Their best-selling desktop runs GNU/Linux.
That other OS seems to dominate notebooks, however. All of the netbooks they sell run that other OS. Android/Linux dominates the tablets.
As people are getting their heads around the economic benefits of cloud computing–pay just for what you use servers and services–I’ve been hearing a lot of people say they’d use the cloud if only they could move their existing servers to the cloud without a lot of blood, sweat, and toil. This is where Racemi, a cloud-services company, comes in with its easy server migration program.
Finger-pointing over the Deepwater Horizon disaster resumed recently after the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Coast Guard issued a joint report (pdf) which concluded all three corporate participants in the calamity -- BP, Transocean Ltd. and Halliburton -- were at fault. The report concluded all three companies violated federal laws and safety regulations by "failing to take necessary precautions to keep the Macondo well under control at all times." The report also found all three companies were "jointly and severally liable for the failure to comply with all applicable regulations." That means all three companies are mutually responsible for the accident, and each can be held singly responsible for the entire debacle. The report parsed blame among the companies for sloppy materials and workmanship, inadequate training, failure to properly assess risk and conduct proper testing, failure to abide by stop-work work policies after multiple anomalies were discovered, and so on.
The rekonq development team has released version 0.8 of rekonq, the KDE web browser. The browser is based on Qt's QtWebKit, and, according the project's home page, aims to be "light, fast & clean", avoiding competing with KDE's more feature-rich web browser, Konqueror. Rekonq is the default web browser in Kubuntu, and has been included with KDE's Extragear collection since May 2010.
Frequent readers of DistroWatch may recall the last time I tried Zenwalk I was quite happy with it. The medium-sized distro provided a polished and responsive desktop platform which ran like a cat with its tail on fire. Though armed with fewer resources than the big-name projects Zenwalk was a strong contender last year, making my Top Five list in 2010. With this in mind it should be no surprise I was eager to try Zenwalk 7 when it arrived in early 2011. So it would appear this review is coming out quite late, and there is a reason for that.
Unity, which drew a lot of flak in its earlier reincarnation, seems to have matured with the latest Ubuntu release. Performance is snappier, and the Dash has received a major face lift that makes it look sleek and professional.
On my old Acer Aspire One, I ran into occasional hiccups, probably because the built-in graphics on the netbook isn’t all that hot. Still, Unity was much more responsive than it was when I first tried it out some months ago.
A big definitive NO should be the answer. But I found this strange new bug with two brand new Ubuntu 11.10 installations of mine. When I tried to change the default application for AVI files from Totem to SMPlayer, an error came up with the warning that says, "Could not set as default. Error while setting "SMPlayer" as default application: Can't create user application configuration folder /home/manu/.local/share/applications: Not a directory".
Welcome to Ubuntu. Yes, that’s the new and improved Unity interface. If you want an old style GNOME interface, , look to Mint Linux. Want to try the new GNOME shell, see Fedora. Ubuntu’s default desktop is going to stay Unity.
Canonical has just released Ubuntu 11.10, it's latest version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. It calls itself 'Linux for Human Beings' and it aims to be one of the most newbie friendly Linuxes. It's innovative 'Unity' GUI (graphical user interface) is designed for simplicity and functionality.
I was extremely excited about Ubuntu 11.10. I was under impression that it will fix the issues with 11.04 and will further polish Unity. I have been using Ubuntu since 2007 and I have been an advocate of Ubuntu. This is one distro which had all the punches to lure any user to ditch Windows and move to Linux.
When we asked Cameron how he found Ubuntu in comparison with Windows, he said 1: I found it's layout much easier to understand 2: The Quick access side docks are awesome 3: I like the idea of multiple workspaces, keeps your screen tidier 4: Easy to access power options on screen 5: I found it much faster than windows at, a) starting up and b) opening programmes.
Canonical actually hired the people behind the original concept of CNR to help them develop a similar marketplace. It's great to see that everything worked out and that this software marketplace legacy was able to find a new home.
Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint Founder and lead developer, has announced that his project has started work on a GNOME 3 edition of its next major release, version 12. The new edition will initially be developed alongside the GNOME 2.32-based release which will remain as the default desktop environment of Mint. The developers had decided to stick with GNOME 2.32 because there had been "radical changes" in GNOME 3.x's desktop which had split the communities of GNOME and Mint users.
The Puppy Linux project announced version 5.2 of the legacy-PC friendly "Wary" version of its small-footprint Linux distribution. Puppy Linux 5.2 ("Wary") features an SMP-optimized version of the Linux 2.6.32.45 kernel, an upgrade path to Xorg 7.6, an updated PuppyPhone 1.1 VoIP app, and a new PupCamera app for automatically detecting digital cameras, says the project.
One of the reasons for the increasing popularity of Linux Mint is the ease of use. But as Ubuntu moved to Unity, instead of enhancing Gnome 3 Shell, it created a divide. Unity/Gnome 3 Shell offers a new interface, which was heavily criticized by Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. This new interface not only demand relearning everything but also takes away a lot of functionality and customization.
