Summary: Knowledge withheld as a business model (and what can be done about it)
Copyrights are being contested by a form of unprecedented sharing of information, promoted greatly by the Internet and currently impeded by the rise of DRM in literature and applications (especially in mobile devices). Artificial limits on the sharing of knowledge are a business model to some. Failing to use copyrights for this purpose, some have escalated and harnessed patents, which make illegal even one’s own personal expression (and application) of ideas. What we are going through right now is a period where we can choose to use technology for the better or simply to use it for selfish and potentially malicious purposes. The decision is in our hands, but at the same time it is not in our hands because we depend on companies like Amazon and Apple to make or distribute products which a lot of people use. The matter of fact is, there are two competing camps — one that hoards and one which is being robbed. The idea that without planned obsolescence and artificial scarcity there will be no incentive to research and innovate is ludicrous and it is as case of wishful thinking in several different ways. If we look back at the industrial revolution and what made it possible, it is none of the things lawyers speak about. The light bulb has in some ways become a symbol of innovation even though it was the result of many ideas and attempts laid on top of each other. It was the sharing of understanding that improved the lives of so many people. Since to many readers this is a national holiday, we’ll keep the news lighter today. █
I like new things. I really do. But, like most people, I don’t like to change the way I work. I have built an efficient flow to my day and to disrupt it by trudging around through some ill-conceived new interface that only serves to frustrate me and slow me down is not something I take lightly. The rule of thumb for any new interface should be efficiency not the lack thereof. For now, I’ll stick with the “classic” versions of my favorite operating systems.
There are many ways to design a website. The most skilled among us are best-known for being able to code a website using nothing but a text editor. However, for those of us who are less skilled in this area, the right software tools can make all the difference.
In this article, I’ll explore the benefits of using a simple text editor,as well as look at the value of various website creation applications available for Linux. Remember, just because there are various web editors available for Linux, doesn’t mean that these applications are going to work as expected. I’ll shine some light on what’s working, what isn’t and why.
Many of today’s top supercomputers are running on Linux operating system (OS) as their users prefer the open source software’s flexibility in customization as well as low costs compared with alternative proprietary OSes, observers said.
Last week, Intel, Nvidia, and AMD announced major strides in high-performance computing (HPC) at SC11. Intel’s Knights Corner CPU is the first processor capable of handling 1 tflops performance, and Nvidia introduced several new supercomputers that would be using its Tesla GPUs as part of a hybrid computing approach.
The changes to Atmos, launched by EMC on Monday, see the storage company broaden the ways people can access and manage the Cloud Delivery Platform layer of the infrastructure-as-a-service private cloud product.
“We’ve seen tremendous traction and interest from both service providers and enterprises looking to deploy public and private-cloud storage offerings, and both have benefited greatly from the new advancements built into the Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform,” Mike Feinberg, general manager of EMC’s cloud infrastructure group, said in a statement.
In an effort to foil crackers attempts to cover their tracks by altering text-based syslogs, as well as improve the syslog process as a whole, two Red Hat developers are proposing a new binary-based tool called The Journal that could replace the syslog daemon in as early as the Fedora 17 release.
Linus Torvalds has issued a Thanksgiving Linux kernel update for those not in a food-induced coma from this American holiday. The delicacy is the Linux 3.2-rc3 kernel.
Samsung has committed a patch in the Linux kernel repository to add support for its quad-core Exynos 4412 SoC (System-on-Chip).
As seen on an October 4 post in the Linux Samsung kernel tree, author Changhwan Youn and committer Kukjin Kim, both employees of the electronics giant, posted information on a new Samsung chipset based on the ARM architecture.
For those wishing to follow the development of Wayland Display Server, there’s some new progress to report on. This time it’s about supporting screensavers under Wayland.
Pekka Paalanen has proposed a screensaver interface for Wayland, which includes adding the interface to the protocol file, compositor stubs, and other changes.
One year after the Radeon and Intel drivers supported precise vblank timestamps, there’s a new patch for enabling this support in the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver.
Precise vblank timestamps and counting is needed for DRI2 sync and swap extensions and GLX_OML_sync_control, among other purposes. See this article for when the precise vblank timestamp support originally came to the Linux DRM drivers.
Two Indian brothers have written a program, called Whiz-Chat, which allows anyone to chat with their Gmail friend directly from the terminal. It is a very good alternative for those who are on a very slow Internet connection or just don’t want to get out of their terminals.
Today KDE released the first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.
The KDE community is proud to announce that next year’s Akademy will be held in Tallinn, Estonia from the 30th of June to the 6th of July. Akademy is the annual world conference held by the KDE community to celebrate the Free Software desktop and work towards the future of KDE.
Akademy 2011 in Berlin ended a few months ago. It was part of the Desktop Summit, which was a great success. Next year’s Akademy awaits us in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.
As always, major support from the local team will be the center of the organization for the conference. Claudia Rauch, the business manager of KDE e.V. in Berlin, is the overall project manager, and a small production team will assist. There’s a lot that needs to happen for Akademy to go smoothly.
As you know, in GNOME, we’re committed to bringing you the easiest, most beautiful, and most advanced operating system in the world today. A major part of this effort, now, is to build a suite of amazing core applications that provide the operating system key or essential features. Today, I’d like to talk about our goals for one of these apps. It is just the earliest stages but here’s a taste of where we’d like to go.
