07.29.10

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Has Dell’s Marketing Team Lost Their Marbles?

    Now, I don’t want this to sound as though it’s a rant against Dell. I’m actually a fan of their products. But when idiotic PR like this comes out, you really have to wonder who in their right mind gave this stuff a stamp of approval. The bottom line is simple. Use what you want and works best for you. Don’t be afraid to try new things. There’s a reason why there are several operating systems out there, variety. Hopefully Dell’s marketing team gets their head out of the sand sometime soon.

• Server

  • Systems Administrators Changing Roles

    Systems administration is not going to go away completly, but I do see a future where there are less of these positions available. Consolidation of equipment isn’t just something that’s happening in your data center, it’s happening across the entire spectrum of IT related fields. The sysadmin of tomorrow will most likely have to handle hundreds or thousands of nodes (as many do today) that provide services to thousands of customers. As hardware becomes more reliable, and virtualization technology also becomes more reliable, the need for dedicated systems administrators for managing the operating system and physical servers decreases. As more and more software vendors start packaging their applications as virtual appliances, the skills needed to adequately manage these packages shifts from the operating system to the application.

• Applications

  • Instructionals

    • LPI 101 – Linux certification

    • Demonstrating multi-processing in Bash 4

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Basket – A Multi-Purpose Note Pad For KDE

      Basket Note Pads is a multipurpose note-taking application for KDE. Business people can use it to keep track of important tasks and notes. Writers can use it to organize their thoughts. Students can use it for note taking. And generally anyone can use it as a virtual paste bin or clip drawer.

    • Linux Mint 9 KDE released

    • Linux Mint 9 KDE Review and Screenshots

      As I stated in the introduction, I think Linux Mint is a top 3 distribution for desktop users. A beautiful interface, powerful tools for beginners, and a decent application selection set it apart from most other Linux distributions. Please comment on your favorite KDE distribution, I think I’ve found mine.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Android

    • Android 3.0: what you need to know

      Even though most Android users are still waiting for Android 2.2, details about the next version – Android 3.0, or Gingerbread – are starting to emerge.

      Android 3.0 release date is looking like Q4 of this year, possibly around October. And Gingerbread may already be in some testers’ hands – Phandroid has shown an unverified photo of a test build of Android 3.0 running in the wild.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Toshiba NB300 review

    The netbook market has moved beyond its infancy and most manufacturers have now found their feet. Like the well-entrenched notebook scene, the market’s biggest netbook makers have hit upon their preferred technology combination and standardised designs have been cropping up over the last couple of generations. Since Intel’s N450 Atom processor boasts such excellent power-saving capabilities over previous chips (courtesy of its integrated graphics processor and improved manufacturing process), it has powered almost all netbooks released in the same period – Toshiba’s mini NB300 was no exception.

• Tablets

  • Apple iPad’s rivals are coming

    Guess what? They’re finally starting to show up. The Dell Streak, a cross between a smartphone and a tablet, will be out later this summer. It will first show up with Android 1.6 under the hood, but it will be user upgradeable to the latest release Android 2.2, Froyo.

    At the same time, Kmart, of all places, is advertising the Augen 7-in. tablet, the GENTOUCH78, on sale for just $150 through July 31. Don’t rush out to your local Kmart, though. The demand has already been so high for this tablet, even sight unseen, that most Kmart retail stores are handing out rain checks.

Free Software/Open Source

• The U.S. Government and Its Partners Open Up To FOSS

  Free and open source software often makes a great deal of sense from a financial and logistics perspective. The product is generally free, and the source code is available for editing if the product does not met the technical needs specified by the user. In a rapidly evolving world, people at high levels in the government have come to the realization that FOSS may offer higher levels of software development flexibility than the traditional proprietary models. The fact that FOSS helps to alleviate some of the pressure created by tight budgets and other fiscal constraints doesn’t hurt. In this article, I will take a hard look at the great inroads being made by FOSS into the processes and programs of the U.S. government and its partners.

• SaaS

  • OpenStack: Open Standards Meet The Cloud

    But there is more to OpenStack: it also gets the power of open standards and how this relates to the cloud. Cloud Computing is the wild west of computing right now with competing strategies and technologies fighting for dominance. The Linux Foundation is pleased to see this new entry that is based on open, collaborative development as well as open standards. Without open standards in cloud computing, we could be headed to the same vendor lock that once gripped the industry. Based on what I can see from the Open Stack project, Rackspace’s aim seems to be to eliminate vendor lock in. If so, I think we will see a huge acceleration in cloud uptake by companies small and large who have been hesitant to enter.

• BSD

  • OpenBSD — I’m back (and I’d like to think you care … but I know you don’t)

    And as far as Flash goes, you can still run Flash 7 in the Opera Web browser, but the near future for the Web should mean that HTML 5 will make video a much easier proposition in non-Windows/Mac environments.

