10.19.11
Posted in News Roundup at 4:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Now we come to 2011 and the Linux desktop horizon is changing with the rise of smartphones and tablets. As our data becomes more mobile, developers are working to synchronize everything we use and need across all platforms, from your phones and tablets to your laptop and desktop computers. It is believed that by having a unified interface, it will help users avoid confusion and create a productive synergy. As handheld platforms are quickly becoming the dominant tools for accessing data, computer operating systems are following suit.
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Desktop
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Take your PC back to 1985 with a cool selection of tools and tricks that build a fully functioning desktop computer on the console!
There are many reasons to use the console. Sometimes you need to run on older hardware. Or you may be stuck running remotely over a slow connection, where using an X11 desktop is just painfully slow. There are lots of articles that describe the tools and utilities available for the console.
But how do you use them all together? This tutorial will look at one way that you can combine all of these programs together to give you a fully functional desktop. You’ll essentially end up with a console desktop where you can check email, surf the web, chat with people, catch up on the news, and more. We’ll use tmux to organise your desktop and make the most of your screen real estate.
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Since then I have used later versions of UBUNTU on both my home desktop system and my laptops. My newest laptop, an IBM ThinkPad T-42 is running Ubuntu 10.04 and – I’m writing this on that laptop. Linux has improved – 99% of the hardware on my T-42 “just worked” with the minor exception of the accelerometer chip (parks the harddrive when laptop is bumped)
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Accumulations
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Kernel Space
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Edward Shishkin, the lone developer that took over development of the Reiser4 file-system following the conviction of Hans Reiser, has shared a new update with Phoronix regarding the efforts towards pushing Reiser4 into the mainline Linux kernel.
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Note, I’ve had some boot problems with this kernel, and I can’t seem to narrow the issue down, but I think it’s due to something not related to the kernel itself, but am not positive. Please test to verify that I didn’t mess something up.
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Graphics Stack
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While there’s many ongoing improvements for Intel’s Sandy Bridge graphics and the next-generation Ivy Bridge graphics within the Linux kernel, Mesa, and xf86-video-intel (namely the SNA acceleration for the DDX), here’s some benchmarks from two older Intel systems using the latest Linux 3.1 kernel to see if there are any improvements there.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Free Game Alliance is a collection five free and open source games spread across a variety of genres. All these games are cross platform and works on Linux, Mac and Windows. The initiative was started by Atomic Blue, makers of MMORPG PlaneShift. However, FGA is made by all the projects participating in it.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Owen Taylor announced earlier today, October 18th the immediate availability for download and upgrade of the GNOME Shell 3.2.1 user interface for the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
The GNOME Shell package provides basic UI (User Interface) functions for the GNOME 3 desktop environment, such as launching applications and switching to windows.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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In a large organization, no single IT staffer will be able to observe all the millions of system events and glean from them a pattern worth paying attention to. It’s a problem with the level of knowledge decreasing in proportion to the rising amount of data.
Back in 2007, Red Hat joined an effort to craft a system for automating the process of detecting actionable patterns from huge amounts of system data. Maybe one human being can’t detect the patterns in a trillion data points, but a rules engine could. This rules engine is called Complex Event Processing (CEP). Last week, the company announced it’s ready to integrate the results of its work into its business rules engine, JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5.2.
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KVM Forum 2011 took place in Vancouver from the 15th to 16th of August, but the videos are finally up. KVM Forum was co-located with LinuxCon North America 2011. Videos are now uploaded to YouTube (all the videos are at that link). Other details on this virtualization conference and the presentation slides are available from Linux-KVM.org.
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Debian Family
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Not entirely satisfied with my last effort in OpenShot, I wanted to try something else, and that something turned out to be Blender’s Video Sequence Editor feature. That was a resounding failure. I had no idea how to do just about anything, and I find the Blender UI extremely uninviting.
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I mentioned last week that there was a new Debian GNU/Linux release available (6.0.3). At that time the Live images had not been updated. As of today (or late yesterday), they have. So if you want to get an easy look at the latest Debian running on your hardware, or you prefer to (or must) install from a Live image rather than the normal netinst image, you’re good to go now.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot final release happened sometime ago. I have been using Ubuntu 11.10 as my default netbook OS ever since Oneiric Alpha 2 was released. So it’s not like I am installing Ubuntu 11.10 just for the sake of reviewing it. Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot has been the OS of choice in my netbook for sometime now.
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Now that Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) has been released, Canonical proudly announced a few minutes ago the official place and date for the upcoming Ubuntu Hardware Summit 2011 event which takes place once a year.
