07.20.12
Posted in Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 10:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Controlling behaviour using money (bribe)
Summary: SUSE developers unite with Microsoft as LibreOffice developers with financial Microsoft ties help advance the agenda of their backers from Microsoft
THE relationship between Go-OO and LibreOffice continues to remind us to be at least somewhat vigilant. Money buys results. As part of Novell’s deal with Microsoft it was required to advance OOXML. It’s a form of bribe, but nothing compared to the other fraudulent activities that Microsoft used to advance OOXML. The elusive format was not even implemented by Microsoft and it led to many incompatibilities. Based on this news, Office continues to be a fragmented mess, which is a way of encouraging everyone to always buy the newest version. To quote: “The newly unveiled productivity suite from Microsoft, Office 2013, won’t be running on older operating systems like Windows XP and Vista it has been revealed.
“As part of Novell’s deal with Microsoft it was required to advance OOXML.”“Office 2013 is said to be only compatible with PCs, laptops or tablets that are running on the latest version of Windows i.e. either Windows 7 or not yet released Windows 8. According to a systems requirements page on Microsoft for Office 2013 customer preview, the Office 2010 successor is only compatible with Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012. This was confirmed by a Microsoft spokesperson.”
More interestingly, some body we have heard of before (the so-called “Open Source Business Alliance” which we wrote about before because of rogue agenda), together with SUSE connections (Microsoft-funded), is helping the promotion of OOXML:
Developers from a project hosted by the Open Source Business AllianceGerman language link are working to improve the compatibility of LibreOffice and OpenOffice with Microsoft Office. The German municipalities of Munich, Jena and Freiburg, and the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland, the Swiss Federal IT Steering Unit (FITSU) and the Swiss Canton of Vaud – who together use OpenOffice on around 18,000 workstations – have jointly raised €140,000 (approximately £109,000) funding for the project.
[...]
In December, the OSB Alliance’s Office Interoperability Working Group introduced a specification which mapped out the improvements that need to be made in these areas. The extensions are being implemented by developers from SUSE and by Hamburg-based open source specialists Lanedo.
So here we have SUSE/Novell, once again helping to demote ODF, giving a lift to OOXML in government instead. As for SUSE itself, its latest build is being reviewed:
In overall, I was more comfortable with the KDE version than the Gnome version.
Let’s hope SUSE does not promote OOXML in KDE as well. KDE has probably been most outspoken in its stance against OOXML. A few hours ago in our IRC channel Ryan asked: “Does LibreOffice still keep creepy metadata in ODF files like Microsoft’s office suite does in all its file formats?” LibreOffice developers should recognise the fact that some of them, the people from SUSE, are funded indirectly by Microsoft. There are ways for LibreOffice to help the Microsoft agenda at the expense of other competitors. Microsoft’s occupation of rivals will be recalled in the next post. █
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07.18.12
Posted in Google, Microsoft, Office Suites at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The corporate press helps confirm that Microsoft’s technical failure takes its toll and the Office franchise is in jeopardy
THE folks from CBS say that “[a]ccording to a new report, the company [Microsoft] is doing everything from cutting prices to increasing commissions to resellers to stop enterprise customers from using Google Apps.”
The original report from Murdoch’s press basically helps confirm that Microsoft is hurt in the area that’s its biggest cash cows. Microsoft imitates the competition, but as we already saw, its downtime issues (caused perhaps by reliance on Windows) will continue to plague it [1, 2, 3]. Over the long run, Microsoft’s cash cow might take a massive hit, which considering Microsoft’s losses [1 2, 3] can put the company’s survival at peril. █
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06.30.12
Posted in Office Suites at 7:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Contents
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The Command Line Interface has its uses, acknowledged Mobile Raptor blogger Roberto Lim, “but no piece of technology targeted at the consumer market should ever require that something be done via CLI; keep it as an option or you can take it out all together. “If it is there, it should just be there for the IT people or tech support to use when you encounter a problem.”
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So, the naysayers are “out to lunch”. Their pet “video editing” section is dominated by GNU/Linux:
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Desktop
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Thanks to Google and the Chromebook, the Linux desktop is getting its chance to make a retail come-back.
