05.04.09
Posted in Microsoft, Rumour at 11:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Rumours from a reliable source suggest the analysts were right and additional layoffs come tomorrow
LAST MONTH we wrote about seemingly reliable claims that Microsoft was looking into further layoffs [1, 2]. The abysmal results which came soon afterwards (earnings down 32%) justified this and the Web is now abuzz over the Microsoft-bred message which says: “Rumors of more Microsoft layoffs being announced on May 5th. Lots of panic in the employee base.“
That’s tomorrow. Todd Bishop has some more details.
We received a tip last week, from a usually reliable person, that Microsoft would be making more job cuts this week. The company so far isn’t commenting, and we haven’t been able to get confirmation elsewhere. But independent of our inquiries, the online buzz increased over the weekend to the point that Microsoft employees will no doubt be a little nervous when they check their email tomorrow morning.
We’ll keep readers updated as more information unfolds, if any. █
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Posted in Google, Marketing, Microsoft at 8:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Rent a bulldog
Summary: A look beneath the surface reveals that ConsumerWatchdog.org is “the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights”, which is affiliated with/derived from Grassroots Enterprise, a Washington/SF-based AstroTurfer for hire
FOR A verifiable fact, Microsoft is the biggest lobbying monster in its area. Someone has just informed us that ConsumerWatchdog.org is apparently a lobby used by Microsoft (mostly to attack Google), so we decided to investigate this. Having already found some Microsoft-backed anti-Google lobbies in the past [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], we took a look at this latest company’s background and dug a lot deeper. Let’s see what ConsumerWatchdog.org says about Microsoft and what ConsumerWatchdog.org has to say about Google. What a striking difference.
Looking at ConsumerWatchdog.org using enhanced tools (the likes of them sometimes use services like DomainsByProxy.com), we find the following record:
Domain ID:D863261-LROR
Domain Name:CONSUMERWATCHDOG.ORG
Created On:03-Jun-1997 04:00:00 UTC
Last Updated On:07-Jun-2008 00:26:36 UTC
Expiration Date:02-Jun-2010 04:00:00 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:GoDaddy.com, Inc. (R91-LROR)
Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT RENEW PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:GODA-044511122
Registrant Name:Doug Heller
Registrant Organization:Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rig
Registrant Street1:1750 Ocean Park Blvd.
Registrant Street2:Ste 200
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Santa Monica
Registrant State/Province:California
Registrant Postal Code:90405
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.3103920522
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:webmaster@consumerwatchdog.org
Admin ID:GODA-244511122
Admin Name:Doug Heller
Admin Organization:Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rig
Admin Street1:1750 Ocean Park Blvd.
Admin Street2:Ste 200
Admin Street3:
Admin City:Santa Monica
Admin State/Province:California
Admin Postal Code:90405
Admin Country:US
Admin Phone:+1.3103920522
Admin Phone Ext.:
Admin FAX:
Admin FAX Ext.:
Admin Email:doug@consumerwatchdog.org
Tech ID:GODA-144511122
Tech Name:Domain Direct
Tech Organization:TUCOWS.com Inc.
Tech Street1:96 Mowat Avenue
Tech Street2:
Tech Street3:
Tech City:Toronto
Tech State/Province:Ontario
Tech Postal Code:M6K3M1
Tech Country:CA
Tech Phone:+1.4165350123
Tech Phone Ext.:
Tech FAX:+1.4165315584
Tech FAX Ext.:
Tech Email:dnstech@domaindirect.com
Name Server:NS1.GRASSROOTS.COM
Name Server:NS2.GRASSROOTS.COM
See that last bit? It’s important. Consumerwatchdog.org is linked to Grassroots.com, which is Grassroots Enterprise.
Grassroots Enterprise is not about grassroots. It’s about AstroTurfing. Sourcewatch wrote:
According to the company’s web site, Grassroots Enterprise, Inc., led by its CEO, John Hlinko, “combines online technology and communications strategy to help our clients achieve their public affairs objectives. Our proprietary technology Grassroots Multiplier® uses the Internet to centralize and simplify the recruitment, management, and mobilization of our clients’ supporters – employees, members, customers, vendors and other stakeholders who can grow into a long-term asset to our clients’ business.”
It’s a business. It hires people to do jobs for companies (clients).
According to Wikipedia, “Consumer Watchdog (USA), [is] an organization which advocates for taxpayer and consumer interests in the United States,” but it also states that it is “formerly the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights.” So they change names; that’s what companies and lobbies typically do when they get exposed or absorb a bad reputation. It’s a well known and basic strategy in PR.
Oiaohm found out that the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (aka Consumerwatchdog.org) even has a subsite on Grassroots.com. Why is this not surprising? They probably just try to escape the obvious affiliation which would be damaging to their credibility. Lobbyists tend to have multiple umbrellas, which make them runaway targets. See for example Jonathan Zuck, who seems to have turned ATL into ACT after it had been exposed massively (think about fake letters from dead people).
Going back to Grassroots Enterprise, watch just what they boast about:
Are you ready to get your volunteers and members to mobilize the vote for you in 2008?
