Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 2/10/2011: More Android Tablets, Protesters -- Not Bankers -- Arrested at Occupy Wall Street





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux





  • Kernel Space



  • Applications

    • Deja Dup, the backup simple and fast is served
      Today we talk about Deja Dup, the tool I used to make a backup of files before the upgrade of my Lubuntu at release 11.04 (most probably this arrive a little late, but the program is worth a blog post) . It is indeed a great software to create backups (so that it’s part of the standard packages in Fedora 13 and if everything goes in the right way it will also be added to Ubuntu 11.10), but the reason for the post is not just that, a large plus of Deja DUP is its extreme ease of use, it takes a couple of clicks to configure it and save our precious documents, even “in the cloud”.


    • Transmission 2.33 Review


    • Instructionals/Technical



    • Games

      • ZOD Engine – Game Review
        Today we’ll take a look at a remake of the classic game Z. Z was a real strategy pc game by Bitmap Brothers launched in 1996. It is about two armies of robots (red and blue) battling to conquer different planets.

        The remake it’s Zod Engine is an open source remake written in C++ using the SDL library and available for Linux/ e Windows.

        The Zod Engine is a multiplayer oriented game where as Z is a single player oriented game. Here you will be able to for the first time do things such as play games against multiple bot players, or play the original levels with friends helping you on the same team.






  • Distributions



    • New Releases



      • DoudouLinux Gondwana update 1
        For the peopel that don’t know what’s doudoulinux, this it is not a new distribution, but a Debian tailor-made for children, the designer Jean-Michael says that is usable by children two years old.

        And in fact by starting this live meta-distro you get a rich and colorful menu from which childrens can choose what to play or learn.




    • Red Hat Family



    • Debian Family

      • Linux Mint Debian Update Pack 3 Released
        I noticed yesterday evening that one of my systems running Linux Mint 201109 Gnome was offering to install Update Pack 3. This morning I see the release announcement for it. This is going to be particularly good news for some users with very new hardware, because it upgrades to Linux kernel 3.0. On my HP dm1-3105ez, for example, this means that it now includes the driver for the Ralink 5390 WiFi adapter. Of course, there are a lot more changes and improvements in this update. If you have been running the normal distribution with Update Pack 2 installed, it will probably install something like 480 updates.


      • Derivatives



        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Oneiric Ocelot (Ubuntu 11.10) Launching October 13th In A Shroud Of Mystery
            Lion and Windows 8 may be stealing their share (and then some) of the spotlight, but that's not to say that other operating systems are just sitting on their laurels. Ubuntu, perhaps the most popular flavor of Linux for the consumer world, is about to release their newest version. Oneiric Ocelot is on the edge of launch, with Ubuntu 11.10 arriving October 13th.


          • Ice Cream Sandwich, Jaunty Jackalope, and other bizarre code names


          • Award-winning Airtime releases new packages for Ubuntu & Debian
            Airtime 1.9.4 has been released with new DEB packages for Ubuntu and Debian that keep installations automatically updated with the latest version. Airtime is Sourcefabric’s open source radio software for scheduling, automation and remote station management via any web browser. It can be downloaded free from www.airtime.sourcefabric.org


          • Ubuntu eyes speedier releases
            The pace of technology change has always been fast, but now even technology companies are feeling the pinch.

            There was a time when new software updates were released years after one another. Then that changed to releases that were released months apart. Today more and more software companies are putting their foot down and accelerating releases to an almost weekly basis.

            Google releases new Chrome versions faster than most people can keep up. Version 14 of the increasingly popular browser was released this week as a stable release. Already version 15 and 16 are well into development. By the end of the year both of those may have been released formally and version 18 will be in sight.










  • Devices/Embedded

    • Teach your router new tricks with DD-WRT
      With each passing year, hardware devices grow less dependent on proprietary components and more reliant on open source technologies. Network routers are among the main beneficiaries of this trend, especially those that can support a variety of third-party open source firmware projects. One variant, DD-WRT has become a common out-of-the-box option for many routers, but also exists in stand-alone implementations that can be placed on routers that support it. Hundreds of routers can run DD-WRT firmware, including nearly 100 Linksys models alone.


