One of the coolest things you can do with linux is control a show laser.
During the last three years, my Macbook Air has been kinda depressed. Every time i tried to install my free GNU programs using ports it has silently played this tune for me.
Continuing with another round of pictures from the Venezuelan FLISOL, i bring here a small recopilation of pictures from galleries of the main site, Caracas, where openSUSE has presence like in the other 19 sites.
I just installed milestone 6 to test our SELinux functionality... it works! :)
One of the good things about EiskaltDC is the flexibility it provides for manipulating GUI according to your needs. It gives you 7 different themes to choose from, you can even go for a sidebar instead of a tool bar.
The Wine development release 1.1.44 is now available.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - Many more new icons. - Support for 32-bit prefixes with a 64-bit Wine. - Many additional msvcr80/90 functions. - Improvements to Bidi handling. - More complete mmdevapi (Win7 audio) support. - Improved handling of MSI patches. - A number of fixes for desktop menus. - Optimizations in OLE storage. - Various bug fixes.
Wally is an easy to use program with an incredible functionality. It might be the ideal program for you if you are looking for a desktop wallpaper changer that supports local and remote sources.
The first thing you'll notice with Google's new beta of its Chrome Web browser is that it's faster -- much faster -- than the last version. You don't need any fancy tests to see that. All you have to do is use it, and you'll see that it blows other browsers away.
This is something I have never heard of. I was trying to install Google Chrome in Ubuntu and in the download page a small note came into my notice. It goes something like this "Installing Google Chrome will add the Google repository so your system will automatically keep Google Chrome up to date".
Wolfire Games is running an innovative pay-what-you-want promotion for five great indie video games with some proceeds benefiting EFF! Normally the five games would be valued at $80, but from now until Tuesday, 5/11, you can pay what you want for the entire game bundle including:
* World of Goo * Aquaria * Gish * Lugaru HD * Penumbra Overture
A little more than two weeks ago we released Kraft version 0.40, the first version of Kraft based on KDE 4 software platform. The release went fine as far as I can tell, no terrible bugs were reported yet. Some work went into the new website since then, but in general I need a few weeks break from Kraft and spend my evenings outside enjoying spring time.
Today, Sourceforge posted a blog about Kraft after they kind of mail-interviewed me. It’s nice, it really focuses on the things also important to me. This might be another step towards a broader user base for Kraft. I say that because one could have the impression that the number of people actually really using Kraft could be larger. A high number of users is one of the fundamental criteria for a successful free software project and thus I am constantly trying to understand whats the reason for the impression or the fact.
* GNOME 3.0 Website: there'll be a specific GNOME 3.0 website to introduce this new version of GNOME, and get people excited about this new version. In the long term, the content will be moved to the main website, but we feel a separate website is the best way to build momentum for the 3.0 effort. The target audience is existing GNOME users and there is already a good sitemap. Work is ongoing for the exact content and design, and the hard work will be the creation of videos. If you're interested in helping there, raise your hand :-)
As we have mentioned with the first of the early GNOME 3.0 development packages getting checked-in (such as the improved Totem Movie Player), the first GNOME 2.31 development milestone is this week in the road to GNOME 3.0 (a.k.a. v2.32) that will be reached this September. Joining this round of new GNOME development packages that are looking for testing is GTK+ 2.21.0, which is leading up to the 2.22 release of the de facto standard tool-kit for the GNOME desktop.
Another big change in the RHEL 6 beta is the wide selection of disk formatting options, including ext4. You know a Linux feature has arrived when it makes its way to the conservative enterprise releases like RHEL and such is the case with ext4 file system, which is now the default filesystem format in RHEL 6. In addition to ext4, the XFS filesystem is now supported.
Virtualization technology has long found a home in Red Hat's Fedora community Linux distribution. Ever since Fedora 4 emerged in 2005, virtualization technologies have continued to advance in the distro and that remains the case with the upcoming Fedora 13 release set for later this month.
Its possibilities like this which I have always held as a reason why I don’t want mass migration away from Windows to the Linux platform. If Linux is to get a wave of disillusioned Windows users, we have to keep in mind that they will bring their demands (and their voting power) to a platform near you which has been going quite happily without Windows users turning up after finally working out that PC does not just mean Microsoft. Now please don’t get me wrong, I am happy that anyone would want to come to Linux after a Windows experience, but what these people need to remember is that Linux/FOSS is != Windows/Microsoft, Linux should never be looked as the OS of choice only for it to still depend on 3rd party Windows apps. Linux and FOSS are unique (and for me) better in their own right, why should we lust over anything Windows offers either natively or via 3rd party apps?
