06.01.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Telstra today revealed it would launch its Linux-based T-Box integrated media centre set-top box from mid-June at a stand-alone price point of $299, with a sledload of free and pay-per-view content available and an associated revamp of its broadband plans in the works.
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Desktop
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Rob Pregoraro at the Washington Post asks the question, “How can an operating system with those virtues, the open-source Linux, remain confined to a tiny minority of desktop and laptop computers at home? “. He’s missed the mark. GNU/Linux is not confined to a tiny minority of computers at home. It may be in the USA but globally, GNU/Linux is on about 10% of PCs. We know that because Ballmer told us and that was a while ago. 30% of netbooks run GNU/Linux and almost all ARMed devices do not run that other OS.You can buy “no OS” and GNU/Linux PCs from most OEMs and some retail outfits.
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The new download stats interface from sourceforge.net geeknet shows what are the countries from where firebird is most downloaded and what operating system is used to download it and the most unexpected thing is that Linux is in the Top
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The $249 Community version is a much easier sell: a low-power PC that could easily run your audio collection into your stereo, has more than enough power for homework or basic image editing, and is unlocked so you can load anything you want on it via Gentoo’s package manager. There are definitely things you won’t want to do on a Zonbu (editing video comes to mind), but for most things, you’ve got more than enough machine here.
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But I don’t want to bore you any further with a story that probably happens everywhere to everyone and all the time in the daily Windows world… While hardware problems occur in Linux just as well, at least the people you talk to about them don’t treat you like an idiot but really know their stuff.
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Schools
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In my earlier post ‘How to Sell Linux’ I looked at three different ways how to popularize Linux and make it more mainstream as well as a household name. In the post I will look specifically at how I would sell Linux to schools, examining all the aspects of such a deployment and how I would do it and what distro and software I would use.
Here is the order I will look at things in this post-:
1. What Distro would be used?
2. What Software would be pre-installed?
3. What would be the Incentive?
4. How Cost Effective would it be?
5. How quickly could new users Adapt?
6. Poll and Conclusion
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Building on the last post, I welcome the opportunity to share some of my experiences with deploying Linux in schools. It is a very broad topic however I will stay with the previous outline. First of all, it is a matter of migrating schools to Linux, not selling them. Second, the approach is different based on whether the school in located in a developing country, the EU or North America.
Before I speak to the suggested list of considerations, which I have reordered based on feedback from my deployments and numerous other sources,I want to say that’ the single most factor for any migration plan to be successful is to is to manage the ‘human factor’ of resistance to change. Effective training and support are critical while technical and functional problems are marginal’ This is where FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt) comes into play and is heavily leveraged by proponents of proprietary software.
1. What would be the Incentive?
2. How Cost Effective would it be?
3. How quickly could new users Adapt?
4. What Software would be pre-installed?
5. What Distro would be used?
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Server
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For anyone who wants to look at the raw data, it’s available at the Top 500 site. Just think, out of the 500 fastest computers on the planet, Linux is used on 455 of them, over 90%, Microsoft Windows is used on 5 of them, exactly 1.0%, and Mac OSX isn’t used at all.
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One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
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Kernel Space
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Linux Foundation has launched a series of free Training Webinars to meet Growing Demand for Linux Professionals. These webinars are taught by well-known Linux developers directly building on their own experience.
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A week ago we reported that Intel’s next X.Org driver (the xf86-video-intel 2.12 DDX) would render text/glyphs faster thanks to optimizations done by Chris Wilson, but this was not all that was in store for this Intel Linux driver that’s updated quarterly. With the most recent Git, there are more performance optimizations.
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Applications
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Just a quick update. I’ve released version 0.4.0 of Lightspark, a free flash player implementation. This release was focused on improving stability, so all the crashes found by many testers should be fixed now. Thanks a lot for testing, several issues were related to particular graphics hardware and I would have never found them without your collaboration. Please keep testing and reporting any issue.
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Now, let’s explore the 9 terminal emulators at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screenshot of the software in action, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.
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Wisotool currently supports 60 games and/or benchmarks (see list below). Please consider contributing support for your favorite game, its not (too) hard. Im especially interested in recent or beta games; ideally wisotool would support (worthwhile) games on the day they are released.
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Instructionals
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I just spent many hours getting a 4GB USB key into a state where it can be used to boot Linux Mint 9 (based on Ubuntu 10.04). Here are some notes on the problems I had to solve.
In the past, I’ve used unetbootin to create bootable USB keys. When I did this with the Linux Mint 9 ISO image, the resulting USB key booted up just fine, but the installer application hung when trying to run the partition editor. I narrowed this down to an assertion failure in libparted. Apparently it doesn’t like the geometry on some USB keys. This is a known bug.
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Desktop Environments
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In fact, modern applications, proprietary and FOSS alike, seem to me explicit admissions that icons do not work very well. Many applications provide mouseover help to help users identify the icons. The KDE desktop goes one step further, offering thumbnails to help you see what each icon does or contains. If icons worked the way they are supposed to, then why would these supporting structures even exist?
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This concludes part four in a sequence of entries presenting some of the new features of the soon-to-be-finished KDE Partition Manager 1.1. Part one was about Mount Management, part two dealt with SMART Status Reports and part three offered a very technical look behind the scenes on the topic of Support For 4096-Byte Sectors.
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New Releases
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Salix is a Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast and easy to use. Salix is also fully backwards compatible with Slackware, so Slackware users can benefit from Salix repositories, which they can use as an “extra” quality source of software for their favorite distribution. Like a bonsai, Salix is small, light & the product of infinite care.
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Red Hat Family
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DeKoenigsberg is probably better known–for now–by his last job title: Senior Community Architect at Red Hat. It was more from this experience that he addressed the OSS 2010 audience on Open Source Projects, Educational Opportunities.
DeKoenigsberg told the attendees of educators, researchers, and students that academic institutions are missing a real opportunity for instruction if they aren’t teaching with open source software. For one thing, working on a 5,000-line senior capstone project nowhere near conveys the sheer scale and complexity of a million-line project. And an open source project is the only kind of project a student developer could even get near something that big.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Barely a few weeks after Canonical released Ubuntu 10.04 aka Lucid Lynx, they already announced plans for Ubuntu 10.10 aka Maverick Meerkat, with a release schedule aimed to launch Meerkat in October 2010.
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So I also installed the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the Toshiba Netbook we have. Used Wubi as before. It was very slow (10+ minutes) on bootup however. Luckily the internet is full of information and a few minutes of googling produced this forum thread that had me change a setting in the BIOS. Now it boots quickly. There’s another page on How-To Geek about doing this install.
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Welcome to The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is Issue #195 for the week of May 23rd -May 29th, 2010 and is available here.
In this issue we cover:
* Track the Desktop Team and UNE in Maverick
* Ubuntu Server update for Maverick Meerkat
* Ubuntu Foundations and Maverick Meerkat 10.10
* Maverick Community Team Plans
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As you know, Ubuntu and Linux are hugely configurable. Find some spare time and you can customize anything starting from the boot up messages to the gradients used on the buttons and the scroll bars. While one might not attempt such extreme feats very often, administration and configuration are standard tasks that you might perform every now and then.
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In recent Linux related news I have been reading about the Ubuntu Control Center (UCC) and the Ubuntu Application Menu (Global Menu). The projects looked extremely interesting so I decided to install them and give them a try. Note that directions for download and installation are provided in the links above.
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Variants
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Parsix team is proud to announce that the final Parsix GNU/Linux 3.5r0 ISO images are available for immediate download.
This release provides a stable computing platform for your daily uses and tasks. Package repositories are synchronized with Debian testing repositories as of April 7, 2010. Frankie ISO images will not fit on CD and a DVD is required to burn them. These images are compiled using SquashFS 4.0 with LZMA compression and for the first time GRUB 2 is used as default Live-DVD boot loader. The kernel build system has been modified and improved vastly to produce better kernel packages.
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Qimo is a desktop operating system designed for kids. Based on the open source Ubuntu Linux desktop, Qimo comes pre-installed with educational games for children aged 3 and up. So If you want to teach your children to use Linux from an early age, Qimo is the perfect for your kids.
Qimo’s interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want.
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Nokia
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MeeGo Linux is being developed as a platform for smartphones, netbooks, internet connected TVs, in-car systems, and other devices where Windows may not always be the best option. The project is backed by chip-maker Intel and smartphone maker Nokia. And so far, every device I’ve seen running MeeGo has had an Intel chip — usually a low power Intel Atom processor.
But in an interview with The Inquirer, Nokia vice president Alberto Torres explained that MeeGo is an open platform and that it will be available for device makers to use on a wide variety of hardware. In fact, Nokia’s first MeeGo device will have an ARM-based chip rather than an Intel x86 processor.
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If you have graced my page before then odds are you know I love my N900. This past Wednesday Nokia released the PR 1.2 update for the N900 and one of the features they added was support for the front facing camera to make video calls via the VOIP services Skype and Google Talk. I made my first video call this evening on my N900 and it works quite well!
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Android
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Sub-notebooks
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The Asus App Store is basically a branded version of the Intel AppUp Center. It’s designed as a place where netbook users can go to find software that’s guaranteed to work well on devices with Intel Atom processors and small screens. Asus will preload the App Store software on all Windows netbooks starting in the second half of 2010.
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This year marks the 50th anniversary of 17 African states gaining independence.
Now, a wave of homegrown programmers, developers and software makers claim to be heralding a new era of African independence.
Earlier this month, the Idlelo conference, organised by the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), brought together the continent’s cleverest coding minds at Accra, in Ghana, to discuss new software opportunities in Africa.
Unlike the bigger, foreign developers – who have mainly targeted the urban markets – the coders at this event looked at how to reach the rural, relatively poorer communities of Africa.
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Oracle
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But wait. Today I just found in [osol-discuss] forums that Opensolaris 2010.06 will be expected to release on June 2010. The release date has not been stated yet but it is expected to be announced shortly after Oracle announces Fiscal Year results, which means in a couple of days or so.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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David Reyes Samblas Martinez is the founder of Spanish Copyleft Hardware store Tuxbrain, and attended the famous Open University of Catalunya. He’s also the subject of this month’s Fellowship interview, in which he answers questions on hardware manufacturing, e-learning and Free Software politics.
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Openness
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Whether open source is a license, a community or more is debatable, but what’s not is that none of it would be possible without the people behind it.
Anyone who knows Linux knows the name Linus Torvalds. Free Software? Richard Stallman. Open Source Initiative? Eric Steven Raymond.
There are many, many more names. Some well-known to people in the open source community, others who toil in relative anonymity.
That’s why I liked the appeal for funding for Signal Boost: A Free/Open Source Narrative, on Kickstarter.
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A young woman, M.J. de Blanc, has picked up and moved to Boston to write a book. It’s the story of open source, but as she notes in her explainer video, not about FLOSS – it’s about FLOS, Free Libre Open Source. She left off the second S – software – for a simple reason: She wants to write about the people, not the programs.
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Open Data
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Yet as new technologies have made it possible for governments to make information more accessible to the public, governments have become increasingly creative in inventing excuses to keep it hidden.
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In an unusual move for such a significant news item, the UK government announced over the weekend that they were ordering all government departments to embark on a voyage of transparency.
There were some very good ideas in the announcement, including a mandate to publish details of all ITC procurements. And there is no doubt that a mandate for open data is a fantastic move.
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This is the story of how Google, for a period of three years, locked me out of their groups service, how I eventually found my way back in, and what it cost me.
Yeah, I guess this is a bit off topic regarding to software development. However these days many of us store important data and value in services like Google’s. Services with terms like: “Google may stop providing the Services to you at Google’s sole discretion, without prior notice to you”. I guess I never took it too seriously, as the companies would probably get seriously bad PR, if they did something like that. Deleting emails for billions. My error was forgetting the case where you are the only person being locked out.
I my case the lock wasn’t from email, but from Google Groups. Not as critical as email would have been, but still, well, rather inconvenient. The lockout meant that I was unable to manage the PyChess mailing list. I was unable to fight the, at that time, increasing spam level; and more importantly I couldn’t reply anybody in my community.
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Science
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In very rough terms, the sun’s activity ebbs and flows in an 11-year cycle, with flares, coronal mass ejections and other energetic phenomena peaking at what is called solar maximum and bottoming out at solar minimum. Sunspots, markers of magnetic activity on the sun’s surface, provide a visual proxy to mark the cycle’s evolution, appearing in droves at maximum and all but disappearing at minimum. But the behavior of our host star is not as predictable as all that—the most recent solar minimum was surprisingly deep and long, finally bottoming out around late 2008 or so.
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For the first time, human embryonic stem cells have been cultured under chemically controlled conditions without the use of animal substances, which is essential for future clinical uses. The method has been developed by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and is presented in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
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Environment
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A fight breaks out as student Vikas Dagar jostles with dozens of men, women and children to fill buckets from a truck that brings water twice a week to the village of Jharoda Kalan on the outskirts of New Delhi.
Three thousand kilometers (1,900 miles) away, near Xi’an in central China, power-plant worker Zhou Jie stands on the mostly dry bed of the Wei River, remembering when he used to fish there before pollution made the catch inedible.
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Internal documents from BP show that there were serious problems and safety concerns with the Deepwater Horizon rig far earlier than those the company described to Congress last week.
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Prolonged exposure to crude oil and chemical dispersants is a public health danger, environmental scientists warned yesterday as BP spent a third day trying to initiate a “top kill” operation to cap the ruptured well on the sea bed.
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A delicate “top kill” operation by BP appears to have halted the gush of oil and gas from its ruptured Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, although experts warned that the underwater leak was still far from being permanently fixed.
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If efforts fail to cap the leaking Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico (map), oil could gush for years—poisoning coastal habitats for decades, experts say.
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BP has challenged widespread scientific claims that vast plumes of oil are spreading underwater from its blown-out rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The denial comes as the oil giant prepares for a new operation to put an end to the worst oil spill in US history – which could see the leak get worse before it gets better.
The company’s challenge to several scientific studies is likely to put it further at odds with an increasingly angry Obama administration, which has accused it of playing down the size of the leak in an effort to limit possible fines.
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The 189 member nations of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) last night struck a deal on a series of small steps towards disarmament, including a 2012 conference to discuss a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.
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A 1960s-style campaign of direct action must ignite on the streets as a catalyst for decisive action to combat climate change, according to President Mohamed Nasheed of the imperilled Maldives. Nasheed told the Hay festival that it was the United States, not China, that was the biggest obstacle to a global agreement to check carbon emissions.
Nasheed, who held an underwater meeting of his cabinet last autumn and is presiding over the relocation of people from some islands because of the effects of warming oceans and rising sea levels, put his hopes in the emergence of “huge” grassroots action after the failure of talks in Copenhagen in December.
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Finance
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A Canadian national who the U.S. government says swindled $70 million from 40,000 investors on six continents carried out the same kind of Ponzi scheme the one-time bank robber mocked on his website, federal investigators allege.
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Forged out of the ashes of World War II and the end of the Cold War, the European Union was meant to create peace and prosperity across the region. But Europe’s debt crisis has laid bare deep financial and cultural divisions within the 27-nation bloc that may never be bridged.
The fateful decision to make the EU effectively a halfway house – tying its member countries into a joint currency and interest rate decisions, while allowing them to retain control over national budgets and taxes – has left the fractured grouping at a crossroads.
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A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college.
Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure.
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The economy trudges ahead yet debt dogs many Americans, stressing them out even as they firm up their own financial foundations.
There are new jobs produced but old worries persisting for people despite belt-tightening and boosted savings, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll.
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FOR decades, until Congress did away with it 11 years ago, a Depression-era law known as Glass-Steagall ably protected bank customers, individual investors and the financial system as a whole from the kind of outright destruction we’ve witnessed over the last few years.
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The complaint begins by explaining the relationships between Lehman and JPMorgan. Lehman was a full-service stock broker. JPMorgan provided clearing services for Lehman’s securities business. JPMorgan was the lead lender and administrator on a $2 billion unsecured revolving line of credit. Lehman also had a large derivatives portfolio with Jamie Dimon’s bank.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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While the magazine publishers may rightly be concerned about private control of a platform that many of them are counting on for their long-term salvation, the German state is at the very least ambivalent about the subject of censorship. This is the country that has banned Wikileaks, sought a ban on violent games, and voted to censor child porn (only to have the president kill the ban as unconstituitonal).
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Bangladesh has blocked access to Facebook after satirical images of the prophet Muhammad and the country’s leaders were uploaded, say reports.
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Pakistan lifted a ban on Facebook on Monday after officials from the social networking site apologized for a page deemed offensive to Muslims and removed its contents, a top information technology official said.
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Copyrights
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Lists of Britons who infringe copyright are to be drawn up by the UK’s biggest ISPs, under proposals from the regulator Ofcom.
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This week Ottawa will try once again to update Canada’s copyright law that Industry Minister Tony Clement says has holes big enough to “drive a Mack truck through.”
The Copyright Act of Canada has not had a significant rewrite since 1988, at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy and an iPad was just a twinkle in some inventor’s eye.
The trick — one the Conservatives and Liberals before them couldn’t master — is to find a balance between right of consumers’ and the rights of the artists or creators to not have their work ripped off.
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Media reports last week indicated that the government plans to introduce its long-awaited copyright reform bill within the next few days. The bill is sure to spark widespread debate since all Canadians — whether consumers, creators, businesses, or educators — have a significant stake in the outcome.
The internal dynamics that led to the bill are by now fairly well known. Industry Minister Tony Clement, emboldened by last summer’s copyright consultation that generated unprecedented public participation, argued for a forward-looking, technology neutral bill with flexibility as a core principle. Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore advocated for a U.S.-style protectionist approach, with priority given to digital locks that can be used to limit copying, access, and marketplace competition.
NASA Connect – VT – Parallax (3/18/2004)
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05.31.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Turnbull told iTWire that he was moving to the United States to take up a role as director of operations at Puppet Labs, which provides services for the open source Puppet configuration management system.
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That, if you use open source products then you will be left high and dry out on a limb without a leg to stand on. They build up on and play with the indecisive Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) you might have regarding usage of open source, in particular, Linux.
Lets have a look at what support there is for operating systems and programs out there. For windows and microsoft related programs there is, of course, microsoft. Only microsoft, no other company or entity can support microsoft programs. This leaves people using microsoft products at the mercy of microsofts whims and whether their problem will be fixed or not is all dependent on microsoft. Sure there are plenty of companies that advertise their support services. These companies can only deal with configuration problems. Real bugs in the programs can only be “fixed” by microsoft and no other. Most of the time this fix, unless you have a lot of money to throw around, will, at best, be released in the next months update cycle. Probably the fix will wait until the next version release or maybe even not at all.
Open source is a completely different story. There are several companies which support open source. These companies provide the same sort of support which microsoft does and more. Generally the support the company provides is focused on their own released Linux distributions.
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Recently a new client called with a Quickbooks issue. I should probably mention that I do a LOT of quickbooks (POS and Financials) troubleshooting. Most generally this work is done in Windows. Sometimes, however, we get a call about a Quickbooks Linux server. That was the case this time. What was going on was the client’s machines were all losing connectivity to the server. So they called me in. I gained remote access to the server and started poking around.
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We have the freedom to choose the operating system we use on our computers. We have the freedom to choose the software that’s installed in that operating system. We also have the freedom to say “No” to non-free software.
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Started in March 2009, Carnation Auto—a multi-brand automobile sales and services network set up by the former MD of Maruti Suzuki, Jagdish Khattar—offers car owners a wide array of services covering servicing, mechanical repairs, body repairs, accessories, insurance, pre-owned cars, car customisation solutions, etc. From rectifying scratches and bumps, to transforming off-the-assembly-line cars into one-of-a-kind attention-grabbers with accessories, Carnation has grown to 15 hubs across 10 cities, with more than 700 employees —all in a matter of nine months.
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Looking ahead, Carnation hopes to deploy open source on its existing desktops. “We have about 20 desktops per hub. We are looking at an open source desktop platform in these hubs in about a year. We are looking at tremendous cost savings, and the easy management of front-end users’ systems, which are like points of sale,” quips Agarwal. It sure is life on the fast lane for Carnation!
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Desktop
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I started getting emails from her, complaining that she couldn’t “download” anything. Remember that to the Windows user, “download” and “Install” have some pretty blurred lines. The “run” option once the download is completed usually keeps the user in the dark as to where the actual download landed. They most times don’t touch the EXE file…Windows does that for them.
Bless their hearts.
So I explained to her that Linux handled the installation of software differently. I took over an hour to “familiarize” her with her desktop and the functions therein.
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Last week my colleague Rikki Kite wrote a good blog entry on how to gracefully introduce a person to Linux. She pointed out that just telling a person to “move to Linux” is not enough, and that most people will “get lost in the move”. She used an analogy of moving a friend to a new house.
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You might also introduce them to their local “Linux users group” that may have meetings in their area, so after a while these people can also become “mentors” to the user user.
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Server
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What are the odds that two different sellers on both sides of the Pond would find themselves peddling some of the processing modules of the original Cray-1 vector supercomputer?
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Announced earlier today, the 35th list of the top 500 supercomputers contains few surprises, just that Linux has almost total domination of the list.
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Audiocasts
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In this show: A metric buttload of Google news (aka. This Week in Google Outlaws), software patents now legal in Germany, Fab rants on the fact that people complain about Google “spying on WiFi” and much more…
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This week on KDEMU we introduce Gabriel Saldana one of the co-hosts of KDEMU, we talk about KDE Mexico, his life as a rock star and emacs.
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Ballnux
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Also with this new version a new KDE bindings is released, namely perl-kde4.
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Kernel Space
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Howdy y’all, and welcome to this weeks’s kernel news – OpenSUSE style!
-We begin our week by noticing a patch proposed by Larry Finger on opensuse-kernel@ that fixes a typo and a reference to websites for instructions; after a correction by Jiri Benc, the patch was committed to the master branch.
-On vger.kernel.org, the week(end) starts with a git pull request from Ryusuke Konishi working on the nilfs2 updates for 2.6.35, Steven Rostedt with perf, of course, OpenSUSE’s Greg with TTY patches for .35 and the same Greg with a series of 38 patches for the driver-core tree also targetting 2.6.35.
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It’s been two weeks, and so the merge window is closed. There may be a few trees I haven’t pulled yet, but the bulk should all be there. And please, let’s try to make the merge window mean something this time – don’t send me any new pull request unless they are for real regressions or for major bugs, ok?
This time, there are no new filesystems (surprise surprise), but there’s certainly been filesystem work both on an individual FS layer (btrfs, cept, cifs, ext4, nfs, ocfs2 and xfs) and at the VFS layer (superblock and quota cleanups in particular).
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Graphics Stack
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Last week NVIDIA had released their first 256.xx series Linux driver in the form of the 256.25 Beta release, but as we discovered, it boasted some major performance regressions for a NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250M and other mobile ASICs. This issue has now been resolved thanks to a new beta release.
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Applications
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A learned a long time ago about the vmstat 1 command, which will allow you to watch some of the action that’s happening in your system. It’s a useful command, and I find myself relying on it most often when I want to get an idea of drive input and output.
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Since the arrival of consumer digital cameras, hard drives have been filling up with images of every social occasion, no matter how boring.
It soon became apparent to happy snappers that where you once merely had to look in a drawer or a photo album to find a particular snap, there may now be thousands of them on your hard drive. And so the need for photo management software was born.
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Instructionals
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Games
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As promised in the Humble Indie Bundle, the classic indie game starring your favorite 12-pound ball of tar, has now had its secret sauce released under the GNU General Public License. Ever wonder how Gish’s famously fluid physics system was put together? Well now you can take a look for yourself. Alex Austin has just made the source code available for download here.
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Desktop Environments
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While XFCE also seems to offer similar level of performance enhancement, I would prefer LXDE over XFCE for following reasons:
* LXDE offers bolder colors and looks a tad bit brighter than XFCE.
* XFCE asked me to unlock the keyring every time I logged in, to connect to the Wireless, LXDE had its own wireless manager interface and it didn’t bother me with saving/retrieval of keyring.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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KDE Partition Manager 1.1 gains support for reading, analyzing and reporting the SMART status of disks. SMART (sometimes also written as S.M.A.R.T.) is an acronym for “Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology”. In plain English it is a monitoring system for hard drives and its intention is to give the computer user a chance to take action before an impending hard drive failure — the action being to copy his data to another disk, of course.
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Hard drives are getting bigger and bigger, a trend that leads to some technical challenges hard to overcome without user-noticable changes. The increase in hard disk size means that the areal density (the number of bits stored per square inch on the drive) also increases heavily, which is a good thing at first glance: The higher the areal density the faster the same amount of data can be read and written. Thus the drives not only get larger, they also get faster.
