07.05.11
Posted in America, Asia, Patents at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
More patents, decreased liberty
Summary: In these special days in which independence is celebrated, we emphasise the relevance of patent monopolies when it comes to the small and oppressed
LONG weekend in the States (Independence Day) cannot provide an escape from bad laws, which continue to make citizens of the US dependent on corporations with monopolies at the USPTO (respected by the government but less so by voters, who are constantly bombarded by brainwash about patent ‘protection’ and promises of “innovation”). TechCrunch deserves some credit for being sceptical of software patents, despite being based in the US and now being owned by America Online. In this new article it has the following to say about patents, spoiling a lot of the previous opinion pieces by implying a correlation between patents and innovation where patents have mostly been used for trade barriers from the West (keeping the East back and away from Western knowledge). It says:
The central question of our time is whether this will be China’s century or India’s. (Assuming that the notion of nation-states survives, which seems likely, there aren’t really any other contenders; China and India contain nearly half of humanity, and both are well on their way to economic superpower.) I admit that right now it might not seem much of a contest. China is more populous, already a decade ahead of India in terms of economic development, growing faster, and—measured by patents—far more innovative. In China, achievements are accomplished at the behest of the government; in India, things somehow manage to get done despite the government.
China has mostly ignored some copyrights from the West, at least when it comes to enforcement. This is changing. Also, as we started explaining some years ago, the attitude towards patents over there is changing and China can conceivably threaten the West with its homegrown patents one day. It is all just a matter of whose patents these are and the whole game is just a matter of mutually-assured destruction. A large country like China, where the number of Internet users already exceeds that of the States, building a mountain of patents might make sense. It helps eliminate the USPTO deterrence , just like the USSR in the days of the Cold War. For small countries — just like small companies — patents make no sense because they can easily be crushed by the large companies/countries.
Understandably, in the small nation of New Zealand, there is a strong fight from NZ business to repel and turn away software patents. NZOSS (our heroes) makes a statement to rebut the propaganda from companies like Intel and Microsoft: [via Glyn Moody]
The Ministry of Economic Development has published the submissions in relation to the draft guidelines on for the Examination of Patent Applications Involving Computer Programs discussion document. The call for submissions was clear that this was not an opportunity to revisit the decision to exclude software patents, saying “”In releasing the draft guidelines for comment, it is not intended to re-open the debate regarding the patentability of computer programs, or whether an amendment should be made to clause 15(3A). This consultation exercise is intended to ensure that IPONZ gives proper effect to the provisions of the legislation, taking into account of the intentions of the Commerce Select Committee, in a manner that is likely to find support from a New Zealand court.”
There were in excess of thirty submissions, primarily by the legal community, including patent lawyers and legal societies. There were also a few manufacturers and international business lobby groups. While the majority of these submissions were critical of the proposed exclusion of software what was notable by it’s absence was a single submission by a New Zealand owned commercial software development company.
By far the largest number of submissions were received from patent lawyers who may see the exclusion hurt their practises. An exclusion of software patents would in a single stroke eliminate the risk of patent infringement for New Zealand software development companies. It is understandable that those earning a living from patent litigation would be opposed. While it may be understandable it is not desirable to follow a path leading to increased litigation like experienced in the United States.
Here is a new article which puts this problem in perspective by stating:
The wireless industry has experienced a wave of legal patent battles in recent years as long-established incumbents try to protect their position against newcomers.
Sadly, this article quotes a lobbyist as though he is an independent voice without clients. It’s tilted against Linux to an extent because companies other than Google are also affected. In this case, Microsoft for example wants to use patents to extort Android because Windows Phone 7 gets no more than 1 in a hundred sales, which is laughable (in its home country, too). To quote:
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Microsoft has managed to get just one per cent of the US smartphone market in the quarter ended May 2011 with its Windows Phone 7 (WP7) operating system.
Nielsen has published its US smartphone sales figures that show Apple’s IOS continues to grow, Google’s Android, albeit having an overall market share lead, remaining stagnant, and Microsoft’s WP7 operating system managing just one per cent of handset sales. Microsoft’s dead Windows Mobile operating system still has nine per cent market share, however that is unlikely to comfort Microsoft as it wants consumers to move to WP7.
Nowadays, Microsoft is busy trying to tax those who do sell phones. How can software patents be defended in light of this? It takes a paid lobbyist to defend this. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Office Suites at 7:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Por El Centro Legal Por La Libertad de Software | 29 de junio 2011
(ODF | PDF | Original en softwarefreedom.org)
El Microsoft tan exageradamente promovido reemplazo de sus $ 20 billones por año [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/technology/business-computing/28soft.html] de negocios de Microsoft Office basado en la “nube”, viene con nuevas características como la de tiempo real multi-usuario de colaboración, la mensajería instantánea, video conferencia, reuniones en línea y mucho más [http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/plans/small-business/im-online-meetings.aspx]. Lo que Microsoft no te dice en su comunicado de prensa es que cuando usted, su negocio o sus amigos, se inscribe en ella, usted podría estar recibiendo una característica que no se anuncia así: ESPIONAJE GRATIS.