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So apparently Canonical decided to name this release after a cat that dreams and pees a lot. Were they trying to send some sort of message? Interesting, I wonder if this decision was made by a particular individual or some sort of committee? Some have said that Canonical is copying Apple too much (Lion anybody?) and perhaps they have a point or two in that regard. Aaah well, it is what it is.
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Now that Ubuntu 11.10 was released, we are proud to announced today, Octomber 18th, the immediate availability for download of a new Linux operating system based on the newly released Ubuntu 11.10 distribution.
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Canonical and Vodacom, the South African subsidiary of Vodafone, have announced the launch of the Vodafone WebBook in South Africa. The ARM-based netbook runs the Ubuntu Linux operating system and is designed to “bring simplified, value-added internet access to thousands of South Africans, many of whom have until now had no access”.
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Following two years of development, OpenMediaVault (OMV) project founder and lead developer Volker Theile has announced the arrival of the first release of his open source NAS (network-attached storage) operating system, code-named “Ix”. Created by Theile – who is also a FreeNAS and Debian developer – OpenMediaVault is a Debian-based rewrite of the FreeBSD-based FreeNAS distribution.
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Phones
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Android
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Google and Samsung have announced the launch of the next superphone dubbed Galaxy Nexus. The phone arrives only a few days after the launch of ‘disappointing’ iPhone 4S. While the iPhone 4S has nothing new to offer (from hardware POV), Galaxy Nexus comes with the best of the breed hardware. We talked about soft aspect of Galaxy Nexus here, in this article we are talking about the hardware comparison of the ‘trying-to-catch-up’ iPhone 4S vs ‘rules-writing’ Galaxy Nexus.
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T-Mobile and LG announced an oddball Android 2.3 phone that features both a 3.5-inch display and a secondary two-inch screen embedded in the middle of a split-QWERTY keypad. Designed for texting and social networking, the 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon-equipped LG DoublePlay will be featured in the fifth annual LG U.S. National Texting Championship on Oct. 26.
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T-Mobile’s HTC Amaze 4G is worth considering by serious shutterbugs who want a phone that can replace their everyday point-and-shoot, according to this eWEEK review. But, reviewer Nicholas Kolawkowski adds, don’t expect its battery to hold out all day.
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Motorola Mobility announced the Droid Razr, a high-end Android phone whose Kevlar-reinforced case is just 0.28 inches thick. Aimed at Verizon’s 4G LTE network, it features a dual-core, 1.2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of flash storage, a 4.3-inch screen packing 960 x 540 pixels, dual cameras, and accessories including a new 14-inch Lapdock 500 Pro.
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We often see Android devices being used as a music player. Android has a fairly capable stock audio player. However, that player has a number of deficiencies. For example the lack of gapless playback is a showstopper for anyone who likes to listen to classical music.
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Earlier today, the Droid RAZR teaser site went live, revealing bits and pieces of the upcoming device as specific bloggers input the codes sent to them directly from Motorola. There’s only one problem with that: we’re still waiting for most of the bloggers to enter said codes. Luckily, one of our readers starting digging through the teaser page’s source code and uncovered the full image.
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Texas Instruments is pretty darn proud to be powering the new Galaxy Nexus handset. While Samsung might have told us we were getting a dual-core 1.2GHz processor in the new hot phone, they didn’t elaborate on which particular brand or model. That’s probably why TI is sending out emails tonight, sharing the good news.
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Are you a ROM developer? Tinkerer? Just a solid geek with a passion for Android? After tonight’s awesome Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and Samsung Galaxy Nexus announcements, the SDK is now available for download,
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The world of Android is growing increasingly complicated. Soon Amazon will begin shipping its Fire, which includes a highly modified version of an old Android release. How free is the heart of Android? How much does its share with its free-spirited cousin Linux? Is it heading into a future where proprietary versions exist?
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Motorola is taking yet another shot at reviving the Razr brand’s glory with the Droid Razr, a new Android smartphone headed to the Verizon network. However, will its thinness be enough to differentiate it from other top-model Android phones out there? “They’ve all got dual-core processors, WiFi hotspot functionality and a wide display,” said ABI’s Michael Morgan.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The HTC Jetstream lives up to its name with a fast, dual-core 1.5GHz processor, 4G LTE/HSPA service, a responsive, eight-megapixel camera, and a Scribe pen accessory. Yet with its $700 price, thick 0.51-inch profile, 25-ounce weight, and relative lack of ports, this tablet’s a tough purchase to justify compared to several other 10.1-inch Honeycomb devices, says this eWEEK review.