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As we’re having a board meeting in the KDE e.V. office in Berlin, we thought we’d take a photo for posterity.
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In March the uTorrent team released the long-awaited version 2.0 of their popular BitTorrent client which introduced several significant changes.
One of the novelties in the new uTorrent release was uTP, a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be network friendly. Critics, however, have labeled the new release as unfair, which has resulted in the client being banned from several private BitTorrent trackers.
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New Releases
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ArchBang will now have a codename for each of it’s stable releases. We will also ask our user’s to suggest us names. It will start from A-Z then repeat. The first stable ArchBang release will be on 2010.09 ,i.e. in September 2010. It will be called “apeiro” after Judd Vinet the “Arch Daddy”.
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Fedora
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In several ways, Red Hat already plays the free game well. Out of Fedora’s 21,676,499+ users, if only a 1/100 of a percent ever contribute any content that lands in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it is a win for Red Hat. It also behooves Red Hat to pay attention to CentOS’s rpm repositories when rolling up the latest updates. As far as I know, Red Hat pays nothing to the CentOS project yet Red Hat can use CentOS as a product development source.
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I became a Fedora contributor after experiencing what I felt was a highly polished distro and outstanding support from the Fedora user community – my Fedora profile can be viewed here. I had attempted to become a contributor for another distro, but the process required to do so ended up being so long and difficult that I just gave up and moved on. I felt that, if they really wanted help, their join process would have been much easier and their people would have been more helpful.
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There were not a lot of vast changes in this cycle, but there were some nice tweaks and of course all the goodness of F13 as a base.
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In general, I like the way the Fedora team approaches security. The installer insists on setting a root password and creating a regular user account. The distro enables SELinux out of the box and has convenient tools for managing SELinux policies. I like that encrypting partitions in the installer is very easy and intuitive. On the live CD edition, the firewall is enabled and OpenSSH turned off, though the firewall port for SSH is left open in case the user wishes to turn on the service later. The only quirk I found was non-root users had the ability to reboot or halt the machine. This probably isn’t an issue for people logged in locally; after all it would be annoying to have to switch to the root account just to shut down the computer you are sitting in front of. However, the regular user accounts can also halt the machine remotely if secure shell is enabled without suing to root, a potential problem for the unaware admin.
For the most part, Fedora 13 feels very similar to Fedora 12, a stable, modern and well put-together operating system. However, there are some things which stood out that I feel the need to complain about. Generally I don’t like to focus on hardware compatibility, but Fedora 13 was a big regression for me, especially on the laptop. It took more resources, performed slower than the last release and didn’t work with some of the hardware Fedora 11 and 12 handled previously. Forcing users to download the entire DVD to choose their root file system is also, in my opinion, a poor design choice, one other distros with live CDs have avoided. Those problems aside, I generally liked my time with the latest Fedora, the project provides a good balance of new software with tried and true configuration tools. Worth a look if you’re interested in trying new technology or would like to experience a polished SELinux implementation.
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The Fedora Project has been running since 2003 after Red Hat Linux was discontinued. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux being Red Hat’s official distribution, the Fedora project has since 2003 catered to the needs of the average desktop user looking to run a stable and free operating system which did everything he wanted and more. Distrowatch rates Fedora as the second most popular Linux based operating system after Ubuntu.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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One other data point to that effect: After installing Linux on the Dell and Sony laptops noted in the column (in addition to testing an in-place upgrade from the copy of Ubuntu 9.10 I’d installed on another Dell last year), I took that first Dell on last week’s reporting trip to San Francisco–then didn’t boot into Windows until Thursday morning. Everything you read here from Monday through Wednesday of that week was done in Linux. I finally switched back to Windows to write my column, since that required running remote editing software that doesn’t work (or I don’t know how to work–anybody have advice on Citrix in Ubuntu?) in Linux.
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Variants
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Lubuntu has come a long way from it’s first release with 9.10 just last year. This 10.04 release is a fantastic addition to the world of light weight Linux distros and just like the others in the *buntu family I have no doubt it will adopted by many for use on slower/older computers.
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A strongly recommended distro which not only gives a solid desktop experience that is capable of handling any task you throw at it, but also introduces you to cloud computing in a very non-committal way.
Just like many of the distro’s I feature here, I encourage you to support this project, the hard work and professionalism this distro displays for me means its one I will be following with great interest in the future and as far as Ubuntu derived distro’s go, this is up there with the best of them.
I have been contacted by the devs behind Peppermint and have the pleasure of saying that a Q&A session will follow in a future article.
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For the last couple of Ubuntu releases I’ve been running the full desktop edition on my netbook (Acer Aspire 1). These have run fairly well, and I’ve even had Compiz configured to run the cube and other eye-candy such as wobbly windows – although this may in part be due to its slightly upgraded spec (1.5gb ram). However despite swapping Firefox for Google Chrome there were some aspects that were disappointingly slow, this was regardless of the processor-hungry features that I had running. As a result I decided to give the Ubuntu Netbook Edition a try.
[...]
The other advantage of upgrading to 10.04 is that this version has long term support (LTS). Which means that Ubuntu will provide security updates for 3 years, as opposed to 18 months for standard releases.
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Hardware/Chipsets
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CSR says it’s now shipping a Linux-compatible SoC (system on chip) incorporating an ARM11-based application processor and a 64-channel GPS engine. The SiRFatlasV offers 500 or 664MHz clock speeds, supports VGA-resolution video, supports DDR2-400 RAM, and includes an on-chip audio DAC and power management unit (PMU), the company says.
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Freescale announced an heir to its i.MX51 family of ARM Cortex-A8 SoCs that boosts video decode performance to 1080p HD. The i.MX535 processor offers 720p video encode, up to 2GB of external memory, and improved peripheral support including new DDR3, SATA, and LVDS, and is compatible with Android, Linux, Windows Embedded CE, and Chromium.
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eReader
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For those of you who think that the Kindle’s 1/3 of an inch thick architecture is just too thick, you may be able to check out a new slimmer Kindle come August this year. According to a Bloomberg.com article, Amazon.com plans to introduce the next version of the Kindle electronic-book reader.
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In each country the company said it will work with local retailers, publishers and distributors to introduce the Reader along with local content.
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Digital photo frame (DPF) maker Pandigital announced an Android-based tablet that offers integrated access to Barnes & Noble’s eBookstore. The $200 Pandigital Novel 7-inch Color Multimedia eReader is equipped with an ARM11 processor, 1GB RAM, a 7-inch, 800 x 600 touchscreen, as well as 802.11n and SD expansion.
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Phones
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Motorola is looking at developing a new tablet-style product that could run Google’s Android operating system, a company exec recently revealed. Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha was answering questions at a conference when the topic came up.
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Dell is almost ready to release its first Android tablet, the 5-inch Dell Streak. There’s just one problem, though: The Streak isn’t really an Android tablet. It’s an Android phone.
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Nokia
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In the history of stupid names for Linux software, MeeGo tops them all. But what is it exactly?
That’s not a very nice thing to say! But yes, MeeGo is an unusual name. OK, it’s stupid.
It’s a new project that brings together Moblin, a name that you wouldn’t call great, but neither was it embarrassing, and Maemo, a name that kept making people disagree over whether it was pronounced Maymo, Maimo or Meemo. Cunningly, MeeGo tops them both in the silly name stakes.
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Steve Jobs may disagree but I think netbooks are fantastic. They’re more functional than a phone and more portable than a laptop, and feature a full keyboard to boot.
Netbooks are capable of running regular operating systems, but I’ve recommended time and time again that users find a netbook-centric operating system to get the most they can out of their systems.
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Well, MeeGo 1.0 is now available for download, and while the merger has slowed development a little, I must say I’m impressed with this operating system (although I’m still not sure it’s ready for prime time.)
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The Intel- and Nokia-backed MeeGo project released version 1.0 of an open source operating system optimized for Intel Atom-based netbooks. MeeGo v1.0 for Netbooks — which we found to be speedy — comprises Google’s Chrome browser, Nokia’s Qt 4.6, plus a variety of other tools, and will be followed next month by a handset version, says the project.
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Liliputing’s Brad Linder also tried MeeGo Netbook and found the operating system to be “really, really fast.” The OS will run even faster when it is installed on a hard drive rather than a USB stick, he added.
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Android
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Ultimately, my reason for switching can be summed up thusly: I used to feel that, to get the best smartphone software and hardware experience, I had to live in Apple’s walled garden. Now, the walls are getting higher, and life outside the garden looks better and better. I can get a really great smartphone without some company telling me I can’t switch out the keyboard, or the dialer, or the voice mail program, or the browser. I can get a world-class smartphone without putting up with AT&T’s spotty network. I don’t have to put up with supporting a company that enforces its restrictive App Store policies in a seemingly arbitrary and draconian manner. I’m not sure I agree with those who say Google has “leapfrogged” Apple in phone development, but I certainly think they’re doing a comparably good job.
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If you’ve ever said anything good about an Apple product, you’ve likely been called one. But a new class of fanboy has emerged — one that, amazingly, may be be equally as passionate. The Android Fanboy. And it’s actually a good thing.
In case you missed my review of the new HTC EVO 4G phone yesterday, be sure to read some of the comments. As stated, I was coming at it from the perspective of a dedicated iPhone user. Long story short, I don’t really like the device. To the Android lovers, I might as well have killed Bambi.
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Tablets
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Next week at Computex, Via Technologies’ WonderMedia Technologies subsidiary will demonstrate low-cost Android-based tablets based on the ARM9-based, 600MHz WonderMedia Prizm processor and related “SmartTouch” reference designs. The tablets will be manufactured by a variety of Chinese manufacturers, and sold for as low as $100 in the U.S. later this year, says Bloomberg.
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Shogo Linux Tablet, a Potential iPad Killer: There is a new tablet PC in town that runs Linux, and its name is Shogo. Made by realease, a Hong Kong-based platform provider, this device features a 10-inch capacitive touchscreen and will be available in two models: one has a Freescale i.MX37 (ARM 11) processor; the other model is loaded with a Freescale i.MX51 (ARM Cortex A8) processor.
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The French firm EviGroup says it is now shipping an Android-based tablet with a five-inch touchscreen. Running on a ARM11-based 667MHz Samsung S3C6410, the $250 “Evi Wallet” offers 256MB RAM, 1GB flash, a microSD slot, and 802.11n WiFi, says the company.
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The Aoson M500 mini-tablet runs on a 624MHz Marvell PXA303 processor, and offers a five-inch resistive touchscreen, plus 3G, WiFi, and GPS wireless capabilities, says the story.
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OLPC
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THE ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD project has said that its upcoming XO-3 tablet will not use a Windows operating system.
OLPC’s chairman Nicholas Negroponte has always wanted the Vole to join the party. Last year he said that the organization was urging Microsoft to make a full version of Windows available for the earlier XO-2, which was based on an ARM processor.
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FOSS is an abbreviation for Free and Open Source Software. In other words, FOSS is software whose source code is openly available. People can install and even modify FOSS as they please, so long as they follow a few basic requirements listed in the license. This arrangement makes FOSS the opposite of proprietary software, and one of the most original developments in the history of IT.
FOSS is a combination of two terms, free software and open source. Both free software and open source refer to software that is licensed in the same way, but the separate terms imply a difference in the reasons for the licensing.
For most free software supporters, the licensing is a way to ensure software freedom, or the ability of users to control their computers and their contents. By contrast, for most open source supporters, the licensing is a way to improve the quality of software. The open source argument is that, because the source code is available, bugs will be more easily discovered — or, as Eric S. Raymond put it, “with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.”
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In this day and age, with all things going digital, the world of writing is getting a little smaller–just ask many of the former newspaper writers and editors beating the bricks out there. Still, good writers will always be with us, and tools for writing continue to evolve. In the open source arena, there are many great writerly applications available. Here are some good resources for finding them.
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Social
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The anti-Facebook movement has created a level of interest in open-source solutions to the privacy issue where virtually none has existed before.
After I wrote about the Diaspora project a few weeks ago, I was contacted by Michael Chisari of the Appleseed Project, which is basically the same thing and predates Diaspora by several years. Reason virtually no one had heard of it was because Chisari had spent months developing the entire project himself and had to put it on hold because he, well, reached the point where he couldn’t finish it alone with no one really interested in it.
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You might expect that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg would dismiss the four NYU college students who want to take on Facebook’s dominance of social networking by building a distributed, open alternative that includes a way for people to run their own servers.
But instead, Zuckerberg said he donated to the Diaspora project, adding to the $190,000 it has raised, in part because he appreciates their drive to change the world.
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Events
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Ghana is one of those “emerging economies” that I sometimes discuss, with people trying desperately to get ahead and utilizing Free Software to get there.
Ghana has more problems than just trying to decide whether they should use Free Software. The Internet backbone to their country (and surrounding countries) is inadequate for the number of people it serves, and the prices for the Internet is pretty daunting, so downloading a copy of any of the distributions is both expensive and slow.
Fortunately I was able to get my friends at Red Hat to sponsor about 500 Fedora CDs for the conference and some university training that I did after the conference. That was the good news.
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Already the fifth edition, Libre Graphics Meeting continues to grow and to become more relevant. The meeting was held in Brussels this year, in a great venue: De Pianofabriek. Exactly the right size, cosy, comfortable, engaging and located in a lively neighbourhood. While LGM was going on, parts of this cultural centre were used by kung-fu, folk dancing and classical music classes. There was some good eco beer to be had in the canteen as well.
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Software Freedom Day is an event held all over the world to celebrate and raise awareness of free software and open source software. Software Freedom Day Melbourne is on Saturday 18 September 2010, 10am–4pm at the State Library of Victoria.
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Mozilla
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Jetpack 0.4 includes four new high-level APIs for coders to play with. The open source organisation said it had held back some APIs that it had planned for this release of the add-on software development kit.
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Databases
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Oracle
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When one executes a Google search on the term “office suite” the first non-ad post which appears is OpenOffice.Org. Now sponsored by Oracle, the OpenOffice.Org suite provides free software for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other desktop productivity tools. It’s commercial version is now called Oracle Open Office.
Market share for such a product has been traditionally tricky considering that it is free to download and redistribute. Moreover big vendors like IBM and smaller folk since Open Office Suite have re-banded OpenOffice.Org with other free and non-free components. By all means, I applaud everyone who gets in the business of marketing and selling OpenOffice.Org.
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R was initially created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. It now has a sizable community of users, as well as a large number of add-on packages.
The new interface will join existing community-developed R packages for Oracle, including a database driver and a user interface.
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Oracle is abandoning AMD’s Opteron processors, according to a person familiar with the company’s server plans.
The new owner of Sun Microsystems will not use the new Opteron 6100 and impending Opteron 4100 processors in future Sun Fire x64 servers, and all existing Opteron servers will be discontinued.
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BSD
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FreeBSD 8.0 was released in November, but now the first update in the 8.x series is approaching. FreeBSD 8.1 has entered beta and is expected for final release around July.
The FreeBSD 8.1 schedule can be found at FreeBSD.org. Before making the July release, two release candidates are expected in June. There is also a Wiki page that’s tracking what needs to be done to this point release.
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This is good news for the FreeBSD world, FreeBSD advocacy and the FreeBSD project in general, and current DesktopBSD users in particular:
According to the DesktopBSD website development of this KDE-based and FreeBSD based, user-friendly system will be restarted / continued by a group of developers
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Software Foundation and GCC Steering Committee have now decided that it’s okay and permitted to write code for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) within C++. Up to this point, C has been the preferred language for working on GCC.
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Open Data
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In a statement issued today, the pair — who were key in driving through changes in government that led to the creation of the data.gov.uk website and the freeing of Ordnance Survey maps and Royal Mail postcode information — say that “the future remains bright” for the web science project, and that they are convinced that open data will become increasingly important to government.
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Open Hardware
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So Willow Garage is not the only open source robotics effort. Gostai in France offers Urbi, an AGPL system that can be used to build small robots. USC has The Player Project, used mainly for education.
What all this really represents is hope. It’s at the bottom of any cycle where America really shines. Apollo began at a time when the Soviet Union seemed to have beaten us to space with Sputnik. Open source rose to prominence from the dot-bomb.
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Earlier this year, the BeagleBoard project released a faster BeagleBoard with the newer 720MHz version of the OMAP3530 (Rev. E). As with the earlier BeagleBoard, it ships with a Linux board support package (BSP).
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Security/Aggression
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As they parked their vehicles and removed a large package from the back, it zoomed in and followed them.
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Environment
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President Barack Obama pretty much stated the obvious when he called the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico “a massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.”
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It sounds like the crisis managers have learned the lessons of Gulf War and Iraq War media control only too well:
The problem, as many members of the press see it, is that even when access is granted, it’s done so under the strict oversight of BP and Coast Guard personnel. Reporters and photographers are escorted by BP officials on BP-contracted boats and aircraft. So the company is able to determine what reporters see and when they see it….
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ABC News went underwater in the Gulf with Philippe Cousteau Jr., grandson of famous explorer Jacques Cousteau, and he described what he saw as “one of the most horrible things I’ve ever seen underwater.”
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BP ‘totally in charge of the news’ about oil leak, energy expert says
As the latest effort to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico meets with failure, the idea of nuking the immediate area to seal the oil underground is gaining steam among some energy experts and researchers.
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“I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down,” Obama said. Saying he was angry and frustrated over the inability of BP and the federal government to contain the man-made disaster, Obama said daughter Malia, 11, on Thursday knocked “on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?”
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I spent a lot of time working with engine companies, in getting their engines certified by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board. I designed a range of 3-Way Catalytic Converters, worked to get a retrofit kit verified (you can read a copy of the interim verification here). I’ve worked with emission control systems for Diesel, Gasoline (Also called Petrol), Natural Gas, and Propane fueled internal combustion engines, used on a wide variety of machines. I’ve even done some work on automobiles. During this time I also worked with staff at both major U.S. agencies, and several of the minor ones (each state has it’s own environmental regulator) as well as Environment Canada.
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Those of you who watched Garbage Warrior will know a little about Michael Reynolds’ bid to create a legally safe space for architectural experiments. Here’s a fascinating map (plus an update) from the earthship website showing places “where permitting for environmentally friendly housing is quick and easy.”
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Lake Baikal is a place of superlatives: the deepest, the oldest, the clearest, the cleanest, with the highest level of biodiversity, the largest volume (20%) of the total stock of freshwater in the world, and it is home to an endemic freshwater seal. For this reason Lake Baikal has been on the World Heritage List of UNESCO since 1996.
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Indonesian forests got some love and some money this week.
The money came in the form of a 4 billion USD fund contributed to by seven wealthy countries – US, UK, Norway, Germany, Australia, Japan and France – to be used for forest protection globally as part of REDD (reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation). A program where developed countries provide funds to help developing ones protect their forests. (Deforestation contributes up to a fifth of global carbon emissions – so this money doesn’t just protect trees it protects our climate too!) In addition to the global fund, Indonesia will also receive 1 billion directly from Norway.
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Finance
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Whitman, then CEO of EBay, is listed among about 200 executives who were to receive gifts of deeply discounted stock, according to court documents filed by prosecutors after the dot-com bust.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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With salt under attack for its ill effects on the nation’s health, the food giant Cargill kicked off a campaign last November to spread its own message.
“Salt is a pretty amazing compound,” Alton Brown, a Food Network star, gushes in a Cargill video called Salt 101. “So make sure you have plenty of salt in your kitchen at all times.”
The campaign by Cargill, which both produces and uses salt, promotes salt as “life enhancing” and suggests sprinkling it on foods as varied as chocolate cookies, fresh fruit, ice cream and even coffee. “You might be surprised,” Mr. Brown says, “by what foods are enhanced by its briny kiss.”
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A New-Jersey-based skin care company, Repechage, offers a helpful guide explaining which of their products would be favored by each of the four female stars, and HBO’s “Shop Now” link to Sex and the City merchandise on their Web page leads visitors to page after page of movie-related merchandise, including “Sex and the City” foldable after-party ballet shoes, mugs, mousepads, charm necklaces, leopard print scarves, martini shakers, champagne flutes, cosmetic cases, and on and on.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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MINISTER for Communications Stephen Conroy has vowed to push on with his controversial internet filtering scheme, despite a barrage of criticism.
Senator Conroy told The Sun-Herald that internet advocacy groups such as GetUp! were ”deliberately misleading” the Australian public about the scheme, which will refuse classification to illegal and socially unacceptable web pages. The legislation, which was expected to be passed before Parliament rises in June, has been delayed until the second half of the year while the government fine-tunes it.
The government’s $128.8 million Cyber Safety policy includes forcing internet service providers to block access to a secret blacklist of website pages identified as ”refused classification” by the Australian police.
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Tony from the StarShipSofa podcast sez, “Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer talks openly to Sofanauts host Tony C. Smith about his arrest by US border guards, being maced, imprisoned, punched in the face and his feelings towards the people that did this. This is a very candid and open testament of what happened on that day and the days proceeding it.”
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The European Commission has issued its draft mandate – setting the ground rules to negotiate with the US to create a data sharing agreement.
This must now be approved by the European Council before negotiations can begin.
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The Australian Services Union has issued a statement claiming that IBM has told 19 of the workers at its Baulkham Hills Flight Deck centre that they are to be terminated. IBM issued its own statement late this afternoon claiming that its ability to meet client needs would be unaffected.
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In a post on his recently opened Twitter account, Rehman Malik, the country’s interior minister, said that the Pakistan cabinet, which met on Wednesday, had accepted his proposal to block only the objectionable sections of the two Web sites.
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A South African government official is proposing a complete ban on digitally distributed pornography.
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Foxconn
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A thirteenth employee jumped/fell from a high roof or ledge at Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory in rural China. The young woman reportedly survived and Foxconn is disputing reports that she meant to take her life.
The factory in Shenzhen assembles Apple’s the majority of Apple’s iPads, iPhones, and iPods – it also produces products for HP and Dell among other manufacturers. After a string of suicides, Apple has become alarmed and has pressured Foxconn to seek solutions to stop the deaths.
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Nine of the workers at a Shenzen plant where iPhones and other hi-tech kit is assembled have killed themselves this year, with a further two unsuccessful suicide attempts. In a satirical response, Foxconn’s human resources site was hacked with a spoof ‘We’re Hiring’ notice. A translation of the Chinese-language defacement by Shanghaiist reads:
Foxconn — We’re Hiring
Are you feeling down today? Do you feel like not living anymore? Do you want to know what it feels like to jump down from China’s model suicide jumping facility? Foxconn provides you the perfect environment to jump.
All the many reasons to jump here have ensured at least one jump per week.
Comprehensive press coverage guaranteed. to ensure your name travels ten thousand miles.
What are you waiting for? Pick up your phone now and join Foxconn.
Be the kickass twelfth jumper.
You can do it.
Hiring hotline: 514514514
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The Two Locks of DRM
When I am explaining DRM to politicians, I feel like I am Ralph Nader back in 1965. He explained that with an automobile accident there are two collisions: the car hits something, and the passenger hits the car. While automobile safety up to that point concentrated only on the first collision, it was quickly understood that safety features should concentrate on the second collision. This gave us dashboards that weren’t made out of metal, seatbelts, air bags, and other such second-collision safety features. We have the same problem with DRM where policy makers think there is only one “digital lock” being discussed, when in fact there are two and it is the lock they are less aware of that is the source of most of the controversy.
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Copyrights
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The concept of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a good one, considering the Internet has made piracy much more of a global problem. The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus emphasized that when it released its international piracy watch list this month. And, of course, it’s helpful if the countries most affected by the problem approach it in a similar manner.
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The Internet Archive launched a new service yesterday, bringing free access to more than 1 million books in the specially designed format to support those who are blind, dyslexic or are otherwise print-impaired.
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ACTA
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A few hours before the vote on the Gallo report regarding the future of EU copyright, the rapporteur, French sarkozyst Marielle Gallo, has tried to lead her colleagues into voting fake compromise amendments. Mrs Gallo tries to hide the clash between two very conflicting positions: on one hand, the rapporteur’s ultra-repressive logic against online filesharing – including the encouragement of the ACTA agreement and of private copyright police – and on the other hand, the understanding that a successful creative economy will be built with Internet users and not against them. It’s up to us, citizens, to help the members of the JURI committee to make the right decision by protecting fundamental freedoms and the public interest.
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Digital Economy Bill
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A survey from law firm Wiggin and Entertainment Media Research asked 1,592 UK consumers aged 15-54 if they thought the law change would mean anything to them. A third of those who admitted to downloading the odd file said that they would not change their behaviour even if the most direct action of Internet account “suspension” is implemented under the DEA. However they might change their minds when they have their Internet access cut off.
