That's a great and powerful thing for Linux in general--regardless of the resistance Unity has encountered from some longtime users--and it amazes me to see how far Canonical has come with its mainstream focus. If Linux is to enjoy more success in "the masses," then this step had to be taken.
Now that we seem to be getting this close, however, it's making me think more than ever about what Linux still needs, and one of the biggest things I see is marketing.
Remember how SCO told the court in SCO v. IBM that Linux wasn't ready for the enterprise until IBM got involved in the year 2000 and allegedly worked to make it "hardened" for the enterprise by donating code? It said that it wasn't until 2001, with version 2.4 of Linux, that Linux was ready for enterprise use. Linux, SCO said, was just a bicycle compared to UNIX, the luxury car, until IBM did all that.
Wyse introduced a mobile thin client using AMD's dual-core G-Series T56N processor, with integral Radeon HD6310 graphics, and soon to be available with SUSE Linux. The X90m7 offers a 14-inch display with 1366 x 768 pixels, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11a/b/g/n wireless networking, 2GB of RAM and 4GB of flash storage, plus a "2G/4G capable" ExpressCard slot and optional smart card reader, the company says.
To help celebrate Linux User’s landmark 100th issue which goes on sale tomorrow, celebrated Linux Kernel contributor, Jon Masters, recounts some of the biggest developments in the Linux Kernel over the magazine’s last 100 issues…
I remember the first article I wrote for Linux User & Developer, way back in issue number one. It was a review of the first OpenOffice.org release, following the announcement by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) that it was open-sourcing its Star Office product. Times have certainly changed. Sun is no more, and indeed OpenOffice.org has itself been forked (somewhat without enthusiasm from Oracle) into LibreOffice. In that same time period, untold changes have occurred within the Linux kernel community, which has grown in both size and complexity, along with its body of code…
There's been many individuals asking how the work is going in tracking down the major Linux kernel power regression I brought to light late last month (actually, there's at least two power regressions in the kernel). Not much progress has been made since then as I've been out of the office (and country) so I've been preoccupied with other matters, but I do happen to have another power test today to satisfy other reader requests.
Back in the 80s, a GUI paradigm called WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) began to establish itself as the new way in which most people interacted with computers. When it comes to one of the most significant elements of that system, overlapping windows, I'm beginning to wonder, has it had its day?
One of few things that Microsoft can claim to have developed from scratch is an efficient method of application switching called the taskbar, although it's now in the process of being superseded on most GUIs by the application dock. One side-effect of that form of program management is that it doesn't penalize the user for running applications fullscreen, and it therefore encourages it. You can glean some ideas about modern user behavior by observing that, in the most popular WM themes and skins, the areas of the window that are used for resizing have almost disappeared. The truth is, if you use Gnome or KDE, you probably run most of your apps fullscreen, most of the time.
Alexander Zubov from Kot-in-Action Creative Artel sent us the announcement news about availability of Steel Storm : Burning Retribution a.k.a Episode II on Steam, Desura, Ubuntu Software Center and Kot-in-Action e-Shoppe for the price of $9.99.
Xfce and KDE are the two desktop environments that I most commonly use, so it is nice when I see distributions that update these environments and keep them close to the most currently available software. In the case of Xfce, Version 4.8 was released near the end of January, so any distribution that offers Xfce really ought to have Version 4.8 available, and the good news is that most of the distributions that I use are now offering Version 4.8, and most of them have the patches that have been added to Xfce 4.8, and some packages are labelled as high as 4.8.3.
It’s great to see so much feedback coming in about my Qt 5 blog two days ago. We’ve read and gone through all the comments, but it’s easier to try to answer the questions and concerns in a follow-up post rather than replying to comments.
We have now created a mailing list for discussions about Qt 5. If you’re interested, please consider subscribing. This will allow us to have better and more structured discussions around Qt 5 than replies to a blog post.
After my last blog about a possible future KDE Platform 5 due to Qt 5, it was interesting to watch the number of "Oh no, not another big release that will break the interface we know!" type comments. Let me put all of that to rest:
The Plasma team has no intention, desire or need to start "from scratch" nor engage in a massive redesign of the existing netbook or desktop shells.
The next Long Term Support version of Canonical’s Ubuntu is set to ship a year from now, with an October release of the OS in between to address usability and hardware fallback issues. A 2D version of Unity is already available in the Ubuntu repositories. As for GNOME Shell, it’s not clear when the new interface will make its way into the enterprise operating systems from Red Hat, Novell or Oracle.
