04.04.13
Posted in GNU/Linux at 5:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Branding is the key
Summary: Why it’s reasonable to say “GNU/Linux”
An increasingly-tiring debate over the naming of the (GNU/)Linux operating system was recently rekindled. It occurred rather virally after several Web sites and longtime authors who habitually cover the subject of (GNU/)Linux had weighed in again, opening an ageing jar of worms.
Like many flamewars in the GNU and Linux world, we should accommodate these, not suppress them. With suppression — after all — moral advantages are lost. It is widely understood that no corporation wants to project infighting, but in the Free software world corporations are not central. Likewise, branding is not the top priority.
What the argument over the names often boils down to is philosophy, not just attribution or credit. GNU was created with software freedom in mind. Linux, in its genesis, was proprietary until it adopted the GNU GPL licence and then became mainstream. A former colleague of mine was the first to distribute GNU and Linux — a practice which over time saw the system’s name abbreviated to “Linux”. The motive for this abbreviation is an interesting subject which merits its own in-depth research.
Rather than argue about what the system should be called we should pay attention to Katherine’s post and ask ourselves, what is it that should be prioritised? Freedom or popularity? These are not mutually-exclusive and describing the problem as such would be a false dichotomy. But practice suggests that those who insist on calling the system just “Linux” are happy to de-emphasise the values originally incorporated into GNU in 1983.
Richard Stallman famously said, “Freedom is having control of your own life. Power is having control over someone else’s life.” To a lot of people — yours truly included — freedom and justice are the goal, software is part of the means. For those to whom branding wars are of greater interest, the “Mac versus PC” (or Apple-branded PC versus Windows-saddled PC) is right around the corner. Or as I often put it, those who do not like Microsoft go to Apple, whereas those who do not like proprietary software turn to GNU/Linux or BSD.
Distributions of GNU/Linux bring yet more brands into the debate, not to mention all the pertinent components that belong neither to GNU nor Linux. Distributions adopt different philosophies which often reflect the views on their founder, e.g. Mark Shuttleworth in the case of Ubuntu and Patrick Volkerding in the case of Slackware Linux, Inc. The brand we use to refer to software often reveals something about our preferences, philosophy, likings and convictions.
Rather than fight over naming of systems let us reason about the innate values each of these brings. Brands are instruments of association, reputation, kinship, and/or status. We need to go deeper and explore what actual substance each of these has got. And we can choose the brands which suit us best. █
Originally posted in Linux Advocates
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Even among our ranks within Linux Advocate, there are “lively” debates on what our goals should be. But I will argue, given the current state of the Linuxphere…..
That’s not going to happen either. Our biggest strength is also our greatest weakness. Fragmentation.
Let’s break it down.
First off, and not to get lost in semantics, I consider myself a Linux Mentor as well as an Advocate. Advocating is all well and good but without follow through, we’re not getting the job done.
Everyone who enters the Linux Advocate fold does so with their own motivation and expectations. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. That’s just a fact of life. I can’t expect a natural introvert to do what I do any more than (s)he can demand I code to their level of proficiency.
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Server
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SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 3 — Algo-Logic Systems, Inc., a recognized leader in providing hardware-accelerated, deterministic, real-time, ultra-low-latency products, systems and solutions for accelerated finance, packet processing and embedded system industries, announces that it will present live demonstration of its newest FPGA-accelerated Market Data Filtering (MDF) application. This live demo will be showcased on Mon., April 8, at the HPC Wall Street Conference at Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.
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Kernel Space
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A few months back there was an EXT4 file-system corruption bug that impacted stable Linux kernel releases and was widely-covered. Today, another EXT4 file-system bug was corrected within the mainline Linux kernel.
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A few months back there was an EXT4 file-system corruption bug that impacted stable Linux kernel releases and was widely-covered. Today, another EXT4 file-system bug was corrected within the mainline Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD’s Unified Decoder has been the object of envy in the open-source community for some time. The silicon, which ships on the company’s Radeon graphics cards, offers hardware-accelerated video decoding — but thanks to legal and DRM issues, couldn’t be used on Linux machines.
