12.18.11
Posted in Finance, Microsoft at 11:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s practices of tax dodging have not dodged the attention of people who address the problem
THE problems with Microsoft are numerous. We can only ever effectively address one at a time. Putting aside technical problems, there are also legal problems and Microsoft’s history shows complete disregard for the law. No company — even of comparable size — can really be named for that, mercenaries aside.
The Executive Director of The Economic Opportunity Institute writes an opinion piece which names Microsoft’s attitude toward taxation. To quote, Microsoft “still needs to skimp on taxes. By running its licensing sales through a shop in Reno, Nev., it avoids royalty taxes that could be funding high-quality schools for Washington’s children.
“The Legislature has enabled Microsoft to continue this ruse. Last year the state budget included a provision to ensure that only Microsoft’s licensing revenue from Washington state customers is taxable. For good measure, the Legislature agreed to an amnesty clause that legally prohibits the state from trying to collect back taxes owed by Microsoft before the narrower definition of taxable licenses was passed.
“So how much did public school students and their teachers and professors lose from this ruse? Somewhere between $100 million and $400 million a year for the past 15 years. (We can’t get much more accurate because we can’t see Microsoft’s internal corporate accounting.)
“Add the $104 million Microsoft got in tax deferrals from the state in 2010, and the $2 million it received in tax credits, and you are a long way along the path to figuring out the revenue problem in our state.
“Microsoft’s corporate counsel recently weighed in on the state’s budget woes: “It’s important for the state to avoid further reductions in higher education funding… It’s similarly important to maintain investments in K-12 education across the state…” Which, I guess, is (squishily) endorsing the proposed sales tax increase that would directly hit low- and middle-class families in the pocketbook. But it’s the waste, fraud and abuse in our own tax code that we should be going after — not the students at Everett High School, not the students at Everett Community College, not their teachers and professors, not their parents, and not their daily purchases.”
It is even worse than that because the legislation in place had former Microsoft folks responsible for it. They broke the system.
We have already explained this point along with many others in previous posts on the subject. One of the better sources of information on this subject is a former Microsoft employee who further explains:
1) $1.51 Billion in Tax Savings: Based on Microsoft’s own reporting, I estimate the company has saved $1.51 billion in taxes, interest and penalties since 1998. For the first time, we’ve published our entire analysis in a Google Docs spreadsheet: Financial History of Microsoft’s Nevada Tax Dodge.
This estimate includes the $104 million that Microsoft saved last year after Chair of the Finance Committee Ross Hunter, a former Microsoft Executive, led the Democratically controlled Legislature to drastically shrink the Royalty Tax from a tax on worldwide revenue to one based just on sales to Washington State customers. Hunter’s action will continue to cost the state more than $100 million annually going forward. Hunter even slipped in a section to grant Microsoft amnesty from its past abuses.
2) $4.37 Billion in Tax Savings: The Royalty Tax rate actually was 1.5 percent (more than three times higher) prior to 1998, but was cut in response to software industry lobbying. Scenario B in the Financial History shows that if not for its lobbying to cut the Royalty Tax from 1.5 to .484 percent, Microsoft would owe $4.37 billion in taxes, interest and penalties.
Separately he notes: “When I interviewed Microsoft’s General Council and Vice President Brad Smith in 2004 for Citizen Microsoft, he admitted the tax avoidance effort, while attempting to make light of its scope…”
So even Microsoft admits that it is doing this. But it does not really respond to queries about it. Once in 4 years when there are elections in the US it simply bribes the candidates (as we showed before) which keeps regulation at bay. That is a subject for another day. The “Occupy” protesters have legitimate reasons to be upset. Bill Gates and Microsoft hardly pay any tax. But the problem is even broader because more plutocrats and corporations receive exemptions they do not deserve and they use the media which they own to justify it with sound bites like “job creators”. █
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12.17.11
Posted in Site News at 6:09 pm by Guest Editorial Team
Posted in Site News at 2:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Time for changes but not without consultation with the Techrights community
IT IS only 7 AM (after 8 hours sleep), but as I mentioned earlier this year, today I turn 30 and there are already greeting cards coming here. Here is one from Harvey (a neat joke): █
I have not been posting much recently, but my intent is to be more prolific and dedicate more time to Techrights (than I did in 2011), even if that becomes a New Year’s resolution. The focus of the site might have to be changed though and readers’ advice would be appreciated here.
Question 1: Should we spent a little less time covering patent issues? They make up about half of all the posts now.
Question 2: Should daily links be abbreviated? To some people they may be too long to follow, but it’s hard to tell for sure.
Question 3: Should comments be opened to non-members? As in the wiki, one of the main drawbacks is the spam this typically leads to.
Question 4: Should the site be further crowd-sourced and responsibilities delegated to make operation efficient. There are already about a dozen ops in the IRC channels.
Question 5: Should we redesign the Web site around Christmas time as Kevin suggested (and offered help)? The drawback might be lack of familiarity with a 5+ year-old theme.
Any other comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. As I have a party tonight I do not expect to find time for new blog posts (there are several ongoing drafts), but any feedback on this post would be taken very seriously. Most of the decisions here were made by readers over the years.
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12.16.11
Posted in News Roundup at 1:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The holidays are almost here, and for a lot of people that means gift giving. Getting gifts, of course, is the easy part. Finding the right gift is the hard part. If you’re shopping for your favorite Linux user, or you’re a Linux user shopping for others, we’ve got a bunch of fun ideas to help you round out the shopping list.
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Kernel Space
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At the request of many Phoronix readers, here are some new Linux virtualization benchmarks. Being compared is the performance of KVM (the Kernel-based Virtual Machine) to that of HandelSpielVM on the Linux 3.0 kernel with a stock Ubuntu 11.10 for both the host and guest.
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Graphics Stack
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Peter Hutterer has provided an update on the state of X.Org multi-touch support as he hopes to have this input feature ready for integration into the next X.Org Server release.