Una solicitud de patentes [http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20110153809&OS=20110153809&RS=20110153809] publicada por la USPTO (Oficina de Patentes y Marcas de los Estados Unidos) el jueves pasado revela que Microsoft ha estado investigando, ya desde antes de diciembre de 2009, la forma de redirigir las llamadas VoIP para interceptar/redirigir a los dispositivos a los agentes de la ley. El método descrito por la solicitud de patente es tortuoso, subvertir los protocolos de enrutamiento para que los paquetes enviados por cualquier persona marcados por una solicitud de control se dirigirán a través de un agente de grabación. La solicitud describe los “sistemas de juego, los protocolos de mensajería instantánea que transmiten las aplicaciones de audio. Skype y aplicaciones como Skype, de reuniones, software de video conferencia, y similares”, así como tecnologías que pueden utilizar estos métodos. En otras palabras, Microsoft tiene razones para creer que su método de intercepción se puede aplicar a la recién adquirida Skype (recientemente desplegada en el Congreso [http://blogs.skype.com/en/2011/06/skype_is_in_da_house.html]), Xbox 360, y las características de video conferencia en la Oficina 365.
La publicación de la presente solicitud, junto con el anuncio del nuevo servicio de Microsoft destaca la necesidad de adopción de soluciones de software libre y de código abierto. Cuando las mismas empresas hacen las herramientas que necesitamos para mantenernos conectados están investigando las formas de espiar a sus clientes, ¿por qué deberíamos confiar en ellos y por qué no habríamos que buscar algo mejor? En SFLC que utilizar un servidor Asterisk [http://www.asterisk.org/] y el softphone Twinkle [http://mfnboer.home.xs4all.nl/twinkle/index.html] para proporcionar una comunicación libre, voz encriptada en cualquier lugar donde cualquiera de nosotros tenga una conexión de red. Nuestro sistema de software libre proporciona comunicaciones seguras y nos ahorra dinero. Cada pequeña empresa, así como todos los grandes van a tener grandes ganancias mediante el uso de VoIP, pero no habrá ganancias empresariales por la pérdida de su privacidad. Microsoft está ofreciendo “comunicaciones unificadas” con unificado espionaje probablemente construido dentro de su software. El Software Libre trabaja para su negocio, no para la gente que piensa que su negocio es negocio de ellos.
A no ser que sea indicado de otra manera, todo contenido es licenciado bajo el CC-BY-SA 3.0.[http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/legalcode] █
Traducción hecha por Eduardo Landaveri, Administrator of the Spanish portal of Techrights.
Translation produced by Eduardo Landaveri, the administrator of the Spanish portal of Techrights.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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I have great respect for Digitimes. They have their finger on the pulse of IT, particularly in China, but they are out to lunch with the story that Apple will overtake HP in personal computing even if tablets are considered in the mix. Digitimes’ story assumes that Apple will continue with a huge share of tablets. That will fall apart because Android/Linux is being pushed by more than a dozen players large and small, each with some variation on the basic OS developed by Google. What this will mean is that consumers will be faced with many choices. While Apple has a large and growing following, the world is much bigger than Apple and consumers, particularly in the hot emerging markets will love small cheap Android/Linux tablets and smart phones.
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All in all I am very impressed and I would recommend Linux Mint to anyone who want to save money and not buy the Windows alternative. It is fairly lightweight, responsive and easy to run and configure. 9 out of 10 in my eyes.
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Here in Brazil, Linux usage is gaining more and more adoption for the past decade, and it is quite common to find Linux-based computers in supermarkets, computer shops, and so on. Of course, they are not that widely available as their Windows counterparts, but still, it is hard to find any computer store which wouldn’t have at least some computers running a Linux-based OS, and it is usually enough to do a web search on any Internet shop to find several compatible models which come with Linux pre-installed. Be it Mandriva, Ubuntu, or any other distribution – they all have the common open-source foundation and all the benefits of free software. And yes, they are ready for desktop and casual users to use!
It is great to know that the Open-Source movement is gaining more and more spread world-wide. I truly believe that it has the power to change the world, and I am really happy to know that it does it.
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Then I grabbed the mini-VGA to VGA adapter, a 24 inch HP monitor, and got it plugged in. Now I have a Chromebook workstation that makes me sing.
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I mentioned that my computer does not freeze. It darn well shouldn’t. It has a 64 bit dual core quad processor with 4 gigs of RAM. Windows 7 infuriated me just as much as Windows XP did with it’s intermittent stalls for no obvious reason. To be fair, a few Linux distros had momentary freezes with a slight darkening of the screen but after a bit of research, I turned Compiz off and it stopped doing it. Personally, I don’t see the point as I didn’t find it useful, just wobbly and shiny.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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While the FreeBSD Foundation is now paying for Linux kernel mode-setting and GEM/TTM memory management to be ported to BSD — and they are making some progress — this isn’t the first attempt at moving major parts of the graphics stack into the kernel. Pre-dating Linux KMS/DRM is the KGI Project, which still is technically around, but it’s pretty much dead in terms of new development and any hope of the Kernel Graphics Interface reaching its goals.
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Graphics Stack
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Now that NVIDIA has officially released the 275.xx Linux driver, they’re onto the 280.xx driver series. Just in time for the US holiday weekend they have released the NVIDIA 280.04 binary Linux driver beta.
While the 280.04 beta driver marks the introduction of a new series, the official change-log is shockingly small. All that’s officially mentioned for being fixed-up in the 280.04 beta is incremental bug-fixes and preliminary support for the X.Org X Server ABI 11. This is the video ABI that’s being used by X.Org Server 1.11 RC1. It’s good to see NVIDIA still at the top of their game in supporting new kernel and X.Org releases, while AMD continues to lag behind with their Catalyst driver. It will still be several months before AMD Catalyst is expected to support X.Org Server 1.11.