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For me, networking of displays is the most important feature of GNU/Linux operating systems. Perhaps X became too fragile/complex/limited. Perhaps Wayland is the way forward, but without networking Wayland is pathetic. Now that it is coming together it is time for Canonical to get behind Wayland and share the load of generating good FLOSS with the rest of the world. Going it alone will mean serious fragmentation of GNU/Linux. OEMs, consumers, system administrators will have to choose which way to go. I can already see OEMs hanging back by using older releases of Ubuntu GNU/Linux. How long will it take Canonical to wake up to that?
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Introduced last month was the ability to overclock Intel graphics under Linux while presented hours ago is a new Intel Linux kernel driver patch to provide better GPU overclocking support.
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Yesterday it was exclusively announced on Phoronix that AMD was releasing open-source UVD code so that their open-source Linux graphics driver can finally benefit from GPU hardware-accelerated video playback. Here’s some more details.
Now with the Linux kernel and Mesa/Gallium3D code having been published and having time to go through this code myself, after Fatima’s article earlier, here’s some more details. Of course, if you didn’t already, first read AMD Releases Open-Source UVD Video Support for the overview.
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Applications
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After five years in development and 43 developer versions, version 2 of the VDR Linux video recorder has been released by its author Klaus Schmidinger. The new software offers full HDTV support. TV images are processed either by a plugin using the graphics card or by a DVB card’s hardware decoder; however, only TechnoTrend’s S2 6400 DVB card, which is mostly unavailable at present, currently supports rendering images in HD.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Atlassian’s HipChat is stepping up to its commitment to roll out native clients for its real-time group chat and private messaging tool, with a beta release of the Linux client. The Linux client couldn’t come fast enough: Adobe AIR no longer supports the open-source operating system, which means the new native app adds to the web-based client as another option for Linux-based users.
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I recently purchased a Chromebook Pixel with LTE, but it hasn’t yet arrived. When it does, I plan to do some casual video gaming on the new hardware. No, I’m not talking about web apps; I mean native, third party video games. How’s that? I’ve shared part of the secret before: Simply run a script to install Linux so it runs side-by-side with Chrome OS. I can instantly jump over to it as needed. The rest of the solution is Steam, the video game distribution service that now supports Linux.
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Wildfire Games has released 0 A.D. Alpha 13 “Magadha”, the latest development installment of this popular open-source ancient warfare game.
0 A.D. is the open-source real-time strategy game that’s been in development by Wildfire Games for more than one decade that was later open-sourced.
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Valve has done another push and put up 5 new games to Linux! All in Beta though so be warned there will be bugs! The titles are Ricochet, Deathmatch Classic, Team Fortress Classic, Half Life: Blue Shift and Half Life: Opposing Force!
It’s great to see since to my knowledge that’s all (or almost all) their older titles now at least in Beta, which can only pave the way for newer titles like DOTA2 and Counter Strike: GO (two of my favourites) to be ported over!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In KDE 4.10, the “Find All” and “Replace All” highlights all matches and at the same time shows a passive notification in a bar below the view. This bar is animated, and takes quite a lot of place in addition to the search & replace bar.
Since some days, Kate Part can also show passive notifications floating in the view. Hence, we’ve changed the passive notification to appear on the bottom right as a small info message, showing the number of matches. However, in order to make this passive notification as small as possible, we removed the “Close” button, since the notification is hidden after 3 seconds anyway. Further, we removed the “Keep Highlighting” button. If you want to keep the highlights, just do not close the search & replace bar. The following video demonstrates this behavior, first for KDE 4.10, then how it currently will be in KDE 4.11 (watch the video in 720p):
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KDE announced the latest release of their popular desktop environment today, KDE Software Compilation 4.10.2. This is an update/stabilization release that brought over 100 fixes. Some bugs were annoying, but one particular nasty bugger was also fixed.
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The KDE 4.10.2 point release is said to have over 100 bug-fixes. Reported improvements within the KDE 4.10.2 release include the Kontact Personal Information Management Suite, the KWin window manager, and others.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The MATE developers have released version 1.6 of their desktop environment. Originally derived from the source code of the last GNOME 2 release, the desktop environment offers a similar user interface. MATE 1.6 now works with the login manager of systemd, which has largely replaced ConsoleKit for user and session tracking in several distributions, and is also due to be used in the, as yet unnamed, Ubuntu 13.10.