In this article is the first of several articles comparing the recently released Fedora 16 to Ubuntu 11.10. This first article is looking at the boot performance and power consumption from several different notebooks when performing clean installs of Fedora Verne and Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot.
The only issue I ran into was this one (initscripts update) which requires simple manual deletion of a file for the update to succeed. This is currently the second news item on the Arch Linux front page, so it pays to check and be prepared.
We all know these arguments. An outsider comments on Linux distribution plurality and says that the lack of a unified platform is what hurts Linux adoption. This argument is not without its merits, but it isn’t exactly a valid argument anyway. The first main issue with it is an obvious one. If no one singularly owns and controls Linux, no one would be able to pull all variants off of the virtual shelves and standardize the community on a singular distribution. Beyond this, there exists an entirely practical reason for distribution plurality that people tend to overlook.
One of the most anxiously-awaited Linux releases in quite some time is now available for download on the Linux Mint Mirrors worldwide. It has not yet been officially “announced”, either on the Linux Mint web page or on Distrowatch, but I assume that will happen in the very near future. A lot of people are hoping that this release will be the “Peacemaker” of the recent Linux desktop disputes, between Gnome 2, Gnome 3 and Ubuntu Unity. It is certainly a very interesting combination of an Ubuntu (11.10) base distribution minus the Unity desktop, and a Gnome 3 desktop with a large dose of Gnome-2-like user interface added to it. To me, the most impressive thing about it is that this “hybrid” was undertaken by such a small group, led by Clement Lefebvre and the Linux Mint development team.
The distribution is available in four ISO images, comprised of 32- and 64-bit versions, each in either a CD-sized image without most of the audio/video codecs and such or a DVD-sized image with pretty much everything included. All of the images are compatible with the existing Mint (and Ubuntu) Startup Disk Creator utility, so they can be easily converted to LiveUSB meida (or, of course, burned to a CD or DVD). One thing I haven’t mentioned in a while, when I boot the LiveUSB image on my systems it comes up to the boot: prompt and waits for input, then I type live and press Enter to start the live image. (I fully expect someone to post a comment that says “Jamie you twit, you’re doing wrong, if you fix that it will boot the live image just fine”, but honestly this has never bothered me enough to take the time to look into it.)
Red Hat is offering partners and customers the chance to download a beta version of its upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 release, the next generation of the open-source software vendor’s virtualization system.
While Red Hat has been previewing the beta software to a limited number of partners since August, this marks the first time the company has offered a preview to the general public.
The penguins are on the march: they are leaving Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu and migrating towards other Linux distros, fresh data suggests.
Distrowatch’s annual web rankings claim Ubuntu’s top spot has been snatched by Mint during the last 12 months. In the past month alone Ubuntu’s been kicked to fourth place by Fedora and openSuSE, who slid in to take the second and third spots behind Mint.
Like other NAS servers from Synology, the DS712+ runs a Linux-based operating system, called DiskStation Manager, and offers an incredible amount of features for both home and business use. Most, if not all, of its features are very well thought out and comprehensive.
With the recent European release of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, we wanted to write a roundup of all the reviews and information available on the net to help our readers cut through the hype and decide if the Galaxy Nexus is the right phone for them. While we always try to present both sides of the story, with the Galaxy Nexus we can’t. No matter who we asked, one fact shown through all the fluff: The Samsung Galaxy Nexus might just be the best smartphone ever.
It would appear that aside from those here in the United States that dropped a mint on an internationally shipped Galaxy Nexus and those of you living in the UK where they’re already in stores, it’s just the publishers who were amongst the lucky to review the device and none other than Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who now have Google’s next hero phone in hand. For today, just one day after the UK launch of the Ice Cream Sandwich device, Woz was invited to have a Galaxy Nexus bestowed upon him along with a lovely Android 4.0 t-shirt. And there was much rejoicing.
The concept of a bootable USB drive running Linux is nothing new. But what if you had a bootable USB drive that was literally an entire mobile device, simply lacking a screen? That’s what FXI has imagined with its “Cotton Candy” device. Details follow …
Kindle Fire users may have to damp their enthusiasm for rooting their devices: unless they’re prepared to chase up some other fixes and put up with some inconvenience, rooting the device kills video access.
The mini-fondleslab was rooted pretty much simultaneously with its launch, with a combination of the Amazon SDK, a suitable USB connection, and SuperOneClick 2.2.
By now, we are all used to the Firefox Mach 9 release cycle. We may like it or not, but it is here to stay, it seems. Therefore, I’m trying to transcend past my dissatisfaction with the Chrome copycat strategy and look into the actual changes, fixes, improvements, and new features added to the latest Firefox release, marked as number eight.
The world of Internet browsers may be largely dominated by the “big three”–Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer–but there are a number of attractive alternatives out there that many users don’t even know about.
Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation, came to the University of Maryland to speak about GNU and the Free Software movement, hosted by the Information Policy & Access Center (iPAC).
The city council of Valmiera in Latvia is saving both energy and money by migrating its physical servers to virtual servers using open source virtualisation tools, says Kaspars Urbāns, head of the city’s IT department. “You will be pleasantly surprised by the electricity bill. With the amount Valmiera saves this way, it could buy a new server for the cluster every six months.”
Seattle’s chief technology officer, Bill Schrier, is bracing for a 6 percent budget cut in 2012, bigger than this year’s, a sign of tighter spending that indicates slower sales gains for Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Intel Corp. (INTC)
“Spending is going to be down, and in some places it’s going to be down considerably,” Schrier said of technology spending by governments generally.