Offensive Security, leaders in Online information security training, proudly announced a few minutes ago, May 10th, the immediate availability for download of the new and highly anticipated BackTrack 5 release, an extremely popular security oriented operating system.
Red Hat Inc., the world's largest open-source software company, has given the first Red Hat Cloud Leadership Award to the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and named the CHTC its first Red Hat Center of Excellence Development Partner.
Red Hat and UW-Madison have worked together for four years to integrate into the company's products research and software produced by the university's Condor Project — technology widely adopted worldwide by the scientific community to distribute complex computing problems across existing networks ("grids" or "clouds" of computers).
When you virtualize your servers, do you divide them by operating system, or is it practical to use a bare-metal hypervisor to support all your x86 operating systems?
That's what Red Hat thinks is the best idea - which is why it thinks you would be better off virtualizing using KVM, included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
With Reg users reporting that the cost of licenses, the problems of managing multiple platforms and virtual machine sprawl are hurdles to virtualisation, the enthusiasm for virtualisation - and the success of early efforts - creates its own problems.
This is the second release running that another component of the Fedora Feature process has come and bitten me in the proverbial. This time its the “Major Features”(tm), must be landed by the Alpha release, part of the process.
For Fedora 14 the feature that abused this requirement was python 2.7. Rather than landing by the Alpha release it landed moments before we locked down for the Beta breaking things horribly and causing massive amounts of work post Beta when we were suppose to be stabilising the release. This affected Sugar amongst massively as that’s the language its primarily written in.
"Our goal is 200 million users of Ubuntu in 4 years", said Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, while delivering the keynote address to the attendees of the Ubuntu Developer Summit, currently taking place in Budapest, Hungary.
According to reports, the Lubuntu Linux distribution will become an official Ubuntu derivative. As a fully supported release, its desktop packages will be made available in the Ubuntu repositories for anyone to install – other official derivatives include Kubuntu and Xubuntu.
In a session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), which is currently taking place in Budapest, Shuttleworth and Ubuntu Devleoper Colin Watson discussed the details of integrating Lubuntu into the Ubuntu ecosystem with project member Julien Lavergne. Topics ranged from ISO building to Ubuntu One and a global menu.
After testing Linux Mint 11, one word comes to mind: Continuity. Katya does include several new features and enhancements which improve the product further, no doubt about it, but are they enough for Linux Mint 10 users to dump their current installation and upgrade? I personally don't think so.
During the Google I/O 2011 keynote address, director of Android product management, Hugo Barra, presented a number of interesting statistics. Google has now activated more than 100 million Android devices worldwide and as of April 2011, Google is activating nearly 400,000 Android devices every single day. That number was just around 100,000 just an year ago!
At the Google I/O conference, Google announced Android 3.1, an update that fixes bugs, tweaks the UI, improves USB support, and adds an Arduino-based Android Open Accessory gadget control platform. Briefly tipping an upcoming "Ice Cream Sandwich" release that will integrate Android 2.x and 3.x, Google also announced Android Market movie rentals, an 18-month Android upgrade program, and an Android@Home home-automation framework.
Google tomorrow will announce sales of the new Chrome laptop in a $20 a month “student package” that combines both hardware and online services, according to a senior Google executive. The product is almost certainly a precursor to an enterprise offering. Google Apps, an online product with features similar to Microsoft Office (word processing, spreadsheets, calendars, and other productivity software) is sold to business for $50 a year
Samsung and Acer will start selling the first Google Chrome OS notebooks starting June 15, priced from $349 to $499 but also available as part of monthly business/school subscriptions. The 12.1-inch Samsung Chromebook Series 5 and the 11.6-inch Acer Chromebook offer dual-core 1.66GHz Intel Atom N570 processors, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, a 16GB solid state disk, memory card reader, a webcam, USB, Wi-Fi, and optional 3G.
Andrew C Oliver recently wrote “I think most know by now that a license is insufficient to make something actually open source.”
What makes this fascinating is that it involves a director of the Open Source Initiative – the stewards of the Open Source Definition – stating that the Open Source Definition is not enough to define software as open source.
SeaMonkey is a good browser choice and solid alternative to the more popular and traditional Linux-based Web browsers. It will seem like home if you come to it from Firefox.
If you are an enamored add-on user, the more limited extensions inventory may disappoint you. But its configurability can make up for this. All in all, SeaMonkey is a full-feature
The schedule on the rapid release process specifics document generally focuses on merge dates. There is some confusion as to what to expect on those dates, so hopefully this post will make it clear.