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Standardization in Linux is “not going to happen,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Robin Lim. “What should be done instead is to stop lumping all the Linux distributions under the name ‘Linux,’ and just call them Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint and so on,” Lim offered. “They are that diverse.” In fact, “if we woke up tomorrow and only one desktop Linux distribution was left in development, we would all be better for it.”
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Red Hat Family
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We’ve told you that Red Hat is one of the world’s biggest “meritocracies,” where employees can, and do, call the CEO an idiot to his face, if they don’t like his ideas.
CEO Jim Whitehurst is proud of that.
He might be the boss, but in a meritocracy, people have power based on the respect they earn from their peers and once respected, they are entitled to speak their minds.
We also told you that Red Hat is hiring like crazy. It just moved into a new headquarters building in downtown Raleigh, N.C.
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Red Hat, the first and only open source software company to reach over $1 billion in revenue, is still on track to nearly triple its revenue to $3 billion by 2016, CEO Jim Whitehurst said in an interview.
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Nearly a week after Raleigh’s Red Hat released its earnings, the price cuts are rolling in.
Just in the past few days, reports began to roll in on price-target cuts for Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) stock from about $60 a share to the low $50s.
BMO Capital Markets cut its price target to $54 from $60 and MKM Partners made a similar cut to $53. Pacific Crest followed Monday by cutting its target from $60 to $55.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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When Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) unveils HP Moonshot servers on April 8, Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution could be along for the ride. How does The VAR Guy know? And what are the implications for channel partners? Here are the answers.
Canonical back in August 2011 vowed to make Ubuntu Server support ARM processors. Building on that statement, Canonical in November 2011 vowed to support HP Moonshot servers– which are also called microservers. Canonical has similar Ubuntu microserver work under way with Dell.
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Hard on the heels of Canonical’s decision last month to halve the support life for non-LTS releases of Ubuntu Linux, the company late last week announced that three versions of its popular Linux distribution will reach end of life in May.
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Flavours and Variants
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David Tavares announced last week that the second Beta release of the upcoming Pear OS 7 Linux operating system was made available for download and testing.
Pear OS 7 Beta 2 fixes even more bugs found in the previous Beta release, cleans the entire system, fixes bugs in CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System), and fixes issues and bugs found in locales.
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Former Debian Project Leader and Linaro developer Steve McIntyre has surveyed a large number of Ubuntu and Fedora packages as part of a detailed study on the use of assembly code in Linux applications. This work was undertaken to identify packages that need porting to the new AArch64 architecture for 64-bit ARM processors. McIntyre generated a list of packages and then checked those that use assembly as part of their code to see what that assembly code was actually used for.
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The Raspberry Pi’s $25 “Model A” made a brief appearance this week on the website of Allied Electronics, its U.S. distributor. Compared to its $35 sibling, the lower end Linux-fired SBC (single board computer) sports half the RAM, one USB port instead of two, and lacks an Ethernet spigot.
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Embest is accepting pre-orders for a $99 single-board computer (SBC) based on a 1GHz dual-core Freescale i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 system-on-chip (SOC). The compact “MarS Board” provides interfaces for Gig-Ethernet, high-speed USB, HDMI, camera, and more, and it’s supported with ready-to-use embedded Linux and Android OS images.
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Phones
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Android
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Google Inc will launch a new version of its Nexus 7 tablet powered by Qualcomm Inc’s Snapdragon processor around July, two sources told Reuters, as the software giant pushes deeper into the cut-price mobile hardware market.
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One year after it made its debut on the platform, Android users make up nearly half of all Instragram users. A post on the Instagram blog tells us that Android now accounts for roughly fifty percent of all users but stopped short of providing any hard numbers.
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Yves Behar’s Fuseproject consultancy has developed the OUYA games console, which was funded using the Kickstarter platform and aims to capitalise on the growing popularity for cheap, ‘open-sourced’ gaming.
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There are several projects that can boast a clear track record of attracting, building and growing a community. LibreOffice is one of them, and so was his parent, OpenOffice.org . I’m not specifically speaking about the developers’ community, but rather about the worldwide community of localizers, QA testers, documentation writers and translators, local volunteers contributing their time to marketing and users support, designers… We had come up with a name back then : the Native-Lang projects. It simply meant the « native-language projects », communities working on the basis of their common language rather than on a country affiliation, which would have resulted often in politically complex and difficult situations.
