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05.05.10

Apple and Microsoft a Threat to Culture (Data), Not Just Software (Tools)

Posted in Apple, Google, ISO, Microsoft, Patents, Ubuntu at 4:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

MPEG crisis

Summary: Microsoft’s and Apple’s cultural threat with MPEG-LA; Canonical listed as H.264 licensee; Google perceived as potential game changer with YouTube

OGG THEORA has been a hot topic recently because it’s under attack from Apple and from Microsoft. Previous and very recent posts about that subject include:

The Microsoft Bott continues his war on Theora this week, so Chips B. Malroy responds by calling him “major Microsoft shill” (which is actually true because his career is dependent on Microsoft). Malroy added that “audio and video codecs and the patents on them, are in some ways, an attack on the right of free speech” and later he argued that: “Most of us do disdain software patents. They only help the monopolies. They do not promote science or innovation. But there is a worse form of software patents, its software patents on codecs. This should never have been allowed in any reasonable world. Software patents on multimedia codecs are basically a patent on sight and sound, two inalienable senses of the human experience.

“Beyond that the monopolies (Microsoft and Apple) want to use software patents as a way to block free operating systems, to control the web, and to profit by taxing those who have to use these multimedia video and sound software patents.

“Multimedia software patents are completely against the idea of standards, or even standards that can be freely used on the web. We must try to educate those in power to reject software patents on video and audio codecs and to get free standards on these codecs for a free web. Not a web that will be controlled and taxed further by unnecessary Microsoft and Apple lockin.

“It is not enough to just have Theora or the new free Google codec.”
      –Chips B. Malroy“As far as IBM and Google with their support of software patents. While we would be better off without the patents, in the meantime, Google has to play the patent game in some countries, as that is the law of the land in the USA. To be able to sue those who come against you, is a weapon that we should not say to Google; “do not sue MS or Apple.”

“It is not enough to just have Theora or the new free Google codec. All of these video and audio software codecs should be free if used on the web, as the web should be free. Free standards for a free web, should be the call. Invalidate the software patents on these video and audio codecs, and make them public domain.”

This point of view is further supported here:

Why Our Civilization’s Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA

We’ve all heard how the h.264 is rolled over on patents and royalties. Even with these facts, I kept supporting the best-performing “delivery” codec in the market, which is h.264. “Let the best win”, I kept thinking. But it wasn’t until very recently when I was made aware that the problem is way deeper. No, my friends. It’s not just a matter of just “picking Theora” to export a video to Youtube and be clear of any litigation. MPEG-LA’s trick runs way deeper! The [street-smart] people at MPEG-LA have made sure that from the moment we use a camera or camcorder to shoot an mpeg2 (e.g. HDV cams) or h.264 video (e.g. digicams, HD dSLRs, AVCHD cams), we owe them royalties, even if the final video distributed was not encoded using their codecs! Let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Microsoft is of course choosing to lobby for MPEG-LA, of which it is a participant. Microsoft is going to use Internet Explorer* to promote H.264 and Canonical’s old codec affairs won’t help, either:

Canonical licenses H.264 – Theora out for the count?

Canonical are currently the only Linux company to license H.264/AVC, the patented non-free technology used to compress video and favoured by companies such as Apple & Microsoft for HTML5 Video.

Neither RedHat, makers of Fedora, or Novell, makers of Suse, appear on the list of over 800 licensee’s.

What’s interesting is that the rival, if you will, to H.264 is the free and open codec Ogg Theroa which one would naturally assume would be the favoured choice for a Linux distribution’s parent to support.

Let us remember that MPEG-LA's CEO (Larry Horn) is a patent troll. TechDirt has just caught up with this news.

Joe Mullin has a great blog post, looking in detail at MobileMedia, a recently launched “company” that fits all the traditional characteristics of a “patent troll” or “non-practicing entity” (if you’d prefer). It doesn’t appear to do anything but hold patents, demand licensing fees and sue. So what’s so interesting about this one? Well, it’s a subsidiary of MPEG-LA, the company that manages some important digital video standards, and manages the patent pools related to them — and both companies have the same CEO.

[...]

