With the Linux Foundation Enterprise End User Summit coming up on April 30, we revisited the data collected for our Linux Adoption Trends report to find some of the global trends among enterprise Linux users.
While the report published in January focused on large enterprises with more than $500 million in sales or 500+ employees, this previously unreleased data highlights regional trends among enterprise users in Europe and Asia.
In the battle of the desktop operating systems (OS), there are only three dominant players left - Windows, Mac and Linux. At some point, Windows was cast as the platform for the common man, Mac as the one for the artist, and Linux as the geek's playground.
Linux found favour in powering servers, supercomputers, large businesses and even stock exchanges. And Google even used it as the platform to build its popular Android mobile operating system. But in the desktop and notebook space, it still failed to gain traction.
From a software perspective, Alcatel-Lucent's networking portfolio is also upgrading their Linux-based AOS operating system. The upgrade will provide SPB support as part of a mesh deployment to enable low-latency connectivity. SPB is an alternative to the older spanning tree protocol and it is competitive with TRILL (transparent interconnection of lots of links) effort that other vendors including Cisco are promoting.
In order to attract buyers, car manufacturers have had to ramp up the amount of technology offered in their cars. Infotainment systems do a lot, like help navigate, set cabin temperature, adjust audio settings and more, but they tend to be a neat party trick, falling short in real-world use.
The Access Company has developed various Linux application platforms in the market to go with its brands. These are generally the operating systems that aid in performing various jobs that suits the user. The following are the top 5 Linux Platforms in the market today.
Last week when out in Bellevue to talk with Gabe Newell about Steam and the Source Engine on Linux, for being a former Microsoft employee his criticism was very surprising. As mentioned in last week's article, "Listening to Gabe Newell talk about Linux for hours made me wonder whether he was a former ex-Microsoft employee (where he actually did work in his pre-Valve days in the 90's) or the director of the Linux Foundation. His level of Linux interest and commitment was incredible while his negativity for Windows 8 and the future of Microsoft was stunning." His criticism of Windows 8 made me very curious to try out this upcoming Microsoft OS, and he also wanted to know what I thought of it, so as soon as I returned to Chicago I downloaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. In this article are just some of my brief thoughts as I tried it out for a few days.
Since the dawn of the computing age, data center servers have been 19 inches in width, fitting into racks that have an outer dimension of 24 inches. The Open Compute Project today announced a new Open Rack standard that will change the interior server width to 21 inches in a bid to improve server density for hyperscale computing data centers.
Linus Torvalds keeps a copy of his Linux kernel project on GitHub, the wildly popular code-hosting website. But there’s a caveat. If you try to send him a patch or a bug-fix via GitHub, he’ll tell you to take a hike.
As he explained on GitHub Friday morning, he does not accept pull requests on GitHub. A pull request is GitHub speak for a suggested code fix, or patch.
The irony is that Torvalds invented Git, the software at the heart of the GitHub website.
By default, the Linux kernel build used in the many open source distributions is the normal/default kernel which doesn’t support real time scheduling. If an embedded developer wants to compare the scheduling policies of Linux to a real time operating system it is more useful to compare RTOS performance to a version of Linux that does have real-time features.
Linux has come so far since its initial release in 1991. In fact it beat all the odds to become the first commercially viable open source platform. The fair of hackers, computer enthusiasts and Enterprise alike there is a lot of love across the board for the little Unix clone that could.
If you are like me, who has this specification, you might be thinking not again. The pain of trying to copy paste lines of Ubuntu .. Natty/Precise.. installation guides and after sure failure at last restoring back to mesa.
In general a file manager is a program that gives some kind of interface to the file system and that show in a graphical or textual way the files and directory, usually a file manager allow to do some standard operations such as delete, rename copy/paste and other typical operations that you can do on files.
Flickr user (and Arch Linux forum member) Paanini loves Arch Linux, and loves customizing his desktop. We love Arch too, and when we saw this beautiful twilight wallpaper, customized with some sharp-looking Conky scripts and a dash of Todo.txt, our favorite plain-text to-do list manager, we had to highlight it.
Even a small business generates giant quantities of data, and a good business intelligence suite helps you analyze and make sense of it all. When you have an accurate picture of where you are, you'll see where you can go, and any of these excellent Linux-based small business intelligence suites will take you there.
Linux brings with it many benefits, and we all have our favourites. For some, it's freedom from viruses, or virii, or even virus, if you're declining your Latin properly.