Multi-touch has been a work in progress for a while after being delayed from the X.Org Server 1.11 release and is not part of X Input 2.1, but multi-touch as a feature of X Input 2.2 will hopefully be ready for X.Org Server 1.12. The original X.Org multi-touch implementation goes back to 2010 and even at that stage had undergone several revisions.
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Back at XDC2011 Chicago plans were laid by Intel OSTC developers to have OpenGL 3.0 support in Mesa before year’s end, but with three weeks left to 2011, will they make this deadline?
The developers working on Mesa within Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center have been making steady progress on reaching this OpenGL 3.0 goal in Mesa. The OpenGL 3.0 specification is nearly three years old, but the Mesa/Gallium3D support has lagged behind as invasive infrastructure changes have had to be made, significant GL Shading Language (GLSL) updates, and other changes made. The latest upstream OpenGL specification meanwhile is OpenGL 4.2.
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Applications
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Serious command-line users will definitely love tmux, a utility that allows you to split your terminal window into multiple screens.
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New Linux users may have been tempted to jump in with both feet after hearing about the customization options and security offered by the number one open source operating system. What they might not have realized, though, is that with freedom comes some very difficult choices—like which shell to use.
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The lightweight and flexible painting application MyPaint has officially made its 1.0 release. The milestone marks the end of a long, stable progression for the application. Consequently, there are not drastic changes from the 0.9 series, but there are several User Interface (UI) and feature improvements that new users and old pros alike will be glad to see.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Oh my God! It’s the return of your old favorite classic, the Rock-n-Roll DOSBox Freak Show, in which I, in the name of truth, justice, and barfing butterflies, randomly snarf up abandonware DOS games from Internet archive sites, plug them into DOSBox, and report what they did to my brain! And those are often very funny things! Sometimes I discover a crusty old classic that curls my toes with joy, and sometimes I get a hoary old croaker that upsets me so terribly that I find myself in a therapist’s office showing her where on the doll the bad game touched me. Well, anyway, let’s strap in and fly though this…
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Desktop Environments
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The Open Source Ecology project is developing tools for building sustainable communities based on the principles of DIY and closed-loop manufacturing
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Softpedia is the first to inform that the Amarok developers unleashed a few minutes ago, December 15th, the final and stable Amarok 2.5 music player and organizer software for Linux OSes.
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At the time, a version of the open source software called Plasma Active One had just been launched for tablets and other mobile devices, but it was compatible with only a limited range of Intel-based devices.
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Nokia has announced the release of Qt 4.8.0, its cross platform application and user interface framework. This release is not accompanied by a new release of the Qt SDK – version 1.2 of the SDK will follow in January 2012.
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GNOME Desktop
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Puppy Linux, the renowned champion of light weight Linux distributions, has reached version 5.3.1. Puppy Linux is one of those Linux distributions which focus on ease of use.
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Last week I posted about an open-source game in development called Pissed Off Penguins that is using Kickstarter to fund the project. Today I ran across another open-source Kickstarter project that I thought was worth sharing. The project, called Debate OS, is an Ubuntu spin focused on providing a debate environment for high school and college students.
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One of the distributions I’ve been wanting to check out for a while now has been VectorLinux. Recently, version 7.0 of VectorLinux was released, so I’m reviewing it.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Fedora 14 reached its end of life for updates and support on December 09, 2011. Now there will be no further updates, including security updates, for Fedora 14. If you are still using Fedora 14, you must upgrade to the latest version of Fedora which is Fedora 16. The Fedora Project wiki contains instructions on how to upgrade from a previous release of Fedora to a version receiving updates.
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It was a little while in coming, but it was worth the wait! It is my pleasure to announce the release of Kororaa 16 (codename “Chum”) which is now available for download.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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“The cloud” can be hard to visualize, not least because the hardware behind it is often an ambiguous collection of servers scattered somewhere across the ether of the Internet. But in Canonical’s vision, the cloud can be something as simple and concrete as a USB stick running the Ubuntu Cloud Live image, which makes the creation of private clouds quite trivial. I recently got a chance to play around with this neat tool, and here’s what I found.
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Ubuntu team picks some of the coolest apps every month. When there are more than 30,000 apps highlight cool apps can help users in picking the right apps. This month the team has selected 3 apps to highlight.
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The Ubuntu One team has announced that users can now stream music they have stored in Ubuntu One (U1) via the web. When signed in, Ubuntu One users can access the music streaming feature from the Music tab on the U1 dashboard; previously, users were only able to stream audio from U1 using an Ubuntu One app for Android and iOS devices.
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Flavours and Variants
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Ubuntu is undoubtedly one of the most user-friendly GNU/Linux-based operating system. Yes, I agree that ‘user-friendly’ is a relative term. For a home user, who is not very well versed with technology, Ubuntu can be extremely easy to use and manage. However, Unity changed (?) something.
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Ruben Vermeersch has posted a cool picture of a cigarette vending machine in Amsterdam running some GNU/Linux OS. It’s funny how one found that the dispenser was running GNU/Linux. There was a grub loading error resulting in black screen of death. A few months ago we noticed Brussels buses running Microsoft Windows, as it was showing the infamous blue screen of death.
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Phones
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Android
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It’s an irony that Linux-based Android tables don’t support Linux-based operating systems. Android 3.x+ uses MTP for mounting the devies on the PCs, which is not supported very well on Linux.
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Google has finally made available its ‘super-phone’ Samsung Galaxy Nexus from Verizon Wireless. Google today sent out emails to those who subscribed on its Galaxy Nexus to be notified when the phone will be available.
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WebOS the once coveted proprietary software that cost HP 1.2 Billion to acquire, is now Open Source software, after tablets running on WebOS failed miserably. Analysts ponder if WebOS entry, as free licensed software, will disrupt the just –consolidating-phase of Android OS.