What I find interesting, of course, is that many patent system folks have said that patent pools are the “answer” to issues like non-practicing entities filing crazy lawsuits. And yet, here we have an example of one of the major patent pooling administrators apparently deciding it’s more lucrative to get into the other side of the business instead…

In the meantime, while all this has been going on, it’s worth noting that Steve Jobs — one of the targets in this lawsuit — has apparently been telling people that MPEG-LA is getting ready to sue open video codecs, such as Theora, for patent infringement. Of course, such threats have been made before and never carried out — but if MPEG-LA now thinks that suing for patent infringement (rather than just alerting the patent holders to possible infringement) is the way to go these days, perhaps the lawsuits above were an opening salvo.

MPEG-LA is hardly a legitimate business if it bullies like this, but ISO, which is a farce that sells out to whoever has enough money to corrupt it, won’t do anything/much to stop this. As the president of the FFII put it yesterday, “ISO [is] pushing for a patent-free video codec, committee stuffing, yes you can do it [...] The analysis of patents is outside of the scope and competence of ISO and MPEG [...] MPEG believes that 20 years after its publication some technology will become royalty-free” (posted in Twitter).

One new writer at IDG puts it like this:

It’s Apple and Microsoft versus Google and Mozilla in a tag team match for the video codec in HTML5

[...]

As I wrote about earlier, there has been a horse race going on about which video codecs will be supported by HTML5. With the stakes so high, the race is starting to get a bit rougher. Now it is turning into a tag team match, with Apple and Microsoft on one side and Google and Mozilla on the other.

This past weekend both Apple (of the open standards according to Steve Jobs) and Microsoft (never afraid to assert an alleged patent claim) have supposedly put down the hammer that Ogg Theora (supported by Mozilla) and other open source video codecs may violate patents.

[...]

This sets up an interesting tag team match. On one side, the defenders of “open standards that we like” Apple and Microsoft. In the other corner, the open source champions Google and Mozilla. Hey maybe Adobe can be the guest referee? The winner of this match will determine what technology will underlie the video you watch on the web or your TV in the future.

Dana Blankenhorn has more to say about Apple:

Will Apple put its lawyers behind the open codec patent attack?

[..]

All this makes the pending decision in Bilski vs. Kappos, still unknown at this writing, so important. A decision that encourages Apple to proceed, especially against Google, may make for the biggest lawsuit of all time.

Apple has already sued Android through HTC.

Do not support Apple and Microsoft, though not just because they produce non-Free software and engage in anti-competitive activities (bad faith and conduct); they are also a threat to freedom in culture. This helps nobody but stakeholders like Disney, which Apple is tied to. █
_____
* Not that Internet Explorer matters so much anymore. Even Microsoft-friendly meters like Net Applications (mostly from the US, secret data and secret methods, funded in part by Microsoft) say that Internet Explorer is losing browser share while about one in two Windows PCs is infected with no foreseeable solution, certainly not even snake oil marketing like this new example:

The word about Immunet’s free anti-virus solution is spreading fast. The agent installed on my computer tells me that there are currently 162,597 people in the Immunet Cloud, and that I’m protected from 12,637,576 threats. When I first installed it almost a month ago, the number of users was around 122,000.

The Cost of Patent Trolls Who Attack Linux

Posted in Courtroom, FUD, Microsoft, Novell, Patents, Red Hat at 3:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Puppet

Summary: Why patent trolls or puppets like Acacia (and Microsoft) do manage to cause harm to Linux, even when their case is altogether bogus

FOR reasons we explained before, Acacia has Microsoft connections and its case against Linux lasted for quite a while before it ended with a defeat.

If legal victory was not Acacia’s sole goal but rather the supply of FUD against Linux (and self publicity), then Acacia won either way. TechDirt correctly states that the ‘ammunition’ was invalid (just like SCO’s).

The latest is that Red Hat won after being sued by a patent hoarder, who claimed that every version of Linux infringed on its patents. The jury found that the patents in question were invalid and tossed them out.

The FFII gives a rough estimate of the cost of this type of litigation, putting it at somewhere around 1 million dollars.

