This shows that GNU/Linux is not only for geeks. If you have some grown-ups in your organization who are reluctant to change, perhaps this example would inspire sufficient effort. The benefits outweigh the costs:
* relative freedom from malware * relative freedom from anti-malware * freedom from monopoly, and * superior performance at lower cost.
A preview version of Userful's Linux MultiSeat 2010 has been made available to potential users.
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Based on Userful Multiplier and Edubuntu, Linux MultiSeat 2010 also includes a wide range of open source applications that are relevant to schools.
"Dell has a problem," said blogger Robert Pogson. "They want to be seen to be friendly to GNU/Linux so they have a few products, but they do not have a real campaign to sell GNU/Linux for fear it would offend M$ or their fans. I do not know at what point Dell will feel comfortable pushing GNU/Linux, but if they do not hurry others will pass them by."
The servers come with Windows Server 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise 11.
GNU libextractor is a library used to extract meta data from files of arbitrary type. It is designed to use helper-libraries to perform the actual extraction, and to be trivially extendable by linking against external extractors for additional file types. libextractor is a GNU package. Our official GNU website can be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/libextractor/. libextractor can be downloaded from this site or the GNU mirrors.
Mark Shuttleworth said, “Moving everything to the left opens up the space on the right nicely, and I would like to experiment in 10.10 with some innovative options there.” So if you guys are wondering what did he even meant by that, you have take a look at this.
All you have to do now is find the bits that sound good and use Audacity's editing features (cut, paste, fade in, fade out, amplify) to separate them out from the bits that might not sound quite so good. I did mention that it was an open mic evening, didn't I? Not everything done during an open mic evening is going to sound, well, wonderful. On the bright side, however, Santa Fe has an overflow supply of musicians, and many of them drop by Second Street on Wednesday to join the house band. It's kind of relaxing for them to have a place where they can play in a non-gig venue and just have a bit of fun.
July 26th, 2010. Today, KDE delivers the third release candidate of the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.5. The KDE Software Compilation consists of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, a large number of applications for all purposes and the KDE development platform the applications and workspaces are built upon. The final version will be available next week This last RC is intended for verifying no showstoppers will creep into the final release of 4.5.0. It will also interest those who want an early look at what is coming to their desktops and netbooks this summer.
So TechBase is a source of mostly technical information. This includes step-by-step howtos for all sorts of KDE development as well as the feature plans and schedules for KDE releases and so forth. It’s mainly static content. Think of a howto for a Plasma Widget or a howto for building KDE. The content usually is valid for a long time, mostly even for years. For those of you longer in the KDE project, TechBase is the same as our good old developer.kde.org page (and we’ve never put arbitrary content there). The only difference is, that it’s now maintained as wiki.
Well it's taken me a little time to commit this work, but here it is. This is the fruits of my labour from the KDE Multimedia Sprint earlier this year.
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This code is now in trunk (r1154776) so feel free to try it out and report other bugs etc. This GUI is also included in Mandriva Cooker (I did want to include it prior to 2010.1 release, but the timing didn't work out - tho' it probably would have been OK considering the delays that cropped up in the release process). I expect this functionality to be included in any updated/backported versions of KDE for 2010.1.
After many years being a Windows user, I took my first steps as a Linux user under Ubuntu. As I started to learn more about the GNOME desktop manager, one of the pleasing and welcome surprises was to find out how incredibly easy it was to transfer files from and to my mobile phone using Bluetooth. From that point on, I tend to use this feature more often, uploading MP3 files or wallpapers to my mobile, or downloading pictures I took from its on board camera. In Windows XP I had always avoided the matter, not willing to download a few hundred MB just to get Bluetooth file transfer to work, or simply too lazy to install Nokia's own software and have to use their specific cable.
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This solution is very simple, so much so that I was ashamed I had not found it earlier. The downside is that it always requires a new device scan before sending files, which can be a bit annoying, but at least I can send and download files to and from my mobile using KDE's own KBluetooth. Hope this helps in case you were having similar problems.