With the Grassroots Multiplier℠ PhoneTheVote application, they can actually be mobile as they mobilize. This innovative alternative to traditional phonebanks gives your activists and volunteers the ability to carry a powerful political application right in their pocket!
Grassroots Multiplier℠ PhoneTheVote takes the traditional phone bank into the web 2.0 generation by empowering your stakeholders to log on and make phone calls on your behalf — for get out the vote efforts, fundraising, grassroots mobilization, or just for rapid dissemination of information.
With Grassroots Multiplier℠ PhoneTheVote your volunteer callers can be directed to make calls wherever they are need — by geographic location, demographic, political affiliation, or any number of categories. Your volunteers can also be given dynamically generated “just-in-time” customized phone scripts to maximize their impact. And best of all, the information that the volunteers collect is feed into a central database in real time.
They brag about AstroTurfing patents/trademarks, just like the ones from Waggener Edstrom. How deep can this really go? █
Microsoft AstroTurf stories:
- The Microsoft Connection with Dewey Square Group and DCI/New Media
- Microsoft ‘Bribes’ Mac Bloggers to Slam Apple, Gartner Hosts Google FUD
- Microsoft, TCS, DCI, Edelman, and Those Fake Letters About IP/SCO/Monopoly
- James Plamondon: Microsoft Guerrilla
- FullSIX and Mr. Youth LLC May Be Ruining the Web (AstroTurfing) on Microsoft’s Behalf
- Microsoft: 800 lb. Guerrilla
- Astroturfing Examples: Learning How Microsoft Tames the Internet
- Waggener Edstrom, Maureen O’Gara and Other Microsoft Shills
- Partial Index: Summary of Bribed Sites, Journalists, and Bloggers (Vista 7)
- Waggener-Edstrom Behind the 2008 Laptop Bribes, Edelman Behind 2006′s
- Manipulation, Astroturfing, and What Governments Can Do
- Beware the OOXML AstroTurfer: “The Wraith”, “multivac1”, “hAl”, Among Other Nyms
- Microsoft May Have Bribed India for OOXML Pressure
- Microsoft Has Been Rigging Votes/Polls for Ages
- Gary M. Stewart (aka “Flatfish”) About Microsoft AstroTurfing: “It’s made me A LOT of money….”
- Former Microsoft Shill Openly Confesses, Alleges Microsoft Still Does This
- Respecting AstroTurfers?
- Some New (But Very Old) Microsoft AstroTurfing Examples
- Joe Barr, Linux.com Editor – My Obituary
- Joe Barr Knew Microsoft’s Tactics All Too Well
- 66 Pages of Microsoft Evilness
- Another AstroTurf Scam Exposed?
- Quick Mention: Sony is AstroTurfing, Just Like Microsoft
- Memo to Novell: Leave YouTube Alone
- Microsoft Blast from the Past: Ads Banned for Spurring Violence
- Is YouTube’s “NovellVideo” a Novell AstroTurfer?
- Microsoft/Munchkin ‘Breaks’ the Web to Break Open Document Standards (Again)
- Rob Enderle Guarantees “Amazing Numbers”, Show E-mails to Microsoft
- Microsoft Agents from Waggener Edstrom Airbrush Wikipedia, Glorify Paymaster
- Microsoft Unleashes Proxies at Journalists to Defend Vulnerable Vista
- Microsoft’s OOXML Viral Marketing Reaches YouTube
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Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 4:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How Microsoft is trying to marginalise GNU/Linux and the extent to which demoralising lies are used as a tool
AN EFFECTIVE TOTALITARIAN regime operates by identifying sources of existing dissent (or brewing dissent) and then eliminating them. Microsoft works very similarly and its so-called "Linux Heat Map" is indication of this. The company maintains a sort of “battle map” which tells the company where attacks against GNU/Linux ought to be coordinated and which large-scale migrations predatory targeted. We saw a lot of this recently and a notable old example is South Africa.
This is not affecting only GNU/Linux and Free software. Microsoft has been trying to suppress its competition at childhood phases for as long as it has held a dominant market position. We already have a partial list of projects/companies that Microsoft strangled at birth, but the strategy strategy can work against commercial entities with finite resources, not against Free software. It’s proving frustrating to Microsoft.
Undeterred, however, Microsoft is currently using another familiar strategy in Spain (as we last noted yesterday) and Glyn Moody got around to commenting on it:
It’s clearly born of ignorance about what is really being offered – lock-in to Microsoft’s systems – in the naive belief that touch-screens are somehow the future, probably just because the iPhone has one.
It is born of arrogance that the government knows better, and therefore needn’t consult with others that might have a view or – heaven forfend – knowledge on the subject.
And it’s born of sheer stupidity, throwing away the huge lead that Spain had in this area, forcing local governments that had saved money by opting for GNU/Linux to waste money on an unnecessary and doubtless insecure solution from Microsoft, and as a result making the country dependent on a foreign supplier when it could have nurtured its own domestic software industry.
