11.14.11
Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE at 11:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Green sheep
Summary: A look at the inactivity at Novell and a quick mention (without examples) of smears from SUSE/Novell/Attachmate
THERE is a flood of ‘new’ Novell videos (over 40 of them in two or three days) from some account called NDMSolutions, but apart from those old videos (re-uploaded) there is radio silence from Novell. The only thing on their lips right now is the release of a new version of OpenSUSE. Some of them are insulting yours truly and trying to incite journalists against Techrights (there are many examples, none will be linked here though for obvious reasons). They try to silence us, as usual. Some of them retaliate against people who cite us. We noticed this funny new bit in Weekly News:
The rights for the compilation itself are copyright by Sascha Manns.
Hilarious. So one just takes bits of news and tries to claim a monopoly on no original content. In other news (packaging for OpenSUSE):
The Unknown Horizons development team has announced the release of Unknown Horizons 2011.3. Since I have full maintainership on this project and I don’t depend on no one to make this release, openSUSE is the first one to provide Unknown Horizons 2011.3. Debian should be the second next monday.
Not many people are even using OpenSUSE at this point. It might make more sense to just target Debian first. Oiaohm, who prefers Debian, wrote a couple of hours ago: “Really you have not done a positive story on anything suse has done. Maybe about the build system they designed that is nice… Just to confuse them a little.” █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 4:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
From: RonB
Date: Monday 14 Nov 2011 08:32:01
Groups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
File this oldie under arrogance and Microsoft’s lack of
foresight (once again). This news story is from four years
ago (Microsoft doesn’t produce very high quality prophets).
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Google Android Just a Press Release, Says Ballmer
Google’s plans to enter the mobile industry with a cell phone platform
might have impressed many in the industry but not Steve Ballmer, CEO of
Microsoft and one of Google’s biggest competitors.
…
“Well of course their efforts are just some words on paper right now, it’s
hard to do a very clear comparison [with Windows Mobile],” he said.
Ballmer went on to note the successes that his company has had with its
Windows Mobile platform, which commands a sizeable share of the smartphone
market, especially in North America. He said Windows Mobile is on 150
different handsets and is available from over 100 different mobile
operators. He added that Microsoft will likely license 20 million Windows
Mobile handsets this year.
“So we have great momentum, we’ve brought our Windows Mobile 6 software to
market, we’re driving forward on our future releases and we’ll have to see
what Google does,” said Ballmer. “Right now they have a press release, we
have many, many millions of customers, great software, many hardware
devices and they’re welcome in our world.”
~~
http://tinyurl.com/yqtslg
This excerpt is linked in a Barnes & Noble letter to James J. Tierney,
Chief, Networks and Technology Enforcement Section Antitrust Division,
United States Department of Justice.
Groklaw has provided several of these letters from Barnes & Noble, dating
back to March of this year. If you want to see Microsoft extortion
thuggery in detail, I would suggest your read these letters. You can also
see why Microsoft demands non-disclosure agreements before detailing their
extortion. Fortunately Barnes & Noble told them where they could shove
their “NDA.”
I think it’s notable that Microsoft, when first discussing their patents
with Barnes & Noble, asserted six patents (all trivial). When they
actually sued Barnes & Noble, they used five patents, but four of these
were not discussed earlier. In other words, apparently admitting the
triviality of five of the first six patents, they came up four other
trivial patents, while only keeping one of the original six. In other
words, they’re employing a scattergun approach, they’re standing in
quicksand. They have no real cause for suing, except for extortion. Now
everyone can see how baseless their patent extortion campaign against
Android (and other Linux distributions) really is.
I think this quote (from a letter written by lawyers representing Barnes &
Noble to the Justice Department on Oct 17th) puts it all in perspective.
~~
Microsoft’s attempts to direct how others enforce their patents are part
of Microsoft’s strategy of attempting to maintain its monopoly in PC
operating systems by controlling and dominating the Android operating
system. Android, which Google gives away for free, threatens Microsoft’s
traditional business model of licensing its proprietary operating system
because OEMs no longer need to pay for a high-quality operating system. In
addition, the open source Android operating system is superior to
Microsoft’s proprietary products. For those reasons, Android threatens
Microsoft’s core business. Application-rich Android devices such as
tablets and smartphones now perform many of the functions once reserved
for PCs, a trend that will reduce demand for PCs and PC operating systems,
where Microsoft’s Windows enjoys a powerful monopoly. Moreover, as
operating systems such as Android become more popular, Android will become
a viable candidate for adaptation to PCs, putting Android (and its
companion, Chrome) into direct competition with Windows. Moreover,
Microsoft has announced plans to run its flagship Windows operating system
on tablets, and the popularity of Android-based tablets threatens the
dominance of Windows.
In response to these competitive threats, Microsoft is embarking on a
campaign of asserting trivial and outmoded patents against manufacturers
of Android devices. Microsoft demands exorbitant licensing fees (similar
to the fee for the entire Windows Phone 7 operating system) and imposes
licensing conditions that restrict manufacturers’ abilities to upgrade and
improve their products with features consumers want. Microsoft is
attempting to raise its rivals’ costs in order to drive out competition
and to deter innovation in mobile devices.
Microsoft’s arrangement with MOSAID and Nokia, in conjunction with its
improper use of its own patents, is causing and will continue to cause
serious harm to competition. Microsoft’s conduct will raise costs to
consumers, reduce the quality of popular goods, and impede innovation in a
technology-rich market. Microsoft’s conduct poses serious antitrust
concerns and warrants further exploration by the Department of Justice.
~~
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2011111122291296
That’s it in a nutshell.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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The Free and Open-source software Developer’s European Meeting (FOSDEM) is quickly approaching. The developer tracks/rooms for this huge open-source event have been announced.
Among the interesting developer rooms for the 2012 event in Brussels, Belgium is X.Org, Open Mobile Linux, Mozilla, open-source virtualization/cloud, cross-desktop, open-source game development, LibreOffice, micro-kernel-based operating systems, and BSD operating systems. The full list of FOSDEM 2012 developer rooms is listed at the end of this posting.
