Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 15/7/2012: Chromebooks, Linux Devices, and PCs for Senior Citizens





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Why People Seem to Love Closed Systems
    Patrick Gray, writing in TechRepublic, has some theories about why open source computing has yet to live up to some expectations. In the abstract, people may love the idea of the openness and freedom in technology. In practice, however, “vendors and consumers alike voted with their wallets for closed systems.” He cites the appeal of Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.


  • A French open source software specialist woos U.S. e-retailers
    France-based e-commerce platform provider PrestaShop seeks to expand in the U.S. Having opened a Miami office in 2011, it provides software for about 6,000 U.S. e-commerce stores—roughly six times as many as last year.


  • Best Ruby on Rails Hosting 2012
    The web hosting review site Top-Cheap-Web-Hosting.com announced the best Ruby on Rails hosting provider for 2012, based on ruby on rails hosting features, loading speed, reliability, technical support and price.


  • Workshop in Free Open Source Software (FOSS)
    The first 30 minutes of the workshop will present an overall of goals of the foundation, the philosophy and advantages of open source software and how it hall be implemented in Fiji.

    "Linux has the same features of operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh," said SFF President, Mr Kush Singh.


  • Open Source Web Development Provides Custom Web Development Services at Reasonable Rates


  • Samsung Open Source Code for Epic and Skyrocket Models
    Samsung, in an apparent attempt to encourage hackers and developers and trying to give them a head start with the ongoing roll out of the OTA updates, have released the source codes of the Sprint Epic and AT&T’s Skyrocket on their download pages. The updates are available currently on their download pages for anyone interested.


  • 25 free open source projects IT pros will love
    Although it’s popular these days to pooh-pooh the advertising-supported, for-profit SourceForge in favor of GitHub, the SourceForge folks want to remind you that the forge still hosts more than 300,000 projects and serves up a good 4 million downloads a day.


  • Digsby becomes Open Source project
    There are a number of reasons why a closed-source project is turned into an Open Source project by its parent company or developer. Among them lack of interest by the parent company or developer, a drop in popularity, not enough resources to continue development, having been bought by another company, or a change of hearts. It is not really clear from the announcement why Digsby is going down the Open Source route but judging from the frequency of blog posts on the official site, it could be a bit of everything sans the being bought by another company part.


  • Digsby becomes Open Source project


  • Major Open-Source ARM Announcement Coming
    There's a very exciting open-source announcement coming soon that will please an increasing number of ARM Linux users and fans of open-source graphics drivers.

    This forthcoming announcement, which isn't being detailed yet but will be yet another Linux graphics exclusive for Phoronix the near future, is something entirely different from the other recent open-source ARM Linux graphics advancements. As something until then. let's recap the existing open-source ARM graphics activities:

    - The Lima driver project that's sponsored by Codethink and led by Luc Verhaegen as a reverse-engineered open-source ARM Mali graphics driver. Here's the latest update on Lima from LinuxTag Berlin back in May.


  • Events



  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Introduces Persona, A Better And Secure Login System
        A normal web user may login and use to tens to hundreds of sites everyday. This is a hectic task and also one may remain in doubt as how his/her data is being used in each of these networks. To simplify this login system and to give users better control over their data, Mozilla has introduced a new product in the market, Persona.


      • Is Firefox's Rapid Release Cycle Causing Too Many Problems?
        In early February of last year, we noted that for the very first time, Mozilla had pledged to move to a rapid release cycle for the popular Firefox browser. "Can't wait," responded one reader. It was clear at the time that Mozilla was making the move to better respond to competition from Google Chrome, which was already on its own rapid release cycle.

        Fast-forward to today, and Chrome's market share is about equal to or possiby greater than Firefox's, depending on whose numbers you believe. And, Mozilla has had to wrestle with problems related to its rapid release cycle. Now, one former Firefox developer is saying that Firefox's woes can be blamed on the cycle itself.


      • Mozilla's Rust language version 0.3 released
        With the announcement that version 0.3 of Mozilla's Rust has been released, the alternate procedural, concurrent, OO and functional style is continuing its rapid evolution. Designed as a safe alternative to C or C++, as it is being developed, Rust is being used to create an experimental parallel browser called Servo. Version 0.1 of Rust was introduced in January 2012 after being created as a side project by Graydon Hoare in 2006 and revealed to the world in 2010. Version 0.3 includes over 1,900 changes from April's version 0.2, as the developers work through the roadmap that will lead to a 1.0 release of the language.






