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Links 11/8/2011: Wineskin 2.4, QEMU 0.15





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Open Sesame With Your Source
    The trend toward open source software has many benefits when creating applications. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for example retains the benefits of enterprise application level components such as security and web services without the prohibitive license costs.


  • Open source solutions gaining acceptance in enterprise projects
    A new survey says open source solutions are being considered for the majority of enterprise IT projects. The survey, by FuseSource Corp., an open source integration firm, outlines deciding factors leading organizations to chose and open source solution.


  • 10 things people get wrong about open source (images)


  • Twitter to open source Storm in September
    Twitter has announced that it will be open sourcing Storm, its stream processing framework, in September, at the Strange Loop conference. Storm was developed by BackType, a company that Twitter acquired in July. At the time, Nathan Marz, BackType's lead engineer, said that the company's plans to open source the technology had not changed. Now Twitter has put a date on those plans in a blog posting.


  • Mozilla

    • HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extension goes 1.0
      The Firefox extension HTTPS Everywhere, designed to automatically navigate users to HTTPS-secured versions of sites by rewriting requests, has reached version 1.0. The project was started in June 2010 with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and The Tor Project collaborating on creating the extension which has been refined and tuned over the past year with an improved UI and better performance.


    • The “App Model” and the Web
      Mozilla’s mission is to bring openness, interoperability and user sovereignty to Internet life. We should do this in the apps world. We should embrace some aspects of the current app model as a complement to the browser model. We should also provide an alternative to aspects of the current app model that aren’t so open to interoperability and user sovereignty.




  • SaaS

    • Ensemble meets Hadoop on the cloud
      So you wanted to play with hadoop to crunch on some big-data problems, except that, well getting a hadoop cluster up and running in not exactly a one minute thing! Let me show you how to make it “a one minute thing” using Ensemble! Since Ensemble now has formulas for creating hadoop master and slave nodes, thanks to the great work of Juan Negron. Spinning up a hadoop cluster could not be easier! Check this video out


    • Hadoop cluster with Ubuntu server and Ensemble


    • Hadoop, Big Data and Small Businesses
      Distributed infrastructures for enterprise search and indexing are becoming the norm, but what can small businesses do?

      Hadoop, HDFS and the MapReduce algorithm are becoming as popular as searching for celebrity gossip, and this surge in interest says a lot about the changing nature of enterprise infrastructure and data and application requirements.

      We all know that search engines and databases have completely different requirements. With most databases, you have a single persistent copy of the data that is backed up and can be restored. With search engines – Google's MapReduce technology is the basis of Hadoop – much of the data is often transient and can be re-collected.




  • Databases

    • Percona announces MySQL conference
      Percona, a MySQL consulting and support company, has announced that it will run a MySQL conference in the traditional location, Santa Clara, and at the traditional time, 10-12 April 2012. There had been a lack of clarity, according to Percona, as to whether anyone was planning a MySQL conference, so, after several months of planning, it has announced the "Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo".




  • BSD

    • BSDanywhere: time machine
      I have already written about BSD-based systems several times. I reviewed FreeSBIE and PCBSD.

      They were system based on XFCE and KDE. These are more or less modern looking operating systems. Could I imaging myself back into 1990s when I was downloading another BSD-based system?




  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC



  • Project Releases



  • Public Services/Government

    • Cough up the hairball and make NHS technology open
      The NHS technology environment could be described as a giant hairball – a Gordian knot of past policies, established practices, new initiatives and government objectives and an ever changing landscape of opportunity from new technology.* Openness, in all its many forms, offers a way to escape from the hairball.

      Openness comes in many forms: open source, open standards, open data, open publishing – the list goes on. Openness is growing. Open source and open standards are in the ICT strategy documents of the Cabinet Office, the Welsh Government and in some form in the NHS IT Strategy too.




  • Openness/Sharing



    • Open Data

      • Cancer Data: It Just Got Personal
        Coincidentally, a few days before my dad’s diagnosis, I published a study which found that cancer datasets are less likely to be widely available for further research than similar datasets outside cancer.






  • Programming

    • Testing JavaScript Code with Jasmine
      Server-side developers have long experienced the benefits of automated testing solutions, taking advantage of testing frameworks such as RSpec for Ruby, PHPUnit for PHP, and JUnit for Java. If you fall into this crowd but are starting to spend more time with JavaScript, chances are you're fretting over how to apply similar techniques on the client (or or server!) side. Not to worry, as several interesting JavaScript testing frameworks exist, perhaps chief among them Jasmine, a popular open source behavior-driven development framework.