Peter: It doesn't make it easier, it makes it easy. It wasn't easy before. As I said in the presentation, we developed the first run wizard with the KDE Usability team. We managed to come up with a nice wizard that gets people started right away.
For Amarok 1.4 lovers, there is more good news. Gereqi is yet another Amarok 1.4 fork, which is still in its early stages of development. And it is already looking good.
PlainSight is a versatile computer forensics environment that allows inexperienced forensic practitioners perform common tasks using powerful open source tools such as RegRipper, Pasco, Mork, Foremost and many more.
Earlier this laptop has been filled with PCLinuxOS 2007, PCLinuxOS 2008, PCLinuxOS 2009.1, and the last was 2010.07. From the series 2007-2009.1 my bluetooth still does not work. My Bluetooth works in PCLinuxOS 2010.1 with kernel update to 2.6.33, and version 2010.07 PCLinuxOS has worked perfectly on my laptop.
Even a Linux fan might not have heard of CentOS Linux but, if you're a Web or other edge-server administrator, I can guarantee you know about CentOS. That's because, according to Web Technology Surveys, in July 2010, "For the first time, CentOS is now leading the Linux distribution statistics on web servers with almost 30% of all Linux servers."
To make the event as simple and accessible as possible, we have picked five topic areas and we are encouraging you lovely people to organize an event with one or more of them:
* Bugs – finding, triaging and fixing bugs. * Testing – testing the new release and reporting your feedback. * Upgrade – upgrading to Maverick from Lucid and reporting your upgrade experience. * Documentation – writing documentation about how to use Ubuntu and how to join the community. * Translations – translating Ubuntu and helping to make it available in everyone’s local language. * Packaging – packaging software for Ubuntu users to install with a clock. * Other – other types of contribution such as marketing and advocacy etc.
Ubuntu Studio 2.0 (Puppy Edition) is based on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and provides a lightweight interface where you can run popular Ubuntu Studio applications like Jack, Ardour2, Hydrogen and many more. This audio production software is available along side all the tools of a normal Puppy Linux desktop. Make sure you check out the Multimedia — Multimedia section of the menu as it contains a very impressive collection of tools and useful apps and I missed it the first time through. I found more applications are available in the Ubuntu repositories which are accessible using the Quickpet package manager, icon on the desktop. You’ll find Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Cinerella, Dia, Inkscape, and many other applications plus Quickpet provides a drivers section where you can add Nvidia or ATI Radeon drivers. Overall, this looks like an excellent idea and I’ll definitely watch as it is developed.
Motorola’s co-CEO Sanjay Jha spoke out about the company’s relationship with Google and its Android OS at Fortune Brainstorm Tech over the weekend. Notably, he asserted his belief that Android would become the dominant mobile operating system seen on a vast majority of devices over the next five years. He likened the current battle between Android and the iPhone to the early years of personal computing, when Apple’s early lead was eventually overcome by a standard OS that was not linked to a specific manufacturer or device.
A photo of a T-Mobile-destined, Android-based HTC "G1 Blaze" phone has popped up on Engadget, and Droid Life has unveiled Motorola's Droid 2, due for a Verizon launch next month. Meanwhile, Verizon's Droid X delay has been extended, some minor screen and security problems have emerged, and the phone has been rooted but not fully conquered, according to reports.