  • SaaS

    • How a Looming Talent Gap Will Crush Enterprise Hopes for Big Data
      Large enterprises are putting a lot of money and effort into making sure they have the latest and greatest in Hadoop and other big data infrastructure tools, but it turns out their IT teams are far from prepared to actually use those tools once they are in place.

      That’s one observation from Jeremy Howard, president and chief scientist of Kaggle, which uses crowdsourcing techniques to provide statistical and data analytic services for clients.




  • Databases

    • The stealth success of PostgreSQL
      Other open source databases may have more name recognition, but PostgreSQL is seeing strong growth -- as is the company EnterpriseDB, which helped develop it




  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



  • CMS

    • Drupal Experiences Exceptional Growth
      Drupal is possibly one of the most popular open-source CMS in the world, and probably one of the largest free software community with over 800,000 members. During the last year, the Drupal business has experienced exceptional growth, both financially and socially.


    • Joomla! 3.0 Alpha 1 Released




  • Healthcare



  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • A GCC Proposal To Build It Better, Faster
      There's a proposal within the GCC development camp to change the CFLAGS under which the GNU Compiler Collection is built when in a release mode.

      Dimitrios Apostolou proposed on Wednesday to the GCC development list Change default BOOT_CFLAGS for release builds.




  • Public Services/Government



  • Openness/Sharing

    • Filmmaker Pledges to Live Open Source for a Year
      It's one thing to like open source, but it's another thing to live open source. Sam Muirhead, a 28-year old filmmaker who lives in Berlin, is making headlines for an unusual pledge he has made: He has sworn that beginning August 1st, he will spend one year living totally open source. And he doesn't just mean he will use open source technology. He means that his beer, the paper he uses--everything he uses--will be open source.




  • Standards/Consortia

    • Accounting for Vendor Lock-in
      I am not an accountant. However, as a Graham and Dodd value investor over the years, I’ve picked up some of the fundamental principles. A key one is the Matching Principle, that revenues and expenses should be booked in a way that clarifies the underlying business performance, rather than based purely on the timing of cash transactions. In some cases this requires the use of special accounts, for things like depreciation, where the lifetime of a fixed asset (say factory machinery) extends beyond a single revenue cycle.

      A similar technique is used when dealing with deferred expenses. For example take the case of a nuclear power plant. A plant has a useful lifetime, but when that end date arrives there is a clean up cost. The property is not immediately usable for other purposes, but must undergo an expensive remediation. From an accounting perspective there is an asset retirement obligation, a form of deferred expense. This deferred expense is recognized on the books as a liability based on the present value of the expected clean up cost, which is then depreciated.






Leftovers

  • Linus Torvalds Asks Google To Stop Google+ Event Spam
    If you are a Google plus use, there are two things you would be most annoyed about. One is there is no way to see the private messages sent to you if you plan to respond to them two days later. Second is the new Google+ Event. I was bombarded by the event invite the moment it was announced.


  • Oracle, HP face off in court over Itanium
    Oracle turned its attention away from its Android patent fight with Google on Monday to battle Hewlett-Packard over Oracle's decision to stop making new versions of database software that works with HP's Itanium-based servers.


  • Security





  • Finance

    • Andrew Williams, Ex-Treasury Spokesman, Headed To Goldman Sachs
      Andrew Williams, a former spokesman for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, is headed to Goldman Sachs at the end of July, the Financial Times reports. That's only increased the speculation that Geithner may head to Goldman next year.

      Williams, currently director of media relations at General Electric, is the second of Geithner's top spokesmen to decamp to Goldman. Richard "Jake" Siewert, also a former spokesman for Geithner, left the Treasury Department a few months ago to lead Goldman Sachs' public relations department.


    • Goldman's fall from grace continues
      Starting tomorrow banks will begin to tell investors how they did in the second three months of 2012. Overall, the indications are that the quarter will be a disappointment. But, surprisingly, Goldman Sachs (GS) may emerge as the biggest loser. Expectations for the once-vaunted investment bank have fallen more than rivals.




  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • How a Right-Wing Group Is Infiltrating State News Coverage
      When Idaho state legislators proposed a seemingly uncontroversial bill to ban access to commercial tanning beds by minors earlier this year, IdahoReporter.com took up the issue with force.

      The state news website, an affiliate of the conservative Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity and overseen by the free market Idaho Freedom Foundation, posted six stories on the proposal between Feb. 16 and March 22, when the bill was voted down in a state Senate Committee.