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Applications
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Firefox 8 Now Available (Windows,Mac,Linux) Firefox 8 officially releases on Mozilla’s site on November 8th, but technology blog GHacks discovered this morning that the Firefox 8.0 final version is already available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Mozilla’s FTP servers.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Hostile Takeover takes place in a not-too-distant future devastated by a global economic crisis. In a desperate attempt to counteract this crisis, the world’s governments agreed to grant all large corporations immunity from prosecution. This was meant to free corporations from the oppressions of control and legislation but instead cast the global business world into deadly conflicts. Now, no longer inhibited by law, corporations wage war. And within this new world, a new occupation has seen the light of day: corporate assassin.
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The Difficult Second Bundle, the latest independent game download bundle from the Indie Royale website has surpassed a major milestone: over 25,000 units sold in just two days.
To commemorate, organizers have released two brand new games for all previous and future 2nd Bundle buyers – intense shmups Bullet Candy Perfect and Irukandji from Charlie’s Games, available on Windows, Mac, and Linux directly, or through download platform Desura.
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Desktop Environments
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When I started working on it, loading various Linux distributions,
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Before I say anything else, I’d just like to say that the reason why I haven’t posted anything in 2 weeks has been due to me being quite busy with classes, my UROP, and other related stuff. I will definitely have another post out this week (and it’ll actually be a bit like this one), but I can’t really promise much more. After all, I did say that I couldn’t count on posting stuff regularly during the semester.
Anyway, I haven’t done a post like this in a while; in fact, it’s been half a year, when I criticized Dedoimedo’s review of Bodhi Linux 0.1.6. There, I criticized the author for holding Bodhi Linux to an artificially higher standard and then trashing it from there. Well, this time around, it’s another Dedoimedo review that’s caused me to write this: this time, it’s the review of #! 10 “Statler”. Follow the jump to read my issues with the review.
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Red Hat Family
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On Oct. 17 voters at special Town Meeting approved a tax incentive for Red Hat, Inc., called a Tax Increment Financing agreement that is designed to encourage the company to remain in Westford and expand its current office space. But the vote does not guarantee that company officials will choose Westford over two California locations that remain on the table. What follows is an explanation of what the vote meant.
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Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has selected Promedia as its new PR agency-of-record, following a competitive review. Promedia will help Red Hat on a broad range of communications activities that are aimed at reaching target groups and maintaining relationships with the open source community in Turkey.
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Seven Israeli early stage technology companies with revenue of less than $1.5 million each were chosen to get free access to Red Hat enterprise software. The program will be expanded in Israel before being extended to other nations, Whitehurst said. Red Hat, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, will offer its software at a declining discount as the companies’ sales grow.
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Fedora
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No distribution’s installer makes setting up disk encryption as easy as Anaconda, the Fedora system installer. And that has not changed in Fedora 16, the latest stable release. On previous versions of Fedora, those released before Fedora 16, the only automated disk partitioning option was one based on LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager. That made it easy to install Fedora on encrypted LVM partitions.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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One that really pleased me with Linux Mint 12 is that it runs in VirtualBox with no configuration headaches to get GNOME 3 to run. Compare that to Fedora 16, which is a pain in the ass to deal with since you have to work to get GNOME 3.2 to actually load.
Note though that if you boot into the live desktop in VirtualBox you will see the fall back desktop (not the GNOME 3.2). Don’t let that bother you, just do the install and make sure that your virtual machine has 3D set to on. When you boot into your installed desktop, GNOME 3 should load without a problem.
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Linux Mint 12 (right now a release candidate) definitely stands out in the crowd of Gnome 3.x Shell Linux distributions. It seems the Linux Mint team cares deeply about giving the community what it wants but doesn’t have. Linux Mint 12 is a Gnome 3.x Shell distribution that stands out on its own because rather than accept the default Gnome 3.x Shell interface like most Gnome 3.x Shell Linux distributions have done Linux Mint 12 tries its best to emulate the Gnome 2.x interface through the use of Gnome Shell extensions.
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Today is Veteran’s Day here in the U.S. and Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth of Nations. It’s a holiday that gets a bit of short shrift these days, so it’s important to take a moment and understand that we have a lot of people to thank for the freedoms we now enjoy.
And there is a lot of work still to do.
That work is being done by armed forces around the world, and it can also be done by us.
In the last decade, one of the ways the free and open source software communities were going to work on the problems of global illiteracy and information distribution was to be the source of computer software for developing nations.
With grand plans like the One Laptop Per Child program in place, the FLOSS community was gung-ho on the notion of delivering great software at a perfect cost: free.
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The Weather Channel LLC has chosen open source master data management (MDM) tools from Talend over competing proprietary products from Microsoft Corp. and other software vendors, an official with the organization said.
The Atlanta, Ga.-based news outlet — which is devoted to all things weather — said the plan to go with Talend Enterprise MDM stemmed from a longstanding commitment to open source technology and the fact that it has already been successfully using Talend data integration software for the last two years.
The Weather Channel, which began implementing the open source MDM platform last week, says it was drawn to the idea that the software package fully integrates with the Talend extract, transform and load (ETL) tools already in use. The company also liked that Talend Enterprise MDM comes pre-packaged with data quality and data integration tools of its own.
“We looked a little bit at a couple of players in the space, mainly Microsoft,” said Ben Garrett, the company’s director of advertising technology and business intelligence (BI). “But the compelling argument for us was that, because we are already ingrained with Talend, it made perfect sense for us to pursue this as the right path.”
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As interest in open-source cloud computing continues to grow, a new–albeit self-interested–survey shows that users are looking to move from experiments to production deployments.
Today, systems management software provider Zenoss released the results of what they’ve titled the “OpenStack Adoption Survey”. (OpenStack is an open-source cloud operating system.) The data was culled from 772 surveys filled out at the recent OpenStack Conference in Boston and the Zenoss open source management community.