Microsoft is doing the same thing in Russia right now, so Slashdot has this update which says: “No [Fedora-based] Russian Operating System, At Least For Now”
“The project by 27 Russian parties to develop a National Operating System for Russia has not taken off, yet (Russian). Ilya Ponomarev, the responsible technology committee chair in the Duma, received a negative response from the government. The government argues that the project and Open Standards would not impact the society and economy. Parliament members regret the setback for Russia’s digital independence. Ponomarev wants to find other interested partners in the Government now.”
This says nothing about what Microsoft has just done, despite the fact that the cited article has a photo of Steve Ballmer. According to Microsoft’s “Linux Heat Map”, Russia is one of the leading countries in terms of GNU/Linux uptake. Needless to say, so-called Web statistics from Microsoft-sponsored entities are hiding all this by measuring adoption of GNU/Linux using hostile methods or biased populations (data sets). We wrote about the "1% market share" lie just a couple of days ago and we urge people never to propagate this lie or else it would become complacently true in the minds of many people, ISVs included. Here is an interesting new press release (also found here):
The percentage of Linux users among the MEDUSA4 Personal audience varies significantly from country to country, and totals approximately 35%. While in Germany, the top download location, about 13% of users work with Linux, in Italy, the second largest download group, Linux users outnumber Windows users by nearly three to one.
This shows that populations play a huge role.
In the first three days of May we received over 96,000 pageviews (excluding bots, by AWStats’ definition). This includes a Friday, a Saturday, and a Sunday, which means it’s mostly weekend traffic.
Among those requests, 50.4% came from “Linux”, 38.7% came from “Windows”, 5% came from “Macintosh” and some of the rest could not be parsed properly although search engines or other familiar bots are not being counted by AWStats. █
“There’s a lot of Linux out there — much more than Microsoft generally signals publicly — and their customers are using it…”
–Paul DeGroot, a Directions On Microsoft analyst
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Posted in FUD, GNOME, GNU/Linux, KDE, Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 3:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Miguel de Icaza and the Linux Hater blog
Tough love
Summary: A quick look at an unhealthy infatuation and its effects on GNU/Linux
AN ANONYMOUS READER has just expressed his concerns about Miguel de Icaza, whose fascination with everything Microsoft may be just the tip of the iceberg. Does he also have a sadistic relationship with GNU/Linux? Some people think so and our reader sent over some reasonable evidence.
“…almost everything in de Icaza’s blog nowadays is about Mono/.NET or other Microsoft software.”Now that Gnote is entering Fedora and probably other distributions also, it becomes clearer that Mono is no necessity. There is nothing that can be achieved in C# that cannot be achieved in other programming languages which also offer vastly superior performance. As Seth put it in 2004, Mono is an unacceptable risk. But almost everything in de Icaza’s blog nowadays is about Mono/.NET or other Microsoft software. It would be amazing for an outsider to think or be told that such a person is even associated with GNU/Linux, which is constantly attacked by the very same company that he (de Icaza) admires and wanted to work for directly.
We were once told that Miguel de Icaza personally knows “Linux Hater” (he knows the real identity). For those who don’t know, it’s an obscene anti-Linux blogger who flames GNU/Linux developers as well as recites and thus propagates old injurious myths. Some say it's a Microsoft front and our reader — independently — thinks so too. We keep hearing it from different people.
Our reader sent us this pointer to de Icaza’s blog:
Lets please avoid inflicting in GNOME a KDE 4.0 (yes, I know its not the exact same scenario; and yes, I know those clock applets are cute).
[...]
Update: As usual, the Linux Hater Blog has some great commentary. Some of his feedback on KDE 4.0 applies to our own decision making. Worth a read.
“I haven’t been paying close attention, but anyone who recommends Linux Hater is either a useful idiot (in the Stalinist meaning) or is himself taking the piss,” says our reader. “Whichever, the man has put himself beyond the pale. Regardless of his programming abilities, is there any way of having him removed to where he can’t do any more damage?
“That previous blog entry of his has him trashing a fellow Gnome developer (Emmanuele Bassi) while referencing a blog that uses the term ‘feces’ in regards to the KDE developers. This is the kind of commentator he recommends people read:”
“I was getting a little worried that I wouldn’t have something appropriate to close of K-pride week with, but then sweet feces rained down from heaven”
To quote another set of examples:
“the mindset is dangerously close to the rationalization used recently by a KDE spokesperson and lampooned by the Linux Hater Blog” — Miguel de Icaza on 15 Jul 2008
“As usual, the Linux Hater Blog has some great commentary. Some of his feedback on KDE 4.0 applies to our own decision making. Worth a read” — Miguel de Icaza on 14 Jul 2008
As a side note and a change of subject, the reader asked us to see this quote from the man’s Wiki entry:
“Miguel de Icaza [..] tried to persuade his interviewers to free the IE code even before Netscape did with their own browser“
“This is total news to me,” says the reader, “and I do try and keep up. How could Microsoft free up the IE code when they didn’t own it and why would they be contemporaneously trying to BUY Netscape if they had any code to free up?
“Has this man been drinking from the Microsoft well of forgetfulness, you know, the one where people can change the past buy remembering if different from the rest of us?”
