A group of chip makers including IBM, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments on Thursday unveiled Linaro, a new software-engineering foundation dedicated to improving Linux distributions, including Android, MeeGo and Ubuntu, used in consumer devices.
The new foundation hopes to take the success Linux has seen in large enterprise software and translate that to the consumer world of TV, tablets, smartphones and netbooks, which is dominated by several main OSes, including Windows, Symbian, Blackberry and Apple's iPhone OS.
Chipmaker ARM and a group of allies have joined forces to back a non-profit Linux company to develop tools for cellphones, tablet PC and similar small devices.
The alliance with Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments was announced yesterday at Computex 2010 and significantly ups the stakes in the battle for future mobile dominance.
Thanks to another Bluetooth SIG listing we now know Samsung is prepping a music player with our beloved Android OS. First spotted a little over a week ago by Samsung Hub and Chocoberry...
Do we got alternative to X ? There's Wayland, but it's far from being usable. There's DirectFB, but that's not very portable. None seems candidate to replace X some days to me.
Free chat client Pidgin version 2.7.1 has just been released with many improvements and fixes pushed to Bonjour, ICQ, XMPP and MXit protocols. The major gainer is the MSN protocol that gets support for direct connections, with faster file transfers to aMSN and the official MSN client. I haven’t tested the file transfer speed but from the screenshot posted at Quantum Logic (a Pidgin developer’s blog) and re-posted here above, file transfer in Pidgin is now pretty fast. Buddy icon and custom emoticon also load faster.
Linux is a very strong platform for budding artists, photographers, animators, and designers. With inexpensive hardware, free software, and a modicum of talent and inspiration, anyone can create professional-looking computer graphics.
Brasero may be the resident disc-burn app on a lot of Linux distros, but GnomeBaker is by no means a second-tier option. The application puts its own twist on many of the same functions Brasero takes care of, and some users may find it flat-out easier to use. For instance, GnomeBaker features a tabbed interface that lets you keep track of multiple screens at once.
If your microblogging activities are limited to the Identi.ca and Twitter services, Gwibber might be overkill for your needs. In that case, Pino is exactly what you need. This microblogging client is lightning fast, and it's not overloaded with features you might never use. But it does support multiple accounts, URL shortening, notifications, and even spell checking.
Freemind, the open source Java based mind mapping application, makes a great writing planning tool. A final release of version 0.9 has been a long time coming, but the current release candidates are very usable and stable, and I would recommend making the extra effort to install one of these rather than an 0.8 “stable” release. Fortunately, the 0.9 RCs have made it into the standard Ubuntu 10.04 repository.
For a long time - in fact, from the beginning if my memory serves correctly - Skype has "promised" that Skype-to-Skype calls will "always be free". Well, it turns out that promise is worth exactly as much as any other promise Skype has ever made, or will ever make for that matter. A big, fat nothing.
I gave in finally and decided to buy X-plane, which has a native Linux version, great right? Well fairly great... As I waited for the CD's to arrive, I noticed that there was a demo version online, so I downloaded and installed it. At which point I ran into my first problem. My 64bit version of Ubuntu was missing a lib file needed for the installer to run. After hours of searching the net, I was able to place the correct 32bit lib file in the correct 32bit lib folder, and then create a link from there to the 64bit lib files. At last the installer worked. After hours of downloading the rather large installer, X-plane hiccuped on install, missing another file. I patched that file in and tried it one more time. It worked, I watched the sweet intro, and played it a bit with the keyboard and mouse as I awaited the arrival of the game.
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X-Plane continues to be developed, while the Microsoft Flight Simulator series ended with FSX. The hope is that X-Plane will get better and better. I hope the developers at X-Plane will realize that their Linux customer is important.
so, in this post we are going to list top ten fluxbox themes for light themes and other dark themes
There’s still more. Like full KIO support in all file dialogs. Or performance improvements in the GUI and the backend code. Or support for setting volume labels on FAT32 file systems. Or fully tested support for devices with more than 2^31 sectors. Or…
You get the idea. In any case, I hope you’ll agree that KDE Partition Manager 1.1 is going to rock.
This concludes part six in a sequence of entries presenting some of the new features of the soon-to-be-finished KDE Partition Manager 1.1. The previous parts were:
1. Mount Management 2. SMART Status Reports 3. Support For 4096-Byte Sectors 4. Improved Size Dialog 5. Options Galore
GNOME Shell is the defining technology of the GNOME 3 desktop user experience. It provides core interface functions like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide a delightful and easy to use experience. The GNOME Shell is currently in active development and while many planned features are not yet implemented it is stable enough for everyday use.