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“Software programming levels have improved from C to C++ to Java to Ruby to you name it. You can now do more with fewer people and open source deserves all the credit here for creating and maintaining these tools,” he said.
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Events
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German lawyer Till Jaeger came to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe to update attendees on the AVM vs. Cybits case that is currently underway in Germany. The case has some potentially serious implications for users of GPL-licensed software, particularly in embedded Linux contexts, so Jaeger (and his client Harald Welte) felt it was important to publicize the details of the case. So important, in fact, that he and Welte are forgoing the usual practice of keeping all of the privileged information (between a lawyer and client) private.
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As we wrote a few days ago we are back from this years Lucene Eurocon, which took place in Barcelona. Despite the fact that the videos will be available shortly, we decided to write something about those presentations we attended.
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Wish to avail this ‘Silver’ opportunity to attend Open Source India 2011, Asia’s mega open source convention, for FREE? All you need to do is click on this link and register for your FREE Sliver Pass (which is otherwise worth Rs 1000). But you need to hurry as this offer is available only for the first 500 registrants.
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The Wikipedia Community and the Wikimedia Chapter are hosting a WikiConference for the first in the country in Mumbai next week. The three day event that will see a congregation of thousands of Wikipedians from all over the country, will be opened by Jimmy Wales, the founder, open-source evangelist and chairman emeritus of Wikimedia Foundation.
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Mobile was a major theme running through many of the finalists — most likely because in developing nations, mobile phone use is often more widespread than Internet connectivity, so many people depend on their cell phones as a way to receive crucial information. Open-source software was the platform of choice for many entries. For more on that, Knight-Mozilla’s Dan Sinker has written quite a bit on the intersection of open-source culture and journalism. Security, too, loomed large among entries. Anyone who followed the Arab Spring probably saw examples of how anonymity and security are necessary for real-time reporting of conflicts.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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New features of the Firefox 8 release, which is for desktop editions of Windows, Linux, Mac, and mobile Firefox for Android, includes Twitter search integration, increased support for WebGL graphics hardware acceleration, and on demand tab-group loading. Mozilla explained in its blog post that with the inclusion of Twitter search in Firefox 8, “Twitter search in Firefox makes it easier to discover new topics, #hashtags, and usernames.” Languages supported for the new Twitter search function are English, Portuguese, Slovenian, and Japanese, but the company will release versions for other languages in the future.
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Five developers, designers and programmer-journalists funded by the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership are to spend a year in five national newsrooms around the world.
Al Jazeera English, the Guardian, the BBC, Zeit Online and the Boston Globe will each be joined by a winner to produce open-source code and solve challenges within the news organisation.
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SaaS
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There was once an idyllic time when people like Joe Kraus described an entrepreneur’s dream of starting robust companies on a shoestring budget, powered by open-source software and cloud infrastructure. Apparently Cloudera and Hortonworks didn’t get the memo. Both Hadoop competitors recently raised mountains of cash at sky-high valuations, fuelled by open-source software and cloud infrastructure. And now Cloudera investor Ping Li has declared that his firm, Accel, is prepared to dump $100m more into Hadoop’s meta-market, Big Data.
What gives?
Well, venture capitalists do, for one, and at valuations that entrepreneurs might be unwise to pass up. In a hot market like Big Data, where Cloudera and Hortonworks compete, it seems that VCs are trying to preempt competition by going very big, very fast, in a scorched earth policy of sorts for would-be competitors. It’s hard to imagine other VCs having the appetite to find other Hadoop companies when Cloudera and Hortonworks are so richly resourced.
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Rackspace Hosting continues to lease data center space, even as it extends its business beyond its own facilities, as seen in this week’s announcement of its Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition. The new private cloud is powered by OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform organized by Rackspace at last year.
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If a company has a batch of data of any reasonable size and wants to do anything useful with it, chances are that at one point or another it’s going to wind up using some version of Hadoop.
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In recent months, the likes of Dell, Oracle, and EMC have unveiled what they bill as specialized hardware appliances for Hadoop, and on Monday, they were joined by storage hardware outfit and EMC rival NetApp, which announced a creation it calls the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop.
Named for the yellow stuffed elephant that belonged to the son of its original developer, Hadoop is an open source software platform that analyzes data by splitting it into tiny pieces and distributing it across a large cluster of machines. The platform was originally built by Yahoo! using research papers published by Google, and it helps drive such web operations as Facebook, Twitter, and eBay. But Hadoop is evolving into a tool for the average business — which faces its own avalanche of unstructured data pouring from the web.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle’s indefatigable efforts to convince the world that it truly will pump effort and resources into open source continue. The newest “stewards” of the Java platform and language have used the Java OpenJDK mailing list to detail plans for the JavaFX rich Internet application (RIA) platform.
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CMS
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Open-source software company Acquia today said it will expand its presence in India to promote use of free website building software Drupal.
“We have two training partners in India, which we are planning to scale up massively. In this visit we are doing need analysis of Indian market and soon we will announce initiative specific to India,” Chief Marketing Officer Ronald C Pruett, Jr. said.
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Education
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The NNI will use Moodle, an open source learning management system as the online platform for its collaboration, cross institutional networking and information sharing. Moodle, already used in approximately 40% of Australian universities will be hosted and maintained by NetSpot, an official Moodle and NNI partner.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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In any business organization, the need to effectively communicate and collaborate in a timely manner is very important. Contending with mobile workers and shifting schedules, many businesses look toward enterprise content management (ECM) systems such as Microsoft’s SharePoint. Their purpose is to allow users within organizations to collaborate and share work inside of a commonly accessed website framework.
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Like so many others, I eventually decided to put my own website up on the Internets, and I used the Apache HTTP server to host it. Why? I had an Ubuntu server box sitting in front of me, and Apache was the Web server I’d heard about the most. If Apache was good enough for big sites, it should be good enough for my little static personal site. Right?
But it wasn’t quite right for me. Here’s why—and what I learned when I spent a weekend ripping out my Apache install and replacing it with lightweight speed demon of a Web server called Nginx.
