Screens from left to right: Condor View of Jobs; PhEDEx Transfer quality; Hadoop Status Page; MyOSG Site Status; CMS Dashboard Job Status; Nagios Monitoring of Nebraska Cluster; CMS Event Display of November 7 Beam Scrape Event; OSG Resource Verification Monitoring of US CMS Tier-2 Sites HadoopViz Visualization of Packet Movement Data Analysis
Once the data is stored at a Tier-2, physicists need to be able to analyze it to make their discoveries. The platform for this task is Linux. For the sake of standardization, most of the development occurs on Red Hat Enterprise-based distributions. Both CERN and FNAL have their own Linux distributions but add improvements and customizations into the Scientific Linux distribution. The Tier-2 at Nebraska runs CentOS as the primary platform at our site.
Before getting a device, personnel, and facilities tour, Carl and I talked shop: uTouch, the future of multi-touch in Linux, Unity, Ubuntu on a plethora of devices. You know, the usual good stuff. I asked him what he'd like to see in Ubuntu that he feels would be necessary to totally rock out the tablet experience. His list of top picks echoes the sentiments of many people with whom I have had similar conversations. In no particular order, the list goes something like this:
* fully-working auto-rotate * a great on-screen keyboard * browser, music, video, photo, and document apps -- all with a user interface designed for touch * the ability to deliver and play games
Over the weekend we reported that QEMU 0.13 had surfaced followed by the release announcement coming out on Monday. The team working on QEMU-KVM, the version of QEMU designed for use with KVM (the Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtualization on Linux, have also pushed out their v0.13 release based upon upstream QEMU.
WebUdp8 reader bhm brought Fliqlo, a very popular screensaver for Windows and OSX to Linux. Fliqlo allows you to make your screen look like a flip-style clock.
For some time now I have been struggling with getting Gwibber working reliably with facebook. Since Gwibber was included by default in Ubuntu, usage has gone way up and we quickly exceeded our API request allocation with Facebook. Facebook allocations are per application, not per user, which means Facebook blocks API requests for everyone, not just the users which are refreshing too often, etc.
If you’re familiar with the command line on Linux or UNIX, you’ve likely heard of a program called “screen”, which allows you to create virtual terminal sessions inside of your current terminal. The major benefit to this is the ability to dettach and reattach screen sessions, leaving your programs to act as if you never left. Additionally, you can have multiple buffers inside your screen that act like tabs, allowing you to flip between.
Using GNU Screen can make life much easier, but how often do you start a job and then realize "I wish I'd started screen first"? I used to do it all the time, then I configured things so screen starts by default when I log into my server.
FlashVideoReplacer is a Firefox add-on that strips out the Flash video on sites such as YouTube, automatically replacing it with a standard video file that is re-embedded on the page. In a nutshell, this means that a native player is used instead of the embedded Flash player. This can offer a huge performance benefit for web-based video playback, particularly full-screen playback.
Just in time for holiday television specials, cold winter nights, and impressing all of your friends and family when they visit, the first Release Candidate for MythTV 0.24 is now available.
An alert blogger at BullCityRising in Durham scored a significant scoop Monday with its report that the American Tobacco Historic District’s owners are trying to lure Red Hat to the Bull City.
The Skinny learned last week about the ATHD’s owner – Capitol Broadcasting, parent of Local Tech Wire and WRAL.com – was making a big push to convince Red Hat to move to one of the buildings it owns around the home stadium for the Durham Bulls baseball team.
The Fedora Design Team Bi-weekly Bounty is a bi-weekly (well, at least monthly! ;-) ) blog post where we’ll outline a quick-and-easy design project that needs doing for the Fedora Community, outlining all the tools, files, and other resources you’ll need to complete the project. If you’re a designer and are interested in getting involved in the free and open source community, this is a good opportunity to get your feet wet!
This is to confirm that Option 1 "Welcome non-packaging contributors as project members" has won the recent GR, with 285 votes versus 14.
Thanks to Mohamed Amine IL Idrissi, Software Center is able to tell you which applications (of which Zeitgeist knows of) you have not been using for a while.
Much like anything in life, what works for one individual might be seen as unneeded by another. Yet when it comes to making the Ubuntu Linux desktop more productive to use, there are some clear cut help tips. They lessen unneeded keystrokes, data loss, and workstation downtime.
In this article, I'll share twenty tips that have saved me countless hours of wasted time, while making my life with Ubuntu easier in general. Some among you may have different variations of the same ideas presented here already. Despite this possibility, I believe it's probable that there’ll be tips included that you might not have thought of yet.