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You watched the announcement, read all the blogs, and drooled over the multitude of Android 4.0 sexiness. Screenshot after screenshot, we saw what the next generation of Android phones would look like — but what about tablets? We all known Ice Cream Sandwich is the new one-size-fits-all Android and is meant for both phones and tablets, so where’s the screenshots of ICS running on a tablet? Google and Samsung were understandably focused on the new Galaxy Nexus, but since Google was so kind to release the Android 4.0 SDK, others took it upon themselves to show us what we can expect ICS to look like running on a tablet.
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Events
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For the first time ever, the Southern California Linux Expo will host the SCALE Kids Conference, a free and open source event where the community leaders of tomorrow will be able to spotlight their talents and ideas.
The goal of the conference is to be as “kid driven” as possible. The event offers a unique opportunity for kids 10 to 16 to see and experience the inner workings of planning, determine the content, and help to steer the direction that the conference will take.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Rory MacDonald sits down with Mozilla’s Pascal Finette, former head of Mozilla Labs and now the man behind Mozilla’s new WebFWD initiative, an accelerator programme for exciting open source projects…
“My path to Mozilla is probably a little bit leftfield,” says Pascal Finette, the man behind Mozilla’s new WebFWD programme. “When you look at my CV, my background is that I studied economics and psychology, then I founded a start-up straight out of college, I worked for eBay, I did mergers and acquisitions for a US software company, I did consulting for start-ups and then, the last thing I did before I joined Mozilla, I actually co-founded and ran a venture capital fund: an early stage seed-fund in Germany and UK.”
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Ever since LibreOffice, the productivity suite forked from OpenOffice, started to take shape, questions have arisen about how its trajectory might differ from OpenOffice’s. This week, the LibreOffice Conference is going on, and The Document Foundation is generating some buzz through the announcement that versions of the suite will arrive for iOS and Android devices, giving LibreOffice a strong mobile footprint. Susan covered the news here. It’s also very good news that the suite will arrive in a cloud-based version that could compete closely with Google Apps and other cloud-centric productivity tools.
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The Apache OpenOffice.org project is currently in the incubation phase. We’re a ‘podling’. It’s where all new Apache projects begin, regardless of how mature your source code base is. In this post I’ll attempt to explain a bit about incubation, and a bit about the ‘Apache Way’, and our current effort to meet the requirements for 3rd party code review and clearance. In future posts, I’ll attempt to tackle other aspects of the project. If we all have a better understanding of how the work is becoming organized, those of you interested to volunteer will have a better idea of where to start, and those who are interested to follow our progress will have an easier way to check up on things.
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Thursday’s story about the future of OpenOffice.org garnered an interesting response from the Apache Software Foundation that, coupled with a broader statement on the ASF blog, disavows any notion of trouble within the OpenOffice.org project.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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PC makers are being lobbied to install Windows 8 on machines in a way that will afford users the freedom to boot Linux or any other operating system.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is urging PC users to sign a statement demanding that OEMs which implement Windows 8′s UEFI Secure Boot do so in a way that allows individuals to disable it, or that the PC makers provide a “sure-fire way” to install and run an operating system of the user’s choice.
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has launched a campaign claiming that Windows 8-certified PCs might prevent users from booting into Linux. The mandatory “secure boot” facility in the systems’ Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) might better be called “restricted boot,” the organization claims.
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Openness/Sharing
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Former Liberal cabinet minister Reg Alcock is remembered as a champion of open government and a tireless advocate for using technology to reform how Canadians are governed and departments are managed.
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Programming
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Google does a lot of good for developers. At one time or another, I’d bet that many developers have played with a Google API at some point.
Developers have also come to rely on Google’s Code Search over the years. It’s a service that I first wrote about when it launched five years ago. At the time, then Google product manager Tom Stocky was enthusiastic about the effort as a way to easily search for publicly accessible source code.
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Cablegate
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Corporate conduct
The Deadly Microsoft Embrace: The government of India’s Tamil Nadu region is planning to purchase some 9 million computers, which will run Windows instead of free software. Cables shed light on how Microsoft has reached similar deals in other countries. In Vietnam, the U.S. government intervened to secure a large-scale contract for Microsoft. In Tunisia, Microsoft won a significant state contract only after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had agreed to donate to a charity run by then president Ben Ali’s wife.
US diplomat said ex-BP boss’s Turkish partner unethical: Cables say Turkish businessman Mehmet Karamehmet is known to have employed tactics including death threats to force favorable deals. Mr Karamehmet is the largest shareholder of Genel Energy, which was recently acquired by Vallares Plc.