Proxmox Virtual Environment is an easy to use Open Source virtualization platform for running Virtual Appliances and Virtual Machines. Proxmox does not officially support software raid but I have found software raid to be very stable and in some cases have had better luck with it than hardware raid.
While there are indeed a fairly reasonable number of video game options for the Linux desktop, none of them are really the mainstream games many of us have come to know and love. This translates into many people either dual-booting their computers or perhaps instead, opting to green-light one of the various solutions that run Wine.
ShiVa3D is a proprietary 3D game engine which handles advanced shading systems, physics engine, HUD rendering and the sound library.
You can create particle effects, trails, animation; design HUDs, materials, terrains, ocean, script AIs in Lua and assign sounds.
Linux Game Publishing is a software company specialized in porting games to the Linux platform. Since 2001, LGP has accomplished many great things on a field that very few people had the guts to explore and invest in. On this interview, we talk with the new CEO of the company in an attempt to learn more about the difficulties of the past, as well as the plans for a brighter linux gaming future. Enjoy!
On April 11, Calligra Suite announced its first release, version 2.4. This release takes Calligra several steps closer to being an alternative to LibreOffice, especially in its graphical applications.
The upgrade will be trivial. Slackware-current was enhanced very recently with KDE 4.8.2 and all the software updates which that move required. Apart from the 4.8.3 release sources, I only had to compile a newer version of libbluedevil and bluedevil, and even those two will be updated in Slackware too, very soon (perhaps Pat already pulled the trigger).
If you hated Ubuntu's Unity desktop then the shock of your first encounter with the Gnome-shell likely caused your entire digital weltanschauung to implode. Make no mistake about it, it takes you right out of your comfort zone to a strange and unfamiliar place even if you've already tried Unity and decided to throw it back or put it in the keep net. Be shocked, very shocked.
First off, Application Menu has not any similarity with Unity’s Global Menus. While Global Menus copy the Window App Menu from the usual spot (inside App) into Unity’s top panel -the Mac style-, Application Menu, is one single menu that steals some elements from Window App Menu and places them in a drop down – no submenu-ed – menu over Shell panel.
The GNOME Project, through Frederic Peters, announced last evening, May 2nd, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.6 desktop environment.
Some Linux distribution are born to be big. Like Debian, Ubuntu and RedHat.
Other Linux distributions are born to die, because only limited set of developers are self-interested in them.
And there are distributions which are born to live small. They are changing maintaners and developers, but don't change the supporting idea. The example is Kongoni GNU/Linux. This is one of the few distributions born with an idea of freedom. This is one of the distributions approved by Free Software Foundation.
Let me introduce you the person who is steering this project now: Robert Milasan.
The quest for perfection is an endless one. Like the quest for freedom (material or spiritual), there is always one more step. It is just the nature of things in the physical universe. The best we can do is keep trying. And that is exactly what I have been doing with regards to the free operating systems that power my (desktop) computers.
€· Announced Distro: Snowlinux 2 €· Announced Distro: Linux Mint Debian Edition 201204 €· Announced Distro: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS €· Announced Distro: Ubuntu Studio 12.04 LTS
The developers at the ArchBang project have announced the arrival of a new version of their Linux distribution. Based on the Arch Linux rolling release distribution, ArchBang is described as a simple and lightweight system aimed at Linux users who want to customise it to suit their needs. Unlike Arch Linux, ArchBang uses the minimalistic Openbox window manager with support for its pseudo-tiling functions.
The latest update of Rocks codename Mamba is now released. Mamba is available for both CentOS 5.8 (Rocks 5.5) and CentOS 6.2 (Rocks 6.0). The Rocks-supplied OS rolls have all updates applied as of May 7, 2012.
Liberté Linux is a secure, reliable, lightweight and easy to use Gentoo-based LiveUSB/SD/CD Linux distribution with the primary purpose of enabling anyone to communicate safely and covertly in hostile environments. Whether you are a privacy advocate, a dissident, or a sleeper agent, you are equally likely to find Liberté Linux useful as a mission-critical communication aid.
Linux Mint Debian is the line of desktop distributions from the developers of Linux Mint that is based on Debian. For the record, Linux Mint Debian is different from Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu Desktop.