In this issue we cover:
* Improving The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Survey * Translators: you are awesome and you should be proud of it * Enabling Automatic Bug Expiry * Unity and uTouch * Multitouch News * Ubuntu Stats * LoCo News * AskUbuntu reaches 2000 questions – 5000 answers – 4000 users – 20000 votes * Introducing the Bikeshed Package! * Ubuntu Manga Chapter 7! * AskUbuntu Growing Fast * In The Press * In The Blogosphere * The Trouble With GUIs * 42 day widget * Planning and Executing the Linaro Cycle * Full Circle Podcast on YouTube * Featured Podcasts * Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings * Upcoming Meetings and Events * Updates and Security * UWN Sneak Peek * And much much more
Edubuntu is an official Ubuntu derivative mean for educational purposes. Unlike Ubuntu, it comes as a DVD not a CD. If you want to try it out you have to download the ISO of the DVD and use the Live Session. Well, this is what most of the Linux dristros offer so that users can test it before making the final decision to install it.
Ever wanted to try out Ubuntu’s educational spin ‘Edubuntu’ without having to download huge .iso’s and install additional applications?
there will be an election for the Fellowship seat in FSFE’s General Assembly between the 1st and 28th February 2011.
As we are getting ready to roll out the first alpha for CiviCRM v3.3, I figured a status update on some of the cool new features of 3.3 was in order.
A silly question? Maybe. But the analogy, made by a speaker at the Educause conference here today, reflects a recurring theme at this year’s event: Do our university bureaucracies still make sense in the era of networks?
In a session called “The University as an Agile Organization,” David J. Staley laid out the findings of a focus group he conducted asking educators what a college would look like if it ran like Wikipedia.
So, 'having a bunch of smart people in a group doesn't necessarily make the group smart'.
This is one of the conclusions from new research on collective intelligence by Carnegie Mellon & MIT (full story below). While this seems counter to what we might expect at a superficial level, on reflection it makes perfect sense. Any of us who've been in group ideation or creative processes can attest to the fact that sometimes things just seem to click, other times the group or team just never quite gets up to speed, even if all the smart people have been painstakingly fought for, gathered, briefed, fed Haribo & put to work.
We had the chance to learn more about his book and how Wikipedia works in an interview with Reagle last month. We were interested to learn more and thought you would be, too.
Nottingham University is giving masterclasses around the UK for those who want to do something with the government data has become available since the launch of data.gov.uk.
The 25,000 peer-reviewed journals and refereed conference proceedings that exist today publish about 2.5 million articles per year, across all disciplines, languages and nations. No university or research institution anywhere, not even the richest, can afford to subscribe to all or most of the journals that its researchers may need to use.
Last year Melanie Manuel, a high school Spanish teacher, decided to reinforce vocabulary by requiring her advanced students to study human rights. She sent them to the Web to analyze the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and asked them to watch films about Latin America with the Declaration in mind. They created an annotated archive of video clips about human rights' abuses to be used in classrooms around the world.
This week is the fourth annual Open Access Week, and starting yesterday Oct 18, the official kick-off date, the CC community has been participating in various open access events around the globe. “Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” Taking place the same week everywhere, Open Access Week brings together people from all ends of the academic and research communities at various worldwide conferences, workshops, and other events to “continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.” Below is a (not exhaustive) list of what CC jurisdiction leads, open culture and open education advocates, and the Creative Commons staff are doing to inspire open access.
The growth rate of open access is robust and growing. DOAJ added 312 titles this quarter (more than 3 per day), for a total of 5,452. There are now more than 6,600 journals using OJS. The number of journals fully participating in PMC continues to grow, while the NIH Public Access Policy compliance rate is about 60%, indicating significant progress but still room for improvement. BASE now searches more than 25 million documents. Hindawi's monthly submissions have grown to over 2,000 this quarter.
BBC bosses fear that the coalition government is gearing up for a €£500m-plus raid on the licence fee, by forcing the broadcaster to meet the full cost of free television licences for the over 75s.
France expects to give away another 210,000 free newspaper subscriptions to citizens aged 18-24 over the next year, in a state intervention designed to help save the country’s news media by regaining young readers.
Objet Geometries, makers of the powerful Alaris, Eden and Connex lines of commercial 3D printers just announced they've managed to receive ISO 13485:2003 certification. This certification means Objet is now able to deliver various types of 3D printing equipment into a wide variety of medical roles. We've seen Objet dabble in dental before but this certification means they can go much, much farther.
To the House of Commons last night where I have been invited to join the panel for the launch of the new booklet by Dominic Raab MP -- "fight terror, defend freedom" (PDF format). As well as Dominic, we were joined on the panel by David Davis MP, the former Shadow Home Secretary, and our host Alex Deane from Big Brother Watch.
Dominic's paper is well worth a read (as indeed is his book, "The Assault on Liberty, What Went Wrong with Rights"). One of his key points is that our justice system is an underused weapon in the fight against terrorism. We should be strengthening our capacity to prosecute terrorists, not least by lifting the ban on using intercept evidence in court.