Richard Branson was ready to fund plan to persuade Mugabe to quit: Cables state that British businessman Richard Branson was to provide the funds for a large group of well-known African politicians, formed with the aim of persuading Mugabe to leave office. Zimbabwean politician Jonathan Moyo, who is alleged to have invited Branson to join the group, denies the allegations, saying that his own involvement was due to Branson, rather than the other way around.
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Finance
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Please contact your Goldman representative for a full prospectus. As the world descends into a Darwinian free-for-all, the Goldman Sachs Rage Fund is a great way to tell the protesters, “Occupy this.” We haven’t felt so good about something we’ve sold since our souls.
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As Canadian and European Union negotiators sit down Monday for the ninth round of talks on a sweeping and controversial trade agreement with the EU, The Huffington Post has learned European officials expect Canada will get the short end of the stick.
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The Occupy Wall Street movement chants “We are the 99 percent, you are the 1 percent.” It’s a catchy refrain, and there are many excellent reasons to put the focus on Wall Street in the struggle for economic and political justice in the US. But even singling out one percent of the US means we are still talking about over 3 million people–are they Wall Street types? Where do they actually work?
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Privacy
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A Nova Scotia girl’s fight to have disparaging Facebook postings about her kept secret is going to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The case could ultimately weigh the privacy of someone who has been tormented against the public’s right to transparency in the legal system.
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Copyrights
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op-ranking Obama administration officials, including the U.S. copyright czar, played an active role in secret negotiations between Hollywood, the recording industry and ISPs to disrupt internet access for users suspected of violating copyright law, according to internal White House e-mails.
The e-mails, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, (.pdf) show the administration’s cozy relationship with Hollywood and the music industry’s lobbying arms and its early support for the copyright-violation crackdown system publicly announced in July.
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10.18.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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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.
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Server
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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.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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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.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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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.
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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.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Flavours and Variants
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Phones
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Android
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Events
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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.
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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.
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Education
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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.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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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.
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Project Releases
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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.
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Public Services/Government
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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.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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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.
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Finance
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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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.
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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.”
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Privacy
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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.”
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Posted in Antitrust, Bill Gates, Courtroom, Microsoft, Novell at 4:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell’s lawyers still pursue justice in the case against Microsoft, which used illegal tactics to derail Novell and prevent people from using anything but Microsoft
MICROSOFT’S history with Novell is a subject that we mostly covered in 2006 and in 2007. We used antitrust exhibits to support our allegations with evidence that had not been publicly viewed before and some of it got organised in our wiki. This post is not about to repeat what we already covered as it would be rather wasteful. Instead we shall look at the latest news.
“Novell is a shadow of its former self,” explains this item of news which looks back at the 1995 era and says:
Who were the big companies back in the 1995 era Internet? Sun, Cisco and Novell come to mind. Sun is now part of Oracle, Novell is a shadow of its former self, and Cisco has acquired 75 companies since then, or so it seems.
“Novell takes Microsoft to court in dispute over Windows 95,” says a British news site about the latest from the Novell-Microsoft antitrust case:
Novell is to begin antitrust proceedings against Microsoft today in the hope of finally settling a long-running dispute involving Windows 95, with Microsoft founder Bill Gates expected to make an appearance as a witness.
Novell alleges that Microsoft deliberately delayed releasing Windows 95 in order to harm Novell’s WordPerfect application software business in the mid-1990s and to crush competition in the office applications market.
The press in the United States covered this too:
Long-running Novell, Microsoft antitrust case going to trial in federal court
Two high-tech heavyweights will go to battle in federal court Monday in an attempt to settle a long-running dispute, and Bill Gates could make an appearance as a witness.
Novell Inc. sued Microsoft Corp., accusing the computer giant of violating U.S. antitrust laws, primarily through its arrangements with other computer makers. Since the suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City in 2004, a judge has dismissed five of Novell’s six original claims.
Bill Gates may now be spending well over a million dollars per day on just PR (not donations but buying positive coverage alone); however his past crimes are known to many. His present greed is a subject we’ll return to covering quite soon. This greed helps feed some patent trolls and lobbyists, not just harmful companies that raid society. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Novell at 4:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More news about Novell’s products, the staff under Attachmate’s wing, and a bit about Novell’s patents, which end up helping Microsoft
TODAY we will leave aside SUSE news (SUSE is
looking for funding of ARM projects despite Microsoft already paying SUSE) and instead we will dedicate some coverage to Novell.
In the news we found an update about this legal case against Novell. There are some old legal cases involving Novell, one of which (against Microsoft) we will deal with separately.