When you look at it methodically, it’s easy to see how all Microsoft’s parts are interconnected. If one part breaks, particularly if that part is Windows or Office, then the whole house could come down.
While the US is still pondering SOPA, we just got some absolutely fantastic news out of Europe. The European Court of Justice, the highest court in the European Union, has just ruled that P2P filters installed by ISPs violate the European Directive on electronic commerce as well as fundamental rights [full ruling]. This is a hugely important ruling that effectively protects all member states of the European Union from ever being subjected to ISP filtering and spying.
The origins of this ruling lie in Belgium. The Belgian version of the RIAA, SABAM, had sued Belgian internet provider Scarlet because the ISP’s users were downloading copyrighted content without paying royalties. The President of the Tribunal de première instance de Bruxelles (Brussels Court of First Instance) then ordered Scarlet to install a filtering system to monitor the internet traffic of its subscribers.
The Horowhenua Library Trust, the birthplace of the Koha integrated library system, the first such open source project, finds itself in a peculiar position today, that of having to fight to regain rights to its own name.
This follows the successful application by the American defence contractor, Progressive Technology Federal Systems/Liblime, for a trademark on the name Koha in New Zealand. Koha is a Maori term that means reciprocity in giving.
Open source Integrated Library System (ILS), Koha, came under a trademark threat when the US based PTFS/Liblime managed to get their application for a Trademark on Koha accepted in New Zealand.
A Koha community blog says, “For the library that invented Koha to now have to have a legal battle to prevent a US company trademarking the word in NZ seems bizarre, but it is at this point that we find ourselves.”
Members of the French Parliament are using a bill on private copying levy as an occasion to kill the copyright exception for private copying. Under the pretense of saving royalties collection, MPs have redefined fair use in the process. Giving in once more to pressure from the recording and movie industry, the French Parliament carries on Nicolas Sarkozy’s repressive policy against the Internet and new cultural practices.
The European Court of Justice just rendered a historic decision in the Scarlet Extended case, which is crucial for the future of rights and freedoms on the Internet. The Court ruled that forcing Internet service providers to monitor and censor their users’ communications violated EU law, and in particular the right to freedom of communication. At a time of all-out offensive in the war against culture sharing online, this decision suggests that censorship measures requested by the entertainment industry are disproportionate means to enforce an outdated copyright regime. Policy-makers across Europe must take this decision into account by refusing new repressive schemes, such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and engage in a much needed reform of copyright.
Is there a Linux lover in your life? Someone who loves to debate the advantage of Debian Linux over Ubuntu? Someone who wears a Tux the penguin t-shirt out to lunch? Then, these gifts might just be what they-or you-need to be happy this holiday season.
EMC today unveiled upgrades to its Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform that add new metering services and additional administrative reporting and controls.
In addition, the Atmos GeoDrive, a piece of software that presents cloud storage as a drive letter on client systems, can now be deployed on Linxux servers. Previously, it could only be used on Windows systems.
Linux users working on laptops and other portable devices may soon have cause to rejoice thanks to a new kernel patch that finally promises to fix power regression problems associated with recent versions of the software.
Many long-term Ubuntu users(including me) overlook at the fact that, there are plenty of good quality applications available free of cost in Ubuntu Software Center already. If you look at our reviews of applications here, a good number of them require adding and updating third party repositories. Not that those apps are somehow inferior, but we will, for a change, list the most highly rated applications which are available for free installation from Ubuntu Software Center.
With holidays approaching for many of us, people will be breaking out their cameras and taking photos. Over the years on OStatic, we’ve covered a huge number of open source applications that can make editing, organizing and adding effects to digital photos much easier. The applications range from well-known ones to titles that you probably haven’t heard of. Here is an updated collection of great tools for the digital photographer–and all of them are free.
On a good week, I consider myself an avid runner. Right now I’m training to run a 5k in the spring. Ideally, I’ll be able to get it under 20 minutes. Now, two of the keys to exercise are to set goals and to track your progress. Clearly I’ve got the first half under control, but the second half? Well, it turns out that’s where a lot of people falter, lose motivation, and ultimately fail. I’m no exception – I’ve tried running without really tracking my progress and I found that eventually I just gave up. Manually drawing routes, estimating distances, and keeping time take effort, and frankly I didn’t have the wherewithal to do it. Thankfully, modern technology has come to save the day. I use a Google Nexus S, which comes with a GPS and dozens of apps on the Android Market for tracking exercise.
Adobe, which decided to kill off mobile-based Flash a few days back, will be delivering one last update to its soon-to-be-dead technology. The update, which comes out later this year, will bring support for the recently open sourced Ice Cream Sandwich. Despite being buggy, many ICS users are griping about the lack of Flash on their device, and many, in fact, are impatiently waiting to get their hands on the update. And even though it is very thoughtful of Adobe to cater to the needs of its loyal Android users, it’s still something the company shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
A new Linux based gaming handheld GameGadget has been announced today by Blaze Europe that will allow you to install your favorite games from iTunes style app store called GameGadgetGames.
Developers will be able to publish games easily via this service and they will be distributed using proprietary DRM .
Unigine OilRush is now set for release on the 25th of January, 2012. This comes after Unigine Corp originally planned to release the game this spring, then the summer, and then this fall. Today the Russian company has officially announced the 25 January release date. It’s coming later than expected, but lately they had delayed the game to enhance the game-play and then last I heard privately from Unigine Corp that they were working on the release date due to discussing matters with their distribution partners.