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Every tech writer on the Internet seems to want to be the one to crack the code and figure out what Microsoft plans to do with Surface. I thought I was one of them until I spent three days trying to write this article. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t really care what Microsoft’s plans are or if they’ll pan-out for them. They bore me. They’re irrelevant now.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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You must already know about the funny codenames of each release of Ubuntu. However, Im sure not many of you know that Linux kernels have their codenames too. And of course, these codenames are weird and funny as hell, like Homicidal Dwarf Hamster, Pink Farting Weasel or Sheep on Meth. ( And as you can guess, Linus Torvalds is the author of these codenames). The codename of each Linux kernel can be found in the makefile of the source trees.
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Graphics Stack
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As part of a GSoC project through the Linux Foundation, some of the popular open-source DRM graphics drivers are being back-ported to older Linux kernel releases.
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While Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors are only two months old, there’s already a feature-rich driver and the full programming documentation available. Meanwhile for the Radeon HD 7000 series from AMD that is now more than six months old, the open-source driver is still incomplete and the documentation is lacking.
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There’s some hope for NVIDIA laptop customers that rely upon their binary Linux graphics drivers that one day hope to utilize Optimus Technology.
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Following the changing of the Catalyst release schedule and dropping old hardware support, Catalyst 12.6 for Linux has been officially released. However, it’s already disappointing some Linux binary driver users.
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Applications
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Tomahawk is a free and open-source music player that allows you to connect your other machines and friends via Jabber, Google Chat and Twitter. You can browse and play their libraries, playlists and stations.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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John Diamond, the CEO of COR Entertainment LLC, has shared with Phoronix that the plan is to release Alien Arena: Reloaded on 6 July. The Alien Arena: Reloaded Edition game will feature twelve new levels, two new player characters, and an innovative new weapon when it comes to the game assets.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Of course, KDE is very dear to me and to Kolab and so, in addition to me, there will be a few other members of the Kolab community will meet at this year’s Akademy. Key contributors Christian Mollekopf and Jeroen van Meeuwen will be present and available to discuss Kolab related issues. Jeroen will also give a talk about release engineering processes using KDE as an example. His experience from the Fedora Project, Cyrus IMAP, Cyrus SASL and from his roleas a Systems Architect at Kolab Systems provides him with ample experience to give some insight into how release engineering and quality assurance within the fast-paced KDE project could be improved further.
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Good news for KDE lovers. If you own a Raspberry Pi, you will now be able to run your favorite K Desktop Environment and integrated programs in it. Thanks to a developer named Luca Tringali.
Tringali got a original Debain release that supports ARM architecture and built an image with basic Plasma desktop and utilities.
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GNOME Desktop
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One of the reasons many Gnome users were frustrated with default Gnome 3 Shell was the lack of power off button by default. All you got when clicking of the user menu at top right was a suspend option. You might have to waste some moments to search Google and learn to use the Alt key to get Power Off.
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The highly anticipated mechanism which is used to bar Gnome users from performing certain actions is on the way, and its name is Lockdown.
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Few days ago the new BoD was elected and today Gnome Live addresses the roles and responsibilities for each member.
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The latest release of the Parted Magic versatile partitioning tool gives users the option to install NVIDIA’s proprietary video driver. Instead of using the bundled open source nouveau driver, which may have problems on some hardware, users can download and install an NVIDIA binary driver module. When doing so, lead developer Patrick Verner notes that users will need to first disable the nouveau driver from the Fail Safe menu.
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We like to think that there is a Linux distribution for everything. There is a distribution for browsing the web, one for playing video games, one for privacy, and there is one for security – Qubes OS.
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With new major releases of Ubuntu and Fedora out the door in the past quarter, the developers at these and other community distributions are now hard at work on future versions of their respective Linux-based operating systems. Smaller, more specialised distributions have also been publishing new versions at a rapid pace.
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New Releases
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A few days ago, we posted about the release of Zorin OS Home and Ultimate edition. Today, Zorin OS group has released Zorin OS Business edition aimed at small and medium sized business organizations.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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There have been some rumors floating around that Mandriva was going to abandon their transition to RPM 5, a fork of the original Red Hat Package Manager. Mandriva began moving to RPM 5 quite a while ago because it offers increased performance and added features. So today Per Øyvind Karlsen, Mandriva Project Leader, confirmed that Mandriva has no plans to abandon RPM 5.
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Mandriva Open Source Relations Manager, Charles Schulz, today tried to clarify the foundation’s vision of structure of community interaction and resulting products. Instead of explaining, he posted a flow-chart to illustrate the relationships between downstream and upstream projects, contributors, and the Mandriva distribution.