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Project Releases
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“Created by the Google Internationalization Engineering team, the sfntly Java and C++ library makes it easy for programmers to build high performance font manipulation applications and services,” he wrote.
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Public Services/Government
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It is wrong to believe that open-source software is implicitly insecure, according to Qamar Yunus, the government’s main official on the subject.
Yunus, an assistant director in the Cabinet Office ICT policy team, made the comment on Monday, as he outlined the organisation’s guidance on open-source software at the EHI Live event in Birmingham.
“There was a myth being circulated around the SIs, saying you can’t use open-source software in government as it’s not secure,” Yunus told the conference, referring to the systems integrators who account for large amounts of government ICT spending.
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Openness/Sharing
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OpenFlow is an open source project borne of a six-year research collaboration between Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. It’s a programmatic interface and protocol that enables software-defined networking, which means that users can define flows and determine what paths those flows take through a network via software, regardless of the underlying hardware.
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Superdesk is a newsroom tool that gives journalists the ability to source, manage, verify, process and eventually present the facts behind a story, across multiple platforms and media — including the web, mobile, radio, television and print.
The plan is to make the newsroom process collaborative and open-source — pulling in data from wire services, APIs and other sources, letting journalists and editors create content, edit it and even translate it, and then publish or broadcast it. The idea, essentially, is to detach the content from the medium, standardising it so it can easily be passed around a newsroom in a universal format.
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Programming
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ActiveState Software today announced new cloud application management and monitoring features for Stackato – its infrastructure-agnostic, polyglot private platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
Built on VMware-based Cloud Foundry open source project, Stackato is designed to enable private PaaS for Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl and Node.js-based applications.
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StackIQ today announced the immediate availability of Rocks+ 6, the comprehensive software suite for automating the deployment and management of Big Infrastructure. Rocks+ 6 is designed for environments having hundreds or thousands of servers supporting Big Data, Analytics, or High Performance computing. These environments require powerful management software that turns loosely coupled commodity hardware and open source software into tightly coupled enterprise grade appliances, and StackIQ has been building software to do that for years. With thousands of satisfied customers using Rocks today, StackIQ is well positioned to solve the Big Infrastructure problem.
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I’ve written recently about Exchange problems and how Outlook problems have been overwhelming the Help Desk. Another issue popped up that tops the cake. It was brought to my attention that some users, receiving some emails, cannot see PDF attachments. But, not only does Outlook refuse to show the attachments, it gives no indication to the user that there is something wrong. So, the user has no idea that there are attachments, other than relying on the sender to notify them in some way. We verified that the attachments are in the message, because Outlook reports the message size correctly which takes into account the extra size that the attachments take up. And, when having the user log in to Outlook Web App, the attachments show up. Seriously, this is idiotic. This is just unexcusable when you are dealing with customers and need to have reliable email correspondence. Already this has caused issues, since the customer needs to ask our staff if they got the attachment and why they have not responded regarding it. Our staff explains that they never got the attachment and back and forth fun begins.
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The Windows Phone 7.5 interface is interesting, but no more so than that of Android or iOS. Partnering with Nokia was a bold move, but in the end will be like climbing into a sinking lifeboat. The mobile-market ship has sailed, and while business users will continue to use Microsoft’s products, they will more frequently access them through the devices and operating systems of their competitors.
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Security
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Security research firm NSS Labs has released an open source scanning tool that is capable of detecting all malicious drivers used by the new Duqu threat, according to its engineers. However, other security vendors believe that the malware’s creators are capable of evading detection at any time.
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Finance
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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner found himself on the defensive Tuesday, trying to assuage Rep. Maxine Waters about the role Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs played in the lead-up to the federal bailout.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Broadband Internet adoption has skyrocketed over the last decade in the U.S, though adoption hasn’t been entirely evenly spread across all Americans. That’s the conclusion from a new Exploring the Digital Nation report from The Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
The report is a followup to one released in 2010 that came to a similar set of conclusions about the so-called digital divide between those that have broadband Internet access and those that do not.
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Copyrights
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Hollywood movie studio Warner Bros. has admitted to a federal court that it removed files from the file-hosting site Hotfile without owning the copyrights. Some of the false takedowns were the result of failing filtering software but Warner also admitted that one of its employees deleted Open Source software that could speed up downloads.
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ACTA
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On 9 November we sent the Chairman of the European Parliament Committee on International Trade (INTA), Mr Moreira, an open letter in which we protested against an INTA meeting behind closed doors on ACTA. On 10 November Mr Moreira replied.
Below you will find his letter and our reply. Mr Moreira defends the secrecy: the document is, for the time being, confidential. We maintain that secrecy is not compatible with “utmost transparency” (art 103 European Parliament Rules of Procedure).
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11.13.11
Posted in Antitrust, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Coordination of Microsoft thugs no better than the mafia
Photo by Luca Sartoni
Summary: Why the modus operandi of Microsoft (against Linux) is mostly overlooked because of proxies that it uses to distance itself from attacks
BASED on the comments we received yesterday, people misunderstood the basis of our complaint. Microsoft is breaking the law like Capone broke the law. Microsoft uses thugs to go and beat up the competition. If a company does not pay Microsoft “protection money”, then Microsoft will send some trolls. Microsoft’s patent troll Nathan Myhrvold does the same thing and should accordingly come under criminal/federal investigation (as already suggested by some of his victims).
When B&N complained about Microsoft abuses it did not neglect to mention this important point. MOSAID, for example, is one of those thugs [1, 2, 3] that Microsoft along with its mole Stephen Elop are arming. As one article from a Linux site put it, “Barnes and Noble petitions Nokia over Microsoft deal”. To quote:
Barnes & Noble has subpoenaed Nokia in its defense against Microsoft’s Android-related patent infringement claims, following its petition to the U.S. Department of Justice to look into Microsoft’s patent behavior for possible antitrust violations. In other patent-related news, Microsoft and Huawei are negotiating on a patent agreement, say reports.