The main takeaway is that the merge date is not necessarily the date users on a particular update channel will see an update available.
I recently wrote about big changes afoot in the Linux market, the topic of a current special report I’m writing. We’ve seen significant changes in the Linux landscape and market in the past 10-15 years — including its enterprise fight and victory over SCO, its rise to dominance in HPC and, more recently, the faster, broader Linux kernel development that continues to remain strong. However, no change has been as significant as cloud computing.
Today, DataStax, the commercial leader in Apache Cassandra™, released DataStax' Brisk – a second-generation open-source Hadoop distribution that eliminates the key operational complexities with deploying and running Hadoop and Hive in production. Brisk is powered by Cassandra and offers a single platform containing a low-latency database for extremely high-volume web and real-time applications, while providing tightly coupled Hadoop and Hive analytics.
SGI), a trusted leader in technical computing, today announced that it is expanding its support of the Lustre€® file system to include Level 3 support, and now provides complete end-to-end coverage for its customers. Lustre is a massively parallel file system, capable of supporting compute clusters of thousands of nodes and many petabytes of storage. The addition of Level 3 support brings the SGI€® Lustre€® solution for scale-out computing environments to a support level equivalent to CXFSTM, SGI’s own high-performance scale-up clustered file system.
We’re very excited about the proposed move of Hudson to the Eclipse foundation. To get the project off the right start in its new home, Sonatype has committed to donating all our Maven 3.x related work to the Hudson project. This includes the Maven 3.x integration for Hudson itself, our Eclipse integration, and our Maven Shell integration.
Google believed (and believes) it avoided this licensing structure by implementing a clean room version of the Java runtime. The problem with clean rooms is that, while they may help avoid copyright claims, they are not particularly helpful in avoiding patent claims -- the ol' two-edge sword of software. So if you are going to develop a new implementation of something like the Java run-time environment, you have to not only use a clean room in order to avoid copyright claims, you also have to work around any relevant patents (and this doesn't require a clean room). Suffice it to say that the approach Google has taken has some potential holes in it with respect to patents. Of course, Google believes the Oracle patents are either invalid or not infringed in this instance. [Editorial aside – none of this commentary is intended to imply that patents are a good thing for software; in the eyes of this writer they clearly are not.]
ForgeRock, the open source identity-oriented middleware company, joined with a global community of contributors today to launch a new open source community, OpenICF, to host multi-purpose connectors using the well-established Identity Connector Framework (ICF). The OpenICF Project will make interoperability between identity, compliance and risk management solutions easier and more reliable.
The 1.2.0 release is the latest production release of MCollective and supersedes the 1.1.4 and older releases. This new MCollective release is fully backwards compatible with earlier releases. It is available for download at http://www.puppetlabs.com/mcollective/introduction/.
Limux is further along than halfway since all of the applications in use are now FLOSS but the operating system on 6000 PCs is now GNU/Linux. At the rate they are going sometime in 2012 12000 PCs will be running GNU/Linux. Apparently they will have 3000 still running that other OS when the migration is complete.
WikiLeaks' Australian founder Julian Assange, who enraged Washington by publishing thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, was given a peace award on Tuesday for "exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights."
A year after the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, Republicans are trying to hasten a repeat performance. They got 4 million dollars from oil companies to promote global heating.
The [Obama] Administration, just months ago, asked Congress to provide a $4 billion loan guarantee for two new nuclear reactors to be built and operated on the Gulf Coast of Texas -- by Tokyo Electric Power and local partners. As if the Gulf hasn't suffered enough.
Yves Smith has written quite a bit on the financial crisis. She has experience on Wall Street, Banking and writing as her bio below will show. To more fully inform you, our reader, I felt it important to share with you some of her published articles in which she educates and informs us. Her current blog, Naked Capitalism is one I feel you should bookmark.
Massachusetts securities regulators may charge Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) with improperly passing along analysts' tips to top clients.
The Massachusetts Securities Division is weighing administrative proceedings against the bank over communications among its analysts, sales staff and clients, according to Goldman's quarterly filing with U.S. regulators.
The tobacco industry spends more than $1 million an HOUR to suggest that cigarette smoking is cool, glamorous, and fun.
Proposed amendments to the Commission’s false or misleading news provisions
The Commission announces that it will not amend the false or misleading news provisions set out in various Commission regulations.
The Commission reminds the public that complaints that arise regarding the news content aired by broadcasters should be addressed to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC). The Commission will typically intervene in the complaint process only if the broadcaster in question is not a member in good standing of the CBSC or if the complaint has not been satisfactorily resolved by the CBSC.