The very latest edition, Linux Mint Debian 201204, was released on April 24. Installation images for 32- and 64-bit platforms for the Xfce and MATE/Cinnamon desktop environments were released. The MATE/Cinnamon edition has already being reviewed (see Linux Mint Debian 201204 MATE/Cinnamon review). This article is a review of the Xfce edition, using a 32-bit installation image. This boot menu is shown below,
Ubuntu 12.04 aka Precise Pangolin has officially been released. This is the next LTS version of Ubuntu. One week back, I had downloaded Ubuntu 12.04 (then in final beta) with an intent to try it out. After I installed it on my machine and started using it, I was very impressed. It is my opinion that the Ubuntu team has pulled off a success here. Unity interface which many people (including yours truly) were eager to banish to the boondocks has made a comeback. It is now simple to use, efficient, and beautiful.
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS will be released to the world this Thursday and it’s going to be fantastic. We’ve known for quite a while that Ubuntu is not only beautiful, but also usable and robust for individuals and a great platform for app developers. Those traditions continue in 12.04, with the added bonus of long term support (LTS) promise. This release will be our fourth LTS release, a significant milestone by itself, but it will also be the first in which we offer special consideration of hardware refresh cycles on the desktop and fast-moving technology developments in the cloud.
Free of charge, free of viruses and designed to outpace its rivals on low-end systems - Ubuntu has some obvious advantages.
The operating system claims 20 million people use it a day. Not an insignificant number, but still a drop in the ocean compared to Microsoft's Windows or Apple's OS X.
Ubuntu 12.04 is codenamed “Precise Pangolin.” But maybe it should be called “Linux that never sleeps.” And that wouldn’t be a compliment. Au contraire — the operating system’s lack of support for hibernation, or the ability to put the computer to “sleep” using no power, is a major flaw in an otherwise great Ubuntu release. And it doesn’t bode well for Canonical’s ambitions of conquering the desktop.
Last evening, Chris Kenyon, Vice President & GM, Alliances & OEM Services at Canonical, announced at the Ubuntu Developer Summit that the Ubuntu operating system will ship on 5% of personal computers worldwide, doubling last year's shipments to 18 million units.
This upgrade is directly inspired from an article by Joey Sneddon over at OMG! Ubuntu. Joey upgrades a 10.04 installation to 12.04 and gets some really great results. The jump from Lucid to Precise is a significant one, so seeing his success, minus the loss of his wallpaper, is great news for those of us that are able to stick with this Jurassic release. I mean let’s face it, it just works. The fact that Lucid ‘just works’ is its greatest achievement. I remember when I was younger, a working computer was not such a big deal. My machines were routinely broken because I was trying this or that, or testing something just for the sake of it. That behavior has changed with age. My argument for using Ubuntu over other distributions is a simple, philosophical one; Do you need something to do or do you need to do something.
On April 27, 2012 Ubuntu released its new operating system Ubuntu 12.04. Since then I have been playing around with it, and I’ve got to say that although I had my doubts about Unity it is turning out to be quite a nice desktop environment. So without further ado let’s take a look at what’s new in Ubuntu 12.04!
Operating systems are like wine: They hopefully increase in quality as they age, and — unless you’re a Beaujolais nouveau fan — you often don’t want to drink one that hasn’t yet had at least a little time to mature. But the fact that Ubuntu 12.04 was released only days ago isn’t stopping a number of PC vendors from shipping the new release on their hardware already. Here’s a look at the status of Ubuntu 12.04 and OEMs.
Canonical announced that the Ubuntu Open Week for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) will take place between 2nd to 4th May, 2012, on the usual Ubuntu IRC channel, #ubuntu-classroom.
I have decided to review the new Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’ because after hearing mixed opinions of it I was very intrigued to try it for myself. I used to use Ubuntu as my main OS but changed to Linux Mint because I couldn’t get on with the Unity environment. I want to find out if the new Ubuntu has improved and if so, will it be enough to persuade me to go back to it?
Yesterday, May 1st, we've announced that the Ubuntu Open Week event will take place on IRC from May 2nd to May 4th, and that Mark Shuttleworth will be present a day before the event to talk with the Ubuntu users.
Linux and quirkiness tend to be synonymous, if looked from the perspective of a user who doesn’t want to fiddle or deal with workarounds to make things work smoothly. Release after release Ubuntu has been no different in this department, even when it seemed closest to the goal of a perfectly user-friendly system. It’s become somewhat of a running joke among some circles to go test out the shiny new hyped Ubuntu thinking this is finally it, and they’ve finally done it, and then leave with a bit of a disappointment. This has been going on for years.
