This is just what will happen next Saturday in Bologna, Italy.
The Linux Day is the largest Italian event for the promotion of Linux and Free Software in General (as you may read in my reports on the 2005 and 2006 editions). This year it will consists of more than 130 simultaneous events all across the country. Coop is "a system of Italian consumers' cooperatives which operates the largest supermarket chain in Italy" (from Wikipedia).
We couldn't have done this without the help of the Linux and FOSS communities, and the money was presented to Joe and his family in your name, not ours.
The move may put Joyent in direct competition with market leaders like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, which also support applications built on Windows and Linux. But customers that are primarily looking for a service that hosts Web applications will find that Joyent is less expensive because of its SmartOS, Ludwig said. Also, Joyent has optimized its offering for Web applications so can better serve customers looking to host Web apps, he said.
Filesystem block size rarely enters the sparkling dialog at your noontime geekfest where movie one-liners and song lyrics replace actual conversation but today is different. The ticking of thumbs halts in mid-text when someone at the table opens up an intellectual volley with, “Have you ever seen the error that there isn’t enough space on the filesystem for the selected operation in Virtual Center?” The puzzled faces stare back as if someone had just announced that iPads are on sale for half price. But, before you, or they, have a chance to react to this obviously simple problem of insufficient disk space, the problem isn’t insufficient disk space.
The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.10 for OpenIndiana today. Bordeaux 2.0.10 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have bundled Wine 1.2.1, updated firefox to 3.6.8, Added support for Apples Safari 5.0 Web Browser, Updated to the latest winetricks release and fixed desktop shortcuts.
Less than a month after Firaxis released its highly anticipated and acclaimed Civilization 5, CodeWeavers, Inc. today announced the release of CrossOver Games 9.2, enabling gamers to play the game on Linux and Mac operating systems.
Stern praised the speed of the game and its puzzle solving. The game was named one of the most promising open source games of 2008 by El Heraldo and praised as a well-made non-violent game for children by heute.
For as long as I can remember my number one music player on Linux (or in fact anywhere) has been amarok. Although, I took a little break from it during its shaky transition from 1.4 to 2.x. I came back when things got stable enough and I have not looked back ever since. Well, until recently when rave of a certain fork of Amarok 1.4 called Clementine started to proof too much to ignore. Couple of times I previously tried Clementine I went back to amarok like 5 minutes later. I found it (then) very unstable, and lacked many of amarok features like lyrics fetching etc.
The XtreemOS partners are pleased to provide access to their open test bed for interested developers and users. It is a distributed test bed spread across several participating institutions.
Many Linux developers in these years are working on porting Linux software on ARM architectures. Debian in particular offers the full distribution to be installed on supported devices, and I wanted to try it out. There are already images prepared for the Versatile platform (thanks to Aurélien Jarno), and with them it is possible to try Debian for ARM without owning an ARM platform, using QEMU.
I consider the latest version of Ubuntu to be the best version ever. The new font makes it cooler than any other operating system. It is extremely secure, resource and cost effective. It is updated every six months thus keeping my machine updated with latest technologies. What else should I ask for?
Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu Linux operating system is quickly moving from being a niche player in the market to an environment which caters for a broad range of users.
Wind River announced the fourth-generation of its commercial embedded Linux distribution, adding 95 packages. Based on Linux 2.6.34+ kernel, Wind River Linux 4 offers GCC 4.4, EGLIBC 2.11, and GDB 7 cross-compiling toolchains, and provides multiple virtualization options, PREEMPT RT real-time Linux, multi-team collaboration features, a new native x86 build environment, and support for the upcoming CGL 5.0, says the company.
Intel's Wind River software division is out this week with a new embedded Linux release that adds new carrier grade and workflow capabilities to the platform.
Wind River entered the Linux space in 2004 as an optional alternative embedded operating system to its own VxWorks embedded system. With Wind River Linux 4.0, the company is building on some of its past systems by extending real-time Linux capabilities. One such real-time capability comes in the form of the preempt_rt Linux kernel.
HP has officially announced the launch of version 2.0 of its webOS mobile operating system, considered to be Palm's response to Apple's iOS 4 and Google's Android 2.2. The latest version of the proprietary-but-Linux-based mobile OS features built-in support for Adobe Flash 10.1 for viewing web content in the included browser and improved multi-tasking support, which the company calls "true multitasking". Users can easily switch between open applications without needing to close current apps by viewing running programs using a "card stacks" view that displays open apps in the order they were last used.
There was a lot of excitement when Intel and Nokia joined forces earlier this year to create MeeGo, a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices. The blending of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin operating systems had all the signs of being a big player in the mobile market, not only because of the backing of two industry heavyweights but also because the open nature of the OS opened up opportunities.