    • Using Images in the GUI




  • Standards/Consortia

    • HTML5 Seems To Be Gaining Momentum
      With Google, Pandora, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Vudu, and even Microsoft embracing HTML5, these are exciting times for vendors, developers and consumers






Leftovers

  • Apple named in e-book price-fixing lawsuit
    Apple and a group of book publishers were accused in a lawsuit today of illegally fixing e-book prices to "boost profits and force e-book rival Amazon to abandon its pro-consumer discount pricing."

    The lawsuit (PDF), which was filed today in U.S. District Court in Northern California, alleges Apple, HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster "colluded to increase prices" on popular books. (Simon & Schuster is owned by CBS. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)


  • Wallpapers from... heaven?


  • Science

    • Portable, super-high-resolution 3-D imaging
      By combining a clever physical interface with computer-vision algorithms, researchers in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences have created a simple, portable imaging system that can achieve resolutions previously possible only with large and expensive lab equipment. The device could provide manufacturers with a way to inspect products too large to fit under a microscope and could also have applications in medicine, forensics and biometrics.

      The heart of the system, dubbed GelSight, is a slab of transparent, synthetic rubber, one of whose sides is coated with a paint containing tiny flecks of metal. When pressed against the surface of an object, the paint-coated side of the slab deforms. Cameras mounted on the other side of the slab photograph the results, and computer-vision algorithms analyze the images.




  • Security



  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Dear Wikipedia: The Death of Mark Duggan is Notable
      I hate broken links, so I try to avoid linking to The Globe and Mail, for instance, because they started locking older articles behind a paywall. That deliberately breaks links that work when I post the article [unless the reader pays ransom].

      I am quite certain that I’ve linked to Wikipedia more than any other website, and so I worry because deleted Wikipedia articles will result in broken links.

      Broken links are bad for blogs, and while online news outlets often don’t understand this, Wikipedia ought to. As a blogger, when I link to something, I expect it to stay there. As an Internet user, it is annoying to follow a link to get more information, only to discover that the original article has been removed. The only time any Wikipedia entry should be deleted is if it is fraudulent.

      The Wikipedia page Death of Mark Duggan is flagged for deletion. There is a huge argument raging about whether or not Mark Duggan’s death is notable.




  • Cablegate



  • Censorship

    • EFF tells Cisco to help curb abuses in China
      The group is reacting to the networking firm's earlier announcement that it would help the Chinese government build up an extensive camera surveillance network in Chongqing. This, as well as its assistance in building the Great Firewall of China, should give it enough leverage to convince its new friend to stop abusing its citizens' human rights.

      "This is the same company that sold equipment to China to build the Great Firewall, which prevents Chinese Internet users from accessing much of the Internet, including online references to the Tiananmen Square protests, information on China's human rights abuses, and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter," wrote the EFF's Jillian York in a blog post.




  • Privacy

    • Indian MPs To Give Critical Data To Apple, America?
      One of the two houses of the Indian Parliament, Rajya Sabha, has decided go for the paperless office. The house is adopting tablet PCs instead of papers. The members will be using either the iPad 2 or the Samsung Galaxy Tab, according to reports.

      Should Indian parliament even consider Apple's iPad? No. Apple is an American company and the iPad uses proprietary technologies to which Indians will not have any access. The ministers will have to use Apple's iTunes software to transfer data to the iPad - which means Apple will have access to all the ministerial and governmental data, without informing the Indian government.

      Chances are that these ministers may also use the iCloud, and as we know since Apple is an American company, all the data on the cloud will be accessible by the US authorities. Apple will hand over that data if the US government demands so.




  • DRM

    • The Danger of E-books: Richard Stallman
      In an age where business dominates our governments and writes our laws, every technological advance offers business an opportunity to impose new restrictions on the public. Technologies that could have empowered us are used to chain us instead.