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There has been no shortage of reaction to HP’s move to make the Linux-based WebOS open source software. Below, I offer some of my thoughts on the meaning for the different players affected.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Move over, Kindle Fire. Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich operating system has landed on a $100 tablet now shipping in China. The 7-inch tablet is also bound for the U.S. market.
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It’s Christmas time, for a Linux and Open Source user. The market is flooded with a wide range of gadgets which can be the ‘perfect’ gift for your loved ones. I am working on a list of top 10 Linux gadgets for this Christmas.
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Sony has introduced its Android tablet category in India with the launch of Sony Tablet S & P. In India, Sony has collaborated with local content developers to design unique applications for the Indian consumers. Priced at Rs. 33,990 and Rs. 36,990 for the 3G + Wi-Fi version, Sony Tablet S & Tablet P will be available across 500 stores in India starting Mid-January 2012.
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The Kindle Fire tablet is the top-selling and most wished-for item across Amazon.com, Amazon said. Among Kindle devices, however, Amazon did not break out how many of those 1 million devices sold were the Fire, the Kindle Touch, Kindle DX, and original Kindle e-reader.
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Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat, please put a penny in Android’s hat! Android tablets are going to be the hottest gifts this Christmas. If you are looking for gifting a tablet to your loved one here is the list of top 5 Android tablets.
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Archos is one of the first out of the gate, announcing an official update to ICS for their G9 tablet in Q1 2012.
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The 7-inch variation of the Toshiba Thrive has gone on sale this week, giving U.S. consumers yet another option in portable Honeycomb experiences. Available in either 16GB ($379) or 32GB ($429) models, the Thrive 7 includes a 1GHz Tegra 2 dual-core processor, 5-megapixel rear camera and 2-megapixel front-facing camera. Additional specifications include microSD card expansion, mini-USB, micro-HDMI, stereo speakers, and Wi-Fi connectivity. Announced back in September, this 7-inch tablet is much thinner and lighter than its bigger brother and features a display resolution of 1280×800 pixels.
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Ah, sweet revenge! After winning its court battle to lift the ban on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia, Samsung is making the most of the fondleslab injunction saga.
Samsung Australia’s vice-president of telecommunications, Tyler McGee, told the Sydney Morning Herald that the case has turned the tablet into a household name in Oz.
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Kyobo Book Centre and Qualcomm have revealed the world’s first ereader to use a mirasol color e-paper display, the Android-based Kyobo eReader. Mirasol’s Mems technology has had us all drooling for a three weeks of battery life with daily use since their screen has no backlight and mimics light reflection in a butterfly’s wings to get its colors.
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Call it an early holiday gift or just making good on a promise, but Barnes & Noble has just released an expected software update for Nook Color owners that adds many of the features now found in the company’s step-up model, the $249 Nook Tablet.
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A telecommunications firm in Britain is supporting its Internet subscribers using the Ubuntu Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, open source management software from Convirture and an approach to virtual machine clustering that shuns live migration.
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Just in time for its 10th birthday, the developers of Rockbox have released version 3.10 of their alternative open source firmware for digital audio players. Rockbox is mainly used on older MP3 players – including devices from Apple, Archos, Cowon, iRiver, SanDisk and Toshiba – and aims to be “considerably more functional and efficient” than the standard device firmware.
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For countless people who are about to start a new year unemployed, this year’s top resolution will be finding a job. We’ve reported before on how acquiring skills with open source technologies can be an effective differentiator or the job seeker. Just this past week, more evidence that this is true has rolled in, and in this post you’ll also find some of OStatic’s best collected resources for leveraging open source skills for employment.
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One of the biggest complaints that many people have about open source software is that there isn’t adequate documentation. On the Linux front, though, there is surprisingly rich information available for free online on moving from being a beginner to an advanced user. Whether you’re new to Linux, or a seasoned Linux administrator, you can find hugely helpful resources online, without paying anything. Here is our most recently updated collection of top free resources for Linux.
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A few people are saying KDE is a winner for 4.7. Folks seem to like that version. It might be time for me to brave away from 4.6, especially since my Aggregator has starting crashing lately.
Another outlier even mentioned Slackware for remaining relevant. Well, his exact words were, “Slackware for continuing to be powerful, rock-solid and fast.” Gotta love the Slack. This same commenter also put Novell in the big loser column with, “Novell for selling their soul.” I’m not sure I agree with that. When I think of Novell selling their soul, I think more of the Microsoft deal than the Attachmate acquisition.
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Over the past year, we’ve been working on a number of projects to help those who want to more closely participate in the Linux community, but don’t know where to start.
First, there’s the Linux Foundation Training program. We’ve continued to add courses as new needs arise, and have had the opportunity to give on-site training to many companies over the past year. While much of our content is on improving technical skills (e.g. “Developing Linux Device Drivers,” “Embedded Linux Development,” “Advanced Linux Performance Tuning”), we have also added courses on being more effective when working with open communities. “How to Participate with the Linux Community” is a roadmap of sorts for developers and managers who are comfortable with the technology, but need some guidance in understanding the Linux kernel community processes. (A related guide on participating with the Linux community is also available.)
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the case study about how Intel Xeon processors and VMware helped virtualize 12 business critical database applications.
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Mozilla
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If you’re a Google Chrome user, you may greatly appreciate the fact that updates to the browser–which many observers predict will eclipse Mozilla Firefox in global market share next year–are automatically pushed. In other words, Chrome users get transparent updates, which differs from how Firefox and other browsers approach moving users to new versions. That’s going to change soon for Firefox users, and some Firefox users are likely to appreciate silent updates, while some others may not.
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SaaS
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ownCloud, the open source file-sharing project which enables individuals to create their own local cloud, has evolved into a company. Former SUSE/Novell executive Markus Rex is joining the company as its first CEO and CTO. ownCloud has more than 350,000 users around the globe. The company is opening its a HQ in Boston, USA.
