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Links 7/10/2012: Linux 3.7, GIMP 3 Discussed





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Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Open source equals software freedom, not free software


  • An Open Source Dyslexic Font
    Programmers seem to be prone to dyslexia, or is it that dyslexics are prone to programming? Whatever the cause, an open source dyslexic font is welcome news.

    Yes reader, I am dyslexic and I am a programmer - and yes it makes things difficult, especially when I get an attack in the middle of a published article, and variable names are often more variable than they are supposed to be.


  • Graduate students in Finland solve real problems beyond the classroom
    The School of Business and Information Management at Oulu University of Applied Sciences (OUAS) created an open source project management software named OpixProject. The objective was not to create something that would compete with the current project management software, but to place students in realistic problem-solving environments in order to reduce the gap between the concepts covered in the classroom and real-world experiences.


  • Copenhagen Suborbitals Release Snowmix, an Open Source Video Mixer


  • Juju Has Charms Included
    So how many of you ever thought of installing/configuring an application like Wordpress/Drupal and compact Big Data mammoth like Hadoop in less than few clicks?

    I am sure everyone of you. A system admin loves automating his work and getting his/her most of the deployments done with some magic scripts. We all are living in the cloud world, its not a buzzword anymore, people are leveraging on it. So I will ask again how will you automate/autoscale/load-balance your entire application ?


  • Open source release for Google reranking technology
    Google has released a general purpose framework for reranking problems, ReFr (Reranker Framework), as open source. Reranking is a technique that is used when there is a model that can offer several scored hypothesised outputs; rerankers can reorder the ranked outputs based on information not available to the original model.


  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla

      • Firefox Is Back on Top of Chrome
        Looks like we weren't the only Internet users that got fed up with Chrome's constant crashes, as the latest numbers show its popularity has been waning a smidge. The chart above shows worldwide mobile browser market share over the last 12 months. Back in May Chrome's adoption numbers just about matched Firefox's. And, at the end of last year, after a year of huge growth, different numbers found the Google made browser surpassed Firefox as the number two most popular browser, just behind Internet Explorer. But since then—perhaps because of the constant flash crashes, or that hip Internet Explorer campaign—Firefox has regained the No. 2 spot, according to numbers from Net Marketshare. Another way to spin the numbers is that Firefox's sped up six-week new release schedule attracted more users.


      • Mozilla Firefox OS Features And Expectations
        Mozilla, the organization behind one of the most popular browsers in the world, is busy developing a new mobile operating system of its own. Competing head-on with biggies like Android and iOS, the fledgling smartphone OS attempts to create its own niche by seamlessly blending the power of the web and the mobility of smartphones together. Codenamed Boot to Gecko (or B2G), the open-source project will include applications that will be written in HTML5. These apps can then use the device's API to run natively with the help of JavaScript.


      • Firefox 19: new tab strip design incoming
        Australis is the name of the new default Firefox theme that Mozilla has been working on for quite some time. The decision was made to release the update gradually, with some updates already in the browser, while others still waiting to be delivered to it. One of the next Australis-related updates comes in Firefox 19. You may have already seen how the new tab bar will look like in mock-ups that Mozilla designer Stephen Horlander released a while ago.


      • Firefox quit warning message bug






  • SaaS



  • Databases



  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Open-source development: The history of OpenOffice shows why licensing matters
      The course of open-source software does not always run smoothly, especially when the development of software becomes entangled with broader corporate strategies.


    • NetBeans 7.3's HTML5 App Dev features go into beta
      Java developers are not left out though, with improvements such as a new-style breadcrumb navigation bar, new member and hierarchy views, updated hints and refactorings, filtering for "Find Usages" and an "effective" POM editor tab for pom.xml files. Java EE developers will find a JPQL testing tool and enhancements to the REST service development features. FXML and the SceneBuilder are better supported in 7.3 Beta's JavaFX handling, which is also compatible with JDK 7u6 on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.




  • CMS

    • Open Source CMS MODX Launches Cloud Service
      Today open source content management company MODX is launching a hosted cloud service to commercialize the product, much as Acquia and WordPress.com have done for Drupal and WordPress.




  • BSD

    • An Easy Way To Try Out FreeBSD 10
      If you have been wanting to try out the FreeBSD 10-CURRENT operating system that's presently under development, there's now an easier way.