Redhat an Novell were lucky this time because the plaintiffs had failed to acquire really bad patents. Bad software patents are those software patents that meet today’s bad statutory requirements. By contrast, those software patents that can be invalidated in court are called bogus software patents. Of course even when you are attacked with bogus software patents you lose time and money, even more so in the US, where the loser doesn’t pay for lawyer fees of the winner.

Typically, as a professional with experience in this area told me these days, winning a lawsuit of this scale is said to cost about 1 million USD. Often companies will prefer to pay license fees 250,000 USD to the owner of a bogus patent.

So, this cost them a lot of money, time, and damage caused by FUD factor, as already pointed out some days ago. On the brighter side of things, Steve Stites says:

This is an important victory for Open Source. It takes us another step in the direction of establishing that it is pointless to mount a patent attack against Open Source. We need to firmly establish the principle that there is absolutely nothing to be gained by a software patent attack on Open Source and it is pointless to even try.

Another person writes:

With MS up to its usual FUD about video codecs and patents, it’s nice to have a little more legal precedent stacked up for FLOSS.

Bob Robertson writes:

Hoorah!

This is just one more good reason to fight Microsoft’s “273 patents that are infringed upon by Linux” claim.

When does the class-action against Microsoft’s legal department’s FUD happen?

Why doesn’t Red Hat report Microsoft’s FUD/extortion activities [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], which are illegal in some countries? It might be cheaper than fighting those patent trolls whose management partly came from Microsoft. █

Microsoft/Novell Faking “Open Source” and Pushing .NET Into Web Browsers

Posted in ECMA, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, OpenOffice at 2:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Mono is greed

Summary: Microsoft does not keep its promises regarding “Open Source” in .NET and its MVP Miguel de Icaza is trying to ram .NET into Web browsers

“Running Mono directly into the browser” is what our reader called this disturbing idea from Microsoft MVP de Icaza. Another reader explained that “Miguel de icaza wants .NET CLI to be embedded in browsers *Not really going through w3c*“

Is anyone surprised?

This is the type of thing that makes de Icaza a Microsoft MVP. It’s only becoming clearer over time who he’s really serving, no matter his denials regarding the question.

Which browser will be the first victim? Firefox or Chrome? Moonlight is already messing up with Firefox. Microsoft also shoved .NET into Firefox (for Windows) without permission, only to cause great distress and trouble.

Elsewhere in the news (notably Slashdot [1, 2]) we find that Microsoft is faking “Open Source” when it comes to .NET (who didn’t see that coming?).

figleaf writes “Three years ago, with much fanfare Microsoft announced it will make some the .Net libraries open source using their Microsoft Reference License. Since then Microsoft has reneged on its promise. The reference code site is dead, the blog is no longer updated and no one from Microsoft responds to any questions on the forum.”

To Microsoft, this whole “Open Source” idea seems nonsensical or “cancer” and “communism”; it’s just for marketing purposes and this is not the first time Microsoft is caught lying about parts of its code being “Open Source” (Sandcastle comes to mind [1, 2, 3, 4]).

The news above only comes to show Novell’s participation in Microsoft’s agenda, which is harmful to the Web as a whole.

Watch what Novell keeps doing to OpenOffice.org using its fork [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Novell advertises its OpenOffice.org fork as just a Windows office suite with OOXML and Visual Basic. Here is what Novell’s PR team wrote some days ago:

The answer is OpenOffice.org Novell Edition for Windows. We’ve recently released the 3.2 version, which contains bug fixes as well as many improvements over both the previous and community versions.

If you aren’t already familiar with this offering, OpenOffice.org Novell Edition for Windows is an open source office suite that is the best choice for interoperability with Microsoft Office. In addition to excellent performance and integrated extensions, the newest version allows users to access and edit Google Docs documents. It also includes enhanced spreadsheet capabilities such as more rows, better VBA macros and improved support for OpenXML files, the default format in the recent Microsoft Office versions.

Meanwhile, promoters of .NET/Mono (de Icaza included) carry on advertising for a Novell colleague who wants an image editor for GNU/Linux to be .NET-based [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] and thus promote Pinta , despite the known problems.

Novell is also trying to put MonoTouch in Android [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], regardless of or because of Apple’s actions [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. This is problematic since Microsoft already uses patent threats against Android and this extortion sometimes works.