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Gentoo Family
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With all the attention that tends to get heaped on Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora, it can be easy to forget about all the many other worthy contenders out there offering users a world of free choice.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat claims it is the No. 3 backer of OpenStack (in terms of code contribution) and a Platinum members of the 180-plus member OpenStack organization but it still won’t say when it plans to ship an OpenStack distribution.
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Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) will buy FuseSource, a 2010 spinout from Progress Software Corp. focused on open source integration and messaging products, according to an announcement Thursday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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When it comes to open source technologies, the decision is even tougher since the technology by definition is open. It’s a challenge that Linux leader Red Hat grapples with all the time. This week, Red Hat decided to go the buy route, and acquired middleware player Fusesource for an undisclosed sum. In an interview with InternetNews, Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst explained why he decided to acquire Fusesource and how he goes about the buy versus build decision making process.
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Red Hat has announced dates for Red Hat Summit to be held next year. This is the ninth annual Red Hat summit and it will be held in Hynes Convention Center in Boston from June 10-14 2013. Leaders from technology industry as well as software professionals from different areas will join this conference.
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Red Hat has used the ongoing Red Hat Summit and JBossWorld 2012 conference to announce four open source products for operating hybrid clouds. They include OpenShift Enterprise PaaS Solution, a bundle of several Red Hat products that enables customers to set up a platform as a service (PaaS) on their own infrastructure, offering the same capability as Red Hat itself offers with its OpenShift public cloud products.
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Fedora
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Chris Smart today blogged that the next release of his Fedora-based Linux distribution would be delayed due to various developmental issues. Kororaa 17 Beta 1 was released June 3, but recent problems have thrown a wrench into the works.
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Fedora 17 S390x, a.k.a. IBM System z mainframe computers, isn’t a primary architecture but is a secondary arch similar to the recent Fedora 17 ARM release.
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Debian Family
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Unfortunately I have yet to get my hands on any Loongson hardware, but on OpenBenchmarking.org it was discovered that Linux benchmark results are beginning to appear for the ICT Loongson-3A V0.5 FPU.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical recently joined hands with Dell to sell Ubuntu pre-loaded laptops in 850 Dell stores across India. With this partnership, Canonical aims to make Ubuntu a common name in India.
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The canonical team has released second Alpha images of Ubuntu 12.10 Quantzal Quetzal.
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The final release of Ubuntu distribution version 12.10 is expected on 18 October 2012, with support through April 2014.
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To the best of my memory, this is something I’ve never done officially, a whole article dedicated to changing Ubuntu’s looks on a serious level. The simple reason is, there never has been any need for that, and there isn’t one now. But if you’re into uber-aesthetics, you might like this article.
Today, inspired by the work of a guy named mack_guy911, I will show you a handful of extremely beautiful themes and icons sets that you can use in any Unity-flavored Ubuntu or even Gnome 3 installation. We will also learn a little more about tweaking tools that can help you in this task, namely Ubuntu Tweak Tool and Ubuntu Tweak. Yes, those are two different programs. Please, follow me on a tour of beauty.
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Reportedly, the two Linux kernel based cousins- Ubuntu and Android can team up in the near future to knock Apple’s iOS down in the smartphone segment.
The strength of Apple lies in the simplicity and integrity of its iOS. Everything is tightly bound and that makes it relatively easy to use and easy to familiarize with. That’s probably what makes it the world’s hottest smart-phone selling brand.
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Flavours and Variants
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New features at a glance:
* Xfce 4.10
* mintMenu and MATE applets
* MDM
* Artwork improvements
* Search engines
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Phones
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Android
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The Google I/O conference is in full swing this week, and many of the rumors from recent weeks are coming true. As we discussed last week, Google did show off its new $199 7-inch Nexus tablet that will run the latest Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” mobile OS. Hands-on reviews of the tablet, many of them favorable, are appearing. Of course, Android 4.1 is also big news and will be at the heart of Google’s mobile strategy going forward. Here is more on what’s new in it.
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At the moment, the only officially-announced smartphones to use a quad-core Samsung Exynos processor are the Galaxy S III (not all versions), and the Meizu MX 4-core. But there’s a third one that should be announced soon: the Lenovo LePhone K860.
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With Android 4.1 Google Chrome has become the default web browser of Android devices. Which means that Chrome for Android is out of beta and get its first stable channel. However, Chrome is available only for devices above Android 4.0.
