The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced that its affiliate organization, LPI-Nigeria, has successfully completed a program of free Linux training for youth in an effort to promote workplace development of skilled Open Source professionals. Lifeforte International High School (Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria), the LPI-Nigeria affiliate, has undertaken a two year program of training, Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) exam lab events, and other special initiatives with the country's National Youth Service Corps and government agencies to promote this goal.
With GNU/Linux, you only need one copy of an app running per terminal server to serve N users simultaneously, greatly increasing how many processes and users one server can accommodate. With VDI and that other OS, each user needs several times as much RAM to get the job done and you have a licence fee or more per user. GNU/Linux thin clients are the way to go. You can use bare X on secure network or NX or X over SSH on a normal network.
At the time of publishing, an official X Server 1.8 release announcement has yet to appear, but you can find this new release tagged in Git.
Loomer have released Sequent in a wealth of standalone and plug-in formats: Windows EXE, VST, and RTAS; Mac OS X Audio Unit, VST, RTAS, and App; and Linux VST and executable. Sequent is a modular multi-effects unit that loomer says is the ideal tool for mangling audio on stage or in the studio. Here's some details directly from Loomer...
The new Chrome 5 is available in beta now for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, not that most Chrome users will ever have to know the version number if Google has anything to do with it.
Pagestream is a very powerful DTP tool. Although this was just a cursory glance, you should easily see how powerful this tool is. We will revisit this tool and dive deeper into how it is used and some cool tips and tricks with its usage on a later date. Until then, enjoy Pagestream!
Previously, we held a contest here of GamingBits.com for a closed beta key giveaway on the game Heroes of Newerth (PC, Mac, Linux). Although we ran out of beta keys a long time ago, the good news is that S2Games has just announced Heroes of Newerth will be entering open beta on March 31st and plans to release quite a few new updates as well. This means that beginning tomorrow, March 31st at 4PM PST, anyone can sign up to play the wildly addicting Heroes of Newerth game.
OpenTTD 1.0 has just been released! And do you know what this means? A whole new era of gaming fun.
BrainParty is extremely popular on the App Store at $0.99, packing 36 fun puzzle games into a single download and charting just how much gray matter you're packing. To share the fun with an even bigger audience, its developer has decided to release the source code under the GPLv3 license.
Time has came for first beta release for 2010 Spring version of Mandriva Linux. It’s now available through 32 and 64 DVD isos, as well as live-CD isos for GNOME and KDE on public mirrors
SimplyMEPIS 8.5 is ready for the spotlight with all the bugs and rough edges remaining in the final release candidate being ironed out. No new features have been introduced since RC3, but SimplyMEPIS 8.5 has plenty to offer users who want a great Linux experience right out of the box. SimplyMEPIS 8.5 is based on Debian Lenny, the latest stable release, but also comes with newer packages when the developers believed they were stable enough or offered enough improvements to justify their inclusion. The new release also marks the transition from the KDE 3.5 desktop environment to the newer KDE 4 software compilation.
“As Ubuntu Server continues its growth in enterprise environments, GroundWork’s Ubuntu-powered virtual appliance is a great solution for those looking to measure, monitor, and manage their mission critical Ubuntu infrastructure,” said John Pugh, Software Partner Manager, at Canonical. “And the virtual appliance form factor has added benefits for those considering cloud computing.”
Linux Mint developers are proud to announce the release of the Xfce version of Linux Mint 8. This latest release features the lightweight Xfce desktop environment and has most of the nautilus features in built.
Vyatta, an open source networking software and hardware specialist, has announced the release of version 6.0 of its Linux-based router and firewall software. The latest release of the networking distribution features a number of changes, including IPv6 and firewall enhancements, Netflow logging and analysis, and quality of service (QoS) improvements.
Going back to its core business of flogging network equipment, the firm launched a bunch of Linksys branded wireless routers. All the units support 802.11N but the most interesting of the bunch is the E2100L which has a Linux OS underpinning it. Linksys equipment became popular with hardware enthusiasts once the WRT54 firmware was hacked and spawned many router distributions, all based on Linux.