Slackware Linux is still going strong. The Slackware Linux Project released Slackware 13.1 on May 24th.This is just a little by shy of the 17th anniversary of Slackware 1.0 and not quite a year after Slackware 13.0. Delve back into yesteryear with me; you're in for a treat.
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You've probably surmised that Slackware isn't for everyone as a full-time OS. It's not. Slackware is for users who like a basic, solid Linux distribution that makes very few assumptions about how the system is going to be used. That approach means that Slackware is perfect for a small percentage of Linux users.
Tieto and Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, have collaborated to advance open source offerings. Tieto is the first Finnish organization to join Red Hat's Advanced Partner program. This partnership will also cover Sweden, Denmark and other major European markets and will enable Tieto to offer value-added IT services combined with Red Hat's enterprise class open source middleware and platform solutions. Customers will benefit from more accessible and cost effective technology.
Rating
Desktop ready: 4/5 User-friendliness: 4/5 Overall rating: 4/5
Mint Linux 9 is an SAGeek Recommended product.
Snapdragon is a powerful ARM-based processor aimed and optimized for smartphones, but up to now has been a single chip offering, though it ran at 1GHz, making it one of the fastest smartphone processors on the market. The processor is known for its low power consumption and long battery life and powers newer phones, including the Droid Incredible, HTC EVO 4G, and the Google Nexus One.
MeeGo support included in "Oak Trail" platform, Acer committed to MeeGo on upcoming netbooks.
Intel has released more details and the deployment roadmap for the company's MeeGo operating system (OS), highlighting its desire for consumers to start utilizing the open source platform.
During his keynote here Wednesday at Computex 2010, Peter Biddle, director of Intel's AppUp products and services, noted that while he is "no longer worried" about attracting developers to create content for the MeeGo platform, it is consumer adoption that now preoccupies his thoughts. "We need more consumers!" he declared.
These are cellbots, if you couldn't think of any reason for getting yourself an Android yet, here is one.
At the moment of this writing the Android app is still in alpha state. So a little patience may be in it's place. I have no doubt android will provide a great platform for the future of home remote control.
Acer has announced the availability of a limited edition version of their Liquid e handset. Called the Liquid Ferrari, it's a glossy, sexed up looking Liquid e with a few special features added in. With a shiny Ferrari F1 red finish, the smart phone includes exclusive content, including videos, wallpapers, and specific ringtones that “allows you to personalize your phone with the inimitable sweet music of the Ferrari engine.” Other subtle tweaks such as designing the microphone to look like an air intake inlet ensure the handset stands out in a crowd and provides a "stronger sense of belonging to all Ferrari fans".
So we've been hearing rumors about the Dell Streak being some kind of a rugged bad boy. Word is, the Gorilla Glass display on this 5-inch slate is good enough to withstand pretty much anything a human would care to throw its way.
Yukyung Technologies showed off a Viliv-branded, Android-based tablet at Computex equipped with a 10-inch, 1366 x 768 touchscreen. The Viliv X10 Tablet with Android offers an SD card reader, USB port, HDMI, webcam, and WiFi, and "could be an incredible iPad alternative," according to a hands-on Laptop story.
Jon "maddog" Hall is the Executive Director of Linux International, a non-profit organization of computer vendors who wish to support and promote Linux-based operating systems. The nickname "maddog" was given to him by his students at Hartford State Technical College, where he was the Department Head of Computer Science. He now prefers to be called by this name. According to Hall, his nickname "came from a time when I had less control over my temper".
Mozilla Weave is no more -- at least in name.
Firefox Sync 1.3 is now available, marking the official shift in name from Mozilla Weave, which had been the name of the application since it was created in 2007.
Weave started out as a Mozilla add-on for Firefox that was intended to provide a Mozilla services backend. The initial target of that services backend was data synchronization and now with the 1.3 release, synchronization or Sync is the name of the app as well.
Jim sent me a screenshot of GIMP 2.7 in single window mode. Looks good and I am going to try it soon. Click on the image for a 100% view.
Developed by Sourcefabric, previously known as Campware, the latest Campsite release is the first release under the new Sourcefabric name.