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Improvements include a smoother and more responsive UI across the system, a home screen that automatically adapts to fit your content, a powerful predictive keyboard, richer and more interactive notifications, larger payload sizes for Android Beam sharing and much more.
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Nexus Q was the surprise announcement that Google made during IO2012. Google claims that Nexus Q begins the new wave of content consumption devices. Nexus Q is primarily a streaming device which can stream content (movies and music) from the cloud to your entertainment system. It requires an Android tablet or phone to control it and then you can simply stream the content from your account.
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So you just got that shiny, new HTC One X or One S (or One V outside the U.S.), and suddenly it’s no longer running the latest version of Android. That’s no good. Neither is it HTC’s fault, but still.
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Google is making another attempt to fix the Android update problem at the Google I/O conference. The plan is to give smartphone, tablet and chip manufacturers earlier opportunities to adapt their current and new hardware to forthcoming Android versions. Google said that it hopes that this will allow users to receive their updates faster.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Citing the usual “industry sources,” Taiwan-based DigiTimes says the search giant is planning a 10-inch Android tablet with display panels to be supplied by Wintek and AU Optronics. Wintek is the manufacturer behind the touch-screen panels for the Nexus 7 and has already picked up orders for around 500,000 panels from Google for the 7-inch tablet, according to the company’s chairman.
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The 7-inch tablet also introduces to the world Android 4.1 aka Jelly Bean. The tablet is seen by press as a competitor to Amazon’s Kindle Fire, but Nexus 7 is more than just a content consumption device. The tablet features the new Google Maps which offers offline feature; all new offline voice search, and new Google Earth (with high quality 3D images).
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The Nexus 7 has been unveiled today to much fanfare. 2 years after the first mainstream Android tablet devices were introduced, Google has finally decided to make an official foray into a segment that is already populated by its immensely popular mobile operating system.
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Twitter has announced that its Iago load generator is now available as open source. Chris Aniszczyk, Open Source Manager at Twitter, says that the micro-blogging company created Iago because existing open source and commercial load generators couldn’t provide all of the capabilities it required.
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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BSD
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Continuing from the theme of the tests a few days back benchmarking Wheezy: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD vs. Debian GNU/Linux, here are some new numbers. Here’s some brief numbers concerning Debian GNU/kFreeBSD versus DragonflyBSD 3.0.2.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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He explains that innovation doesn’t require a PHD, and that open source development is a great example of innovation and a way to bring different opinions together to advance technology.
“Open source software is an innovation in that it brings together in a productive way programmers who disagree on many things,” Mickos said. He goes on to list other examples such as Facebook, the touchscreen, and e-learning.
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Standards/Consortia
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Adobe’s non-free technology Flash is dying a slow death. The company earlier announced that they will discontinue Flash for Android devices. Now, the company has posted that there won’t be any updates of Flash Player for mobile browsers. Adobe Flash will no longer be available in Google Play Store after August 15.
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The Competition Bureau is supposed to defend the Canadian economy from anti-competitive acts like exclusive dealing, bundling, price-fixing and the like. Despite some good work, the departing chief did nothing about M$ and its “partners” excluding GNU/Linux from retail shelves all across Canada. She did nothing about bundling that other OS with nearly every PC sold in Canada for decades. Clearly that prevents competition for operating systems and prevents competition on price/performance. Shame…
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Health/Nutrition
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The World Trade Organization (WTO) issued a final ruling today against the U.S. country-of-origin labeling (COOL) law. This popular pro-consumer policy, which informs shoppers where meat and other foods were raised or grown, enjoys the support of 93% of Americans, according to a 2010 Consumers Union poll. Now Congress must gut or change the law to avoid the application of punitive trade sanctions.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs cannot wiggle out of class action securities fraud claims by arguing that public statements that it valued “honesty,” “integrity” and “fair dealing” were “puffery,” not promises, a federal judge ruled.
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You’d imagine, as the economy continues to tank, as banks continue to reveal themselves as incompetent (RBS and NatWest) or crooked (Barclays et al), as Europe drifts deeper into turmoil, that the two political parties who delivered these conditions might be interested in working out between them what brought matters to this grievous state. But the Westminster setup means they don’t have to do anything so sensible. One of the things that both the Conservatives and Labour love about the first-past-the-post electoral system – maybe even the thing they love about it most – is that they have always got each other to blame.