The firm realises that not everyone who purchases its kit will know, or particularly care, whether it is running Linux or not.
For Linux users, Linksys will offer the E2100L router ($119) with a USB port for added storage, enabling Linux to build apps and hacks on top.
While it's not yet clear how Linux is implemented in the E2100L, Linksys routers have long been popular with homebrew router firmware developers, so it's likely that the E2100L will cater to a do-it-yourself crowd.
The Motorola VE66 is a slider phone with a difference, offering as it does a wide array of useful functionality whilst also offering a Linux-based operating system. The handset measures 103 mm x 49 mm wide and is 15 mm thick, whilst weighing 121 g in weight.
When it was first announced last summer, the Nokia N900 was Nokia's answer to a smartphone market that seemed to be progressing rapidly without it. Not only was it highly specced - with a TI OMAP 3430 SoC - but it was the first smartphone to run the Maemo Linux-based operating system developed by Nokia.
So without further ado, let's have a look at it.
The MeeGo society, created by Intel and Nokia, on Thursday released the MeeGo allotment infrastructure and working arrangement base to developers. Imageries which were released include Intel Atom-based netbooks; ARM-based Nokia N900; and Intel Atom-based phones operating on the Moorestown chip.
Imad Sousou, Co-chair of the MeeGo Technical Steering Group, said that the images that had been downloaded were presently boot into workstation because user understandings for them have not yet been released. In the upcoming days, the imageries will boot from a USB stick or be straight sparked on the gadgets from developers' Linux Computers.
Appcelerator, maker of the open-source Titanium cross-platform mobile, desktop and Web development platform, has released a new survey of its developer base that indicates that, while still hot, developer interest in Apple's iPad is slightly on the wane from earlier this year, while interest in the Google Android platform continues to grow.
MIPS Technologies, the microprocessor core licensor, has identified penetration of the cellular handset market as its top corporate priority.
"It's at the top of my agenda," Sandeep Vij, who took over as CEO of MIPS last January, tells Electronics Weekly, "two customers are building chips for Android handsets based on MIPS - one in China and one in EMEA."
Librarians and strategists at Simon Fraser University (SFU) have collaborated with a team of middle-sized libraries to expand the open-source CUFTS Researcher suite of tools to include an Electronic Resources Management (ERM) system. This paper focuses on: the development and implementation of the CUFTS ERM; interoperability between CUFTS ERM and integrated library systems (Millennium); impact of the ERM on acquisitions, serials, and collections workflows and staffing at SFU Library and the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) Library.
Registration opened last week for the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON,) the premier free and open source software confence in Columbia, South Carolina. It's a great way to both educate and involve yourself, or your organization, in free and open software and technology.
Sitting in a restaurant, the designer and organizer of an upcoming Open Source conference saw tweets flashing on his screen. Within five minutes, the hashtag #pdxboom emerged. And so, Beels waded in, creating a Google map for people to mark where they were when they heard the bomb and how it sounded.
With the official start of the 2010 Major League Baseball season just days away, I thought it would be a great time to talk about two baseball related open source projects that I have on GitHub. These projects are Gameday API, and Baseball Tracker. Gameday API is a Ruby API that makes it easy for you to get live MLB statistics direct from the MLB servers that power their own Gameday application.
We just published a collection of articles on the state of play within open source design and innovation. It’s an interesting bunch of pieces, with op eds from the likes of Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst, who makes the case that Toyota should open source its cars’ software systems, and San José State innovation and entrepreneurship professor Joel West, who explains precisely why many big companies find collaboration and sharing control so challenging.
While most people have heard of Linux, an open-source community founded by individual programmers, increasingly companies are sponsoring their own communities and supplying development resources, infrastructure, and initial technology in the hope of attracting individuals and other businesses to help them create products and services for potential users. Sponsors also set rules for developing and using cooperatively developed software, to align the community to corporate objectives and avoid time-consuming negotiations inherent in shared governance.