Indian minister for HR Development HRD, Kapil Sibal announces $35 tablet project. It seems to be based on the Freescale i.MX233 system on chip, with a 7ââ¬Â³ resistive 800Ãâ480 touch screen. Here's my video with AllGo Embedded Systems, a R&D company based in Bangalore India, where they are showcasing their $35 tablet reference design at the Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando last month. This is likely to be the tablet that India's HRD Minister is talking about:
The Bill Of Material is as following:
* ARM9 Processor: $5 (Freescale i.MX233) * Memory: $3 * WiFi B/G: $4 * Other discret components: $3 * Battery: $5 * 7ââ¬Â³ 800Ãâ480 resistive touch screen: $15 * Total bill of material: $35
Depending on which particular business school text you pick up, you might have seen the organizational lifecycle stages described as some approximation of the following:
1. Startup 2. Growth 3. Maturity 4. Decline
We must of course acknowledge the glaring impedance mismatch between mixed motive movements such as open source and profit-centric enterprises. Undoubtedly, open source will occasionally, even frequently, follow a different trajectory than will closed source alternatives.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are helping the U.S. military analyze and develop the advantages of open-source software -- programs that make their source code open to others so it can be changed and improved.
Need to connect to a remote client securely and simply? One way to do that is to employ Hamachi, a zero-configuration VPN service. While zero configuration sounds pretty easy, you can make things easier still by using Quamachi, a Hamachi GUI for Linux.
Monopoly is not good for us. Monopoly is good for those who have the monopoly, in this case, two powerful corporations with fewer than a million people. We are thousands of millions. We can do more and better whatever the monopolists can do. Monopoly is not good for us because we pay too much for IT and are limited in what we can do with IT because we depend on what the two monopolists do. Then there are their partners. Need application X in 64bit? Nope. Need application Y to run on ARM? Nope. Need application Z to run on another OS? Nope. Need your network to be secure from intruders? Nope. Need an upgrade? Nope. Pay full price and you have to buy version 12.34 first, etc.
Hardware. We can buy ARM, AMD, even Apple. If you are locked into Intel because the stuff you run only runs on that other OS and it only runs on x86 you can change.
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Invest in FLOSS. Free yourself from monopoly. You can start right away by migrating parts of your operation to GNU/Linux and identifying the parts that do not migrate readily and fix the causes of that non-portability. Fix it by finding a FLOSS project that does what you need done or creating one. There are lots of resources on the web. FLOSS is reusable so you do not have to reinvent the wheel. Just use the wheels others have developed and contribute to the world under a Free Software licence.
Originally scheduled for release late last week, Mozilla has confirmed that the second beta for version 4.0 of its open source Firefox web browser has been delayed by one week. Firefox 4 Beta 2 is now expected to arrive on Thursday, July 29th. The third beta is still on schedule for an August 6th release.
The company, ForgeRock, has released a new version of Sun's Open Single Sign On (OpenSSO) Enterprise software, called OpenAM, that adheres to the OpenSSO roadmap established by Sun.
The Drupal trademark policy was launched officially about 11 months ago. As explained in my blog post on the Drupal trademark policy, the purpose of the policy is to create a level playing field for all. It allows everyone to use the trademark without administrative hassle, while at the same time keeping some control and oversight to avoid dilution and misuse. For example, we all know the scarcity of cool domain names, and how frustrating it can be for a local Drupal user group to find that their domain name has already been taken by a commercial entity. The trademark policy seeks to resolve this problem.
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I hope everyone can see that the trademark policy is not a money printing machine for me. In fact, it's the opposite. I have paid personally for the creation of the policy and the cost of responding to trademark usage requests. The balance between costs and income is quite skewed out of my favor, although the amount of payments seems to be increasing.
I’ll spare you their 57-page argument that corporations are Americans too (apparently) and spending is speech. But the result left President Obama, congressional leaders, and states a little shaken, grasping for any fix shy of amending the First Amendment (and Sen. Kerry signaled that option is on the table). Out of that scramble has come Sen. Schumer’s DISCLOSE Act.
The Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK, recently at the centre of the hacked emails controversy, is launching a pilot study into how best to make public three major temperature data sets and detailed records of how they are processed. They will include data repeatedly requested by climate sceptics under freedom of information legislation.