Take Private Finance Initiatives, under which – across the public sector – taxpayers owe around £229bn for assets worth a capital value of £56bn. Hospitals, particularly, are struggling under a debt burden that obliges them to spend up to a fifth of their income on PFI commitments each year. PFI was imported from Australia as a wheeze under Thatcher, first implemented under Major, enthusiastically embraced under Blair, then under Brown, then utilised yet further under Cameron.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) (GS), the fifth- biggest U.S. bank by assets, eliminated several dozen jobs to pare expenses in the U.S., according to a person familiar with the matter.
The cuts affected positions in New York, New Jersey and Salt Lake City, Utah, according to the person, who wasn’t authorized to comment and asked for anonymity. Another person with knowledge of the matter said the reductions affected administration and other jobs that don’t produce revenue.
Wall Street firms are targeting expenses as trading slows and new regulations pinch profit. Goldman Sachs employed 32,400 people at the end of March, down 8 percent in 12 months. Reuters reported the cuts earlier.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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CNN jumped the gun this morning when it erroneously announced that the Supreme Court had struck down the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate — appearing to side with the court’s most vocal critics of the healthcare overhaul.
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Civil Rights
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Intellectual Monopolies
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As the TPP negotiations progress, concern about the almost total lack of transparency (and the USTR’s laughable statements to the contrary) is starting to gain significant attention. Most recently, we wrote about Rep. Darrell Issa’s request to observe the next round of negotiations, and before that, Senator Ron Wyden’s quizzing of Ron Kirk about transparency during a senate hearing. So far, the USTR has managed to brush this off by claiming everybody else in Congress was happy—but, like almost everything the USTR says about TPP, that too is blatantly untrue. Over 130 members of the House of Representatives have now chimed in by signing on to a much longer open letter addressed to USTR Ron Kirk, expressing specific concerns about the TPP process.
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So called “cybersecurity” and “intellectual property” are two very different issues, but it seems that politicians are realizing that they get further by screaming about “cybersecurity threats” than about “intellectual property infringement.” The latest proposed appropriations bill for the State Department includes a role for a “coordinator for cyber issues” — which is an awful title.
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The problem arises from natural selection. The more we use an antibiotic — especially if we use it carelessly, failing to complete the full course — the more we select for bacteria that are partially resistant to it. Over time, those bacteria thrive, displacing bacteria that are unable to withstand the antibiotic. Eventually, bacteria that are completely resistant to that particular drug are likely to evolve — a situation that can have dire consequences. For example, even five years ago, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) was killing more people in the US annually than AIDS.
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Copyrights
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As Techdirt reported in 2010, the passage of the Digital Economy Act was one of the most disgraceful travesties of the UK parliamentary process in recent times; it was badly drafted, hardly revised and then pushed through with almost no debate in the dying moments of the previous government. Since then, two UK ISPs — BT and TalkTalk — have challenged the Act in the courts, but lost earlier this year.
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The battle between Megaupload (David) and the US Government and the MPAA (Goliath) started out with a flurry of blows against the New Zealand based site staff, but in recent weeks the blows have all been falling stateside.
Today, the New Zealand High Court ruled that the search warrants used to raid Dotcom’s mansion were illegal, casting uncertainty over the entire ‘Mega Conspiracy’ case.
An earlier ruling by High Court Justice Judith Potter concluded that a previous search and seizure order was invalid because of improper paperwork. The documents were later corrected.
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ACTA
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On June 25th, the European Union Parliamentary committee voted to reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). This signifies a major blow to ACTA, but its standing in the EU still comes down to the European Parliament vote scheduled for July 4th.
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06.26.12
Posted in IBM, Mandriva, Office Suites, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 10:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: An interview with the Open Source Relations Manager of Mandriva, one who is boasting a pivotal role in the free office suites space
MR. Charles-H. Schulz is prominent in the Free/open source world and he is no stranger to Techrights. 4 years ago we wrote about him in relation to ODF advocacy and a year later we interviewed him. Recently, Charles got an appointment at Mandriva and last week he also got married. We decided to catch up and learn more about Mandriva, Openoffice.org, and LibreOffice.
Techrights: Please explain to us your role in Mandriva.
Charles-H. Schulz: My official title is “Open Source Relations Manager”. My role is to help with the general open source strategy of Mandriva SA, and that implies several levels of involvement, either with the community or with the corporate level as well.
How does one go about transitioning from a corporate-centric model into a community-based one?