NASA Connect – PSA – Robots (1/22/2004)
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Send this to a friend
05.29.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Rapid growth of Linux into corporate and government IT environments is fueling the need for Linux certified professionals. CIOs and managers are eager to have Linux experts in their organizations. A training or certification provides a tangible mechanism for their hiring evaluation, as well as a means to market the prowess of organizations.
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Over the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of discussion surrounding Sony’s decision to remove Linux support from the PS3. Those inclined to sue over the removal of Other OS support say they purchased their PS3 because they could install Linux on it.
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Desktop
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A Los Angeles judge this week ordered Lindsay Lohan to wear an alcohol-detection ankle bracelet at all times, after the actress was convicted for driving under the influence. Last night, Ms. Lohan tweeted that she wished to bedazzle her Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor (SCRAM). The device isn’t pretty. Neither is alcoholism.
Snip from the Los Angeles Times:
“Can CHANEL please help me out by getting me some stickers to put on my scram bracelet so that I can at least wear a chic dress?! maybe!? x,” Lohan wrote.
But the maker of the ankle bracelet warns that anything that affects the alcohol-monitoring device could be considered a violation and could trigger its tampering mechanism. So adorning the lightweight monitor with sequins or stickers could be fraught with problems for the fashionable actress.
Guess that means you can’t install Ubuntu on it, either. Bummer.
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This post is a summary of a conversation I had the other day with an acquaintance of mine. It started out with him asking me what I do for a living and ended up with me having to choke back tears of laughter. I hope you have the same reaction although I realize that it might be one of those, “You had to be there” moments.
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Yesterday, I installed Linux Mint on my dad’s laptop. With the exception of a couple of bits of poorly supported hardware, the installation went without a hitch. I think my dad was genuinely pleased with his new Linux installation and he commented that it was definitely faster than the old Windows XP installation, he added that he thought it looked fairly easy to use too.
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These are just more trash statistics telling the world or at least anyone who wants to listen that GNU/Linux is not relevant. Real statistics with pedigree showed that GNU/Linux surpassed MacOS share back in 2003 and has not looked back.
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This also indicates that those who tried GNU/Linux are happy enough to keep using it and they do not value the need for support from Novell highly and more continue to ask for GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is simple, modular and reliable.
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During a quiet period my colleague and I happened to find ourselves comparing notes on our company-supplied laptops: Dell Latitude E6500s. My colleague, let’s call him Diglio, runs Windows 7 on his, and I am running Kubuntu 10.04. We were just sitting ourselves down in an empty conference room to take advantage of the CMU wireless to check our email.
Diglio opened his laptop, which had been suspended, and nothing happened. Well, sort of. The fan came on, but not the screen. Nothing he could do would turn the screen on, he had to reboot.
Watching that I said, “That happens to me sometimes too. I thought it was the Linux power management tools that were screwing up. Do you sometimes close the lid to suspend, stick the laptop back in your case only to find a very hot laptop a bit later when you realize that it didn’t suspend properly as well?”
“Yep”.
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HPC
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89% of the top 500 high performance clusters run GNU/Linux and 1% run that other OS. That will not change any time soon.
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SGI ProPack 7 is the latest version of SGI’s suite of tools and libraries that enable industry-leading application performance on standard Linux(R) distributions. SGI software products are designed and built on open standards supporting Linux distributions from Red Hat(R) and Novell(R). SGI also integrates and certifies leading third-party software tools to provide best-in-class open software stacks for customers’ most demanding workloads.
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Audiocasts
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Topics for this podcast:
*Licensing buzzes with Google, OSI, virtualization and the cloud
*Open source barometer Black Duck sees growth in mobile, healthcare, government
*New life for LinuxCare shows renewed vigor for Linux in clouds
*Apache Hadoop support old and new with IBM, Datameer
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History of IRC, the Peer-Directed Project Center, freenode and more.
Guest: Jonathan Simpson
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Ballnux
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As we reported here earlier this week, the Samsung i897 looks to be AT&T’s first serious attempt at releasing an Android phone. In terms of specs, it appears to be almost identical to the Galaxy S with its 4-inch AMOLED screen, Android 2.1, and 5-megapixel camera. Our source for a few hardware details just dropped a handful of pictures on our lap showing the future AT&T device looking ready for prime time.
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The Samsung I8330, thought to be Vodafone’s next 360 range handset has been revealed
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One of Samsung’s newest phones – the Samsung I8330 – is reported to be available shortly on the Vodafone network and under the name Vodafone 360 H2.
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Kernel Space
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The testing Phoronix does may have some use but it is not a reflection on Linux in general just the filesystems and hardware that Phoronix uses that are quite narrow. The code in question is just a tiny percentage of Linux.
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* Wim Coekaerts (Senior Vice President, Linux and Virtualization Engineering, at Oracle): Coekaerts will take a technical look at Linux at Oracle.
* Rob Chandhok (President of Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc.): Chandok will discuss the challenges in open source and mobile today.
* Markus Rex (Senior Vice President and General Manager of Open Platform Solutions at Novell): Rex will speak about the changing nature of IT workloads on Linux.
* Intel & Nokia: A joint keynote titled, “Freedom to Innovate: Can MeeGo’s Openness Change the Mobile Industry?”
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Graphics Stack
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The latest ATI graphics drivers are here to satisfy the needs of the Linux gamers out there. ATI Catalyst 10.5 comes with preliminary support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and Server 11 Service Pack 1. It also fixes quite a lot of Linux-specific issues and bugs. Other than that, it’s just a regular evolutionary update, nothing to write home about.
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Applications
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Upon loading DeVeDe you are presented with a screen which asks you what type of disk you are creating. In my instance it was DVD video, although there are offers of VideoCD, Super VideoCD, China VideoDisc and DivX/Mpeg-4 too. Next up you select the titles for your buttons on your menu screen and with a quick click to the adjacent box to select the files that are going to be played when this title is selected. This is where DeVeDe 3.16.8 really impresses and taking the worry of all those command line options away, it will automatically convert your files into DVD compliant format. After that its rinse and repeat for any other titles you want on your disk. NTSC and PAL are both catered for and there is a status bar to show you how much room you have left on the disk.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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The KDE Project developers have released a first beta for version 4.5 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC), a development preview of the next major release for the popular Linux and Unix desktop. According to the developers, the beta is aimed at “testers and those that would like to have an early look at what’s coming to their desktops and netbooks this summer”. The final version of KDE 4.5 is scheduled to be released in August, 2010.
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Good news for fans of KDE, the first beta of KDE SC 4.5 is now available for download. KDE has a history of introducing some of the most innovative features in each release. In KDE 4.4 we got tabbing support at the window manager level, making it possible for people to combine any two arbitrary windows from different applications, into one tabbed window.
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Highlights of KDE SC 4.5.0 Beta 1:
· Revamped notification area;
· Added KWin-Tiling effect, which automatically places windows next to each other;
· WebKit web browser engine can now be used in Konqueror;
· Improved overall stability of the software components in KDE SC 4.5;
· Many other amazing, new features!
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Every once in a while I write a post related to relations between lancelot and kmail or kopete.
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There were a lot of complaints when we decided to limit the size of icons placed on panels in plasma to 32×32 pixels.
The reasoning behind limiting the size were requests from users who use vertical panels – vertical panels are usually made wider then standard panels, and icons would grow to 300×300 pixels taking up most of the space on the panel.
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One of the most requested features after KDE Partition Manager’s initial release has been that users asked for a way to modify mount points from within the application. This came as a bit of a surprise to me because I would not have seen this feature to be in the immediate scope of a partition managing application. But, the user is king after all, and thus this will indeed be possible in KDE Partition Manager 1.1.
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This morning, while having my usual Cafe Latte (albeit this time in Berlin instead of at home sweet home in Nijmegen), I read about the Trinity project, which is an effort to revive KDE 3. I think this project nicely shows the advantages of Free Software. While the vast majority of KDE contributors agrees that KDE 3 is a dead end, technologically, these two guys (according to the somewhat sparse information on the website) are trying to continue to support and feature development on KDE3. Now I see a couple of real challenges for this project:
* Maintainance – KDE 3 is a large codebase. You need a good amount of people with domain knowledge of many different areas to effectively maintain a project like KDE. I see some of the first roadmap tasks for Trinity are updating the build system to deal with all the updated developer tools (e.g. newer autotools versions).
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Continuing on with the theme of measuring the popularity of Linux distros, today we’ll go for another method. Linux Tracker is a website that provides a bit torrent tracker for various Linux distros and related projects.
Another way of measuring popularity is to look at the number of seeders and leechers a torrent has (the number of people uploading/downloading the torrent at that moment) and the number of downloads it has had.
While the only takes a smaller fraction of the downloads, as most people prefer to use HTTP downloads. These will also cater to the slightly more technically aware, as downloading via bit torrent is not quite as simple as downloading via HTTP. Another issue is that it is possible (and encouraged) for one person to be seeding multiple torrents at once, so someone could be seeding every single Ubuntu torrent on the site, even though it is only 1 user. Conversely someone could have downloaded the disc straight and then not seeded it at all. Projects with lots of DVDs/CDs (such as Ubuntu and Debian) will have more seeders together than a project with only 1 or 2 CDs.
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Zenwalk
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Jean-Philippe Guillemin proudly announced last evening, May 27th, the immediate availability of the Zenwalk Linux 6.4 operating system. The new release is powered by Linux kernel 2.6.33.4, with the BFS scheduler, and the new XFCE 4.6.2 desktop environment. Cutting-edge packages and overall performance improvements are also present in this new release of the lightweight Zenwalk Linux distribution.
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Zenwalk 6.4 provides many enhancements at system and application levels, while confirming the maturity and features stability of Zenwalk. The brand new 2.6.33.4 kernel is featuring the new BFS scheduler, designed for the best desktop interactivity on multi-core CPUs while taking the most of lower spec machines. You’ll notice better responsiveness of graphical applications, better realtime performance of sound applications (very low latency), and efficiency of niced commands (compilation tasks can really be niced in a way they don’t disturb other applications). Like its predecessor, Zenwalk 6.4 features EXT4 as main filesystem, and latest versions of most applications and desktop environments.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring’s development planning is on track. Latest release helped to fix many bugs and improve quality of your favorite distribution.
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Red Hat Family
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Here is the statement a Red Hat spokesperson sent me, in full:
“The Fedora Project and the engineers and developers that are part of it always keep tabs on technology trends in open source. We included KVM early in Fedora distributions because its developers did the work necessary to have it included in the Linux kernel. We predicted KVM’s inclusion in the kernel would make it the best virtualization solution going forward, and we’ve been proved right. Over time we deprecated Xen hypervisor support in Fedora, while KVM has continued to flourish and grow in features and adoption.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This month:
* Command and Conquer.
* How-To : Program in Python – Part 11, Adding Screenlets, and Streaming Media.
* Review – Lubuntu.
* MOTU Interview – Stefan Lesicnik.
* Top 5 – Tiling Window Managers.
* plus: Ubuntu Women, Ubuntu Games, My Opinion, My Story, and all the usual goodness!
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Variants
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A new version of the Software Manager is available in the repository. You can use the Update Manager to upgrade to it.
The Software Manager was rewritten from scratch in Linux Mint 9. It’s a very complex application, and it can be improved in many ways. Today we tackled the time it takes for the application to start. Basically it needs to process some 30,000 packages, a growing number of comments (we’re receiving about 200 comments per day at the moment) and match all that in categories and do some other fancy processing… Because of all this, it’s far from being immediate.
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Although Pandora is promoted as “the most powerful gaming handheld,” the specs lean more towards an ultra-portable, pocket-sized PC. This portable rig can surf the Internet thanks to a built-in Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g wireless adapter, allow users to compose email using its 43-button QWERTY keyboard, and perhaps even export high-quality video to a TV thanks to its S-Video output jack. The Pandora sports a battery with a 10+ hour duration.
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Nokia
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According to an earlier Reuters report based on Gartner figures, Nokia only managed to sell less than 100,000 top-of-the-range N900 smartphones in its first five months on the market.
However, Nokia has since told The INQUIRER that the original figure quoted by Reuters was incorrect, and that it actually sold more than 100,000 Nokia N900s in the first five weeks.
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Meego is facing stiff competition from Google’s Android and Chrome operating systems, Canonical’s Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Microsoft’s Windows 7 Starter Edition. Like Canonical’s and Google’s products, Meego is based on the open source Linux kernel.
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Android
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More than 4 billion TV users exist in the world. Americans watch an average of five hours of TV per day.
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Instead of Android being the best that Linux will ever get on a portable device, it’s actually the first step into having open systems on mobile platforms. As Android gets into the netbook and tablet market, it will only get better for Linux users. People will learn to trust these open platforms and find out that these work out just as well as other types of platforms. The flexibility felt with these will be superior to other platforms that are more closed and controlled where users can’t make personal choices.
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“The open operating system offered by Google doesn’t necessarily translate to openness for users,” Hazelton said. “In some cases when you lock down a smartphone, it’s almost like running around the Internet on AOL. It’s just like going back to the ‘walled garden’ on feature phones.”
The idea of openness may have gotten away from Google with regard to Android, he said. Initially, the goal for Android was to create a mobile platform that would spotlight Google’s features — maps, search, cloud-based applications. The Nexus One is Google’s attempt to create just that phone, even though the versions of Android phones sold by other handset makers may not live up to the Googleplex’s ideal for a smartphone.
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While we’ve got no way to confirm at the moment, here’s some proverbial food for thought. A friendly reader last night published in our comment thread for the two rumored Verizon-bound Motorola devices with the above picture (subtitles added by us), claiming the bottom image is the Droid 2′s upgraded QWERTY keyboard. The story goes that his friend had one but no other information is currently available — the font on the keys is identical, and the mic icon on the bottom left is distinctively Android. If it’s legit, we gotta say we’re hopeful; the keys look to have a more protruding center à la the CLIQ, which should make typing on the little guy much easier than before. And if it’s not the Droid successor, well, it’s still something we haven’t seen. Could this be the updated QWERTY-fied Android solution we’ve been waiting for? Time will tell.
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There is always the option of building your own brand of Linux but Android has most of the advantages of this and much more.
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CEO Sanjay Jha tells investors Motorola is concentrating on the convergence of mobility and the home and ‘nearly all’ of his focus is on Android.
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Tablets
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While VIA is helping to produce a line of devices that come in at the $100-$150 range, Marvell’s teaming up with the organization to keep their tablets at a maximum price of $99.99 to help less-fortunate children and families get computing devices that will help them with their education and everyday life.
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Realease (no, that is not a typo) has rolled out a new 10″ tablet device which runs on the Linux operating system, with a choice of Freescale i.MX37 (ARM11) and i.MX51 (ARM Cortex A8) processors within.
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The folks over at ARMDevices have posted an exclusive look (via YouTube video – see below) at the Realease Shogo tablet. Sporting a 10.1 inch capacitive touchscreen, the Shogo comes built with a Freescale i.MX37 (ARM11) or i.MX51 (ARM Cortex A8) processor inside and is completely open with Linux as the OS.
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In the high-stakes competition to grasp Apple Inc.’s hit iPad, the Android operating system that Google Inc. made popular in cellphones is promising to be a front-runner.
Tablet-style computers, a declining hardware category until the iPad began generating buzz previously this year, which are anticipated to be a huge topic at next week’s Computex trade show, which is a major topic of discussion for product announcements by creators of personal computers.
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A pair of the most-anticipated mobile computers from this year’s CES show were Lenovo’s U1 Hybrid and Skylight smartbook. Both ran a custom widget-based Linux OS (sometimes also called Skylight), and were powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU. But since then, both devices seem to have fallen off the map, and now we think we know why. Both systems are getting a software overhaul, jumping to the Android platform in search of better performance and more usability.
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Switching to Google Android would benefit Lenovo in the long run. They would not have to spend too many resources on developing the core OS for their products. Android would also provide a massive support for third party apps that are available from the official market operated by Google.
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Lenovo settled questions around its ultra-mobile PCs on Friday by planing a switch in OS for the Skylight smartbook and the IdeaPad U1 detachable tablet. The two will drop Lenovo’s in-house Linux OS for Android in what’s treated as a reaction to “market conditions and user feedback.” Future plans now involve creating an entire ecosystem of Android devices that would include devices like the LePhone.
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New Pentaho sponsored report from Mark Madsen conducts price comparison of commercial open source and top five proprietary vendors
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Two years ago many companies were skeptical of Open Source, but after living two years through tough times during a recession, many companies have a better handle on what Open Source is all about and are enthusiastically embracing its potential. And the new mind shift among customers is forcing many vendors to change. They’re changing the way that they sell. And they’re changing the way that they develop with and support their software purchases.
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In theory, open source should win hands down. The open environment allows a cooperative ecosystem to evolve, guaranteeing a rate of innovation simply not possible in closed system. But I think it depends on where we are in the maturity of the market. Open source allows for more innovation, but it’s also an open invitation for more things to go wrong. This can be deadly as you try to push along market adoption.
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Mozilla
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Today marks 10 years of continuous full-time employment working on Mozilla.
I still can’t believe I get to work with so many amazing people. It’s pretty much the best job ever.
Thank you to all the Mozillians that have made this such a wonderful decade.
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The Mozilla developers have issued a first release candidate for version 3.1 of their open source Thunderbird email and news client, code named “Lanikai”. According to the developers, the development preview is considered to be stable, addressing 57 bugs from the previous beta, and is “intended for developers and members of our testing community to use for early evaluation and feedback.”
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The numerous bug-fixes include preventing specific, popular add-ons such as Gmail Conversation View from crashing the e-mail client, saving drafts when written in offline mode, and several critical stability fixes.
According to Mozilla’s calendar, Lanikai remains on schedule for a June 1st release barring bugs discovered in the release candidate. The full change log for the release candidate can be read here.
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The email client release is considered stable by the developers but it still aims largely at developers and testers and not general users who are asked to wait until the final version of Thunderbird 3.1 is released before they migrate to the new client.
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For some reason that is completely unfathomable to me, the URL that’s shown as hilighted in firefox’s URL window can get out of sync with options that show up in the drop down menu of possible alternatives, yet firefox gives preference to the drop down menu when you hit the TAB key to complete.
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Opera, ever scrappy in its effort to promote its browser over larger rivals, is poking fun at Google’s recent video boasting about the speed of its Chrome browser.
“The Opera browser is much faster than a potato,” concludes Opera’s low-budget video, which features herring-obsessed caricatured Scandinavians rolling the tubers into a pot of water at the same time Opera loads a Web page.
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Databases
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VoltDB, a new open-source database for large-scale transaction processing, emerged from beta on Tuesday.
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It is open source and available from the project website under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
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Oracle
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OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 Release Candidate 2 is not yet available from the usual download website but on many mirrors. So, just download from your favorite mirror next to you. Please note that currently a few Windows builds are not yet ready, these files need a bit more time to be available.
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Although Oracle will continue to support the GlassFish 2 customers through its commercial support, plans are for the team to focus on the Version 3 roadmap.
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CMS
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Welcome to the June installment of our what’s coming from the open source projects in the next month.
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Education
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Cheers to ReadWriteWeb for the heads up on this, and kudos to Google for releasing more open-source code.
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Healthcare
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Given the collaborative roots of VistA and all the third-party development that’s been done on top of it, in use in hospitals all over the nation, it makes sense to make this a full-fledged open source project, engaging the best coders and developers out there to build the best system for our veterans. And with the federal government moving toward electronic record-keeping for all healthcare, this gold standard could be applied across the board.
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Business
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How much does BI software and ongoing support actually cost? The report pulled real numbers from public sources and direct from the vendors revealing and comparing BI software and support costs for Pentaho, IBM (Cognos), MicroStrategy, Oracle and SAP (Business Objects).
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The Open Source Channel Alliance will potentially reach roughly 15,000 Synnex resellers — many of whom are managed service providers targeting mid-market customers.
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Ben Golub is new to the storage industry, having served previously as CEO of Plaxo (now part of Comcast) and in the upper management of VeriSign (which recently sold a security division to Symantec Corp.) before taking over as CEO of Gluster earlier this month. Golub and other executives from the open source clustered NAS software vendor recently sat down with SearchStorage.com to discuss the state of the enterprise data storage industry, building an open source business model, and what’s coming in new releases of their product.
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Project Releases
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Terracotta has upgraded the distributed caching open source code it acquired last year, Ehcache 2.1, for the fourth time in 10 months. The pace of upgrades reflects how making use of pooled server memories governed by a distributed cache has become a hot method for scaling up Web applications.
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A technology leader in cross-platform collaborative editing and shared media storage, has announced the Lightworks Open Source Beta Programme.
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When we talk about server virtualization, we often mention the resources behind the technology, such as the memory, CPU, and disk. We do so because at least one of these resources will ultimately become the bottleneck somewhere down the road on our path to consolidation. But what about the network? Remember the network — that thing that everyone used to point the finger at and assign blame to when something went wrong in the data center?
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Government/Licensing
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The Spanish Police, Spanish Mint and Portugal’s Agency for Administrative Modernisation have been heckled by developers of OpenSC, open source software for smart cards. The developers found that the public administrations use their software libraries, but have not made available this open source code, one of the terms of their licence.
The Portuguese Agency for Administrative Modernisation corrected the error last week, the open source developers report.
According to one of them, Martin Paljak, the Portuguese agency had overlooked the emails sent by OpenSC at first. “A few weeks ago we tried again, and then they replied and began fixing the mistake.”
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The decision on Tuesday by the administration of the Bolzano region to renew the proprietary software licences for it’s servers, will be challenged by Associazione per il Software Libero (Assoli), an advocacy group on free and open source. The group says the region should have investigated alternatives and should have issued a call for tender.
The Bolzano administration on 25 May decided to spend 2.2 million Euro to renew proprietary licences for the next three years. In its decision, the administration admits it is forced to renew the licence contract: “There are no alternatives for the development of the IT system. Changing these essential and central servers would be irresponsible. The administration fails the resources and expertise for such a change.”
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Open Hardware
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Robotics company Willow Garage has started a two-year project to work with institutions from around the world on new applications for its robot: the PR2. Each of 11 teams will work on their own projects, but will share their code with each other and the rest of the world. Everything created will be open-source, meaning others can use the code for their own endeavors. (The PR2 runs on a software platform called Robot Open Source, also developed by Willow Garage.)
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VP8
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One week after Google open sourced its $124.6m VP8 video codec, Mozilla and Opera have called for its inclusion in the still-gestating HTML5 specification.
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Google has the resources to fight any industry consortium in court, and it might just get the chance, as the company has declared that it will make all of YouTube available in VP8. But, as John Paczkowski pointed out, unless it’s ready to indemnify everyone else who uses the standard against future licensing or legal fees, its claim that VP8 is not only open source but free to use may prove meaningless.
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An Arkansas woman who locked her son out of his Facebook account and posted her own items there was convicted Thursday of misdemeanor harassment and ordered not to have contact with the teenager.
Clark County District Judge Randy Hill ordered Denise New, of Arkadelphia, to pay a $435 fine and complete anger-management and parenting classes. He said he would consider allowing her to see her 17-year-old son, Lane New, who lives with his grandmother, if Denise New takes the two courses.
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Security/Aggression
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Former home secretary David Blunkett said today he was considering suing the Government for the £30 cost of his ID card, after it was announced that holders of the documents will not be compensated when they are abolished.
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In any other situation, Jason Wilde might have been flattered to be thought of as a decade younger.
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A new show called Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera opens at Tate Modern this week. It features images made surreptitiously or without the explicit permission of the subject. It is the history of spying with a lens in just over 250 photographs.
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Companies that operate critical infrastructures and do not voluntarily allow the federal government to install monitoring software on their networks to detect possible cyberattacks would face the “wild” internet on their own and place us all at risk, a top Pentagon official seemed to say Wednesday.
Defense Deputy Secretary William Lynn III, speaking at the Strategic Command Cyber Symposium in Nebraska, said we need to think imaginatively about how to use the National Security Agency’s Einstein monitoring systems on critical private-sector networks — such as those in the financial, utility and communication industries — in order to protect us.
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Finance
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After completing an elaborate sting operation, the FBI arrested a Disney employee and her boyfriend Wednesday for trying to sell corporate secrets to hedge fund managers and other Wall Street traders.
The FBI and other federal regulators said the plot was dependent on the ability of Bonnie Hoxie to covertly exploit her position as an assistant to Zenia Mucha, Disney’s head of corporate communications.
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The House of Representatives passed a bill today that would raise the taxes that venture capitalists and other investment managers pay on carried interest — their share of the profits from a successful start-up investment.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Fighting PC game piracy with restrictive copy protection is “a losing battle”, Blizzard has said.