    • Phones



    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • ThinkPad Tablet holds its own against iPad in enterprise, says review
        Lenovo's 10.1-inch ThinkPad Tablet is a reasonable alternative to the iPad 2 for enterprise users, says this eWEEK Labs review. This capable Android "Honeycomb" tablet offers business-focused extras like built-in enterprise software, full-size ports, and an effective digitizing pen.


      • India Gets a $35 Tablet: Is the U.S. Next?
        The Amazon Kindle Fire promises a lot of great features, including free cloud storage, an innovative Web browser and access to all of Amazon’s multimedia services, but the most eye-catching part of Wednesday’s announcement was the price point: The device will cost just $200, far less than the $500 base price of the iPad 2.

        That’s hardly the cheapest tablets can get, though. The Indian government has announced that a long-awaited $35 tablet intended for students will be coming out next month.


      • Sony Tablet S review
        It has taken two years for Sony to enter the tablet market, and in that time every manufacturer and their budget Taiwanese spin-off have colluded to fill the tablet market with dross.


      • 12 best Android tablets in the world
        Some have ten-inch screens, others seven, and there are big differences in battery life, processing power and on-board RAM. So while we wait for the likes of the Asus Eee Pad Slider, Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 and Amazon Kindle Fire, let's see what the current best tablets are...








Free Software/Open Source



  • Google open sources JavaScript testing tools
    Google is open sourcing one of its key JavaScript testing tools in an effort to get developers to speed up web applications.

    Google JS Test is used internally on the V8 JavaScript engine using in Chrome. Google has attributed much of the speed increases it claims for the browser to the performance of the V8 engine, and the company is clearly hoping this will improve matters further.


  • Google open sources JavaScript unit testing framework
    On the Open Source at Google blog, Google has announced the release of JS Test – the JavaScript unit testing framework that it uses in-house – as an open source project. The tests run on Google's V8 JavaScript engine, the same open source JavaScript engine used in Google's Chrome web browser. In developing JS Test, the creators of the framework were inspired by googletest, an open source framework for writing C++ unit tests.


  • X2Contacts Emerges From Stealth With Open Source Beta Release


  • A Few Sparks of Open-Source Virtualization
    VMware dominates the virtualization market and is likely to do so for some time. Why, then, does an intrepid band of tech firms continue to put stock in open-source technology?


  • Twitter Storm: Open Source Real-time Hadoop


  • The Apache Software Foundation Announces 10th Anniversary of Apache Lucene


  • Events

    • Looking to JavaOne 2011 with Apache expert Rob Davies
      JavaOne 2011 will be a novel experience for some, but Rob Davies is an old hand at the event. Last year was the first time in ten years that Davies, now CTO with FuseSource, missed the conference. He's often been a speaker or presenter on Apache projects, especially Apache Camel, and other open source development issues. Still this year promises to be a new experience even for him, because last year was also the first year that Oracle had taken the reins of JavaOne.




  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 8 Beta arrives with Twitter search
        As expected following the arrival of the stable version of Firefox 7, Mozilla has announced the release of version 8.0 of Firefox into the web browser's Beta Channel. Available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Firefox 8 Beta is based on the Gecko 8 engine. According to the Releases wiki, it is scheduled to arrive in a stable production-ready form on 8 November.


      • Firefox Aurora for Android likes big buttons and cannot lie
        While some solid changes to JavaScript rendering and other under-the-hood code have landed in the latest Firefox developer's build, the bulk of what's new focuses on the second version of the recently introduced Android version of Aurora. Aurora 9 for Android includes some big interface changes designed to improve its usability on tablets, support for native camera apps, faster start-up times, and broader language support.






  • SaaS

    • Experimentation, Open Source and Big Data
      More than ever, today intelligent businesses are trying to make sense of millions of tweets, blog posts, comments, reviews, and other form for unstructured data. The obvious question becomes, “How?”


    • Revolution speeds stats on Hadoop clusters
      Revolution Analytics, the company that is extending R, the open source statistical programming language, with proprietary extensions, is making available a free set of extensions that allow its R engine to run atop Hadoop clusters.