Recent Techrights' Posts

We Are Safe in a Modern "Tech" Society, Right?
People are safer if they control their own computing
The Way Things Are Going, They May Soon Stop Saying "Web Address" and Instead Say "Chrome Address"
The Web isn't built or based around open Web standards anymore. It's centered around user-agent.
Microsoft as a Golden Cage
"I was laid off by Microsoft and can't find a job. I'm weeks away from giving up my apartment and moving across the country to live with family."
Weekend Discussion About How IBM's Bluewashing of Red Hat Will Cause "Enshittification" for Users
"I worked at a software company that was acquired by IBM so I knew it was game over for RedHat the day they were acquired"
Brett Wilson LLP Getting Sued by Its Very Own Clients, a Legal Story That Has Made the Mainstream News (Law360)
Law360 or Law.com are about as mainstream as one can get in that "sector" (litigation 'industry')
Lucas Nussbaum & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
 
The Same People Who Attacked Richard Stallman (RMS) Are Attacking Daniel Pocock to Discourage People From Listening to His Information
Pocock is being demonised for the same reasons and by the same people who attack RMS
Your Typical Anti-Richard Stallman (RMS) Cancellist
"About the RMS cancellation"
Richard Stallman (RMS) Has Announced His Talk in Rome Less Than 20 Hours in Advance (and on a Sunday)
Why did he wait until the night before?
GNU Tools Cauldron Event in Portugal: Videos Now Available via Invidious
Go have a look
Slopwatch: GNU/Linux Sites That Became Slopfarms and Spamfarms
The Web is a mess and "Linux" or "Ubuntu" sites became part of the problem
Richard Stallman's Talk 25 Hours Away, Aula Magna Palazzo del Rettorato (CU001), Sapienza Università di Roma (Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5)
The talk is 25 hours away and we see some QR code for it
Gemini Links 12/10/2025: Watches, the Depression of 2026, Gamboling with Odds
Links for the day
Links 12/10/2025: 'False' DMCA Claims and Slop Facing Perils Again (the Hype Wears Off)
Links for the day
Microsoft Has Just Lost Privacy Case in Austria and Its Latest Moves Make a Complete Ban Seem Imperative
Microsoft is not a software company, it's a spying agency that uses software to collect data
The Register MS: Microsoft is the Security Expert, Not the Prime Culprit, So Buy More Microsoft
This front page feature is devoid of any actual substance, it's just Microsoft copypasta
Paris 'Love Nest' & Debian Outreachy: from Lycée Lakanal to ENS Cachan, Cr@ns, nepotism
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Stefano Zacchiroli (Zack) & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 12/10/2025: "Palm Computering", Further Exploration of Slide Rules, and Key Takeaways from The Well-Grounded Rubyist
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 11, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, October 11, 2025
Tomorrow: Founder of the Free Software Foundation and of GNU/Linux, Richard Stallman, Speaks in Roma (Rome), Italy at 4PM
GNU/Linux is more important than ever in this dystopian world
Microsoft and Apple Are Rare Topics in Geminispace
in Geminispace it's rather safe to assume everyone is into BSD, GNU/Linux, and sometimes retro
Qualcomm and Manchester United Appear to Have Dumped Microsoft (Qualcomm Now Invests More in Linux, Apparently)
It's a relief to no longer see Microsoft logos and brands on a local football club's gear (I'm not a Manchester United fan, but not a foe either)
As Guest of Honour in Rome, Founder of the Free Software Foundation to Speak ("Distinguished Lecture") After Introduction by Leonardo Querzoni
Happy hacking...
All Things Open is Proprietary
The OSI has become a front group of proprietary software openwashers, led and sponsored by proprietary giants
When Microsoft Lays Off Lots of Workers They Say It "Invests in AI" (a Lie), Now It's "Reshuffles" or "Microsoft Tightens"
Microsoft "news" by bots
"I saw Richard Stallman give a talk in the mid 80s, which began my fear and loathing of software patents" and "Richard Stallman was always right."
"By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction — moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological."
There Were Several Waves of Microsoft Shanghai Layoffs in 2025, Western Media Continues to Turn a Blind Eye to Chinese Layoffs of an Epic Scale
Sometimes select Taiwanese news sites (published in English) or automated translations are all we have
Brett Wilson LLP Spreads Trumpism to the United Kingdom, Looking to Profit From 'Legal Colonialism' (Overriding Sovereignty)
There's growing recognition of this conundrum worldwide