In recent months some publishers have begun using digital rights management (DRM) that requires players have an active internet connection at all times.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A cease and desist order sent to Google on behalf of The Tetris Company LLC has resulted in 35 Tetris clones being pulled from the Android Market. The developer behind FallingBlocks was among the first to feel the fallout as they took to Slashdot to air their complaint.
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Artists are being ripped off by copyright rules applied by the federal government’s latest tourism campaign, arts groups claim.
Tourism Australia has been sourcing images and photographs from the public free of charge for use in its latest Nothing Like Australia campaign.
The government agency has previously sourced artwork from commissioned and library-stock photographs, generating income for the copyright holders.
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Copyrights
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One thing though this news must be good news for FACT, because P2P tech threatens to take away the pirate DVD market stall if the new “code of practice” makes it “too hot” for P2P users then I would expect those not frightened to take the risk will be raking in profit as they sell the copied titles on the street. So for FACT the revitalised industry of pirate DVD sales will make the work flood in….happy times ahead Im sure.
I get fed up with saying it, copyright infringement can be greatly reduced. This is not the way to do it. But who cares if it doesn’t work? You are paying for the experiment….theres always next year.
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Michael Scott points us to one of the best summaries I’ve seen of the state of the music business today — published in the ABA Journal. It’s an incredibly balanced piece, that really does carefully present both sides of the story on a variety of issues, and presents actual evidence, which suggests the RIAA is blowing smoke on a lot of its claims. The piece kicks off by highlighting that the music industry appears to be thriving, and then noting that it’s not the same as the recording industry, which has been struggling.
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It’s official. “Hurt Locker” producer Voltage Pictures has declared war on 5,000 unidentified people who allegedly pirated the Oscar-winning film. The lawsuit was filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
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A proposed class action was commenced yesterday, May 25, 2010, against Thomson Reuters Corporation and Thomson Reuters Canada Limited on behalf of a class of Canadian lawyers and law firms. The Statement of Claim (which has not been proven in Court) alleges that Thomson Reuters breaches copyright by making available original lawyer created legal documents for fee or subscription without permission from, or compensation to, the authors of the documents.
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More than 2 years ago the IFPI and other copyright groups brought action against Danish ISP Telenor demanding that it should block its subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay. Following a hearing which began a week ago, the Supreme Court in Denmark has just ruled that The Pirate Bay must continue to be blocked, upholding previous rulings by lower courts.
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One evening this week, fitness instructor Michael Montgomery tried to spur four dozen exercisers through a frenetic routine of lunges and jumping jacks by applying a tried-and-true prod—a Britney Spears tune.
“Gimme gimme more, gimme more, gimme gimme more,” rang the lyrics of the 2007 song, which is called “Gimme More.”
The words, however, weren’t sung by Ms. Spears, but by an almost-but-not-quite soundalike cover artist identified as Mandy Brewer.
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A case testing the meaning of the so-called “innocent infringer’s” defense to the Copyright Act’s minimum $750-per-music-track fine has landed at the U.S. Supreme Court.
The case the justices were asked to review Wednesday concerns a federal appeals court’s February decision ordering a university student to pay the Recording Industry Association of America $27,750 ($750 a track) for file sharing 37 songs when she was a high school cheerleader. That decision reversed a Texas federal judge who had ordered defendant Whitney Harper to pay $7,400 ($200 per song).
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The internet was created to share and distribute data. It’s the whole reason the world wide web exists.
Of course some of that data is going to be copyright-protected work. If it can be digitized, it can, and will, be shared.
What continues to amaze me is how freaked-out authors are by this. The thought that someone is sharing their work–without paying for it–seems to evoke the same reaction as having someone hack your bank account and drain your life savings.
[...]
And yet, I’m not worried. I’m currently selling 220 ebooks per day, and that rate shows no signs of slowing down.
So everyone needs to take a big, collective breath, let it out slow, and stop worrying about illegal file sharing. Here are some reasons why.
1. Copyright is unenforceable in a digital world. Period. Exclamation point. At no time in history has any individual, company, or industry been able to stop file sharing. No country or law has been able to stop it. No technology has been able to stop it. Which brings us to…
NASA Connect – PSA – Microgravity (1/22/2004)
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 6:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Ballnux
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Swapnil: Which distribution do you use, and which desktop environment?
Greg: I use openSUSE as my main distro, with Gentoo still on a few server or ‘tiny’ machines I use for infrastructure. I use SLED for testing new hardware out as part of my job.
As for the desktop environment, my laptop is now running Moblin. Before that it was running Fluxbox. My main desktop is running GNOME, and I have a test box running KDE to ensure that the FACTORY branch of openSUSE is still working properly.
[...]
Swapnil: Although binary-only drivers make life easy for the end user, in your opinion, how good are they?
Greg: They do not make life easy for end users; they make life harder. My opinion, as well as those of a very large number of Linux kernel contributors, was published last year and can be seen at www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Kernel_Driver_Statement.
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A new snapshot of openSUSE 11.3 is available, which now puts it at Milestone 7, and means that the first release candidate is near. However, while the release of openSUSE 11.3 is approaching in July, it continues to add in new packages and support.
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Graphics Stack
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For those of you not interested in today’s ATI Catalyst 10.5 for Linux driver, if you pull the very latest open-source ATI Radeon Linux graphics driver stack there is now tiling support for the R600/700 (Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series) graphics processors.
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Applications
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Minitunes is just another music player, only better. It is currently being developed, so you cannot download it at this time. But you can stay up to date by reading the developer’s log (RSS). Minitunes will be available on Linux, Mac and hopefully Windows.
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Proprietary
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Most of us have been in a situation from time to time when we needed to convert a video file to another format. We would all claim of course that it was of a family event that we recorded last summer. Ahuh. There have always been tools and programs available to help automate the process, although in many instances the interfaces were cumbersome and confusing. Some on the other hand were very easy to navigate but never seem to work quite right.
I have used a few converter programs on Linux in the past like, Avidemux, OggConvert, and Pitivi. However, a few months ago I stumbled on a media converter for Linux that I had not heard of before and discovered they had a deb file already created for Ubuntu Linux, so I figured it was worth the few clicks to check it out. I was surprised to discover a simplistically elegant interface although more importantly it also worked perfectly each time I threw a “family video” at it.
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The latest version also supports operating systems including Ubuntu 8.04.4, Ubuntu 10.04, OpenSUSE 11.2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, Fedora 12, Debian 5.0.4, Mandriva 2009, the firm said.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Lugaru HD was a part of the Humble Indie Bundle which allowed users to pay whatever the want for some great cross-platform games. They said they will open-source the games if they reach 1,000,000 – which they did, so all the games are about to be released as open source.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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KTorrent 4.0 is finally released. This release add some rather interesting features like magnet support and the µTP protocol (bittorrent over UDP).
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GTK/GNOME Desktop
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Beyond updates to Clutter, Mutter, GNOME Shell, and various other GNOME applications, there is one very other important change that happened to the GNOME desktop this week. After being around for years, X Input 2 support was finally merged into the GTK+ library for the 3.0 release.
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I’m sure you had lost hope. Hope to finally see GNOME 2.31.2. It’s true that it’s one day late, which is unusual. I could say it’s because of an udpated toolchain here, or because some tarballs were missing files, were depending on unreleased version of libraries or didn’t build for another reason. Or because I started a bit late to work on this release. Or because Roland Garros has started. Okay, this last one could be a
good reason. But no, the real reason is that someone casted a curse on the release team to make sure we’re late. Want a proof? Did you see the 2.31.1 release? See! I told you! We can’t let this happen! So let’s all rock and show the world that we’re much stronger than those little magic things!
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Remember, there is no wrong choice. Whatever distro suits you best is the right one for you, so if you’re happy with a distro that didn’t get a high score (or isn’t listed here) that’s OK. It’s impossible to objectively say “this distribution is the best one, period.” The goal here is to set out a roadmap for new Linux users or experienced Linux users that may not be fully happy with their current distro.
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New Releases
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Billix debuted in the August 2008 issue of Linux Journal, and it’s gone thru incremental updates since then. I’ve tried to keep it on the same track as Ubuntu updates, more-or-less, though I’ve had varying levels of success with that. However, Billix 0.27 released only a few days after Ubuntu 10.04LTS did. As usual, Billix fits easily on a 256MB USB key or higher, and is available from the usual spot (http://sourceforge.net/projects/billix).
Billix 0.27 consists of:
* Ubuntu 10.04LTS (Lucid Lynx) netinstall
* Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) netinstall
* Ubuntu 8.04LTS (Hardy Heron) netinstall
* Damn Small Linux 4.2.5
* Fedora 12 netinstall
* Centos 5.4 netinstall
* Centos 4.8 netinstall
* Debian Squeeze netinstall
* Debian Lenny netinstall
* Memtest86+ Memory Tester
* Windows Password Cracker
* DBAN disk wiping tool
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Red Hat Family
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Thank you to all who joined us for the first Open Your World forum yesterday, and a special thanks to our speakers. We hope you all learned something new to apply to your lives.
If you weren’t able to join us, or if you’d like to see a session again, you can listen to any of the session recordings. We’ve also added the PDFs of the presentation slides below as attachments to this post. We’ll also be posting a few followup articles related to some of the presentations.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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At around this point, UDS had become too big, and had too many constraints, to plan on the fly (unconference style). We resolved to plan more in advance, and agree on the scheduling constraints ahead of time. We divided the event into tracks, and placed each track in its own room. Most participants could stay in one place throughout the day, taking part in a series of related meetings except where they were specifically needed in an adjacent track. We created the schedule through a combination of manual and automatic methods, so that scheduling constraints could be checked quickly, but a human could decide how to resolve conflicts. There was time to review the schedule before the start of the event, to identify and fix problems. Revisions to the schedule during the event were fewer and less painful. We added keynote presentations, to provide opportunities to communicate important information to everyone, and ease back into meetings after lunch. Everyone was still exhausted and/or ill, and tiredness took its toll on the quality of discussion, particularly toward the end of the week.
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Though Apple has added additional data security features to the iPhone with every iteration of the OS—including encrypting files on-device for the iPhone 3GS—vulnerabilities still exist. These issues are of particular concern to enterprise users, since sensitive corporate data may exist on any given employee’s mobile device. A new vulnerability revealed by security researcher Bernd Marienfeldt, however, shows that all someone needs to get at that data is the latest version of Ubuntu.
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Tablets
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The Android tablets are coming and this time Apple won’t have a big head start. Will value tablets sell?
Dell’s Streak (top right), a 5-inch tablet powered by Android, launched Tuesday in the U.K. and the device will come to the U.S. later in the summer. The Streak has integration with the Android market and a few other goodies that may attract buyers, according to Dell.
Meanwhile, Pandigital has its Novel, another Android-powered device. The Novel (bottom right) is a 7-inch touchscreen device also powered by Android. Joel Evans calls the Novel a poor man’s iPad at $199.
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Dell and HP have recently made very strong declarations of OS independence from Microsoft. Take HP first.
[...]
At the sametime Dell has committed to the Android OS for both its Streak tablet and its lineup of new mobile phones. In sum, both vendors a)cant wait for Microsoft to get its mobile act together and b)the appeals of the customizing advantage of Android or self-owned webOS are too big to ignore.
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One Tablet Per Child/OLPC
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Judging from early mock-ups of the Moby—which will be available this fall, according to Marvell—the device will resemble a somewhat chunky iPad, right down to the single “home” button on the bezel. Marvell hasn’t announced the device’s full specs, but says the tablet will include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM, and GPS radios and will support “multiple software standards including full Adobe Flash, Android, Windows Mobile, and Ubuntu.” (Ubuntu is a variant of Linux.) Like the iPad, the Moby is expected to have a long battery life compared to a laptop, but unlike the iPad, it will have a built-in camera for photography and video conferencing. Marvell also says the device’s virtual keyboard will provide “touch feedback,” although it hasn’t specified how this will work.
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OLPC hopes to have this tablet run on only one watt of power (the current XO consumes 5W). It is unclear what kind of battery life this will allow, but it should be long, if not very long. As for how much it will cost, the target point is a fairly attractive $99.
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Colonyzer was developed using the open source packages: Python, RPy and the Python Imaging Library and its source code and documentation are available on SourceForge under GNU General Public License. Colonyzer is adaptable to suit specific requirements: e.g.
automatic detection of cultures at irregular locations on streaked plates for robotic picking, or decreasing analysis time by disabling components such as lighting correction or colour measures.
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I’m very pleased to annouce that Antelink, the INRIA’spinoff I lead and cofound with Stépane Bagnier, joins FOSSBazaar community.
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Databases
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VoltDB is available immediately from www.voltdb.com. The open-source Community Edition is licensed under the GPL and is available for free. Pricing for annual subscriptions starts at $15,000 per year for a 4-server configuration. Visit this link for detailed VoltDB pricing.
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Open Data
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A federal appeals court has ruled that former patent boutique lawyers now working at Philadelphia-based Woodcock Washburn crossed into frivolous territory in pursuing an inventor’s lawsuit. But whether the lower court’s sanctions against their old firm will stick remains uncertain.
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Another South Florida receiver trusted by judges for years to oversee bankruptcies resigned from hundreds of cases after the U.S. Trustee’s Office determined more than $1 million was missing from accounts under her control, sources told the Daily Business Review.
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Science
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It’s hardly a secret that large segments of the population choose not to accept scientific data because it conflicts with their predefined beliefs: economic, political, religious, or otherwise. But many studies have indicated that these same people aren’t happy with viewing themselves as anti-science, which can create a state of cognitive dissonance. That has left psychologists pondering the methods that these people use to rationalize the conflict.
A study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology takes a look at one of these methods, which the authors term “scientific impotence”—the decision that science can’t actually address the issue at hand properly. It finds evidence that not only supports the scientific impotence model, but suggests that it could be contagious. Once a subject has decided that a given topic is off limits to science, they tend to start applying the same logic to other issues.
The paper is worth reading for the introduction alone, which sets up the problem of science acceptance within the context of persuasive arguments and belief systems. There’s a significant amount of literature that considers how people resist persuasion, and at least seven different strategies have been identified. But the author, Towson University’s Geoffrey Munro, attempts to carve out an exceptional place for scientific information. “Belief-contradicting scientific information may elicit different resistance processes than belief-contradicting information of a nonscientific nature,” he argues. “Source derogation, for example, might be less effective in response to scientific than nonscientific information.”
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The waters of the Gulf of Mexico will see a novel offshore platform later this year, one that will use wave power to desalinate water.
Independent Natural Resources, which makes the Seadog water pump, on Wednesday said that it has received a permit for a wave power generation facility off the coast of Freeport, Texas. The company says it’s the first to receive a “section 10 permit” from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to operate a wave generator in the U.S.
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Environment
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Videos and stills posted by Pas au-Delà appear to show spectacular events going on in the operation to cut off the flow of oily gunge in the gulf — possibly a ‘junk shot,’ where rubber and other materials are forced into the failed blowout preventer in an attempt to plug it.
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Finance
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The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under Mary Shapiro is trying to escape a difficult legacy – over the past two decades, the once proud agency was effectively captured by the very Wall Street firms it was supposed to regulate.
The SEC’s case against Goldman Sachs may mark a return to a more effective role; certainly bringing a case against Goldman took some guts. But it is entirely possible that the Goldman matter is a one off that lacks broader implications. And in this context the SEC’s handling of concerns about “high frequency trading” (HFT) – following the May 6 “flash crash”, when the stock market essentially shut down or rebooted for 20 minutes – is most disconcerting. (See yesterday’s speech by Senator Ted Kaufman on this exact issue; short summary.)
Regulatory capture begins when the regulator starts to see the world only through the eyes of the regulated. Rather than taking on board views that are critical of existing arrangements, tame regulators talk only to proponents of the status quo (or people who want even more deregulation). This seems to be what is happening with regard to HFT.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Yesterday, the Chairman of the European multi-national group of ministers overseeing online privacy policy enforcement, Jacob Kohnstamm of the Article 29 Working Party (WP29), sent letters to the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, urging them to alter their personal data retention policies in keeping with new EU standards. Kohnstamm wants their search engines to destroy personal data after six months’ retention rather than nine, as is Google’s current policy; and he simultaneously urged European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding for help getting that message across.
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Copyrights
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I have run some numbers on how the size of the (Australian) Copyright Act has changed over the past century or so. With one exception, these numbers were generated automatically from electronic versions of the legislation. Before counting the words I stripped out the table of contents and everything from “The Schedule” on. This is because a bigger Act automatically means a larger table of contents and an older Act means more notes about when sections came into force, were repealed etc. The one exception is the Copyright Act of 1905, a word count for which was estimated by manually counting words on 3 pages, generating an average per page and multiplying by the number of pages. There are a couple of versions of the Act from between 1905 and the 1970s which are not plotted (as I don’t have access to a full copy of them) but everything I could find from 1970 on is there.
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Those considering President Obama’s nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court should remember that she did an excellent job on the brief in Cartoon Networks v. CSC Holdings, where she took positions directly contrary to those being taken by the Jenner & Block law firm, whose pro-MPAA pro-RIAA partners occupy very high positions in the Obama administration’s Department of Justice.
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Producers of Oscar-winning film “The Hurt Locker” have made good on a promise to file copyright lawsuits against people who have illegally downloaded the movie via file-sharing networks.
NASA Connect – BHFSTE – Healthy Bones (11/20/2003)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
05.28.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Introductions
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Linux is growing in popularity but unless you’re up to speed with its jargon the open source operating system could make no sense. We offer a short, plain-English guide to some of the key concepts used by Linux users.
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Note: Before you read this Article I want to tell you that I am a big Linux fan and Linux being an open source Operating System is doing a Great Job.
Most of the people I know think Linux is very difficult for a layman to understand. They fear that after installing Linux they will not be able to do the normal tasks they do with Windows and thus they prefer paying money to Microsoft instead of even trying Linux.
There are lot of reasons behind this. Few reasons that I could figure out are:
1. Lack of Advertising about Linux compared to Windows. I understand that Linux is an open source product while Windows is Commercial but still I feel that there is lot of scope for advertising.
2. Lack of Awareness among the Retailers of Computers who advise the buyers to go for Windows instead of Linux. Some times its not just lack of awareness but also to gain more commission on the part of the retailer.
[...]
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One of my favorite geek shirts is my ZaReason ‘Friends help friends use Linux’ shirt, which I was in the mood to wear last night after I helped my friend move to Linux. My non-technical friend was suffering from a sickly Windows Vista PC. She’d caught herself a nasty virus (she blames an old Red Hot Chili Peppers video, but we’ll never know for sure). Other people had suggested that my budget-conscious friend move to Linux.
Tip #1: Don’t tell your non-technical friends to move to Linux. Please, just don’t do this. If you do this, you set them up to hate it. Your friend might be like my friend, who just wants her email, music, and internet to work. My friend doesn’t want to install, configure, or troubleshoot. Yes, she’s certainly smart and capable enough, but she’s just not interested. She’s got two teenagers and some chickens to raise and a business to run, and she’d rather live without her computer than spend hours tweaking it. I told my friend I’d be right over to see whether I could help, and I brought along my laptop, a couple of Linux DVDs, and my external hard drive to rescue her music and photos. Friends help friends move.
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Desktop
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Recently, I’ve come across a few interesting, yet misleading articles debating the pros and cons, mostly pros, of using this or that Linux distribution as the ultimate solution to Windows security problems, including frequent malware infections and reinfections and other related issues. While the overall conclusion might be correct, the specific analogies used to prove the point and bring you to said conclusion are most erroneous.
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So, it seems as if the only applications people miss when using Linux are games and Adobe CS. This will hopefully be less of a problem in the future with Steam coming to Linux. As for the Adobe Suite, I do not see Adobe taking an interest in Linux any time soon, but PlayOnLinux supports some of the Adobe applications. Otherwise, people are forced to look for alternatives to CS. Quite often, people choose Adobe Creative Suite for the layout of the applications, not for their functionality. GimpShop can replace Photoshop, but anything else would require a bit of a learning curve.
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Ballnux
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In conclusion, OpenSUSE is a very nice looking OS, and it has one of the easier installers out there on the market. But if I see it again in any way, shape, or form, at any point in my life, it would be too soon. I’m going to be extremely nice and give OpenSUSE a one and a half out of ten, and would recommend to everyone to stay as far away from it as you can. I didn’t bother looking at documentation, which I admit, might have been a good idea, but if I could break it as easily as I did, no amount of documentation would ever encourage me to use it ever again.
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Applications
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DVD authoring can be a deceptively tricky business. Though it can take some time to convert source video to the proper MPEG format, the technical requirements for the various regions are standardized, so it is at least possible to configure the conversion tools and do it right, once and for all. What cannot be automated is building the disc structure that distinguishes a user-friendly disc with chapters, eye-pleasing menus, and a file hierarchy that makes sense from a down-and-dirty, technically-it-plays-but-it-looks-awful amateur job.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals
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Perhaps the best part of using Linux is the massive amount of free software you have access to. The Ubuntu repositories, for example, gives you access to tens of thousands of programs for free-and that’s just by default. Yet for some this isn’t enough.
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Games
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A reader pointed out that the open source motorsport sim Speed Dreams has reached version 1.4.0:
* Visually reworked menus
* 3 new car sets
* Updated TRB1 car set
* 3 new tracks and visually improved existing ones
* AI opponents
* Experimental Simu V3 physics engine
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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More than six months after the release of KOffice 2.1, the KOffice developers have announced the release of version 2.2 of their open source office suite. KOffice is composed of the KWord word processor, KSpread spreadsheet, KPresenter presentation manager, KPlato project management, Karbon vector graphics editor and Krita, a raster graphics editor.
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Red Hat Family
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Lazard Capital initiates coverage on Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) with a Buy rating. PT $35.
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CentOS
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Network monitoring vendor GroundWork announced its new GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Quickstart Virtual Appliance based on CentOS and including commercial support from OpenLogic. The move marks the first time that OpenLogic has done an appliance support contract for CentOS, which could potentially lead to further growth in the CentOS installed base.
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Fedora
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Very few followed my riddle and to my knowledge nobody guessed the answer, but the time has come for the first part of the trilogy, today the day for the Fedora 13 Alpha release.
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BLAG is one of the few Linux distributions that has been labelled “Free GNU/Linux distribution” by the Free Software Foundation (here is a link to the relevant page on the FSF website: http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html). It is based on Fedora, but all packages that contain non-free software are replaced. It also features a free-kernel (kernel-libre). The distribution is made available on one CD. BLAG comes with a variaty of applications including multimedia, graphics, desktop internet applications and more
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One of the important things to remember with Fedora Linux is that it is a platform on which solutions can be built. One such solution is the Sugar On A Stick Fedora Linux spin which adds the Sugar learning environment originally built for the One Laptop Per Child effort to Fedora and packages it up so it’ll run on a USB stick.
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Debian Family
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Debian is one of the most successful free software projects that many new users have never heard of. Debian is an entirely community developed Linux distribution with no single commercial backer. While many companies contribute to Debian in one way or another, it’s a purely independent project, driven entirely by volunteers. Debian has a large developer community and is the basis for many other projects, including Ubuntu.
Debian has a very developer-centric community. It’s driven by its Social Contract to remain free, give back to the larger community, be open with its problems, and be guided by the needs of its users and the free software community. There’s an intense focus on technical excellence and shipping free software. Debian does allow some non-free repositories, but they’re not “officially” part of Debian.
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That is a big improvment over the minutes we spend waiting/please waiting on XP on our old hardware.
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Ubuntu
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Ubuntu is probably the best known desktop GNU/Linux distribution at street level, picking up new users by word of mouth and astute viral marketing. So much so that for many users new to Linux, Ubuntu has become synonymous with Linux. Linux is Ubuntu; and Ubuntu is Linux. But Linux and free software come in many different flavours, and the adventurous user goes in search of wider options, other distributions and new desktops.
Ubuntu is easy to install, easy to update, and easy to manage, which makes it attractive to first time users and long term Linux enthusiasts alike. It has a regular six-monthly upgrade cycle, which makes it easy to keep up with the latest and greatest with the minimum of fuss, but also has drawbacks in the form of occasional reliability issues.
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No Windows viruses. Free. Any questions?
Of course. Start with this one: How can an operating system with those virtues, the open-source Linux, remain confined to a tiny minority of desktop and laptop computers at home?
Linux may run TiVo video recorders and live inside Android phones, in addition to running much of the Internet’s servers, but it still lags on home PCs.
Will that change anytime soon? A new version of a consumer-oriented edition of Linux, Ubuntu (http://ubuntu.com), offers hope for Linux optimists but leaves room for doubters, too.
Ubuntu 10.04, nicknamed “Lucid Lynx,” comes from London-based Canonical, but like other open-source releases it benefits from other programmers who have improved its source code.