The Commission further reminds the public that for the Commission to take action on a complaint relating to the broadcast of false or misleading news, the breach of the false or misleading news provisions must be flagrant.
“Censorship is always an opportunity, because it reveals a fear of reform. And if an organization is expressing a fear of reform, it is also expressing the fact that it can be reformed,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange boldly stated
Their new hopes for regaining control are the micromanagement and censorship of search engines such as Google, through the criminalization of Web page linking, laws limiting the ability of Internet users to upload content, and related attacks on free speech and the open dissemination of knowledge. - Lauren Weinstein
PJ opines: These are the guys who write patent law. Sigh. And could someone check and see who Microsoft gives money to in Congress? There is something very odd about this, considering Microsoft's privacy policies. Why only Apple and Google called on the carpet? Seriously. It feels like a smear campaign to me. And do you see why Groklaw matters? Folks making important decisions about tech don't understand tech either, let alone patents. It's scary
The province is on the hunt for a new Information and Privacy Commissioner after the man who has served in the role for the past decade announced he is stepping down.
Frank Work has been with the office for all its 16 years and has been commissioner since 2002. His current term concludes at the end of the year, after which “there are some other endeavours I wish to turn my attention to,” he said in a statement Wednesday.
As we've noted before, many trademark owners are none too happy when political activists use their marks as part of a larger statement about the owners' business or political practices. Sometimes, that unhappiness takes the form of improper legal threats and even lawsuits designed to silence critical speech. In a ruling issued today, a federal judge called a halt to one such lawsuit, affirming the essential balance between trademark rights and free speech.
The case has its origin in a brief action carried out by members of Youth For Climate Truth (YFCT), a group concerned about climate change. The action targeted Koch Industries, a billion dollar company that has publicly challenged the science behind climate change theories. Borrowing "identity correction" techniques pioneered by groups such as the Yes Men, YFCT issued a press release, purportedly from Koch, in which the company promised to stop funding organizations that deny climate change. The release was posted for a few hours on a website (www.koch-inc.com) that partially imitated Koch Industries' own website. The action received some media coverage, but no press organization thought the release was real. If Koch were sensible, that should have been the end of it.
The US Trade Representative's latest Special 301 report's criticisms of New Zealand's drug agency PHARMAC have drawn angry responses in that country.
The UTSR's newly-published annual report on intellectual property rights notes that the US pharmaceutical industry "continues to express concerns regarding, among other things, the transparency, fairness and predictability of the PHARMAC pricing and reimbursement regime, as well as the overall climate for innovative medicines in New Zealand."
The government's plans to include lawful access provisions within its omnibus crime bill has attracted mounting attention in recent days as many commentators express concern that the legislation could create criminal liability for linking to content that incites hatred and for using anonymous or false names online. The concerns started at the Free Dominion site and have since spread to Brian Lilley at the Toronto Sun and Jesse Brown's blog at Maclean's.
if the "duty to police" might be driving trademark owners to be (over)zealous in their enforcement efforts, maybe we should fix the duty to police. After all, this "duty" isn't in the statute at all; it's barely in the caselaw
The Intellectual Property Constituency has asked that, as a condition of Verisign's ongoing management of the .NET top-level domain, that they should be required to act as private copyright cops. Among the IPC's demands are that .NET domains should be subject to suspension on copyright complaints and that anonymous or privacy-shielded .NET domains should be abolished. - Cory Doctorow, boingboing
It is said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance and that’s just as true now, after the Conservative win, as it was before.
I’m sure that some Tory supporters have been dancing in the streets singing Let Freedom Reign, but putting your faith in any one political party is having blind faith.
Last week, Billboard ran an article on what the Conservative majority government might mean for copyright reform. The article placed the spotlight on the sharp divide between the Canadian Recording Industry Association on one side and much of the remainder of the music industry on the other. While CRIA was one of Bill C-32's most vocal supporters (aided by its Balanced Copyright for Canada site), many other music associations including collectives, songwriters, and publishers were sharply critical. This divide came through in the original article, noting that CRIA's Graham Henderson told Billboard.biz that "he believes 90 percent of C-32 was agreed upon by members of the music industry 'with just a difference of opinions on a couple of things'".
ACTA would expend international goodwill by requiring other governments to change organizational and legal structures....[and] sweeping powers ... could even harm small U.S. exporters competing with foreign companies favored by local governments.
Welcome to Minecraft - Bonus 001 - Chicken