Yesterday in Darmstadt, Germany I met up with Martin Gräßlin, the developer known for leading KDE’s KWin compositing window manager advancements, and a few other Linux developers. A few words about KDE on Wayland were said.
Yesterday, the MyPaint team released version 1.0.0! Warm hugs and congratulations to their entire team! Read all about it on the MyPaint website. MyPaint is a digital painting application with some unique features, like its brush engine (well, we’re still working on making that usable in Krita) and its infinite canvas. Our projects are connected through frequent meetings between the developers on IRC and in real life, the OpenRaster file format, and our users!
We want to make Plasma Workspaces 4.8 a great release, and one way to reach that goal is to take care of the defects that creep in. To do that, we need your help to groom the bug database. We also realize that to do that, many of you would appreciate some help and teamwork.
It’s been a while since we’ve held Plasma bug days. They worked very well in the past so we’re resurrecting them.
A couple of weeks ago, the harddisk in my small frontend, the one I’ve been using since last January after Yamato started acting up too much to be usable as a desktop as well, decided to give up. It wasn’t much of a bother as I was planning to replace it anyway: the small frontend was supposed to become an HTPC in short time, but for the moment it’s not of importance either since, as I noted previously I recently got a Sky subscription so that I can have most of the content I care about in my bedroom without having to spend time “finding” it.
For me, it is my dream job and it is also the best job in the world. My personal passion for making free software easier to use is encouraged & celebrated, and I’m always in the company of folks much smarter than I with a never-ending supply of interesting and challenging projects to work on together. The position also comes with the satisfaction that it is, even if only in a small way at times, making the world a better place. Not only does Red Hat work to make more free software available and to make its power more accessible, saving time, money, and pain for businesses: with Red Hat’s support, for example, I’ve been involved in initiatives to teach kids how to use free software and to develop openly-licensed course materials for teachers interested in their own free software programs. It’s a position that has never been boring and through which I’ve been able to travel internationally and constantly learn and grow as a person.
I’m really excited by Ceylon and what it might mean for other things we’re doing in Cloud and JBossEverywhere. So expect to hear more about this effort in the coming months, because just like Java, it’s going to continue to evolve. And can we please stop these “my language is better than your language” arguments? There’s room in this evolving polyglot world for a few more, even if just to allow people to stretch their mental legs and see what works and what doesn’t. Everyone is entitled to their opinions and reasoned arguments are always allowed; but flamewars, especially if they’re subjectively based, don’t help anyone.
The more I figure out how GNOME 3/Shell works in Fedora 16, the more I like it.
I’m not at the point where I can say, “Oh, it’s totally better than GNOME 2,” but I’m increasingly able to do things the way I’m accustomed to doing in the GNOME Shell environment.
I will refrain from comparing how things work in Fedora 16/GNOME Shell vs. Ubuntu 11.10/Unity until I spend more time in the latter. But this comparison is at the forefront of my thinking about which direction my Linux desktop use will go in during the year ahead.
It’s been one year since the first People behind Debian interview. For this special occasion, I wanted a special guest… and I’m happy that our Debian Project Leader (DPL)—Stefano Zacchiroli—accepted my invitation.
He has a difficult role in the community, but he’s doing a really great job of it. He’s a great mediator in difficult situations, but he’s also opinionated and can push a discussion towards a conclusion.
Read on to learn how he became a Debian developer and later DPL, what he’s excited about in the next Debian release, and much more.
One of the most wonderful things about Open Source and collaborative community is that every community member participates in a commons; a shared area of community real-estate in which we can all contribute.
As an example, with most small Open Source software projects, the commons is the code-base, the website, documentation, IRC channel, mailing list etc. Within that project’s commons people can contribute in different ways, such as writing code, fixing bugs, updating the website, creating documentation, providing support etc.
The look has not changed much in Ubuntu 11.10, but the features sure have. For those unable to use Unity 3D, Unity 2D is now available as well. The login manager is now LiteDM which is fast and efficient. A new window switcher has also been added and there have also been improvements to the lenses feature. Ubuntu as always, is free to try, and remains one of the top choices for Linux newcomers. For a long time Ubuntu was the most popular choice among Linux users, but for the time being the position may have been respectively passed on to Linux Mint. At least temporarily…
I’ve been spending time each day working in Ubuntu 11.10′s GNOME 3/Unity and Fedora 16′s GNOME 3/GNOME Shell desktops.
They’re more alike than you think. Rather than do things the GNOME way, Ubuntu/Canonical decided to take its own direction with Unity, which is now, like GNOME Shell, built on top of GNOME 3.
Linux Mint has always been known as the great alternative to Ubuntu. In fact, after Ubuntu implemented the Unity desktop, many people switched ship and flocked to Linux Mint as their next “easy-to-use and user-friendly” distro. According to DistroWatch, Linux Mint has even overtaken Ubuntu as the most popular distro. Well, that was Linux Mint 11, which is still based on Gnome 2, the desktop that most people are familiar with. What about Linux Mint 12?
In the latest release of Linux Mint (version 12, codenamed Lisa, Release Candidate), the developers of Linux Mint decided to embrace the new technology and use Gnome 3 in place of Gnome 2. As we all know, Gnome 3 comes with a brand new user-interface (aka Gnome Shell) that is confusing to many. It is interesting to see how the developers of Linux Mint intend to tame this beast, without failing the expectation of its users.