I have been a Gnome user from the very first day I started using GNU/Linux. Whether it was Fedora, Debian or then Ubuntu what I was interacting with was Gnome. The underneath OS was irrelevant to a great extent depending on who the user was. The reason I liked Gnome was its ease of use and simplicity. Gnome on top of Ubuntu was a perfect combo as Ubuntu also strives to keep things simple for an average user. I would say that I was actually a Gnome user and not an Ubuntu user.
I know there's not much new here, but I am amazed that Ubuntu, Linux Mint and friends ship with a Guest account present and enabled.
Fuduntu is somewhat of a unique distribution, it has the feeling of Ubuntu but it is really a fork from Fedora. It is a distribution that releases quarterly updates with incremental changes which its goal is to keep on providing a better user experience.
Ubuntu GNOME Shell Remix is unofficial Ubuntu remaster in which Unity has been replace with GNOME Shell. Besides this, Ubuntu GNOME Shell Remix also comes with some applications that are a part of GNOME and aren't installed by default on Ubuntu, such as Evolution, GNOME Sushi, Contacts or Cheese.
In the world of Linux, there are many distributions out there that one can choose from and Ubuntu is one of the most popular distributions out there. LUbuntu, is a LXDE based version of Ubuntu distribution that is more lightweight and geared towards speed and lower end systems.
Now that Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) has been released, we are proud to announce today, May 3rd, the immediate availability for download of the GNOME Shell Remix 12.04 Linux operating system.
Well, it's that time of the year again. Canonical just released the spring editions of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Edubuntu (and with those have come releases of the officially-recognized derivatives Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Mythbuntu). Today, I'm reviewing Kubuntu, for a few different reasons.
Still waiting for news on your Raspberry Pi? You shouldn’t have to wait much longer, as element14 announces they will update all pre-order customers shortly
Today we are excited to announce Tizen 1.0 Larkspur, including the addition of new complimentary components, as well as source code that focuses on enhancing stability and performance. We believe that these updates and new offerings improve the experience for developers. We are also continuing to work on improvements and additions, and we will be doing frequent updates to the SDK and source code. There are a few additional components that we plan to add in the coming weeks, and we will continue to fix bugs and add additional features.
Like almost everyone else, DeviceGuru initially dismissed Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire as merely a vehicle for Amazon to generate ongoing revenue from ebook, music, videos, and Android app sales. But when I learned that Kindle Fire refurbs were going for $140, I couldn’t resist snapping one up and finding out what I could make it do. Turns out, it wasn’t hard to morph it into a relatively full-featured general purpose Android tablet, complete with Google services and apps.
Anthony Favre used Linux for the first time as a student in 1997 and has since started two companies that specialize in Linux and open source technologies.
Samsung Galaxy Nexus debuts on Google Play Store as the first hardware to be sold via the online store. Google also plans to sell select Android tablets through Google Play Store. The phone is priced at competitive $399, lesser than Amazon prices.
An old idea about open source -- that it's all about cheap knockoffs of proprietary ideas -- has been turned on its head. Today's open source communities, where it's easy to build on the work of others without constantly seeking permission, offer the most fertile soil for seeding new ideas and growing innovation.
JAR files provide developers with a handy way of distributing Java class files, associated metadata and resources between projects on the Java platform, and Android is no exception. There are plenty of third party Android-compliant libraries that are packaged and distributed via the JAR format, which can add valuable extra functionality to your Android project. However, to leverage these JAR files, you must first add them as a Referenced Library within Eclipse.
In this tutorial, I'll show you how to add a JAR file to an existing Android project in an Eclipse installation, before showing you how to create your own Android-compliant libraries, for easily sharing resources between projects.
Strong sales of the iPhone 4S are putting renewed pressure on Android to innovate. Ubuntu for Android could give the platform a key capability iPhone is still missing.
The next version of the trend setting Galaxy S series was unveiled last night, with upgraded guts and a giant new screen
The hyped KDE Plasma tablet Vivaldi has been upgraded to 1GB RAM from the previously planned 512MB. Those who have pre-ordered the tablet will be getting the upgraded model with a whooping 1GB RAM for the same price.
In March 14, 1999 Ethan Galstad released the first version of Nagios. Then, nearly exactly 10 years later (May 2009), Icinga (a fork of Nagios) was born. What happened there? Why a fork? In this article, I will shed some light about what made the Icinga developers decide to fork (although they still send patches to Nagios). In this article, I will talk to both Ethan Galstad himself, and Michael Lübben (one of the founding Icinga team members and Nagios addon developer). I will quote Michael and Ethan in the article. You get to read their points of view here.