3.Try to become an answer
Ubuntu Studio, Lubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu server among others are part of what I call the Canonical suite which helps to gain more users in that it is able to meet more needs. Do not narrowly focus on being just an OS, try to be an answer to more specialized needs.
4.Clearly define the role of your community
It is necessary to clearly define the role your user community will play in the growth and development of your OS. The faux pas that happened following the change of the window buttons from right to left in the Lucid Lynx could have had a devastating consequence had it been a smaller distro.
5.It does not hurt to apply marketing to Linux
If there is any one Open Source company that does marketing right, it is Canonical. And as is clear now, it does not hurt at all to invest some time and if possible some money to marketing your distro, it really pays.
In January I received a call from a friend: Her laptop hard drive had crashed leaving her in a bind. I was able go install a new one and reload Her OS that evening. She was very grateful and wanted to do something for me. The one thing I had been wanting was a scarf with the Linux Mint logo. So it was agreed She would do this for me. I most admit that I got the better end of the bargain, it only took me a few hours one evening and my part was done. The knitting of this scarf took much more time.
Four distributors have begun shipping the open platform, Linux-ready Hawkboard single board computer (SBC) for as low as $89. Based on the Texas Instruments OMAP-L138 system-on-chip (SoC), which combines an ARM9 core and a DSP, the community-driven Hawkboard project is structured on the TI-sponsored BeagleBoard project, and is similarly designed for hobbyists and general testing.
UK customers with Motorola Milestone owners take notice. Your Android 2.1 upgrade started rolling out today!
The ARCHOS 7 home tablet comes preloaded with select Android apps including eBuddy, Aldiko, and DailyPaper. Archos' own AppsLib is also installed allowing for users to customize their tablet with even more applications.
Motorola is acquiring LiMo-linked middleware and Web 2.0 app software company Azingo, according to several reports. Several hundred India-based software engineers would be focused on lessening Motorola's dependence on Google, suggests The Register, while GigaOM speculates that Motorola is building its own OS and SFGate sees a China connection.
Ubuntu Netbook Remix (reviewed version 10.4) is Linux like you've never seen before. It has a smooth, attractive, interface that works very well with the netbook form factor. It is a clear winner, as good as if not better than operating systems from enormous corporations. There was a gotcha on my HP Mini installation in an otherwise great work. Digg this article
Adobe has demonstrated a prototype Nvidia Tegra 2-based Android tablet from Google running Adobe's Flash, say industry reports. Meanwhile, Samsung is preparing an "S-Pad" Android tablet, and Bill Gates tips new Microsoft tablet projects, say other reports.
This is no doubt the Year of the Tablet computer. As such I began searching some months ago for a tablet I could add to my ever growing list of gadgets, I researched and played with many different devices before deciding on my Asus T91MT. I have had my tablet for a couple of weeks now and it amazes me how many people do not even know they exist when they released almost a year ago! The iPad on the other hand got more press than you can shake a stick at and everyone under the sun knows what it is after just a few weeks.
The following is my list of reasons why Asus's T91MT tablet/netbook hybrid is better than Apple's iPad:
#1 - It is also a Netbook Touch screens are fantastic, don't get me wrong but honestly some things are much quicker to do with a physical keyboard and a mouse. Having the option to flip my T91MT around and use it as a netbook is a wonderful option to have. Plus I personally feel my device's screen is much safer when I can "close" the screen instead of just sliding it into a case.
Android smartphones are giving Apple's iPhone a run for its money and may soon overtake it. If Android tablets follow suit, will Flash get its mojo back?
If you use open source software, and aren’t a programmer, you may wonder how you can give back to the community that provides you with such marvelous tools at no-to-little cost. At the same time, maybe you’ve run into a problem running some piece of open source software, clicked F1 or otherwise looked for some help in doing something—and found little or no help on offer. There’s a way to solve both these problems: Check out, and get involved with, the FLOSS Manuals project.
AS OPERATING SYSTEMS increasingly become visual feasts, those who want to create useful interaction enhancements are having to bend over backwards thanks to closed source software in order to bring innovation to the user's environment.