Clement Lefebvre, the founder, project leader, developer and maintainer of the Linux Mint project, is working very hard
these days to release an operating system that will enchant many Linux users.
Long story short, the upcoming Linux Mint 12, dubbed Lisa, is an operating system based on the Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) distribution and powered by Linux kernel 3.0, featuring a new user interface based on the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
Right or wrong, plenty of Linux users — such as this guy — have been less than happy with the interface changes wrought by the advent of Unity and GNOME 3. Lucky for these people, there’s hope in the form of MATE, a fork of GNOME 2 that bills itself as “a non-intuitive and unattractive desktop for users.” Curious what MATE was all about — and pretty fed up myself with Unity — I recently gave it a spin. Here’s what I found.
It’s true: Try as I have, I just can’t learn to love Unity. The concept itself is fine and I can even live with its biting lack of customizability, but I just can’t take the bugginess anymore. Random things happen when I try to switch between applications — trying to open recently used files via the dash launches Nautilus instead, and the whole thing just generally doesn’t work the way I need it to on a production machine.
Like it or not, GNOME 3 is the new direction for the Linux OS. But that doesn’t mean you have to learn a lot of new OS habits overnight. Two varieties of Linux Mint may be especially attractive for those making the transition. Mint 11 will allow you to maintain your current habits for the time being. Mint 12 gives you a steady and easy path to transitioning to GNOME 3.
KOREAN ELECTRONICS GIANT Samsung might be behind a video that pokes fun at Apple and its Iphone users.
A video posted to Youtube looks like an advert from the firm, but has not been posted to a company account. It’s a professional looking number however, and is rather good. We’ve asked Samsung to confirm whether it is the company’s work but so far have not had a response.
Adlink announced a ruggedized Android handheld computer with IP65 protection and and optional 1D scanning and 2D bar code imaging. The TIOT 2000 runs Android 2.3 on an ARM11-based 800MHz Qualcomm processor, and is further equipped with a 3.5-inch, 320 x 240-pixel resistive touchscreen, a five-megapixel camera, plus a full slate of wireless features including 3G and optional RFID.
A startup called Romotive is readying a small, tank-tread “Romo” robot controlled by Android and iPhone smartphones that communicate to the robot via audio signals. Meanwhile, a prototype bartending robot called the iZac — based on a Motorola Xoom tablet and Arduino Mega controller board — has been created by developer Nick Johnson via the Android Open Accessory Development Kit.
The Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet ships with a couple of great apps pre-loaded including Pandora, Netflix, a decent email app, and an excellent eBook reader. There’s also an app section of the B&N Shop where you can browse for additional apps for the tablet — but the selection is pretty limited.
Fortunately it’s pretty easy to install third party apps on the NOOK Tablet. You don’t even need to root the tablet or install any custom firmware to do it. You might need a microSD card though.
Kyobo Book Centre and Qualcomm MEMS Technologies (QMT) announced an Android 2.3-based e-reader, said to be the first device to use QMT’s sunlight-readable Mirasol color display technology. Equipped with a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, the Kyobo E-Reader provides a 5.7-inch, 1024 x 768-pixel display and offers “weeks of reading” on a single charge, the companies say.
Open source middleware is delivering reliable messaging and routing for the UK’s largest and newest network for roadside assistance. The Automotive Network Services, developed and managed by Apex Networks, is using FuseSource distributions of Apache projects to link 90% of the UK’s 32 million drivers with tow trucks, garages and emergency first responders.
Organizations like the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation have long been a part of the open source and free software ecosystem. But some in the FLOSS community are beginning to wonder if these venerable organizations need to change in order to keep up with the changing demands of FLOSS.
Yesterday, I read what could be the most articulate presentation of this line of reasoning from Yammer Developer Advocate Mikeal Rogers. Rogers also happened to be Employee Number One at CouchOne from 2010-2011–a tenure that certainly pertinent to his arguments.
Add to it the pets underfoot and your children complaining that they want to play on the Wii when grandpa wants to watch the Law and Order marathon on USA, and you have potential for a grumpy household.
Apache was founded about 12 years ago, a time when companies were still very afraid of open source and many people in the open source community were very afraid of companies. The world hasn’t changed that tremendously, big companies still use an open source stamp as a marketing tool, commonly referred to as “open washing”, and some in the enterprise are still wary about open source, particularly when it comes to certain kinds of licensing.
When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were faced with an interesting question:
Should we open source Grit or keep it proprietary?
Keeping it private would provide a higher hurdle for competing Ruby-based Git hosting sites, giving us an advantage. Open sourcing it would mean thousands of people worldwide could use it to build interesting Git tools, creating an even more vibrant Git ecosystem.
The SeaMonkey Project has announced the release of version 2.5 of its “all-in-one internet application suite”. Based on the same Mozilla Gecko platform as Firefox 8, the update includes several under-the-hood performance and stability improvements, while also improving on the way in which add-ons are controlled.
These days, everybody is talking about cloud computing, and many people use it in one form or the other. But popular cloud computing services are provided by a third party, which means that you store you data on a server somewhere, so that you can access it any time, from anywhere. But there are cloud applications that any person can use to host their own private cloud, from their home.