The answer is both simple and complex at the same time. Let’s define the terms here for the sake of clarity. A corporate centric model of open source governance, or better, a corporate centric model of FOSS project is a model where one corporation defines the project, is supposed to reap the benefits out of it, has a weak governance structure, and where most of the contributors are individuals who contribute to the project are individuals who are employed by the said corporation or by its affiliates.
“It’s a model that allows for a diversity of stakeholders to get involved at various levels of the project, from the contributor to the leadership.”A community-centric model is not a model where there are no corporations around. It’s a model that allows for a diversity of stakeholders to get involved at various levels of the project, from the contributor to the leadership. It is also a model where the governance structure tends to be more defined, because the project is actually much more independent and does not rest on one sponsor for most of its resources and contributors.
So how do we transition from the former to the latter is by assessing what the main sponsor can offer, and by setting up a governance structure that allows a diversity of contributors to get involved. The resources question here is crucial. What do we need? How many servers? What’s the migration process? And of course, what’s the governance, and how do we make the new project truly independent from the former sponsor (regardless of the friendly or unfriendly relationship with this sponsor)?
I think the keyword here is “contributor”. If you have enough contributors outside the main sponsor who are coming from diverse affiliations, then you have a sustainable project.
That’s the kind of questions we have been studying on the 19th of June in Paris together with the Mandriva Linux community representatives. I think the results are very encouraging, and that we manage to make sense of what we want to do, how we are going to do it and why we do it; now we are entering the actual phase of work, and we’ll try to keep this committee work effective while trying to involve the community at large on specific areas.
What office suite does Mandriva use by default and why?
Mandriva uses LibreOffice by default. And if you ask why, it’s simply because it’s the best free office suite ever.
You have had experience ushering a community from one project (OpenOffice.org) to another (LibreOffice) amid times of uncertainty and great risk. Are these are parallels to this case?
I think there are, although here we have the main sponsor, Mandriva SA, who is very open about the reasons why it can no longer sustain a Linux distribution project on its own, and therefore is working directly with the community to make an independent project emerge. That’s the main difference. There are parallels though that tend to be more subtle: What we’re trying to achieve, just like with the transition from Openoffice.org to LibreOffice, is a culture shift from “it will get done by someone else” to “we must do it”. In other words, there is the same demand and urge to set up a fully meritocratic system.
How is collaboration between OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice coming along?
You mean between Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice? Because Openoffice.org is dead, and it had several children. The collaboration is limited on practical terms because of the licensing differences, but we are rebasing our code on the latest Apache OpenOffice in order to be able to have a cleaner licensed base. Right now, we must still deal with the LGPL v3, and while it’s a great licence it cannot change over time; so we have embarked in a relicensing effort towards MPL v2 and GPL v3+ and we are looking forward the interesting switch at Apache OpenOffice from the Openoffice.org codebase to the Symphony codebase; there will certainly be some code we might be able to reuse. Although, when you come to think of it, it’s funny to enter the Apache Incubation Process with one software you’re inheriting, and to use a different software you’ve also inherited just after the incubation process is completed
Mandriva was once one of the most used (if not the most used) distributions of GNU/Linux. Where would you position the distribution on those terms in 2012?
“What we will end up seeing in 2012 and onwards, is a great community powered distribution that’s separate from the company itself; and the company offering a range of Linux-powered products and platforms for the enterprise and the education market.”Let’s face it, the Mandriva Linux distribution was for years the most widely used distribution around. It’s not the case anymore. Several changes happen in the GNU/Linux distribution market and Mandriva never really caught them. It’s not so much that the distribution became outdated: if anything, using Mandriva today, or its fork, Mageia, shows just as advanced, beautiful and user-friendly the distribution is. But the alignment between a sound corporate strategy and the community side of things was never really thought of until now. What we will end up seeing in 2012 and onwards, is a great community powered distribution that’s separate from the company itself; and the company offering a range of Linux-powered products and platforms for the enterprise and the education market. So if anything, you’ll see more of Mandriva as a corporate distribution, and more of the Mandriva Linux community as a community distribution; there is no fork here, but a friendly and productive relationship with no exclusive reliance on each other.
Congratulations on the wedding. Have you gotten the wife using GNU/Linux yet?