Here is a classic blog post from de Icaza: LinuxHater’s blog, I am a fan
I love the LinuxHater’s Blog. This is a must-read RSS feed.
[...]
A first class grilling/roasting of Linux and the Linux community. It should help keep things in perspective.
Epic. What more can be said? █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Mono, Patents, TomTom at 2:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Workaround created to dodge FAT patents, but why is Mono learning nothing from all this?
FAT Lessons
FOR THOSE who have not seen the details yet, Groklaw published “Tridge — Subject: [PATCH] Add CONFIG_VFAT_NO_CREATE_WITH_LONGNAMES option”
It is already covered bt Heise.
A new patch to the VFAT filing system in the Linux kernel adds an option to disable the creation of files with long file names.
This is all happening whilst OIN at al attempt to invalidate those patents (e.g. using prior art), which directly refer to something Microsoft implemented. That initiative is still on.
We’re all familiar with the MS vs TomTom case regarding FAT patents. While that has settled, there appears to be some consequential action from this case…
From this whole thing we not only learned but were also given evidence to show that Microsoft is not interested in "interoperability"; it’s all about what we previously called “taxoperability” [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. A few days ago, a Microsoft-loving Seattle-based Web site wrote about Ray Ozzie’s spiel on “devices, startups, IP and open source.”
“IP and open source…”
Where Microsoft assumes that open source (not Free software) is all fine and dandy with software patents and apathetic towards Microsoft products/protocols that are plagued by this. As long as this “open source” thing only enriches and helps sell more copies of Windows, then Microsoft won’t go hostile. It’s attacking Linux for the most part. As Steve Ballmer put it in 2007, “I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows.”
That’s why they specifically attack GNU/Linux, which Ballmer compared to “cancer”. And that’s why it’s foolish to put a hopeless copy of .NET inside GNU/Linux. It might not be long before Microsoft uses that too as an excuse to knock on people’s doors and demand patent tax (or otherwise force Mono-built applications to change, which would not resolve the API riddle).
Jonathan Corbet Likes Gnote?
Gnote is still receiving quite a lot of press. The editor of LWN.net is offering a good word to Gnote for technical merit, but he is almost totally ignoring the problems with Mono itself.
Some people have complained about its faults for a while; Hubert Figuiere, instead, chose to do something about it in the form of the Gnote utility.
[...]
So what are the problems with Tomboy? For your editor, at least, the biggest issue is the simple sluggishness of the tool. It is a large program which takes quite some time to start up. If one tries to bring up a note on a system which has been used for other things, there can be a lengthy delay before the menu from the taskbar icon appears. Rightly or wrongly, users blame this fundamental slowness on Tomboy’s use of the Mono platform. Now, of course, use of Mono brings in a whole host of other complaints, but we need not consider those here. The simple fact is that Mono adds a great deal of baggage to what should be a small and simple application. A basic note-taking tool should not be a heavyweight program.
Gnote is a reimplementation of Tomboy’s functionality using C++ and GTK+. In a sense, though, it is not an independently-developed application. Instead, Gnote is a straightforward port of the original C# code to C++.
The point to be added is that it’s not about performance, which too is an advantage. There is a recurring theme in the pro-Mono blogs which portrays Gnote as just a matter of changing programming languages for the sake of it. Regardless of the real motivation, these people conveniently hide what matters to us a lot more: the issue of programmer control and legal control. If this is not a simple concept for Mono enthusiasts to grasp, then previous posts about Gnote and the Mono/FAT issue might be required reading [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. █
“I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue”
–Robert Scoble, former Microsoft evangelist
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05.03.09
Posted in News Roundup at 8:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The popular scripting language has become more versatile than ever before. Today, it’s not just the domain of Linux and Apache fans, even Windows users can enjoy its benefits. Here, we compare it on three platforms.
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That’s the number thrown out by mainframers when they talk about how many virtual Linux instances can be supported on IBM zSeries hardware. It’s not news that the zSeries runs Linux, but for most of us living in the distributed world of x86 servers, that fact has been treated like something of a curiosity. After all, the mainframe era pretty much ended in the 1970s, right? Wrong. While mainframes aren’t at the center of a modern computing environment, they still do certain things well, and their sales typically grow at least as fast as the national GDP. And let’s face it, if there are people out there who know how to run 800 VMs on a single set of hardware, they probably have something to teach us.
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Socket Mobile, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCKT), an innovative provider of mobile productivity products, today announced a partnership with embWiSe for the introduction of Linux and Nucleus® support for the new Socket Go Wi-Fi!® 802.11a/b/g SDIO.
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The Linux flight computer on board the rocket would evaluate all the sensor data and decide when to deploy the parachute. The parachute needed to be deployed in the five-second window when the rocket reached its peak altitude (apogee), slowed down and started to fall downward.
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ITS is pleased to offer a Red Hat Enterprise Linux download and patch management service to the Vanderbilt community. The offer provides employees and students with free access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.3 Desktop for use on personally owned systems.
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Belltown Media, Inc., publisher of the award-winning monthly magazine Linux Journal, has announced the winners of its annual Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards. The 2009 winners appear in the June issue, with awards presented to vendors and organizations in 36 categories, ranging from favorite version control system to favorite Linux laptop.