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I’ve been asked to provide a brief security analysis of the OpenStack open source cloud computing platform and whether our enterprise should pursue it as the basis for our cloud infrastructure build-out. My initial assessment is that, like with Apache and Linux, the open nature of the platform allows security flaws to be found and fixed quickly, which helps decrease the likelihood of exploits. Do you agree? What other OpenStack security points (pro and con) are worth considering?
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The astonishing speed at which the “big data” processing industry is evolving dwarfs anything we’ve ever seen with regard to software. Problems that stymied the best engineers just 18 short months ago are now commonplace tasks for modern data centers. Already, the systems envisioned by Google’s and Yahoo’s engineers are being prepared for the history books, as 2012 should bring forth the second generation of open source, scalable, big data processing.
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Databases
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A year ago I posted a blog on The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating. (Also Giuseppe wrote about the topic at that time, and Peter Zaitsev covers it in his conference keynotes.) So I’ve been wondering if it would be good to write an update on the topic now, and in that case what to write.
Sometimes it helps looking at particular examples to understand a general thing, at least my brain works that way. It just so happens that this might be a good approach to give a snapshot of how the MySQL forks are doing. So I will here focus on the recent announcements on authentication plugins – but not to focus on the feature itself, rather letting this be my 2011 edition on the state of the MySQL forks.
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The PostgreSQL developers have announced the release of version 9.1.2 of their open source relational database, a maintenance update that includes fixes for 52 bugs found in PostgreSQL 9.1. Bug fix updates have also been released for the 9.0.x, 8.4.x, 8.3.x and 8.2.x branches of PostgreSQL.
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Education
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As an educator, trained Linux systems administrator, and technology director for a K-12 school district, I have been actively involved with NYSCATE (The New York State Association for Computers and Technologies in Education), a non-profit organization that works to lead the transformation of teaching and learning through technology. It’s been 20 years since I attended my first NYSCATE conference, and the conference’s open source presence has taken many different forms.
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Business
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Platform-as-a-Service provider CloudBees has released Jenkins Enterprise, a version of its continuous integration (CI) software designed for use in businesses. The service goes beyond the open source Jenkins community’s Long Term Support (LTS) release and provides enhancements for large installations, resource management, and access rights management; to this end, CloudBees has developed a variety of enterprise plugins. Customers who purchase Jenkins Enterprise also gain access to the company’s other proprietary products.
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Project Releases
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GIMP team has announced the release of GIMP 2.7.4. This release does’t bring any major changes and is mainly minor improvements and bug fixes release. Most improvements are related to user interface and usability. The GIMP team is now looking at version 2.8 and it is expected, depending on amount of bugs, that this could be the last version before 2.8 release candidates and 2.8 itself.
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The developers behind Icinga, which forked from Nagios two-and-a-half years ago, have released version 1.6 of the network monitoring software. This was quickly followed by version 1.6.1 released in response to a bug. Major changes in the new version include extended logging capabilities in the Classic UI and Core designed to make troubleshooting easier and increasing the performance of notifications. The developers have also added the ability to assign expiry times to acknowledgement, making use of an idea from a recent feedback poll.
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The TYPO3 Security Guide is available to view online or to download in DocBook or OpenOffice.org Writer format. Like the project’s other official documentation, the Security Guide is published under the Open Content License; the source code for TYPO3 is licensed under the GPL
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DNS service provider OpenDNS has announced a preview release of a new open source tool to improve internet security: DNSCrypt encrypts all DNS traffic between a user’s system and a DNS server. The tool is currently only available for the Mac, with a Windows version promised, and only works with OpenDNS’s own DNS service. Normally, DNS information is exchanged between client and server as plain text which makes it vulnerable to snooping or modification and man-in-the-middle attacks. By encrypting the exchange, OpenDNS hopes to make the “last mile” of DNS requests more secure.
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Licensing
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Open source software (OSS), like any other software, is protected by copyright and its usage is governed under a license. As such, it is important enterprises pay attention to considerations, such as how much freedom they need with regard to developing on the source code or whether they plan to monetize the software, before deciding which license to use.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Creative Commons project has announced the beginning of the process leading to version 4.0 of its license suite.
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Open Data
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This first code that has been released concerns the tools needed to set up an automated process for publishing data on the platform; this Data Management System handles the submission and approval of data and the updating of the catalogues of data on the Open Government Platform. The next set of data that will come from India’s National Informatics Centre relates to providing web site access to the platform. The two countries are encouraging developers to get involved and provide feedback, new modules and capabilities.
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Programming
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LLVM 3.0 was released last week as a major update to this increasingly popular open-source compiler infrastructure. With the release of LLVM 3.0 proper also came major updates to the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end and the DragonEgg GCC plug-in (here are the exciting LLVM3 changes). In this article is a look at DragonEgg for LLVM 3.0 that plugs into GCC to replace its optimizers and code generators with those from LLVM.
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The developers behind the jQuery plugins site have come clean – in a blog posting, they explain what happened to the jQuery plugins site. It went down around a week ago with only a message saying that the old site had issues with spam and was being reworked with a new submission process. In fact, what had happened was that, in an attempt to clean the spam using Drupal Views Bulk Operations, all the plugins were deleted, and all that they had was a year old backup. “In an ideal world, this certainly wouldn’t have happened exactly as it did. Sadly, it did” said the developers, who asked for forgiveness and “maybe even a hand” developing a completely new plugins site for the jQuery community.
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Five months after the arrival of 1.5, version 1.6 of qooxdoo has been released. Project Lead Andreas Ecker says that the update to the open source “Universal JavaScript Framework” includes a number of “substantial improvements” and new features.
The 1.6 release of qooxdoo adds support for applications going offline. qooxdoo makes use of local/session storage and offline event technology and adds an offline event handler and offline data store to simplify using those facilities. This allows developers to create apps that can pre-cache data and will work without an internet connection; a feedreader demo app with offline support is provided.