Two bright young men from the University of Washington recently presented Prefab, a technology which they say will facilitate the implementation of "advanced behaviours in graphical interfaces". That in itself isn't particularly new but the route Prefab takes to implement well documented graphical user interface (GUI) techniques are a clear example of the lengths engineers have to go to circumnavigate the limitations posed by closed source software.
Lucid Imagination, the commercial company for Apache Lucene and Apache Solr search technology, today announced the launch of its Global Partner Program, a channel sales and support offering which enables VARs and Integrators experienced in selling search technologies to reach new customers and markets through Lucene/Solr open source search. The program’s inaugural participants have all previously sold and supported traditional commercial enterprise search products. With the help of Lucid Imagination, they are now extending their offerings portfolio to meet the demand for Lucene/Solr.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced a project to assemble a replacement extension library for OpenOffice.org, which will list only those extensions which are free software, at http://www.fsf.org/openoffice.
"OpenOffice.org is free software, and an important contribution to the free software community. However, the program offers the user a library of extensions, and some of them are proprietary. Distributing OpenOffice.org in the usual way has the effect of offering users the nonfree extensions too," said FSF executive director Peter Brown.
The Midgard Project has released the first release of Midgard2 10.05 "Ratatoskr" LTS. Ratatoskr LTS is a Long Term Support version of Midgard2 Content Repository.
Those who've been waiting for the release of Moodle 2.0 are getting their open source just rewards this week. The release, which has been met already with several delays, is a "beta preview" -- which is to say, not yet a stable release, but a functional template of what's in store for early adopters (note that Moodle HQ will be releasing weekly updates as the code matures as a series of beta previews leading up to the stable release€¹).
I'm reminded of an article Dana Blankenhorn wrote a few years back, where he noted that trust lies at “the heart of open source.” Trust is what motivates software coders to open up their projects to communities of strangers. It drives a CIO to choose an open source vendor, who won't lock them into a particular technology or brand. And it is broken when a social networking (and advertising) business repeatedly strongarms its users into pushing their private information out to the world.
BIRT is an Eclipse Foundation open source project that was founded by and continues to be co-led by Actuate. It is used by about 750,000 developers worldwide and has become the de facto open source environment for presenting compelling data visualisations on the web.
Another week, another important announcement. The SpringSource division of VMware today announced that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GemStone Systems, a leader in data grid technology.
Rapid-I, a leading provider of open source solutions for predictive analytics, data mining and text mining, is launching RapidMiner 5.0: The new version allows enterprises to map and manage the entire business intelligence process chain from analytical ETL, data mining and predictive reporting with a single solution. The fully revised user interface offers a significantly simplified operation, meaning that even newcomers to analysis can be given vital support with tasks that come up frequently.
A Veterans Affairs requested VistA Modernization Report is now available. The good news: it prominently features and recommends open source and discusses the prospect of VA VistA as a national standard.
[...]
Among the reports issues, it calls the GNU General Public License 'restrictive'. Restrictive of what? Restrictive of the ability of proprietary vendors to establish and maintain vendor lock-in at the great expense of taxpayers and patients? The report at times treats open source and proprietary EHR software as equals instead of proprietary EHR software as a destructive invasive species. The report probably understates the number of private sector VistA deployments as measured by the 2008 AMIA Open Source White Paper. Finally, it makes the common error of subdividing open source vs commercial when open source is certainly commercial. They probably mean open source vs. proprietary.
Economist logoThe online team at The Economist recently set up a Launchpad project, using a commercial subscription. I asked Mark Theunissen, from The Economist Group, about their plans.
Mark: We’re migrating the existing Economist.com stack from Coldfusion/Oracle to a LAMP stack running Drupal. At present, we’re about half way through — if you visit a blogs page, channel page, or comments page they will be served from Drupal, but the home page and actual articles are still served from Coldfusion. There’s a migration and syncronisation process happening in the background between Oracle and MySQL.
The world renowned Economist Magazine is migrating its infrastructure from proprietary to an Open Source stack. According to this blog post on Launchpad, The Economist is migrating its existing stack "from Coldfusion/Oracle to a LAMP stack running Drupal," says Mark Theunissen from the Economist Group.
In December of 2008, the Ruby on Rails community was at a crossroads. The mainline Rails project was losing ground to Merb, an alternative open source MVC framework for building Ruby applications. The community was fragmenting. Yehuda Katz was the creator of the Merb framework, and rather than continue on with that project, he and his fellow contributors decided to merge Merb and Rails. The decision sparked a number of Rails homecomings for other outside projects, and in February the first beta of an integrated Rails 3.0 arrived. We sat down with Katz to discuss the past, present and future of Ruby on Rails.