Version 3.3.6 is not a major upgrade over previous releases but does add a number of security fixes and improvements. The next major release will be version 3.4 at the end of June.
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Version 3.3.6 is not a major upgrade over previous releases but does add a number of security fixes and improvements. The next major release will be version 3.4 at the end of June.
Google, in an attempt to be more open about its tracking mechanisms, has announced that it has open sourced the RLZ library that is built-in to the Chrome browser. RLZ, a previously closed component of the open source based browser, is responsible for generating promotional tokens which are non-unique and not personally identifiable. The tokens are used by Google as a parameter in URLs to, for example, track search queries to Google made from Chrome. The Apache 2.0 licensed RLZ library now has its own Google Code project, where the details of the RLZ parameter are also explained.
Many of you surely know the Android operating system developed by Google. Maybe not everybody know it’s not fully free software.
This is why activists from LibrePlanet Italia and Software Freedom Law Center created a fully free software Android alternative called Replicant.
The DIY movement is growing every year, with no signs of slowing down. In May, Make held its fifth annual Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, where 95,000 people came to celebrate the unique rewards of DIY. This year, Maker Faire is also coming to Detroit and New York. I hope you can come and participate in the transformative power of DIY.
The real battle is in the hearts and eyes of the artists who are paid to create incredibly beautiful objects in the span of just a few hours. The designers will make the final determination. As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet.
The VideoLAN Project developers have announced the availability of a release candidate for version 1.1, the next major release, of their popular VLC Media Player. According to the developers, the latest 1.1 branch of VLC is much faster and more stable, thanks in part to a substantial amount of "important code clean-up" and rewrites. VLC is a free open source cross-platform multimedia player for various audio and video formats.
Google has asked the Open Source Initiative to delay its consideration of the WebM license (requested by Bruce Perens) for a couple of weeks; the company has also requested some changes in how the OSI does business.
A woman was fined €£80 for littering after wardens caught her throwing bread crumbs – to the birds.
The county’s surveillance operation will increase dramatically with major new schemes being introduced to Whitchurch and Ludlow.
A new state-of-the-art headquarters will be launched in Shrewsbury which cameras across the county will be linked to – giving officers the ability to monitor people from a central location.
West Berkshire Council has taken remedial action after a USB memory stick was lost that contained sensitive information on children and young people.
The memory stick, which was neither encrypted or password protected, contained information relating to the ethnicity and physical or mental health of the children.
Among practices specifically invited to join the rollout, one in six has refused to do so, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from 91 PCTs.
In 36 areas which have begun the rollout and provided complete figures, 1,732 practices have been invited to participate – with 286 so far declining to take part.
The RCMP and Manitoba's ombudsman are investigating allegations of corruption, secret surveillance and harassment at a rural municipal council. The former top administrator of La Broquerie, southeast of Winnipeg, says town politicians installed hidden surveillance cameras in nearly every room in the town hall to spy on rival councillors, staff and the public, and hired a security company to sweep offices for bugs possibly planted by opponents.
The California Court of Appeal has held that a man who set up a bogus MySpace profile of his former church pastor can stand trial for criminal “personation.”
A sticker found on a trash can at a Washington, D.C., airport last week depicting what appeared to be a suicide bomber is actually the logo of a popular graffiti artist. His fans have plastered his stickers around the world since around 2005.
Then, there's the matter of America's own spy, communications and navigation satellites. Most of these could be taken out by a sufficiently advanced enemy, perhaps with serious consequences. If this was done by using another fully-orbital spacecraft along ASAT lines (as opposed to a suborbital rocket launch directly aimed to get in the way of a spacecraft) it might be difficult or impossible for the USA to know who had done it - or even if anything had actually been done.
The European Union yesterday called for a single supervisor of credit-rating companies as politicians in the 27-nation bloc demanded a new regional agency to increase competition in the wake of the sovereign debt crisis.
The European Commission proposed giving the power to investigate, issue fines and revoke licenses to a new EU authority. The Brussels-based commission also proposed reining in risk-taking behavior and compensation at financial companies to prevent a repeat of the credit crunch.
The FSA has levied its largest ever fine of €£33.32m on J.P. Morgan Securities for client money breaches over a seven-year period.
The regulator says J.P. Morgan Securities was guilty of an error in which it failed to protect client money by segregating it appropriately.
Between 1 November 2002 and 8 July 2009, the company failed to segregate the client money held by its futures and options business (F&O) with JPMorgan Chase Bank.