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2012 could be an especially interesting year for open-source software with continued advancements in the area of open-source drivers, prominent announcements, major software releases like GIMP 2.8 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and much more. Another event to look forward to next year is a new operating system release built atop the unique Genode Operating System Framework.
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Science
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Intel [NASDAQ:INTC] and Micron has announced a new benchmark in NAND flash technology – the world’s first 20 nanometer (nm), 128 gigabit (Gb), multilevel-cell (MLC) device. The new 20nm monolithic 128Gb device is claimed to be the first in the industry to enable a terabit (Tb) of data storage in a fingertip-size package by using just eight die.
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Security
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Devices running Microsoft’s Window Phone are susceptible to a denial-of-service attack that disables their messaging function, a tipster has told WinRumors.com.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Exxon Mobil has released its 2012 Outlook for Energy: A view to 2040 report. I actually find these industry forecasts helpful, especially for their nuanced contrast with comparable long-range reports from EIA Washington and IEA Paris. For example, I find Exxon’s view that oil will retain its role as the primary energy source—not to be eclipsed by either natural gas or coal—unrealistic. But this is the same view held by IEA and EIA. Where Exxon is more on track however, is in their call that growth in global coal consumption rises very strongly through the end of this decade. This is the call I would have expected IEA and EIA to make as well. Given current trends, I explained as much in Coal’s Terrible Forecast: Because it is coal, not oil, that is steadily growing in supply. And you can’t increase consumption of a resource whose supply has been flat, for the past six years.
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Privacy
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Richard Stallman has declared Facebook and Google+ are mistreating their users. Furthermore, he points out Facebook performs massive surveillance with its tracking cookies.
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Civil Rights
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SOPA has been making the rounds of headlines across the internet and print media this last couple weeks. It is a bill to criminalize “illegal” content online. So, someone posts a snippet of a song owned by a record company on your website, and you are now a criminal. You are not just a person with a legal dispute between you and someone else. The Federal Government is also standing between you and that someone else.
This represents a dramatic shift in copyright law in recent years. At its inception, copyright law was designed as a civil matter. If a copyright holder felt their material was used illegally, the holder was granted the right to take any offenders to court, at their own expense, as one would do over a contract dispute.
Criminal matters are intended to be those issues that threaten the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of the general public. For issues where the interests of only a few select entities are at stake, our once wise Constitutional legislators designated those issues as civil matters.
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The U.S. House of Representatives has set aside time today to discuss the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), as we covered here. Members of the House Judiciary Committee will debate the proposed legislation, and Judiciary chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) will reportedly try to address strong concerns from the technology community about the bill. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has said that the bill would: “….grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet’s domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users’ attempts to reach certain websites’ URLs.” With the discussion looming today, many new organizations are coming out in opposition of the bill, or firming up existing opposition.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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There will continue to be discussions and debates about Linux on the desktop, including popularity, vitality, usability, commercial connections and more, which is good for users and vendors. However, based on trends in cloud, mobile and consumer computing, Linux should and will move to these areas, leaving its longstanding low use on the desktop as it is.
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Desktop
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If this sort of initiative gains momentum, will it finally see Linux make it to the mainstream market for desktop computers? And if so, is it too late? Nowadays the tech-media would have us believe that everything is shifting into the cloud. The tablet and the mobile phone have become king. The desktop computer is dead. In this article, I want to look at some of these claims and see whether Linux has any hope as a mainstream desktop operating system.
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Server
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The world of hypervisors is complicated by the fact that there are proprietary and open source tools and the latter are often pressed into service in different ways, say nothing of the fact that the whole market is evolving quickly. To get a handle on recent developments, Network World Editor in Chief John Dix corralled a panel of experts to assess where we are today and where we’re going. The experts included Al Gillen, an analyst IDC who tracks virtualization developments, Kerry Kim, director of solutions marketing at SUSE, and Adam Jollans, program director of IBM’s Linux and Open Virtualization Strategy.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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There is a lot of debate over whether or not one should defragment file systems on Linux. Frankly, in most cases fragmentation of Linux file systems is probably not a problem. However, in a very few cases fragmentation might be a problem. When such a scenario has arisen is up to the reader of this article to decide. Recently here at ERACC we experienced access / speed degradation of the XFS file system on a heavily used /home partition. Part of the problem was that the file system was over 90% full. Another part of the problem was when we checked it with xfs_db the file system was roughly 20% fragmented. Besides cleaning up the file system by deleting and archiving old data from user’s directories, we came up with a defragmenation strategy for the entire server. This script is the result:
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Graphics Stack
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Since starting their GPU Technology Conference in 2010, NVIDIA has expanded into several events so that they can hold events in Europe and Asia. The next flagship GTC will be in San Jose in May, but NVIDIA’s #2 conference, GTC Asia, is occurring this week in Beijing. As with GTC America, GTC Asia serves several purposes for the company: a research symposium, a developer training program, and of course a platform for NVIDIA to announce new GPU computing products and initiatives.
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With AMD having published the Catalyst 11.12 driver yesterday, the year is now complete as far as their graphics drivers are concerned. As such, for the sixth year, it’s time for the year-in-review articles looking at how the NVIDIA and AMD GPU drivers have matured over the past twelve months in terms of features and OpenGL performance.
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Applications
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Guake saves you the time of managing your terminal windows with circumstantial key-combinations and mouse-clicks by providing a configurable dropdown-terminal which you can call with F12 by default. Just like with usual terminals, it is possible to create new tabs, but also to edit the opacity, the size, colors and everything you need:
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Although this blog is mainly about Ampache I am taking this opportunity to let the community know about a recent piece of software that I have discovered and packaged for Debian/Ubuntu.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Weeks ago (sorry for the delay) CodeWeavers has released a maintenance update for CrossOver Games (10.2.0 version), and this is the changelog:
* Worked around the ‘backwards elbow’ bug in Rift on Lion.