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The Global Menu for Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 has just been uploaded to a PPA (it’s still building, but should be ready in a few minutes). The new “global menu” is called “Application Menu” and it can be installed in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx already (both in GNOME and KDE).
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Proprietary
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Ubuntu One offers a couple of subscription options. Choose from the free subscription plan and receive 2 GB of storage or pay a monthly fee for more storage and additional features.
Subscribers can upgrade, downgrade, change billing information or cancel a subscription at any time. Choose the Account tab on the Ubuntu One website to view details or make any of these changes to your account.
Ubuntu One uses Ubuntu SSO (single sign-on) for user accounts. If you already have an Ubuntu SSO account or even a Launchpad account, you can use the same username and password.
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Carbon Mountain has recently released a new version of its open source KaOS Hypervisor – Version 0.6.0.0. Based on the popular Linux kernel and utilizing KVM technology, KaOS is built from the ground up to contain many innovative features that make it ideal for today’s highly complex and agile virtualized environments.
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Nokia
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Moblin 2 had its own custom Web browser that brought together a unique Clutter-based user interface and Mozilla’s Gecko HTML rendering engine. It was a very compelling idea because it opened the door to a browsing experience with rich visual affects and more fluid platform integration. Although the concept is intriguing in theory, it was very difficult for Intel to execute on. The custom browser was incomplete and somewhat dysfunctional when we reviewed Moblin last year. Intel has ditched the custom browser and chose to adopt Google Chrome for MeeGo.
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Nokia and Opera Software have taken sides in the Adobe-Apple battle over Flash multimedia support: They are in the Flash camp.
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Android
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Acer announced an Android 2.1 smartphone called the Stream, offering a 1GHz Snapdragon, a 3.7-inch AMOLED WVGA display, and a five-megapixel camera. At the device’s Chinese launch, the company also showed off a LumiRead e-reader with a 6-inch grayscale display, WiFi, 3G, and an ISBN scanner, and provided a brief glimpse of a seven-inch Android tablet.
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I worked like a madman right through I/O 2010 and went straight from there to an internal meeting and from there to my Mom’s 80th-birthday bash, so there hasn’t been much time for reflection. I can’t find a theme to organize my notes by, so what you get is a dozen poorly-sequenced take-aways interspersed with seven faces.
The faces are here because I did a bunch of short interviews with strangers and got the idea of pointing my 40mm pancake prime at people straight-on and close-up, and found the results compelling enough to share. I don’t know all the names so I won’t mention any.
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Motorola Milestone
The Milestone, otherwise known as the Droid in other markets, is a neat package, coming in at just 13.7mm thick. Even more impressively the Milestone has a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard as part of the package.
The 3.7-inch touchscreen is every bit as good as the HTC Hero’s screen, the most common of the Android phones.
The Milestone runs Android 2.0 and supports Quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G support. The Milestone also supports multi-touch support, which the Droid in the US didn’t.
The 5MP camera, WiFi and A-GPS is fairly standard, as is the MicroSD slot and 256MB of RAM.
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Sub-notebooks
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One Laptop Per Child won’t use Microsoft’s Windows OS on its upcoming XO-3 tablet, which will run Linux, OLPC’s CTO said Thursday.
OLPC’s chairman Nicholas Negroponte last year said that the organization was “urging” Microsoft to make a full version of Windows available for the earlier XO-2, which was also based on the Arm processor. The XO-2 was later canceled.
The XO-3 will also use an Arm processor, but OLPC is ruling out loading multiple versions of Windows on the tablet, said Ed McNierney, OLPC’s CTO, by e-mail Thursday.
“We have no evidence that Microsoft will make full-featured Windows 7 available on Arm, and that’s their decision,” McNierney said.
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Tablets
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The onslaught of ARMed devices will continue indefinitely. Check out the smartphone/tablet Dell has announced. We still do not know the price of it but all they have to do to get some action is be in the neighborhood of the iPad which has fewer features: no Flash and no phone.
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Mozilla
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It was with delight that I read these words on Thursday: “The proposed IndexedDB standard, which provides a local database store for Web applications, will be supported by Firefox 4.”
The statement appears on Mozilla’s new Firefox 4 for developers site, boding well for those of us who use the Web a lot: the IndexedDB interface gives Web applications a way to work even without a network connection.
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I finally tried my ISP’s DNS servers and that seemed to take hold, though I don’t know why. It shouldn’t make a difference but I’ve been surfing from my Lucid Lynx VM for two days now without a hitch. That leads me to my second problem.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Software Foundation has said it has approached Apple because a GPL2 licensed application, a port of GNU Go, is available from Apple’s App Store. The FSF say that distribution through the App Store is not in compliance with the GPL’s conditions because they clash with Apple’s terms and conditions. The developers of the application, are also not in compliance with the GPL as they do not currently distribute the source for the application. Brett Smith, writing on the FSF blog, is at pains to say that the FSF have not sued Apple or made any legal demand and says the only reason they are announcing this is because Apple has removed applications from the store before without explanation and that they want to prevent wild speculation.
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Standards/Consortia
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This is important news. The crucial paragraph:
“The National Assembly Research Service (NARS), a parliamentary unit that provides policy research and analysis for legislators, now claims that government organizations should be required to use software products that support open standards. The idea is to eventually allow government documents to be created, read and edited by a wider variety of office applications run on any type of computer operating system, NARS said.”
But let’s continue:
[...]
Supposedly, according to an Hancom spokesperson, ““ODF is supported on Hancom Office 2010, which was released last year.” But I do wonder what “supported” means here; as well, as the article points out,
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Finance
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The failure of investors to treat the euro area as a unified market could set a dangerous precedent for the bloc’s future, according to the chief of the giant European cross-border lender UniCredit.
“If I say I am not funding a company because it’s a Spanish company or a Greek company, we have a problem,” Alessandro Profumo, the chief executive, said during a recent interview in Paris. “This is a way of thinking on the topic that could create serious problems.”
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Last week Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany banned naked credit-default swaps on the bonds of European governments and naked short sales of the stock of the country’s 10 most important financial institutions.
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Top U.S. and German officials on Thursday acknowledged differences over key financial regulation issues, and they said a “broad agreement” on basic concepts may not produce uniform rules in all the world’s capital markets.
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The estate of Lehman Brothers Holdings sued J.P. Morgan Chase, alleging that the firm helped drive Lehman into bankruptcy by forcing it to give up billions of dollars in cash reserves that it otherwise could have used to stay afloat.
The suit, filed Wednesday, says J.P. Morgan forced the now-failed bank to put up collateral in the days before it collapsed that sapped Lehman of cash that, at the least, would have enabled it to wind down operations in an orderly process.
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Turmoil in the stock market and the European debt crisis are making life easier for American homebuyers and families looking to refinance: Mortgage rates are inching closer to a record low.
The window of opportunity may close soon. Home loan rates will rise if investors grow more confident and shift money out of the safety of government bonds, which influence mortgage rates.
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The House of Representatives approved pared-down legislation that would extend long-term employment benefits and revive several popular business tax breaks.
Friday’s vote came after Democrats patched divisions within their ranks over the bill’s impact on the nation’s budget deficit. The wide-ranging bill comes with a 10-year, $115 billion price tag, about half the cost of a more ambitious package unveiled just days ago.
The legislation represented a modest but hard-fought accomplishment for Democratic leaders, who struggled for several days to build consensus on the measure, amid demands from fiscally conservative Democrats for greater financial restraint.
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Senate Republicans sent a letter Thursday to the top Democratic Wall Street reform negotiators, Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, laying out the key principles they believe will lead to a successful merger of the House and Senate bills.
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The world is suffering from the worst downturn since the Great Depression. The crisis has left tens of millions unemployed in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. The huge baby boomer generation in the United States, now on the edge of retirement, has seen much of its wealth destroyed with the collapse of the housing bubble.
It would be difficult to imagine a worse economic disaster. Prior periods of bad performance, like the inflation ridden seventies, look like mild flurries compared to the blizzard of bad economic news in which we are now enmeshed.
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The real shocker is a thing known among Senate insiders as “716.” This section of an amendment would force America’s banking giants to either forgo their access to the public teat they receive through the Federal Reserve’s discount window, or give up the insanely risky, casino-style bets they’ve been making on derivatives. That means no more pawning off predatory interest-rate swaps on suckers in Greece, no more gathering balls of subprime shit into incomprehensible debt deals, no more getting idiot bookies like AIG to wrap the crappy mortgages in phony insurance. In short, 716 would take a chain saw to one of Wall Street’s most lucrative profit centers: Five of America’s biggest banks (Goldman, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup) raked in some $30 billion in over-the-counter derivatives last year. By some estimates, more than half of JP Morgan’s trading revenue between 2006 and 2008 came from such derivatives. If 716 goes through, it would be a veritable Hiroshima to the era of greed.
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“We have found no evidence that these events were triggered by ‘fat finger’ errors, computer hacking, or terrorist activity, although we cannot completely rule out these possibilities,” a recent Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) report on the so-called May 6 “Flash Crash” that wiped out a cool trillion in a mere half-hour weakly admitted. “Much work is needed to determine all of the causes of the market disruption.”
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After SEC civil charges were lodged against the firm on April 16, Goldman executives mounted a vigorous public defense. Two weeks later, when reports surfaced of Main Justice’s emerging criminal probe directed at both the company and an individual executive, Goldman’s tone suddenly changed from recalcitrance to conciliation. No surprise–settlement of the civil case is now in negotiation. The mere threat of corporate criminal indictment appears to have changed Goldman’s, and the government’s, game plan entirely.
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Forget the settlement, I want to know this: Who was the dipshit lawyer that advised Goldman Sachs to fight this tooth and nail? Was it some executive who simply charged ahead, Dick Fuld style? I’d like to know who totally failed to anticipate the political climate, the public reaction, the prosecutors attitude, and myriad factors that has turned this into a giant disaster. Even if GS were to prevail in court, they have already lost. The reputational damage is already measured in $ billions, and will last years if not decades.
NASA CONNECT: Atmospheric Detectives (11/19/2003)
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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2: Carry a Web-enabled smart phone and carry a big (16GB USB) stick
Pay for that data plan. Get reasonably proficient with a favorite mobile browser. Store bookmarks. Most phones support flash cards where additional remediation software can be stored. Also, consider carrying a hefty USB drive containing favorite anti-malware utilities, if not a fully bootable OS with security tools on it, such as Slax.
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Free operating system: Let’s start with the operating system (OS). A Microsoft OS is chosen by a majority of users as no retailer bothers to inform buyers about the free to load open source OSes like Red Hat, OpenSolaris or the most popular one, Ubuntu. A word of caution: If you are a newbie at open source, it might be advisable to get a technical expert to upload the OS.
Cost Saving: An entry-level Microsoft OS would cost you between Rs 4,000 and Rs 14,000.
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Server
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1. Assemble the Pieces
CentOS is the free version of the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. It is a community-supported, mainly free, software operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It exists to provide a free, enterprise-class computing platform, and it strives to maintain 100 percent binary compatibility. CentOS stands for Community ENTerprise Operating System.
We knew that CentOS had clustering capabilities, so we installed it across all five of our servers. Once we patched them and hardened the servers, we used the native clustering functionality to run all five servers as one environment. The really nice thing here is that the enterprise investment in the RHCE certification for us was not wasted. Our server administrators already had the skills to carry out the architecture design, so right there we were able to avoid contractor or training expenses.
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Audiocasts
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In this episode: We discuses the three big Linux-related announcements from Google. We present our amazing discoveries from the last fortnight and ask whether anyone is excited by the HP Slate.
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Graphics Stack
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Those owners of ATI Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series (R600/700) graphics cards not only have a reason to celebrate today over the voltage adjustment support to improve their GPU power management, but there’s another reason too. The Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver known as “R600g” has been merged to Mesa’s mainline “master” code-base.
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Applications
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This is simple realtime 3DS file previewer based on the lib3ds library by J.E. Hoffmann. It won’t display any 3DS model, but it can properly display 3DS scenes. lib3ds was developed as part of the support libraries for FAMP, the Free Animation and Modeling Project.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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One of the additions that I’m particularly enthusiastic about is support for tiled window management in KDE’s KWin window manager. This feature allows users to snap windows together in non-overlapping arrangements and resize them together, much like the behavior of Ion and other tiled desktop environments. The feature was implemented as a Summer of Code project last year and was finally merged last month. I’ve long been a fan of tiled window management, so I’ve been looking forward to seeing this feature land ever since work on it was started.
KDE 4.5 is getting a new panel notification area that is designed to be more consistent and functional. This feature is based on a D-Bus protocol that the KDE development community has submitted to the FreeDesktop.org organization with the aim of making it a cross-desktop standard. Although the upstream GNOME community has rejected the protocol, it has been adopted by Canonical and is used to power the new application indicator feature that is included in Ubuntu 10.04.
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It must be about time for an update, tough to blog when summer is here. 5.3 is in the works and is at a RC2 status. Some of the changes include bug fixes of course, btrfs support, mono removed from grub and installer fixes. Keep in mind that btrfs is very young in development and should not be used in a stable environment. I did try it out in a virtual box setting and it seemed to work good for the little bit of time I worked with it. Mitch follows the progress of it and has been a good source for information. It sounds like in kernel 2.6.36 things will even be better for btrfs. I’ll have to try and keep an eye on it myself, seems promising.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The fact that I really like about PCLinuxOS is its small community with great connection between one another. I can always reach to its developers easily. I know who is working on the distro that you are using. This is a great advantages for me to learn about Linux and grow to love it. I learned about packaging even though I seldom practice it.
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Ubuntu
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Pete found a local place, B-Sharp Music.Pete started talking to the owner Stan, who as it turned out is an advocate of Open Source. After they talked and he took a look at Ubuntu, he switched his computers over to Ubuntu. Karmic at the time, but now Lucid. Stan also asked for some CD’s and fliers so that when people asked what he was running on the computers in the music store he could tell them and help them switch to Ubuntu.
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Pandora is also designed for the emulation of older computer systems and video game consoles. It has working emulators for Dreamcast, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Amiga, SNES, Atari Jaguar and Sega Mega Drive software.
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Nokia
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MeeGo, in its first release, is pretty damn good, and this coming from a KDE loving maniac! It used to be Maemo, all Gtk in the backend, but now it is MeeGo with Qt (v4.6) as its backend now with a really nice MeeGo API as well. With MeeGo using Qt, KDE apps and Qt apps integrate nicely. What I don’t get is this, why in the hell are all of the Apps Gtk-based then? Chromium, OK I can understand, it is an amazing browser, and my browser of choice right now. Banshee? I think Amarok would have been a better app for media. Evolution? Oh hell no! I would rather they ship Mutt. You want me to say KMail or Kontact don’t you? Well I won’t, just yet. If I used POP3 for email, then yes, KMail/Kontact for the win! But seeing as I am lazy and use GMail’s IMAP settings, KMail needs help here. Thunderbird seems like a good choice, but for what I am guessing to be as a netbook operating system for those who aren’t hardcore mostly, I would think KMail/Kontact would be perfect. You can’t beat Kontact’s tight integration, you can’t, so don’t even try to argue that. Empathy is nice and light, so I understand it, even though I do not like it. I would have loved to have seen Kopete here, especially with its Skype plugin.
Overall though, I am still impressed with MeeGo, though I don’t think it is my replacement for the KDE Plasma Netbook Workspace. I think it is a perfectly fine solution for many though, and I am excited to see the ongoing work that is going into it. I know a few of the developers and I know they will be doing an amazing job on it in the future, especially as it starts getting on the more mobile devices out there. It uses Yum/RPM, which took me a few minutes to get used to again, but package management was as fast as I am used to when using APT or some other Debian package manager.
Good job MeeGo devs, and keep up the good work! I am fairly certain my review here sucked, so if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask them in the comments section, or email me at nixternal AT gmail DOT com, or even hit me up on IRC (freenode) as nixternal.
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Android
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Departure of Palm’s Matias Duarte may signal a vote of no confidence in HP’s ability to compete on mobile
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Android 2.2 (codename: Froyo) is a minor SDK release, but it still packs some punch, providing both developers and users with some much-anticipated features. After attending the Google I/O conference and witnessing the Froyo announcement, here are the top ten features (in no particular order) that we think developers cannot wait to get their hands on.
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OLPC
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The One Laptop Per Child foundation’s aim to create the world’s most innovative tablet computer for the developing world just took a giant leap toward reality. But as is often the case, reality may not be quite as exciting as imagination.
On Thursday the foundation announced a partnership with chip maker Marvell to collaborate on a sleek and cheap touch-screen tablet for developing-world school children, a device it now plans to launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2011 for less than $100. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) says that’s close to two years ahead of its scheduled release for the so-called XO-3, the long-awaited upgrade to the non-profit’s XO, the so-called “hundred-dollar laptop” launched in 2007.
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Living in Sweden, conferences usually include travelling abroad. This is all fun, but it also means spending time away from family and work. This in turn means catching up on work, i.e. spending even less time with the family. Not exactly what I want to do all my life.
Recently this has changed. First of all, the free community conference FSCONS (held in Gothenburn Sweden), has gained more and more technical content (without losing the free community angle!). This means that it is more and more attractive to my flavour of geeks. This year, in November, they are even pursuing an embedded track and I definitively plan on both attending and speaking!
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Check out this video below. Its basically an animation about an MIT social experiment, where sociologist found a bizarre pattern when it came to work and incentives. When the task at hand was a mundane and a repetitive task, money was found as perfect incentive. However, when the task required “rudimentary cognitive” skills, money, it turns out, wasn’t the best incentive. This makes perfect sense when we look at the amazing open source projects out there. From Linux to Wikipedia to Open Street Map, all these project tap into this basic human behavior.
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Many open source businesses have a multi-tiered product model, offering an open source version for free and a closed source version with extra features that users have to pay for. TimeTrex, a Canadian company that offers a web-based payroll and time management application, offers free Standard and commercial Business and Professional editions of its TimeTrex software, but all of them are open source. “Having a freely available edition allows potential customers to test out the software without any restrictions before deciding if they require support or features available in our other products,” says developer Jon Hutchison.
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Free as in Speech
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Cloud computing is supposed to save you money and make things easier for your business/organization. If a self-proclaimed cloud computing provider tries to sell you some expensive and fancy new technology that requires a lot of training on your employees, then be alerted that this may just be a hoax. Try partially replacing MS Word and Frontpage with wiki before buying any cloud solutions. Wiki is a minuscule, and yet most used form of cloud computing. It takes more cultural changes than monetary investment to introduce cloud computing into your organization/business. You can forget about cloud computing if your employees cannot get accustomed to this new culture of transparency, participation, and democracy.
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But should that be the default for the entire web? Is complete openness always the best way? Are there valid reasons for completely closing comments (as a policy, not for specific posts) on a news site like NPR? What about the heavy policing implied in this comment? At the very least, shouldn’t it be more transparent–visible comment deletions, and reasons given to banned users?
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Although the term gets used quite a lot in technology circles, there is often some confusion about exactly what it means, particularly when it comes to questions of whether or not software that is “open source” is necessarily “free.” In an oft-repeated saying, open source is free as in “free speech” not free as in “free beer.” In other words, it is meant to be open and accessible, but that doesn’t necessarily come without a price-tag.
In other words, open source is a practice that opens up the source (in the case of technology, this is typically the source code) so that others beyond the original creators can develop, expand, and modify the code. Unlike proprietary systems in which you are forbidden to “open the hood” to tinker with the moving parts, open source allows anyone to download the code and then alter it without restriction or fear of punishment.
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Databases
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According to its motto, the underlying premise behind the open source CouchDB NoSQL database is about helping developers “relax” — chiefly by providing them with a simple, powerful database alternative.
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Government
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A final version of the decision is not found in the register. In Europe you can file a request for public document access under the regulation EC/1049/2001 and usually get what you ask for. IDABC is now superceded by a new EU programme for interoperability, ISA. Apparently the Commission decision was later updated when the 1.1 version of the European Union Public License was approved. The EUPL is a wise choice for software from the public sector and enterprises as it is the legally best reviewed license for European market jurisdictions, available in all EU languages, it does not contain a political agenda and is compatible to most common licenses such as the GPL.
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Open Hardware
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4. Willow Garage is community first, personal gain second. The whole company is focused on how they can work with the global community to advance the field of robotics as a whole. This is largely expressed in the open source licensing of everything they do, and their insistence that everyone who uses the PR2 follow the same open sharing. Even more than that, it’s apparent in their attitudes. Keenan Wyrobek, Co-Director of Personal Robotics, freely admitted that other groups are working on PR2 like robots, and may soon make them cheaper and perhaps even better. He liked this idea. He wants other groups to innovate, to expand, and to improve the field of robotics. It’s cooperation first, competition later.
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Programming
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According to a poll conducted by analyst firm Redmonk and sponsored by dynamic language vendor ActiveState, over half of the developers surveyed have deployment plans for cloud applications within the next 12 months. Those cloud deployments are likely to be a hybrid of both public and private cloud platforms, according to 37 percent of respondents.
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Standards/Consortia
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In August 2009, Google acquired codec developer On2 Technologies for a rumoured $106 million. The flagship On2 codec was VP8 and it was also rumoured at the time that Google may open source this technology in the future, although a number of challenges lay ahead.
Late last week this rumour became reality and WebM was born. Alongside Theora and Dirac, WebM now enters the open source HTML 5 ready codec battle. Almost immediately all major web browsers, except one, but including Internet Explorer announced support for the codec. Using the might and muscle of Google WebM must have a solid chance of taking on the dominance of H.264 in the web video delivery battle. This really will be a solid kick in the pants for Theora, which now seems destined to remain a reasonably niche product, even with direct HTML 5 support from Firefox.
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The VideoLAN Project developers have announced the availability of a release candidate for version 1.1, the next major release, of their popular VLC Media Player. According to the developers, the latest 1.1 branch of VLC is much faster and more stable, thanks in part to a substantial amount of “important code clean-up” and rewrites. VLC is a free open source cross-platform multimedia player for various audio and video formats.
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Mozilla is working to incorporate Google’s newly released VP8 video technology as part of the specification for Web video.
“That’s our hope,” said Mozilla Chief Executive John Lilly when asked if VP8 could be built into the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specification for Web-based video. “We’d love for VP8 to be specified in the HTML5 standard. Once it’s in the spec, it can really get better traction from other players.”
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Google last week announced the high-definition WebM video file format to deliver high-quality Web video to multiple devices including TV sets and handhelds. WebM files will include video streams compressed with the open-source VP8 video codec, which was acquired by Google when it bought On2 Technologies in February.
“Just like we did with other codecs like MPEG2, H.264 & VC1, if VP8 establishes itself in the Smart TV space, we will add it to our [hardware] decoders,” said Wilfred Martis, general manager for retail consumer electronics at Intel’s Digital Home Group.
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UK
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The BCS is facing a call for an Extraordinary General Meeting from 50 BCS members. Supporters of the EGM motion, led by former BCS trustee Len Keighley, have listed 20 reasons for suppporting the EGM. In the debate below, the BCS and Len Keighley put forward their arguments for and against the EGM.
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The UK’s Times and Sunday Times are putting up search walls in addition to pay walls.
The papers, which plan to start charging users for access to their newly redesigned Web sites in late June, will prevent Google and other search engines from linking to their stories.
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Science
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From the beginning, exoplanets have defied our expectations for what a solar system would look like.
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Security/Aggression
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The 15,000 people who voluntarily paid £30 for a card since the 2009 roll out in Manchester will not get a refund.
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A bipartisan pair of Senate leaders have introduced a first-of-its-kind bill aimed at stopping terrorist suspects such as the would-be Times Square bomber from hiding their identities by using prepaid cellphones to plot their attacks.
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Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) has released a basic fuzzing framework to help identify and eliminate security vulnerabilities from software products.
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In previous blogs, Symantec has highlighted threats that steal user data. We recently analyzed a new sample submitted to Symantec and came across a server hosting the credentials of 44 million stolen gaming accounts. What was interesting about this threat wasn’t just the sheer number of stolen accounts, but that the accounts were being validated by a Trojan distributed to compromised computers. Symantec detects this threat as Trojan.Loginck.
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Environment
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As BP continued its effort to gain control of its untamed deep-sea well, President Obama announced more restrictions on offshore oil drilling Thursday and insisted his administration is firmly in charge of the response to the spill, now believed to be the largest in U.S. history.
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Finance
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The monetary advantage of the current strategy is rapidly exhausted after a lifetime of approximately four seconds–an eternity for a machine, but barely enough time for a human to begin to comprehend what happened. The algorithm then switches to another trading strategy of higher ordinal rank, and uses this for a few seconds on one or more electronic exchanges, and so on, while opponent algorithms attempt the same maneuvers, risking billions of dollars in the process.