  • Databases

    • Google VP backs open database processing tools
      Basho CEO Don Rippert suggests that Riak's openness means that developers have been able to, "More easily build and maintain powerful business applications on top of our platform." He also says that, "Riak has already proven its stability, ability to scale and provide absolute fault-tolerance in a highly distributed deployment."




  • Education



  • Healthcare

    • Open Source and EHRs: A proven reality and invaluable opportunity
      The marriage between open source technology and electronic health records is at first blush, greeted by many with skepticism regarding robustness and efficacy. In truth, persistent myths obscure an intriguing reality: Open source EHR systems are not only possible but already in place.






  • Semi-Open Source



  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC



  • Public Services/Government

    • NASA's open source space applications challenge
      NASA, the US space agency, is organising an international open source application competition next year which it hopes will deliver a new generation of software to address global issues. The agency plans to liaise with other space agencies to create the International Space Apps Challenge that will encourage "scientists and concerned citizens" to create new solutions using open technology, open data and open source.




  • Openness/Sharing

    • WMMNA: Open Source Biological Art
      Hackteria is a collection of Open Source Biological Art Projects started in 2009 by Andy Gracie, Marc Dusseiller and Yashas Shetty. They have since been joined by Anthony Hall, Urs Gaudenz, and a growing community of people keen on making experiments and developing their own projects in the field of biological art and science.


    • The New World of Open-Source Mentoring
      Kathleen Lim wanted to move up the learning curve. At 24, she had just been promoted to billing operations manager at Box.net, a $10.7 million cloud-computing company in Palo Alto, California. It would be her first management job at her first postcollege employer. Box.net also wanted her to strengthen its collections department, not previously a focus. "I was looking for guidance, from best practices to how to structure my team," says Lim. "And there was this curiosity about what else is out there. How do other organizations do it?"


    • Open-source R&D advocates prep $150M cancer drug project
      After watching the cost of drug research escalate year after year with only a small annual crop of new drug approvals to point to, a number of the Big Pharma companies have begun to question all the fundamentals of the grossly inefficient game. And one of the biggest assumptions--that you have to keep your drug IP carefully sequestered behind a legal firewall of patents--will be put to the test by a new project being hatched by some of the leaders of the open-source research movement in biopharma.




  • Programming

    • Engine Yard's PaaS adds support for JRuby
      Engine Yard, a San Francisco-based company that provides a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution for Rails applications, has announced that developers can now use JRuby, the Java implementation of the Ruby scripting language, in the Engine Yard cloud. Other supported Ruby implementations include CRuby (Ruby MRI), which was written by Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto, and Rubinius. It is no surprise that support for JRuby has been added, as three of the four main JRuby developers are employed by Engine Yard.


    • A Look at Phabricator: Facebook's Web-Based Open Source Code Collaboration Tool




  • Standards/Consortia





Leftovers





  • Finance

    • Hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested
      More than 700 people from the Occupy Wall Street protest movement have been arrested on New York's City's Brooklyn Bridge, police say.


    • Occupy Wall Street protests grow amid Radiohead rumour
      An estimated 2,000 people have gathered in Lower Manhattan, New York, for the largest protest yet under the banner Occupy Wall Street.

      Demonstrators marched on New York's police headquarters to protest against arrests and police behaviour.


    • SEC finds 'apparent failures' at credit rating agencies
      The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has discovered "apparent failures" at 10 credit rating agencies.

      It said it was concerned that the agencies - including Standard & Poor's (S&P) and Moody's - were not making timely and accurate disclosures or managing conflicts of interest.


    • Wall Street's unwelcome warriors hang on to protest
      All are anti-Wall Street protesters, but with barricades and swarms of police officers in front of the New York Stock Exchange the closest they can get to their target is Liberty Street, a good three streets away.

      An online activist group called Adbusters organised the gathering and the word spread through social media.