* Fixed behavior of Plants vs. Zombies in windowed mode.
* Improved loading and play of Portal 2.
* Fixed ‘Add a Character Friend’ behavior in StarCraft 2.
* Fixed the Perfect World International launcher.
* Added a ‘steamid’ tag to the CrossTie format. This allows a CrossTie to install and detect games via Steam.
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Games
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The Aleph One development team has announced the release of version 1.0 of its open source game engine. Based on the source code of the Marathon 2 game engine from American game developer Bungie, Aleph One natively supports Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity, as well as a fan-made conversion of the original Marathon game; it can be further extended using community-made scenarios.
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You can’t get more “good guy” than Humble Indie Bundle. The organization, which distributes bundles of independent games, let’s customers pay whatever they want, apportion their payment however they want (between developers, charity and Humble Indie Bundle) and install the games as many times as they want on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux).
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3D physics based marble game Marble Arena 2 has been released by Brightside Entertainment yesterday. The game features updated HD graphics and 50 action packed levels.
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Spacetime Studios have made available their hugely popular 3D mobile MMORPGs ‘Pocket Legends’ and ‘Star Legends’ in Chrome Web Store. These games are now playable on Windows, Mac and Linux via native client (NaCl).
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Desktop Environments
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LightDM is a login manager (think KDM/GDM) for Linux, it is written in a way that is completely backend/frontend independent so we can share our the complex parts with our Gnome friends, whilst keeping KDE UI layers on top. It is currently the default display manager in Ubuntu, and the front end they’ve made looks gorgeous.
There are two parts I’ve been working on, Qt bindings for LightDM which means anyone can easily write a whole new front end method in Qt, and a KDE front end using all the best KDE tech. The library has been majorly rewritten and the KDE front end has undergone a lot of work in the past few weeks..
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The newly independent Qt Project announced a new release of its Linux-ready cross-platform development framework. Qt 4.8 adds Qt Platform Abstraction for easier porting of Qt to different windowing systems, threaded OpenGL support, multithreaded HTTP, optimized file system access, and a browser update to QtWebKit 2.2.1, says the project.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gentoo Family
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This is my first step in blogging universe. I did that never before and hope my english isn’t to bad. The reason, why i decided to blog from now on, is that i reached the Gentoo developer state. Which gives me the chance to get a central theme to write. My personal goal is at least one post per month, maybe a little bit more if there is something i want to share. For sure the content of this blog won’t be Gentoo only related.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, says wind energy and transmission company Pattern Energy Group LP is using Red Hat Storage’s technology to manage weather-prediction data, including for wind farms.
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Goldman Sachs maintains its Neutral rating and $55 price target on Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) ahead of 3QFY2012 preview and as company continues to execute in a tough environment.
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For the fiscal year, analysts are projecting earnings of 78 cents per share.
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), which employs about 800 people in Raleigh, plans on moving its headquarters from Centennial Campus to the Two Progress Plaza building in downtown Raleigh starting in mid-year 2012. The process would take at least six months.
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Fedora
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I currently own two Samsung netbooks (an N150 Plus and an NF310). Following up on some information from Moley (thanks), I found that most Linux distributions have a lot of trouble with the display brightness control on both of them. The most obvious and severe symptom is that when running on battery power they will sometimes (often) suddenly start to run the display brightness all the way up and down its range continuously. Not nice. A secondary problem, not quite so severe, is that the Fn-key control for display brightness is often erratic, and on some distributions doesn’t work at all.
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Debian Family
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* Volunteers needed for publicity team
* Removal of sun-java6 from the archive
* Debian SDL packaging team revival
* Bits from the DPL
* Ubuntu appreciates Debian
* India mini-DebConf, Mangalore edition
* New mirror in El Salvador
* Debexpo maintainers call for contributions
* Bug Squashing Party marathon started
* Call for talks: FOSDEM 2012
* New s390 buildd at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
* Further interviews
* New Debian Contributors
* Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Whether you’re stuck on gift ideas for the Linux loving folks in your life, playing secret Santa in the Office, or keen to add something to your own xmas list, the handful of ideas below might help.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint have agreed to split the revenue generated from Banshee’s MP3 Store plugin with ‘upstream’.
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I repeatedly tell on my blog that my laptop has quadro-boot landscape. It became so when I first installed Linux on my hard drive (really installed, not frugal installation that I had for SLAX and Puppy).
[...]
And then Xubuntu came. I tried it recently for the first time, and liked it so much that fate of hard drive’s partition was decided.
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Solid-Run is shipping an open source mini-PC platform for developing Android TV and media center apps. Measuring 2.17 x 2.17 x 1.65 inches and consuming less than three Watts, the CuBox runs Android 2.2 or Linux 2.6 on an 800MHz Marvell Armada 510 CPU, has 1GB of DDR3 memory and a microSD slot, and includes eSATA, USB, infrared, S/PDIF, HDMI, and gigabit Ethernet interfaces.
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Pogoplug announced a new version of its Linux-based file-sharing and backup device. The Pogoplug Series 4 adds more local storage options, including two USB 3.0 ports and a SATA port compatible with Universal Storage Module-compliant devices such as SeaGate GoFlex hard disk drives.
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Refurbished D-Link Boxee Boxes are currently being offered by BestBuy.com for $99, with free shipping, although it’s not known how many are available or for how long the opportunity will last. Check it out!
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Phones
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Android
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Nixeus Technology announced an Android 2.2-based multimedia player selling for as low as $160. Offering 1080p playback, web browsing, and third-party Android app downloads, the Nixeus Fusion XS Network Media Player includes a dual-core, 900MHz Marvell Armada 1000 system on chip (SoC), an Ethernet port, dual USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, and audio I/O.