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Yesterday we shared the exciting news that an OpenVG state tracker was coming quite quickly to the Gallium3D architecture for providing hardware-acceleration to this 2D vector graphics drawing API commonly used with mobile devices. This hour the OpenVG 1.0 state tracker was committed to the Mesa code-base.
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I had the chance to met during the Solution Linux event a lot of very nice people, amongst them many persons from the team that build the Linutop, who are strong Open Source supporters.
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PBP: So, would you say Linux is harder to use than Windows, the same, or easier to use?
D: I guess it’s about the same to me really dude. I mean, its not like it’s rocket science. You just like, click on a button and look for whatever it is you want to do. Pretty much the same in both of them as far as I can tell. Although, I can say Lavender doesn’t get as harsh
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I know a fellow who, in his mid-60′s, has been using Windows for about 3 years, and still had no clue what I meant by “double-click,” “drag-and-drop,” or “select.” He already knew about double-clicking, but didn’t know what it was called. The notions of “copy-paste” and “clipboard” were totally foreign to him. (So is “don’t click that blind link,” but that is for someone else to explain. That battle is already being fought by those who actually have something to lose.)
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Kernel Space
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The 3rd Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, held this April 8-10 in San Francisco, left me surprised and in high spirits. Why you ask? Because although I am fully aware that the downturn the economy has taken is affecting both individuals and businesses alike across the board, it didn’t seem to have this effect on the summit this year – not in a lack of attendees, enthusiasm among the participants or spirit of the collaboration.
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Linux is simply a better operating system in so many respects that it doesn’t make sense to change. I am not going to trade the stability and security of Linux for the bug and virus world of Windows just so I can watch Netflix on demand. I think the logic of the naysayers is that this means I should just accept the situation as it stands. I see where they’re coming from, but that’s absolutely the wrong attitude, especially coming from other Linux or BSD users. Desktop Linux users are still a minority, sure; but what’s keeping it that way? Lack of support and compatibility is a big part of the reason; hardware, software, and service vendors locked in to Microsoft standards because they don’t see any reason not to be. And unless we stand up and demand to be counted, there will never be much reason for them to change.
I want to use the better OS, and I want to be acknowledged as an equal customer. If there is something you want from your business relationship that you’re not getting, you should ask for it. Maybe Netflix or AT&T might still decide not to offer it, but they will never offer it if they don’t know anyone wants it. So we should speak up.
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Applications
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Linux has been my primary Desktop for about 13 years now. As such I rarely have to pay for software. Open source is just awesome that way. Yet when I thought about it I have paid for Codeweavers Crossover Linux, despite the fact that its available for free as wine. I’ve also paid for Zend’s Studio for Eclipse even though much of the functionally is available in the PDT plugin for Eclipse. While I don’t do so currently, I’ve been known to pay for SuSE Linux and StarOffice.
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To me Digikam is one great example of the right way to steer the development of a complex application. The Digikam team are very good at understanding what a good digital photo management workflow is, and every release of Digikam advances both functionality and efficiency. They listen to users, and while it is impossible to please everyone, I think they’re doing a great job. The best FOSS projects have this blend of clueful leadership that has a sound, clear vision, and also knows how to listen to users.
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In this article I’ll include three ways to screencast your Linux desktop with the help of recordMyDesktop, XVidCap and Istanbul. These three applications are included in every major distribution.
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Mac/Linux
These have proved more difficult than expected, but we’re getting close. We expect to also be testing Mac and Linux versions of QUAKE LIVE internally this month and then making those publicly available just as soon as we feel they are ready. This work is being done by a separate programmer in parallel with the other work that we’re doing, and is his only priority – point being, that this is a top priority for us and not being delayed because of other work.
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Desktop Environments
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Another way that GNOME 3.0 should change is to completely rewrite what it means to be a desktop environment. Maybe the entire desktop need not be a desktop metaphor at all. The community has a lot of bright and creative people. I believe its time for the open source desktop community to bring the best minds together to create something completely new. The general interaction of using a mouse, keyboard, and in some circumstances, using ones hand through a touch screen, hasn’t changed in decades. Sure, some fancy 3D effects and such have been added, but the underlying metaphor has not changed. Maybe this isn’t possible in one large change. Maybe iterative design is the way to go. I hope I’m proven wrong.
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KDE
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Access to a lot of user-generated information offers a great way to provide online community support. This user-generated content comes from openDesktop.org right now and there is work going on integrating the KDE Forum as knowledge Base as well, so people can help each other via the web, and application developers transparently integrate this knowledge into applications and the desktop.
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Yakuake – Great terminal application
Yakuake is a very popular Quake-style terminal application which sits in the background unless it’s invoked with the (default) F12 global shortcut. It can inherit Konsole’s settings and it is probably the best alternative to Konsole. Just like Konsole, Yakuake supports full transparency effects, various colour schemes and backgrounds, middle-click paste and tabs. Definitely an essential tool.