Other changes for the Droid Bionic includes higher RAM capacity, change in chipset from the Tegra 2 AP20H to the Texas Instruments' OMAP4430 and surprisingly the inclusion of lesser battery capacity compared to the one introduced in the beginning.
Droid Bionic, which runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS, comes with a 4.3-inch HD screen featuring the Corning Gorilla scratch-free glass, a front-facing camera for video chat, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, Adobe Flash preloaded, 32 GB of memory and a slim frame. It has a dual-core 1 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM.
Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha took the stage just moments ago to announce their new pride and joy, the DROID RAZR. The device boasts the world’s thinnest profile measuring in at just 7.1mm thin and weighing only 127 grams. It’s not only thin and light but it’s also built to take a beating thanks to its stainless steel core, laser-cut kevlar fiber outer body, tough Gorilla Glass display, water resistance with Splash-guard technology and carbon fiber accents.
Ice Cream Sandwich, or Android 4.0 for those of you not familiar with the code name, will unify the disparate smartphone (Android 2.x) and tablet (Android 3.x) versions of its mobile OS with a consistent UI and app framework. This will hopefully enable developers to more easily port their apps to all of the many screen sizes and resolutions that Android devices sport. As is normal with new Android launches, Samsung is expected to reveal a new phone that will show off the new operating system's capabilities and serve as a baseline for other Android partners' devices.
Venkat Mangudi, an open source evangelist and OSI Days speaker, recalls how his 10-year-old kid made him realise that Linux should be made compulsory in schools. He also explains how FOSS came to the rescue of small businesses, the new open technologies revolutionalising the world and how to overcome the 'Ow' of discomfort in open source to get a 'Wow' of admiration!
At a surprisingly rapid pace, machine language translation is now moving into high gear on devices that we already use, and open source platforms are leading the charge. Ten years ago, futurists such as Ray Kurzweil predicted that the devices we carry with us would become fast and efficient at translating languages, and it's happening now. If you haven't tried the translation tools in platforms such as Google Chrome and on Android, you're missing out.
What does the future hold for eager, talented software developers, and people with related essential skill sets? The overriding trend, as in all industries, is you're on your own, chum. But free/open source software (FOSS) offers considerably more richness of opportunity than anything else. Let's peer into the crystal ball and see what the future holds.
An open source ideal is not to be branded mechanical. It's not to be deemed irrelevant to the world. Instead it's to be understood as any philosophy that employs collaborative thinking, evolving mantras and a refusal of traditional notions. It's a methodology of progress - and even religion can't escape it.
Eddie Pickle, Senior Vice President of OpenGeo, the open source geospatial software company behind the OpenGeo Suite will participate on a panel discussing open source technologies at the GEOINT 2011 Symposium. The panel, Demonstration of Military Relevant Open Source Geospatial Software, will be hosted by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OpenGEO), Military Open Source Software Working Group (MIL-OSS), and the USGIF Tradecraft Subcommittee.
Lucid Imagination, the commercial company for Apache Lucene and Apache Solr search technology today announced record registration numbers for its second Apache Lucene EuroCon EMEA Conference. More than 300 developers, IT professionals and decision makers will convene in Barcelona this week; double the number of delegates from last year’s event and a testament to the industry’s focus on open source search. This interest in an open source path to search applications follows a turbulent 12 months in the proprietary search market and the emergence of Big Data as one of the biggest challenges and opportunities for today’s businesses.
Four months after the transition from Oracle to the ASF, the Apache Software Foundation has made it clear that it considers OpenOffice.org (OOo) to be heading in the right direction. It believes that the presence of more than 70 active committers – ten times the number involved in other projects in the Apache Incubator – illustrates the level of interest in the project. Although it has been six months since the last new OpenOffice release, this is, says Apache, a matter for each individual project. Intensive work on adapting OpenOffice.org to the Apache Way is apparently under way.
The office suite has occupied a very strange position in the world of open source. As a key software tool used by practically everyone on a daily basis, it was vital for free software to be able to offer one. And yet what came to be the leading office suite - OpenOffice.org - was widely recognised as deeply unsatisfactory. Its early versions were barely usable, and even in its later incarnations it was hard to get enthusiastic about it.
That was largely a function of the way that it had come into being, starting as the closed-source application StarOffice, and then being open-sourced by Sun, which had bought the product, largely in an attempt to irritate Microsoft. Licensing issues meant that OpenOffice.org never really became a true community project. As a result, there was no real passion behind its development, and it showed.
Following yesterday's post that asked specific questions about the goals and objectives of Team OpenOffice.org e.V., members of the broader OpenOffice.org community pointed out that as far back as August 13, Apache OpenOffice.org leaders were calling for the cessation of outside fundraising activities specifically aimed at OpenOffice.org.
A bit of semi-random open source software searching is generally beneficial for the soul and spirit at least once a month. My most recent expedition in this vein led me to find Mantra, an open source browser-based security framework for penetration testing and security assessments.