Analyst firm Forrester has encouraged businesses to recruit software developers who take part in open source projects, as it shows they are keeping their skills current.
At that time, most open source vendors were trying to replicate what proprietary vendors were doing, or what they had failed to do. The value proposition was simple: vendors would say they were like X, but more open, more extensible, and less expensive. Take a few of the successes of the late 2000s and who they were compared to: MySQL (Oracle), JBoss (WebSphere), Jaspersoft (BusinessObjects), Talend (Informatica), SugarCRM (Siebel).
By and large, these vendors were successful. The first “billion dollar baby” of open source was MySQL, when Sun bought the company for $1 billion. At that time, Techcrunch headline was: “Sun Picks Up MySQL For $1 Billion; Open Source Is A Legitimate Business Model.” And indeed, 2008 marked a turning point for open source: more and more enterprise deployments; acquisitions, like in the “real” corporate world; more and more funding. The 451 Group tracks the history of VC funding in open source – the graph in this post shows that investment in 2008 was at an all-time high, which would only be matched again in 2011.
The lead developers behind open-source storage system Ceph have launched a company, called Inktank, to commercialize the software. The company describes Ceph as a “fully open source, distributed object store, network block device, and POSIX-compatible distributed file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability.” It’s uniqueness comes in part because Ceph does all these things within a unified platform.
Twitter, Facebook, the Library of Congress -- all of these institutions have mind-numbing amounts of structured and unstructured data that must be indexed and searched quickly. In Twitter's case, that's about 300 million new pieces of information to index every day.
Many parents in recent years have chosen to homeschool their children. The reasons for this vary, but most include some measure of the understanding that to truly pass on one’s values to one’s children one needs to be the primary source of information for that child. To place one’s child in a school, public or private, is to give up at least part of one’s responsibility to and for that child. There is usually also a desire to have more control over what that immature mind is experiencing as it grows. Some life events should be shielded from a growing mind until that mind is mature enough to handle such events in the context of the desired values imparted by the parents.
I have studied Physics in Bonn, did my PhD in Biochemistry at a Max-Planck Institute in Göttingen and got my habilitation (In Germany and Austria you need such a licence to teach) at Innsbruck University in the Pharmacology department. I worked most of the time at the Max-Planck-Institute for molecular physiology in Dortmund. It always was somewhat strange, being a physicist working in biochemistry, chemistry and pharmacology. For a physicist, an equation or a reaction scheme is easy, because it is logical and precise. For a chemist, reaction schemes often seem to be incomprehensible and equations may lead to immediate paralysis when used in lectures. In contrast, chemists can perform complex chemical reactions which are admired (not really conceived) by physicists. I have spent most of my scientific life trying to help life scientists to bridge that gap.
For the past two days, we've held our annual Enterprise End User Summit at the New York Stock Exchange. Besides the fun of ringing the bell during our evening reception, it's been an incredibly valuable event, fueling collaboration between kernel maintainers and enterprise end users who are pushing Linux to its edge.
The 19th Croatian Linux Users' Convention will be organized this year between 23-25 May. The convention will be held in Croatia's capital city, Zagreb (Croatian chamber of economy, Nova Cesta 5, 10 000 Zagreb).
(Sacramento, CA, USA: May 2, 2012) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization, announced promotional exam labs for their Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) at Southeast LinuxFest (SELF: http://www.southeastlinuxfest.org/), June 8-10 in Charlotte, North Carolina. During the conference LPI will also host an information booth and an LPIC-1 Exam Cram session.
Canonical announced earlier today, May 4th, that the Mozilla Thunderbird 12 email client landed in their supported Ubuntu distributions.
With the recent buzz around the OpenStack project, momentum behind open source cloud development is building. We’re now seeing an early ecosystem of companies and products built around OpenStack – a goal that Rackspace’s Lew Moorman laid out for the project when it launched two years ago.
Lo and behold, it takes you to then-Sun employee Tim Bray's blog back on the day that Sun released Java under the GPL. I wonder if Oracle followed that link, because if I were Oracle, it's the last thing I'd want the public or the jury to see. Bray explains the choice of the GPL by Sun and says that he not only expects forks, he approves of them. Let me show you.
For the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA), the decision to dump its aging content management system (CMS) was easy. Running 65 state government websites on two different versions of proprietary software — Vignette 6 and 7, one of which is no longer supported — had become cumbersome and costly. And moving all sites to Vignette 8 was too much of a “force fit,” said state CTO Steve Nichols.