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Now, I’ve been eloquent enough, and now I would like to grab opinion and ideas. Do you like it? Would you like to see it in 4.4? Do you think it’s a major improvement and/or sucks? Let’s gather some ideas so that I know where to work on 
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In my view, it has for a number of years now been the greatest failing of Linux: video editors have been a joke. No one who is serious about video editing could really be happy in the least with the sorry state of non-linear video editing apps. There have been some decent entry-level standard def programs, such as Kino. If you were masochistic enough to play along with the quirks and straight-jacketed file format limitations of Cinelerra, well, you could spend many happy months trying to get that to work. Sure there are some nice conversion utilities like Avidemux and Handbrake and (for you command line lovers) ffmpeg and mencoder. And high definition? Well, please just forget about it, unless you really like self-torture and inevitable failure and aggavation. Trying to edit 24p HDV in Cinelerra? Been there, done that, and have very little hair left for my trouble.
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So that’s IP geolocation, next step is to work on geolocation based on wireless access points. Two neat advantages of this:
i) Better coarse-level geolocation – record APs visible at home/in the office/parents’/etc., and be able to geolocate at least down to a few km from that.
ii) In a building with a whole bunch of visible APs, geolocation down to a few metres. And, unlike GPS, works indoors.
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That was one reason I never was happy with Mepis, but Mepis developers have changed from being based on Ubuntu, they are now based on Debian. So I tried it again and find it to be a fine fine Distro.
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Sabayon is a fairly popular Gentoo-based distribution which is generally said to target power-users instead of users who need user-friendliness. Sabayon Linux is developed by Fabio Erculian in Italy.
In this review, the normal Sabayon distro won’t be tested, but the recent Sabayon 4 Lite Media Center Edition Revision 2 will be reviewed. This edition is a distro which uses Gnome as the default DE, but also contains Fluxbox if wanting a lighter WM. And consists of XMCE to aggregate media center capabilities.
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The Gnome Partition Editor is not included in the Ubuntu base install, but all you have to do after installation is go to Synaptic and install gparted. That has been a standard step in my post-installation setup and configuration for a long time.
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* Mailbag
* Talkback
* 2-Cent Tips
* News Bytes, by Deividson Luiz Okopnik and Howard Dyckoff
* Command-Line Processing with ‘process-getopt’, by Bob Hepple
* New Options in the World of File Compression, by Brian Lindholm
A short history of compression; a comparison of gzip, bzip2, and 7-zip; and a pointer to some conversion software.
* Joey’s Notes: TCP Wrappers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, by Joey Prestia
Our monthly column of basic Linux advice and education
* XKCD, by Randall Munroe
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Fedora
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So you ask, who’s presenting. Well, check out the Fedora Classroom wiki page and find out. It looks to be fun and there should be something for everyone.
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Come by the Fedora Classroom tomorrow and get some free knowledge.
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I’m watching this video hosted by the Linux Foundation of a panel at the LF Collaboration Summit on why we want to measure community contribution. One of the issues that gets discussed is the need for better testing. In some ways, this is as important as code contributions itself.
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Ubuntu
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The latest Ubuntu release–code named Jaunty Jackalope–boots faster, shuts down faster, and includes numerous improvements that help it become even easier to use than before. If you like open-source software like Firefox, you owe it to yourself to see what an open-source operating system can do.
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If you have an existing collection of music files — as in, MP3s — be warned that MP3 playback is not installed by default in Ubuntu. It has to be added after the fact, since shipping the OS with MP3 codecs might run afoul of patent issues in some countries. The good news: if you try to play just such a file, Ubuntu will attempt to automatically detect what’s being played and offer to install the components needed.
The same goes for Flash support — nobody likes being stuck without their favorite YouTube videos! Click on a page that requires Flash in Firefox, and you’ll get a prompt at the top to install the needed plug-ins. Use the “Gnash” plug-in to get Flash going (be sure to restart Firefox after you install it), and for certain Flash-embedded videos that require multimedia codecs, you’ll be prompted to add the needed codecs in the same manner as when you try to play MP3s. Finally, you might need to restart any program that depends on such codecs after they’re installed, or they may not recognize that anything’s changed.
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The release of Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) on April 23 might have been the most celebrated open source operating system release to date — with 110 release parties taking place across the globe. But here’s the twist: This wasn’t the result of a corporate PR machine. Instead, the parties involved the efforts of individual Ubuntu community members.
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Phones
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Based on that, Specht is now suing Google and pretty much anyone who’s ever mentioned the possibility of partnering with Google and using the Android OS (over 40 companies are listed).
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Sub-notebooks
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Linux is fine, but it hasn’t had a powerful organization sponsoring it and promoting it to hardware vendors — until now. And from all appearances, Google is doing a fantastic job of promoting Android to hardware vendors of all stripes.
A relatively obscure Chinese netbook maker — Guangzhou Skytone Transmission Technologies — is about to set loose on the market an Android-powered netbook using an ARM processor chip, probably for under $200. And that’s just the beginning. An executive at ARM told Computerworld he expects to see 10 ARM-based netbooks later this year, and it’s a safe bet to assume many of those will also be using Android.