Your editor's iRiver H340 music player attracts stares in the crowded confines of the economy class cabin; it is rather larger than many newer, more capable devices, contains a rotating disk drive, and looks like it should have a smokestack as well. But your editor has continued to nurse this gadget for a simple reason: it is no longer possible to buy anything else like it. The device is open, has a reasonable storage capacity, and is able to run Rockbox. It is, thus, not just running free software; it is far more functional and usable than any other music player your editor has ever encountered. These are not advantages to be given up lightly.
Android 3.0 ("Gingerbread") will feature video chat support, SIP support for Google Voice on Android devices, and a major graphical redesign, says an industry report. Due this fall, Gingerbread will also provide support for Google TV and its "Youtube Leanback" feature, says the story.
Google this week rolled out the first development versions of Chrome 8, the latest vein of its development browser. The primary focus for Chrome 8 is on cloud-based services, probably with Google's Chrome OS imminent release in mind.
Google has released the latest version of its web browser Google Chrome. The version 7.0.517.41 has been released to the stable and beta channels for Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuse, Windows and Mac.
The version mainly fixes hundreds of bugs and inlcudes an updated HTML5 parser. Google releases a new stable version of Google Chrome approximately every six weeks to get bug fixes, improvements, and new features.
Mozilla Prism lets you run web apps in their own desktop window allowing a certain degree of freedom compared to running the app in a web browser, while restricting crashes to the app’s window. Follow Sukrit’s step-by-step guide to find out just how easy it is…
Ingres has announced the availability of Ingres Database 10, the latest version of the company's flagship open source database product.
During Free Software Foundation Europe's pdfreaders.org campaign, Free Software activists from 41 countries have reported 2286 public sector institutions which advertise non-free PDF readers on their websites. FSFE will now contact these institutions, trying to get as many advertisements for non-free PDF readers as possible removed before the end of the year. Progress will be documented on the list of reported institutions.
Stephen Colebourne has proposed that Oracle split the Java Community Process into core and ecosystem organisations with Oracle retaining control of the core parts of Java while the surrounding JSR (Java Specification Requests) are handled by a newly independent body.
It’s a weighty question for such a silly product, but it illustrates perfectly why ThinkGeek has become so popular. The company makes toys for adults, novelties designed to appeal to both your inner child and your inner grad student. These dorks have been retrofitting classic novelty items with a veneer of obsessive dorkiness for more than a decade, lavishing so much care and imagination and wit on their products that they sometimes seem more like conceptual art than cubicle kitsch.
For three weeks, China has blocked shipments of rare-earth minerals to Japan, a move that has boosted the urgency of efforts to break Beijing's control of these minerals. China now produces nearly all of the world's supply of rare earths, which are crucial for a wide range of technologies, including hard drives, solar panels, and motors for hybrid vehicles.
United's announcement is cause for joy because maybe, just maybe, the nation's state insurance commissioners -- whom Congress gave the responsibility of determining how major parts of the new law will be implemented -- will finally realize that they don't need to give the big insurers the truck-sized loopholes they have been lobbying so hard for over the past several weeks.
Governments should formulate a doctrine to stave off cyberattacks similar to the Cold War-era principle of nuclear deterrence, according to former US Department of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff.
'Rules of the road' for dealing with cyberattacks should include agreed principles on how to react to sustained cyberattacks on critical national infrastructure, Chertoff told a press conference at RSA Conference Europe on Thursday. "[President Eisenhower's workshopping exercise] Project Solarium gave us the theory of deterrence, where rules of the road were clearly understood," he said. "An attack on the US or its allies with a nuclear weapon would be responded to with overwhelming force."
We reproduce here in full the account of Michael Roberts, an American pilot whose life and career has seemingly been ruined by his principled opposition to body scanners.
Speaking in a live interview on France's LCI television channel, Hortefeux confused the terms for fingerprints ("empreintes digitales") with that for "genital prints" ("empreintes genitales").
People in the auto industry are opening up a new chapter in its history by transitioning to electric vehicles but they're writing the book as they go along.
The technology to make fun-to-drive, well connected plug-in vehicles is already here. Now, auto and utility companies are grappling with how to make these electric vehicles a commercial success, speakers at the Business of Plugging In conference said here today.
Every day the financial crisis continues to hit home for families being foreclosed upon. Last month, there were 347,420 foreclosure filings across America, and the rate shows no signs of slowing. The unemployment rate is now driving these tragic foreclosures and 11 million Americans are at risk of losing their homes.
One of the good things about intellectual property issues is that it's really a non-partisan debate. While, in practicality, this seems to mean that both of the major political parties support bad copyright and patent law, at the very least, it leaves ridiculous political rhetoric out of the debates on things like copyright. But, sometimes, weird things happen. Such as when Glenn Beck seems to think that "fair use" is a choice of some sort. Apparently, in political circles, there was a lot of attention paid recently to a video mashup showing Donald Duck being influenced by Glenn Beck -- created by Jonathan McIntosh, who I saw speak earlier this year at the first Fair Use Day in DC. The video, which I had not seen until this, apparently made the rounds in political circles.