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While Intel’s OSTC (Portland) team is busy at work on Intel Ivy Bridge Linux graphics support for this next-generation hardware due out by year’s end, the same team doesn’t play with Intel’s Poulsbo or other graphics IP that isn’t an in-house Intel creation and part of their open-source driver. It seems, however, that Alan Cox is personally working on early “Cedar Trail” support for the open-source GMA500 driver.
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Applications
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There’s a number of open-source non-linear video editor programs that have been going for a few years, including Cinelerra, OpenShot, and PiTiVi, among others. None of these projects have been particularly promising and yet comparable to the proprietary competition in the video editing world. Lightworks is an option since it’s a professional software product that was then open-sourced, but it’s Linux client isn’t expected until late 2011. There is though another new option coming in the Linux video world and that’s Novacut. Novacut is an open-source video editor, but at least it’s taking a slightly different approach than the other projects.
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Proprietary
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Skype is without doubt one of the best proprietary software available to Linux users. However, ever since Microsoft acquired it, some people have started looking for free and open-source alternatives to the popular communication (Voice over Internet Protocol, instant messaging, videoconferencing) software.
Let’s take a close look at some of the best choices you have if you were to quit using Skype today. So without further delay, here are some of the best free and open-source Skype replacements (in no particular order) especially for those of you who are using Linux…
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Valve Software has announced they’ll be making the Source Engine’s Software Development Kit (SDK) available free of charge to the community and their gaming customers.
Details can be found on the Valve Software web-site. They also have information on their Wiki as making free access to the Source SDK should allow their “modding” community to further flourish.
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Jimmy Thomsen from Linos a company which specializes on customizing Ubuntu to suite costumers needs has released a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu for gamers called Game Drift Linux !
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Desktop Environments/Login Managers
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If you believe that you are not yet ready for Gnome 3 or if your hardware can’t handle the heavy desktop environments then you can always enjoy Fedora 15 Lovelock with your old hardware using light desktop shells like LXDE or XFCE.
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If you do a lot of work on a Linux computer, continuously switching between many windows, the right window manager can make you much faster and more productive than an extra 2GB of RAM.
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I love the idea behind LXDM: provide a lightweight, NOT freakingly bloated (in terms of dependencies, == doesn’t pull in half GNOME) Login Manager.
If it only worked properly. Until yesterday night at least.
Besides we all know that LXDM (the LXDE Login Manager) is in its early stage of development (kudos to its devs), it doesn’t mean that XDG specifications don’t deserve proper attention, and implementation.
Until yesterday, in Sabayon land, LXDM wasn’t able to load Desktop Environments correctly, for this reason (lxdm.c): the lxdm_do_login() is in charge of reading user configuration ($HOME/.dmrc or whatever) and fork() the DE loader away.
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As part of the Quality Assurance commitment I am making for compiz, one of the biggest parts of this is unit and regression testing. Previously, compiz has had no such infrastructure for doing so and this has allowed for subtle regressions to be introduced into earlier revisions and then not become noticable until much later ones, making the regression very difficult to track down. One of the more annoying ones is one I have just finished debugging at 3:45AM, bug 804683, where due to the way that clock_gettime () works, it can return time values which are less than what it previously would have returned a few nanoseconds ago. Luckily, I have a fix for this. However, it was difficult to find and a lot of time was wasted debugging one of the problems that came out of it (wallpaper plugin auto-cycling not being called accurately).
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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GNOME Desktop
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The design of the default GNOME 3 theme Adwaita has been optimized for the GNOME Shell where it really shines but it’s not really meant to be used in the Fallback Mode.
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Gnome shell may have started its bull run but the good old Gtk themes still don’t fail to pack a punch. Have a look at our choice of Gtk 3 themes sourced from the Mecca of all Gnome themes – gnome-look.org
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Ask every Gnome user. Every Gnome release, developers take away features, while giving us a proverbial carrot, but Gnome 3? They decided to just give us a stick.
For starters, the GDM, The screen where you log in? There used to be a way to select your keyboard language and other settings. That’s gone in 3.0. (Psst, some people use áccénts on their passwords but I guess Gnome isn’t designed for people)
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Well its almost a week since I upgraded to Fedora 15 and started using gnome-shell. The good news is I’m still using it and generally really like it, although admittedly there’s quite a few bugs, and quite a few regressions that I really dislike. Fortunately a lot of those are fixed in the short tern with a few extensions and gnome-tweak-tools. I’ve also filed quite a few bugs, updated others where I felt I could add useful information, or just added myself onto the bug for easier tracking. There’s a lot of fixes that are being worked on for gnome 3.2 and I appreciate that the gnome team is working hard to balance their vision and design with a workable desktop.
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After playing with Lightweight Portable Security for a few days, I have to say I’m a bit disappointed.
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ISO image of Porteus 1.0 is quite small, well below 300Mb. Of course, it can be burned to CD and ran from there. And also you can put Porteus onto USB drive and run from there. I wanted to use second option. Documentation says that I need to copy files from iso-image when it is mounted as loop device or via archive manager. Then script has to change Master Boot Record on the drive.