Oh, when I met Melissa she was already using the Gimp on Windows. She’s a very creative individual, and a few months after the beginning of our relationship, her old laptop broke. I introduced her to GNU/Linux; she used various distributions: Ubuntu for a long time, but also Mandriva, and now she’s a very happy Fedora user. I should also add that she created all of our wedding decorations, from the menus to the walls,
with the Gimp; she’s a poweruser of the Gimp and there are several community members, including me, who approached her asking whether she’d be interested in providing video tutorials for the project. █
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04.17.12
Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Office Suites at 4:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Bits and pieces from the news about phones and office suites
THE duopoly from the West Coast has met Linux and it doesn’t like what it’s seeing.
Android makes the hypePhone less desirable and analysts notice this. “Walter Piecyk, an analyst with BTIG Research, issued a rare downgrade on shares of Apple Inc. on Monday,” says a pro-Apple site, “moving his recommendation from “Buy” to “Neutral.” In a research note to clients, Mr. Piecyk said that changes to aggressive carrier subsidy policies will result in fewer smartphone upgrades. He also expressed doubt about Apple’s ability to wrangle US$600 per iPhone in emerging markets where carrier subsidies are few and far between.”
Microsoft itself is deep in the gutter of mobile platforms, as a matter of course.
Microsoft has been relying on people buying a computer with Windows or OS X on it, then paying for a copy of the cash cow, Microsoft Office. Now that more people move into mobile computing (and off Windows) this cash cow is in danger. Even Microsoft-affiliated publications like Slate dare to call for the death of Office (or Word). The crux of the argument:
Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone’s archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It’s time to give up on Word.
People prefer to be given URLs to access work through. This is why Microsoft plays catchup with Office 360 (5 days downtime).
Cash cows like Office and iPhone are losing share to Google, so it’s no wonder that the duopolists attack Google together. █
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03.28.12
Posted in Novell, Office Suites, OpenDocument, OpenSUSE at 3:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Despite Novell involvement in Go-OO (and later LibreOffice), the rolling release of OpenSUSE does not have it
OPENSUSE’S rolling release gets the latest KDE while the mainline release shows almost no signs of real progress. Greg K-H, who recently left SUSE, writes about the subject and notes that LibreOffice cannot be included:
From there the report states that Linux kernel 3.3 is in Tumbleweed and Greg K-H said it seems to be working well. Also in Tumbleweed is KDE 4.8, which was released by the KDE project on January 25. Because of the KDE 4.8 update, Greg K-H explained that LibreOffice had to be dropped because it won’t build with current packages in Tumbleweed or Factory. A bug report has been filed and hopefully will be addressed soon.
It seems as though Greg cares about SUSE even after leaving the company. Since a lot of the community jumped ship there is not much that can be done. █
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09.10.11
Posted in America, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument at 8:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Photo by Espen Moe
Summary: The impact of leaked diplomatic cables on current affairs and perceptions people have about companies, government, and elected officials
OVER the past day or two we have been receiving a record number of links to this site, mostly pointing to Cablegate posts. People from all over the world share with their friends what they previously suspected but could not prove.
One person from Brazil is pulling skeletons out of Microsoft’s closet and embarrassing the cowardly, supine government at the same time. Following some blog posts about American diplomats lobbying for OOXML (including our own post), we are notified about this very detailed post which provides further background to the leak from someone who was nearby:
Let me make clear here that I don’t believe that this meeting between Microsoft and the major representative from the American Government in Brazil has been a personal initiative of Mr. Michel Levy, but for me it was an corporative initiative. Even being a Microsoft employee, Mr. Michel Levy is a Brazilian, and I prefer not to believe that he has, on its own initiative, decided to start an initiative to put the American Government against the Brazilian Government, thus violating our sovereignty and our national technical merit.
The first question that I leave here is on how many other countries that voted NO to OpenXML the same kind of initiative also happened, and how much of these countries “have accepted” an eventual intervention by the U.S. government.
Yes, the intervention may have occurred, because if you notice the general line of argumentation used here in Brazil, the national technical decision is presented as being an initiative against the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), and one of the things that cause retaliation in free trade agreements with the United States are eventual IPR violations. I have my own collection of rumors from the times of OpenXML, where possible sanctions motivated by IPR violations were brought to the negotiation table to get the governmental votes in some countries (if your country has changed the vote after the voting in September 2007, please investigate and you will probably find a ‘key’ governmental role on that vote changing). Maybe one day, WikiLeaks could help us to investigate that too!
[...]