    If you do have a spare machine in your stable — and who doesn’t, do a little distro-hopping. And a few BSD experiments couldn’t hurt. You’ll learn something. That I guarantee.

Leftovers

• Security/Aggression

  • ‘Secure OS’: The Latest IT Oxymoron

    Open source OSes like Linux prove that you don’t need to be closed to create a computing platform that can be made very secure indeed.

  • Cisco Details Enterprise Security Threats

• Environment

  • More Evidence That BPA Laces Store Receipts

    People interested in limiting exposure to bisphenol A — a hormone-mimicking environmental contaminant — might want to consider wearing gloves the next time a store clerk hands over a cash-register receipt. A July 27 report by a public-interest research group has now confirmed many of these receipts have a BPA-rich powdery residue on their surface. But you can’t tell which ones on the basis of a visual inspection.

  • Fight Over Fracking

    The state of New York has some of the cleanest drinking water in the country, but natural gas drilling is threatening water resources there. At issue is whether drilling companies know enough about how to protect groundwater sources from contamination by a drilling procedure called “fracking,” the term used for the hydraulic fracturing of rock formations to make them produce more gas. Citizens also doubt whether existing rules and regulations can assure drilling companies will do enough to protect water sources, and whether there are enough qualified staff people to enforce current and future drilling regulations.

  • Chez Sludge: How the Sewage Sludge Industry Bedded Alice Waters

    The celebrity chef Alice Waters is probably the world’s most famous advocate of growing and eating local, Organic food. In February 2010 her Chez Panisse Foundation chose as its new Executive Director the wealthy “green socialite” and liberal political activist Francesca Vietor. Vietor’s hiring created a serious conflict of interest that has married Waters and her Foundation to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and its scam of disposing of toxic sewage sludge waste as free “organic Biosolids compost” for gardens.

• Finance

  • Get Serious About The Deficit and Cut Military Spending

    The United States is far and away the world’s leader in military spending. In 2009, America spent over $663 billion on defense. That massive amount equals 4.3% of our 2008 Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That number is sure to grow next year.

  • Tell the President to Put Warren to Work!

    One of the strongest parts of the Wall Street reform bill that just passed Congress is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). But whether the new bureau delivers on its promise to protect consumers depends in large part on who runs it. The agency was the brain-child of Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren who has championed consumers and taxpayers for decades.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Big Falsehoods: An updated guide to Andrew Breitbart’s lies, smears, and distortions

    Following the dissolution of Andrew Breitbart’s smear of former Obama administration official Shirley Sherrod, Media Matters provides an updated look at how his sensationalist stories have been based on speculation, gross distortions, and outright falsehoods.

  • Enough right-wing propaganda

    The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now-trivialized phrase has it, a “teachable moment.” It is a time for action.
    This Story

    *
    Enough right-wing propaganda
    *
    Ruth Marcus: Time for the slow-blogging movement
    *
    Standing up to the Breitbarts

    The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that “fairness” requires treating extremist rants as “one side of the story.” And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year’s election.

  • Health Insurers Leaning on State Insurance Commissioners to “Reform” Reform

    The nation’s biggest insurers — not happy with provisions of the four-month-old health care reform law that would force many of them to spend more of the money they collect in premiums for their policyholders’ medical care — are pressuring regulators to disregard what members of Congress intended when they wrote the law, so that they can keep raking in huge profits for their Wall Street owners. If they are successful, many policyholders will soon be shelling out even more than they do today to enrich insurance company shareholders and CEOs. Billions of dollars are at stake, which is why the insurers and their symbiotic allies are pulling out all the stops to gut a key part of the law that would require them to spend at least 80 cents of every premium dollar they take in for medical care.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • The first million seller e-book is….

      I knew e-books would be big. What I didn’t know would be that they would get so big, so fast. On July 28th, Amazon announced that Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoohas become the first e-book to sell a million copies.

      It won’t be the last. Stephenie Meyer and James Patterson are quickly closing in on what Amazon is calling the “Kindle Million Club” for authors who have sold over a million Amazon Kindle e-books. Charlaine Harris and Nora Roberts with more than 500,000 Kindle book sales each, will soon join them.

    • Digital Copywrongs

      New DMCA exemptions are an improvement, but the basic paradox of telling consumers how they may use electronics remains unaddressed.

    • ACTA

      • Statement on ACTA in Plenary

        It appears Commissioner De Gucht found out recently what technical difficulties are inside the ACTA package.

        In response to a few requests let me add the following talking points:

        * Moving ACTA to WIPO or WTO: In our jargon we call such a demand a “poison pill”. An innocent reasonable demand which demonstrates a problem underlying the process and is unacceptable for its proponents. ACTA is about forum shopping on purpose. ACTA emerged because WTO and WIPO are blocked. Yet, an international treaty of that kind needs to be administered.

        [...]