But the tighter their control, the harder it is to attract outside participation. Sharing seems particularly challenging for large companies that are used to having their own way and running their own ecosystems. In the past five years, three big companies have created new open-source projects and communities to adapt Linux for use in mobile communication devices. None would be mistaken for a grassroots democracy.
Organizations that embrace "open" will innovate better, cheaper, and faster. Here are three things to think about when implementing open-design principles
Software developers have dominated the open source community, leading to the creation of a tremendous volume of free code used to build the foundations of Web sites and browsers. Less attention has been paid to how they look and how easy they are to use. Design often gets short shrift in open source.
The keystrokes are based on Emacs, a somewhat complicated but powerful text editor for Unix-based systems such as Linux. Some commands allow for rapidly skipping around a Web page or among open tabs, while others offer mode-sensitive editing features that work only while in a text entry area, for example.
Mozilla estimates that Firefox now handles almost 30 per cent of worldwide web access.
Unlike Google, Mozilla says it's not committed to the idea of integrating Adobe Flash with its web browser.
IELO, Mandriva, and Nexedi this week joined forces and formed the Free Cloud Alliance, which will work to push open source products for cloud computing.
At this morning’s Bunker Session, the central question of the relationship between cloud computing and open-source software was answered early and often. The one thing everybody agreed upon is that most clouds of any appreciable scale are built on open-source software and, in fact, might not even exist without it. As to whether there’s any money to be made with open source, however, there was enough contention to go around.
Pharmaceutical distributor has found the Ingres database better value and more forward moving since its 'commercial open source' makeover
Ingres Corporation and OpTech have entered into a strategic reseller agreement to bring open source solutions to government agencies across North America.
As part of the agreement OpTech, a systems integrator (SI), will promote Ingres Database and encourage migrations to Ingres Database from Oracle and Sybase IQ. The Ingres partner program offers ISVs and SIs the opportunity to innovate and profit, while building a loyal and satisfied customer base.
3. Open source. Open source solutions are popular and cutting-edge. For example, Hadoop, an open source solution for scalable and distributed data storage and data processing, is growing in popularity as it has shown the ability to handle massive data while using cheap commodity hardware (computers) similar to cloud environments. R, an open source analytic solution, is widely considered one of the most robust analytic tools available. Given that both solutions are open source, both communities work happily together to integrate. Other open source solutions that may help with additional tasks include the data integration toolkit Jitterbit and traditional open-source databases such as MySQL.
While there is no reason for Oracle to upset the Java community at this point, I highly doubt the company will continue with certain projects that are either direct open-source competition, or that require too much additional effort to be worth it for Oracle to continue.
By March 15, just a month before DrupalCon San Francisco, Robert Douglass of Acquia (news, site) reports that there were over 1700 registered attendees, which exceeds the sum total of all previous DrupalCons. The conference program was also announced for the San Francisco Drupalcon.
Alfresco Software, the leader in open source ECM today announced the closing of its 2009 fiscal year ending February 28th with 61 percent year-over-year revenue growth.
Alfresco reported both record fourth quarter earnings and record revenues for 2009. Growth is up 61% compared to last year. We look at these results with a grain of salt but in Alfresco's case it increased its staff 29 percent and also added 300 customer, including companies such as Cisco, Merck and the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Most people think of Pentaho as an open-source business intelligence vendor. In fact, the company's most popular product is ETL software. Pentaho now hopes to trade on that popularity with an integrated development environment (IDE) that blends data integration and business intelligence.
The idea behind Pentaho Data Integration 4.0, announced this week, is speeding development of BI applications by combining ETL, data modeling and data visualization into a single IDE. Pentaho's Kettle project has long provided the ETL part of that equation, and it has been notable success.