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What is interesting here is that Microsoft may not be the operating system of choice for the netbook. The article suggests that Google’s operating system may be the operating system of choice. If this happens, then it is possible that Microsoft will face pressure from the low cost end of the computing environment. And the risk to Microsoft is that the netbook will become “good enough” of a computer for enterprize just like so much of the consumer technology.
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Having learned from my prediction in 1984 that mainframes were on the verge of extinction, I know that PCs will be with us for years to come. But the future is a world where all sorts of appliances are used to get online and where applications and data usually live in the cloud with access through a browser. No one will consider it necessary to have a PC to go online. No one will be offline for very long.
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Palm is going release an inexpensive laptop running its new webOS, if an unconfirmed report from an industry analyst is correct.
The webOS is going to debut soon on the Palm Pre, a smartphone being released by Sprint. But Trip Chowdhry from Global Equities Research says Palm is also working on a netbook that will run this same operating system.
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The Open Source Index is a collection of rankings based on research at Georgia Tech. Recently, Red Hat made the findings available via this cool online web application. It might be arguable that Spain and France rank higher than Brazil (rank: 3) in government adoption of free software but the rankings show that large governments who could be doing amazing programs like the United States (rank: 28) are being beaten out by developing nations like Venezuela, Peru, South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam — even Costa Rica (population: 4 million).
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Pau Garcia-Mila founded three start-ups in Spain and is currently at the eyeOS Project board. He founded eyeOS in 2005 at the early age of 17 and was the youngest member of the ’08 Center for Entrepreneurial Learning student from the Judge Business School at Cambridge University in the UK.
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Richard Stallman is the poster boy for open source, and is viewed by many as nothing more than a nuisance. Why is this? He’s a bright man. Hired by IBM at an early age he wound up creating one of the first pre-processors for the IBM System/360. At some point, however, he discovered open source and began extolling its benefits. He even created the Copyleft and was the main writer of the GPL. With such a background, why is he considered nothing more than a raving mad man at times?
Not that I compare myself to RMS, but he and I have something in common. We are both very passionate about Linux and/or open source. So much so that we begin to see the hurdles and challenges of open source software as “features” or “part of the fun”. It’s easy to forget, when challenges are part of what make life a joy, that most people do not want challenges. Challenges make work harder and, therefore, less productive. But evangelists, nay, cheerleaders, are blinded to this.
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GIMP is good, GIMP is great, GIMP is what I use for all my image work.
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The sun rises in the east, the earth revolves around the sun, and an open source solution arrives when the business it serves has become fat and lazy. At least that’s how it used to go. That’s what happened in operating systems when Linux was born. That’s what happened in content management when Alfresco emerged as that industry’s open source entrant.
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Audio
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Ian Pratt is VP of Advanced Virtualization Prododucts at Citrix Systems, and the leader of the Xen program. Previously, he was a senior lecturer at University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge.
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This week on a belated Linux Outlaws: More political rants as the German government loses its last shreds of sanity, the Pirate Bay judge is implicated as a member of a copyright lobby organisation, Microsoft’s earnings take a drop and Fab previews Chromium on Linux even if he isn’t supposed to.
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‘Other’ Operating Systems
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On a whim, I installed the latest pre-release release of ReactOS today. I tried it a long time ago and had no luck whatsoever — black screens, nonbooting or just generalized irregular behavior — and so I rarely give it a thought.
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FreeBSD is just plain old good UNIX with rock solid networking stack. It is quite popular amongst hosting companies, ISPs, portals (such as Yahoo) and a few large financial institutions because of its reliability, robustness and performance.
A new version of the FreeBSD is scheduled for release next week (4-May-2009). A beta 2 was made available for download few weeks ago for final round of testing before the official launch
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The OpenBSD developers are channeling Tron to celebrate the release of version 4.5 of their open source operating system.
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Sun
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Second, for this to really work in light of Sun’s existing licensing commitments, Oracle would have to open source the database and communications components for Oracle Office. Since MySQL is well suited to the job and already open source, my guess is that the pros and cons of using it would then tilt in favor – meaning that my hypothetical Oracle Office would boost the MySQL community first by creating long term support commitments and secondly by putting it at the core of a lot of Exchange replacements.
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Every six months, Sun updates its Solaris 10 operating system to include bug fixes as well as feature updates. That continues to be the case, even though it’s likely to be the last release before Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) becomes acquired by Oracle.
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The number and gee-whizness of features Sun Microsystems is putting into updates to both the Solaris 10 commercial operating system and the related OpenSolaris development release of Solaris are slowing. That’s the best indication that Nevada – the code name for Solaris Next or Solaris 11 or whatever you want to call it – is getting closer to release.
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Project Renaissance of OpenOffice.org opened up proposals for “Access Functionality” design changes for its office suite on April 20, 2009. The Impress presentation application was chosen as the Guinea pig. Deadline for submissions is just around the corner: May 4, 2009.
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It has been a while since last talking about OpenSolaris 2009.06 at Phoronix, but this weekend we decided to fire up Sun’s latest build based upon the SXCE 111a build available from Genunix. Enclosed are a few screenshots and other information about this Sun community operating system that should be officially released within a month.