It's always kind of amusing when you see a business owner make obviously false statements as they try to justify why everyone should be worse off, just so they don't have to adapt their business model. It's especially amusing in the movie theater business, where we keep seeing theater owners complain about shortening windows between theatrical release, and when a movie can be viewed at home. As we've noted over and over again, every time a movie theater executive makes such a complaint, they are effectively admitting that they're too clueless on how to compete. Even though they have huge theaters with great sound systems and seating, they're admitting that they either don't want to or simply cannot compete. If that's really the case, they don't deserve to be in business.
We've already covered the bizarre story of Homeland Security effectively working for Disney in seizing some domains of sites that were used to file share movies (way, way, way outside of Homeland Security's mandate), and covered the sneaky attempt to defend those moves by conflating copyright infringement online with counterfeit drugs being sold online. It's also still not clear that Homeland Security even has the legal right to seize those domains as it did.
The "journalist" who made-up the story about Grand Theft Auto Rothbury in yesterday's Daily Star says he's "baffled" by the uproar and has responded to complaints by ridiculing adult gamers.
We've written a few times in the past about the attempt by Vision Media TV to use legal tricks to force down critiques of its business practice. The company, as has been covered in detail by the press, tends to focus on charities, suggesting that it will create a news report that may air on "public television" with "Hugh Downs." But the reality is that they're expecting the organization to pay, and there's no evidence that the content ever gets on TV anywhere. And Hugh Downs only participates in very, very limited cases. The company -- or one very much like it, based from the same basic place -- has gotten into legal troubles in the past. Even though the NY Times and NPR have covered Vision Media's method of doing business, Vision Media has not sued them, even though it has claimed such articles are defamatory.
The family of Ian Tomlinson today branded as a "cover-up" the decision not to bring a single criminal charge against a police officer who attacked the newspaper seller before he died.
Sören Preibusch and I have finalised our in-depth report on password practices in the wild, The password thicket: technical and market failures in human authentication on the web, presented in Boston last month for WEIS 2010. The motivation for our report was a lack of technical research into real password deployments. Passwords have been studied as an authentication mechanism quite intensively for the last 30 years, but we believe ours was the first large study into how Internet sites actually implement them. We studied 150 sites, including the most visited overall sites plus a random sample of mid-level sites. We signed up for free accounts with each site, and using a mixture of scripting and patience, captured all visible aspects of password deployment, from enrolment and login to reset and attacks.
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Amazon, for example, didn’t block our brute force attempts, but there’s ample reason to believe they detect account takeover by other means. On the whole though, the level of security implemented is dramatically lower than security researchers might expect. There’s an interesting parallel here. At first the insecurity of passwords was blamed on users not behaving the way security engineers wanted them to: choosing weak passwords, forgetting them, writing them down, sharing them, and typing them in to the wrong domains. It’s now generally accepted that we should design password security around users, and that users may even be wise to ignore security advice.
Fast forward four years however and the formerly close and protective relationship between the US federal government and Sourcefire/Snort has soured to the point that the Department of Homeland Security is funding an alternative through the OISF foundation. The Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) and commercial partners are also contributing to the development of Suricata, OISF's open source IPS.
As the Gulf of Mexico continues to battle the oil from the BP Deepwater drilling disaster, President Obama's establishment of a national ocean policy is a significant step forward in the management of our oceans, our coasts, coastal economies and ocean health. This first ever national ocean policy is not a new idea – in fact, two blue ribbon commissions recommended establishing a national ocean policy more than five years ago. For the most part, those reports have sat on bookshelves in Washington DC, while legislative efforts to implement their recommendations were defeated by ocean industries.
The scientific community has always had difficulty policing conflicts of interest, since financial interests and other exterior motivations have a very real potential to influence if and how scientific data gets reported. This issue has historically reared its ugly head in the biomedical community, where many researchers also consult for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. But it appears that a number of different scientific fields are about to see these conflicts played out in a very public manner, as a report indicates that BP is now locking scientists into contracts that will prevent them from publishing their results at all.
Hundreds of penguins that have apparently starved to death are washing up on the beaches of Brazil, worrying scientists who are investigating what exactly killed them.