Tiger Shore Management Ltd, the operating company behind the OpenRate open source mediation and rating engine for use in telecommunications, utilities and logistics environments, today announced the release of the long awaited Version 1.1 of their flagship product. The OpenRate V1.1 “Convergent” release consolidates the improvements made during 2009 and the early part of 2010 in the real time processing framework, meaning that OpenRate now offers a true “configure once, use anywhere” high performance charging engine.
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OpenRate is a fully open source product, professionally supported with a dual licensing strategy that makes it accessible to both end user organizations and service providers or resellers.
Some people love 'em and others hate 'em. Now you can play with streamgraphs (seen here and here) yourself, whatever side you might be on. Lee Byron has made the code available on Github, under a BSD license.
Now it appears some of that transparency may be taking root. A California-based nonprofit is creating a suite of open source election software that lets users view and modify the underlying computer code. Proponents of the approach say exposing the code used by e-voting machines allows a worldwide community of experts to evaluate the security of the code and make beneficial modifications.
In October 2009, the nonprofit Open Source Digital Voting (OSDV) Foundation made the computer code for its election system available on the Web. The foundation also plans to make other open-source election tools available this year through its Trust the Vote initiative.
Now, open source advocates are teaming with tech industry giants and some electronic voting systems manufacturers to usher in a fundamental change to the way Americans cast their ballots. But it won't to be easy. There are still many reasons voters conjure to be skeptical of electronic voting. And the electronic voting systems market is populated by a small, and powerful group of manufacturers who still deploy proprietary technology to keep a competitive edge.
Once President Obama arrived at the White House, it was clear that the new administration had greater demands for connecting with constituents and using rich media. "We couldn't keep up with what the new media team wanted," Klause said.
Redington Value, the value-added distribution division of Redington Gulf, along with its Kuwait partner, KuwaitNet, discussed the importance of open source solutions to boost performance, reliability, security and cost- effectiveness among regional businesses, at the recently concluded conference ‘An Opportunity to re-invent IT with open source during the current economical challenges’. The event revolved around how open source solutions is an option that IT decision makers should consider as part of their IT strategy, and how it can unlock the potential of existing IT infrastructure. This was presented in context of Red Hat, a leading open source vendor.
Redington Value along with its Kuwait partner, KuwaitNet, discussed the importance of open source solutions to boost performance, reliability, security and cost- effectiveness among regional businesses, at the recently concluded conference 'An Opportunity to re-invent IT with open source during the current economical challenges'.
Open Source software (OSS) is standards based software that is free to acquire and free to modify. OSS runs the mission critical servers for global organisations like Google and IBM and is generally acknowledged to be less error-strewn and more secure than conventional proprietary software. Traditionally OSS occupied the uber-geek territories of operating system (Linux) and infrastructure (Apache Web server) but is increasingly available for line-of-business applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
This is the 4th article in a series giving a practical overview of intellectual property rights, targeted towards normal people like you. This one talks about the GPL (The GNU General Public License) and other such"open source" software licenses, and what does a regular business need to be careful about with regard to such licenses.
Many of those involved in steampunk do take a political stance by championing open source software, transparency and the use of licences that let anyone rip mix and burn what they have done.
I found out about www.openprosthetics.org in March, and immediately fell in love. NPR described the creator, Jonathan Kuniholm's mission, as an "open-source collaboration that makes its innovations available to anyone."
The free software community, along with the commercial ecosystem which surrounds it, is widely seen as having pointed the way toward successful, collaborative development of common resources. We have seen a number of attempts to port the free software model to other areas of endeavor. Open content, headlined by sites like Wikipedia, has adopted this model with considerable success. Other areas, such as open hardware, are still trying to find their way. Your editor recently read an interesting book (Rob Carlson's Biology is Technology), which raises an interesting question: is there a place for an ecosystem based around free "software" running on biological processors?
Google has announced that the deadline for student applications for this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event is Friday, the 9th of April at 19:00 GMT.