All Things Digital reported last week week that the company behind WordPress could generate almost $50 million in revenue this year.
If you blog at all, you know WordPress is a big deal, but fewer people are aware that there is a company behind the platform called Automattic. The public face of Automattic and WordPress is Matt Mullenweg.
Recently we published a story that WordPress was the platform of choice on 48 of the world's top 100 blogs. According to Mullenweg's "about" page on the Automattic site, it accounts for 15 percent of the world's websites.
When open source software gets used in production grade environments, commercial support businesses tend to show up. That's exactly what is now happening with the open source Ceph distributed storage filesystem.
Ceph is now backed by Inktank, a commercial venture led by Sage Weil, founder of Ceph. The company had originally incorporated under the name Ceph Inc, but it decided to take a different route to help preserve the integrity of the open source project.
Lately, I've been recording music in my spare time. Since I try to use as much Free and Open Source software as possible, I found the free digital audio workstation Ardour. When I went to download the software, I was asked for a donation before I could download it. Intriguing!
If current trends hold, then sometime late this summer, Microsoft's Internet Information Services will fall to the number three web server position in global domains, behind two open source web server platforms: Apache and nginx.
A couple of days ago, Malcolm Davenport posted here about Certified Asterisk, a new series of Open Source Asterisk releases being produced by Digium. Since that post went out, there’s been some discussion (almost confusion) in the Asterisk community about exactly where the Certified Asterisk releases are coming from, and what they contain. In order to try to help describe how this whole process works, I’ve created this page on the Asterisk Wiki which includes a diagram showing how all the current development and releases branches relate to each other, where tags (and releases) are made, and most importantly, how the Certified Asterisk branches are produced.
Technology giant IBM is replacing CRM vendor Siebel and replacing its CRM systems with cloud-based SaaS provider SugarCRM.
According to reports in the Wall Street Journal, SugarCRM is set to snap up the contract to manage sales, marketing and customer relationships for Big Blue. The contract sees Oracle-owned 67,000 Siebel seats swapped out for the open-source vendor.
Of all the many examples of excellent free and open source software out there, GIMP is surely among the best known examples for offering a no-cost and yet power-packed alternative to an extremely high-priced proprietary market leader.
The first development version of the upcoming Empathy 3.6 instant messaging client for the GNOME desktop environment has been announced last night, April 30th.
Solving non-linear least squares problems comes up in a broad range of areas across science and engineering - from fitting complicated curves in statistics, to constructing 3D models from photographs in computer vision. Today we're happy to announce the release of a solver we use at Google.
MAILBAG A roundup of some of your recent comments on our coverage of the debate over open-source software in the Canadian government
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University have teamed up to deliver online learning to millions of people around the world, through their new edX initiative. "Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone," the edX site reports. (If you're familiar with MITx, it is now a part of edX.)
The Hungarian government has committed to invest just over a million pounds (370 million HUF) in the development of applications that use the open document format (ODF), according to a report on the European Union's Joinup web site. Two organisations will benefit from the funding: the Department of Software Engineering at the University of Szeged and the open source development company, Multiráció. In December of last year, the Hungarian government announced that from April 2012 all official documents would need to be prepared in internationally recognised open-standards-based formats.
Few web video standards are truly open or free, and the major players have no interest in pushing them, says Richard Hillesley…
Americans might remember that when the first mad cow was confirmed in the United States in December, 2003, it was major news. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had been petitioned for years by lawyers from farm and consumer groups I worked with to stop the cannibal feeding practices that transmit this horrible, always fatal, human and animal dementia. When the first cow was found in Washington state, the government said it would stop such feeding, and the media went away. But once the cameras were off and the reporters were gone nothing substantial changed.
Herbicide manufacturer Syngenta had an interesting way of celebrating Earth Day this year, touting the joys of pesticides.
As a new film highlights water contamination throughout the U.S. Midwest from Syngenta’s flagship herbicide atrazine, the world’s largest pesticide company has mounted a PR counter-attack downplaying the human and environmental health risks of a chemical linked to birth defects, low birth weight and certain cancers. Atrazine was banned in the EU in 2003, leaving the U.S. market as one of Syngenta’s most profitable and vigorously guarded markets.
When a corporate laptop goes missing, do you worry about the risk of a data breach? There is good reason for concern: According to recent research by Symantec, 34 percent of data breaches are the result of lost or stolen devices such as laptops.