    • Malcolm Gladwell Unmasked: A Look Into the Life & Work of America’s Most Successful Propagandist
      In the vast ecosystem of corporate shills, which one is the most effective? Propaganda works best when it is not perceived as propaganda: nuance, obfuscation, distraction, suggestion, the subtle introduction of doubt—these are more effective in the long run than shotgun blasts of lies. The master of this approach is Malcolm Gladwell.

      Malcolm Gladwell is the New Yorker’s leading essayist and bestselling author. Time magazine named Gladwell one of the world’s 100 most influential people. His books sell copies in the millions, and he is in hot demand as one of the nation’s top public intellectual and pop gurus. Gladwell plays his role as a disinterested public intellectual like few others, right down to the frizzy hairdo and smock-y getups. His political aloofness, high-brow contrarianism and constant challenges to "popular wisdom" are all part of his shtick.




  • DRM





Recent Techrights' Posts

The UEFI Restricted Boot 'Time Bomb' is About to Go Off in a Few Weeks
Garrett was the first person to face sanctions (like muting) in our IRC channels because of his abuse; worse yet, he hijacked other people's names and then locked them out of their own accounts
Nobody is "Replaced by AI", It's Just a Smokescreen for Jobs Being Eliminated by Lack of Money (Too Much Debt) and Offshoring
It's also why many make the jokes about the "I" in "AI" being "India" or "Indians"
 
