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Links 4/10/2010: DebConf10 Report, ODF is Green



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Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • FOSS Community Orientation?
    * Yellow: Production Orientation * Pink: Marketing Orientation * Green: FOSS Community Orientation


  • Wasteful Technology Habits - Think Before You Buy
    OpenOffice meets the needs of easily 95% of home users (and a good deal of those that use office software at work) and most of those people using an, often times illegal, version of Photoshop would be able to accomplish the exact same tasks using the legally free GIMP. Beyond this beginning Linux distros such as Linux Mint or Pinguy OS easily fulfill all the desktop computing needs of your average user.

    With all of this in mind, why don't you see Linux, OpenOffice, or GIMP on the shelf at your local computer store? Simple:

    There is no money in it for the retailer.


  • Draft of the ANLoc FOSS localisation manual


    Today is international translation day! As part of the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc), I have been writing a book on the localisation of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).


  • Events

    • IRILL Days 2010: detailed program


    • Free Software and the Playing Field
      In only a few years, Free Software has evolved from being a niche phenomenon into an increasingly mature mainstream movement. Despite the commonplace understanding as Free Software as one of the driving forces of tomorrow's information technologies, the surrounding political and economic environment has often not yet kept up. As the founder and first president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, as well as CEO of a Free Software enterprise, the speaker has unique insight into political and economic aspects that keep favouring proprietary technologies until the current day despite the assurances to the contrary by some. From his personal experience, Georg Greve will give some real life examples of how Free Software companies work and interact with partners and customers, and how a truly level playing field would be constructed.




  • Web Browsers

    • Desktop dictatorship: Corporate Australia still prefers IE
      That’s a sizable chunk, when you realise that total global average daily users of Firefox at the same time was about 114 million. In short, roughly 1.5 percent of total Firefox users globally are Australian. And the number is growing. As at August 2009, there were 1.6 million average Australian daily users of Firefox. That figure was much smaller — 1.2 million — in August 2008. In other words, although IE is still the dominant force, Firefox is a strong challenger, with Chrome and then Safari coming up behind.

      IBM CIO Godbee compares his company’s adoption of Firefox to the way that the similarly open source Linux operating system gained traction on servers around the world over the past several decades since it was first released.

      “Over a period of time it has been organic,” he says. “And suddenly there is it is, on a wide scale.”




  • Databases

    • Road to MariaDB 5.2: Virtual Columns
      MariaDB 5.2 is almost here. The gamma release (think “RC”) was released on 28 Sep and the stable release will follow just as soon as the developers are happy with it.




  • Project Releases

    • FireBreath 1.2 released
      FireBreath is licensed under a dual license structure; this means you can choose which of two licenses to use it under. FireBreath can be used under the New BSD license or the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1.


    • ForgeRock Releases OpenDJ




  • Programming



  • Standards/Consortia

    • Is ODF Green?
      Green IT is concerned with approaches to information technology that reduce the environmental impact from the manufacture, use and disposal of computers and peripherals. Occasionally I am asked whether Open Document Format (ODF) has any relationship to “Green IT”. This is an interesting question, and the fact that the question is asked at all suggests that Green IT goals are increasing playing a central role in decision making.

      When an organization migrates from Microsoft Office and their binary file formats (DOC/XSL/PPT) and moves to ODF, they will immediately notice that ODF documents are much smaller than the corresponding Microsoft format documents. This is a benefit of the ZIP compression applied to the contents of ODF documents. It also reflects that fact that Microsoft-format documents, especially ones that have been edited and saved many times, tend to accumulate unused blocks in the file, blocks which are not used, but still bloat the file’s storage.

      [...]

      So in summary, yes, a move to ODF will cause your documents to be far smaller than they were before, and that has advantages in terms of storage and bandwidth consumption. But let’s be honest, when it comes to disk storage and bandwidth documents are not your biggest problem. Graphics and video are far larger.






Leftovers

  • Editor's Note: Do Boobytrapped Websites Capture Readers?
    Compounding the problem is decreasing quality and quantity of original material and increasing torrents of swill from content farms, recycling the same shallow junk over and over merely to provide a framework to hang yet more ads on, and then SEO-gaming for all they're worth. Thanks, I so love it when the first page of a Google search is link farms and content farm crapola.

    Consider supporting sites you enjoy, if they accept reader subscriptions or donations. For example, Groklaw and LWN.net serve up some of the best, most in-depth articles anywhere. Groklaw runs no ads, and LWN.net relies on subscriptions to help them keeps the ads to a minimum. As always, it comes down to the Golden Rule-- the one with the gold makes the rules. Me, I don't even want to live in a world controlled by marketers. Though I fear we are already mostly there.