The good news is that this is a preventable issue. A Full Disk Encryption (FDE) solution can ensure that sensitive information isn't exposed in the event that one of your organization's laptops is lost or stolen.
The updates to PHP versions 5.3.12 and 5.4.2 released on Thursday do not fully resolve the vulnerability that was accidentally disclosed on Reddit, according to the discoverer of the flaw. The bug in the way CGI and PHP interact with each other leads to a situation where attackers can execute code on affected servers. The issue remained undiscovered for eight years.
In some sense, TED is the techno-innovators’ version of the faith expressed by neo-liberal economics, in which the market solves nearly all of its own problems. The enduring posture at TED, therefore, is one that acknowledges serious world problems, ranging from war to famine, water and food availability, but which nearly always concludes that amazing and ingenious people – geniuses – are working to solve the problem. The Great Man theory of history would find each TED conference a comfortable place to be.
The Washington Post was a strong supporter of NAFTA at the time the deal was approved. It continues to be a strong defender of the pact nearly two decades later. It has repeatedly shown itself willing to make up facts or just ignore them to push its pro-NAFTA line.
To avoid social discontent and, in addition to stimulate the economy, China has embarked on a (serious?) policy of building cheap housing for the urban poor. A total of 5mn homes are expected to be built this year, with goal of reaching 36mn by 2015. However, the financing for this proposed rapid build out is questionable. The Government has increased central funding for low income housing by +23% to 212 Yuan this year, though the expected bill for the 36mn homes comes in at Yuan 5tr !!!. Local Governments, however, are not keen on spending on social housing. In addition, corruption has, in the past, meant that affordable homes have been sold to relatives/friends etc, etc – estimated at near 80% !!!! (Source GK Dragonomics) and authorities classify certain building programmes as social housing, when they are clearly not. As a result, I remain totally sceptical of this programme;
President Obama’s reelection campaign is likely to have more money than any presidential campaign in history. Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign, when you factor in the super PACs supporting him, could have even more money than that.
Goldman seems to be making a renewed effort at PR in the wake of the letter by derivatives staffer Greg Smith accusing the firm of caring only about profits and treating customers as stuffees (“muppets” was revealed to be the new term of art). That observation probably came as no surprise to anyone save Goldman staffers, most of whom probably thought they had conned their clients into believing otherwise, and a few like Smith who believed the party line.
The London arm of Goldman Sachs paid only €£4.1m in corporation tax to the Treasury last year despite making pre-tax profits of €£1.92bn, annual accounts have revealed.
Goldman Sachs International (GSI) had a corporation tax bill of €£422.3m but it deferred €£418.2m – or more than 99 per cent of the amount – that it had to pay immediately in "current tax". The Wall Street giant, presided over by Lloyd Blankfein, was able to postpone payment because of "timing differences", according to the accounts.
Several of my savviest readers wrote expressing disappointment and consternation with the Frontline series on the crisis, “Money, Power, and Wall Street.” The first two parts of the four part series have been released, and it’s probably safe to say that this program is far enough along to be beyond redemption.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) (GS) closed Sigma X Canada today, shutting down the dark pool for equities seven months after starting it.
The stock trading venue stopped taking orders, according to a statement from the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada. Since all orders expire daily on Sigma X Canada, none will be open after it closes, the agency said.
In theory the post of next Governor of the Bank of England won't even be advertised for several months.
In reality, the scheming and jostling for position are already in full flow. A new name in the frame today is Jim O'Neill, the affable Goldman Sachs economist now chairing the bank's asset management division.
Goldman Sachs may dominate financial markets, but there is one frontier it has not yet conquered: social media.
So the Wall Street firm that many on the Internet love to hate plans to hire a “social media community manager,” according to a posting on its Web site. The position involves overseeing the firm’s online communities and developing a “positive online presence.”
So we have yet to be completed incremental staffing of a grand total of 15? 65 people pursuing to the biggest consumer fraud in American history, when the savings & loan crisis had 1000 FBI agents tasked to it?
The worst is the insulting five financial analysts. Tell me how “financial analysts” are supposed to get up to speed on securitization. There aren’t that many people who are experts who are willing to educate people going against the banks, and I’d bet big money that the Feds won’t be able to hire anyone of that caliber (they’d make more doing expert witness gigs).
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) (GS) won dismissal of some claims in a lawsuit brought by CIFG Assurance North America Inc. over $275 million in residential mortgage-backed securities.