The latest demonstration of the impact that Citizens United is having on this election season is a $50 million corporate-funded ad blitz to support Republican House congressional candidates. While some Republican leaders are finally acknowledging the role of anonymous corporate money in buying influence, the ads funded by those dollars remain misleading.
Ads being run by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce contain demonstrably false distortions of truth and statements that fact-checkers have repeatedly exposed as false. The Chamber's "cookie-cutter" ads running across the U.S. target numerous Democratic representatives and candidates and claim the Democrats in question supported "gutting Medicare by $500 billion," a reference to their support for the health reform bill.
In the space of about five minutes this morning, Fox News turned a shutdown of the Brooklyn Bridge over a suspicious flashlight into an international terrorist threat before dismissing the whole thing like it never happened. It's a classic example of Fox News fear-mongering -- in this case, based on Fox's own fear-mongery "scoop" that's been a central narrative of the network's broadcast day.
Fox News Channel turned a brief investigation of a flashlight found on the Brooklyn Bridge into a potential terrorist attack by the Pakistani Taliban, and then later dismissed the whole affair as though it didn't happen.
The Nevada Democratic Party is lashing out at a conservative Hispanic group over an ad the group is launching that urges Latinos -- a critical Democratic voting bloc in the state -- to stay home on Election Day.
The 2010 midterm elections have been marked not only by unprecedented amounts of anonymous corporate spending, but also piously patriotic defenses of these potentially corrupting expenditures. What would the Constitution's framers have really thought about unlimited amounts of anonymous corporate dollars influencing American elections?
Two House members asked Facebook Inc. for more details about the way applications on the social network handle user information, following revelations of new privacy concerns.
Facebook doesn't seem very disconcerted that its top 10 apps are among those reportedly sharing user IDs with advertisers in clear violation of its privacy policies. The sharing was inadvertent, suggested engineer Mike Vernal, and the press reports exaggerated its importance. Users may be steamed about the breaches and the company's yawning response, but they're not likely to do anything other than complain.
Results of a Wall Street Journal investigation published today show that many of the most popular Facebook applications have been transmitting personally identifying information—in some cases, even your friends' names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies.
EFF recently received new documents as a result of our FOIA lawsuit on social network surveillance, filed with the help of UC Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic, that reveal two ways the government has been tracking people online: surveillance of social networks to investigate citizenship petitions and the Department of Homeland Security’s use of a “Social Networking Monitoring Center” to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration. This is the first of two posts describing these documents and some of their implications. (Read part one.)
So, what does this all mean for the Net Neutrality debate in the US? No matter how you view each and every stakeholder and their issue, negotiations are stalled and nothing will be happening before the November 2nd elections. Chances are that the FCC will make a declaration or ruling during either their November or December meeting, but with a new Congress coming in January it is likely that nothing will be done in great detail on this issue over the next several years. All of this means that we here in the UK will have a little more breathing room on this issue before our American cousins make a definitive decision. Hopefully, the UK can lead its own debate before the US has any impact on the issue.
Back in August, we wrote about two companies Flattr and Kachingle that were trying to create a very easy to use form of micropayments, that do away with the mental transaction costs, as a method of getting people to voluntarily support content they enjoy monetarily. Since then we've been experimenting with Flattr (you can see the widget to the left) and it's been quite interesting, especially since Flattr finally opened its doors to anyone, rather than being invite only, as it was when we first started. We'll have a more complete report about our Flattr experiment sometime soon...
That said, Flattr's competitor, Kachingle (which is similar, but with a few key differences) recently put together an amusing publicity stunt. Knowing that the NY Times paywall is fast approaching, it put together a "Stop the Paywall!" campaign for Kachingle uses, letting them designate which NY Times' columnists they want a piece of their monthly contributions to go to.
Free bows to govt decree, and will begin sending out “three-strikes” email warnings to its customers on the govt’s behalf sometime later today.
Last week I first mentioned how the French ISP Free was refusing to submit electronic “three-strikes” warning letters to its customers on the govt’s behalf as part of the “Creation and Internet” law, the controversial “three-strikes” measure to fight P2P that was formally passed last September. It cited Article L331-25 of the Code of Intellectual Property which says that warning letters shall be submitted by the Commission for the Protection of Rights “under its seal and on its behalf, electronically and “through” ISPs.
Many critics of current copyright doctrine believe its problems stem largely from an infusion of “property talk” into policy discussions. William Patry writes in Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, “By describing copyright as a private property right, proponents of the description hope to get policy makers and courts to believe that only private, and not public rights are implicated.”1 Later, he adds, “The effort to describe copyright as property is intended to invoke ancient entitlement to powerful rights of exclusion, rights granted automatically as a member of the oldest families.”2
Victory Records hired Gilbert Gottfried of all people to star in an anti-piracy PSA, which you can see above. I think Gilbert Gottfried is hilarious, and he did make me chuckle a bit in this video. The problem that I have with this video is that old Gilby's argument is that you shouldn't steal because you are taking money from the artists.
Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04 Beta 2 19/04/2010