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New Releases
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· Announced Distro: PCLinuxOS KDE 2011.6
· Announced Distro: Vinux 3.2
· Announced Distro: Linux Mint 11 LXDE RC
· Announced Distro: Mandriva 2011 RC1
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I think users are going to like Mandriva Desktop 2011 plenty. Check the main website for a full review when the stable version is released.
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Gentoo Family
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The Sabayon developers have done a good job at making Gentoo accessible for less technical users. However, this distro is in need of some software management improvements as I noted in the problems section. The Entropy Store needs to be a bit more aesthetically pleasing and it could also use a name change.
Overall though my experience with Sabayon was pretty positive and there’s not a whole lot to dislike about it. It’s a solid desktop distro that should get the job done for most people.
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Red Hat Family
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I was the first Massachusetts employee – early 2001. At the time we were a completely retail, boxed product. We decided that there was a need to bring Linux to the [business] enterprise, to make Linux enterprise-class. I did a job fair up here. I had 1,500 people show up, 400 of which had some kind of kernel expertise. I did job fairs in other parts of the country, and I would get one or two.
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Fedora
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Despite all the efforts to make Fedora 15 easier and more user friendly, making power users kind of unhappy by removing functionality and features, it doesn’t look ready yet (please, remove more features! 
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When installing Fedora , we can send hardware profile to Fedora Team.
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Our local Linux Users Group in my home town of Osijek has started workshops called knowledge exchange in partnership with our public library. So first step was to install Fusion Linux Fedora Remix on their PCs.
Are there other examples with Fedora being rolled out in public libraries or in some other public institutions? I would be really interested with their experiences.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Firstly, sorry about the lack of posts recently. I kind of function on a post-when-I’m-not-doing-anything-else schedule. Recently, doing anything else has involved, at least computer wise, breaking yet another Ubuntu based installation. This time it was Netrunner, which is a shame as it looked quite nice from what I saw. It was probably my fault. Anyway, I have never actually given KDE a fair shot. I like GTK a bit more, particularly because it is used in more than one environment. Netrunner’s implementation showed me that KDE 4 could actually be quite simple to use and of course, nice to look at.
So I wanted to keep trying out KDE, but also to escape an Ubuntu base and the instability it brings (at least in my experience, yours may very well be different). This left me with many options. Fedora, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, OpenSuse, Sabayon, Calculate and Salix all offer KDE desktops, among others. MEPIS, Chakra and Pardus are also great devoted KDE distributions. Still, I wanted stability without losing the package variety I am accustomed to from Ubuntu so I opted for the only Debian stable based distro out of those, MEPIS 11.
[...]
Having used MEPIS for a few days now I can officially say that it is as stable, nice looking, and easy to use as it is said to be.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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According to a recent update to the Ubuntu Wiki Messaging Menu page, the MeMenu will be integrated into the Messaging Menu. Further more, the MeMenu Ubuntu wiki page now says it’s obsolete and will be replaced “by an IM status section in the messaging menu”, which makes it pretty clear that the MeMenu and Messaging Menu unification is about to happen.
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It has been two full months since Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” was released with the new Unity user interface. With Unity, Canonical has taken a very drastic step and cut down on a lot of customizability that many power users would want. Understandably, many proclaimed that Unity is the best thing that Canonical has ever done. There was even an article claiming that Ubuntu is on a decline due to Unity.
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The release schedule for the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system has been modified last week by Canonical. The second Alpha version was supposed to arrive for testing last Thursday, June 30th, but it was rescheduled for July 7th.
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Recently I’ve found that I have a problem with Ubuntu, but it’s not a simple one to explain.
You don’t expect a distribution at the top of the popularity charts to risk its user base and its wider community standing by making big changes in a single release, yet this is exactly what Canonical has done with Ubuntu 11.04.
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The latest version of Ubuntu, codenamed Natty Narwhal, isn’t just another release of the iconic distribution. We take a comprehensive look at the new interface.
[...]
Natty is nice. It boots fast, is slick to use, and Unity is the visual upgrade Ubuntu badly needs to compete in this age of Mac OS X and Windows 7. It’s also bold enough to go out on its own limb and not emulate either competing OSs (though it does clearly borrow from Mac OS X). And this is a good thing, because we need fresh ideas every now and then to see if there’s a better way of doing things.
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Second, everyone talks about this bad relationship Ubuntu has with Gnome. This I personally find amusing. If Ubuntu has upset Gnome, and the Gnome foundation so much, why do they accept financial support for them? Canonical sits on the Gnome Advisory Board because they support (donate money to) Gnome. This position allows them to help ‘guide’ the Directors of the Gnome Foundation in the overall direction of Gnome and the Gnome Foundation. Doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of bad feelings there, or neither of the two would be together is my guess.
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Flavours and Variants
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If you have used Bodhi before then you may be aware that one of the profiles we offer by default is one that is optimized for touch screen devices.
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Phones
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Hewlett-Packard, which makes and sells its own phones and tablets that run the WebOS operating system, rose 1.3 percent to a three-week high of $35.55 in New York trading yesterday.
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Android
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Android and Ubuntu are cousins, they share the same blood stream and DNA code. However, there seems to be some problem between the two brothers (or sisters). Honeycomb uses MTP as the file transfer protocol instead of Mass Storage Device (non-Android OS such as iOS for iPad are even worse as you can’t do anything without risky iTunes.)