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I am proud to announce that finally SOS Open Source has found a new steward in the person of Raffaella Corona. Raffaella has over 5 years experience in the IT industry, she has been at the forefront in selling high value training courses about open source languages and applications.
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CHIP DESIGNER ARM says it expects its server chips to be deployed on servers that run open source software stacks.
ARM has been a vocal and active supporter of open source software for many years and has taken a major role in a number of Linaro working groups in recent years. According to the firm open source software stacks will run on most of its upcoming server chips, with the firm citing market demand.
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Avetti’s enterprise e-commerce software used in many high volume online stores now has a Community Edition available under the OSL v3 Open Source License. A key feature is integration with the Open Ice Cat product database, which provides images, descriptions and specifications permitting merchants to create professional stores faster.
The Community Edition software is designed for programmers, consultants, and do-it-yourselfers. For the first time the open source community has access to a full featured multi-store e-commerce solution for Java that is optimized for speed for both the EC2 Cloud and Data Center deployments. David Sopuch, CEO and eBusiness Director of Avetti.com Corporation said, “Finally the open source community now has a free fast solution that is full featured and can handle high volumes.”
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Open source is used just about everywhere, but when it comes to “safety-critical” systems, like software that flies planes or controls medical equipment, most of us assume that open source just doesn’t fit the bill. The regulations and requirements are rigorous, and ill-suited to the usual “fail faster” approach of open source.
Then, we learned about an initiative called Open-DO, which shows that FLOSS has a critical role to play, even in this specialized, highly regulated environment.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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When Opera Software killed its web browser’s rendering engine Presto, and announced it will instead use WebKit, the company did so with the best intentions.
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Google is moving away from WebKit. Google is now going its own way with a new rendering engine called – Blink
Shocking isn’t it?
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WebKit makes the web go ’round, and yet it is soon to be joined by a new kid on the block: Blink, which was announced on Chromium’s blog earlier today. Says Chromium, the decision to create a new rendering engine “was not an easy” one, but ultimately good will come from it. Developers don’t need to worry, as the announcement reassures that little will change for them during the initial rounds of work.
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Just earlier today was word that Mozilla is developing Servo, a new web-browser engine, and now comes a similar action out of Google. The search giant announced this afternoon they are forking the WebKit code-base for their Chrome/Chromium web-browser to form the “Blink” engine.
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Mozilla
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SaaS/Big Data
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Big Data is an all-inclusive term that refers to data sets so large and complex that they need to be processed by specially designed hardware and software tools. The data sets are typically of the order of tera or exabytes in size. These data sets are created from a diverse range of sources: sensors that gather climate information, publicly available information such as magazines, newspapers, articles. Other examples where big data is generated include purchase transaction records, web logs, medical records, military surveillance, video and image archives, and large-scale e-commerce.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Use LibreOffice. It’s a great value. Most people will save more than the cost of their hardware using it if they use LibreOffice instead of the “pro” licences from M$. It has all the most-used features of office suites and few of its own that maximizes the value of your hardware.
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Business
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NxtGen Data Center and Cloud Services has saved in excess of Rs 4 lakh per server by using free and open source software (FOSS).
The company has saved more than $4,000 per server in licensing costs for setting up private clouds by using the open source based OpenStack cloud virtualization platform.
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Here’s where FLOSS can help. A small business can migrate to FLOSS in a day or two, often over a weekend, and have software that just keeps on working. Problems that drop off the radar:
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BSD
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Even though it was known by most of FreeBSD users that the 9.0 release of the best BSD operating system will reach EOL (End-Of-Life) on March 31, 2013, we feel obliged to announce users that FreeBSD 9.0 is no longer supported.
Originally released on January 10, 2012, FreeBSD 9.0 was a short-term supported release (one year), as opposed to the FreeBSD 8.3 release, which is still supported until April 30, 2014.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The Open Source industry have been waiting the best part of ten years for the UK Government to mandate a ‘preference’ for Open Source Software (OSS) over proprietary or closed-source alternatives.