Until now, Heroku’s Postgres database service – originally launched in 2007 – has only been available to Heroku customers for use with Heroku platform apps. Today we’re excited to announce the launch of Heroku Postgres as a standalone service.
With measured service uptime of four nines (99.99%), and designed data durability of eleven nines (99.999999999%), the service is trustworthy for mission-critical data. As of today, these production-quality Heroku Postgres databases are independently available for use from any cloud platform, provisioned instantly, metered by the second, and without contract.
Judge Alsup has now invited the parties to jointly submit a list of the four motions in limine that are most deserving of oral argument. (629 [PDF; Text]) Presumably, each party will name the two of its own motions it most wants to argue before the judge. How the remainder will be disposed of, given that neither party has filed a response to the motions in limine of the other, is unclear. The list is due to Judge Alsup by December 7.
Google has announced that it will kill Knol, its Wikipedia competitor. Interestingly, Google co-founder Sergey Bring donated half a million dollars to Wikipedia foundation, last week.
Google launched Knol in 2007 to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles. In order to continue this work, Google has been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress.
I have heard it said that companies don’t want open source because they want the security of a relationship with a big business. But this outlook reflects misunderstandings of the real values of open source. I believe it to be yet another consequence of the “price frame”.
There is an overall price-related message-frame that proprietary software companies like to use around open source. In each instance, an idea completes the phrase “open source may come with free licenses but…” in creatively manipulative ways. In many cases, the resulting statement conceals a weakness of proprietary software by casting it as a weakness of open source.
In the case of software investment protection, the phrase gets completed “… but you need a proprietary vendor for long-term investment protection”. That’s a deceptive statement and I suggest that actually the open source model – done well – offers more security than the proprietary model.
Because of the large ecosystem that has developed around GWT, App Engine, and Google’s Cloud services, and because our primary mission is to help users (as opposed to creating proprietary development tools), it makes a lot of sense for us to open source GPE and make it easier for the community to enhance and extend the tools.
The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to publish more of its software using open source licences. It is considering to use a source code tracking system to help untangle code that can be made available as open source and programs that, for whatever reason, can not.
FOSS icon The French government has published a request for tenders to provide ICT support. The authorities are looking for a three-year support contract, worth two million euros and covering two-thirds of the country’s twenty-two ministries as well as the Court of Audit. According to Le Monde InformatiqueFrench language link this will include departments ranging from the Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Justice and Freedom to the Ministry of Sports and Ministry of Culture and Communication.
The European Space Agency (ESA) hopes to promote more collaboration by open sourcing more of its software where possible. The effort is one of the facets of a recent case study of ESA by the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR.eu). ESA produces software for its own use to, for example, evaluate and analyse data from its missions. Software it has already released under open source licenses includes POLSARPRO, a tool package for manipulating polarmetric data, BEAM, a platform for analysing remote sensing raster data, and NEST, used for analysing mission data archives.
How exactly should you gain visibility into the performance levels your customers are seeing when they use your Web applications? One method that’s still in wide use is compelling users to install plug-ins and background processes. But for many users, that’s not just performance monitoring, that’s behavior monitoring. You don’t want your analytics tool straying too far into the realm of potential privacy violations.
Until HTML5 can fully implement its standard methodology for capturing browser performance specs, Web developers need alternatives. One candidate, provided by a company RWW spoke with called New Relic, is to have Web apps servers supply performance measurement agents to clients while the apps themselves are being served. These agents communicate not with your server, but with New Relic instead, and the results are made visible as analytics charts through your browser.
In November 2001, IBM made its Java tools IDE and platform, developed for WebSphere Application Studio, available under an open source licence. It was the beginning of Eclipse, which now claims 65 per cent of the Java IDE market. But why was Eclipse founded and what has been its impact over a decade?
The “phone” bit of the new iPhone 4S has stopped working properly for some users who are experiencing repeated SIM card failures, according to customer help forums on the Apple website.
The SIM stutter appears to be affecting customers running the new iOS 5.01 on the iPhone 4S: those affected report frequent error messages detailing “invalid SIM”, even while using SIM cards they know have worked with other phones.
Thanks to the hard work and vision of Steve Jobs, Apple has managed to evolve from a mere cult to a mainstream phenomenon. Fanboys, celebrities, politicians and geeks who adore their products have exalted the billion-dollar company to a technological pseudoreligion. A silent witness to Apple’s magnificent ascent from failure to stardom has been Microsoft.
One of the reasons why Congress has been largely unable to make the American health care system more efficient and equitable is because of the stranglehold lobbyists for special interests have on the institution.
Whenever lawmakers consider any kind of meaningful reform, the proposed remedies inevitably create winners and losers. Physicians’ incomes most likely will be affected in some way, as will the profits of all the other major players: the hospitals, the drug companies, the medical device manufacturers, and the insurers, just to name a few. The list is long, and the platoons of highly paid and well-connected lobbyists who represent their interests comprise a large private army that conquered Capitol Hill years ago.
Google’s hackerishly hirsute Open Source Programs Manager, Chris DiBona, stormed the IT headlines this week when he stuck his paddle into the computer security world and stirred.
In a blog posting which was at least as far above the line in gung-hovity as it was below the line in orthography, DiBona openly referred to vendors of Android anti-virus software as “charlatans and scammers.”
While many of us do simultaneous facepalms and giggle at a decade-late decision, others question the legality of doing so. A multi-billion dollar industry has grown, based on the absolute porous operating system that is Microsoft Windows.