The secure boot mechanism planned for Microsoft's Windows 8 has already provoked considerable outcry from Linux users worried that the technology will make it impossible to install their favorite free and open source operating system on Windows 8 certified PCs.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced the release of version 1.0 of the open source, highly scalable, column-oriented, distributed "NoSQL" database, Cassandra. The release comes just under five months after the release of the previous version, 0.8.0, and since then the developers have added support for data compression to reduce the volume of data on disk on Cassandra nodes and have improved the memory and disk space management with off-heap storage of the row cache and self tuning memory tables.
I believe we are at a stage where governments around the world are going to put aside FUD and look at the facts in choosing/purchasing IT. Any OS can function. GNU/Linux costs less to do the job. The FUD that no applications are available for certain specific tasks is nonsense. Governments are larger than the corporations producing non-free software so they can produce their own software at much lower cost especially if it is shared amongst governments.
HTML 5 is becoming more and more popular. This stems from the controversy over the late Steve Jobs objecting to using Flash technology, explaining that it is outdated, and HTML 5 is the future. While this is still debatable, HTML 5 has some huge backing by some major companies. Companies like Google, Apple, and Mozilla. HTML 5 brings new tags along such as header, footer, article, video, and audio.
Wall Street executives, facing demonstrators camped for a fourth week in New York’s financial district, said they were anxious and angry for other reasons.
An era of decline and disappointment for bankers may not end for years, according to interviews with more than two dozen executives and investors. Blaming government interference and persecution, they said there was not enough global stability, leverage or risk appetite to triumph in the current slump.
Citigroup Inc.'s earnings rose 74 percent in the third quarter as more of its customers paid their bills on time, leading to lower losses from loans. An accounting gain also boosted income.
It was the seventh straight quarter of income growth for Citi, the nation's third-largest bank by assets. Citigroup was one of the biggest recipients of taxpayer support during the financial crisis. It received $45 billion in bailouts funds and was partly owned by the government until December 2010.
The New York bank's net income rose 74 percent, to $3.8 billion, due to lower losses from loans and an accounting gain related to the valuation of the bank's own debt. Citi's stock fell 1.7 percent to close at $27.93, less than other banks stocks.
In what may be an early sign that credit card users are again having trouble paying their bills, five of the nation's top six credit card issuers said Monday that late payments rose in September.
That's the first month since February 2009 that so many major companies reported upticks in payments late by 30 days or more.
A majority of Americans want President Barack Obama’s agenda to succeed, but ultimately believe it won’t, according to a new poll out Monday.
Asked whether it seemed more likely that Obama’s policies will succeed or fail, 59 percent of those surveyed in a CNN/ORC International poll said they believed they will fail, while 36 percent said they believed Obama’s policies will succeed.
Right now Occupy Wall Street has favorable polling. So did the Tea Party at its beginning. As Seth Ackerman pointed out to me, once people saw that the Tea Party wasn’t a new thing but this old, arch-conservative thing, one that wants to take our global historical moment and wage total war against public sector workers and uteri, they turned against it. One symptom that it was an old thing was the books that it circulated: from Hayek’s underwhelming Road to Serfdom to Bircher Cold War tracts from the types who thought Eisenhower was a member of the communist conspiracy.
At the start of a crucial week for the euro, Germany sought Monday to play down expectations of a decisive breakthrough at a summit meeting of European Union leaders this weekend, indicating that an emerging five-point plan designed to end the euro zone’s sovereign debt crisis could take months to implement.
So while Rep. Cantor may believe the Occupy Wall Street movement is “the pitting of Americans against Americans,” the reality is the movement is pitting Americans against his campaign contributors.
The American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC -- like countless other such 501(c)(3) and (4) non-profit conservative charitable organizations -- has an intentionally dull-sounding name, for conservatives prefer to operate behind closed doors, secretly, without attracting attention. I first noticed ALEC during the Bush II years when I read a Mother Jones article about what was described as “one of the nation’s most powerful -- and least known -- corporate lobbies.” Even then, ALEC had already been “ghost writing” state laws for nearly a decade. Yet I’d not heard of ALEC before. It had no website, and I could find little reported information about its work.
British Defense Secretary Liam Fox has stepped down in the midst of an escalating scandal tied to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The ALEC connections have led opposition party leaders and the British press to question whether British Prime Minister David Cameron has been "allowing a secret rightwing agenda to flourish at the heart of the Conservative party."
CMD has signed onto a letter with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and seven other pro-privacy groups requesting that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigate changes Facebook has made to user accounts that undermine the privacy rights of millions of users.
The letter focuses on two recent policies implemented by Facebook called “frictionless sharing” and “post-log out tracking.” According to the letter,“frictionless sharing and post-log-out tracking harms consumers throughout the United States by invading their privacy and allowing for disclosure and use of information in ways and for purposes other than those to which users have consent and relied upon.”
Comments
NotZed
2011-10-19 14:08:55
I'm really somewhat surprised this has taken so long to come to light. I put a url block on facebook.com months ago via my modem and noticed that all sorts of seemingly completely unrelated sites had error boxes in iframes from the use of the facebook like button or other various means.
It did rather surprise me, given that that if a site can reference a bit of html it can do all manner of tracking and loading of 3rd party scripts.
It's a crappy walled garden you usually can't see into without an account, so one doesn't lose anything useful by blocking it.