The insurer sued Goldman Sachs in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan in August, accusing the investment bank of making misrepresentations in connection with the securitization of a portfolio of 6,204 mortgage loans.
Perhaps because we don’t trust our government, our big corporations or our other institutions to do anything very helpful for the country. Indeed, we don’t trust our government, big corporations and other institutions to even allow a fair playing field where we have a chance of competing fairly to get ahead on our own initiative.
The U.S. anti-bribery law that Wal-Mart may have violated in Mexico has ensnared leading companies from virtually every sector of the economy as federal prosecutors increasingly crack down on a wide range of transgressions, from improper accounting to giving foreign officials computers and bags of cash.
The City of Oakland should find a way to get out of its interest rate swap agreement with Goldman Sachs, a deal that costs the city $4 million annually, according to a city staff report. The problem before the city council now is figuring out the best way to do that without costing the city more money.
Recent price spikes in global food commodities – most notably the bubbles of 2008 and 2010-11 – have exposed a fundamental fault of economic analysis: although speculation in the world's food supply has long been suspected, no one has been able to prove it. The world's most precious resources may have been transformed into a casino for high rollers such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Barclays and Deutsche Bank, but it's nearly impossible to figure out who is betting how much.
Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) advises developing countries against signing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, BMZ official Frank Schmiedchen said during a meeting of the Committee of Petitions of the German Parliament yesterday.
The committee discussed a petition signed by over 60,000 German citizens calling for a stop to the ratification of ACTA by the German Parliament.
A popular Firefox add-on appears to have started leaking private information about every website that users visit to a third-party server, including sensitive data which could identify individuals or reduce their security.
Today, 3 May, is United Nations World Press Freedom Day. For me this is a chance to remember the fundamental rights, including to self-expression, that are safeguarded for all of us in the European Union – whether you’re a journalist, blogger or ordinary citizen.
And a chance to remember those people around the world who don’t have those protections, and are often restricted in what they can say or investigate.
In places without human rights safeguards, the right to express oneself is all the more important. People who struggle for democracy must have a voice. People like Eynulla Fatullayev: Azerbaijani journalist, human rights activist and winner of the 2012 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. He dared to speak up to defend freedom of expression — and was for a time imprisoned for having done so. I salute his brave work.
The Netherlands became the first EU country to adopt a law protecting Net neutrality. This initiative must set the example for the rest of Europe and France.
The last week has been terrific for "Lunatics". We've cleared the licenses on almost all of the music -- and certainly the most important pieces. However, for a moment, I want to focus on the little problem with the one minute of music we probably won't get to use, and the right and wrong way to relicense your art if you are ever in that situation.
The European Court of Justice ruled this morning that the functionality of a computer program and the programming language it is written in cannot be protected by copyright.
Europe's highest court made the decision in relation to a case brought by SAS Institute against World Programming Limited (WPL), effectively leaving the door open for software companies to "reverse engineer" programs without fear of infringing copyright.
Traditionally, application programming interfaces (APIs) have been presumed to be non-copyrightable, because unlike other elements of a software, which involve creativity, APIs are typically comprised of facts that enable one specific task: how does my software program talk to your software program and vice versa?
Google’s ultra high speed Internet project aims to bring Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri Internet speeds 100 times the current U.S. average. This has Hollywood petrified. Will users with gigabit connections pirate enough movies to decimate the movie industry’s revenue? Will piracy crush Hollywood in the way that it crushed the music industry? Not if Hollywood is smart: they need to CAREFULLY study how the Linux kernel is developed, and how Free Software is developed in general.
The MEP F. Castex asked about the public access to ACTA preparatory documents.
This morning, member of the EU Parliament Dimitrios Droutsas presented his draft report on the impact of ACTA for fundamental freedoms to his colleagues of the LIBE (Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs) committee. This draft report is a very fortunate acknowledgement of ACTA's dangers for fundamental rights and democracy, which must play a key role in leading the rest of the EU Parliament to reject ACTA.
Dimitrios Droutsas is the rapporteur for opinion on ACTA in the LIBE (Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs) committee of the European Parliament. Below is an abstract of his draft report that demonstrates an insight and a democratic commitment that should act as an example for his colleagues and for policy makers everywhere. In particular, other committees such as the JURI committee should realize that it is vain and offensive to democracy to use procedural tricks in order to prevent the Parliament from taking a clear and timely decision to reject ACTA.