Here are memories of Novell as recalled by a Radio World article: “The initial equipment consisted of a Novell server and three DOS-based workstations. The workstations had no internal storage. They booted from a floppy drive and connected to the server to playback audio from there.
“It was great for playing back promos, underwriting, etc., but what about the music? Storage space was expensive; but in 1999 we purchased a whopping 300 GB RAID system to attach to our Novell server.”
Further down it says: “We replaced our old Novell workhorse server with a new 1.2 TB Windows server to meet the audio storage requirements for two stations and the new ContentDepot system. We also purchased an option to have multiple libraries in order to prevent ContentDepot from overwriting our existing audio.”
They are not alone. While Novell fails to find new customers existing ones are leaving and we found many examples in this month’s news, starting with this:
The projects were the culmination of a five-year computer replacement plan. A second phase begins in October, which includes moving the district’s network from Novell/Linux to Windows servers running Active Directory. Cook said that when Novell discontinued some of its products, CPSD was put in a position where it had to put in new servers.
How about evidence that, contrary to Novell spinners, partners (“SKyPRO Announces Enterprise Texting For Novell GroupWise”) and expensive events, Groupwise is losing? We gave many examples before (large-scale losses).
Here is another new story:
As of July 25, the district switch from Novell to Microsoft computer services has brought changes for both staff and students in getting work done at school, according to Scott Burns, Cleveland’s tech support teacher.
Another one says: “At the District level, monies have been invested to upgrade the network backbone from Novell to Microsoft.”
We are seeing some former Novell staff and people who sold their company to Novell moving between companies and appearing in different places. Novell’s current staff (rebranded as Attachmate staff) goes after children:
Rowland Bolman, a representative from Novell, said his company was looking to hire approximately 40 positions in testing, tech support, information technology and development.
A lot of Novell’s venom, the software patents, has been passed to Microsoft and Apple and based on this news report we can see where the valuation came from:
Ocean Tomo has been involved in the valuation of patent portfolios for the likes of Novell, Interdigital, and Eastman Kodak. Michael noted that when they had first looked at Interdigital, it had $13 in cash, $16 per share in 3G IP, and had a stock price of $29. The company’s 4G patent portfolio was effectively free.
More on Novell’s patent portfolios can be read here:
During the Q&A session, a number of analysts questioned Page and the rest of the Google management team on how the company is protecting the Android ecosystem from competitors—referring, of course, to the joint effort on the part of Microsoft, Apple, and RIM (among others) to buy up Nortel’s and Novell’s patent portfolios with the express purpose of keeping them away from Google. If Google had been able to purchase the patents, it would’ve prevented competitors from being able to sue them for patent infringements.
Novell essentially helped the patent war against Linux. Well done, Novell. Well done for nothing. We saw that coming. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents at 3:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A review of some of the latest news about the Microsoft/Apple patent attacks on Linux/Android
THE PATENT war has shifted to growing markets where Microsoft is a minority, Apple was a growing force, and Linux is now taking over. Feeling pressured, Apple has been trying to embargo the primary Linux-based competition. Sadly for Apple, Samsung is not without patents, so Samsung strikes back [1, 2].
The Korean press writes about Apple’s legal attacks against Samsung and the press in Taiwan writes about the local company Quanta getting extorted by Microsoft (as covered here), which chose to turn Linux into its own cash cow through racketeering, as opposed to Apple which wants product removal and fabricates evidence to achieve that.
ThistleWeb (from TechBytes) links to this excellent new observations from Masnick, who sure knows how to summarise absurdities with a decent headline:
Can We Just Admit That It’s Insane When Microsoft Has A ‘Licensing Program’ For Someone Else’s Products?
[...]
Let’s sit back and consider the sheer insanity of this entire effort. Microsoft is going around, trying to get lots of companies to buy licenses to Google’s products, when there is simply no evidence that those products infringe on any Microsoft patents. And, notably, Microsoft has never sued Google over those products.
I’d be interested to see if anyone can explain how a system that allows a company like Microsoft to set up a licensing business on someone else’s products without any proven legal basis other than the implied threat that they might sue, is a functioning system? It’s a huge joke.
No, it is white-collar crime. As ThistleWeb puts it, “Microsoft need to be torn to shreds on racketeering charges for all their criminal activities around the world” (posted in Identi.ca as a response to the article).
The Quanta ‘deal’ puts a Linux tax on Kindle Fire, as we noted the other day. The Microsoft boosters write about other lawsuits that very much serve Microsoft’s interests and watch who is suing. Some articles label them “potent trolls”, but whose? This is a lawsuit we mentioned before and we also said a lot about the claimant, Acacia.