One downside is that "shouting," as for humans and other animals, requires more energy expenditure and probable strain, so we are making life more difficult for these already at risk marine mammals. Since communication is tied to mating, feeding and more, these critical aspects of whale life may also be impacted.
Globally NOAA just reported that June is the fourth month in a row of record global temperatures, and the first half of 2010 is on a record pace. This is all the more powerful evidence of human-caused warming “because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect,” as a recent NASA paper noted.
Globally nine countries have smashed all-time temperature records, “making 2010 the year with the most national extreme heat records,” as meteorologist Jeff Masters has reported.
Plan to charge large polluters abandoned in favour of narrower legislation focusing on increasing firms' liability for oil spills
Increased use of satellite data and new tactics to deter loggers have led to drop, says Brazilian environment agency
A telephone call between a financial adviser in Beverly Hills and a trader in New York was all it took to fleece taxpayers on a water-and-sewer financing deal in West Virginia. The secret conversation was part of a conspiracy stretching across the U.S. by Wall Street banks in the $2.8 trillion municipal bond market.
Central bankers and regulators have reached an almost unanimous preliminary agreement on new standards to reinforce the stability of the global financial system, adding to investors’ confidence in the outlook for many banks.
Britain's financial regulator has banned the former finance director of mortgage lender Northern Rock - the country's first major casualty of the global credit crunch - and fined him 320,000 pounds ($500,000) for misreporting figures on loan arrears.
Americans might be counting on the day when home and retirement-fund values start to rise again, but anyone expecting to benefit from a future boom in prices should take note: Economic policymakers around the world are looking for ways to make sure that doesn't happen, or at least not with such intensity that it risks the kind of bust that usually follows.
With powerful senators watching closely, federal investigators search high and low for evidence of insider trading in shares of Microsoft. One of Wall Street's best-known hedge fund managers is targeted, but the feds can't find proof. Years pass, and they close the case without filing charges.
The rules, developed after lengthy negotiations among regulators on the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, would not take effect for at least seven years.
You remember the big to-do about Goldman Sachs and how the United States Securities and Exchange Commission brought a so-called landmark fraud case against the mighty Wall Street firm? If you followed the legal soap opera, you were entertained with congressional hearings, thrilled by the lurid stories and dazzled by all the posturing and pandering. Then, at the eleventh hour, as the Gulf leak was capped, as FinReg was about to be signed, the Hollywood ending came into play as the case miraculously settled for something like half a billion dollars.
The S.E.C. wasn’t forced to grapple with the issue until 1990, when Congress greatly expanded its power to seek financial penalties from corporate violators. (Before then, companies could shrug off civil orders as a passing embarrassment.)
Goldman’s executives claim they do not track all information pertaining to derivatives, a position towards which the F.C.I.C. are clearly dubious.
Goldman Sachs, the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, has argued that it didn’t depend on the U.S. government’s $182.3 billion rescue of AIG because the investment bank had collateral and credit-default swaps to protect itself. Joshua Rosner, an analyst at research firm Graham Fisher & Co. in New York, said the list of counterparties indicates that Goldman Sachs may have had difficulty collecting on those swaps.
Goldman Sachs is facing a threat by the US financial crisis inquiry commission to hire outside accountants to comb through the bank’s systems for data on its derivatives business.
According to the report, “Who Gains and Who Loses from Credit Card Payments? Theory and Calibrations,” released Monday, the reward programs create “an implicit money transfer” to credit card users from noncard users (i.e. cash payers) because of the across-the-board price increases merchants put in place to cover the costs of accepting the cards.
Parts of the bond market are shutting down this week as ratings agencies try to figure out how they'll be affected by a last-minute provision in the finance bill, the WSJ reports.
President Obama will sign bill into law this morning, and this may be the first unintended consequence.
Iraq's proposed new journalism court is a further blow to the country's already oppressed media
Prankster activists The Yes Men are sick of having the videos depicting their shenanigans taken down through copyright complaints, so they've put the latest video, a full-length doc called The Yes Men Fix the World up as a torrent file through VODO, resistant to censorship and easy to get.