While we can mount and see folders on Honeycomb tablets, we can’t see content inside those folders or take back-up of images or files that we downloaded.
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Well, it turns out they both love that other OS more than freedom but at least in China, Android and Linux get equal time.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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At 7 inches I found tablets as cheap as $86 CDN. So it’s not the latest and greatest – 4 hours battery life, 800MHz ARM11, Android 2.1, 256MB RAM and resistive touch screen.
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Each comes with a set of pros and cons and will almost certainly influence your tablet buying decision, so here’s our guide to every major system.
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We have written before about the International Free and Open Source Law Review, but it’s worth getting an update as to what was in the last issue. I also want to make you aware of the latest publication coming out of the community of lawyers interested in free and open source software, the IFOSS Law Book.
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Mantra is an open source, browser-based framework for penetration testing and security assessments. It’s based on Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, so it’s cross-platform, and it’s part of the Open Web Application Security Project — OWASP. Techworld Australia recently caught up with project leader Abhi M. Balakrishnan to talk about Mantra and its goals
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Events
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Time has come again to think to our friends down under ! Since I was there in 2007 for a MondoRescue conference I think this is really a place to be in the FLOSS ecosystem when possible; Too bad it’s so far away from France 
Travel costs are not light either.
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The Debian Project is pleased to announce that it will be present at several events in the coming weeks, ranging from developer-oriented conferences to workshops for users and wannabe developers. As usual, upcoming events are also listed on our website.
From June 27 to July 3, during Campus Party 2011 in Bogotá, Colombia, Debian Colombia invites all to join the special event “Lleva un paquetico en tu corazón (Keep a Little Package in Your Heart)” during which attendees will work on bugs and will create Debian packages. It will also be possible to participate via IRC by joining the channel debian-co on irc.debian.org. Further information (in Spanish) is available on the wiki page.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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One reason I had for awhile considered cmake so strongly in GNU Telephony is that I choose to experiment with using Qt to build applications, and at the time I thought it rather difficult to build QT applications under autconf/automake. A week ago I revisited this question on my own, and found I was actually wrong about this.
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Project Releases
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Besides releasing libgcrypt 1.5 this week, another GNU project has been updated. Gawk 4.0.0 has been officially released as a major update to this popular free software utility. Gawk 4.0.0 presents several new end-user features along with revamped internals.
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Minitunes 1.0 has been released, The new release added a new search box that allow you to search music in your collection , added drag’n'drop, which let us to add songs or entire albums simply by dragging them within the application, adding new translations. Fixed some bugs found in previous versions to improve stability. and more.
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Public Services/Government
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Includes procurement guidelines and open source software policy.
The Federal Government has issued version 2.0 of its Guide to Open Source Software, after seeking public comments on a draft guide in March.
The new, 67-page document (pdf) replaced a guide that was issued by former special minister of state Eric Abetz in April 2005.
Australian Government CIO Ann Steward said on Friday that she was “very pleased with the response” to the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO)’s call for comments on the draft.
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Programming
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Hey all i am sorry for the last post i have many posts drafted to be posted within the next 2-3 weeks where i am going to discuss my project GccPy as there has been alot happening with it recently, i am working on a paper which shows everything about it so far but i want to have some posts demonstrating the basic principles of compilers and in deed creating an Ahead of Time version of Python on top of GCC and how this actually works. I personally find it a pretty cool topic but first i will am just in a bit of rant mood and its about whats happened since my last blog post:
Well anyway i’m currently in an awkward position i feel i may leave university but i will see because its simply causing me so much problems in my day to day life, I’ve got onto Google summer of code 2011 yet again to work on Gccpy with Ian lance Taylor but i may focus a little more on working on the Gcc middle-end to make some of my work a little easier. But the problem i am having at the moment with university is i actually failed all my modules last semester which may sound awful. Esp the one in compiler development i am writing a complaint about this at the moment due to the fact i actually took my own time to create a compiler specificity for this language they developed which works i cant emphasize this enough it actually works and demonstrates an IR properly designed and works well and doesn’t segv if you put in a syntax/grammar error i didnt even have to do this for the module.
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As open source usage has entered the mainstream, are users contributing less time and money to open source projects, thereby putting the future of the project at risk? One CEO of a leading open-source-based company thinks so.
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The GNU Awk developers have announced version 4.0.0 of Gawk, aka GNU Awk, the GNU Project’s free software implementation of AWK, the data-driven scripting language for extracting data and creating reports. Gawk 4.0.0 is the result of two years’ work in which the developers made a number of major changes.
For example, they have added BEGINFILE/ENDFILE allowing Gawk programs to execute rules when they begin or end processing a file and support for indirect function calls and “arrays of arrays” (including an isarray function). There is a new –sandbox option which disables the system() call and redirects input/output and extensions, allowing for “scripts from questionable sources” to be run with minimal access to the system.
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When Dominique Strauss-Kahn first mulled over the idea of running for president of France, he professed concern that his vulnerabilities in the coming election would be the trifecta of “money, women, his being Jewish.” In the week since a housekeeper at New York’s Sofitel Hotel alleged that he assaulted and attempted to rape her, all three of those elements have converged to render any thought of a political future for Strauss-Kahn entirely beside the point.
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Finance
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More than six months have passed since Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and others cut WikiLeaks’ purse strings. And if that blockade lasts six more days, the secret-spilling group plans to take its financial fight to the courtroom.
