some unique elements like the switches which look amazing (see the screenshots). If you use GNOME Shell, you must really give it a try!
Well the pros, well really the wants, finally won out over the cons and I upgraded my primary laptop that I use for work and just about everything else to Fedora 15 and gnome 3. What finally pushed me over the edge? Evolution 3 and Firefox 5.
Which GNU/Linux distribution a person prefers is a very individual choice. Some people like distributions that give them total access: the freedom to do whatever they want. Others want a desktop OS that will hold their hand if they run into problems. There is no single distribution that provides all of the right answers; each GNU/Linux user has to find the operating system distribution that best meets their own needs. In this week’s TLWIR, I will look at some of the best GNU/Linux distributions with a unique twist: I will compare the distribution to the city that I think most embodies its fundamental spirit. This week’s stories are as follows:
DoudouLinux is a Linux distribution for children, designed to be both educational and fun. It can be used from a CD/DVD or an USB stick so you don’t have to install it. We’ve reviewed it a while back so check out that post for more info.
Mandriva, Europe’s leading publisher of Linux solutions, announces the collaboration with the Norwegian company Open Framework Systems (OFS).
Mandriva and OFS are working together to provide a secure collaborative solution to its customers. OFS Collab Collaboration Suite is designed to be a real time secure collaboration suite that can be accessed from different types of clients and editors. With simple mouse clicks, user will be able to secure parts of a document with read and edit access rights. The Collab Collaboration Suite is client server based. The server handles the security and stores the documents in a centralized document management storage.
The Sabayon community released version 6.0 of its Gentoo-based Linux distribution, moving up to Linux 2.6.39.1, but opting for GNOME 2.32.2 and KDE 4.6.4 desktop environments instead of the controversial GNOME 3.0. Sabayon 6.0 adds support for the Btrfs filesystem, switches to LibreOffice 3.3.3, and updates to version 1.0 of its Entropy package manager.
* Call for Testing Maverick Language Pack Updates
* Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) Development Update
* Ubuntu Oneiric Open for Translation
* Ubuntu Cloud Portal: Graphics Ninjas invited to help
* Ubuntu Stats
* LoCo News
* LoCo Council Meeting Digest
* Launchpad News
* Ubuntu Certification: What components do we test?
* Accessible Qt now in Oneiric!
* Has Unity Knocked Ubuntu Off Its Pedestal?
* Full Circle Magazine – Issue #50
* Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
* Upcoming Meetings and Events
* Updates and Security for 8.04, 10.04, 10.10 and 11.04
* And much more!
I tried. I really did. I tried to like Ubuntu’s new Unity interface and tried hard to make it work. Unity felt ok on the Acer Netbook — the small screen is a good match for the new vertical application launcher.
A self-styled ‘hybrid OS,’ Peppermint Two has a lot to offer those looking for a lightweight web-friendly distribution, but is it a realistic alternative to Lubuntu? Gareth Halfacree finds outs…
This number is, of course, great news for Google and the Android platform. With such a large number of activations per day, it really shows how popular the mobile operating system is around the globe, and how much demand there is for Android devices overall. Not only is this number high, but it’s also a more true representation of consumer activity as it directly relates to users purchasing (and activating) their devices, as opposed to numbers referring to shipments (to retailers), as companies often provide.
We were told that, once upon a time, “7″ was shipped on an average of 7 PCs per second. Growth of “7″ is about 1% per month. On 1400 million PCs, that’s about 14 million PCs shipping with “7″ per month, ~5.4/s per second. Android/Linux is activating 500K per day (500K/86400 = 5.8/s). Further, the growth rate of the growth is 4.4% per week…
Wait, what did he say, 3 million XOs? Did I miss something? The map on OLPC’s Web site says “over 2,100,000 children and teachers have xo laptops” and the corresponding wiki page also mentions “2.1 million XOs in the field as of January, 2011″.
One of the things that I have observed in relation to open source-related business strategies in recent months is the decreased use of the term ‘open source’ as an identifying differentiator in some companies’ marketing material, either to describe the company or its software.
The way in which a company identifies itself in the opening lines of a press release may not necessarily describe accurately what the company does, but it is a clear indicator of how the company wants to be perceived.
It seemed to me that a significant number of high profile open source-related vendors had stopped using the term open source as an identifying differentiator.
Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others,’ informs www.ubuntu.com. The word also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’, adds the site.
“The vision for Ubuntu is part social and part economic: free software, available free of charge to everybody on the same terms, and funded through a portfolio of services provided by Canonical.”
It was, therefore, a pleasant meeting that I recently had with Prakash Advani, Regional Manager – Asia Pacific, Canonical, Mumbai (http://bit.ly/F4TAdvaniP). “I have been using the latest Ubuntu 11.04 on a laptop that’s almost three years now and I don’t see any degradation of performance,” says Prakash. “It performs the same that it used to three years back when I installed Ubuntu 9.10. After that we released three more versions and they have all worked beautifully on the same hardware.” Our conversation continues over email.
Mozilla is committed to providing the best Web experience for people everywhere, for whom the Web has become such an important part of their daily lives. Providing updates to Firefox more frequently allows us to secure users against emerging threats and provide the platform for innovation that today’s rich and compelling Web experiences demand.
The Mozilla Community has focused our efforts on the needs of the individual user, and prioritized the product roadmap and features accordingly. However, as is the case with many technologies, loyal Firefox users and their IT departments have sought to bring Firefox into their places of work.
The 451 Group was pleased to work with North Bridge Venture Partners, GigaOM and additional companies and players in the industry for the Future of Cloud Computing Survey 2011, which confirmed the early nature of the market, but also indicated customers and users have learned from previous trends, particularly open source software and virtualization. The Future of Cloud Computing Survey 2011 garnered 417 responses from both vendors and end users, focusing on current use, drivers, barriers and future plans regarding cloud computing.
If it looked like UK open source policy, just recently exhumed, had already been swept back under the same carpet it has been kept under since it was first launched two and a half years ago, the announcement yesterday that Liam Maxwell had acquired responsibility for it with a Cabinet Office portfolio did surprisingly little to improve its mien.
It is then just as well Cabinet Office is about to announce long-overdue progress in its cause of creating a level-playing field for open source software. Because the new appointment will need all the help he can get.
In light of events that occured in the Middle East earlier this year, many worry that in the future, rogue governments could cut off access to the internet as a way to control political “threats.”
Douglas Rushkoff has championed the idea that the current corporate-controlled internet is far from the open commons we pretend it is.
Open Document Text (ODT), Open Document Presentation (ODP), and Open Document Spreadsheet (ODS) outputs are also available with the addition of three new emitters.
Summary: Allegations of “Negativism” in Techrights and in “Boycott Novell” are put in perspective.
THIS is not a proper episode of TechBytes Video. I have been testing a few things in order to improve future delivery (when Tim and I both find time) and in the mean time I do try to convey some messages in means that are not text-only. In this video I speak about my experiences facing the allegation that this site is too abrasive.
We hope you will join us for future shows and 