There’s a disturbance in the gadget force everyone. You probably aren’t aware of it because most you are Mac or Windows users, but those who’ve been using Linux on the desktop or on servers have known for some time that Microsoft has been bullying Linux software vendors with threats of lawsuits for infringing on their intellectual property (IP). Remedy: sign our “patent agreement” and share your technology in exchange for immunity.

Microsoft claims that most parts of what makes up the GNU/Linux OS infringes on Microsoft’s closed-source patent war-chest. To put it in simple terms, they claim that they came up with X process or X functionality first and they have a patent on that feature. I’m not a IP or patent lawyer, so I can’t get into specifics, but I can tell you that the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) movement prides itself on being open and sharing code with others to be used how one sees fit. And, if you make an improvement, to share that improvement back with the community. FOSS developers like to look at a proprietary app and say, we can make that… and not only can we make it, we’ll make it better through the inspection of thousands of users who will voluntarily test the code, kill bugs, improve upon the feature-set, and so on and so on.

This whole mess started with Novell, which is currently injecting actual patent traps into everything that uses Linux. █

Linux-based Operating Systems Replace Windows

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, HP, Vista 7, Windows at 2:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Palm Pre with WebOS and Palm OS

Summary: HP gets WebOS and Google gets BumpTop (for 3-D desktop), which in turn help replace Windows that is simply too bloated and unimpressive

LAST WEEK we wrote about HP buying Palm, later to point out that HP products that run Windows are now dead (“Slate” as we knew it from public demos is called off).

Some say that “Slate” is only delayed (unlike Courier which is dead for sure), but it is likely that it will just come with Linux rather than Vista 7; it’s not the form factor, it’s the software. As Perlow put it some days ago:

HP’s Slate was an Ugly Baby with Windows 7

[...]

The existing WebOS application base of 1500+ programs, while not huge, will run pretty much as-is with some simple re-packaging and screen optimization, because the apps are all written in the lingua franca of the Web, HTML and Javascript, and are completely CPU platform neutral.

Other reports tell us that WebOS might have something to do with Windows being abolished.

Techcrunch is reporting that Hewlett-Packard is killing off its Slate tablet before it comes to market.

The reasoning, according to a Techcrunch source, is that HP isn’t happy with the performance of Window 7 as a tablet operating system. That means HP will be shopping around for a new operating system such as Google’s Android OS or they could be fixing to convert Palm’s webOS for tablets.

In other interesting news, Google acquires BumpTop probably to put it on top of Chrome OS or Android. Will Google port it to Linux/Android? Will it become Free software? We shall see.

Google is acquiring BumpTop, a startup that aimed to improve the interface of your computer desktop.

BumpTop launched its first product about a year ago. The idea, as founder and chief executive Anand Agarawala described it during a talk at the 2007 TED conference, was to do away with the “same old crap” found in the layout of both the Windows and Mac operating systems. By turning the desktop into a three-dimensional space, users can arrange things more naturally and creatively. They can pile things up, just like they can on a physical desk.

BumpTop is rather impressive and Google will probably bring it to GNU/Linux in one form or another. Given that Chrome OS and Android are mostly ‘open’ (not entirely), it would be reasonable to assume that BumpTop will augment the GNU/Linux experience as Looking Glass once did (even though it was proprietary). █

Novell Gives up on RadeonHD, to Resume SCO Case, BrainShare EMEA

Posted in Europe, GNU/Linux, Kernel, Novell, SCO at 1:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Graphics card

Summary: Several bits of Novell news, starting with the significant report about RadeonHD going deprecated and more positive reports, such as BrainShare EMEA returning

SEVERAL years ago, apologists of Novell loved pointing at RadeonHD’s direction and say that Novell was a champion of Free software. Setting aside the fact that Novell laid off one of the key developers of RadeonHD (Luc Verhaegen, last mentioned here) while struggling with DRM and with AMD, it is important to separate (Open)SUSE from Novell. It’s the source of many straw man arguments. In any event, “OpenSUSE Says Farewell To RadeonHD Driver,” according to Phoronix.