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When Verizon Wireless’ version of the Galaxy Nexus finally launches, it will cost consumers $299.99 with a two-year contract, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
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Google has announced that Android Market has exceeded 10 billion app downloads. Google claims that its the growth rate of one billion app downloads per month.
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Verizon Wireless on Wednesday finally announced the upcoming launch of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The world’s first Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone with 4G LTE support will become available beginning tomorrow for $299.99 with a new two-year service agreement. BGR reviewed the international version of the Galaxy Nexus last month and called it the best Android device in the world, offering a more cohesive user experience than previous Android builds as well as solid hardware and an amazing screen.
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Android Market is all over the news for the stupendous growth it managed to achieve in such a short span of time. Searching for the right applications in Android Market, with over 600,000+ apps already, is a classic needle-in-a-haystack problem. We have already pitched in to help you choose the right set of Siri alternatives and top launchers for Android from that burgeoning list of apps, now let’s take a sneak peek into the best music player apps available for Android.
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E-Fun announced a nine-inch Android 2.3 tablet for $280. The Nextbook Premium 9 is equipped with a 1GHz Rockchips RK2918 processor, 4GB of storage, a two-megapixel camera, and a 1280 x 800-pixel capacitive display, says the company.
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Via Technologies demonstrated Android 2.2 on an Em-ITX single board computer (SBC) equipped with a 1.2GHz dual-core Nano X2 E processor. Running Android on an x86 platform offers increased I/O, performance, and cost-saving advantages for embedded applications such as in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and interactive kiosks, Via claims.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Coby Electronics says it will unveil five tablets running Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”) at the CES show in Las Vegas, with shipments due in 1Q 2012. Meanwhile, Samsung is readying an Android 4.0 tablet for early 2012, offering 2560 x 1600 resolution and based on its Cortex A15-based Exynos 5250 processor, and Toshiba is prepping an “Excite” tablet running Android 4.0 on a TI OMAP4430 for February release, say reports.
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Ever since Nicholas Negroponte started announcing that OLPC would parachute XOs into remote villages many people have asked whether he could possibly be serious about this. It seems like we now have an answer thanks to an interview he did with New Scientist (registration required to access the full article, at the moment the full text is also available here).
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In preparation for reviewing ViewSonic’s low-cost 7-inch Android tablet, this post tabulates the key features and specifications of five 7-inch Android tablets. The comparison includes ViewSonic’s ViewPad 7e and 7x, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, and Barns & Noble’s Nook Tablet.
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Google’s open source ANGLE, the “Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine” which brings OpenGL ES 2.0 support to Windows without relying on OpenGL drivers, has passed the complete test suite for the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification. Version 1.0 of ANGLE has also been certified as a compliant OpenGL ES 2.0 implementation. The certification was announced by Vangelis Kokkevis, Software Engineer for the Chromium project, writing on the Chromium blog.
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Proprietary social networking platforms have a few distinct issues for free software users, but one of the biggest is that it is often hard — if not impossible — to extract your information from them. With Twitter, for example, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and wait for more tweets to load via JavaScript, but you can’t sort and analyze them yourself. But that’s exactly what the open source application ThinkUp does for you.
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“I think Google is the biggest FLOSS story of 2011,” said blogger Robert Pogson. “IBM and Red Hat and Dell and ASUS all did good things for FLOSS, but Google is the first one to drive a wedge into the heart of darkness: retail shelves monopolized by M$. … Nothing ensures the success of FLOSS like its ubiquity and popularity amongst ordinary people.”
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One of the unfortunate by-products of HP’s decision to shift webOS to an open source project is the notion that somehow webOS has been “dumped”–cast aside or buried in the open source graveyard.
I was just wondering… when did it become okay to consider open source a dead-end option?
Not to go all Pollyanna on all these pundits, but I would think that the historical open source success rate would at the very least see open source as an equivalent alternative to proprietary development practices–not as some kind of downgrade. (If I were not holding back, I would even argue that open source development is a better goal for which to strive. But, for the purposes of this discussion, I will settle for equality.)
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If you rely heavily on open source software, should you be expected to contribute financially to its success? What if the project coordinator is specifically seeking out donations to keep things afloat?
These are questions that I think most of us avoid. I believe that this avoidance might make sense to some end users, since no one wants to spend money where they don’t have to.
In this article, I will point out how this way of thinking is why so many promising projects don’t last over the long term. While some open source projects manage to find successful ways of funding themselves, many others do not – a loss for all Linux users.
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Ambitious open source projects are nothing new. After all, the free software movement started with the GNU project – the creation of free tools to build a free operating system – which at one point many would have considered an impossible dream.
However, the participants in the Open Source Ecology project take ambition to new heights. The project takes the principles that were developed originally by the open source software movement and later the experiments with open source hardware, and applies them to developing an environmentally friendly society by creating open source tools capable of building sustainable communities – pretty much from scratch, using recycled and scrap materials.
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After failing in its webOS strategy, HP has announced plans to use it to create an open source project. This is an example of what (in our 2006 paper) Scott Gallagher and I called a “spin-out” strategy by firms to find a home for a technology they no longer wish to control.
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Events
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Thirteen years have gone by since the first Australian national Linux conference was held, but the event is still driven by the same category of people: volunteers.
A great many things are organised very professionally, but it’s all done by people who have boundless enthusiasm and who work selflessly, often for a whole year, just to make sure that things run on schedule.
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The Linux Foundation’s CE Linux Forum (CELF) workgroup announced a call for participation (CFP) for this year’s Embedded Linux Conference (ELC), to be held Feb. 15-17, 2012, in Redwood Shores, California, with submissions due Jan. 6. O’Reilly Media, meanwhile, issued its own CFP, due Jan. 12, for its Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2012, scheduled for July 16-20, 2012 in Portland, Oregon.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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OwnCloud, a Linux-based program that enables you to set up your own personal cloud, is on its way to becoming a commercial program under former SUSE executive Markus Rex.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Project Releases
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A new version of GIMP – the free graphics suite par excellence – has been released. GIMP ver 2.7.4 , which is termed as an unstable release leading to a stable version 2.8 sometime in January next year, brings a lot of new features.