A trio of Google engineers have ported id Software's gib-filled first-person shooter Quake II to browsers— you know, for kicks—as a way to show just what HTML5 compatible web browsers are capable of.
In my opinion, Brightcove, like most of the others that are announcing support for HTML5, is not acting as a friend to the Open Source movement by going with H.264 encoding and not adding support for Theora.
Sandy Rossouw says she was among 366 people evicted from the Spes Bona Hostel in the district of Athlone three months ago because a stadium there is to be used for training by some of football's biggest stars. She is now one of five family members who squeeze into one bed in her shack at Blikkiesdorp.
"We were forced out of our hostel because of the World Cup," Rossouw said. "The hostel is on the main road to the stadium, only about 200 yards away. We didn't want to move because we're used to it and it's close to everything. But they said if we didn't get out, they would move us out with law enforcement.
An elaborate scheme to get the husband of a co-worker he was obsessed with locked up in jail, backfired on Ilkka Karttunen, a 48-year from Essex.
His plan was to get the husband arrested so that he could have a go at a relationship with the woman, and to do this he broke into the couple's home while they were sleeping, used their family computer to download child pornography and then removed the hard drive and mailed it anonymously to the police, along with a note that identified the owner.
Yep, the United States spent a staggering $607bn (€£402 bn) on defence in 2008. Currently engaged in what will likely be the longest ground war in US history in Afghanistan. Harbourer of thousands of nuclear weapons. 1.5m soldiers. Fleets of aircrafts, bombs and seemingly endless amounts of military technology.
Alan Johnson got his way on mephedrone, but good drug policy depends on looking beyond the media-driven demand for action
More than €£1tn may have flowed out of Africa illegally over the last four decades, most of it to western financial institutions, according to a new report.
Even using conservative estimates, the continent lost about $1.8tn (€£1.18tn) – meaning Africans living at the end of 2008 had each been deprived of an average of $989 (€£649) since 1970, according to the US-based research body Global Financial Integrity (GFI).
JPMorgan Chase’s crisis lead appears to have vanished. Its investment bank was crowned king of the downturn. Last year, it sat atop the rankings for debt and equity underwriting, and was No. 2 in merger work, behind Goldman Sachs. But it looks as if the edge is proving hard to keep.
...JP Morgan was prepared to pay whatever it took to buy off officials in Jefferson County. In 2002, during a conversation recorded in Nixonian fashion by JP Morgan itself, LeCroy bragged that he had agreed to funnel payoff money to a pair of local companies to secure the votes of two county commissioners. "Look," the commissioners told him, "if we support the synthetic refunding, you guys have to take care of our two firms." LeCroy didn't blink. "Whatever you want," he told them. "If that's what you need, that's what you get. Just tell us how much."
Just tell us how much. That sums up the approach that JP Morgan took a few months later, when Langford announced that his good buddy Bill Blount would henceforth be involved with every financing transaction for Jefferson County. From JP Morgan's point of view, the decision to pay off Blount was a no-brainer. But the bank had one small problem: Goldman Sachs had already crawled up Blount's trouser leg, and the broker was advising Langford to pick them as Jefferson County's investment bank.
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That such a blatant violation of anti-trust laws took place and neither JP Morgan nor Goldman have been prosecuted for it is yet another mystery of the current financial crisis. "This is an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior," says Taylor, the former regulator.
If I know my Masters of the Universe– and I think I do!– the message is this: “blow us.” Or variants thereof. Prove me wrong.
For the past year, as its name was sullied, Goldman maintained a bunker strategy, largely fending off media inquiries. (The one major exception proved to be a disaster. After Blankfein sat for an interview with the London Times in November 2009, he famously quipped, when he thought he was off the record, that he was just a banker "doing God's work.") That fleeting attempt at humor created a weeks-long media storm, after which Goldman stopped trying to defend itself.
"Goldman is trying to pretend it didn't know any better, while also trying to say they are great risk managers," says Tavakoli, the president of Chicago advisory firm Tavakoli Structured Finance. "Goldman cannot have it both ways."