In a 1996 law review article, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan warned that campaign finance laws "easily can serve as incumbent-protection devices, insulating current officeholders from challenge and criticism." The DISCLOSE Act, a speech-squelching bill supported by the man who nominated Kagan, is a good example.
President Obama and congressional Democrats say the DISCLOSE Act, which is expected to come up for a vote soon, is aimed at ensuring transparency and preventing corruption in the wake of Citizens United v. FEC, the January decision in which the Supreme Court lifted restrictions on political speech by corporations and unions. But the bill's onerous, lopsided requirements suggest its supporters are more interested in silencing their critics.
Nobody, including the press, is very happy with the press these days. So state Sen. Bruce Patterson, a man of luxuriant mustaches and florid expressions, came up with an idea: Regulate' em.
Set up a board to check reporters' credentials, license them as if they were manicurists or lawyers, and charge them a registration fee. Then issue those who pass muster and pay the state the designation of "Michigan Registered Reporter."
Dear FTC. Instead of worrying about whether bloggers are disclosing all they should when writing about products, perhaps a little more attention should be focused on TV programs and product placement? This season’s 24 took things to a new level, where plot points were constructed around featuring a product. Is a tiny mention in credits at the end really disclosure enough?
The Federal Trade Commission has been nosing around how to save journalism and in its just-posted “staff discussion draft” on “potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism,” it makes its bias clear: The FTC defines journalism as what newspapers do and aligns itself with protecting the old power structure of media.
With Rupert Murdoch's The Times of London going behind a paywall, we're already seeing some of their writers bailing out. A bunch of folks sent over the news that the writer of the Times' legal blog, Tim Kevan, has set up shop on his own blog, outside of the paywall.
On Friday, I broke a tasty story about a woman suing Google, claiming bad directions caused her to get hit by a vehicle. Today, I discover our story is everywhere, often with no attribution. Come along and watch how the mainstream media, which often claims bloggers rip it off, does a little stealing of its own.
Woman Follows Google Maps “Walking” Directions, Gets Hit, Sues was the story I posted on Friday afternoon, Pacific Time. I was tipped to the lawsuit by Gary Price of ResourceShelf. Gary hadn’t written about it himself but thought Search Engine Land would be interested in it. He came across it through the regular monitoring of search-related news that he does across a variety of resources (Gary watches many, many things — he’s a research guru extraordinaire). Gary downloaded a copy of the suit via the PACER Service and sent it to me.
Someone had to be the first, and AT&T decided that it would be the one to take the plunge - the carrier has announced that it will completely eliminate unlimited data service from new mobile subscription plans.
Plenty of folks, from copyright lawyers to Internet entrepreneurs to investment bankers, have been watching the long-running legal battle between Viacom and Google/YouTube carefully, well aware that a decision in the case could have a profound effect on the future of the Internet. But most YouTube users probably haven't given it the same attention. They should, and in an amicus brief filed in support of YouTube last week, a group of YouTube video creators explains why.
This is the same mistake that the RIAA and the SMPTP are making today. They think they're in the business of selling discs. They're not. They're in the business of delivering entertainment. And they've forgotten that. At least, their lawyers seem to have forgotten it.
This isn't the first time the entertainment industry has made this mistake. Almost forty years ago, Sony started selling Betamax videotape recorders for home use. Universal and Disney promptly sued, claiming that home video recording would create the opportunity for copyright infringement and they would lose billions of dollars. The Supreme Court ruled against them. Under the fair use provisions of the copyright law, it's legal to record media at home for personal use. Even if some people might use videotape machines for illegal purposes, that was not sufficient justification for denying fair use to everyone else.
After losing that lawsuit, Disney and Universal (and all the other studios as well) began selling their movies on Betamax and VHS tapes, and later on DVD. Videotape sales became an enormous market for the studios and eventually DVD sales accounted for at least half, often more, of a film's total gross income.
While we're still not convinced you can trust the Associated Press's reporting on its own lawsuit with Shepard Fairey, the AP is now reporting that the judge in the case has indicated that the AP will almost certainly win, and that Fairey should give in and settle.
Voltage has hired the U.S. Copyright Group to oversee the litigation and go after alleged file sharers. The group has sued alleged movie pirates on behalf of the makers of such films as "Far Cry" and "Call of the Wild 3D." Some of the people accused of pirating those movies, including Jon Harrison from Irving, Texas, have already been notified and are well along in the process.
