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Links 21/6/2010: Debian Community Poll Results



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Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Events





  • Mozilla

    • Browser Speed – Perception IS Reality
      It looks as though the people over at Mozilla Foundation are more than a little fed up with the fact that their software, no matter how it changes, has of late been perceived as slow, especially at start up.








  • Oracle

    • Solaris, OpenSolaris, and the Oracle wall of secrecy
      And perhaps it is also telling that in an article posted on the Oracle website and extracted from the July/August 2010 issue of Oracle Magazine, that Ed Screven, who bears the title of chief corporate architect, never once mentioned Solaris or OpenSolaris.

      None of Oracle's actions (or inaction) could be construed as being proactive about telling the 50,000-strong Solaris customer base – from which Oracle is trying to extract $2bn in profits – what is going on with the platform.








  • WordPress

    • 400,000 WordPress 3.0 Downloads in 2 Days
      WordPress is one of the best blogging platform. Bloggers and Webmasters were waiting for the release of WordPress 3.0 and now it is available for download. Response for WordPress 3.0 is awesome as it is already downloaded 400,000 times in just less than 2 days of its release. Number is still moving in positive direction.


    • Q&A: Founder of WordPress talks tech


    • WordPress 3.0 Released: The Top 7 New Features
      WordPress custom post types are a feature that could turbocharge WordPress as a content management system — and not in the way of the now defunct Turbo mode. While this may not seem much different than a post category at first glance, this gives developers and theme designers the ability to cause certain types of posts to have a different appearance and functionality than the rest of the blog.








  • Business

    • Linux: “Free” Software vs “You Get What You Pay For”
      Some may ask, “What about those stock holders in a company? Won’t their dividends suffer in a switch that is possibly as disruptive as a switch to FOSS and Linux on the corporate desktop?” Sure, in the short term, a corporation may spend less to stay with proprietary, costly, closed source software and keep dividends up for stock holders. But anyone with the ability to think ahead and plan for long term results can see that down the road switching to in-house support using FOSS and Linux will mean significant savings for a corporation in the long term. It could also mean more dividends for stock holders, those people that Microsoft FUD mongers try to point to as blockades for moving off of Microsoft. Any company that I hold stock in should be thinking in the long term and should be switching to FOSS and Linux.








  • Project Releases

    • Getting Blender 2.5 Test Builds
      Blender 2.5 is still live and in development, but the most recent builds are getting really close to a stable version that can take over for 2.49. I’ve been updating my Blender on a semi-regular basis for some time now, and so far it’s actually been a fairly stable platform, with the occasional crash, mostly in the weird corner cases people who animate with textures and physics run into.








  • Openness/Sharing

    • KLISS: Law as source code
      Over the past couple of days I have received some comments - and some pushback - about my assertion that law is basically source code, so I'd like to explain what I mean. As it happens, explaining that is also a good way for me to start to explain the Legislative Enterprise Architecture that underpins KLISS, so here goes.


    • Open Web Challenged By Misuse of the Word "Open"
      At Google I/O, Messina talked with us about several topics related to the open web, including Facebook's "Open" graph, which has been heavily criticized for not really being that open.


    • Graham Linehan: The genius behind The IT Crowd
      And he also has a faith in web users and filesharers as fundamentally honest, saying: "It's probably not been the best thing for people to brand themselves as pirates … the image we should be concentrating on is sharing" – a view that informs his opinion that the media, music and film industries need to stop regarding filesharers as thieves, and accept that trying to patch up their current models is pointless.


    • Something in the Air: the Open Source Way
      One of the most vexed questions in climate science is modelling. Much of the time the crucial thing is trying to predict what will happen based on what has happened. But that clearly depends critically on your model. Improving the robustness of that model is an important aspect, and the coding practices employed obviously feed into that.




    • Open Access/Content

      • 21 Years of Open Access Publishing
        In August 1989, I began my scholarly digital publishing efforts, launching one of the first e-journals on the Internet, The Public-Access Computer Systems Review. This journal, if it was published today, would be called a "libre" open access journal since it was freely available, allowed authors to retain their copyrights, and had special copyright provisions for noncommercial use.










Leftovers



  • ICANN

    • ICANN Day 0: A lot of yakking, a little movement


    • Beckstrom: You are not a pipe
      Answering accusations that the organization is ignoring its own accountability processes, that the staff and Board have insufficient checks on their work, and that he himself had overstepped the mark in comments he made to governments at the last meeting in Nairobi, Beckstrom was unapologetic.

      “Much has been made in the media of ICANN’s consideration of the application for a dot-xxx top-level domain, which the board will address this week,” he acknowledged, before repeating the assertion that caused much of the trouble: that the decision, made by an independent panel, was “non-binding” on the Board.

      [...]

      This defiance is a marked departure from the previous CEO – who is at the conference – who always tried to avoid conflict, particularly in public. It is also a risky strategy in an environment that spends much of its time trying to get people to agree with one another.








  • Science

    • Forth Valley Royal Hospital to use robot 'workers'
      A hospital in Scotland is to become the first in the UK to use a fleet of robots to carry out day-to-day tasks.

      The robots will carry clinical waste, deliver food, clean the operating theatre and dispense drugs.


    • San Francisco will tell the world about mobile phone radiation
      MOBILE PHONE USERS in the UK and EU will soon be able to tell if their mobile gadget is more or less likely to be toasting their brain cells.

      A law passed in San Francisco will require mobile phone companies to post how much radiation they are pouring into your ear everytime you ring someone up to say, "I am on the train".






  • Security/Aggression







  • Environment







  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Fake News







  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Google to Commies: We’ll make censorship illegal
      Google is working with the US government to try to make it illegal for countries to censor the Internet by using international trade rules.


    • Indonesia flips over internet rock star smut clips
      An online celebrity sex video is giving Indonesia's authorities an opportunity to try and restrict internet use.

      Two explicit web clips showing Jakarta rock star Ariel in action with two models/television presenters has upset yet proved strangely enticing to the population, which is mainly Muslim.


    • Australia mothballs Internet controls
      WITH ITS PROSPECTS in the next Australian election not looking that well for the party in power, it seems that the Rudd government wants to avoid bringing in its daft Internet filtering plan.

      The Rudd government has plans to censor the Internet to make it safer for children and right wing born again Christians.


    • Spanish Lawsuit Joins Stack Against Google
      Google's collection of sensitive WiFi data sent over personal networks will cause the company problems for a long time if a group with a long name has its way. The Association for the Prevention and Investigation of Crime, Abuse and Malpractice in Information Technology and Advanced Communications has filed a lawsuit in Spain.


    • DoS attack stuffs Turkey's internet censors
      Access to the internet in Turkey is becoming increasingly ragged, as growing state censorship collides with retaliation by anti-censorship hackers, leading to difficulties both in viewing sites and applying key online functions.






  • Copyrights









Clip of the Day



CLUG Talk 11 November 2008 - Homebrew Utilities (2008)

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