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WikiLeaks and Datacell (a service provider assisting WikiLeaks) are to sue Visa & MasterCard for engaging in an unlawful, U.S. influenced, financial blockade.
On June 9th a the law firms Bender von Haller Dragested in Denmark and Reykjavik Law Firm in Iceland acting on behalf of DataCell and WikiLeaks told the companies that if the blockade is not removed they will be litigated in Denmark and a request for prosecution will be filed with the EU Commission. Visa Europe, MasterCard Europe, and Teller (a Danish company licensed to process transactions on behalf of the card companies) are the subjects of the complaint.
It was pointed out to these companies that their coordinated action on December 7th last year to block all credit card transactions to WikiLeaks and DataCell constituted a serious violation of the Competition Rules of the EU (Article 101(1) and 102). Furthermore, that the actions of these companies have violated Danish merchant laws when they terminated the payment services and by refused to reinstate them.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Creative Commons’ chief of staff, Lisa Green said that the campaign was partly aimed at combating the myth that it supported “giving everything away for free”.
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Anti-Trust
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Censorship
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Privacy
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Thanks to the PAT RIOT act, law enforcement does not have to ask a court for permission, so the rise in asking is just a drop in the bucket. People who want privacy should only free software and encrypted communications.
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Intellectual Monopolies
Android-контроль и зеленая фигня
Credit: TinyOgg
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07.02.11
Posted in News Roundup at 10:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In retrospect, I have recently read a large amount of comments and articles on how Linux is not ready for prime time. Honestly, if I had read even a fraction of these articles, I doubt I would have installed it, even with Mark’s endorsement. In the past two months or so, I can honestly say I can not understand how these writers came to such a conclusion. Linux works extremely well for me.
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Linux IT is aiming to kick-start community-based open-source software adoption among UK enterprises with the launch of an indemnification scheme.
In what it claims is a world first, the integrator is offering to underwrite any community-based open-source software that meets the requirements of its
verification process.
The soon-to-be-launched programme, which is backed by an unnamed insurance firm, enables Linux IT to fix or replace the software if it does not work as expected. Cover to the value of £5m is provided.
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Desktop
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Virgin America is offering its flyers an opportunity to ‘test-fly’ Google Chromebook with fee Wi-Fi. Virgin America flyers will get a chance to check out a Chromebook at their departure airport gate and take the new notebook computer out for a spin onboard select Virgin America flights. The offer will run from July 1 to September 30, 2011.
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Server
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The issue with the MCSE is that the tests are glorified word association exams. To pass, all you need to do is learn all the technology names and keywords created by Microsoft, the contexts in which these words are used, and the contexts in which they aren’t used. Obviously an understanding of the technologies behind the buzzwords is helpful, but not essential.
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Applications
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Bioinformatics has been defined in many different ways, but it is common ground to regard this discipline as the application of mathematics, computing and statistics to the analysis of biological information. The objective of bioinformatics is to enable the finding of new biological insights, and to create a broader, more critical view from which unifying principles in biology can be perceived.
Bioinformatics is very important in the field of human genome research. It has become crucial for large-scale measurement technologies such as DNA sequencing, microarrays, and metabolomics. The field of bioinformatics has been aided significantly by Linux-based hardware and software. There are a number of Linux distributions which offer an integrated bioinformatics workstation. The popular distribution Bio-Linux packages hundreds of bioinformatics programs spanning a number of different fields.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Dead Cyborg, a new donation based episodic science fiction adventure is coming soon to Linux. The game is based on Blender game engine and is made by one person Endre Barath, who has done all the coding, designing and written the story as well.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Now that things are well on their way and that Mageia 1 is there, it’s time to discover some more about the persons that are making this a reality.
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IndigoVision announced a doubling of capacity to 2TB disks on its NVR-AS 3000 of Linux-based, surveillance-oriented network video recorders (NVRs). The NVR-AS 3000 systems are now available with up to 6TB of usable RAID 5 storage, as well as RAID 0/1 options, and can record full framerate video and audio from 64 cameras, and play back 20 streams simultaneously, says the company.
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Phones
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Android
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LINUX VENDOR Canonical has brought its cloud storage that it calls Ubuntu One to Android devices, saying that in order to stream files, it stores them as plain text.
Canonical’s Ubuntu One cloud storage service had previously been available from the outfit’s Ubuntu Linux distribution, however with the arrival of Ubuntu One Files on Android, users can access the service on both PCs running Ubuntu and Android devices. The free service offers 2GB of storage space and does not need a PC to operate.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The Wi-Fi version of the 9.7-inch HP TouchPad tablet went on sale today for $499 (16GB) and $599 (32GB). Early reviews follow the same general pattern as those of the original Palm Pre two years ago: praise for the promise of WebOS, but disappointment over bugs, performance, lack of apps, and limited battery life.
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Because WebOS won’t survive if its runs only on HP devices, its as simple as it goes. HP doesn’t command the smartphone market as much as Samsung or Motorola do. In addition HP also needs what matters the most ‘apps’ for WebOS to be successful. Not many developers will be interested in porting their apps for a platform which has a non-existent market.
Most HP smartphone users are corporate users and they may not want Angry Birds on their devices. If there are no takers, Rovio won’t port Angry Birds to WebOS and if there is no Angry Birds there, many regular users won’t buy WebOS phones. Simple.