The aircraft carriers are important to our ability to support US invasions abroad.They have no other purpose. The big question so far ducked is whether we have abandoned the disastrous "Blair doctrine" of liberal interventionism. or bombing foreigners to make them better people. The unspoken presumption isthat we are still maintaining this option.
We have long known that lender fraud was rampant during the real estate boom. The FBI began warning of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud as early as 2004. We know that mortgage originators invented “low doc” and “no doc” loans, encouraged borrowers to take out “liar loans”, and promoted “NINJA loans” (no income, no job, no assets, no problem!). All of these schemes were fraudulent from the get-go.
At first glance, I thought the Times piece might be a report on New Age self actualization for investment banks. But the title suggests something more troubling. The whole point of financial reform is that Goldman (and the others) should no longer be permitted to be Goldman. A return to business as usual is the last thing we need.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is taking its first steps to change the way it does business after it weathered harsh criticism and paid a $550 million fine tied to its actions before and during the financial crisis.
The Wall Street firm, which is trying to rehabilitate its public reputation with an ad campaign that, among other things, tries to show how it helps create jobs, is planning to make changes in the way it reports its finances and how it relates to clients, investors and analysts, people involved in the planning say. It has also gone outside the company and hired an executive who has been a vocal critic of Wall Street pay practices and weak corporate governance.
In a troubling sign for Democrats as they head into the midterm elections, their signature tax cut of the past two years, which decreased income taxes by up to $400 a year for individuals and $800 for married couples, has gone largely unnoticed.
Mr. Lawler is a founder of Lawler Economic & Housing Consulting LLC, which provides data, analysis and forecasts of housing, mortgage, financial and economic trends. His clients include hedge funds and financial firms or fund managers, as well as the mortgage insurance company Fannie Mae. He had previously worked for Fannie Mae for 22 years, first as director of financial economics in 1984, and as a senior vice president from 1989 until he retired from Fannie in January 2006. Before joining Fannie Mae, he worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
JPMorgan Chase & Company has a proposition for the mutual funds and pension funds that oversee many Americans’ savings: Heads, we win together. Tails, you lose — alone.
Amid a rising uproar over slipshod bank foreclosure practices, members of the Obama administration on Sunday expressed anger about the revelations, but urged caution as multiple investigations into the crisis unfold.
It is widely, though not universally, assumed that the Federal Reserve will soon move to bolster the economy by trying to nudge down long-term interest rates on Treasury bonds, home mortgages and corporate bonds. Just how much rates would decline and how much production and employment would increase are uncertain. What's clearer is that the move would be something of an act of desperation, reflecting a poverty of good ideas to resuscitate the economy.
More than half of Americans say they think that federal workers are overpaid for the work they do, and more than a third think they are less qualified than those working in the private sector, according to a Washington Post poll.
The mind readers at the NYT told readers that:
"The Obama administration has resisted calls for a more forceful response, worried that added pressure might spook the banks and hobble the broader economy [emphasis added]."
It is easy to see how a foreclosure moratorium might hurt bank profits. After all, the banks could be forced to follow the same laws on mortgages and property transfers as the rest of us. This would raise their costs and reduce their profits, which is why they had been taking short-cuts instead of following the law.
Flights were canceled, drivers scavenged for fuel and hundreds of thousands of people, young and old, took to the streets of Paris and other cities on Tuesday as protests over President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plans to change France’s pension system mounted in advance of a parliamentary vote.
In the 1990s, capitalism was on the march and the United States mortgage market seemed like a model. In much of the world, it seemed miraculous that ordinary Americans could move into a big home by borrowing large sums of money for 30 years. A crucial element in the American system was that lenders could take the homes of delinquent borrowers; it was impossible to imagine a well-functioning mortgage market in places like Russia and Bolivia, without a similar ability to foreclose.
The dollar surged and stocks slid after a Chinese interest rate hike Tuesday left investors pondering whether the U.S. and China were looking to ease market tensions ahead of a crucial meeting of finance ministers this weekend.
Worries that China's monetary authorities are putting the brakes on an overheating economy also weighed on sentiment and demand for more risky assets - in times of heightened risk aversion, the dollar gains ground through its status as a safe haven currency while stocks retreat.
Bank of America Corp. said Tuesday it lost $7.65 billion during the third quarter due to a charge related to credit and debit card reform legislation passed over the summer.
The bank also announced a change in its consumer banking strategy to focus on providing customers with incentives to do more business with the bank instead of generating revenue through penalty fees such as overdraft charges. The bank is already starting to implement some changes, and has cut overdraft fees on small amounts that customers charge to their debit cards.