Microsoft Is lobbying for software patents in New Zealand again, based on this new article which says:
Software patents excluded
The policy also pledges Labour will enact and implement the draft Patent Bill currently before parliament that excludes computer software – a provision welcomed by many in the local software industry who see patents as impractical, expensive and often wielded as a market-blocking tool by larger companies, but opposed by Microsoft and other software multinationals based in New Zealand who see the move undermining intellectual property rights, and discouraging innovation.
[UPDATE: Microsoft corporate affairs manager Waldo Kuipers told NBR: "While you’re correct to say that Microsoft multinationals based in New Zealand oppose the proposed clause 15(3A), there’s far wider opposition to clause 15(3A) than that." Mr Kuipers said local companies including Fisher & Paykel Appliances, Aptimize and Intergen had also wanted software to be covered, not excluded, from the draft patent bill.]
Microsoft lobbies for software patents like no other company. It is amazing that some people still pretend that it is not a sign of trouble and Xamarin goes further by actually promoting yet more Microsoft patents overlap in as many platforms as possible. There are policy changes in Mono, but none of these addresses the patent problems. All that Mono does is, it is infecting many platforms with something Microsoft will claim to be its “IP”.
Apple and Microsoft remain the biggest problems Linux is having and it is easy to see why and how (patents). This site focuses on this one issue because it is most crucial. █
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10.17.11
Posted in News Roundup at 8:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Texas Instruments has put out a new version of its DRM/KMS Linux driver for OMAP platforms as it prepares to hopefully see this open-source graphics driver merged into the mainline Linux kernel.
Rob Clark of Texas Instruments released the third version of its “omapdrm” driver that provides basic DRM/KMS support for OMAP hardware from TI. This comes just days after talking about the Linux 3.2 kernel DRM and how Samsung’s Exynos DRM driver was merged into the drm-core-next tree as the first ARM DRM driver that will be introduced in this next major kernel release after Linux 3.1.
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Graphics Stack
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The R500 texture semaphores work, the feature I wrote about and tested earlier this month, has been merged to master. This feature in the R300 Gallium3D open-source driver can provide some impressive performance improvements.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Oil Rush is a real time naval strategy game with stunning graphics and gameplay. This is one game that kept all of us waiting. We had listed Oil Rush right at the top of 12 best paid games for Linux. Now, Oil Rush is available for installation via Ubuntu Software Center. Note that you can only pre-order the game right now, but you also get access to beta version of Oil Rush.
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Desktop Environments
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It sounds to me like GNOME is joining KDE on the road to computing hell…with the very best of intentions. Both teams are trying to add the glitz and polish that Windows and Mac users have come to expect. (I get the impression that GNOME is trying to imitate OS X.) The problem is, both teams are making their once-loved desktop environments bloated, slow, clumsy, and counter-productive.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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At the desktop summit, many contributors got a ExoPC from Inten, but the software on it was quite a disappointment. Meanwhile, there is an official release of Plasma Active that fills the gap. So I sat down and installed it on the ExoPC. It really works quite nice and smooth. Applications like Amarok and a browser make it usable to hear music and do some quick internet surfing. I documented the steps in order to get everything up and running.
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GNOME Desktop
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I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons. 11.04 dropped me into the new “Unity” GNOME interface. There may be people in the world for whom Unity is a good idea, but none of them are me. The look is garish and ugly, and it takes twice as many clicks as it did before to get to an application through their supposedly “friendly” interface as it did in GNOME Classic. No, dammit, I do not want to text-search my applications to call one up!
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Ubuntu branched out of Gnome 3 by using its own Unity shell instead of Gnome shell on top of Gnome 3, there are reason well understood and I personally believe it has made GNU/Linux richer as we now have two Shells and users can pick the one they want.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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If I ever had any regular readers, I’m sure I’ve lost them all by now! We had a bit of weather in Connecticut, as you might have heard; putting up hurricane shutters, and later taking them down, brought me into an uneasy truce with some long-forgotten muscles. I decided to take a night course or two. I’m processing my long-departed Uncle Jim’s thesis into publishable form (it’s about John Milton; or, more precisely, it argues that Milton’s poem Paradise Regained has been consistently underappreciated and misunderstood), which (and this is the point) is handing me a good excuse to learn LaTeX. And I’m doing some Linux-oriented volunteer work, too; I’ll blog about that when I understand it a bit better.