As part of a broad coalition of privacy groups, think tanks, technology companies, and academics, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today issued recommendations for strengthening the federal privacy law that regulates government access to private phone and Internet communications and records, including cell phone location data.
The "Digital Due Process" coalition includes major Internet and telecommunications companies like Google, Microsoft, and AT&T as well as advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). The coalition has joined together to preserve traditional privacy rights and clarify legal protections in the face of a rapidly changing technological landscape.
TOURISM Australia is investigating legal action against an internet "brandjacker'' who is lampooning its new $150 million advertising campaign.
The site is targeting Tourism Australia's new campaign, There's nothing like Australia.
Late one Saturday night in February 2007, a stand-up comic named Joe Rogan decided to take the law into his own hands. Rogan, a well-known comedian, was on stage at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles, one of the nation’s most important comedy clubs. For weeks, Rogan had been furious over reports from fellow comedians that an even more famous stand-up, Carlos Mencia, had stolen a joke from one of Rogan’s friends, a relatively obscure comedian named Ari Schaffer. Rogan spotted Mencia in the audience, and he blew up. Slamming Mencia as “Carlos Menstealia,” Rogan accused his rival of joke thievery. Mencia rushed the stage to defend himself, and there began a long, loud, and profane confrontation.
A company should not have read e-mails a former employee wrote to her lawyer from a private, password-protected web account, even though she sent them from her employer’s computer, according to a state Supreme Court ruling today that attorneys said could influence workplace privacy rules across the country.
Now, of course, it's preposterous to blame YouTube for this, but how much do people want to bet that's exactly what's going to happen? The article notes that this may be "the next big headache for YouTube," and it seems likely that sooner or later some software will try to pin the blame for such videos on YouTube, rather than the creators/uploaders of the videos.
I recently co-produced a documentary titled Copyright Criminals, which examines the messy three-way collision between digital technology, musical collage, and intellectual property law. It aired on PBS's Emmy Award-winning series Independent Lens, played at the Toronto International Film Festival, and got a DVD release. My filmmaking partner Benjamin Franzen and I should be celebrating, but we're actually kind of terrified.
While we raised the money to license about two-dozen songs and some footage, our film nevertheless contains over 400 brief-but-unlicensed uses of copyrighted material. When I can't sleep at night, I sometimes count how much we'd be liable for: up to $150,000 in statutory damages, per infringement. 400 x $150,000 = $60,000,000. Sixty. Million. Dollars.
Reader cram points us to a paidContent post by John Yemma, the editor of The Christian Science Monitor, in which he makes a lot of great points about digital strategies for news publishing.A year ago, we ceased publishing the daily, 100-year-old Christian Science Monitor newspaper and launched a weekly magazine to complement our website, on which we doubled down by reorienting our newsroom to be web-first. Our web traffic climbed from 6 million page views last April to 13 million in February. Our print circulation rose from 43,000 to 77,000 in the same period.
Except... Canada already does have copyright/counterfeiting laws in place, and they seem to work pretty well.
Watching that $14 Elements demo for the iPad reminded me again of the throwaway line that geeks of a certain age make of the iPad — that it all seems a bit CD-ROM.
In my interview in this episode, I focused on digital liberty issues, which I believe to be hugely important and becoming more so every day. If you’re ready to find out more about the issues I discussed, here’s a quick guide along with hints on taking action. I mentioned writing to your MP and MEP – there’s an encouraging guide to read if the idea makes you nervous.
You'll have heard of the Digital Economy Bill: it introduces powers to cut your Internet connection if you're caught illegally downloading films, music or software. It does more than that. It takes your photographs from you, too.
Until now, if someone found one of your photographs and wanted to use it commercially, they couldn't without first asking you. Clause 43 changes all that by allowing the use of “Orphan Works” - photographs, illustrations and other artworks whose owners cannot be found.