I’m sure Windows fans will protest, saying such things as:
“Well, I’ve run Windows for years and NEVER had a virus”.
Of course, when he says that, he should also hold up a sign to identify himself as belonging to the 1%.
Personally, I cannot suss where this will land legally. It’s hard to argue with the fact that MS is finally going to at least try to address the issue of virus/trojan/malware security. But then again, we all know most anti virus “protection” is a reaction to something that’s already happened on the system….
Of course, simply bandying names about isn’t the point. The point is that the activists fueling social movements like Occupy need to be able to understand exactly how oppression works and which individuals are controlling the process. Where would our nation be if, in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, activists had spoken only of the systemic issue of segregation and didn’t have George Wallace and Bull Connor to single out as perpetrators? We at Brave New Foundation are helping build a narrative so that citizens can draw a straight line between the cheats and bullies misusing their wealth and the economic predicament in which our country is now ensnared.
We aren’t alone in this effort. Our partners include progressive media truth tellers like AlterNet, TruthOut, the Nation, PoliticusUSA, CARE2, the Center for Media and Democracy, the Young Turks, Campaign for America’s Future, Free Speech TV, Thom Hartmann, and MichaelMoore.com.
Responding to Rob Reed’s Google+ post on the dark side of huge corporate entities — read: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — controlling what we see and don’t see on the Internet, I wrote a couple of responses (instead of one because you can’t edit an existing post or comment on Google+’s Android client), which I will repeat here because, a) they’re not bad and b) I’m against “giving away” content to social networks and c) the irony of us having this discussion about Facebook on the newest, shiniest corporate-created social network, Google+ is particularly rich (and I acknowledge my part in it).
Crisis averted, so far. Last week’s hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was stacked in favor of the Internet blacklist bill but we seem to have come out unscathed.
Public outcry against the bill rallied enough opposition to keep it from sailing through. Google testified against the bill, MasterCard voiced some objections, and tens of thousands of users lit up their representatives’ phone lines thanks to Tumblr. But it’s not over.
Following the proceedings, I spoke with Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Parker Higgins. “Considering the makeup of the meetings, and how expectations were, it went really well” says Higgins. “It remains to be seen what happens next, but given positive experience [at the hearing] and outpouring through the EFF and other groups, things look better today than they did earlier this week.”
Summary: Nokia will not produce anything of mass appeal, but it will, however, emit patents for Microsoft to attack Linux/Android with
OUR new page about MOSAID will help us keep track of the troll Microsoft plans to use, probably against Android.
Microsoft has taken what it wanted from Nokia and it will leave the corpse to dry up and die like like Yahoo! Even longtime Microsoft boosters do not believe that Nokia can save Microsoft or vice versa.
There are early signs of trouble with Nokia‘s initial round of Windows-based smart phones.
The Espoo, Finland-based mobile phone company has bet its future on a decision to shift its high-end hardware to Microsoft Windows Phone software and away from its proprietary Symbian OS. The company recently started selling the first fruits of its arrangement with Microsoft, the Lumia 800.
Bernstein Research analyst Pierre Ferragu pointed out a research note Friday that checks on Google Trends finds that the buzz level for the Lumia 800 is about on a part with the Nokia N8, the company’s top-of-the-line but poor selling smartphone a year ago. He thinks this one could be a dud, too.
Nokia was about to deliver a great GNU/Linux-based platform before a mole entered the company. The rest is history and we covered it extensively. Now we need to keep a close eye on MOSAID. Regulators should too. █
Anyone who thought Microsoft was full of straight-laced computer geeks was wrong. Over the summer, a £10m High Court battle raised the curtain on allegations of a culture of lewd behaviour, heavy drinking and sexism at its UK division, entirely at odds with its blue chip corporate image.
Claims ranged from senior managers making sexual advances towards their colleagues; female executives having “catfights” for being too “bubbly”; and unlimited vodka served on ice sculptures to drunken executives as they partied in a “throbbing” mass. It all sounds a bit – well – 1980s.
Many will argue that this sort of behaviour is not unusual at an office party, especially among sales staff, often driven by a “work hard, play hard” ethic.
But what was striking about the alleged behaviour at Microsoft was the number of senior executives involved.
The High Court lawsuit was brought by Simon Negus, once one of its most senior directors in Britain, who was sacked for lying amid claims that he kissed a colleague, Toni Knowlson, at one of the company’s annual “Global Microsoft Exchange” parties in Atlanta. He was also accused of sexually harassing a string of other women.
Quoting some more key bits, “sexual advances that one married director made towards Emma Cloney, a well-respected businesswoman, so rattled her that she ended up fleeing a party under “protection”.
“Drinking to excess and loutish behaviour was commonplace, along with wrecking hotel rooms and throwing food around restaurants – always on expenses.”
It’s not just in the UK. “More recently, in Texas, a new legal row over sexual harassment has alleged that a very senior executive in the US told colleagues he had “zero pity” for the victims of the Japanese tsunami, and would like to “push them right under the bus and create another”.”
And on we go: “We work on the basis that everything is a zero sum game – I win, you lose.”
“Microsoft is a bunch of narcissistic thugs, who run the company like gangsters,” Homer claims. “I’m shocked and amazed,” he adds sarcastically.
Also from the article: “Claims ranged from senior managers making sexual advances towards their colleagues; female executives having “catfights” for being too “bubbly”; and unlimited vodka served on ice sculptures to drunken executives as they partied in a “throbbing” mass.”