Finally, they try to insinuate that the ODF is an anti-American standard. I confess that I would like to know what IBM, Oracle, Google and Red Hat (and other North American companies) think about the that, since they work hard on the past years on its development and worldwide adoption. Actually I prefer that these companies explain directly to the American Government if the ODF is anti-American, and I still hope they ask clarification from the American Government about Microsoft’s similar initiatives in other countries during the 2007 and 2008 years.
For those who did not follow the whole story, the ODF was adopted in Brazil, OpenXML rejected here and just didn’t had a major role on the international scene, because we were silenced on the last day of the BRM, just when we would submit a proposal that could change the end of this history. I’ve already told this story here.
Special thanks to WikiLeaks, for helping us get the skeletons out of the closet. For those who want to understand how Microsoft deals and negotiates with governments that have pro-FLSOO policies, it’s worth reading this other cable here.
Well, now there is proof too.
Several days ago we found out what American government officials were saying about Neelie Kroes. We published this yesterday and Jan Wildeboer notes that there is plenty more where that came from. Sooner or later we shall get around to it. This promises to change the way Microsoft and its lobbying practices are widely perceived. █
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07.05.11
Posted in Microsoft, Office Suites at 7:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Por El Centro Legal Por La Libertad de Software | 29 de junio 2011
(ODF | PDF | Original en softwarefreedom.org)
El Microsoft tan exageradamente promovido reemplazo de sus $ 20 billones por año [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/technology/business-computing/28soft.html] de negocios de Microsoft Office basado en la “nube”, viene con nuevas características como la de tiempo real multi-usuario de colaboración, la mensajería instantánea, video conferencia, reuniones en línea y mucho más [http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/plans/small-business/im-online-meetings.aspx]. Lo que Microsoft no te dice en su comunicado de prensa es que cuando usted, su negocio o sus amigos, se inscribe en ella, usted podría estar recibiendo una característica que no se anuncia así: ESPIONAJE GRATIS.
Una solicitud de patentes [http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20110153809&OS=20110153809&RS=20110153809] publicada por la USPTO (Oficina de Patentes y Marcas de los Estados Unidos) el jueves pasado revela que Microsoft ha estado investigando, ya desde antes de diciembre de 2009, la forma de redirigir las llamadas VoIP para interceptar/redirigir a los dispositivos a los agentes de la ley. El método descrito por la solicitud de patente es tortuoso, subvertir los protocolos de enrutamiento para que los paquetes enviados por cualquier persona marcados por una solicitud de control se dirigirán a través de un agente de grabación. La solicitud describe los “sistemas de juego, los protocolos de mensajería instantánea que transmiten las aplicaciones de audio. Skype y aplicaciones como Skype, de reuniones, software de video conferencia, y similares”, así como tecnologías que pueden utilizar estos métodos. En otras palabras, Microsoft tiene razones para creer que su método de intercepción se puede aplicar a la recién adquirida Skype (recientemente desplegada en el Congreso [http://blogs.skype.com/en/2011/06/skype_is_in_da_house.html]), Xbox 360, y las características de video conferencia en la Oficina 365.
La publicación de la presente solicitud, junto con el anuncio del nuevo servicio de Microsoft destaca la necesidad de adopción de soluciones de software libre y de código abierto. Cuando las mismas empresas hacen las herramientas que necesitamos para mantenernos conectados están investigando las formas de espiar a sus clientes, ¿por qué deberíamos confiar en ellos y por qué no habríamos que buscar algo mejor? En SFLC que utilizar un servidor Asterisk [http://www.asterisk.org/] y el softphone Twinkle [http://mfnboer.home.xs4all.nl/twinkle/index.html] para proporcionar una comunicación libre, voz encriptada en cualquier lugar donde cualquiera de nosotros tenga una conexión de red. Nuestro sistema de software libre proporciona comunicaciones seguras y nos ahorra dinero. Cada pequeña empresa, así como todos los grandes van a tener grandes ganancias mediante el uso de VoIP, pero no habrá ganancias empresariales por la pérdida de su privacidad. Microsoft está ofreciendo “comunicaciones unificadas” con unificado espionaje probablemente construido dentro de su software. El Software Libre trabaja para su negocio, no para la gente que piensa que su negocio es negocio de ellos.
A no ser que sea indicado de otra manera, todo contenido es licenciado bajo el CC-BY-SA 3.0.[http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/legalcode] █
Traducción hecha por Eduardo Landaveri, Administrator of the Spanish portal of Techrights.
Translation produced by Eduardo Landaveri, the administrator of the Spanish portal of Techrights.
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