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Genetics
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In the past decade, an increasing number of patents on plants and animals have been granted, especially in industrialised countries. The negative impacts of these patents on farmers, on breeders and on innovation have became more and more evident during the last years, as has the patents’ contribution to market concentration. There is a growing rejection of these patents by NGOs, farmers’ organizations, breeders and even governments. The conference “Patents on Seeds – The turning point?” shows current trends, highlights the negative impacts of the current patent system. Conference participants will discuss what the necessary changes are and what the possibilities are to effect such changes.
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Fruit fly larvae made this mistake while participating in a study recently published in Frontiers in Neuroscience Behavior. By adding a light-sensitive protein to certain smell receptors in the larvae, German scientists allowed the genetically engineered bugs to essentially smell light.
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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ACTA is being negotiated by a handful of countries behind closed doors and is on track to be finished by the end of this year. Despite its potentially far-reaching impact for consumers and the future of the open Internet, the U.S. Trade Representative has claimed that it can shut out Congressional oversight by treating ACTA as a “sole executive agreement” under the President’s executive power, rather than a treaty.
We can’t sit back and let this fake “anti-counterfeiting” agreement become law! If your congressional representative is on one of the committees below that has oversight over the U.S. Trade Representative, tell your lawmaker not to be fooled by this chicanery and demand that ACTA be limited to addressing international counterfeiting.
NASA Connect – VE – Systems (10/16/2003)
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop (GNU/Linux Versus Windows)
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With the latest releases of both windows and Linux there is really not much to separate them in terms of ease of use and eye kandy. They both look really pretty at first glance and even have similar features. I would go so far as to say that both Linux and windows have “borrowed” ideas from each other. Personally I am quite happy with that as it makes it easier for people to migrate from windows to Linux ;P
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Since some people have learned to look at the bright or should I say funny side of life, they have decided to create something out of those error messages. They have Photoshopped or edited some Windows error messages and made them look so realistic to try to tickle our funny bone.
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Server
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1. Debian
Surely a seasoned pro with more than a decade of development. The distribution is entirely based volunteers bound by Debian social contract. There are leaders elected annually from and by members of the Debian project.
Those using the up-to-date and they age rapidly, especially since the new stable releases are only published. The users who prefer the latest packages and technologies are forced to use the potentially buggy Debian testing and unstable branches.
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Ballnux
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Food for thought when you’re using that HTC EVO 4G front-facing camera: it records everything backwards. I first noticed someone mention that the camera recorded “backwards” but I thought they were just experiencing an error because of the Qik app. Then today I discovered that the “problem” is indeed the 1.3 megapixel camera at the front of the phone. Take a look at this test video I shot using the EVO.
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Kernel Space
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It’s been a hectic few months narrowing down the content for this year’s LinuxCon. Craig Ross and I have been working on this schedule for what seems like years, but we are very proud to announce it today. You can find it here.
I think the program has an amazing mix of business, operations and of course developer content that reflects the growing ecosystem that is Linux. I’m especially proud of the technical content that features many of the best minds behind the kernel and other upstream Linux projects. But LinuxCon is much more than just technical kernel topics: it also has content touching mobile computing, cloud and legal and business issues facing enterprise IT managers today. Linux is now becoming dominant in mobile and cloud computing so it’s no surprise LinuxCon’s content matches those themes.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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The world of open source software has lots of options for editing and manipulating audio and video media files. However, when you want to just sit back and watch, Gxine will get the job done, usually with minimal fuss. Don’t look to the app for a built-in help file, though — if you need to work out a problem with this community-supported project, a little online leg work will be in order.
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Since there are still several excellent free and open source backup software that I failed to mention the last time, I decided to once again gather another list of some of the best backup software that are available for Linux.
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If you’re tired of the same old “match three” games, we have a fun alternative for you. In Zaz, you control a vehicle or a grabber on a predefined path, and by dragging and dropping you arrange different colored balls in triplets to make them explode and disappear. The game can be played in sequential mode, where the player proceeds through one level after another, or survival mode, where the battle is fought on a single level with more and more different balls appearing over time and the game speeding up until the player can no longer handle the pressure.
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I only have a few minutes this evening, so rather than share something of my own creation, I shall borrow the words of BoneKracker, who had this to say when discussing a preference for the command line over a file manager.
(File managers) just get in the way and slow you down. It’s like having somebody holding a map in front of your face when you’re trying to drive.
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A few days ago we blogged about a simple wallpaper slideshow generator called, somewhat un-surprisingly, ‘wallpaper slideshow’.
Well… forget that application as the following wallpaper slideshow maker is easily more capable, configurable and darn-right cool.
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Video editing is the process of editing motion video footage. In the new age of personal video, video editing is becoming a central function of the desktop, with the popularity of video editing software ever increasing.
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This is something I always asked myself. How is Google Chrome different from Chromium. Apart from the logo, there is hardly any difference visually between the two. So I decided to dig further. Here are some of the interesting facts you should know.
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PhotoRec is a recovery software for data and files, designed to recover lost files including video, documents and files on hard disks, CD-ROMs, pictures and images (hence the name Photo Recovery) from digital camera’s memory.
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Proprietary
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LightZone has come a long way from its previous versions and is probably the finest option Linux users have for photo editing. Extremely useful features include the Regions and Zones support. It’s great value for money, although those familiar with Photoshop or Aperture might find it lacking in terms of usability and power features.
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Instructionals
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Games
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With the recent success of The Humble Indie Bundle that managed to rise over 1 million dollars in donations, elecorn the developers of the Caster game also jumps on the trend.
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Basilisk Games Announces the Availability of Eschalon: Book II for Macintosh and Linux
Indianapolis, IN – May 26, 2010 – Basilisk Games, Inc. today announced that Eschalon: Book II for Macintosh and Linux based computers is now available.
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Technology provides today’s school with numerous avenues to provide quality education to kids while making learning fun. With schools increasing the use of technology to deliver learning, parents are faced with embracing technology to provide learning and fun experiences for kids growing up in a technology saturated world after school.
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When I joined my first SC2 game on Windows I had just selected my workers to start mining when the lag started, around two minutes later I was dropped from the game and it counted as a loss in my ladder league. I figured it was just something funky with my internet line, even though I had not had any issues in SC2 under Wine in the last three weeks, as such I promptly selected “find match” to start another game. Two minutes later I had “lost” another ladder game due to “connection” issues.
Fan-flipping-tastic.
Just out of curiosity I decided to boot in Linux to see if the issue existed there as well (I’m hoping the irony of rebooting into Linux to play a game isn’t lost on anyone). Needless to say the problem was not present there, after sweeping two ladder games without any connection issues on Ubuntu I can indeed confirm that it was a “connection” issue with the SC2 was only happening under Windows.
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If you have an old machine that no longer has an operating system, you don’t have to throw that machine away. You can put it to good use with an operating system that doesn’t require a fast processor or big disk drive. Fortunately there are plenty of Linux distributions that will work on your old hardware and run at fairly moderate speeds even if your machine is really old. There are quite a few Linux distributions that don’t demand too much resources so that your computer will run relatively fast.
First of all, you need to stay away from distributions that use Gnome and KDE. These tend to use too many resources for old hardware and will cause the machine to lag way too much for basic applications. Look for these distributions that don’t use these graphical interfaces.
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Here you can see that Linux Mint and PCLinuxOS do actually exist in Google’s eyes, but not compared to Ubuntu’s search rankings. Still they only have a fraction of the googles of OpenSUSE, which only has a fraction of the googles of Ubuntu.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Here are the results of the contest Mandriva launched one month ago. Thanks everybody for your interest and for contributing, we had almost 150 photos submitted (rules were more strict this time for submission, explaining why submission pool was smaller).
We had to pick 10 photos, choice was really hard. You will find below the 10 winners. Note that we have a 11th photo we wanted to add as we found it really nice (and it is from one of the 10 winners). Again congrats for all contributers and especially to the winners.
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Red Hat Family
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Matthew Szulik, chairman of Red Hat’s board of directors, is stepping down in August after his term expires, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Fedora
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As far as I am concerned, I consider Fedora a distro suited for experienced and advanced users, and Fedora13 is no exception.
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Summary: Fedora 13 adds social media to the desktop, the GNOME Color Manager and numerous other updates and enhancements. It’s definitely worth an upgrade if you’re currently using Fedora 12.
Rating: 3.5/5
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Overall: 4/5 (Good)
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A few months ago, I talked about mintMenu being ported to Fedora. I was excited to see it happen. Using technologies such as Git and GitHub.com we can easily fork projects and keep track of the improvements and bug fixes done on each fork. Commits can be selectively applied and so the more our technologies are forked, the more momentum they get, the more communities provide feedback and ideas for them, and the faster they improve.
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Ubuntu
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Shuttleworth will need similar help to keep Canonical moving in the right direction, especially as new rivals potentially step in to acquire Novell and/or Mandriva.
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Design
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As these results suggest, our methodology should help us develop a systemic representation of icon attributes from which we can build a coherent design language and it promises to provide pointers to problem areas as it suggests alternative interpretations. Some of the learnings from this first effort…
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Quite often, designers work on a design for something they’re unlikely to use themselves. This is a situation I’ve found myself in the past few weeks, designing a new keyboard menu for Ubuntu.
[...]
At UDS earlier this month we discussed the new menu. We’d also like your feedback on the full specification, especially if you use input methods or multiple keyboard layouts.
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The official Ubuntu.com website has finally gone live with its new re-branded design.
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Ubuntu Control Center
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I was reading about the Ubuntu Control Center-UCC fever from a lot of blogs and twitter from people linked to the Ubuntu Community.
The author did a very good job. He made glowing lights come out from people’s eyes staring at the application layout looking very Ubuntuish.
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Ubuntu Control Center or UCC is an application inspired by Mandriva Control Center and aims to centralize and organize in a simple and intuitive form the main configuration tools for Ubuntu distribution. UCC uses all the native applications already bundled with Ubuntu, but it also utilize some third-party apps like “Hardinfo”, “Boot-up Manager”, “GuFW” and “Font-Manager”.
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Reviews
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Ubuntu improves a bit with each release. This release is no exception. I recommend that all Ubuntu users do the upgrade as long as their equipment permits it.
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KMS would be especially nice in a server environment without X installed.
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We are in the middle of another release cycle. Folks in the community are busing updating their systems, and demoing distributions that hold promise. Should Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, be on your demo list? I can’t answer that for you. The best I can do to help you decide, is present to you a list of features that should make you smile and also ones I think will not be good for your blood pressure.
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Variants
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In addition to the use of SLAB, Mint has its own Software Manager as well as its own Software Updater that look different and are more streamlined than Ubuntu’s. Mint also includes its own software/file backup tool.
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After much hard work, and some delay, we are pleased to bring your the second version of our popular Linux Desktop for Kids!
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Nokia
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ConnMan (which is sponsored by both Intel and Nokia) is used for connection management – application which Ubuntu will also use for its 10.10 Netbook Edition, as well as Telephony APIs (oFono) for telephony services.
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Finally, we have our Bootchart numbers for the four distributions. With Fedora 13, prior to collecting the boot metrics, we set the GDM to automatically login to the GNOME desktop, since the three other desktops all use auto-logins as well.
Fedora 13 had a boot time of 23 seconds, Moblin 2.1 had a boot time of 18.45 seconds, Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04 came in at 17.31 seconds, and MeeGo had a boot time of just 8.151 seconds.
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Android
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Leave it to the very same poster who teased the Motorola Shadow’s Getting Started manual, wnrussell of Howard Forums, to provide a pretty clear shot of the device itself — yep, that’s a HDMI out port — and reveal some purported specs. Here’s the claimed technical details: 4.1-inch screen, TI OMAP 3630 processor (a 720MHz ARM Cortex A8), 8GB internal storage, 8 megapixel camera.
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OLPC
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It’s time to take the old meme of $100 computing seriously.
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One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project founder Nicholas Negroponte said that the organization is accelerating its development of the XO-3 tablet computer and will have a working prototype by December 2010, two years ahead of projections. Negroponte said the final product would cost US$75.
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One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a global organization whose mission is to help provide every child in the world access to a modern education, and Marvell, a worldwide leader in integrated silicon solutions, have agreed to jointly develop a family of next-generation OLPC XO tablet computers based on the Marvell® Moby reference design. This new partnership will provide designs and technologies to enable a range of new educational tablets, delivered by OLPC and other education industry leaders, aimed at schools in both the U.S. and developing markets. Marvell is also announcing today it has launched Mobylize, a campaign aimed at improving technology adoption in America’s classrooms.
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The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is looking to launch a prototype of its XO-3 later this year. The real advantage of having the OLPC around is as a product conversation starter and design influence.
IDG News Service reports that the OLPC is speeding up the development of the XO-3 tablet, which wasn’t supposed to land until 2012. The idea is that this tablet would cost $75. OLPC also provided details on its blog.
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Tablets
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Dell introduced the Streak, a tablet with a 5-inch touch screen and the Android OS, May 25. Unlike the Apple iPad, the Streak is also a phone, offers multitasking and can support Adobe’s Flash for viewing video and animations. Its size, however, may give some consumers pause. Some analysts have called it an oversized Android smartphone targeted at high-end consumers wanting a tablet-style Web-browsing experience.
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It houses two screens – one with an eInk display, and the other an LCD – for maximum functionality and flexibility. You can use one side exclusively to read, the other side exclusively as a tablet, or both sides to create a netbook-like experience. It would be perfect for students and teachers alike to use in a class-room (especially considering the cost of books and the probability that they’ll be beat up over a short period of time).
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Via Technologies Inc., the Taiwanese computer-processor company, expects $100 tablet devices containing its chips to reach the U.S. in the second half of 2010, offering a cheaper alternative to the iPad.
About five different models, ranging in price from $100 to $150, will be available, Richard Brown, vice president of marketing at Via, said in an interview. The new computers, made by the company’s Chinese customers, will run Google Inc.’s Android operating system.
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Acer
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Acer has shown off an Android-based iPad alternative.
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Acer has created a new 3D user interface that features animations and a ‘peeling’ gesture to unlock the phone. The lock screen lets users read information without having to open applications and a History panel provides quick access to often-used apps.
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The obvious reason to use open source software is cost savings, says Mark Madsen, president of market research firm Third Nature. But, whether you actually save when it comes to license and support costs is the question among many.
Using public sources and vendor information, Madsen created a Pentaho-sponsored cost comparison report (“Lowering the Cost of Business Intelligence With Open Source”), comparing BI software and support costs from Pentaho, IBM (Cognos), MicroStrategy, Oracle and SAP (Business Objects).
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In open source, the idea that the endgame for a project won’t necessarily closely resemble the origin is a given, not a surprise. It’s part of the point of open source. If you look at what’s going on on the open source scene, now, you see this concept being played out all around.
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Free and open source projects provide an amazing example of what volunteer contributors can do. While many folks are paid to work on open source, there’s still an enormous amount of work done by volunteers. Like any volunteer work, though, contributions can be disrupted by more pressing work and personal issues. What do, or should, contributors commit to when volunteering with a project?
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BitTorrent has decided to open source its new uTorrent protocol, which has now entered a public beta.
The software is available at GitHub and the license can be viewed here. Reportedly this is the MIT License.
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Mozilla
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Firefox parent company Mozilla Corp. has hired Tantek Çelik, a well-known figure in the developer and open-Web community, for the role of Web standards lead.
But as Mozilla deals with internal issues and a continued threat from Google’s Chrome, where exactly does this hire fit in? CNET spoke with Çelik on Tuesday, on the eve of his first day at the new job, and rather than talking about keeping ahead of Chrome or dealing with Facebook’s increasing dominance, he said that what’s really in his crosshairs is the iPhone–and how pretty it makes everything.
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Business
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Richard Stallman has agreed to answer your top ten questions. RMS will answer the top ten comments in this thread (using “best” comment sorting) as of 12pm ET on June 2nd. This will be a text only interview (no video). Ask him anything!
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Government
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Turkey’s ministry of Justice, all of its institutions and all law courts are considering to move or partly move to a complete open source desktop, according to judge Cengiz Tanrikulu. That migration would complete the implementation of an information system built on open source software, the National Judiciary Informatics System (UYAP, Ulusal Yargi Aği Projesi).
Judge Tanrikulu, involved in the development of UYAP, said the government’s law offices are considering a move to Pardus, a Linux distribution primarily developed by Turkey’s Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology. “We are already using OpenOffice on all of the desktops. We began using OpenOffice in 2007 and it has helped us to save billions.”
The judge presented UYAP in Amsterdam in a workshop organised by NOiV, the Dutch government project on open standards and open source, on Wednesday.
Development of UYAP started in 2000 with a document management system, built using open source components. It offers access to legal documents to civil workers at the ministry, at law courts, police, prisons, prosecution, Home Office and to the Land Registry. The system can also be accessed by any mobile phone.
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Licensing
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Google’s open source programs manager, Chris DiBona has asked the Open Source Initiative to delay consideration of Google’s WebM license, and in doing so has called on the OSI to be more open. Specifically, DiBona said Google “will want a couple of changes to how OSI does licenses” and that he thinks “that OSI needs to be more open about its workings to retain credibility in the space”.
DiBona statement came in response to Bruce Perens’ request for the OSI’s License Discuss mailing list to consider the WebM license introduced by Google for its VP8 video codec, and follows the declaration by Open Source Initiative board member, Simon Phipps, that WebM is “not open source”.
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Openness
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CC Korea prepares “The 1st Shared Film Festival” for showing and sharing global movies with CC License. The festival, lasting from June 3 to June 9, will be held at Cine-maru located in Seoul, South Korea.
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Open Data
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The Guardian isn’t the kind of tech-savvy enterprise one would normally look to for guidance on digital issues or Internet-related topics. For one thing, it’s not a startup — it’s a 190-year-old newspaper. And it’s not based in Palo Alto, Calif., but in London Manchester, England. The newspaper company, however, is doing something fairly revolutionary by simply changing the way it thinks about value creation and where that comes from in an online world.
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I should make it clear that although I campaign gently for Open Access publishing (as opposed to frenetically for Open Data) I accept that there are closed-access publishers. My concern there is that they make it clear what they are providing, what rights they have extracted from the author, what restrictions they have placed on the reader (sorry, enduser-customer) and whether they provide reasonable value for money. For example, a closed-access publisher usually has an Open Access option where authors can pay – in some cases this is very good value (e.g. Acta Crystallographica) and in others (ACS) it’s very poor (the freely visible material is not open and festooned with restrictions).
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In a classic example of the Broken Window Fallacy successive governments have regarded the data they, or government-supported monopolies such as the Post Office, collected as the government’s property to be monetised to the hilt. They have also kept many details of their own working practices secret. In this article I will deal with the case for as much openness as is possible in both these areas: government produced data and data about government.
So, first on government produced data. The previous government had some good track record on the principles here, passing the Freedom of Information Act and setting up data.gov.uk. The principles were right here, but they failed to go the distance and truly change the attitudes embedded in government that data by default should be kept secret and only opened up when necessary. the incoming government need to work hard to change this attitude and free the data. Unless it is PII (see Lilian’s article on the challenges for the new government on privacy) government data should be free (as in speech). Very narrow lines requiring significant work to justify closure should be put in place otherwise.
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Open Access/Content
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The very mission and identity of academia is implicated in the future of digital technologies, the Internet and copyright law. At stake is the ability of colleges and universities to act as inter-generational stewards of knowledge… to assure that their own scholarly output is freely accessible and usable…. to curate knowledge in better ways and to disseminate it as broadly as possible….and to foster innovative research and learning.
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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The Django Web framework got a major update this week with the release of Django 1.2 on Monday. This release brings some security improvements, better email handling, performance improvements, and better localization support.
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We consider everyone who attends ESE to be a participant. When you come to the conference, you’re learning and teaching about Eclipse by attending the sessions, talking with colleagues, and joining in the networking at the social events.
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Last summer we skeptically directed your attention to a carrier by the name of Zer01, which was promising users unlimited voice and data on smart phones for $69.95/month, without a contract. The service claimed to use a VoIP application to route all calls. According to the founders, the service tunneled over GSM networks, though Zer01 claimed to have their own IP network — and claimed to be using interconnect (roaming) agreements to make calls. In short, Zer01 was supposed to be a mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE).
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So what kind of code names are developers out there coming up with? Here is a collection of code names for software products from companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Canonical, Red Hat, Adobe, Mozilla, Automattic and more. We’ve tried to give some background information where possible. You’ll notice that some code name schemes are definitely more out there than others.
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In a rare move, a Wyoming judge has blocked two newspapers from publishing stories on an internal report about a college president’s trip to Costa Rica, saying the report was improperly taken and that releasing details could prompt the federal government to cut college grant money.
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The Chicago judge’s inbox was flooded with hundreds of messages, and his Blackberry froze. He promptly found Trudeau — who was being sued by the Federal Trade Commission — in contempt of court and sentenced him to jail. The term was stayed pending appeal.
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As Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. get ready to begin their latest paywall experiments with the Times of London and the Sunday Times, the company has revealed a few more details, and it looks like this particular paywall will be fairly complete. Unlike the WSJ, this won’t be a “leaky” paywall. The content will be opted out of Google, and there will be no way to get to it, unless you subscribe at the rather hefty price of £1 per day. What’s amazing is that the folks behind this experiment still think it’s going to be a huge success — even as nearly all of the papers’ competitors are remaining steadfastly free.
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Science
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The scramjet engine in the experimental aircraft burned for a little over three minutes at around 10 a.m. PDT Wednesday in a test range over the Pacific Ocean, pushing the X-51A to the hypersonic speed of Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. That was the top speed reached by the aircraft in its brief flight, according to Boeing and press reports citing U.S. Air Force officials. (Editors’ note: A separate Air Force News Service report had initially cited a higher speed, but was amended to give the Mach 5 figure.)
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It is now growing season across the Corn Belt of the United States. Seeds that have just been sown will, with the right mixture of sunshine and rain, be knee-high plants by the Fourth of July and tall stalks with ears ripe for picking by late August.
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But George W. Beadle, while a graduate student at Cornell University in the early 1930s, found that maize and teosinte had very similar chromosomes. Moreover, he made fertile hybrids between maize and teosinte that looked like intermediates between the two plants. He even reported that he could get teosinte kernels to pop. Dr. Beadle concluded that the two plants were members of the same species, with maize being the domesticated form of teosinte. Dr. Beadle went on to make other, more fundamental discoveries in genetics for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 1958. He later became chancellor and president of the University of Chicago.
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Security/Aggression
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Threats to sensitive computer networks lurk everywhere and with a few mouse clicks, organized criminals and hackers could shut down vital networks that run the U.S. government, industry and military.
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Ch Insp Topping added: “The cameras can help bring about earlier pleas of guilty and potentially less time in court for our officers and the victims of crime.”
Trials of the cameras in other forces have shown they reduce the amount of time officers spend on paperwork.
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Dozens of CCTV cameras have been scrapped in a huge overhaul by Havant Borough Council.
Of the 76 cameras covering the town, 32 have been switched off following a review into the system.
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Thousands of people who bought identity cards will not receive refunds under a Bill to be unveiled tomorrow scrapping the eight-year project.
The Government has decided it will be too costly to administer a scheme to pay back the £30 to each of the 13,000 people who bought a card.
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A good day. The ID card scheme’s demise is one in the eye for the authoritarian busybodies. Nobody wanted them and they were an intrusive waste of money.
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Environment
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In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted, according to records.
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By now there’s little debate that the technology used to obtain oil in deeper waters was developed and rapidly put into use before safety technology could keep up. As we’ve noted, that’s a development that regulators allowed, despite their concerns.
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Who is going to pay to clean up BP’s disastrous oil spill, besides BP? After all, they made $14 billion in profit last year alone. BP has asserted it will pay all “legitimate claims” for damages — talk about a lot of wiggle room there — but beyond actual cleanup costs, BP’s economic damage liability is legislatively, and outrageously, capped at $75 million, a pittance to a company that made 186 times that amount in profit in 2009. Senate Democrats attempted to increase the liability cap to $10 billion by proposing and passing a bill, but their efforts were thwarted by Senate Republicans. The current tally for the cleanup cost stands at $760 million, but that is surely understated.
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Fishermen hired by BP to help with the oil spill cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico are coming down sick with “severe headaches, dizziness, nausea and difficulty breathing” after working long hours in oil- and dispersant-contaminated waters, according to the Los Angeles Times.
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Crisis Commons has released a new open data initiative to enable response organizations to report from the oil spill. Oil Reporter allows response workers to capture and share data with the public as they respond to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.
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There will be plenty of blame to go around, as events leading up to the fatal rig explosion are sorted out. Even if efforts to plug the gushing leak succeed sooner rather than later, the damage to the Gulf environment and to the economy of the region will be incalculable and will linger for years if not decades.