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Gentoo Family
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But usually, I only review the KDE edition, so why am I reviewing the GNOME and Xfce editions too this time? Well, GNOME is now at version 3.2, and the Xfce edition is now considered to be stable enough to not be “experimental” anymore, so I think both of those things warrant reviews. Of course, I’m going to be reviewing the KDE edition as well, and KDE is now at version 4.7, which I haven’t had much experience with as most recent KDE distributions I’ve tried have included KDE only at version 4.6.
I tested all 3 editions using live USBs made with UnetBootin. I did not test the installation procedures, because I didn’t see anything in the release notes about improvements to the installer, so I don’t really anticipate any changes from last time. Follow the jump to see what each edition is like.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 11.10 users are being encouraged to take part in ‘Ubuntu Friendly’ – a community-drive database of desktops, laptops and netbooks that work well with Ubuntu.
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This one — 11.10, dubbed Oneiric Ocelot — is a regular, incremental update of 11.04 (Natty Narwhal, which came out in April). The changes are minor for the most part, but the Unity desktop is much improved.While Unity has been around for some time, Canonical made it quite clear with 11.04 that it was going to be phased in while the older, tried and true Gnome 2 shell that had anchored Ubuntu for years was going to be put out to pasture.
Such a bold decision, of course, brought on some negative reactions (yes, I was one of the complainers and wrote a nice, long rant about how much I hated Unity here). Here’s the thing — the Gnome 2 desktop is very familiar with its Windows XP-like layout and behavior. Does it look dated? Sure it does, but people don’t want to replace “familiar and effective” with something new and shiny that doesn’t work that well.
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I’ve been running Ubuntu 11.04 for several months and have been satisfied with the experience. Less than a week ago, the newest stable Ubuntu 11.10 version (Oneiric Ocelot) was announced.
To my surprise, I didn’t have to go to fetch Ubuntu 11.10 or run a command to get it, it came straight to me!
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I’m probably going to be answered as though I were a hybrid of Ebenezer Scrooge and Darth Vader, but can we quit with the code names for Linux distributions, already? People are taking them way too seriously.
Code names make sense if you want to keep what you’re doing a secret. If you’re planning a military operation, you probably don’t want anyone to know until you actually hit the beaches of France. Or maybe in the case of the revised Doctor Who, when you’re a producer who doesn’t want the excitement to peak too soon (in which case, you pass around sheets of paper watermarked with “Not to be copied” and call what you’re doing “Torchwood,” then decide the name would make a great spinoff series).
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Flavours and Variants
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The Puppy Linux development team has announced the arrival of version 5.2 of the “Wary” edition of its independent Linux distribution. Puppy Linux is a popular small release that can run entirely from RAM and its primary focus is ease-of-use.
Based on the 2.6.32.45 Linux kernel, and with all of its base packages recompiled in the T2 System Development Environment, the new release is a “massive upgrade” to the 5.1.x series. Users can now easily upgrade from Xorg 7.3, which is still included by default to support older hardware, to version 7.6 for newer video devices by installing a single PET (Puppy’s Extra Treats) package. Because of several problems, the gtkam GTK2 GUI for libgphoto2 has been replaced with PupCamera for automatically detecting digital cameras.
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Phones
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Android
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Google dropped some interesting information about Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of Android – Android 4.0 at its Google I/O conference back n May.
We now know that Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will be announced at a Google event on 19 October.
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I think one thing that often confused people when they first get involved with free software is the difference between FOSS and freeware (or shareware). When speaking about open source software in my writings I try to always use the term “FOSS” which is an acronym for “free open source software”. The source of this sometimes confusion can be sorted with the Latin statement:
Gratis versus Libre
Which roughly translates to:
“for zero price” versuses “with little or no restriction”
Or to simplify it even further to a common analogy first used by Richard Stallman:
“Think free as in free speech, not free beer.”
Should Joe Average the end user care if their software is Gratis or Libre? Whether or not a program is truly free doesn’t affect the user user right?
Wrong.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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First there is a great number of presentations and discussions. We started with an impressing overview, by Italo, Michael and Florian, of the first years’ achievements of TDF. Impressive numbers, some polished to an very shiny state. But hey, marketing is marketing after all, and also without the footnotes that would make some of them look more realistic: we may be very proud with the people that are involved and all product improvements and the tooling and community that are set up!
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An October 5 press release from The Document Foundation provides a bit of information about a vulnerability that was fixed in recent versions of LibreOffice (LO). The vulnerability sounds fairly serious: “This flaw could have been used for nefarious purposes, such as installing viruses, through a specially-crafted [.doc] file.” It was evidently fixed, silently, in versions 3.4.3 and 3.3.4 of LO, which were released in August. The details (such as they are) were withheld “until users have been given time to migrate to the new version”, but it isn’t at all clear that Linux distributions have put out fixes yet. Worse still, OpenOffice.org (OOo) is vulnerable as well, but there has been no release from that project since January.