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FSF/GNU
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A new stable release of GNU sed, version 4.2, is available. GNU sed is the free software version of the UNIX stream editor, which is typically used to filter or manipulate files or streams of text non-interactively, for example, within shell scripts. The new version is the first to be released under the GPL version 3 .
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Government
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To date, 462 agencies from a total of 720 agencies have implemented Open Source Software, which managed to provide a savings of more than RM47 million, said Mampu deputy director of ICT (information and communications technology) policy and planning division, Tan King Ing.
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Licensing
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Will the FUDsters pick it up? Sadly I bet we will see some more FUD on how Firefox extensions open the same vulnerabilities that ActiveX does; how this is an example of Firefox not really being more secure than IE and so on. Firefox’s superior security has been a very effective point and devestating to IE, especially when mainstream respected sources flat out recommend switching to Firefox.
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Open (But No Source Code)
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Doctors tend to restrict their writing to journals that target their peers rather than to publications meant for consumption by the general public. For the most part, they have shunned Wikipedia, with its open editing policy. However, a recent study suggests that more professional participation on Wikipedia could be of great benefit to the public.
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Applications
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The international SchoolTool development team and the Shuttleworth Foundation are proud to announce the release of SchoolTool 1.0, a web-based open source student information system and calendar server for primary and secondary schools around the world.
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Every three years, the Copyright Office lets the public ask for exemptions to the DMCA’s tough anti-circumvention requirements. Ars talks to three people who will be fighting for your rights to crack DRM, starting tomorrow.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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Orlando police Chief Val Demings is threatening to sue one of her critics for creating a Web site that criticizes her performance.
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It would seem that George Orwell might have been more prophetic than we perhaps gave him credit for. Currently, our televisions cannot watch us, but at the rate things are progressing, it is only a matter of time. After all, most PCs now come with web cams and certainly 90% of cell phones.
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Nemertes Research has a history of putting out fear mongering reports about the coming bandwidth flood that will kill the internet. So I pretty much ignored the news that it had come out with another one, which the press is happy to report without any hint of skepticism (or noting that Nemertes is funded by telcos who stand to benefit from fears of a bandwidth glut).
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Government officials have been monitoring environmental campaign groups and then passing intelligence on to the police, according to documents seen by the Guardian.
An internal risk report from the Department for Transport reveals that a unit referred to as the comms directorate ”continuously monitor[ed]” peaceful protest groups opposed to the expansion of Heathrow airport and then briefed detectives about their findings.
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On both parts of the Telecoms Package, rapported by Malcolm Harbour (IMCO report) and Catherine Trautmann (ITRE report), agreements have been found with the Council of the EU to destroy or neutralize major protections of the citizens against graduated response, “net discrimination” and filtering of content on the Internet. There is little time left, but the Parliament has a last chance with the plenary vote on May 6th to reaffirm its commitment to protecting EU citizens.
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Time Warner Cable spent much of April pushing scary statistics about internet hogs, futilely attempting to convince the press and its eight million broadband customers that downloading was killing the company’s bottom line and would lead to internet Armageddon if its current buffet-style plan was not replaced with a pay-by-the-byte model.
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Copyrights
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While the entertainment industry still really seems to think that the disputed verdict in the Pirate Bay trial was a victory, most folks who can look beyond the immediate ruling have recognized what a horrific loss this has been for the industry. On the technology side, it’s done nothing of importance.
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Google is blocking searches originating from torrent sites using Google Custom Search to find .torrent files, according to TorrentFreak.com, a move the founder of the site calls “censorship.”
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You can waste an awful lot of energy and resources “fighting pirates” and losing, or you can focus on actually serving your customers and making money. Which seems more intelligent?
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This goes all the way back throughout history. One speaker pointed out that the big innovation of the 1909 copyright was compulsory licensing on mechanical rights. This was put into place for one reason: fear about player pianos and how they would dominate the market and destroy the need for musicians. Within a matter of decades, the player piano market was effectively gone… and yet, these massive changes designed solely to deal with the player piano have stuck around ever since. Now apply that same story to basically every other technological innovation, and that gets you copyright law.
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Plenty of folks have noted that the Justice Department has been the landing place for a number of RIAA lawyers. Some have suggested not to get too worked up about this, given that the Obama administration’s ethics rules supposedly forbade those lawyers from being involved in issues related to their former work.
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Having apparently been scared off illegal file sharing in large numbers by a new Swedish law that went into effect April 1, pirates in that country now have a new safe harbor to escape law enforcement.
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The well-known Swedish author Unni Drougge was so upset by the court verdict against the Pirate Bay that she uploaded a home-made audio book version of her best-selling new novel Boven i Mitt Drama Kallas Kärlek (The villan in my drama is called love) to the site, complete with a manifesto for free file sharing and a link to her Paypal account.
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According to the BBC, the film is set between The Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring, and “tells the story of Aragorn as he sets out to discover the truth about the Ring”.
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The move is not unexpected, given recent comments from Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Congressional panels as well as the demands from U.S. lobby groups.
Not finished: Bhaskar Chakravorti 01 (2004)
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