When we say that Microsoft is breaking the law, it is essential to understand why and perhaps actually read the B&N complaint. One of our US-based members is currently preparing a petition to the White House about this. █
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Posted in Antitrust, Europe, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 11:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Negative pricing and retaliatory offerings from a convicted monopolist with antitrust violations — is that the ‘new’ Microsoft?
WHEN Microsoft paid people to use its Google scraper (known as "Bong") journalists called it a "bribe" and it failed anyway (Microsoft loses billions per year online). Microsoft wanted to be able to spy on more Internet users for all sorts of purposes. Now, we also know that Microsoft uses Internet Explorer to spy on users by keeping track of all the pages they visit. But this browser is failing pretty badly, so what does Microsoft do? Bribe ‘em:
Somewhere along the line, Microsoft went from being the 800-pound gorilla in the browser market to begging users to switch back to Internet Explorer. Now, Microsoft is running a “where’s the love?” campaign to offer “free stuff” for users who download IE9. After all these years, hasn’t Microsoft learned yet that it can’t buy love? Is the company capable of competing on features at all?
While IE may hold a lead over Firefox, Chrome and Safari individually, it’s trounced by the trio overall.
There are several articles about it out there. Microsoft gets slammed for trying to merely buy its userbase and thus deprive smaller companies, removing their rivals’ customers to the point where they are in mortal danger. This is monopoly abuse. There is some other interesting news today which very much screams “EDGI”. Assuming this report is accurate, Microsoft is offering ‘free’ stuff to derail its Free/open source competition, which again, is definitely monopoly abuse and ought to be investigated. To quote:
Free Microsoft upgrade when you threaten open source?
Qamar Yunus, assistant director in the Cabinet Office ICT policy team, says that Microsoft provided its software for free when a government department decided to pilot open source LibreOffice as an alternative to upgrading its Microsoft software.
Yunus was making the point that considering open source helps improve competition. He added, though, that open source should be considered properly rather than simply as a negotiating tool, according to Guardian Government Computing.
Yunus was speaking at EHI Live in Birmingham. He said that extensive research has established that neither departments nor system integrators understand open source.
He was also reported as saying that the ‘myth’ that open source was less secure than proprietary had been dispelled, and every government department was now mandated to look at both proprietary and open source software.
Antitrust officials should take action against this. If they disregard monopoly-related rules, then what good is the rule of law anyway? █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Microsoft at 11:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Caution: lobbying on the BBC
Summary: The establishment which was supposed to be taxpayers-funded (to serve taxpayers of course) is broadcasting propaganda funded by one of the world’s most infamous abusive monopolists and shady lobbyists
THIS POST is being written just 100 meters away from the BBC at Media City UK, where a lot of footage is done to promote public understanding of the world, at the expense of people who pay TV tax.
It is truly troubling that the BBC lost sight of its goals, yet again. It is now taking money from billionaires (through their front groups) for what can only be described as “placements”. They piggyback the reputation of the BBC to deceive the public, glorify themselves, and create a financial dependency (strings) in an establishment that operates worldwide, supposedly informing people.
It has been years since we last showed the great number of Microsoft UK executives who moved to the BBC. The bias of the BBC was accordingly noted and now we discover that yet more money is being funnelled from Bill Gates to the BBC in exchange for coverage:
A television health show supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation launched on BBC World News last week. The 26-part weekly magazine programme, called The Health Show, reports on global health issues from areas vulnerable to specific conditions.
This is part of the Gates PR campaign, which in turn aids lobbying and allows him to market particular patents or run the world the way he wants to. The post-Microsoft Gates is in many ways more dangerous than that man who was grilled for (and found guilty of) criminal business activities. His PR operating is currently trying to dismiss critics as “ill informed”, armed with empty and arrogant rhetoric.
As Gates Keepers put it:
Gates Keepers find it odd that this chronic problem with the Gates Foundation is being framed and labelled as a value-free ‘communication problem’. Institutional values are involved. Perhaps it is a mission problem, a leadership problem, or even an attitudinal problem. Or all three or none of them.
But the focus on a ‘communication problem’ with grantees does not allow for discussion of a far greater issue – the relationships between the Foundation and other institutions & between the Foundation and its beneficiaries around the world.
This whole “communication problem” line is not new. We saw it used before. it’s worse than the “rotten apple” line, which companies typically use to excuse themselves when they are caught in a major scandal. The author gives several examples of the whitewash. These are example that he gives of Gates-funded publications that push this form of apologism while one talks about the real issue, concluding:
Perhaps the reason this issue has become such a chronic refrain isn’t due to the lack of coming up with some new plan, or timeline or committee-designed set of principles, as it is about developing a new mindset.
As a journalist who’s been covering the Gates Foundation for more than a decade, I’ve seen it evolve from an upstart start-up philanthropy run by just a handful of people — who were actually pretty bold, outspoken and perhaps even a bit reckless — into a massive, fairly bureaucratic and apparently risk-averse organization.
The Gates Foundation has no “communication” problem. When you are doing selfish things that harm society, then it is simply hard to communicate it positivity, even when you spend a million dollars (or more) per day on media coverage that is warped, corrupted, and essentially just a case of ghost-writing/PR/placements. █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Microsoft, Steve Ballmer at 10:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News suggests that more people from Microsoft (not just Raikes and Gates) are occupying the obligatory system which shapes the next generation at taxpayers’ expense
INJUSTICE is prevalent when the legal system is operated directly or indirectly by those who are affluent. Such status quo would be prejudiced against those who are unable to pay. Tax law is similarly dependent on the influence of money, which means that those who are very rich will make up ways to pay little or no tax. This is a famous problem in the United States of America and increasingly in the UK too. People pay more tax the richer they are but once they get to a certain level they can become almost tax-exempt, using loophole which they lobbied to create and call “legal”.