Men Who Abuse Women Should Never Spend Over 3 Years of the UK High Court's Time
This demonstrates that we need a reform in the UK
Links 24/08/2025: Microsoft Settles Data Breach Lawsuits and Climate Change Causes Heatwaves, Water Shortages
Links for the day
CachyOS is Rising Fast, But Slopfarms Are 'Googlebombing' It
CachyOS receives more media attention
No Reason for Red Hat Relief Yet (Layoff Rumours)
the execution could be stalled, delayed, or scheduled for some time after people come back from holiday
GNU/Linux 6%, Windows 60% in Venezuela, Suggests statCounter
The cash cows are dying
Mass Layoffs Continue at Microsoft This Month (Remaining Workers See Conditions That Deteriorate)
So far this month (one week remaining) we saw at least two waves of layoffs at Microsoft
How SPAM E-mails With Windows-Centric Files Get Twisted as Linux Threats, Then Slopfarms Spread the Word
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
Links 24/08/2025: Heatwaves Threaten Workers, Maldives Versus Press freedom
Links for the day
Gemini Links 24/08/2025: Digital Cameras and Printers
Links for the day
Links 24/08/2025: GAFAM Lie About Pollution and Slop's Carbon Footprint, The Guardian Says Slop ("Hey Hi") is a Bubble That Will Send Stock Markets Into a Freefall
Links for the day
80% of the Sponsored (Fake) Articles in The Register MS Are Promotions of Ponzi Schemes (Unethical Money), the Rest is Banned Chinese Business
Is that an ethical way to make money? No.
Should Currys PCWorld Start Voiding Warranties of Users of Vista 11?
If a person's laptop has a mechanical issue, should this person replace GNU/Linux with Vista 11 for the repair shop? Only to damage the SSD?
Newer is Not Always Better, and It's Possible That 'Peak' is the Past
People creating their own platforms means progress, whereas centralisation (like moving from blogs to social control media) is the opposite of progress
LLM Hype is Sowing Destruction: It Contributes to DDoS Attacks and Makes the Web Less Accessible (JavaScript "R U Human?" Tests)
If it was googlebot, it would be possible to argue that you'd at least then get referral traffic from Google Search. With LLMs, all you get is plagiarised.
Links 24/08/2025: New York Times Talks About Hey Hi (AI) Bubble
Links for the day
Gemini Links 24/08/2025: Upgrading Debian and Mobile-indifferent Design
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 23, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, August 23, 2025
Richard Stallman's Talk in Buenos Aires Scheduled for 16 November 2025 (a Month After FSF Turns 40)
they've just updated their site and Stallman is listed first
Slopwatch: Linux Journal, WebProNews, LinuxSecurity, and the Serial Slopper
The bubble needs to burst, but even then the Web will be left with residues of these slopfarms
Links 23/08/2025: Science, War, and Important Win for the British Media Against SLAPPers Who Abuse Women
Links for the day
Gemini Links 23/08/2025: BaseLibre Numerical System and Back to Oldschool
Links for the day
"Deserved Victory" for "Women That Suffered"
"GNM defended its reporting as being both true and in the public interest and in a judgment on Friday"
The US Government is Now in the Business (Literally!) of Saving Microsoft and Intel
This means that President TACO/Cheeto now has greater financial incentive to also prop up Microsoft and Windows
Links 23/08/2025: onmicrosoft.com as Spam Cannon, The Cheeto-Intel Deal Is Official
Links for the day
Wired Complained About LLM Slop Only Days Before It Got Caught Doing That Itself
Never throw stones in a glass house
IBM "Value" Down 14.16% in a Month, Red Hat Layoffs Allegedly Discussed 12 Days Ago
"IBM is a dinosaur. Dinosaurs get extinct when the don't keep up."
We're Seeing More Countries Where Windows Isn't Even in Second Place Anymore (Third or Worse)
In a way, Microsoft can barely even hold onto second place anymore
Microsoft Workers on Canonical's Payroll
If you want something that's sort of like Ubuntu but is not controlled by Canonical, then look into Linux Mint, Debian, or LMDE
GNU/Linux Climbs to 4% in Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone isn't a very rich country (to say the least), but it's better off than some of its neighbours
The SLAPPS Run Out of Oxygen Because They're Abuse of Process
At the end of the day we plan to publish over 1,000 articles explaining what happened
The Register MS Gets Paid by the Employer of the Previous Editor in Chief to Promote the "AI" Ponzi Scheme, Which Does Considerable Damage to the Web and to Online Journalists
The Register MS can 'badmouth' slop all it wants; it gets paid to inflate this bubble. It's actively participating in it.
Soon It'll be Autumn, Time to Repair Things
Where they don't charge an arm and a leg
Doing Our Best to Cover Software Patents When the Mainstream Media Does Not
Even the FSF has its limits
Gemini Links 23/08/2025: August Questions and Network Solutions
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 22, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, August 22, 2025
Microsoft Has Issues in Guyana
It's not just Guyana
About 25% of the "Linux" News/Results in Google News Today Are LLM Slop, Almost 20% From the Same Rogue Operators of Slopfarms
Google, which tries to market itself as an LLM giant, apparently fails to understand what's wrong with it
Harassing People on Holiday
There are "no-go areas"; but that assumes all laws firms have ethical standards
The Great, Undeniable Value of Paper Trail, Not Purely Digital Systems
Suppose you have nothing but bits on someone else's computer and "word of mouth"...
The Company Behind Ars Technica, Reddit and Wired Caught Publishing LLM Slop (It Also Admits It Now)
Condé Nast busted
Links 22/08/2025: Lagrange 1.18.8, Wired Magazine and Business Insider Caught Resorting to LLM Slop
Links for the day
This Saturday It's Gonna be 3.5 Years* Since Russia Invaded Ukraine. No Microsoft Protests Against Microsoft Having Provided Russia With Services.
Companies do not have consistent policies and enforcement of "corporate values" is somewhat of an egg salad
Slopwatch: Sites Gone Rogue, Google Promoting Lies, and DDoS Attacks by Plagiarism Giants
Charlatans and frauds engage in a war against artistic industries, mislabeling plagiarism as "AI"
Links 22/08/2025: Cisco Layoffs, LA Times Says "AI Hype is Fading Fast"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 22/08/2025: K for Kentucky and Caddy Versus LLM Slopbots
Links for the day
The "End Software Patents" Initiative of the FSF Explains "WHY [to] ABOLISH SOFTWARE PATENTS"
We hope to cover patent-related issues more and more as the big anniversary of the FSF approaches
Freenode Sniffing
The grown-ups left the building
The Only Thing Worse Than Misinformation is Misinformation Sold to Everyone as "Intelligence"
Misplaced trust is worse than none at all
The Register MS Now Openly Admits LLM Hype Does Damage, But It's Also Being Paid to Participate in the LLM Hype (With Paid 'Articles' and 'Webcasts' for Paying Advertisers)
The Register MS gets paid to do this
End of the Smartphone Era? No.
Maybe the media should focus on producing accurate, factual news
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 21, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, August 21, 2025
Enshittification of Airports, Airlines, and Airplanes
If people are willing to tolerate standard declines and enshittification (nowadays sold as "pivot to AI" or "replaced by AI" or "AI layoffs") they will pay for it some other way
Latest Is Not Greatest: The Case of "Foldable" Tech
don't be shamed into abandoning old things just because the "fashion industry" of Apple and Samsung tells you to
Airlines and Their Tricks That Only Work in the 'Digital Age'
People sceptical of the direction technology has taken are not "Luddites"
Open Source Initiative (OSI), Which Became a Propaganda Front of Microsoft and "Hey Hi" (Hype, Misnomer), Wants You to Forget These Scandals
A lot of these issues won't be set aside until there's a resolution