This is not just gossip because it helps establish a connection between people who run an unethical company and have a dubious lifestyle, too. █
Summary: Bill Gates’ crimes come back to haunt him, but he refuses to admit what things he previously wrote can show rather clearly — that he decided to break the competitors’ products rather than compete
I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for the likes of Notes, Wordperfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage. [...] Having the Office team really think through the information intensive scenarios, and be a demanding client of systems is absolutely critical to our future success. We can’t compete with Lotus and Wordperfect/Novell without this.
We had a reporter there at the Novell v. Microsoft antitrust trial on Friday, and I gather it was quite a day. As you probably saw from the Salt Lake Tribune article we put in News Picks yesterday, the judge, U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz, had set aside five hours Friday to consider a Microsoft motion on whether to stop the trial now, on the alleged ground that Novell had failed to present a case. That kind of motion is typical after the plaintiff finishes presenting its case in most civil trials. What was different was that the judge took it seriously enough to even listen to extended oral argument. He does seem to have a Microsoft tilt, frankly.
By the way, Bill Gates is expected to testify on Monday. The trial is scheduled to continue on Monday, but the judge took the arguments on the Microsoft motion under advisement, and he could still rule to stop the trial if he wants to. And from all I’ve seen, he wants to. But if that happens, it won’t be before Gates testifies. It seems Novell found a crucial bit of evidence that the judge was not expecting.
The media reports that Bill Gates’ testimony was that they decided to make the API change because of worry about breakage, but Novell responds to that and the other excuses amply.
Novell even points out that the judge is bound by the appeals court. They did rule that this case had to go to the jury, after all. It’s the law of the case. Novell seems to be setting things up so the record is complete and clear for an appeal, should one prove necessary.
The Microsoft boosters cannot quite spin Gates out of this one. Yes, Microsoft needed to shoot Novell’s horse, as Pamela Jones once put it. Techrights‘ Ryan quotes an article as saying: “He [Gates] testified later that Microsoft had to dump a technical feature that would have supported WordPerfect because he feared it would crash the operating system.”
Based on the exhibits we have, this is nonsense. The statement from this article is a lie. To quote other bits:
Microsoft’s Windows 95 rollout presented the most challenges in the company’s history, leading to several last-minute changes to technical features that would no longer support a rival software maker’s word processor, Bill Gates testified Monday in a $1 billion antitrust lawsuit filed by the creator of WordPerfect.
As Homer put it in USENET, “Microsoft’s Godfather [is] back in court”
Quoting his message through The Register: “Gates: Novell are sore losers, Word trounced WordPerfect Microsoft supremo testifies at antitrust hearing
“Gates told a court in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Monday that his Redmond minions “worked super-hard” on Word. He added: “It was a ground-breaking piece of work, and it was very well received when we got it done.”"
Homer’s response is that “they worked “super-hard” … by poaching Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie from Xerox, to “rewrite” Xerox Bravo, the first GUI word processor, then rebranded it as Microsoft’s “innovation”.
“Then they worked “super-hard” to break cross-platform software, by releasing deliberately broken APIs, whilst using undocumented APIs for their own software, just like they did with Novell, Netscape, Real Networks and anyone else who dared to support anything but just Windows.
“Both the DOJ and the EU Commission have already exposed Microsoft’s criminal business methods in great detail, producing a swath of court evidence, most of which originates from within Microsoft, so why does this even need to go to trial again? It should be an open and shut case.
Attorneys for Novell are expected to cross-examine Microsoft chairman Bill Gates Monday in a federal courthouse in Utah, where jurors are hearing Novell’s claim that the software giant used anticompetitive means to quash Word competitor WordPerfect and Excel rival Quattro Pro.
U.S. district court judge J. Frederick Motz, who is presiding over the case in Salt Lake City, may also rule Monday on Microsoft’s request, submitted Friday, to dismiss the case.
Novell sued Microsoft in 2004, claiming the software maker “deliberately targeted and destroyed” its WordPerfect word processor and Quattro spreadsheet franchises because they were compatible with non-Windows operating systems. Novell also charged that Microsoft banished WordPerfect from the Windows 95 rollout in an effort to drive the application into obscurity.
While it is true that this was ages ago, no justice was ever restored and Gates has done some other atrocious things since then. He is a user, a self-glorifying one (reputation laundering). █
Posted in Microsoft at 11:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s inability to get security right costs the customer a lot, literally
The Xbox business has been a disaster for years, but we have not covered it for about a year because we decided to shift focus to more urgent matters. But there is this interesting news that affects Xbox users:
GAMERS USING Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service have been hit by scams resulting in millions of stolen cash.
Thousands of accounts have been hacked by scammers conning users into giving up sensitive details in return for rewards, reports The Sun. Users in the UK apparently have lost £100 on average but some have been swindled out of up to £200.
Thousands of Xbox Live users have fallen victim to a phishing scheme perpetrated by online thieves.
The scam entailed sending emails to users directing them to a phoney website offering free Microsoft Points. To redeem the points, individuals were asked to enter confidential information, allowing the criminals to access their bank accounts.
This is not the first incident of this kind. It’s just the reliability Microsoft is able to assure (or not). Thanks for readers who pointed this out to us. █
how’s your knee?
Summary: Nokia will not produce anything of mass appeal, but it will, however, emit patents for Microsoft to attack Linux/Android with