Harrison showed CNET the documents he received from Verizon--his Internet service provider--and the U.S. Copyright Group. To be sure, without seeing the actual notices that will be sent as part of the "Hurt Locker" suit, we don't how they'll differ. But there are likely to be many similarities.
The film, which cost only $15 million to produce, has so far grossed $150 million worldwide. Nevertheless, the firm maintains that this mere 1000% return represents "a direct decline" in the film and entertainment industries.
Nicolas Chartier, one of the film's producers and co-founder of Voltage Pictures, went on to prove how out of touch he is with the real world by claiming that anyone that disagrees with him is a "moron". Thus, by extension, he believes that Radiohead, Trent Reznor, Stephen Fry, Michael Moore, the Featured Artists Coalition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Larry Lassig and the entire Creative Commons movement, the Open Rights Group, the Pirate Parties worldwide, scores of his film's fans, and countless others are all morons.
Let's run an experiment and see if piracy is harmful to sales.
Sure, it's not really piracy. The free preview is a transparent marketing stunt by Lionsgate, the studio behind the film, which has decided to hide the movie from critics and instead put the first few minutes in front of its target audience during the run-up to its release. To that end, they've enlisted the movie's co-star, a genuine Internet phenomenon, to help promote that effort.
It really does make you wonder why the MPAA and the RIAA have bothered with all of this. It hasn't even remotely slowed file sharing down. In fact, their actions have helped advertise The Pirate Bay worldwide and made those running it into celebrities. And, even if they eventually do shut down the site, a dozen others will quickly step up to take its place. At some point, you have to wonder when they will realize it's time to figure out ways to focus on building a better business model rather than trying to do the impossible and deny what technology allows.
Today, exactly four years have passed since The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police. While the entertainment industries hoped that this would be the end of their troubles, in hindsight they’ve created a a multi-headed hydra that is impossible to kill. The events that unfolded could easily be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster.
Barry Sookman appears to be missing in action – only two tweets, and no posts since May 27, 2010.
Michael Geist has posted The Canadian Copyright Bill: Flawed But Fixable – since I haven’t read the entire bill yet I don’t know if I can agree, but I’ve disagreed with him a lot in the past. Quite frankly Michael’s too damned moderate for my tastes.
Ars Technica has an article – “Canadian DMCA” defends DRM, legalizes DVRs – which points out that Digital Locks over ride consumer rights. What they don’t consider is that Digital Locks also over ride artist rights.
Mike Masnick over at TechDirt is also covering this – Canadian DMCA Introduced; Digital Lock Provision Trumps Any And All User Rights – Mike’s a bit weird at time, but I think his title hits the mark.
For those of you who have been counting, this is the third effort, in the past five years, by Canada to amend the Copyright Act. The previous two each died on their order papers - victims of Parliamentary instability. That is unlikely to happen this time. It appears the government will endeavor to fast-track the bill into law.
Yet all the attempts at balance come with a giant caveat that has huge implications for millions of Canadians. The foundational principle of the new bill remains that anytime a digital lock is used - whether on books, movies, music, or electronic devices - the lock trumps virtually all other rights. In other words, in the battle between two sets of property rights - those of the intellectual property rights holder and those of the consumer who has purchased the tangible or intangible property - the IP rights holder always wins.
But, of course, according to various folks at the USTR and the Copyright Office, now that ACTA's been released, it's proven that all the "fears" from online sources were misguided. Right?
While ACTA has now been released, the review still happened. Hephaestus points us to the news that the analysis found that negotiators were not allowed to keep the document secret (pdf) from Parliament, and that if it had continued to the Parliament could have taken legal action. The key points:
* Confidentiality cannot be used as a justification for not complying with the obligation to keep Parliament fully informed. Where a degree of confidentiality is justified to ensure the proper conduct of negotiations, the Council and Commission may request that agreed measure on the confidentiality of the documents be applied. * The obligation to inform Parliament cannot be modified or limited by any agreement among the institutions or by an arrangement with third parties which does not involve Parliament. Where documents originate from a third party, the Union negotiator may be justified in agreeing not to disclose such information without the consent of the third party concerned. In such circumstances, Parliament should nonetheless be provided with sufficient information. * In the case of a persistent refusal to provide it with sufficient information, Parliament could initiate proceedings for illegal failure to act.