So, HP needs vendors which can take WebOS to consumer segment.
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Vizio announced the VTAB1008, an eight-inch tablet that includes infrared “universal remote” capabilities and runs Android 2.3. The company added that it will employ Android and its own Vizio Internet Apps Plus (V.I.A. Plus) additions in forthcoming TVs, Blu-ray players, smartphones, “and more.”
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In June of 2010, Cisco CEO John Chambers announced the Cius, an Android based tablet that was supposed to be the first enterprise grade tablet. Fast forward to 2011 and the Cius still is not yet generally available, but that’s about to change.
Cisco today announced that the Cius will become generally available in July and will include a new enterprise AppHQ component for the delivery of mobile applications. Cisco is trying to differentiate the Cius from consumer tablets like the Apple iPad as well as other Android tablets by providing enterprise grade collaboration, security and applications. The device isn’t just a tablet, it can also be docked with a phone and a keyboard as well.
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The Georgia Tech Research Institute has been designated the lead organization in a government project to develop open-source cybersecurity capabilities.
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Events
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Calls for papers were announced for CELF’s Embedded Linux Conference Europe, co-located with LinuxCon Europe in Prague on October 26-28, as well as the Australian Linux.conf.au, planned for Jan 16-20, 2012 in Ballarat, Australia. Meanwhile, the Linux Foundation announced Kim Blanche’s “Flying Penguins” as the winner of the 20th Anniversary of Linux T-shirt contest, earning her a trip to next month’s LinuxCon Gala in Vancouver.
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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A few minutes ago, July 1st, The Document Foundation company announced the first maintenance release of the LibreOfficeb 3.4 open source office suite software for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms, bringing several bugfixes.
LibreOffice 3.4.1 is available now (see download links at the end of the article), for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. The new release fixes some important bugs and updates several translations. Overall it is much stable than the previous release and everyone is encourage to update.
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Yesterday Sergio, a user of OpenOffice Impress, sent to the OpenOffice.org discussion list his list of the “Major Gaps of OpenOffice Impress 3.3 vs. Microsoft Office PowerPoint”.
Sergio compiled the list because, as much as he likes OpenOffice, “after struggling for over 1 year, sadly he had to stop using Open Office Impress and go back to Microsoft Power Point”.
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First I would like to thank everyone for their interest in LibreOffice! Second, I think it’s very important to understand that there’s a difference between PPAs and the default version shipped by Ubuntu. Just like any other distribution, Ubuntu releases a full GNU/Linux system that comes with a set of fully defined and qualified packages. Unless Ubuntu chooses to upgrade these packages themselves, they won’t move or change until the next version of the distribution is released. PPAs are a community based and convenient way to use more up-to-date version of software packages, but do not expect the same quality or to have a fault-proof software running; it’s an upgrade for the users who wish to enjoy their system with more spice and n
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It seems I’m continuing my pattern of posting less here, which I find to be a disappointing yet apparently an unescapable trend. If you haven’t seen my “dents” and “tweets” on the side of this page, feel free to follow me on identi.ca (charlesschulz) and on Twitter (ch_s). Note that I’m much more often on identi.ca than on Twitter. Today, I would like to send everyone reading this blog a very special invitation. The first LibreOffice Conference will take place in Paris, from the 12th to the 15th of October. These will be great days to meet face to face and to exchange though conferences and informal, quick talks about several topics related to LibreOffice development, distribution and design. Also, and this is important: our call for papers is open but it will close by the end of July, so feel free to submit your proposal now. I would like to unveil somewhat what we have in store for this event.
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Education
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Do you ever wish your kids would do something besides play video games on the computer? What if you could get a head start teaching them to be the next generation of open source developers?
Computers are increasingly easy to use, but programming is far more complex–and less accessible. For many of us who now have small children, programming began with BASIC programs on computers that forced you to make them do something by offering nothing but a command line.
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Business
Semi-Open Source
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Enterprise giant Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) has been warning its users this year that it plans to abandon the Intel Itanium architecture that powers HP’s (NYSE: HPQ) Unix operating system. While Oracle isn’t interested in supporting Itanium, others are.
EnterpriseDB today announced Postgres Plus Advanced Server 9.0, which provides Oracle compatibility and now supportS HP-UX on Itanium.
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This week, Google released Google+, which is basically a social network that’s a lot like Facebook, but run by Google instead of Facebook. The big deal here is that it’s a lot easier to modify privacy settings and configure what information to post to which group(s) (“Circle(s)” in Google+-speak) of contacts. This shows that Google, at least on the surface, takes privacy a lot more seriously than Facebook. I say this because whenever a controversial privacy settings change occurs on Facebook, it’s usually in the direction of less privacy, and only when the users get outraged does Facebook do anything at all (and it’s usually insignificant), because the truth is that Facebook’s business is built upon selling users’ data to companies for marketing, advertising, etc. I’ve also gotten annoyed with Facebook’s chat and constant UI changes that occur for no good reason, so I’m a little more drawn in that sense to Google+ because it integrates Google Chat (which I know works), and all of Google’s applications have kept pretty much constant, simple UIs over the years. Please note that I haven’t actually used Google+, though I have an invitation (it seems like Google can’t process that invitation right now); any statements that make it seem like I’ve used it are actually just my hopes and expectations.