“Additionally, Gates uses the publicly-funded education system to do what it tells everyone to do.”So-called foundations make the situation ever more outrageous because they glorify those who do not pay tax and sometimes help rob the public, too. Citing this article, Gates Keepers alleges that “The public subsidises the Gates Foundation” — a subject that we covered here before. To repeat the crux of the argument, what the Gates Foundation is doing is lobbying politicians to funnel taxpayers’ money into companies that the foundation invests in for profit. It is about monopolies, patents, and public subsidies. We gave many examples and showed how this is done.
Additionally, Gates uses the publicly-funded education system to do what it tells everyone to do. These acts are an injury and an insult to future generations, which Gates believes he is responsible for along with fellow plutocrats, shaping the minds of children not for critical thinking but for obedience and admiration of those in power (like himself).
There is a new article titled “The Money Behind the School Board Incumbents”. It is one among many recent articles that portray Bill Gates as the villain in the education scene. They know he is up to no good, a self-servitude of sorts that also buys the media to hide those real interests. To quote:
All the School Board incumbents are supported by zillionaire donors who don’t have children in our schools. Most live on the Eastside. They generously funded The Seattle Foundation to bring Teach for America into Seattle Public Schools. Most also backed the defeat of Initiative 1098. The anti-1098 donors include Steve and Connie Ballmer, Matt Griffin, Evelyne Rozner, John Stanton, and James Faulstich. In addition to backing TFA and the incumbents, Connie Ballmer sits on the WA advisory board of Stand For Children, a national lobbying organization that aggressively promotes charter schools. Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and his wife Patricia did not donate to defeat I-1098, but they support TFA, charter schools and the incumbents. The same holds true for John Faulstich.
What if any connection is there between defeating Initiative 1098, supporting Teach for America, Stand for Children and the incumbent School Board Directors?
First– why the opposition to I-1098 from anyone who supports public education? Initiative 1098 would have provided $2 billion a year as a trust fund dedicated to public education, health services and middle class tax relief. The year I-1098 was filed, Seattle Public Schools had a budget shortfall of $34 million. It’s safe to assume these people don’t want a miniscule portion of their ginormous incomes to support public education as it is now. They must have another plan.
Teach for America provides public and charter schools with conditionally certified teachers who have received a total of five weeks of training during the summer. Charter schools hire many of their teachers through Teach for America. Wendy Kopp, founder, CEO and relentless marketer of TFA draws an annual salary of $660,000, paid for by funds presumably raised for public education. TFA also received $50mil from the Obama administration last year. TFA is very much a part of a national movement to privatize and profit from public education through charter schools.
[...]
The challengers in this race are trying to move us beyond this phase of Ed Reform to the next. Our vision of effective Ed Reform is about meeting the individual needs of our students, rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all standardized education. We must increase pathways to success by offering compelling programs that engage students all the way through high school, and help them prepare for the futures they want. We must improve our curricula and give struggling students more support. We must open up our district to far greater community input and control. We need to restore more choice to our student assignment plan. And we can do it all without diverting public funds into the pockets of people like Wendy Kopp and others who profit from charter schools.
We found it most interesting that even the Ballmers are in it now. Ballmer’s wife is a PR person (professionally), which says a lot on its own. These couples also sponsored Obama's PR campaign, which got him elected. Ballmer routinely visits the White House now. We gave examples in the past.
Here is another new article critical of Gates, despite his sponsorship of education news sites (with aim of influencing coverage). The headline says Bill Gates’ Big Play: How Much Can Money Buy in Education?
What would happen if one of the wealthiest men in the world decided to remake the institution of public education in America? What if that man believed he understood the secrets to success, and sought to align the nation’s schools to his vision and methods? What if he decided to devote all his time and considerable money to this objective? Could he succeed? We are in the process of finding out just how far money and a sharply defined agenda can take you.
Why is Gates deciding on educational policy in public education? This is a person who went to prestigious private schools and sends his kids to these. There is a poor article titled “Bill Gates: Poverty not excuse for no education”. So says the man who was born rich and didn’t finish college. Here is a copy of it (the original expired):
Bill Gates: Poverty not excuse for no education
Microsoft founder Bill Gates told the National Urban League on Thursday that a child’s success should not depend on the race or income of parents and that poverty cannot be an excuse for a poor education.
This is just the usual shallow coverage from AP, but what’s troubling here is different; who is he to talk for the poor? Or to demand better education/results from these people? Just because he is wealthy and employs lobbying groups to run a lot of things (for profit) does not make him a figure of legitimate authority. The AP not only parrots or promotes his so-called ‘studies’ (sponsored propaganda, as we showed before in AP). In this case it also lends to the man’s status by quoting him as though he is an education expert. This is truly troubling. But the BBC is worse. We’ll deal with that next. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Clearly, GNU/Linux has a dominant position in China by this measure. With hundreds of millions soon to gain access to IT in China, GNU/Linux has a bright future.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Floating around the Linux kernel mailing list information is some new data about the evolution of the Linux kernel’s size. Obviously, it’s getting larger.
Jérôme Pinot took the size of every Linux kernel (the .tar.bz2 package) since Linux 1.0 and through the recent Linux 3.1 kernel release and plotted it out. It’s comparing the size of the kernel versus the release number (not against the time). His findings are that “Impressive, it’s mostly exponential. If dev keeps same pace, we should break the 100MB at linux 3.19.”
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This blog post isn’t only directed to ThinkPad owners as most notebook Linux users with Intel Core Duo 1/2 and i3/i5/i7 processors have been affected by this bug if not all. And yes, this problem is present on latest Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 11.10.
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Graphics Stack
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Many Phoronix readers have written in asking about the news this week concerning HTC joining the Open Invention Network. In particular, many Phoronix readers are interested in HTC joining OIN due to their acquisition of S3 Graphics earlier in the year and the accumulated graphics IP portfolio.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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The Fedora Project recently released Fedora 16 (“Verne”), featuring GNOME 3.2, as well as virtualization and cloud enhancements including Aeolus and OpenStack integration. Fedora 16 upgrades to Linux 3.1, the GRUB2 bootloader finally shows up, and Firefox 7.0.1, while offering improved system settings, plus enhanced contact and document management apps.