The Demise of Shopping in Person
In a world like this, how valued is the customer?
This Past Friday, "Nearly 700 People Came to Listen to RMS!" (Richard Stallman)
"Nearly 700 people came to listen to RMS!"
Distinguished Lecture by Richard Stallman This Coming Monday in Rome
After "Free software, Crucial for Freedom in a Digital World"
Slopwatch: UbuntuPIT Churning Out Plagiarism and the Slopfarm LinuxSecurity Turns to Pseudonyms
Our hunch is, UbuntuPIT will sooner or later realise that this toxic approach is just harming UbuntuPIT and tainting the reputation of past articles
The Lawsuit by Clients of Brett Wilson LLP Against Brett Wilson LLP is Officially On, It is Progressing, The 'Experts' Pick Outside Law Firms (RPC and Mills & Reeve) to Spare Them From Litigants in Person
So it is probably quite potent
Gemini Links 11/10/2025: Nyctography, Gerrymandering, and Lurking
Links for the day
The 'Culture Wars' in Free Software Have Gone Out of Control
Social control media amplifies such utterly infantile discourse
Teaser: To Compensate for the Fact Our Clients Are Terrible Human Beings Who Strangle Women (While on Microsoft's Payroll) and We Get Paid by Mystery Parties We Bombard You and Your Wife With Almost 10 Kilograms of Legal Papers
If you can't win an argument, then drown the other side with papers?
Links 11/10/2025: World Mental Health Day 2025, Another European Legal Defeat for Microsoft 360
Links for the day
MIT Technology Review is Part-Time SPAMfarm of Billionaires and Mega-Corporations
Does MIT operate its own "b2b" SPAMfarm?
Open Source Initiative Executive Director Leaves, Replacement Sought by Monopolists, Not the Community or OSI Members
Serves to show who runs this show...
Links 11/10/2025: China-US Tensions Grow Again, "Hey Hi" More Widely Recognised as Bubble Made of Capital That Doesn't Exist
Links for the day
Now Confirmed in Western Media: Microsoft Azure Layoffs This Month
Affirmed by more sources moments ago
Peter O'Callaghan QC represented grandparents, Westernport Hotel, at Liquor Royal Commission
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Either The Register MS Divests From FOSS Coverage or Liam Proven is on Long Holiday
Publishers perish when their audience loses trust in them
Microsoft Cancelling Another Datacentre is a Sign of Financial Trouble and Lack of Growth
The debt continues to grow
Gemini Links 11/10/2025: An Evening at the Fair and Fast Fourier Friday
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 10, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, October 10, 2025
Geminispace is Very Large
The word continues to spread and the number of participants grows
Another Wave of Microsoft Layoffs, This Time During National Day Holiday
This time it's China again
10 Out of 10: RMS Attracts Massive Audience in Göteborg, Sweden (All Seats Occupied, Some People Standing)
a 55-second clip of his talk
Staying Happy in Times of Crackdowns on Civil Society
Optimism in this sort of "new reality" or "new normal" seems like something for the irrational person
"Nobel" Exploited Posthumously for "AI" Hype, Now They Do the Same With "Quantum"
ere have been many jokes about "Nobel" for peace (often granted to pro-war people) and a fake one for "Economics" (establishment propaganda)
Slopwatch: Plagiarism and "Linux" Articles by Bots
Sites that do this won't survive; many of them rely on slop services (suppliers) that will cease to exist after the bubble bursts
Links 10/10/2025: Putin Admits Russia Downed Azerbaijan Airlines Jet, More New Heat Records
Links for the day
Noteworthy Claim That IBM is Firing a Lot of Lawyers This Week (RAs in the Legal Department)
A lot of what they do is patent 'trolling' or lawyering up against their own staff (e.g. HR disputes)
Links 10/10/2025: US Judge Bars Attacks by ICE On Journalists and Protesters; “We Took The Freedom of Speech Away” Says the President
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers, Google News Gifting Slopfarms, and Fake News/Plagiarism About "Linux"
Google itself is a slop pusher these days
Qualcomm, the New Owner of Arduino, Blasted for Its Software Patents Tax on 'Smartphones'
A lot of Qualcomm's patents are on software. We wrote about this in prior years.
XBox Layoffs Rumours, Downtime, and Criticism From XBox Co-Founder
"everyone is ditching the xbox."
Links 10/10/2025: Honoring The Legacy Of Robert Murray-Smith, Many Articles on the Hey Hi (AI) Bubble
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: October Gothic and Reading Middle Earth Role Playing; C and Ada
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 09, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 09, 2025