The review's publisher apparently used a DMCA takedown notice of copyright infringement to get the critical blog post deleted. I wonder if it will work out for them.
He outlined the FTC’s law enforcement actions against companies accountable for protecting consumer privacy. He said that the FTC has brought 28 actions charging businesses with failing to protect consumers’ personal information and 15 actions charging website operators with collecting information from children without parents’ consent.
The iPhone ecosystem, which Apple protects with the ferocity of a Smoke Monster, is about to get wilder.
We mentioned, when the recent FCC report on broadband came out, that it seemed notable that the first politician out of the gate complaining about it, Rep. Cliff Stearns just happened to have had massive financial support from the biggest broadband players around when it came to raising money for his political campaigns. Given that, it seemed worth looking into the sponsors of a new bill designed to prevent the FCC from implementing net neutrality rules. Now I'm still not convinced the FCC really has the authority to do what it's trying to do, but I find it even more troubling when a group of Senators get together and call a new bill the "Freedom for Consumer Choice Act (FCC Act)," and it seems like they're all funded by AT&T. Somehow, I don't think that AT&T is supporting "freedom for consumer choice" when it comes to broadband. Over the years, they've done exactly the opposite, and worked hard to limit competition.
As various broadband providers drool over the idea of implementing broadband caps, they've mainly focused on the claim that they're doing so to make "bandwidth hogs" pay "their fair share." Sometimes they sprinkle this with claims of poverty over having to provide unlimited access to people who actually use it a lot. Of course, none of this is true. The various metered broadband plans almost always end up increasing everyone's bills, and there's little to no evidence that bandwidth hogs are a problem, either technologically or economically speaking.
Last year the Industry Ministry held a public Copyright Consultation, soliciting Canadian input on copyright reform. More than 8,000 Canadians made submissions in last year’s Copyright Consultation, and these submissions overwhelmingly said
A copyright infringement lawsuit filed by SAS Institute against a small British software company is being passed from a British court to a higher European judicial body following a Friday ruling that has both companies claiming victory.
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British court precedent holds that it is not copyright infringement to study how a program functions and write a program to emulate the functionality.
That sounded wrong to our reader, who questioned how that could make sense, seeing as Mucha has been dead for over 71 years. Now, I'm certainly no expert on Czech copyright law, so anyone out there who is an expert, feel free to chime in. But I'm assuming that the situation is similar to one that we discussed a year ago. In the US, thanks to Bridgeman vs. Corel, it is mostly believed that a photograph of a copyrighted work does not receive a new copyright (technically, it only applies in the court where the ruling was made, but the ruling has been followed by other US courts as well). However, in Europe, I believe the question is more or less unsettled -- so many claim that a photograph of a work can itself get a new copyright.
It claimed websites such as Ars Technica and ZDNet were 'taken in' by a report put out by the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL) and pushed by the 'anti-piracy' outfit AFACT, which said that only 0.3 per cent of files available on Bittorrent were legal.
In a blog post, Torrentfreak said that the report tried to answer four questions and got them all entirely wrong due to inaccurate data and a flawed methodology.
For instance, ICSL said that there were slightly more than a million torrent files from 17 Bittorrent trackers last Spring, but this was only a small sample of what they could have looked at. Also it was biased towards the most-seeded torrents such as TV and film, leaving others badly unrepresented.
Before the Digital Economy Act, it was possible for a copyright owner to gain an injunction against a service provider from the High Court. Under Sections 97A and 191JA of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended by the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003), the Court can grant an injunction if it is proved they have "actual knowledge" that someone is "using their service to infringe copyright" - s97A(1). In practice, this means the copyright owner must notify the service provider and then take them to court (where they would need to prove the infringement) before anything would have to be done. The powers potentially available under the Digital Economy Act take this much further.
Java is Everywhere