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Texas Governor Rick Perry plans to host a “National Day of Prayer and Fasting” on Saturday, August 6 at Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas, in an event is billed as a “non-denominational, apolitical Christian prayer meeting.” Despite the “apolitical” label, the event has some political undertones, particularly since Perry has been flirting with a run for the Republican presidential nomination and currently serves as chair of the Republican Governors Association. Perry has invited the other 49 U.S. state governors to the event. The portrayal of the event as a “nondenominational” ceremony is a misnomer, too, since the event will be exclusively Christian, and no other belief systems will be represented.
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Governor Scott Walker will sign the controversial state budget bill into law June 26. He was originally scheduled to sign his budget at Badger Sheet Metal Works, a private business operated by a man with six felony tax convictions, in Green Bay, at 2 p.m. on Sunday. However, now that Gregory A. DeCaster’s tax troubles have been publicized, the governor’s office has announced a new location for the ceremony: Fox Valley Metal Tech, also in Green Bay.
“While Mr. DeCaster has served his time in jail and paid his debt to society, it is fitting that the governor would choose to sign this budget at a business owned by someone who was once convicted of the felony of tax evasion,” said Marc Norberg, a Wisconsin native and assistant to the general president of the Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association.
Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch said something quite similar earlier in the day when he told WisPolitics, “Green Bay, and certainly the company that we’re going to, reflects really what this budget and what Gov. Walker’s first term here is all about.”
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Health
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More and more Americans are falling victim to one of the most insidious bait-and-switch schemes in U.S. history. As they do, health insurance executives and company shareholders are getting richer and richer. This industry-wide plot explains how health insurers have been able to reap record profits during the recent recession as the ranks of the uninsured and underinsured continue to swell.
It also explains why the insurance industry and its allies are pulling out all the stops to kill a measure in the California legislature that could protect state residents from losing their homes and being forced into bankruptcy if they get seriously sick or injured.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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While the ban is cause for celebration for those truly in favor of a “clean energy future,” it is largely symbolic because only a tiny sliver of the Marcellus Shale actually touches the state. There is actually some truth to the statement made by Energy in Depth’s Chris Tucker, who stated that the ban, by-and-large, is “irrelevant.”
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Fukushima has been a wake up call about the dangers of nuclear power, and some countries are heeding the information. But it seems the U.S. is still sleeping when it comes to this issue. Light-to-absent coverage of TEPCO’s struggles to bring Fukushima under control, legislators who insist on acting favorably towards the nuclear power industry despite the deteriorated state of our current reactor fleet and an ineffective Nuclear Regulatory Commission have all contributed to a bad combination of a dangerous situation and a complacent American public on this issue.
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Finance
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Nowhere are health insurers working harder to thwart reforms that could save consumers billions of dollars than in California. One measure they are especially determined to kill is a bill that would give state regulators the authority to reject rate increases that are excessive or discriminatory.
The California Assembly passed a bill to do just that earlier this month over the intense opposition of insurers, including the state’s biggest supposedly nonprofit health plans: Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente.
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Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), one of the richest members of Congress and the chairman of the House Oversight Committee who promised a hearing a day after the November 2010 elections, has always been slimy little creature who refuses to accept responsibility for his own misbehavior, everything from car theft to lying about his military history.
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The fifth-biggest U.S. bank by assets said yesterday it hired Bank of England economist Andrew Benito after recruiting Huw Pill from the European Central Bank in May and Naohiko Baba from the Bank of Japan in January. Moving in the other direction, Ben Broadbent, Goldman Sachs’s ex-chief U.K. economist, started at the Bank of England last month. Former vice chairman Mario Draghi will take up the presidency of the ECB in November.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Ah, the RIAA will apparently stoop to pretty much any old ridiculous argument to get PROTECT IP passed, I guess. The RIAA’s Mitch Glazier has written a typically ridiculous blog post defending PROTECT IP. Most of it tries (and fails) to counter the very credible claims of folks like Paul Vixie (who knows this stuff) that PROTECT IP (1) won’t work and (2) will break the internet and cause tremendous collateral damage. The arguments against Vixie pretty much amount to quoting people, who have known associations with those backing PROTECT IP, saying that “eh, things won’t be that bad, and we can minimize unintended consequences.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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Even though Think Computer Corporation, the company that runs FaceCash, is capable of meeting both of these requirements, the unfortunate reality is that the California Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) requires licensees to have far more than the dollar figures specified by the statute. The DFI has been unwilling to provide a single number to us explaining how much money is actually required to obtain a license.
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Anti-Trust
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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[the OECD's Paris statement] could undermine “online freedom of expression, freedom of information, the right to privacy, and innovation across the world
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Censorship
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Privacy
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Copyrights
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This article is propaganda by the publisher who cries that ““pirates” are reading journals “for pennies on the dollar.” Communist China is invoked for inflammatory effect. How dare people share journals with each other?
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Pharmacies are said to have a “free speech” right to sell doctor prescribing information. EPIC argued that “de-identification” techniques were insuficient to protect patient privacy. The dissenting opinion was:
the Vermont law affects expression “in one, and only one way” — by depriving data-mining companies of data that “could help pharmaceutical companies create better sales messages.” That is more linked to legal government effort to regulate a commercial enterprise, and not speech protected under the First Amendment,
Ludicrous decisions like this are predictable from a court that says corporations have free speech rights.
Greenpeace – The Darkside.mp4
Credit: TinyOgg
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