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A national group that thinks global warming is “junk science” and that teaching it is unnecessarily scaring schoolchildren brought its first petition effort for “balanced education” to Mesa County Schools on Tuesday night.
Rose Pugliese, an unsuccessful candidate for a District 51 school board seat in the last election, presented a petition with 700 signatures to the board asking that science teachers stop giving lessons on global warming.
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A new group called “Balanced Education for Everyone”(BEE) is rolling out a national effort to stop the teaching of global warming in schools, calling it “unnecessary.”
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Why throw away valuables as waste? That is the simple yet profound idea behind Daily Dump. As of May 2010 Daily Dump customers keep 4095.8 kgs of organic waste out of landfills every day. Simply because Daily Dump enables them to do so.
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Among conservationists, policy-makers, and the public, there is great debate about whether the establishment of national parks and reserves in developing nations causes poverty or helps to alleviate it. While opponents claim that protected areas limit agricultural development and the harvesting of natural resources, supporters contend that protected areas generate tourism income and improve infrastructure in the surrounding areas. A new study in PNAS this week suggests that, in the long term, establishing protected areas in developing nations does reduce poverty in local communities.
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Finance
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A European Union official proposed Wednesday that member states tax banks to raise money for a fund that would be used specifically to manage future financial crises.
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Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in Berlin on Thursday that the United States and Europe were in “broad agreement” on the need for stricter market regulation but stressed that they would take different paths when necessary.
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A threatening TV commercial appearing in Pennsylvania has residents of the state spooked by its “Orwellian” overtones, and critics are calling it a government attempt to scare delinquent citizens into paying back taxes.
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The group that sets corporate accounting standards proposed an overhaul Wednesday of the way lenders record the value of their assets, hoping that more stringent and consistent reporting rules might help avert another financial crisis.
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There is a fifth way to improve the financial reform bill that has received scant notice. Both the House and Senate versions are almost identical on this point, because the authors of the pertinent section were evidently not familiar with current industry practice. The bills require that the packagers of asset-backed securities that fail to meet certain underwriting standards (which have yet to be specified) retain ownership of 5 percent of those securities. The basic idea is that by requiring issuers of subprime securities to have some “skin in the game” (a phrase used in the Senate bill summary), they will have the incentive to be more careful underwriters.
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The fees in question are honour and dishonour fees on overdrawn bank accounts and over-limit and late payment fees on credit cards. Financial Redress refers to these as “exception fees” and alleges that the banks have been charging customers an “unfair” amount. Customers are both individuals and businesses.
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Or look at the lifetime contributions by the financial sector to (some) senators who voted for and against the Brown-Kaufman amendment, which would have imposed a hard size cap and a hard leverage cap on the biggest banks – over $2 million per senator by this one partial count.
But wait. This is actually very little money considering what is at stake. For an individual large firm actively engaged in derivatives trading, the stakes could easily be in the billions of dollars. For the big banks as a whole, the amount they will be allowed to earn (and pay themselves) as a result of the failure of these financial reforms is – conservatively speaking – in the tens of billions of dollars.
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Not long after the financial crisis, it was clear that the “solutions” that would emerge from the administration would be weak. With Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in the driver’s seat it was clear that there would be no bold transformative vision, no “New Deal” for the 21st century, but tweaks like a “systemic risk regulator” that would somehow endow failed regulatory bodies with the foresight needed to predict the next crisis and the back bone needed to take decisive action.
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The federal prosecutors investigating Goldman Sachs are focusing on Timberwolf, the infamous “shitty deal” repeatedly cited in a tense Senate hearing last month, according to people who have been contacted by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office.
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Legal authority against market manipulation would be greatly strengthened and there would be more protection for whistleblowers. And the kind of transaction that Goldman entered into with Greece – a swap transaction with the goal of reducing measured debt levels, effectively deceiving current and future investors, would become more clearly illegal. All of this is entirely reasonable and responsible – and completely opposed by the most powerful people on Wall Street.
Of course, most of the anti-Lincoln fire has been directed against the idea that “swaps desks” would be “pushed out” to subsidiaries – i.e., the big broker-dealers could still engage in these transactions, but they would need to hold a great deal more capital against their exposures, thus making the activities significantly less profitable.
It is striking that while Treasury argues that increasing capital is the way to go with regard to financial reform, they are adamantly opposed to what would amount to more reasonable capital levels at the heart of the derivatives business.
This is beyond disappointing.
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Goldman Sachs is preparing to file a full-blown, point-by-point defense against the fraud allegations filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to people familiar with the matter.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Google is nearly everyone’s best friend. But have you ever stopped to think about just how much Google knows about you?
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There’s so much wrong with Mayor Lynch’s resolution that I can’t quite get my head around it. Even if the gripe site has published false and defamatory statements about the mayor or his family, shutting down the entire site would not only be ham-handed, it would be blatantly unconstitutional.
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It is hard to understand why some enterprising TV company hasn’t already created a game show called “Breach of Privacy.” This would entail people telling their stories of the most egregious ways in which their privacy was removed from them, with viewers voting for the winners.
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Google has balked at requests from regulators to surrender Internet data and fragments of e-mail messages that it collected from unsecured home wireless networks, saying it needed time to resolve legal issues.
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The European Commission today adopted a draft mandate to negotiate a personal data protection agreement between the European Union and the United States when cooperating to fight terrorism or crime. The aim is to ensure a high level of protection of personal information like passenger data or financial information that is transferred as part of transatlantic cooperation in criminal matters. The agreement would enhance the right of citizens to access, rectify or delete data, where appropriate. EU citizens would receive a right to seek judicial redress in the US if their data is unlawfully processed. Independent public authorities would be given a stronger role in helping people exercise their privacy rights and in supervising transatlantic data transfers. The Council must approve the Commission’s negotiating mandate before talks can begin. The European Parliament will be fully informed at all stages of the negotiations and will have to give its consent to the outcome of the negotiations.
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While there’s no way to defend what this guy did, so far this whole case seems to go in dangerous directions, both from the standpoint of free speech questions, as well as overly aggressive internet bans, due to one particular activity done on the internet.
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Censoring websites used by terrorist groups to recruit supporters is counterproductive, according to expert testimony on the Hill Wednesday.
Any laws or regulations aimed at blocking or removing extremist web content could hamper law enforcement’s ability to collect information on the groups, according to civil liberties advocates at a hearing of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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This time around we’ve learned that the DRM and app protection is unlike anything we’ve seen on the platform.
Short version: Any games you purchase from them are good for only one install on one device. That’s it.
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His company – which is responsible for the biggest videogame of all time, the worryingly-addictive online fantasy role player World of Warcraft – is to release Starcraft 2 on July 27th and Pearce has told Videogamer that the title won’t be hobbled with the kind of crazy copy protection schemes which have made Ubisoft very unpopular in gaming circles of late.
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In recent times, it seems to be an increasing trend for anti-copying software DRM systems to install invasive privileged software. For example, there’s the ever so infamous “Sony DRM Rootkit” that Mark Russinovich publicly exposed some time ago. Unfortunately, software like this is becoming commonplace nowadays.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The thing that disappointed me about the presentation, frankly, is that while it’s titled: “Lessons from fashion’s free culture” Blakely never really gets that deeply into the lessons. She does talk about a few other areas of creative endeavors where copyright is not allowed for the most part (recipes, cars, furniture, etc.) and has an amusing slide that compares the revenue generated in industries with copyright and those not protected by copyright (the “not protected by copyright” part vastly outweighs the “protected by copyright” side). I’d like to see that slide in a bit more detail, because, while amusing, it threatens to fall into the same trap as the recent Chamber of Commerce report that tries to claim the exact opposite. It says that copyright protected industries contribute a lot more to the economy than non-covered industries. In both cases, though, I fear that there’s some cherry-picking of data and questionable classifications.
I do think that there’s a ton to learn from industries like the fashion industry — including suggestions on ways those lessons can be applied to industries like music and movies. Hopefully we’ll start seeing a deeper analysis on that soon.
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Politically engaged and disarmingly geeky, Cory Doctorow is one of the better-known faces of the digital revolution: co-editor of the celebrated blog Boing Boing (“a directory of wonderful things”), he is also author of half-a-dozen science fiction novels and a journalist. Born in Canada, the 38-year-old writer now lives in London, although when we speak, he’s in the US, promoting his latest book, For the Win. This tells a story of teens rebelling against global corporations and is pitched at the “young adult” market. As with all his fiction, the book has been released simultaneously in bookshops and, for free, online.
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That said, I agree with you that there is no “religious” reason for a given individual or firm to use open source over non-open — whatever works better and is the better deal for you, of course. And in fact the “open source” model is not without problems: it also relies on copyright, and has insidious aspects — that’s one reason I, as an anti-copyright type, prefer public domain or creative commons attribution only instead of the share-alike/GNU type model (which I explain in Copyright is very sticky!, Eben Moglen and Leftist Opposition to Intellectual Property, and Leftist Attacks on the Google Book Settlement).
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Albert Einstein is among the world’s top-earning dead people, and an Israeli university that holds rights to his image is asking General Motors Co. to pay for putting the physics pioneer in a magazine ad.
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As I wrote recently in my Open… blog, copyright is about making a fair deal: in return for a government-supported, time-limited monopoly, creators agree to place their works in the public domain after that period has expired. But that monopoly also allows exceptions, granted for various purposes like the ability to quote limited extracts, or the ability to make parodies (details depend on jurisdiction.)
The industries based around copyright’s intellectual monopoly don’t like those exceptions, and fight tooth and nail against any extensions of them. Naturally enough, you might say – after all, they’re businesses, and it’s they’re duty to shareholders to maximise their profits. But sometimes this reflexive refusal to compromise a jot because of concerns about the bottom line goes too far. As, I would suggest, in this case.
A draft treaty has been prepared by the World Blind Union, and put forward by the WIPO Delegations of Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay in May 2009. In essence, this treaty seeks to allow those with visual impairments to read books that are currently unavailable to them – a staggering 95% of the total market.
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Industry Minister Tony Clement has an admission to make: He built his impressive music library on his iPod in part by breaking Canada’s copyright law.
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Copyrights
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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a complex and highly controversial statute, and the anti-circumvention provisions in section 1201 are some of its most complex and controversial components. Despite more than a decade’s worth of judicial interpretation, there remain plenty of unsettled questions about just what constitutes circumvention and just what constitutes a protected technological measure. And what we do know for sure makes a strong case that the anti-circumvention provisions are overbroad and have significant and harmful unintended consequences.
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David Byrne is suing the governor of Florida, alleging that he used the Talking Heads’ 1985 single “Road to Nowhere” without permission or proper licenses.
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Some have already commented on their scruples arising from the large economies of scale approach to copyright litigation that’s being undertaken by lawyers with the U.S. Copyright Group to go after Bittorrent movie sharers. See, for example, what Mike Masnick and Eriq Gardner have had to say. And the ISPs aren’t all that happy about the work required to respond to a bunch of subpoenas.
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Lawyers ACS:Law in the UK are now into their second year of threatening alleged pirates with legal action. Since they don’t have a good case when people deny their allegations, for some time now the firm has been sending out questionnaires which allow people to build a case against themselves. As a UK consumer magazine is pointing out, people don’t have to play this game.
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The legal campaign that targets tens of thousands of alleged movie pirates on BitTorrent is getting more interesting. Now one of the nation’s largest ISPs could be held responsible for facilitating copyright infringement.
Yesterday, Thomas Dunlap at the U.S. Copyright Group filed his response to Time Warner Cable’s motion to quash or modify thousands of subpoena requests. TWC had asked the court to require no more than 28 IP address lookup requests per month, citing the burden of having to comply with discovery requests that were “far out of line with other comparable copyright infringement cases.”
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Popular self-help author Wayne Dyer has been accused of helping himself to someone else’s book.
In a copyright infringement lawsuit filed today in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, author Stephen Mitchell says Dyer “copied verbatim a significant portion” of his interpretation of the ancient Taoist scripture Tao Te Ching in two separate books.
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A consortium of independent film producers is hitting a stumbling block in its plan to simultaneously sue thousands of BitTorrent users for allegedly downloading pirated movies. Time Warner Cable is refusing to look up and turn over the identities of about a thousand of its customers targeted in the lawsuits, on the grounds that the effort would require three months of full-time work by its staff.
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Recently, we’ve noted some similarities between Amanda Palmer and the band OK Go, in that both had been signed to major record label deals, both had built up an amazing (and amazingly loyal) group of fans through various means (different for each) using methods totally outside of their major label marketing effort (which was somewhat lacking in both cases)… and last month, both were officially dropped from their label deals.
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The filing talks about those three reports — all of which we’ve discussed here previously — to reiterate some of the key points made in the original filing. The first, of course, is the GAO report that debunked the claims from industry studies about all of the “losses” caused by infringement. Amusingly, that GAO report was required by the same law that created the IP Czar position in the first place, the ProIP Act. The filing notes, by the way, that the GAO’s mandate for the report didn’t even say it had to investigate copyright infringement — just counterfeiting. However, the GAO appears to have been so troubled by the bogus reports out there that it decided to publicly call those studies into question. As this new filing points out, many of the comments filed by groups in support of strong copyright enforcement, relied on those reports that the GAO has since debunked. This should call into question the legitimacy of those filings entirely.
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ACTA
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U.S. copyright official Steven Tepp said Tuesday he doesn’t understand many of the current objections to the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a 37-nation effort to enforce copyright and counterfeit laws across international borders.
Tepp, senior counsel for policy and international affairs at the U.S. Copyright Office, dismissed objections to ACTA voiced by representatives of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), an intellectual-property research and advocacy group, during a debate on the trade agreement at the Future of Music Coalition’s Washington, D.C., policy forum.
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The session kicks off with U.S. Copyright Office official Steven Tepp defending ACTA, by saying right from the outset, “Quite candidly, we’re in the midst of a worldwide epidemic of copyright piracy.” What kind of epidemic? Well, he uses that old line about how organized crime groups and terrorists are being funded by copyright infringement — a claim that the industry keeps making, but which makes little sense. Even if it were true that some crime operations are selling bootleg DVDs and such, aren’t they under the same, if not more, pressure from unauthorized internet file sharing?
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U.S. Copyright Office official Steven Tepp appeared at a Future of Music Coalition debate on ACTA yesterday, arguing that the release of the ACTA text proved the prior concerns wrong. The full debate is available online as Tepp offers gruff responses to fellow panel members, but refuses to answer many other questions on the grounds that the USTR leads on the file.
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Digital Economy Bill
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It is also wholly wrong that customers should be footing the Bill of this enforcement scheme. The vast majority, even by copyright holders’ estimates, do not infringe their copyrights, yet they will be paying for a quarter of this scheme. A small number will be priced off the Internet by even a small rise in broadband bills – Consumer Focus estimate perhaps 10,000 households.
BT also drew attention to the lack of a Privacy Impact Assessment for the scheme. Privacy concerns could scupper the acceptability of letter writing. Yet the engagement from the government and ICO on this issue has so far been less than acceptable.
ORG and other groups have been willing to accept the principle of letter writing, but this current consultation shows the weaknesses in the legislation that was rammed through in the dying hours of the last Parliament. Already the Act threatens to punish innocent people with additional, unwarranted costs and bars to clearing their name.
NASA Connect – VE – Mission Statements (10/16/2003)
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05.27.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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· Announced Distro: Arch Linux 2010.05
· Announced Distro: Linux Mint 9
· Announced Distro: Slackware 13.1 RC2
· Announced Distro: SystemRescueCd 1.5.4
· Announced Distro: Mandriva Linux 2010.1 RC1
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If intending to use an off-the-shelf processor running Linux or another standard OS in the embedded system, it can be challenging to ensure that the system will operate safely at all times.
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Desktop
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Coincidence? I don’t think so. HP and the others are not big on “No OS”. I think “No OS” may be working for folks who hate that other OS and want to pick their own OS, such as GNU/Linux. I think about 10% of PC users are able/willing to install an OS so a large part of the growth of ASUS and Acer could be due to this plus the fact that they push low-end mobile PCs.
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Most computers that you may purchase will come with an operating such as Microsoft Windows or a Macintosh OS. However, not all manufacturers include an operating system on their computers and if you need to purchase an operating system it can cost you several hundred dollars, depending on what you need.
Linux is a term used to refer to operating systems based on the Linux Kernel and is generally free and open source. Linux is made of different distributions or “distros.” Each distro has its own features and uses, so it is up to the user to decide which is best for them. A distro can be made by a single individual or a collaborate group of dozens.
However, because Linux is the way it is, there is no paid support for most distros and help comes from online forums normally. Linux is usually considered fairly advanced and requires the computer user to be fairly computer literate.
Usually considered one of the most user friendly distros, Ubuntu is very popular among new Linux users and would be a good place to start. Download at www.ubuntu.com.
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About a third of all users are on Linux.
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Server
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LSE claims it will save millions of dollars annually by using Millenium Exchange on GNU/Linux instead of TradeElect on that other OS. This is another case where buying a company producing a product was cheaper than paying the costs of licensing some non-free stuff. We don’t know the details of their cost structure but if they are saving money like that even while using the costly Oracle DB, the cost of TradElect must have been huge. LSE is writing off millions in depreciation on the money invested in TradeElect. Switchover is expected to come in September.
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The anti-spam firm’s developers have previously worked with ESET on the development of the NOD32 platform for Linux mail servers.
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Clear Center is a well known provider of open source Linux Server, Network and Gateway (News – Alert) solutions. Recently, it announced the availability of ClearBOX 300 to the global markets through the global network of ClearCenter Partners. ClearBOX 300 is a Linux server appliance for small businesses and distributed IT environments.
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Granted, ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation only supports Linux and only supports certain kinds of workloads, like HPC and messaging jobs that would otherwise have nodes chatting with each other across some other software layer in the system.
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LAMP
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The LAMP stack is a collection of open-source technologies commonly integrated to create a platform capable of supporting a wide variety of Web applications. LAMP typically consists of Linux, Apache Tomcat, MySQL, and either the PHP, Python or Perl scripting languages. Famously used at some of the best known Web businesses (such as Wikipedia), LAMP has seen widespread adopting in corporate and government settings in the last several years.
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LAMP is an acronym for a collection of open source software tools that is often seen as a platform for Web-based workloads. Typically this acronym is explained as meaning the combination of Linux, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database engine and PHP, an application development tool.
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Hosting
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Custen says degree or not, if you know Linux, you’re what he’s looking for.
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HPC
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HP already has its Ibrix and PolyServe-powered X9000 scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) in its cluster portfolio, along with its SFS G3, a product using MSA2000 storage and the Lustre file system, which is aimed at Linux cluster HPC users. In other words, this product line-up implies the X9000 isn’t well-suited for Linux HPC cluster use.
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Fully upgradeable from a Cray XT5 and Cray XT6 system, the Cray XE6 supercomputer features additional enhancements such as an improved network resiliency, a mature scalable software ecosystem and the third version of the Cray Linux Environment, which was announced in April 2010.
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Right now, the CCM feature of Cray Linux Environment 3.0 is supported on XT6 and XT6m mini variants and only emulating Ethernet, but will be backported to XT5 and XT5m machines later this year and to XT4 machines in early 2011; eventually, CCM will be able to emulate InfiniBand as well, if your HPC apps prefer that.
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Ballnux
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Three hackers have managed to successfully root the HTC Evo 4G 11 days before the smartphone’s official release date.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced new keynote speakers and its full conference schedule for North America’s premier annual conference LinuxCon taking place in Boston August 10-12, 2010.
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Graphics Stack
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General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units, or GPGPU, is one of the hottest up-and-coming trends in software development. By writing code specifically to run on the massively parallel stream processors found on today’s high-end 3-D graphics cards, programmers can speed up an array of algorithms — and not just in high-performance computing (HPC) applications. One of the most popular GPGPU architectures available for Linux is NVIDIA’s “Compute Unified Device Architecture” (CUDA). If you are looking to get started, CUDA allows you to write GPU-optimized code in C, using only a few language extensions.
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Applications
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The developer behind Greenpois0n, p0sixninja has managed to port “Spirit” jailbreak tool to Linux. Spirit is an all-in-one untethered iDevice jailbreak for iPhone 3.1.3, iPad 3.2 and iPod touch 2G/3G. It was released earlier this month for both Windows and Mac OS X.
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Linux only: While lots of people like advanced file browsers like previously mentioned Total Commander or Path Finder, sometimes the explorer can get overwhelmingly complicated. Nautilus Elementary is a mod that compacts and streamlines Nautilus in GNOME to make file browsing easier.
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Proprietary/Middle Ground
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The Wine developers have announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC1) for version 1.2 of their Windows API implementation, marking the beginning of the code freeze period. Wine, which is an acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, is free open source software that allows users to run Windows applications on Linux and Unix by providing its own native versions of Windows DLLs.
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Google has officially released Chrome for the Apple and Linux operating systems, taking the software out of beta.
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Although I’m perfectly happy clicking away in Opera, Firefox, or Chrome/Chromium, the speed/stability improvements in this cross-platform release make for a pretty compelling argument to stick with Chrome, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time in Google Apps and AJAX-heavy sites.
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Although many proponents of free software and an open web don’t like Flash, the multimedia platform has become so ubiquitous that it is difficult to imagine the web without it. However, Flash support has always been a challenge for Linux distributions. Adobe has had a proprietary Linux release of its Flash player software for years now, but only for the x86 processor architecture. Meanwhile, open source projects trying to recreate Flash functionality are lagging behind and struggling with lack of manpower. Luckily, there are also some interesting new technical developments in the open source Flash world. One that sparked our interest recently is Lightspark, which was written from scratch based on the SWF documentation Adobe published in June 2009 as part of the Open Screen Project.
[...]
But x86 and preliminary x86_64 support for Flash obviously isn’t enough in the open source world. Granted, Adobe is or has been working with some mobile phone manufacturers to offer a version for ARM (for example on MeeGo or Android), but people running a Linux desktop system on a non-Intel processor are left in the cold. Until last year, your author was in exactly this position, running Debian on a PowerMac G5. If non-Intel users want to run the official Flash player they have to use ugly solutions such as running Flash in an x86 emulator.
Luckily there are some open source programs recreating Flash functionality, of which the most well-known is Gnash (“GNU Flash”), which also runs on PowerPC, ARM and MIPS processors. It’s not even limited to Linux: Gnash also supports FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, so it pleases a lot of people that don’t want to run proprietary software on their open source operating system but have to be able to see Flash content. In March we looked at the current state of affairs of Gnash when project lead Rob Savoye talked about the project at SCALE 8x.
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Instructionals
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Games
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In 2003, David White created Battle for Wesnoth, an open-source, strategy RPG with turn-based gameplay and hooks for user-created content, including entire campaigns. Since then over 100 contributors have turned the project into one of the most successful open-source games ever made.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Now there’s Clementine, a version of Amarok for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
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In case anyone wondered why I haven’t been offering any of my highly-opinionated pieces on Linux Planet lately, it’s because I’ve been exploring Lilliput: sampling for myself a few of the better known small-footprint distros that offer an astonishing amount of computing power packed into a mere handful of megabytes. And though I haven’t been at this long enough to try out more than a small fraction of the available ones, some overall characteristics of the breed are beginning to appear. The most interesting feature to me is that there seem to be two main branches of small distros: the Tools and the Products.
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Red Hat Family
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3PAR has announced support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation for Servers, a server virtualisation offering that includes a standalone Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor and server management tools.
The company said that 3PAR InServ Storage Server customers can choose the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation Hypervisor to build and deploy a virtualisation environment on a scale necessary for public or private cloud datacentres.
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Fedora
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Paul works for Red Hat and is currently the Fedora Project Leader and chairman of the Fedora Project Board. It’s no coincidence that our chat with Paul was posted on the day that Fedora 13 was released. But I can’t express how excited I was when I saw his responses to the interview questions drop into my inbox. Then I read the email. Twice. When Paul started talking about overcoming failure, curating leadership, and fostering community participation, I was ecstatic. I think you will be too.
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For developers Python 3 can be installed in parallel with an existing Python stack and there is support for the Java EE 6 specification in Netbeans 6.8.
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Known as “Goddard”, Fedora 13 not only boasts a current software selection and a modernised design, it also offers an extensive range of technological improvements. As usual, the distribution demonstrates its pioneering role in this area and many of its advanced features are likely to appear soon in other Linux distributions.