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The GIMP development team has released version 2.7.4 of its open source GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) image editing software. Aimed at developers, testers and early adopters, the fourth point update to the 2.7.x branch is an unstable development snapshot that fixes bugs found in the previous release and includes changes to the user interface.
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gThumb, an image viewer for Gnome has his the version 2.14.1. gThumb is a light weight image viewer which comes handy if you are going through images and want to delete bad once while viewing them. You can’t do the same with Shotwell the image viwer that comes with Ubuntu. Another advantage of using gThumb is that you can open the image with other tools such as GIMP by right clicking on the image — shotwell lacks this ability. But, then Shotwell also comes with tools to edit images, which gThumb misses. Shotwell can also download images from your cameras. Anyway, each app has its own advantage and disadvantage. I prefer gThumb as when I go through my images I want to be able to delete the bad ones while I am going through them. Since I extensively use GIMP so ‘open with’ feature also comes handy.
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The Blender Foundation today announced the release of Blender 2.61, the first bugfix update in the 2.6 series. Blender is an Open Source 3D graphic and animation application made famous for being used to create the first Open Source movie Elephants Dream and the Yo Frankie! video game. It has been used to create television commercials and Hollywood movies. Blender is quality Open Source Software at its finest.
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Openness/Sharing
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The open mapping service OpenStreetMap has launched an appeal for funds to finance the purchase of a new server. The main components for OpenStreetMap are currently hosted on several small servers held in the Imperial and UCL colleges of London University. The OpenStreetMap Foundation now feels that it is necessary to buy a new server to improve the system’s reliability and performance.
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We recently covered a story about LinuxMint using DuckDuckGo as the default search engine. The LinuxMint project will generate revenue through DDG. We do support LinuxMint and have nothing against them using DDG as the default search engine.
However, the primary goal of a search engine is to show relevant results. We are aware that Microsoft’s Bing doesn’t show quite a lot of open source projects on the first page. LibreOffice, the default office suite of all major GNU/Linux based operating systems is missing from Bing’s first page.
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SCO has now filed its reply to IBM’s opposition to SCO’s motion to partly reopen the case. Guess what its argument is? To paraphrase, they say, What? Not fair? Who cares? Bankruptcy court lets us go ahead while tying IBM’s hands behind its back, so we want to do it that way. Besides, it’s not unfair, because IBM could have asked for relief from the stay, but it didn’t. It’s not SCO’s responsibility to help IBM advance its claims.
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Judge David Sam gets the hot potato now. I can’t tell if the problem is that nobody seems eager to take this case or if it’s just that Utah is a small and narrow world, so intertwined that it’s hard to find an impartial judge.
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Health/Nutrition
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It was four years ago today that I received a phone call from a Los Angeles TV reporter that would change my life, although I certainly didn’t realize it at the time.
The reporter said she had been told that CIGNA, the big health insurer I worked for back then, was refusing to pay for a liver transplant for a 17-year-old girl, even though her doctors at UCLA believed it would save her life and her family’s policy covered transplants.
I didn’t pay much attention to the call at first, because as chief spokesman for the company, I had received many calls over the years from reporters seeking comment about benefit denials. We took them seriously, but usually didn’t have to do more than tell the inquiring reporters we couldn’t comment substantively because of patient confidentiality restrictions. If pressed, we’d email a statement to the reporter briefly noting that we covered procedures deemed medically necessary and that patients and their doctors could appeal a denial if they disagreed with a coverage decision.
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Security
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The Water Environment Federation (WEF), the sewage sludge industry trade group that invented the Orwellian PR euphemism “biosolids” for toxic sludge in 1991, is now “rebranding” sewage treatment plants as “water resource recovery facilities.” The PR spin conveniently glosses over the toxic sewage sludge removed from the water and then heated and dumped on land for crops and grazing as “fertilizer” or misleadingly called “compost.” The toxins in sludge can then bioaccumulate in the meat and dairy we eat and be taken up by the food plants that feed us.
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Finance
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As the New York Times media reporter, Brian Stelter, noted on Saturday, December 9, NBC agreed to broadcast a two-hour television show fully funded and sponsored by JPMorgan Chase called the “American Giving Awards.” The program, which aired this weekend, showcased solely recipients of charitable donations from Chase, featured commercials for Chase and reminded viewers constantly throughout the broadcast that the entire event was “presented by Chase.” NBC presented the show under the guise of a heartwarming holiday season special, but it was really a promotional/advertising event emblematic of a troubling trend among big businesses of creating their own media and disguising it as entertainment. As Lisa Graves, the Center for Media and Democracy’s Executive Director told the New York Times, the show is a “greed-washing campaign to score PR points.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Color of Change has launched a campaign encouraging corporations that rely on business from African-Americans to stop funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which promotes voter ID legislation that suppresses the black vote.
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Privacy
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The Information Commissioner’s Office won’t begin enforcing the new cookies law for another six months yet – in the meantime, the regulator has issued a reminder to web outfits warning them to prepare to comply with the legislation.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Remember the story about the composer who found his music featured in anti-piracy ads and had a difficult time getting paid out, triggering a corruption scandal at collection society Buma/Stemra? It was obviously a bit ironic that the music in question was used in anti-piracy ads, but it appears the irony truck forgot to unload a package – filled to the brim with humiliation.
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This is timely. Just as we are all reading about Carrier IQ, with our eyes wide in horror and our jaws on the ground, the Software Freedom Law Center has announced that it has filed comments [PDF] with the US Librarian of Congress, asking for an exemption to the DMCA, so that users can legally control their own devices — have the legal authority to control what software is installed, including being able to install a completely free operating system, and be able to remove whatever is not desired.
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