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Last week I was in Paris as a guest of The Document Foundation to speak at their first annual LibreOffice Conference. It was my honour to make the opening remarks at the opening reception, hosted by the government of the Paris region. Here’s what I said.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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With the Free Software Foundation having removed GNU PDF from their list of high priority projects after declaring the open-source work to implement proper Adobe PDF support a success, what’s left to the FSF high priority project list and how are those remaining projects coming along?
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Public Services/Government
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The IOOS2011 conference is based on global interest generated by MARSSA, the Marine Systems Software Architecture, a revolutionary Maltese high technology for the marine and yachting industry. Originating from Malta and launched in February, MARSSA has grown into the first Community Driven project in the marine industry with a global outreach.
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The council said its interpretation was based on advice from implementation partners and a reading of security guidance documents from CESG and Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office called for the meeting to clarify the situation. The meeting yesterday was also attended by GCHQ and suppliers LinuxIT, DeLIB and Nameless.
Bristol City council leader Barbara Janke said the meeting was very productive and the council now has the green light to push ahead with its open source strategy. “The Cabinet Office were able to reassure us that there are no security or accreditation issues that should hold us back from pushing ahead with our open source agenda.
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Openness/Sharing
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Creative Commons held its Global Summit a few weeks ago in Warsaw, with amazing international participation. Without question, the most-discussed topic was the upcoming 4.0 release of the licenses, including related issues and a lively debate regarding whether the licenses should be ported to specific countries – or whether we should instead try to create a new international license.
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Programming
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I ultimately decided on Python, not just because I’m comfortable with it and it meets the criteria, but also because it’s widely in use running things the kids have heard of (Google, Facebook, NASA), widely recognized as a good first language for learning, and is eminently readable for any of the kids who decide to pursue it further after class is over.
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Standards/Consortia
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The challenge of developing and maintaining mobile banking applications that will run on an iPhone, an Android phone, a BlackBerry or a Windows phone, as well as browser-based or wireless application protocol apps that will run on anything, is daunting even for large banks with massive IT budgets, never mind the rest of the banking world. But Jeff Dennes, who led the development of some of the first mobile banking apps at USAA and was recruited to Huntington Bancshares, Columbus, Ohio, a little over a year ago, says a multi-platform strategy is necessary. And HTML5, the latest version of the hypertext language for structuring and presenting content on the internet, is the next development frontier for banks to ignore at their peril.
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On-line open/free content originates from a variety of sources. This edition of NetSpeak explores yet another avenue for tapping free content.
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UNIX
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OpenIndiana (OI) is a distribution of illumos, which is a community fork of OpenSolaris. And OpenSolaris itself was the open source version of Solaris, before it (OpenSolaris) was discontinued by Oracle, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, Inc., in January 2010. Before OI’s base was switched to Illumos, it was based on OpenSolaris. I know this all sounds convoluted, but that, in summary, is the history of OI.
Compared to popular Linux distributions, OI is a relatively young distribution, with a very small development community whose members are mostly based in Europe. OI Build 151a is the latest development release, and the third so far. A stable edition is slated for release before the end of this year.
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For those with only a sketchy knowledge of computer-speak, the job of an operating system is to organise the various parts of the computer – the processor, the memory, the disk drives, keyboards, video monitors and so on – to perform useful tasks. A programming language, meanwhile, is usually an artificial shorthand of words, numbers and punctuation used to construct computer programs – including operating systems themselves.
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Security
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Finance
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Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. manager who has clashed with banks on the need for tougher regulations, is the leading candidate to run the body charged with rewriting the rules of global finance, two officials from Group of 20 nations said.
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Censorship
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The Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris has ordered the blocking of Copwatch Nord-Paris IDF, a website charged by the French government with defaming and putting at risk the safety of police officers.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The European Parliament is finalizing the negotiation of “compromise amendments” to its resolution on Net neutrality. At this point, the weak text binds the Parliament to the failed “wait-and-see” approach of EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes, which amounts to letting operators restrict Internet access to pursue short terms economic goals. The resolution could however bring a proper definition of Net neutrality and increase the pressure on the Commission to investigate telecoms operators’ behaviour and take action.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The New York Times has picked up on the recent proposal by the Administration to modify copyright law by invoking a new international agreement (ACTA) which would give US copyright protection previously given copyright protection under foreign law link here. These were in the U S public domain in the past but now they would be recognized as copyrighted. The Times opposes this.
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