    • In pictures: New York mass arrests






Recent Techrights' Posts

Deja vu: Hitler's Birthday, Andreas Tille elected Debian Project Leader again
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Microsoft's 'Lawsuit Diplomacy' (SLAPPs Riding UK Libel Law and Piggybacking UK GDPR, Inapplicable!) Will Only Give a Worse Image to Microsofters (and Microsoft), Give Exposure to Even More Suppressed Facts and Scandals
Microsoft came to dominate some sectors because of (or owing to) crimes; Microsoft won't just go away without some more crimes.
Five (or Three) Years Without Social Control Media
Glyn Moody quit X (Twitter)
Why GNU/Linux is Growing
There's growing interest in GNU/Linux right now because people do not fancy buying a new PC just to 'upgrade' (more spying) Windows
 
Links 20/04/2025: Partly Assorted Scientific and Political Leftovers
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Links 20/04/2025: Many Data Breaches and Growing Censorship Wave
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Gemini Links 20/04/2025: Canadian Elections and "Use the Best Tools You Have for the Current Environment"
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Links 20/04/2025: Bleeding Constitution and ChatGPT Infuriates Users Some More
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Chinese OEMs (and World's Largest) Pave a Path Out of Microsoft Windows
So Microsoft now values (or prices) Vista 11 at just $140?
Gemini Links 20/04/2025: Contradictions of Mark Carney and Blog Questions Challenge
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Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 19, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, April 19, 2025
Electronics in People's Bedrooms
Modern technology not only blurred the gap between "functions" of rooms
Gemini Links 19/04/2025: Contingencies, GTD, and Old Computers
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Links 19/04/2025: Economic Races, Charm Offensives, and USB-C Rants
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Links 19/04/2025: "Infantilization at Big Tech" and LLM Slop Abused in Defiance of Workplace Rules/Policies
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Gemini Links 19/04/2025: Palm Addiction and Real Experts
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Egypt is Controlled by Google, Not Microsoft
Moving from Microsoft to Google is not the answer
Microsofters Say They Cannot Find a Job (That They Want) Because of Techrights, But Techrights Merely Reported on Their Behaviour
Quit pointing the finger at people who are recipients of abuse or merely mention the abuse
Free Software and Standards - Not Marketing Blitz - Needed Amid Growing Severity of Dependency on Hostile Suppliers (or Another Country's Sovereignty)
ZenDiS can be described as the "Center for Digital Sovereignty of Public Administration"
When It Comes to the Web, Google is Evil and It Destroys the Web's Integrity With LLM Slop
Even academia, which is meant to keep standards high, is being lured into LLM slop
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 18, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, April 18, 2025
Links 18/04/2025: "Fentanylware (TikTok) Exodus Continues", Chinese Weapons Allegedly in Russia Already
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Gemini Links 18/04/2025: Price of Games and State of Tinylog
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Sounds Like IBM is Preparing for Mass Layoffs/Redundancies in Red Hat, Albeit in "PIP" (Performance Improvement Plan) or "Relocation" Clothing
This isn't the "old" IBM; they're applying pressure by confusion and humiliation
Gemini Links 17/04/2025: Role of Language and Back to Mutt for E-mail
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"Sayonara" (さよなら), Microsoft
Windows had fallen below iOS in some countries
Links 18/04/2025: Layoffs at Microsoft Infosys and Qt Becoming Increasingly Proprietary (Plus Slop)
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Google News is Dying
treating MElon's algorithmic/biased site as a source of verified news
Microsoft's Attack Dogs Have Failed. Now What?
It would be utterly foolish to assume that Microsoft has any intention of changing
All Your "Github Projects" Will be Gone One Day (Just Like Skype)
If you have code you wish to share and keep, then start learning how to do so on your own
To Understand Who's Truly Controlling You Follow the Trail of Censorship (or Self-Censorship)
Do not let media steal and steer the narrative; CoCs are not about "social justice", they're about corporate domination
Fedora Already Lost Its Soul Under IBM
Fedora used to be very strict compared to many other distros and it had attracted very bright volunteers
Microsoft is Still Attacking GNU/Linux and the Net
Microsoft bribed the government using money that did not even exist
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 17, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, April 17, 2025
Gemini Links 18/04/2025: Pinephone Pro and Linux is too Easy
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