The judgment was awarded by Magistrate Judge Elizabeth D. Laporte of the US District Court in Northern California. It comes in a case filed against the principals of a business called Find a Quote. A four-employee ISP in Garberville, California, Asis said it receives about 200,000 junk messages per day and spends about $3,000 per month to process them.
A school spokesman said it's possible the student who recorded the cell phone video could get in trouble as well because students are not supposed to use their phones during the day.
School officials said they are not allowed to record video in locker rooms because of privacy.
The investigation into the fraudulent use of red light cameras in Italy last week concluded with prosecutors preparing charges against thirty-eight public officials and photo enforcement company executives. Prosecutors claim that three photo enforcement companies formed a cartel that operated in collusion with public officials for the purpose of generating revenue. The officials accepted bribes in return for approving lucrative contracts and shortening the duration of yellow lights at intersections equipped with red light cameras.
If ISPs should be subject to "net neutrality," should companies like Google be subject to "search neutrality"?
When we wrote recently about the idea of "search neutrality," some readers seemed to believe that we had coined the term, but nothing could be further from the truth. "Search neutrality" now fills the FCC filings of companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T, all of whom see no reason why their businesses should be picked out for regulatory scrutiny while Google goes about its business unmolested.
A court decision ruling that the supply of software through a digital download mechanism is not a supply of "goods" has been upheld in the Supreme Court of NSW, setting a precedent that software downloaded via the internet is not protected by the Sale of Goods Act.
There is a little Neanderthal in nearly all of us, according to scientists who compared the genetic makeup of humans with that of our closest ancient relatives.
NASA's Mars Meteorite Research Team reopened a 14-year-old controversy on extraterrestrial life last week, reaffirming and offering support for its widely challenged assertion that a 4-billion-year-old meteorite that landed thousands of years ago on Antarctica shows evidence of microscopic life on Mars.
A teachers' body at the Aligarh Muslim University has demanded immediate removal of CCTV cameras installed at the campus, calling the measure as an "unacceptable encroachment" into privacy of people at the premier institute.
A Miami airport screener, agitated at continued ribbing after colleagues saw his body parts in an imaging scanner, attacked a colleague, police said.
Unlike some systems, the Vue doesn’t use a Wi-Fi network to carry its signals. Instead, it creates its own network between the gateway and cameras, like cordless telephones communicating with a base station.
Over the next few days cranes will attempt to lower the 100-tonne contraption around 5,000ft (1,500 metres) to the sea floor and position it over a leaking pipe that has been gushing 210,000 gallons of crude a day into the Gulf.
I've seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon's name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was ... British Petroleum. That's important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.
White House lists actions taken to contain the disaster as BP says robot submarines have blocked one leak
John Browne, the former chief executive of energy giant BP, used to brag about his company's relative lack of political involvement, saying the London-based conglomerate purposely shied away from spending too much on lobbying and campaign contributions.
So it's not exactly surprising that the executive director of such a group would have a nonchalant view of the impact of oil spills on the Gulf. What is maybe a little surprising is that the New York Times would present a coalition of offshore drilling interests as neutral experts on the environment.
Der Spiegel captures standoff between Obama, Sarkozy, Brown and Merkel and developing country negotiators
The lenders, notorious for high fees and interest rates, have been pressing vulnerable customers to help them kill the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
There are now two stories based on two completely calculations munged together into one sound bite. The explanation will likely turn into “more people are looking for jobs now.” But why is the denominator shifting around? Weren’t those people already jobless (unemployed), even though they weren’t looking for jobs? Oh – wait, if we include the people not looking for jobs in the historical unemployment calculation, the unemployment rate goes up, maybe by a lot. Eek – wouldn’t that be more scary.
It’s a simple game the government is playing with the numbers. Occasionally I’ll run into a company that does this – usually around revenue vs. gross margin dynamics, or bookings vs. revenue, or GAAP accounting vs. actual cash flows (where what really matters is cash flows.) Picking the better number vs. dealing with reality is disingenuous at best; presenting them in conflicting ways that obscure the message is bullshit.
Federal regulators reviewing yesterday’s stock plunge will try to determine if the fivefold increase in the number of American equity exchanges has left them unable to manage the biggest surges in volume.
