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Links 20/7/2011: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Release Schedule, Linux-powered HP TouchPad Competitive With iPad, New OLPC Surfaces





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • It's Time for Packt's Open Source Awards
    Has it been a year already? It must have because Packt Publishing (news, site) is launching its annual Open Source Awards, formerly the Open Source CMS Awards, designed to recognize and support promising open source projects . This year’s awards will be very similar to the awards in previous years, but there are a few changes.


  • Open Source Pulse Sensor Project Looking for Funds
    An interesting new project on Kickstarter is raising money to support the creation of a small, cheap pulse sensor. The device is being developed on the open source Arduino platform so that it can be easily integrated into other projects.


  • vSphere 5's licensing opens the door for open source


  • 10 things to think about to improve software product descriptions


  • Web Browsers



  • SaaS

    • OpenStack turns 1. What’s next?
      OpenStack, the open-source, cloud-computing software project founded by Rackspace and NASA, celebrates its first birthday tomorrow. It has been a busy year for the project, which appears to have grown much faster than even its founders expected it would. A year in, OpenStack is still picking up steam and looks not only like an open source alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud in the public Infrastructure as a Service space, but also a democratizing force in the private-cloud software space.


    • Yahoo and open source
      Yahoo is a well-known user of, and contributor to, open source projects. The company is most closely associated with Hadoop, and rightly so, as it is this open source project's biggest contributor. Last month, it sponsored the Hadoop Summit 2011, in which its internal Hadoop experts, and others, ran a collection of workshops on the distributed workload operating system. It even announced that Yahoo had collected some top Hadoop engineers and spun off a new company, Hortonworks. Hortonworks hopes to sell Hadoop consulting services to enterprises.


    • The big deal about big data


    • OpenStack Turns One; What's Next For The Open Source Cloud?




  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • VirtualBox 4.1 has been released! PPA Ubuntu
      Oracle today released VirtualBox 4.1, a new major release. Introducing VM clones, this mean the ability to clone virtual machines via the GUI and VBoxManage, the New Advanced wizard for creating new virtual disks and virtual disk copy also for 64-bit memory limit is up to 1 TB. For guest Additions, status of modules and features can now be queried separately by the frontends, Experimental support for PCI passthrough for Linux hosts


    • Free hypervisor adds virtual machine cloning
      Oracle released a new version of its free virtualization software, now offering an easy way to clone virtual machines (VMs). VirtualBox 4.1 also includes a memory limit increase to 1TB for 64-bit hosts, guest support for Windows Aero, a new UDP networking tunnel for interconnecting VMs, and support for SATA hard disk hotplugging, among other cited new features.


    • Oracle Improves VirtualBox 4.1
      VirtualBox 4.1 is being officially released today, debuting new features that expand the use cases and deployability for the virtualization software. VirtualBox came into Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) as part of the Sun acquisition in 2010. The technology is used both as a desktop virtualization tool on the client side and as a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) delivery server side.


    • Oracle revs VirtualBox, mushrooms memory
      The open source VirtualBox hypervisor for PCs and servers got a major release on Tuesday when Oracle – which controls the VirtualBox project – kicked out version 4.1.


    • Oracle Girds VirtualBox for Enterprise Use


    • VirtualBox 4.1 Supports Upto 1TB RAM


    • IBM to donate Symphony code to Apache for consideration
      Six weeks ago I noted here that Oracle had to decided to offer the codebase for OpenOffice.org, the open source word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software suite to the Apache Software Foundation. Two weeks after that, Apache voted to accept the proposed project for incubation. Now, one month later, IBM is announcing that it will offer the Symphony source code to the Apache OpenOffice incubator for consideration. Why and what does this mean?




  • CMS



  • Business



  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Interview: Kuno Woudt, MusicBrainz
      During November 2010, I travelled around Europe, meeting various free software developers on my way to FSCONS, the annual free software conference, in Gothenburg, Sweden.






Leftovers

  • Computer scientists say it's time to start looking at treatment of data waste
    Hasan and Burns analyzed three computers: a MacBook laptop, a desktop running Ubuntu Linux and a Fedora Linux fileserver in the University Library (Linux is a variant of the Unix operating system used primarily at educational and research institutions).


  • How to move your Facebook photos to Google+


  • Security



    • Lulz Security hackers target Sun website
      A group of computer hackers has tampered with the website of the Sun, owned by News International.

      At first, readers were redirected to a hoax story which said Rupert Murdoch had been found dead in his garden.

      A group of hackers called Lulz Security, which has previously targeted companies including Sony, said on Twitter it was behind the attack.




  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • ALEC, For-Profit Criminal Justice, and Wisconsin
      As the first half of 2011 has revealed, Wisconsin is not a moderate “purple” state, but a state divided between staunchly “blue” progressives and righteous “red” right-wingers. That rift is particularly apparent in legislative conflicts over the criminal justice system, a debate spurred by corporate interests represented in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and perpetuated by ALEC legislative members, including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

      Wisconsin’s history and public policy reflects the red/blue divide. It is the state that gave birth to the Republican Party, which supported slavery abolition, and the John Birch Society, which opposed the civil rights movement. In the first half of the 20th Century, the state elected both progressive hero Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette and right-wing extremist Joe McCarthy. It is the state that elected both former Senator Russ Feingold (D) and Representative Paul Ryan (R).


    • ALEC Exposed: Milton Friedman's Little Shop of Horrors
      Although he passed away in 2006, states are now grappling with many of the toxic notions left behind by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.

      In her groundbreaking book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein coined the term "disaster capitalism" for the rapid-fire corporate re-engineering of societies still reeling from shock. The master of disaster? Privatization and free market guru Milton Friedman. Friedman advised governments in economic crisis to follow strict austerity measures, combining radical cuts in social services with the full-scale privatization of their more lucrative assets. Many countries in Latin America auctioned off everything standing -- from energy and water utilities to Social Security -- to for profit multinational firms, crushing unions and other dissenters along the way.




  • Censorship

    • Telex to help defeat web censors
      Data smuggling software could help citizens in countries operating strict net filters visit any site they want.

      Developed by US computer scientists the software, called Telex, hides data from banned websites inside traffic from sites deemed safe.

      The software draws on well-known encryption techniques to conceal data making it hard to decipher.

      So far, Telex is only a prototype but in tests it has been able to defeat Chinese web filters.






Reader's Picks





Recent Techrights' Posts

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