Now though the RadeonHD driver has perhaps suffered its final blow as the RadeonHD driver is no longer being used as the default within Novell’s own openSUSE distribution. As is said in the OpenSUSE 11.3 Milestone 6 notes, “radeon video driver has superseded radeonhd, providing KMS/DRI support.”

This is actually not good news for Linux as a whole. Novell did contribute in some areas of Linux development (although less and less over time) and another important area is the SCO lawsuit, which will apparently resume some time later this year.

SCO has now filed with the bankruptcy court in Delaware its report on the small stuff it sold off, what it calls its First Quarterly Report of De Minimis Asset Sales Consummated By the Chapter 11 Trustee Pursuant to Order Approving Certain Procedures for the Sale, Transfer or Abandonment of De Minimis Assets.

[...]

Update: And news on the US Supreme Court front. SCO has been given more time to respond to Novell’s petition. The new date is August 5.

So, what have Ocean Park folks been doing for their $91,829.50? Some of it is rather vague. This covers the time period of the sale of mobility assets and the finalization of the Yarro loan, so the vagueness is a little frustrating. There are several items about conference calls regarding various “commercial, financial issues.” Whatever that means.

Novell is coming to Europe quite soon and it gives the illusion of interest by setting expectations accordingly.

Set expectations and beat them. That’s the situation facing Novell as the company prepares for BrainShare EMEA, scheduled for May 18 to 21 in Amsterdam. This is the first time in five years Novell is hosting a BrainShare conference for EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) partners and customers. Novell Chief Marketing Officer and Channel Chief John Dragoon says the event is sold out.

We no longer post weekly links about Novell because the company is up for sale and there is too little news about it. █

IRC Proceedings: May 4th, 2010

Posted in IRC Logs at 1:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

Read the log

Enter the IRC channel now

05.04.10

Links 4/5/2010: Opera EULA Tweaked for GNU/Linux, PlayOnLinux 3.7.6, KDE 4.5 Teaser, and Fedora 14 Names

Posted in News Roundup at 3:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Another successful Company built around Linux

    I can remember when many opponents of Linux would claim that open source technology is not business friendly that the opportunities to profit are too limited. There are few people saying that these days even amongst the opponents. Many companies have profited from building services around Linux and many companies have risen through building products and services around Linux.

    The PTR Group is one of these companies. They have been around for 10 years now. They have enjoyed rapid growth with steady double digit annual growth percentages. They provide training to the two main distributors of embedded Linux products. They have been involved in getting Linux

  • Virtual Linux: Platform and OS Linux Virtualization

    Virtual Linux is accomplished through many techniques, ranging from emulation to platform to OS virtualization. Indeed, Linux is a unique operating system in its breadth of virtualization solutions that are available. In this article, we’ll explore the various ways that virtualization is achieved and then review the various solutions provided through virtual Linux.

    When we talk about virtualization solutions, we tend to talk about specific products offered by specific companies. But when we talk about virtualization solutions with Linux, we instead talk about a rich and diverse open source ecosystem.

  • wearable linux computer, makes you feel like cap’n crunch

    This is the 1D/2D scanner imager available as an extension to the wearable w200 rugged Linux computer. Finally the Linux equivalent of the cap’n crunch secret decoder ring.

  • Desktop

    • Gamers Mad at Sony for Yanking PS3′s Linux Compatibility

      A group of Linux users has filed suit against Sony, upset about the company yanking Linux capability from its PlayStation 3 (PS3) game console.

      When PS3 made its debut in 2006, it gave users the option to run a so-called alternate operating system, something that couldn’t be said of Nintendo Wii or Xbox. The “Install Other OS” feature was popular among gamers who used Linux, the Unix operating system that is free to download.

  • Server

    • Inside NASA’s world-class supercomputer center

      That place is the advanced supercomputing facility at the Ames Research Center here, the home of Pleiades, NASA’s flagship computer, a monster of a machine that, with a current rating of 973 teraflops–or 973 trillion floating point operations per second–is today ranked the sixth-most powerful supercomputer on Earth.

  • Audiocasts

  • Kernel Space

    • Stable kernels 2.6.32.12 and 2.6.33.3

      The 2.6.32.12 and 2.6.33.3 stable kernel updates are out.