      Rather than needing to install a current FreeBSD release and then upgrade to the "-CURRENT" packages from there, a FreeBSD developer has finally started offering snapshot images of the FreeBSD 10-CURRENT and 9-STABLE versions. Yes, finally ISO snapshots to make it easier to try out the current development state from a clean install.




  • Project Releases



  • Public Services/Government



  • Openness/Sharing



    • Open Data



    • Open Access/Content

      • California passes groundbreaking open textbook legislation
        It’s official. In California, Governor Jerry Brown has signed two bills (SB 1052 and SB 1053) that will provide for the creation of free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges. The legislation was introduced by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and passed by the California Senate and Assembly in late August.




    • Open Hardware

      • The Open Hardware Summit: The Future of Manufacturing is Sharing


      • HexBright, the Programmable Open Source Flashlight


      • Arduino Uno open-source prototyping board comes to market
        A starter kit for the Arduino Uno open-source prototyping board which can be used by professional embedded system engineers and students is available from RS Components, writes Richard Wilson.

        The kit contains the components required to start programming with the Arduino Uno board along with a guidebook featuring 15 different projects. There is a definite mechatronics flavour to the kit which includes a motor, servomotor and driver.


      • Open Hardware Summit open to hybrid models
        If there was an overarching message from the speakers at last week's Open Hardware Summit, particularly those in the first morning block, it's that openness isn't that critical. It sounds strange coming from a conference whose name starts with "open," but speaker after speaker talked about hybrids and doing whatever worked, not just doing what was open.

        That's not to say they don't believe in the power of openness. The first words of Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson's opening keynote were the very foundation of open source: "Everything I've learned as I built my own business is because people shared what they knew."






  • Programming





Leftovers



  • Health/Nutrition

    • Superweeds, Superpests: The Legacy of Pesticides
      The rapid adoption of a single weed-killer for the vast majority of crops harvested in the United States has given rise to superweeds and greater pesticide use, a new study suggests. And while crops engineered to manufacture an insect-killing toxin have reduced the use of pesticides in those fields, the emergence of newly resistant insects now threatens to reverse that trend.

      Farmers spray the herbicide glyphosate, widely sold under the Monsanto brand Roundup, on fields planted with seeds that are genetically engineered to tolerate the chemical. Found in 1.37 billion acres of corn, soybeans, and cotton planted from 1996 through 2011, this “Roundup Ready” gene was supposed to reduce or eliminate the need to till fields or apply harsher chemicals, making weed control simple, flexible, cheap, and less environmentally taxing.






  • Finance

    • 2nd Circuit remakes MBS class action rules in Goldman ruling
      Now they tell us? More than four years after investors in mortgage-backed securities began filing class actions accusing MBS issuers of deceiving them in offering documents -- and at least three years after federal judges began tossing class claims because name plaintiffs didn't have the requisite standing -- the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has redefined standing in MBS class actions. In a 38-page opinion that revives a class action against Goldman Sachs, the appeals court rejected what had been conventional wisdom, finding that a union healthcare fund represented by Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd isn't limited to claims based on specific offerings it invested in. Instead, wrote Judge Barrington Parker for a panel that also included judges Reena Raggi and Raymond Lohier, the union fund has standing to assert claims related to every certificate backed by mortgages originated by the same lenders that originated the loans backing the notes purchased by the fund.


    • The War Between Credit and Resources
      Such a policy, which received wider attention during Ben Bernanke’s Congressional questioning last year and was also highlighted this year in a paper delivered at the Jackson Hole conference (Woodford, opens to PDF), has not caught any visible traction with Washington policy makers possibly because it’s seen as either too radical, or simply too new.