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I have loaded the Gnome 64-bit version on my Lifebook S6510 (Intel Core2 Duo and 965 graphics) and HP Pavillion dv2-1010ez (AMD Athlon Neo and AMD Radeon graphics), and the Gnome 32-bit version on my HP 2133 Mini (VIA C7-M and Chrome9 graphics). All loaded easily and without significant problems. The 2133 has a small (10″) relatively high resolution (1280×768) screen, and I thought the default font size was much too large, but it took just a few mouse clicks to reduce that, and it looks fine now.
Here are a few of the significant changes and improvements that I have noticed personally.
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I tested Fedora 13 myself to see how it compares to the previous version. It’s a fairly solid release, certainly one of the better offerings from Fedora that I’ve seen in a while. The improvements relative to version 12 are somewhat modest, but compelling enough to motivate an upgrade. The general level of fit and finish has increased since the previous version. After spending several hours with Fedora 13, my conclusion is that the new hat is a good fit.
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Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 10.04 LTS comes with a video editor pre-installed–a widely perceived weak point in desktop Linux distributions. PiTiVi is probably the best choice to bundle with Ubuntu. It is one of the easiest-to-use video editors out there, yet still robust enough to keep most users from seeking an upgrade. Throw in the best GTK conformity, and PiTiVi is the obvious choice for Ubuntu. With a minimalist interface and a focus on drag-and-drop interaction, this app finally brings Linux users a video editor that can seriously compete with Windows Movie Maker for user-friendliness.
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Ubuntu is one of the best open source computer operating system based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Ubuntu provides an up-to-date, stable operating system for the average user, with a strong focus on usability and ease of installation. The Ubiquity installer allows Ubuntu to be installed to the hard disk directly from the Live CD, without requiring the computer to be restarted prior to installation.
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Ubuntu has taken the Linux world by storm on the desktop, but, for the enterprise market, it is still an up-and-comer. The open-source operating system is evolving to meet the requirements of this market as well and has proven especially popular for cloud applications. The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud version is an interesting option for those looking to deploy an Amazon EC2-compatible private cloud. Now, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has released an updated version of its Landscape management tool for enterprises.
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The OpenPandora project has created a Linux-based hand-held intended for hacking, gaming, and for use as an ultra-portable desktop. The ARM-based OpenPandora platform features OpenGL ES–the mobile version of the OpenGL 3D graphics API–and is capable of powering real-time 3D games similar to what might be found on the Nintendo DS or Playstation Portable.
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The Pandora packs a 600MHz CPU, PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware, analogue and digital gaming controls, and a host of other features. It’s basically a little Linux OS computer made for portable gaming and with an app store.
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Where’s the robot revolution already? It’s 2010! Aren’t we supposed to be hip-deep in droids by now? Well, Spanish robot developer Francisco Paz thinks he’s got the makings of a proverbial Ford Model T for robots, a cute little number called Qbot.
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StrandVision LLC recently introduced an optional preconfigured, point-of-display Linux player for use with its digital signage system. The compact appliance can be mounted at or behind a flat screen digital signage display to ease deployment and administration.
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Linux is making rapid strides into the embedded world. There are several factors that are driving this trend. Many devices such as netbooks, set-top boxes, mobile devices, assorted gadgets, media players, etc, are Linux powered. Cutting down Linux’s boot time is one of the final hurdles that’s left to be conquered.
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Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) today are becoming smarter and are able to perform ever more difficult tasks. They can help find people in remote environments, or explore dangerous places.
Nicolas Roy, from the Robust Robotics Group at MIT, leads a team that designed a quadcopter that won the International Aerial Robotics Competition last year. And guess what? It runs on Linux.
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Phones
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Nokia
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Researchers at Dartmouth College have developed an advanced iris recognition algorithm that they have cleverly christened the Eyephone. The algorithm runs on Nokia’s 810 tablet, which runs Linux.
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Nokia may lead the pack in the mobile handset race but when it comes to their smartphone market share, it’s totally a different story to tell. Nokia has evidently struggled to keep pace with the growing competition in the smartphone space but is trying their best to gain some lost ground.
It has the aging Symbian OS that currently powers few Nokia smartphones like N97, N97 mini, 5800XM and they’ve Maemo, a linux-based platform that has often been undermined by the Finnish giant. Maemo OS is responsible to produce some decent tablet devices in the past but it’s the N900 that is the first device from Nokia to marry the internet tablet with cellular capabilities. But does N900 deliver? We delve to check out.
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Maemo is backed up by a superscalar ARM Cortex-A8 processor to deliver a PC-like multitasking experience and a super-fast, fully interactive, Mozilla-powered browser that has to be seen to be appreciated.
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In the next few weeks, we will be coming to you with a review of the N900 featuring the new PR 1.2 firmware which we will extensively explore. In the meantime, we will give you a short summary of the features that have been added by Nokia with the PR 1.2 firmware update.
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Take one part Intel’s Moblin, mix with Nokia’s Maemo, bake for three months in the Linux Foundation oven, and you get MeeGo. Linux Foundation executive director, Jim Zemlin has called this new embedded Linux, the open-source uber-platform for the next generation of computing devices: tablets, pocketable computers, netbooks, automotive IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) and more.”
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MeeGo is an open source Linux Project which integrates the Moblin project headed by Intel and Maemo headed by Nokia, into a single open source platform. MeeGo platform delievers no-compromise web standards and rich web experience to the Netbooks and mobile devices. MeeGo’s immense popularity is based on the fact that it includes flexible and powerful app development environment based on Qt.
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Android
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Sending Android 2.2 to OEMs and open source community in the coming weeks is a good thing, right? Definitely. (Hello 2.2 ROM anyone?) Continuing to expect the Motorola Droid or Droid Incredible to receive the update sometime in June? Probably a reach.
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The war of words between Google and Apple – in public at least – has never raged more fiercely. On stage, as the search company announced the new generation of its Android mobile phone operating system, Vice President Vic Gundotra repeatedly referred disparagingly to the closed ecosystem that Apple uses for its products.
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“He said it was critically important to provide a free mobile operating system, an open-source operating system, that would enable innovations at every level of the stack,” Mr Gundotra started.
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“Some of the press has called it fragmentation, but that’s probably the wrong word for it,” he told reporters last week at Google I/O, the company annual developer conference. “The better word for it is ‘legacy.’ With these phones and devices, the iteration cycle is incredibly fast. It used to be that every 18 months, a new device would reach the market. But we’re seeing it happen every three or four months. The software obviously has to keep up and I don’t think anyone is harmed by it.
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Want to see what all the Android fuss is about? You can if you have an older iPhone 3G or 2G. 3GS owners need not bother; it won’t work yet. For details you’ll need to head on over to Linux on the iPhone and read about the process. There is a version of Android that has been hacked to install and run on older iPhones.
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Since Google first announced that they were working on a Linux based open source mobile platform, many people were already on board with the Android operating system. The establishment of the Open Handset Alliance already saw many major figures in the mobile industry moving to support Google’s project.
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Reports are stating that Google’s Android operating system is bringing a bigger boost to the already growing number of smart phone sales. The big plus factor comes from people finally seeing the point of owning a smart phone over a conventional handset –thanks to the many practical and useful features of the Android OS.
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Leveraging Linux – Many home electronics already run embedded Linux, and Linux is at the core of Android. Manufacturers know how to integrate Linux, so commercializing Google’s platform should not require dramatically new skills. Additionally, these same hardware companies are also delivering Android mobile devices today.
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eWEEK evaluated a Nexus One running Android 2.2 and a beta Flash Player 10.1, and found Flash to be slow loading, but surprisingly smooth and power efficient. Meanwhile, HTC vows that most of its Android phones will move to version 2.2 later this year, and a 4Q release for Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) has been tipped.
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Sub-notebooks
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New platforms hint at new directions too. ARM’s recently-released Cortex A9 processor claims far greater computing power per watt than the Atom, but doesn’t offer the x86 compatibility required to run Windows. ARM could thus bring Linux-based netbooks back into play, perhaps providing a boost for Google’s web-based Chrome OS.
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Tablets
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The spec list on the Dell Streak is also deeply impressive, running the Open Source Android operating system and with a speedy 1GHz processor to help you get the very best out of it. There’s a 5-Megapixel camera on the back, and the 16GB of integrated memory can be expanded using microSD cards.
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Dell Inc. unveiled a touch-screen tablet computer called Streak, as the computing giant made its much-anticipated foray into the emerging tablet arena that has been pioneered by Apple Inc.
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Dell announced on Tuesday (May 25) its Streak, a five-inch tablet based on Google Android and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor. An AT&T executive said the carrier will announce as many as ten Android systems for its network this year, but managers from Toshiba and Samsung were guarded in their support for ARM/Linux mobile systems.
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For reasons best left to the reader to uncover, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has often been at loggerheads with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and particularly with its more excitable supporters.
In the words of one trollish commentator:
The (Free Software) world doesn’t need a worthless ORG like the OSI.
Advert
I beg to differ. I have been (and in plenty of ways still am) a critic of OSI, as well as a firm supporter and advocate of the FSF. I believe OSI should be a member organisation with a representative leadership.
I believe it should strive for the inclusion to its community critics, ending the perceived divide. Most of all, I believe that its stewardship role for pragmatic software freedom should be broader than just licence approvals.
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For those looking for a cost-effective solution for maintaining their company’s IT infrastructure, here’s some good news. FOSS Yellow Pages, the brain child of LINUX For You magazine, is now available on the web to cater to enterprises looking for experts to deploy and support various Linux and Open Source Solutions.
Fossyellowpages.com lists all companies that support and provide Open Source and will be of great help to users in finding category-wise information on Free and Open Source Software.
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The award which was the first of its kind by the Free and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) and Deutsche Welle (DW), under FOSSWAY project, was presented to Mr. Nweke in Accra, Ghana, last week by the Director, Deutsche Welle Online, Mr. Thomas Bastian, in company of FOSSFA chairperson, Ms. Nnenna Nwakanma, as part of the weeklong fourth Idlelo Conference, organized at the Banquet Hall, State House, Accra.
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Changing procurement rules and regulations, increased uptake of open-source-based certification and growth in the software and hardware markets has led to the rise of businesses that were previously ignored.
[...]
Most open-source software service companies were considered too small to get big contracts and did not have the capital to invest in technical support compared to established proprietary software companies.
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Most calendar clients are able to use the CalDAV protocol which allows remote swapping of appointments – however, there is a shortage of open source CalDAV servers. Version 1.2 of open source PHP framework SabreDAV now includes the requisite functionality.
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BiTtorrent has open sourced an update to its popular peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol.
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Zenoss, maker of open source monitoring software, has added another managed services adopter: Digital Parallels, a master MSP in the United Kingdom. Although most MSPmentor 100 companies seem to be using traditional closed-source software, there are niches where open source alternatives are gaining momentum. Here’s a closer look at Zenoss and open source in the MSP ecosystem
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I guess Vernon has not spent a lot of time watching zombie movies. Generally, at best, humans find a bit of respite from the zombies but they’re still there. Usually waiting for George Romero to work on a sequel. But the point is, zombies generally win. While I’m not crazy about the zombie analogy, the same is true of open source. It’s not really possible to kill off an open source project or the movement permanently. The licenses ensure that the code will always be there for someone else to pick it up. The community may suffer setbacks, but over time it will adapt to solve not only technical problems but also solve the business, legal, and social issues. Maybe more slowly than some of us would like, but like the undead, we have time. Maybe that zombie analogy isn’t quite as bad as I thought.
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During a recent interview at technology blog The Stop, OSS community member Tony Baechler raised the issue of how difficult it is for visually-impaired Linux users to access documentation. He says that he would like to point other vision-impaired friends to Linux and open source software but custom audio tutorials designed specifically for the blind are almost non-existent.
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Events
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The technology we are using to power the API – Apache Solr, an open source search platform – works well with these requirements. As an open source product Solr/Lucene has been developed by a wide community, and is used by LinkedIn, Digg, AOL, MTV and many more. We really are genuinely impressed by how good this software is.
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Guradian
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Mozilla
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I’m working with an ever growing group of web, audio, and Mozilla developers on a project to expose audio data to JavaScript from Firefox’s audio and video elements. Today we show you how much JavaScript can really do.
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Databases
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A new generation of low-cost, high-performance database software is rapidly emerging to challenge SQL’s dominance in distributed processing and Big Data applications. Some companies have already traded SQL’s rich functionality for these new options that let them create, work with, and manage large data sets.
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Oracle
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Partly. As described in the section above on licensing, there is a portion of JavaFX that is open source, but significant portions are not. The openjfx site now forwards one to the JavaFX.com site.
Again, I’m not the first to wonder about the degree of “open sourcedness” of JavaFX. Others have posted questions on this topic in posts such as JavaFX: Open source or not? and the JavaFX forum thread Is JavaFX open-source? I particularly like the latter (the forum thread) because it nicely covers the intricacies of making a product like JavaFX open source.
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CMS
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The refreshed site, like other federal Web sites, takes advantage of open source components. It was developed on the open-source platform Drupal, which also powers the WhiteHouse.gov site that was relaunched late last year.
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Education
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While the LibLime Koha Community offering is available both as a SaaS or hosted service and for local installation, Enterprise Koha is limited to SaaS because the General Public License, which all those participating in Koha development must accept, requires that any enhancements made to open source software must be “distributed” by free download to any interested party.
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When seventh grader Joonas Puuska switches on the computer in his school library, it’s not the familiar Windows that appears. Instead, it is the big Ubuntu logo, under which Puuska types in his name and password.
Puuska, a pupil at the Lauritsala School in Lappeenranta, shows the software on the computer, which includes word processing, picture modification, a web browser, a spread sheet, and various teaching programmes.
The appearance of the desktop on the screen is similar to the traditional one, but the computer uses the Ubuntu operating system. Puuska dies not really like Ubuntu, because the computer tends to crash.
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BI
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With the recent trend toward its adoption in a wide variety of companies, business intelligence (BI) software is no longer the enigma it once was. Jaspersoft is one of the BI vendors we regularly cover here at OStatic, on part because of its strong open source business model. We recently caught up with Jaspersoft’s President and CEO, Brian Gentile, to get a reading on what’s going on in the BI niche and where open source software fits into the mix.
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Openness
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Daniel James is the director of 64 Studio Ltd, a company developing custom GNU/Linux multimedia products for OEMs. He was the founder of the linuxaudio.org consortium, which promotes the use of GNU/Linux and Free Software in the professional audio field.
Daniel is also the author of Crafting Digital Media: Audacity, Blender, Drupal, GIMP, Scribus, and other Open Source Tools (Apress). The book is a foundation course in photographic manipulation, illustration, animation, 3D modelling, publishing, recording audio and making music, DJ’ing, mixing and mastering audio CDs, video editing, and web content delivery with open source tools.
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While he has no immediate plans to mass produce this blimp, Mr. Yoshimoto has kindly open sourced his work, making his software, materials, mechanical drawings, and circuit diagrams readily available on this page (Japanese only) for anyone who would like to take to the air with Beatfly. It uses an Arduino chip and the free software Pure Data was used as the programming environment.
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Now a Florida-based engineer has come up with an open source design to help feed the hungry.
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A decade ago, the Linux operating system helped spark a revolution in how software is developed. A move by GlaxoSmithKline PLC could test how well similar open-source principles work for developing new drugs.
[...]
In software, the approach has spawned the Linux operating system, MySQL database and an array of other programs. Those community-born technologies now compete with products from Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and other traditional, commercial software makers. Open-source developers share programming instructions called source code that software companies traditionally kept confidential.
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Open Data
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I see the high costs for textbooks and wonder why. What about open-source e-textbooks? Set up an online community that can develop e-textbooks.
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The best way to get around this would either be some coordination between states in order to increase their leverage against the publishers, or for more states to begin opting out of the for-profit textbook industry altogether and moving toward an open-source curriculum / open-source textbook model.
Indeed, even in Texas the open-source textbook movement may prove to be a bit of a thorn in the Board of Education’s side. Of course, open-source has its share of problems also, and if implemented badly these could be just as worrisome as anything the Texas reformists are doing. But done properly, open-source can connect education communities nationally without a national mandate; they can save states lots of money to spend on things like teachers and school supplies; and they can get around bad education reforms like those passed in Texas. Furthermore, open-source can combine the best parts of local autonomy and the best parts of national connectivity, and the material will constantly evolving to meet the needs of modern students and educators.
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Open Access/Content
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Robert Moffat, the former International Business Machines Corp. executive who pleaded guilty in the Galleon Group LLC insider-trading scheme, had an “intimate relationship” with accused tipster Danielle Chiesi, prosecutors said in court.
Moffat admitted to securities fraud and conspiracy in March and is scheduled to be sentenced in July. He faces six months in prison at most. Today at the sentencing of Mark Kurland, a co- founder of New Castle Funds LLC and Chiesi’s former boss, a defense lawyer said Kurland deserved no more prison time than Moffat.
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IBM’s Moffat, Chiesi Were `Intimate,’ U.S. Says
So Sun’s secrets were gifted to an insider trader as pillow talk? Great, that makes it so much better. Can’t say I instantly feel “Moffat is the least culpable person charged” on that basis.
(tags: IBM Sun Insider Corruption Acquisition)
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Science
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Security/Aggression
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When companies pay such a lot of money for software, it should be possible, somewhere in the development cycle, to put the investment in to make the software properly secure. The problem at the moment is that there is no incentive to make that investment.
When software fails or is insecure, the developer, producer and seller rarely suffer. The small print of any contract protects them.
If there was some sort of accreditation for secure software, then at least vendors could get extra revenue. If we could build up trust in the security kitemark, then users would pay a premium for accredited software, and it would actually be worth their while making secure software.
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The Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers — whose disclosures are one of the very few remaining avenues for learning what our government actually does — continues to intensify. Last month, the DOJ announced it had obtained an indictment against NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who exposed serious waste, abuse and possible illegality. Then, the DOJ re-issued a Bush era subpoena to Jim Risen of The New York Times, demanding the identity of his source who revealed an extremely inept and damaging CIA effort to infiltrate the Iranian nuclear program. And now, as Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports, an FBI linguist who leaked what he believed to be evidence of lawbreaking is to receive a prison term that is “likely to become the longest ever served by a government employee accused of passing national security secrets to a member of the media.”
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Environment
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NSF approves supercomputing time as researchers apply storm surge models to oil spread
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The biggest oil spill ever. The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. The deadliest mine disaster in 25 years. One recall after another of toys from China, of vehicles from Toyota, of hamburgers from roach-infested processing plants. The whole Vioxx fiasco. And let’s not forget the biggest climate threat since the Ice Age.
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So let’s do it. Let’s show the world how the open source way can help solve the world’s most pressing issue and let’s do it in the next week. May the “best ideas win” and always remember that none of us is as smart as all of us.
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Finance
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The euro stops with the European Central Bank — or does it?
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As fears grow that Europe could face a full-blown financial crisis, potentially damaging the economy in the United States, investors are abandoning risky bets in the financial markets and rushing for safety instead.
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America’s Ten Most Corrupt Capitalists
1. Robert Rubin
2. Alan Greenspan
3. Larry Summers
4. Phil and Wendy Gramm
5. Jamie Dimon
6. Stephen Friedman
7. Robert Steel
8. Henry Paulson
9. Warren Buffett
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Max Keiser is unhappy. “I feel like Robert Oppenheimer. I invented something and it destroyed civilization.”
Keiser, unlike Oppenheimer, didn’t have access to atomic bombs. His lethal weapon is more the financial kind, and after a long hibernation it has become the root of this year’s biggest controversy in Tinseltown: an exchange on which traders could bet on the performance of movies. What Keiser created along with Michael Burns in 1996 was the Hollywood Stock Exchange, a virtual technology where over 350,000 registered players traded shares of movies and celebrities using fake dollars. If Congress approves the idea, real trading should go live on exchange as soon as June 28—with real money.
For much of its life, the HSX has functioned as a prediction market, and pretty accurately; in 1999, its users correctly called 82 percent of the major Oscar nominees. Keiser’s technology eventually got acquired by Wall Street bond trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald, then warehoused in favor of different technology created by Cantor itself—although the name and idea of his creation have lived on for the past 12 years.
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Capital is the body fat of banking: too much is debilitating, too little is fatal. During the financial crisis, as large banks burned through their capital reserves, governments were forced to add padding at public expense.
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Home prices remained weak through the early months of this year, according to a closely watched housing index released Tuesday, an indication that the housing market continues to struggle despite recent improvements.
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Senate leaders on Tuesday appointed seven Democrats and five Republicans to meet with counterparts from the House in coming weeks to hammer out differences between new financial rules approved by each chamber.
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The global campaign to harmonize rules for financial firms is swerving off course, threatening efforts to curb the risky bets that rocked the world economy two years ago.
This Story
* Lawmakers to work out final financial overhaul
* Nations go own way on global financial reform
As U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner lands in Europe on Wednesday, differences are growing among world leaders over how to keep the promise they made at the height of the financial crisis: that they would work together to reshape how finance is governed. Their aim was to avoid another upheaval by making financial rules consistent across borders and closing loopholes.
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A lot could still happen in either direction this week, but let’s talk about the medium term in this fight for financial reform. Given where progressives are, I think it is best to think in terms of specific battles where it is likely they’ll both win and where they’ll be able to do the most in terms of serious reforms of the financial sector. I see three battles in the next two years that will happen regardless of a double-dip financial crisis.
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Sorkin, appearing on “Charlie Rose,” initially didn’t agree with his fellow guest Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post, who argued that Wall Street was “popping Champagne” over the bill’s holes and omissions.
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Federal regulators moved Wednesday toward requiring a uniform system for tracking all securities orders on U.S. exchanges, in hopes of making it easier to investigate market disruptions like the May 6 plunge.
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As part of the 1,500-page effort to overhaul Wall Street regulations, the Senate adopted a seven-page amendment with major implications for debit card issuers, merchants and consumers. The legislation aims to limit fees paid by merchants to debit card issuers.
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I can already hear you saying, “Whatever, I’m never going to be a homeowner in the bleak 21st-century job market,” but remember that all this liquidity and stabilization handles the rental market, too. Where you live. (Or your parents’ mortgage or rental, if you live with them.) So there’s no getting outside of this question.
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Insurance giant American International Group Inc. is better positioned to pay back all of its $182 billion federal bailout, a key Treasury official testified Wednesday.
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A former bank director built himself a financial fiefdom out of automotive-chemical companies, then plundered it through a series of stock frauds that let him live lavishly even though he’d declared bankruptcy, prosecutors said Tuesday.
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The Federal Reserve and other central banks must protect their ability to make key economic decisions free from political interference, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday.
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The proposal, included as an amendment to the financial reform legislation recently passed by the Senate, isn’t far-reaching enough. There’s still time to fix this during the reconciliation process, but you should let your congressman and senators know that when it comes to something as important as credit scores, half a loaf isn’t enough.
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Harold Meyerson wants Washington to quit the Deficit hawkery and focus on creating Jobs: Of all the gaps between elite and mass opinion in America today, perhaps the greatest is this: The elites don’t really believe we’re still in Recession. Or maybe, they just don’t care.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Parents Television Council ramped up its ongoing crusade against how human beings actually speak by condemning the title of a new CBS TV Series: $#*! my dad says.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The Federal Communications Commission’s plan to impose Net neutrality regulations just became much more difficult to pull off.
A bipartisan group of politicians on Monday told FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in no uncertain terms, to abandon his plans to impose controversial new rules on broadband providers until the U.S. Congress changes the law.
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Digital Economy Bill
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The British Computer Society is in the process of being transformed into The Chartered Institute of IT. This is the wrong direction – it’s becoming a club for the Pointy Haired Boss instead of an association to support Dilbert and Alice. The consequence? It’s full of talk of outsourcing real computer jobs abroad and wants to serve the people who are doing it. It failed to take any public leadership position over the Digital Economy Bill and rejects attempts to embrace open source. It has no connection to the interests of actual computer professionals any more. For me (a Fellow, for now) it has come to symbolise all that’s worst in British IT.
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Thanks for the reply, David. The BCS did indeed show up a little in the DeBill debate, but it was not in the way most of the computer professionals I know would want.
The BCS appears to support 3-strikes/graduated response kangaroo-courts-without-the-court, according to http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc.34746 where I also see BCS supporting the fallacy that “the creative industries” need defending from the internet (rather than recognising the benefits of adapting to it). BCS concerns I have read are rarely about fundamental liberties or software freedom; they are about the cost of implementing the legislation.
From my vantage point as a branch committee member, I see none of the vitality I would want from my professional association; just PHB-speak and core governance that gives lip-service to inclusion of technologists. The bCS voice I read in http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/read-all-about-it/2010/04/the-egm-debate-bcs-v-len-keigh.html turns me off, I’m afraid.
Maybe the BCS doesn’t need people like me as Fellows? That seems to be the message I’m hearing.
NASA Connect – VE – Representation (10/16/2003)
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