    • Linux 2.6.34-rc6 Kernel Released

      The complete change-log for the Linux 2.6.34-rc6 kernel can be read at Kernel.org.

    • Linux Versus E. coli

      Both Linux and E. coli are organized into hierarchies. But their hierarchies have different shapes. E. coli’s genome is dominated by workhorses. Middle-managers and master regulators make up less than 5% of the total number of genes. In Linux, by contrast, over 80% of the functions are in the upper echelons. Each workhorse in Linux is controlled to many middle managers. In E. coli, on the other hand, each workhorse gene is typically controlled either by a few genes or just one. And so in E. coli it’s the higher levels where genes have the most links, not the workhorses.

    • Graphics Stack

      • LLVMpipe: OpenGL With Gallium3D on Your CPU

        The software rasterizer used in Mesa that allows for software acceleration of OpenGL on the CPU without any assistance from the graphics processor has largely been useless. Even with a modern-day, multi-core processor, the performance of Mesa’s software rasterizer has been abysmal. The performance of Mesa classic DRI drivers have traditionally been poor anyways compared to the high-performance, proprietary NVIDIA/ATI graphics drivers, but when dealing with just the software rasterizer there really aren’t any games or applications that run well. Fortunately, software acceleration on Gallium3D is very much a different story thanks to LLVM.

  • Applications

  • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

  • Distributions

    • Fedora

      • Post-Goddard.

        Voting is now open for the Fedora 14 release name. Naming the next release is yet another way that our community is involved in making the future of Fedora. If you’re a member of any group in Fedora (beyond completing the CLA), you can vote on this ballot.

      • Fedora 14 Might Be Called Fytnargin

        As was reported last month, with development on Fedora 13 winding down for a release in two weeks, planning for Fedora 14 has got underway. One of the first steps taken by the Fedora and Red Hat communities is coming up with a new codename for the next release, for which they have been reaching out to the community for in recent times.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • European embedded Linux show seeks presentation ideas

      The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) announced a call for papers for the next Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE), scheduled for Oct. 27-28 in Cambridge, UK. CELF is looking for a variety of technical presentations focused on the use of embedded Linux in consumer electronics products.

    • Phones

      • webOS update coming soon, PDK apps likely to land

        Well, what have we here? A friendly tipster, who just so happens to be a registered Palm developer, has sent us the latest informational email from the recently-swallowed outfit, and while the tone here may be gentle, the implications are certainly serious. According to the memo, a new webOS update is “coming soon,” and developers are being alerted that they’ll need to be prepared to test their apps when it hits.

      • Nokia

        • Comparing Maemo & Ubuntu

          While I’ve occasionally been critical of Ubuntu as a project, it is a distribution with very open processes, for the most part.

          I’d like to compare the experience of a casual Ubuntu user, an engaged Ubuntu user, an Ubuntu developer, and an upstream application developer to the equivalent MeeGo or Maemo experiences.

          The casual Ubuntu user gets regular stable updates on a predictable schedule, with long-term supported versions less frequently, but still on a predictable schedule. Stability, releases, this user doesn’t want to know what happens behind the scene, he wants to get software when it’s “done”.

        • MeeGo Presentations from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit

          The MeeGo project was featured in two keynotes and an all day session during the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. It was a great opportunity for me to meet more of the people who are contributing to MeeGo in person, and I was very happy with the MeeGo content at the event. In addition to great presentations, we had a lot of audience engagement, questions and discussion, which is critical during this early period for the project.

      • Android

        • Multitasking the Android Way

          Android is fairly unique in the ways it allows multiple applications to run at the same time. Developers coming from a different platform may find the way it operates surprising. Understanding its behavior is important for designing applications that will work well and integrate seamlessly with the rest of the Android platform. This article covers the reasons for Android’s multitasking design, its impact on how applications work, and how you can best take advantage of Android’s unique features.

          [...]

          So far, we have a way for applications to implicitly do work in the background, as long as the process doesn’t get killed by Android as part of its regular memory management. This is fine for things like loading web pages in the background, but what about features with harder requirements? Background music playback, data synchronization, location tracking, alarm clocks, etc.