The selloff erased $700 billion from U.S. markets in eight minutes after actions by the New York Stock Exchange to slow trading increased volatility on other platforms, said Joe Ratterman, chief executive officer of the five-year-old alternative exchange Bats Global Markets Inc. NYSE Euronext Chief Operating Officer Larry Leibowitz said the Big Board prevented a bigger decline.
Almost 24 hours have passed since the stock market had its momentary freakout, and it's still unclear what happened to trigger the sell-off.
The stock market's slump this week reflects a widespread concern among many economists that the European debt crisis could slow the U.S. economic recovery.
The SEC and CFTC have ultimate oversight of financial markets, but they generally rely on the markets to write and enforce their own rules.
You could say let's just not have any rating agencies. But we'd have a problem if we didn't have rating agencies at all. I think what you want are rating agencies that do a good job.
This smells like a little payback for Goldman’s role in the AIG collapse.
Bita Ghaedi, who feared her life was at risk if returned to Iran, wins interim reprieve
There is a current campaign on the internet for users to not log into Facebook for a whole day on June 6th, 2010. This comes in response to the recent changes made by Facebook to their privacy settings, especially to the one leaving the default “on” instead of “off.” Basically it became quite apparent that Facebook is in fact, a business, and that your so-called “personal” data was for sale. To economists and investors, this was no surprise at all. They all expected Facebook to make a genuine attempt to make money at some point, and what better way than demographic targeted advertising?
As noted earlier by PC World, the social networking site silently adds apps to profiles whenever a user is logged in and browses to certain sites. Facebook displays no dialogue box or notification window asking permission, and there is no easy way to opt out of the process.
To be clear: this shouldn't be confused with pure "billing by the byte." The low cap and high overage model (which Time Warner Cable tried -- and failed -- to impose in the U.S. last year) simply jacks up prices "thousands of multiples beyond what the costs are" on top of the already high flat rate price -- ensuring that consumers wind up paying significantly more money for the same service.
That logic is backwards. Basically, Hollywood is saying that it held the public hostage until the FCC let it break your TVs, and because the FCC caved in and Hollywood will release the movies it easily could have released before, consumers win. When someone is taken hostage and the family pays up, that's not a "win" for the family. As Public Knowledge points out, this appears to be the FCC doing this just as a favor to Hollywood.
Librarians, digital activists, ISPs, music managers and other associations and trade bodies have called for the relaxing of copyright law in the EU to allow more people to access and re-use copyrighted material.
Canada has long had a blank media levy on things like blank CDs, which is a sort of "you must be a criminal" tax on things. Of course, what it really does is drive down the usage of blank CDs by making them ridiculously expensive -- such that, in some cases, it accounts for 90% of the price of a blank CD.
Particularly notable: WAPO's "collection of national copyright laws", where each country's page is linked to a "Disclaimer" in which UNESCO claims copyright on the content of the collection and restricts its use to educational, non commercial purposes - even though in most cases, they simply downloaded the copyright law from the official site, renamed the file and re-uploaded it on the UNESCO server.
So, the question is do we not use Brittany’s painting, the piece that 18 months of design work have been crafted around, because the Manager of Intellectual Property of a famous Pop artist who also appropriated from the same source image says we can’t? Brittany’s painting certainly appears to be an appropriation of the uncopyrighted(?) graphic novel piece as opposed to an “adapted…Roy Lichtenstein image” as Ms. Lee has stated. We haven’t pressed the album yet, so we just need to know whether or not we CAN use the image based on its appropriative properties. What IS the answer here??????
That's simply not true. McArdle is making the same mistake that many politicians and reporters make, despite it being pointed out as an error time and time again: she's confusing the recording industry with the music industry. The music industry is actually doing quite well when you look at the numbers. Switching back and forth between the two, as McArdle does throughout the piece, and pretending they're the same thing at some points, and different at others is really weak reporting. Yes, the numbers for the recording industry are worse, just as the numbers for the horse buggy industry got worse and worse each year as the automobile industry ramped up.
Stuart Hamilton from the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) alerted us to the news that his organization, along with "a broad based coalition of European groups, representing consumers, creators, libraries, civil society and technology companies" have put together a declaration in the EU Parliament for Copyright for Creativity -- with the goal being to reform copyright law to bring it back to its original purpose, while updating it for the internet age so that it "fosters digital creativity, innovation, education, and access to cultural works."