  • Science

    • US Government To Operate Fab Labs?
      They want to establish "at least one Fab Lab per every 700,000 individuals in the United States in the first ten years of its operation". Um, our simplistic arithmetic shows this would be 438 Fab Labs, based on 307,006,550 residents (from July 2009) divided by 700,000. Many cities would have several Fab Labs, if this scheme works. Oh, and the population is likely to grow a tad by ten year's time.


    • Anti-antibiotics: Bugs, drugs and bureaucrats
      For certain kinds of bacteria, we have reached the end of the line. No new antibiotics have been developed for decades, and some superbugs are now resistant to all those we have. There is no one solution to the problem of antibiotic resistance, but we desperately need new antibiotics.

      Far from helping, though, drug regulatory agencies are discouraging the development of new antibiotics, say those who met in London last week to discuss solutions to the problem of antibiotic resistance, at a conference organised by the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. New Scientist finds out what is going on.

      Why are regulators coming under fire?

      They are making it ever harder and more costly to get new antibiotics approved. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) came in for the most criticism.




  • Health/Nutrition

    • Conversation With Frederick Kaufman
      Could Del Monte, Heinz, Unilever and Walmart become the deciders on stainability? In "What's New for Dinner," Frederick Kaufman writes about the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops, an attempt by large companies to measure the environmental impact of the seed-to-shelf life cycle of any produce-based product.


    • Say hello to mechanically separated chicken!
      Basically, the entire chicken is smashed and pressed through a sieve--bones, eyes, guts, and all. it comes out looking like this.




  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Miliband retains Labour line on DNA and CCTV
      Ed Miliband, giving his first speech to the Labour party conference on 28 September 2010, said of civil liberties, "too often we seemed casual about them".

      "I won't let the Tories or the Liberals take ownership of the British tradition of liberty," he said. "I want our party to reclaim that tradition."


    • We would be better off without the vetting and barring scheme
      As a report published yesterday by the Civitas think tank makes clear, this is a dangerous approach. The idea behind the Vetting and Barring Scheme is flawed and remodelling it will make no difference. The scheme was introduced to make children safer after the murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells in Soham in 2002 exposed the flaws in vetting their killer Ian Huntley. Yet it is more likely to put our children in greater jeopardy, while at the same time poisoning their relationship with adults.


    • Police to trial while-you-wait DNA tests
      Police will soon have the means to grab someone's genetic sample and run it through the national DNA database while waiting in the street, if early trials by military industrial giant Lockheed Martin are successful.


    • Supermarket tells Norwich toddler - take your hood off
      A Norwich two-year-old was asked to take down the hood of his anorak when entering a city convenience store - for security reasons.


    • €£470,00 Norfolk speed camera may never be used
      Yesterday Norfolk County Council confirmed that the camera has never been used and as a result no tickets have been issued.




  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • 10:10's Boom video: you can't control the debate any more
      10:10’s climate change murder video has caused much offence, but one thing nobody is questioning is their inability to control the material, or the debate.

      The instant negative reaction from most of the climate change campaign community after its release yesterday morning, prompted the video to be quickly pulled from 10:10’s own website, but it was even more quickly reposted by people wishing to continue to comment.

      Wisely, in their apology statement yesterday evening 10:10 said they are not going to try to control how people use the video now it is in the wild, for instance via copyright take-downs.






  • Finance



  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Social Mores At Work: Sigur Ros Calls Out Commercials With 'Similar' Music


    • Well then; All's right with the world


    • Copyrights

      • Sintel Open Movie Released and It's Absolutely Beautiful!
        This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. Also, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.


      • Ministry of Sound Silenced By Huge DDoS Attack
        Today, lawyers Gallant Macmillan will attend the High Court in London in an attempt to persuade a senior judge to order the handover of hundreds more identities of people accused of file-sharing. To mark this occasion, Operation Payback decided to hit the London law firm but after they tried to nullify the planned DDoS attack, Anonymous hit their client instead. Many hours later, Ministry of Sound is still out of business online.


      • Historic audio at risk, thanks to bad copyright laws
        The Library of Congress has released a sobering new report on the state of digital audio preservation in the United States. The Library's National Recording Preservation Board concludes that most of the nation's audio libraries are ill-equipped to handle the complex array of streams and digital formats by which music and other recorded sounds are released today.

        "It is relatively easy to recognize the importance of recorded sound from decades ago," the survey notes. "What is not so evident is that older recordings actually have better prospects to survive another 150 years than recordings made last week using digital technologies."


      • ACTA

        • ACTA is No Done Deal!
          The spokesperson for the Trade European Commissioner has announced Saturday October 2nd, that all parties have reached an agreement on ACTA. This is one more example of how the secrecy of this negotiation permits all manoeuvres to deceive citizens and Members of Parliaments. La Quadrature du Net calls all European citizens to alert their MEPs and National MPs about the need to monitor closely the rest of this negotiation and prepare to reject its by-product.




      • Digital Economy (UK)











Clip of the Day



Neal Walfield - "GNU Hurd"



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Credit: TinyOgg

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