Recent Techrights' Posts

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He spoke there before; there's a very high seating capacity there
US Government: 6.1% of Site Visitors Use GNU/Linux
GNU/Linux has a considerable share and it is growing
Why the FSF No Longer Recommends Debian, as Explained by Richard Stallman This Month
some weeks ago
 
Today (a Day Before Richard Stallman Talk at TUM) There's a Patent Propaganda Event at TUM
Perhaps an opportunity for Dr. Stallman to rebut this "invention to patent" nonsense/fantasy (conflating monopolies with innovation)
OpenSource or "Open Source" as a Brand is Dying, Let's Get Back to Talking About Software Freedom
Those of us who actually want to reform the industry and put users in control of their systems/devices will recognise that "Open Source" was selling a lie or got-co-opted by liars
19 Years in Numbers: Techrights' Anniversary Countdown and Retrospective
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Slop Turns People Off (LLMs Lack Intelligence, They're Just Plagiarism Powerhouses That Fail to Deliver Any Real, Measurable Value)
"More" (or "MOAR") isn't always better
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This won't end well
Fake Numbers, Fake Claims, Fake Economy, and Media Grifters That Prop Up Fraud
Grifters like The Register MS won't be looked upon kindly after the bubble implodes
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They seem to have gone into some kind of lock-down mode
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A crashing franchise
Psychiatrist confession: Germanwings crash & Debian toxic culture recognized before suicides
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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there's nothing unreasonable about it
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Inane garbage disguised as "journalism"
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Disclosure is OK, but the practice of using slop is not
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Each year it gets worse
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
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IRC logs for Saturday, October 18, 2025
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Gemini Links 18/10/2025: "Planetary Rings", Steam, and PSU Replacement
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The aim is to get them to stop using LLMs to rip off other people's work
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Links for the day
Credit Where It's Due: LinuxConfig.org Quit Doing LLM Slop, Back to Original and Real Articles
We waited for a while to say this, now it seems conclusive
Of Note: UbuntuPIT Aware of Critics of Slop, Adds Disclosure of Use of LLMs
We appreciate the honesty
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It'll be a good opportunity for patent examiners to listen, ask questions, and maybe greet him in person
From Scholar to Booster of Slop (and Even Slop in His Own Blog)
We're going to keep an eye on future posts of his
End of Vista 10 Also Good News for the BSDs
There are many news sites that recommend trying GNU/Linux this month
What's Wrong With Liking Parrots or Birds as Pets?
They'd demonise people for speaking about freedom, no matter what they say or do
Digital Sanitation Good Practices
leave behind Microsoftism
10 Days Ago Richard Stallman Gave a Long Interview in French (linuxfr.org)
English translation
Science, Not Fast Food/Junk Food
The commercial exploitation of users won't stop until users exercise full control over their software or - more broadly - their computing (including data)
The Free Software Foundation, Which Has Appointed a 43-Year-Old President, is Looking to Add Another Board Member (or Treasurer)
expect the FSF to add more people
Richard Stallman Confirms Next Week's Talk at Technical University of Munich, We Urge EPO Staff to Attend
That's probably late enough for EPO staff to attend after work
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Many Red Hat People Are Leaving, But It'll Be Framed Publicly as Leaving IBM
Similarly, IBM layoffs (or "RAs" as they're called) include Red Hat layoffs
Expect More Waves of Microsoft Layoffs This Month (at Least Two Rounds Confirmed Already)
From what we can gather, assuming the recent rumours about XBox are true, there will be at least 3 waves of Microsoft layoffs this month alone
Security Issues in Cisco and Jenkins Passed Off as "Linux" Problems
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) tactics
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
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IRC logs for Friday, October 17, 2025
[Video] Dr. Richard Stallman at Technické Univerzitě v Liberci
New/via libre-liberec.cz
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egregious plagiarism
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Links for the day
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Links for the day
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What a World Would Look Like If Everyone Used Free Software Only
Freedom is what matters, not "Open".
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The media, instead of saying that there's an "AI bubble" crashing the economy might instead choose the narrative of "jobs replaced by AI"
Bad Tempered? You Might Have Just Given Away That You're Losing the Argument
Brett Wilson LLP is fully aware that it is being investigated
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Here in this site we try to refrain from politics, except in Daily Links
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It seems certain GNU/Linux will grow in popularity over time
Taking Stock of a Week's Worth of EPO Leaks
We remain committed to exposing EPO corruption as long as it keeps happening
Mathieu Parreaux claims FINMA knew since day one
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Calumny, Libel, Joerg Jaspert & debian-private untouchable cyberbullies
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC logs for Thursday, October 16, 2025
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coverage of suppressed topics and protecting all sources/whistleblowers
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message from Akira Urushibata
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These people become millionaires by doing illegal things
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Zeljka Zorz, Editor-in-Chief at Help Net Security, was reported to us
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