Amid the testosterone-fueled trading floors of Wall Street, Ms. Buchan has not only built a hugely successful hedge fund investment firm but also one that is, on paper, owned and run by women.
But questions have surfaced about whether her firm, Pacific Alternative Asset Management Company, is now — or ever was — controlled by women at all.
It turns out that S. Donald Sussman, a hedge fund mogul who has bankrolled some of the biggest (male) names in the business, has quietly stood behind Paamco for years, pocketing much of its profit. A recent court ruling officially put a chunk of Paamco’s parent company in his hands.
Facebook has just got poked in the security department after some of its most popular apps have reportedly been transmitting user information
Ofcom says it won’t investigate the YouView connected-TV JV under the UK’s Competition Act - essentially on the grounds that it’s not anti-competitive because it hasn’t launched yet and because few details are available on exactly how it will behave.
MIT's Tech Review reports on a paper in the Stanford Technology Law Review, in which law/economic scholar Eric M. Fraser explains the anticompetitive aspects of the Google Book Search settlement that the Authors Guild has proposed.
Of course you do - and here's your big chance. Dirk Riehle is not only the Professor for Open Source Software at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany orders these things better than we do), but he is also part of a “multilateral commission instituted by the German parliament to discuss and make recommendations on, well, Internet and digital society.”
Specifically he is looking at revisions to German copyright law, and being an open source-y chap he is soliciting views and ideas from everyone, which is jolly kind of him. He rightly points out that maybe a glance at existing German copyright law would be a good idea before letting rip. The closing date for comments on the blog post is the beginning of next week.
Following a complaint from a group representing local music and movie companies, prosecutors ordered the takedown of Moldova’s biggest torrent site last week. As the authorities try to work out if any crime has been committed at the 270,000 member TorrentsMD, the entertainment industry group is setting out its terms for a truce with the tracker.
When Shane Comegys was 16 he loved two things: his 1970 Mustang and illegally downloaded music. Given the choice, he'd happily take the car and delete the music, but the RIAA's lawyers didn't give him a choice. They took both.
In most cases, recorded music has always been somewhat of a promotion for the live show. It’s a little known fact that most musical artists have always made as much as 95% of their income from playing live, if we take publishing out of the equation. Even artists that were selling millions of albums during recorded music’s heyday from the 70’s through the 90’s weren’t making as much on record or CD sales as you might think.
Re: "Modernized copyright law crucial to artists' success; In digital age, musicians still need to sell music," by Jeff Rogers, Opinion, Oct. 11.
As an avid music fan, I read this piece with great interest, but could not disagree more with the author.
Jeff Rogers claims he wants Colleen Brown to be fairly compensated for her creative expression.
I would argue she already is. In the age of digital file sharing, artists cannot rely as heavily on album sales as a source of income. To compensate for this, a greater emphasis is placed on live performance.
Since consumers now have free access to an artist's work, they will be more inclined to listen to it and if they like it they will attend a live performance. In this sense, the artist's album is no longer a product, but is instead an advertisement or promotional tool to get people to pay to see a live performance.
I wish singer/songwriter Colleen Brown's career well, but for Jeff Rogers to lay the problem of the decline of music sales at the door of Internet downloading is unfounded.
A 2007 Industry Canada report "found that music downloads have a positive effect on music purchases among Canadian downloaders, but that there is no effect taken over the entire population aged 15 and over."
Other reports conclude there are no negative effects of downloading on the music industry. The music industry is facing stiff competition, particularly video gaming, now overtaking music in terms of sales.
Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act, is not the answer to declining music sales. Rather, the draconian system of digital locks presently proposed by the legislation is more likely to alienate those who purchase music or any other form of digital media.
California schoolchildren are obliged to copy ideas, and it was copyright lobbyists who put them up to it.
Since 2006, the school system of a state dependent on a profitable entertainment industry has made it mandatory for teachers to run their students through a programs like “What’s the Diff?” which has them role-play as different stakeholders in the unauthorized downloading of a movie: actors, directors, producers against a feckless, hard-drive-stuffing computer user.
The program leads students to pre-determined conclusions: “If you haven’t paid for it, you’ve stolen it,” “Intellectual property is no different than physical property;” for the record, there is no “diff” between digital piracy and shoplifting. The curriculum was developed by the Motion Picture Association of America, which also provided the Boy Scouts in Los Angeles with the guidelines for a Respect Copyright badge.
The motion will be tabled today and voted on Thursday. Unlike other ACTA countries, which have held meetings with interested parties and politicians since the last round of negotiations, Canadian officials and politicians have remained silent. These hearings offer an excellent opportunity to learn more about the Canadian approach at the ACTA talks.
A European Parliament majority accepted a written declaration on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which iterates the calls to European Commissioner Karel de Gucht for more legislative transparency.
Geany snippets