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Games
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Clothing retailers better listen up, because Jens Nilsson and his team at Frictional Games have discovered a way to make a good chunk of gamers go out and buy a new, unsoiled pair of trousers. The indie developer’s previous effort, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is regarded by some as one of the scariest games of all time, and the Penumbra trilogy that preceded it shares its innovative control scheme and focus on realism and physics-driven puzzles. Spurred by Amnesia’s unexpected success, the team is already hard at work on their next project, and the next iteration of their “HPL” engine.
I almost didn’t manage to speak to Jens at our arranged time on Tuesday; I had issues with our Internet connection and wasn’t able to keep our Skype appointment, and it was merely by the stroke of luck that I managed to get his telephone number and call him at his home in Helsinborg, Sweden. He’s currently the CEO of the eight-person team, handling both audio and scripting for their games’ development process, as well as “all the boring stuff with the company”, like administration and so on. He’s one of the team’s two original founders, and his passion for video games is obvious.
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Desktop Environments
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For some time, I have been noticing that KDE Display Manager (KDM) slows down after every version bump. I was of the idea that this was because KDE was becoming bloated. However, CPU usage of KDE had started declining after version 4.4. So, I was sure that KDE was actually not getting hung up in the background any more. However, till 4.7 the KDM load time kept increasing. As a matter of fact, after the recent update, KDM became so slow that I had to restart my system twice before actually getting to KDM. In fact, during the first two restarts, I was thinking that my installation was broken after the update.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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In fact the feature was finished some weeks ago with a complete transition to KWin. Unfortunately it turned out that there is one possible situation for a race condition which could lead to a desktop being unlocked in the worst case if KWin crashes. Of course it would not be possible to trigger a crash when the screen is locked, but KWin relies and integrates libraries which are out of our own control (e.g. think of drivers).
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With this release, there is a DVD and a CD installation image. The CD image contains very few applications, while the DVD image is relatively loaded. This review is based on test installations of the DVD image on real hardware and in a virtual environment.
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New Releases
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Directly from our “Breaking Stuff” dept., three new Sabayon 7 releases have seen the light!
These releases all go under the “Experimental” umbrella, not that because
* LXDE is a minimal, CD-sized flavour geared towards low-end computers, shipping the LXDE Desktop Environment.
* E17 is a minimal, CD-sized flavour made for people wanting to showcase the magic of Enlightenment 17.
* Awesome is a first timer here, thanks to Brian Tomlinson efforts, Sabayon has now an Awesome WM flavour as well.
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Parted Magic lead developer Patrick J. Verner has announced the release of version 11.11.11 of his open source, multi-platform partitioning tool. Based on the Linux 3.1 kernel, the new release introduces a new versioning system (the previous version was 6.7) and upgrades a number of the included applications.
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You can download SoaS v6 via bittorrent or direct downloads by heading over to this page. The accompanying installation instructions for various operating systems are available here.
As you can see from the screenshot above I gave SoaS a spin around the block using VirtualBox on my Windows 7 laptop and it worked like a charm. As I have access to XOs I personally don’t need SoaS that often but I do use it occassionally to show off Sugar during presentations or talks I give.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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PCLinuxOS has been around since 2003. It started off as a set of RPM packages to improve Mandrake (now Mandriva) Linux. Eventually it grew and changed and became a standalone distro in it’s own right.
PCLinuxOS uses APT-RPM as it’s package management system. Basically, it uses APT and Synaptic, but on RPM packages instead of DEB. It’s used a variety of desktop environments in it’s time, but currently (version 2011.09), KDE is the only desktop environment available officially.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Jared Smith has been associated with the Fedora Project for several years and currently is the Project Leader. In an exclusive interview with devworx, he spoke on Fedora 16, the btrfs filesystem, other Linux projects and more! Jared said his role is all about bridging the gap between the Fedora user community, developers and Red Hat. To Red Hat as a company, he represents the Fedora community, while to the Fedora community, he represents Red Hat. That way, the bridges of communication always stay open in the community side as well as the corporate side.
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I admit, my brief tryst with Fedora 16 the other night has been stuck in my mind. It was good. Really good. I guess I had a few preconceptions going in. When you go with IBM, when you date that FBI agent, or that covert military assassin, you just expect some kind of perfection. They’ve got to have hard-core discipline, they had to work everything out well in advance. A downright ruthless execution in the name of perfection.
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So, I also updated and here are my impressions 
XFCE live cd works like a breeze, installation went smooth. I even got wifi (broadcomm) working out of box (suspend works for me too, btw.)! GRUB 2 seems nice, although it associated detected kernels with the newly installed Fedora. Still better than nothing from grub 1 >:-D Now for the system itself. GDM suck. It sucks hard. As soon as I installed some of gnome as deps it started putting gnome instead of xfce to session. It also does not seem to allow for keyboard and language selection. I need to switch to LXDM or try out LightDM soon… XFCE works as expected, after copying old configuration and installing apps I use, almost everything seems to work.
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For those who wonder “what updates are already pushed out”, there aren’t that many updates for Fedora 16, which I suppose is a good indicator of its stability at release. My update was 55MB, and took only a few minutes while I did other things.
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Debian Family
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Commodore OS Vision stands on the shoulders of giants, with a lineage that traces back to fantastic linux operating system distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu and Mint, which you might also be interested in installing on our machines. Commodore OS Vision auto-installs a graphical operating system boot menu facilitating this further, making your new Commodore machine a technology tinkerers delight.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical is in a hurry. After the successful release of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, it’s time to plan for next, more important, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release. Ubuntu 12.04 is codenamed “Precise Pangolin” and following are the important changes in the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 release, as decided upon during recently concluded Ubuntu Developer Summit.
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Do you want to know if your computer will work with Ubuntu? Head to Ubuntu Friendly to quickly find out. It’s an ever-growing database of computers known to work flawlessly with everyone’s favorite Linux-based operating system. Do you want to help make that website useful? Run the system test on your computer running Ubuntu right now. You will run tests on your wireless card, your sound and more.