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The term “Open Government” (OG, hereafter) has been used since the 70s to refer to the effort to reduce bureaucratic opacity and open up governments to public scrutiny. Current notions of OG are thus the result of more than four decades of endeavours to increase the transparency of government actions. These efforts materialized mainly in the enactment of legislation on access to information, privacy, data protection and administrative procedures, and by creating ombudsman offices and supreme audit institutions.
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So far, only 9 agencies report using FLOSS desktop or client OS but that should change rapidly when more of the applications are FLOSS. 9 ministries have been declared self-reliant in FLOSS. Two hundred people participated in a conference on self-reliance in FLOSS for governmental agencies recently.
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Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still widely-used nowadays as a communication method on the internet. On IRC, you will connect to IRC servers in which there will be individual chatrooms called channels. By joining a IRC server, you will be able to chat with other users who have connected to the same server, you can either chat on a channel with many other peeps or make a person-to-person conversation. Most Linux distros have official irc channels on freenode.net for users to come to ask questions and help other people. There are in fact many IRC clients in Linux but in this article, I will show you several IRC clients that I personally know and have used. All these clients are available in the repository of most distros I think you know how to install them already.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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When Unglue.it first launched its platform to strip the copyright status of books once a crowdfunded, pre-determined amount of money had been raised, skeptics spoke out. Not against that concept of “ungluing” a book, of course, but against the idea that ordinary readers would be willing to donate money to a publisher to make a book permanently public domain. Happily, Unglue.it has already enjoyed the fruits of their labors and announced a number of open source books, thanks to the donations and promotional efforts of its followers.
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FLOSS and education certainly go together. FLOSS software is being developed for on-line education by major educational institutions. It seems to be making waves…
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Programming
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It’s an open-source technology that has grown a solid backing in many parts of enterprise IT, but is largely done on a “do-it-yourself” basis with little vendor or channel support behind it. That could describe Linux a decade ago. Or, Zend Technologies is betting, it could describe PHP today.
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Health/Nutrition
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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As the Palestine Center’s Yousef Munayyer pointed out, this is true only in a very narrow sense–this would be the first Israeli airstrike. But Israel has violated the cease fire a number of times, as his organization has documented in a very helpful timeline–tacks that appear to have killed four Palestinians. In fact, the first incident occurred within 24 hours of the “cease fire.”
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It’s not easy to figure out what’s going on with North Korea. We hear that new leader Kim Jong-Un is making threats to attack the United States, South Korea or both–and that’s leading to some rather alarming, and alarmist, coverage.
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“There is no ethical or legal rational for attacking people in countries we are not currently at war with,” said Rick Greenblatt with San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice.
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This month, FOR members across the country are working to stop military and surveillance drones and reduce military spending. Will you join them?
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Prime Minister David Cameron has said it would be ‘foolish’ for British to renounce its nuclear program in the face of threats from North Korea and Iran. His call to arms comes despite harsh criticism that Trident is too costly and unnecessary.
British Prime Minister Cameron stated that the UK needs an “ultimate weapon” to combat the growing threat of nuclear attack which he said had “increased” since the end of the Cold War.
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Cablegate
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Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks party is going to turn heads. But turning attention into votes is going to be an even harder job for a candidate who may not be able to enter the country, let alone take his seat, writes Michelle Grattan.
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It was “sheer fantasy” that Julian Assange was in danger of being extradited from Sweden to the United States, Bob Carr declared in February. If anything, it was even less likely Assange could be extradited from Sweden than the United Kingdom.
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Supreme Court chief calls sex charges against Julian Assange “a mess” and praises him for leaking secret US documents.
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The Ecuadorian government has reiterated its offer to Swedish prosecutors to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at its embassy in London following a “significant” speech by a senior Scandinavian judge.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Beef farmer Nicholas Stokes, 57, used his quad bike to etch out the giant letters on his land in Ellesmere, Shropshire, as temperatures plunged to -4 over the Easter weekend.
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What’s really noteworthy is the subhead about the “new oil spill” not seeming to have a big impact–a reference to the ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline leak in Arkansas. As the paper noted, “The numbers come amid continuing efforts to clean up a major new oil spill in Arkansas.”
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Finance
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The Bank of Japan unleashed the world’s most intense burst of monetary stimulus on Thursday, promising to inject about $1.4 trillion into the economy in less than two years, a radical gamble that sent the yen reeling and bond yields to record lows.