        • Adobe Giving Free Android Handsets To Employees?

          BGR is reporting that Adobe will be giving away free Android handsets to their employees. While this has not been confirmed yet, it is believed that Adobe will give their employees a phone running Android 2.2 with Flash so that they become comfortable developing with Flash on the Android platform.

        • TMO Announces MyTouch 3G Slide!

          So, it sports Android 2.1, comes in three colors, has Swype installed, and has a pretty nifty screen. What’s missing from this press release though? How about a processor speed?

    • Sub-notebooks

      • OLPC laptops for East Africa and Palestinian children

        According to the BBC, approximately 30 million laptops are expected to be delivered to East Africa by 2015 and 500,000 units in the Middle East.

      • Joojoo 3G tablet will appear within 3 months

        TABLET UPSTART Fusion Garage plans to offer a 3G enabled version of its tablet, the Joojoo, within three months according to the firm’s CEO, Chandra Rathakrishanan.

      • We have an early Linux tablet video

        FUSION GARAGE has announced the availability of its Joojoo tablet in the UK, and The INQUIRER went along to the launch for a walk-through of the Linux handheld device and obtained an exclusive demonstation video.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Musings of an open source peddler
  • When can’t MATLAB add up?

    Update: Just had an email from someone who points out that Octave (Free MATLAB Clone) can handle 64bit integers just fine

    octave:1> a=int64(10);
    octave:2> b=int64(20);
    octave:3> a+b
    ans = 30
    octave:4>

  • Oracle

    • Thanks for Suggesting Better Default Settings

      Many thanks go out to everyone who added one of the 90+ suggestions for the Better Defaults collection. Impress is currently in focus for Project Renaissance, so any suggestions relevant to Impress (presentation application) have now been taken to be evaluated by the iTeam. Those entries are therefore now in italics.

  • CMS

    • State of Drupal presentation (April 2010)

      Two weeks ago at DrupalCon San Francisco I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. A total of 6000 people watched my keynote live; 3000 were present at DrupalCon, and another 3000 watched the live video stream. Nonetheless, a lot of people asked me for my slides. So in good tradition, you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 48 MB) or you can watch a video recording of my keynote on archive.org.

  • Government

    • Even the ‘worst’ open government plans include open source

      An independent group released its rankings for U.S. government agencies’ open government plans and said Treasury, Defense, Management and Budget, Energy and Justice had the weakest plans of the lot.

      NASA came out smelling like a rose, with the strongest-ranked open government plan, followed by the EPA and HUD, according to the rankings by OpenTheGovernment.org.

      [...]

      Some agencies have said they plan to revisit their plans based on the group’s evaluation, so OpenTheGovernment.org will re-evaluate them in June. It’ll be interesting to see how the use of open source continues to evolve in open government.

    • The spy who came in from the code

      If you were going to pick an adjective to describe the Central Intelligence Agency, “open” wouldn’t immediately spring to mind. But according to Carmen Medina, who recently retired from the CIA and will speak at Gov 2.0 Expo, openness is just what the agency needs.

  • Licensing

    • Is an open license enough?

      Recently I have been trialling a new web based account/billing software. It is not a very mature project, but the features listed and performance so far have me believing that this is potentially a good solution. Also it is written in a language I am comfortable with (PHP), and it has an open license (GNU AGPL). Hence I may be able to contribute.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Happy Birthday ODF!

      On the Saturday 1st of May 2005, ODF 1.0 became an ISO standard. So as Rob Weir and the ODF Alliance already did, let me wish as well a happy birthday to OpenDocument Format. By this I would like to celebrate the fact that after 5 years, ODF is alive, kicking and growing its market share at a nice rate. But I would also like to thank everyone behind ODF, the engineers, the OASIS consortium, the volunteers, the implementers, and the users. Without you ODF could not exist, and as ODF 1.2 is almost out of the door it’s good to see how much the ODF ecosystem has grown and is growing.

Leftovers

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NASA Connect – EOM – Angle Activity (1/1/2000)


IRC Proceedings: May 3rd, 2010

Posted in IRC Logs at 5:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

We’ve just had to catch up with the logs. Sorry for this flood of IRC postings.

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