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I am looking to hire a new member for my team (the Community Team) here at Canonical. I am looking for a bright, motivated, and experienced person to build, maintain and develop a cohesive, productive and effective Ubuntu QA community. I am looking for someone with solid QA experience particular in the areas of testing and defect management.
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Flavours and Variants
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Earlier preview added by LinuxMint shows quite the same new features mentioned on the release notes of Linux Mint 12 RC Lisa. Linux Mint 12 based on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, It comes with Gnome 3 and Mint Gnome Shell Extension. MGSE featuring with the new bottom panel, applications menu, window list, visible system tray icons and a task-centric desktop allows you to easily switch with between running applications using Alt+Tab.
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Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few days ago that the upcoming Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) operating system will feature a new desktop interface built on top of the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
So, we’ve downloaded a development version of the Linux Mint 12 distribution and took it for a test drive, to see that amazing new interface everyone is talking about, that Unity killer.
To our surprise, it appears that Linux Mint 12′s new interface, called MGSE (Mint Gnime Shell Extensions) is actually a small modification of the GNOME 3′s GNOME Shell interface.
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I like Mint… it is not the distro I run on my own system, that is Ubuntu, but I am VERY impressed with Mint. This new version looks very cool. Time to play!
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Phones
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Android
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Occasionally, if you get stuck on a difficult word, there’s always the big fat dictionary waiting to be dusted off. But what if you find that process a tad old-fashioned? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. These days, more and more people are using online dictionaries instead of the traditional paper-made ones to find synonyms, definitions and antonyms. Also, for looking up words on the go, there are a myriad of apps available for smartphones and tablets. So, if you’re an Android user and are looking for some good dictionary apps to try out, read on as we cover the best ones for the platform.
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Naughton made the same claim in March and again in August. It looks like nobody is listening to his dog whistling else he wouldn’t be at it for the third time in a calendar year.
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Over the next few months, dual-core phones with 720p HD displays will be the new standard by which all high-end Android phones will be judged. And it looks like SONY Ericsson is already at work on a new phone that will allow them to play with the big boys. Pictures, specs and benchmarks for the upcoming SONY Ericsson Nozomi (aka SONY Ericsson XPERIA Arc HD) made an appearance on the web this weekend, giving us a close look at what SE’s next generation handsets will look like.
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A leaked picture of a retail box for a Motorola “Corvair” has surfaced, indicating the company is prepping a small tablet/ TV controller. Likely to be tied with Google TV, the 6-inch Android 2.3-powered device is called a “dedicated controller” designed for the “connected TV”.
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Toys R Us is synonymous with kids, so you shouldn’t be surprised to hear they have teamed up with app developers to offer a kid-centric Android tablet. What is surprising is the price. Available for just $199, the Nabi tablet joins Amazon’s Kindle Fire as one of the few sub $200 dollar Android tablets available in the market today. While we all love a good price… what exactly are we getting with the Nabi tablet?
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Asus announced the first quad-core Android tablet, featuring the newly shipping Nvidia Tegra 3 clocked to 1.3GHz. The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is slimmer (0.33 inches) and lighter (1.29 pounds) than the original Transformer, and offers a 10.1-inch display,an eight-megapixel camera, and up to 12 hours of claimed battery life — or 18 hours when plugged into the optional keyboard dock.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has released the first beta of Firefox 9, just days after the release of the eighth build of the popular open source browser.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Just over a year ago the open source Office Suite world was disturbed by indecision, much the same way world stock markets have been upset by uncertainty today. Oracle had purchased Sun Microsystems and with it the “ownership” of the open source office suite OpenOffice.org.
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The Free Software Conference and Exhibition 2011 organized by FSF.hu Foundation was held today in Budapest. With more than 500 participants, it was the biggest free software event in Hungary this year. I think it was a great success, there were many good presentations in 4 tracks, and there was also a room for workshops.
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Public Services/Government
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I have a fairly simple approach to investing: Start with data and objective evidence to determine the dominant elements driving the market action right now. Figure out what objective reality is beneath all of the noise. Use that information to try to make intelligent investing decisions.
But then, I’m an investor focused on preserving capital and managing risk. I’m not out to win the next election or drive the debate. For those who are, facts and data matter much less than a narrative that supports their interests.
One group has been especially vocal about shaping a new narrative of the credit crisis and economic collapse: those whose bad judgment and failed philosophy helped cause the crisis.
Rather than admit the error of their ways — Repent! — these people are engaged in an active campaign to rewrite history. They are not, of course, exonerated in doing so. And beyond that, they damage the process of repairing what was broken. They muddy the waters when it comes to holding guilty parties responsible. They prevent measures from being put into place to prevent another crisis.
Here is the surprising takeaway: They are winning. Thanks to the endless repetition of the Big Lie.
A Big Lie is so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. There are many examples: Claims that Earth is not warming, or that evolution is not the best thesis we have for how humans developed. Those opposed to stimulus spending have gone so far as to claim that the infrastructure of the United States is just fine, Grade A (not D, as the we discussed last month), and needs little repair.
Wall Street has its own version: Its Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash. You see, the entire boom and bust was caused by misguided government policies. It was not irresponsible lending or derivative or excess leverage or misguided compensation packages, but rather long-standing housing policies that were at fault.
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Finance
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Privacy
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Civil Rights
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A couple of days ago, the Associated Press reported that the Department of Homeland Security claims not to be “actively monitoring” social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. Lest you worry that status updates that present a threat to national security are going unread, the AP today reports that the Central Intelligence Agency is actively monitoring social media networks.
The story in the earlier article was that our sprawling intelligence and national security apparatus was caught off-guard by social media-fueled uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, and that they were going to take steps to be better prepared in the future.
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Copyrights
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This is about how over-budgeted media productions historically paid to license things they didn’t need to license, just because they had tons of money and their lawyers preferred to “play it safe” rather than claim Fair Use, which is how Fair Use became the weak pathetic limping layer of pointlessness it is today.
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