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“They sought the utmost secrecy in offshore tax havens,” says the CBC, going on:.
“But now some of the world’s wealthiest citizens are having their undisclosed financial records laid bare.
“An unprecedented leak of documents is revealing the closely guarded investment information of more than 100,000 people around the world, including hundreds of Canadians.”
It says it says it “partnered with the ICIJ to gain exclusive Canadian access to the information,” adding:
“Thirty-seven media outlets in 35 other countries are also involved.”
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Oligarchs and dictators’ daughters apparently have a penchant for bunkering their assets on the British Virgin Islands. Barons and composers, on the other hand, seem to prefer the Cook Islands. To cheat on taxes, they create bogus firms with imaginative names like Tantris, Moon Crystal or Sequoia.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, easily won reelection on Tuesday. Unconfirmed official results have Evers beating opponent State Representative Don Pridemore by 61 percent to 39 percent. Pridemore, who has served in the Wisconsin State Assembly since 2004, supported a far right education agenda, including placing armed volunteers at schools in response to the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Pridemore was also known for telling a Tea Party group in 2011 that he would back a law that would throw federal officials in jail if they tried to implement the federal health care reform bill, the Affordable Care Act, in Wisconsin.
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In a victory for working families, New York is poised to become the largest U.S. city to require businesses offer paid sick days to workers. Community activists and labor leaders struck a deal with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to allow a vote on a paid sick leave ordinance that would cover almost 1 million people. But workers in more than 700 other large American cities must choose between spreading their illness and getting paid.
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Censorship
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This story is incredible. Saint Louis University is threatening a faculty member with copyright infringement claims for his decision to take a survey of his colleagues. It appears that the faculty and the administration have been battling with each other recently, leading to a “no confidence” vote by students and faculty of the University provost. In response, the Board of Trustees sent around a “climate survey” to faculty, staff and students — but some had complained that the questions were not useful and only asked one question about the leadership of that provost, Lawrence Biondi. In response, some of the faculty designed their own “supplemental survey” for other faculty members that included more questions, specifically about Biondi’s relationship with the faculty itself.
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Privacy
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Sheriff’s office exploring use of drones
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City Council here is set to vote on a proposal Thursday to ban drones in residential areas, what could be the first law of its kind in California.
The proposed ordinance bans the flying of “unmanned aircraft that can fly under the control of a remote pilot or by a geographic positions system (GPS) guided autopilot mechanism” up to 400 feet above areas zoned residential. Anything flying higher is in Federal Aviation Administration jurisdiction.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday gave explicit permission for companies to use media such as Twitter and Facebook to announce key nuggets of information, but it turns out that many public companies still aren’t sure about what they are allowed to do.
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Compuware’s latest foray into mobility is a free bundle of cloudy code for dropping into mobile apps, which it will then monitor and measure for developers’ (and Compuware’s) benefit.
Compuware’s Application Performance Management (APM) lurks quietly in the corner of an app, reporting back every now and then but mostly watching for a show-stopping event to let the app’s developer know what went wrong and how it might be avoided next time.
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Civil Rights
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The Associated Press, the largest news-gathering outlet in the world, will no longer use the term “illegal immigrant.”
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Ever since American soldiers massacred men, women and children here more than a century ago in the last major bloodshed of the American Indian wars, this haunted patch of rolling hills and ponderosa pines has embodied the combustible relationship between Indians and the United States government.
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Fallout from Amira Hass’s article on Palestinian stone-throwing shows that as far as Israelis are concerned, any and every form of resistance against the occupation is illegitimate.
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It’s kind of sad that anyone could possibly think that it’s okay for the government to have secret interpretations of the law in a free and open society. “The law” is more than just the legislation itself, but the collection of caselaw and interpretations, combined with the legislation, that make up the overall “law.” If some of those interpretations are kept secret, then how can the public obey the law? The answer is that they can’t — which is why secret interpretations shouldn’t be allowed. The Justice Department, however, prefers to keep some things secret, and it’s asking the court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the EFF seeking to find out how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is interpreting parts of the FISA Amendments Act, after it was revealed (late on a Friday) that the court found at least one situation in which the feds collected info in violation of the 4th Amendment.
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