04.13.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Jolla
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The fifth update of Sailfish OS, called Sailfish OS 1.0.5.16 Paarlampi has been released, coming with both interesting new features and bug-fixes.
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Hello Jolla Enthusiasts. As you may know, Jolla is a project developed by former Nokia employees. The first Jolla smartphone is running on Sailfish OS, a modified Megoo Linux system, which is Android compatible, uses Wayland as the default display server , uses Nokia N9′s Maliit touchscreen keyboard and impressive hardware specifications.
WebOS
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It is a known fact that Palm’s mobile operating system dubbed webOS never really took off commercially. However, that is no indication that the team behind the OS did not have great ideas. In the latest, the team is rolling out its interesting (read: exciting) user interface ideas to the community. Known as Mochi, the project aims at the community to further work on it as the team was working on some intriguing ideas before HP decided to stall its plan for the same.
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A class action lawsuit filed in the wake of that decision in 2011 has now been settled by HP at the cost of $57 million. The plaintiffs are primarily pension funds and other institutional investors, whose anger stems from the dissonance between what HP was saying publicly and planning privately. Citing employees from within HP, the lawsuit alleges that the company didn’t have plans to build webOS PCs or printers until at least the beginning of 2013, which would have contradicted its bold claims about flooding the market with webOS hardware.
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It’s been almost three years since HP decided to scrap all of its webOS hardware and in that time some of the software has been released as an open source project, and much of the the webOS team has moved to LG to work on televisions.
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Firefox OS
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Firefox OS 2.0 plans include copy and paste support, a new mechanism for launching apps and switching among them, a more useful lock screen, a find-my phone system, and more. Those features will be crucial to the success of the nascent OS, which lags Android and iOS by years but which is critical to Mozilla’s continued relevance.
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The images display a new lockscreen, as well as new SMS interfaces and other features. It’s a flatter look, with more transparencies, among other changes. There’s also a view of the EverythingMe-based context-sensitive search function.
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Despite the fact that the newest Firefox OS version available on devices is Firefox OS 1.3, a preview of Firefox OS 2.0 is already available and it looks quite awesome, for an OS targeting low-range and mid-range devices.
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There have been a lot of interesting developments surrounding Mozilla’s Firefox OS platform and smartphones built on it. Mozilla made clear at the recent Mobile World Congress conference that it wants to seed a market for $25 phones based on the platform, putting smartphones in the hands of many people who haven’t owned mobile phones before. And, a while back, I covered Geeksphone’s concept for a high-end Firefox OS phone called Revolution that would purportedly run both Mozilla’s platform and Android. Now, the Geeksphone Revolution, an Android smartphone on which it is easy to install Firefox OS, has gone on sale in France, Germany and the U.K. Some reports say that it will also go on sale in Italy.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Swisscom
FireTV
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It’s interesting to note that, according to Koush, the APK is the “regular Android APK,” and can be used to mirror your Android phone with any other suitable Android device. As we all know, the Fire TV does run on Android and although, on the surface, it may not be immediately familiar to most Android users, its roots are the same and have allowed the app to work seamlessly.
Android TV
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Rumors of the impending sunsetting of Google TV have been around at least since September when Sony, Google’s most stalwart partner for its struggling, Android-based Google TV, announced a Bravia Smart Stick media player. Sony noted “Google services” but never mentioned Google TV. The trend was confirmed by several unnamed Google TV partners in an October report by GigaOM that cited the “Android TV” name. In December, when Marvell announced an Android 4.2.2-ready, Armada 1500 Plus SoC update to the official SoC of Google TV — the Armada 1500 — the Android TV term was used again.
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Leaked images of Google’s new Android TV user interface show a more streamlined and intuitive approach to the big screen than Google TV.
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The Verge reports that Google is getting ready to launch Android TV, a set top box based on Android that comes complete with apps and games. The new device is said to have an entertainment-focused interface, and it will be geared toward getting content in front of the user with three clicks or less. Such a product could prove to be a very tough competitor for Amazon’s Fire TV and the Apple TV. It looks like Google is declaring war on Apple and Amazon for control of the living room.
Android in Home-centric Form Factors
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Photographs serve as our best memories. Through good times and some great times, photographs stay with us etching our emotions deftly onto a little piece of paper. Over the years, photographs have gone a major transformation. Few years ago, taking a photo meant that you had some memory that you thought would be worth sharing. You took a picture and then kept it with you for the rest of your life. These days, taking a picture is all about getting the maximum likes on Facebook or Instagram. Oh, and there’s the bizarre trend of “selfies” that well, isn’t that cool as you might think.
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Laptops
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So the question is, what would Android need to do to make it a great laptop operating system? The biggest thing missing, in my opinion, is bringing great desktop apps to this OS through the same Play Store. Just like you install Chrome for smartphones, there should be an option to install Chrome Desktop for the same touchscreen devices—this app, however, would need to be made for keyboard usage.
Tablets
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If you want to be totally up-to-date, HP has the answer for you — though it will cost you a little bit. The company has stealthily launched the Slate 8 Pro Business edition, which is similar to the non-Business version save for one key difference: It runs the latest version of Android — 4.4, or KitKat.
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Nikon (Microsoft-taxed)
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Nikon has launched the Coolpix S810, which packs in all the technology Nikon is famous for along with the most popular operating for smart devices – Android. It is a simple point and shoot camera powered by Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean.
Samsung (Microsoft-taxed)
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Samsung Electronics will add two safeguards to its latest smartphone in an effort to deter rampant theft of the mobile devices nationwide, the company said Friday.
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Samsung Galaxy S5 is the fastest smartphone available in the market right now. Galaxy S5 has top of the line Qualcomm 2.5 GHz quad core Snapdragon 800 chipset along with 2GB of RAM. The internal storage include options for 16GB or 32GB expandable up to 64GB using microSD. It features a 5.1 inch Super AMOLED display with FULL HD resolution of 1920×1080. The smartphone is running the latest Android KitKat 4.4. Special features include fingerprint sensor, heart-rate monitor, health-centric apps and water- as well as dust-resistant body. The device is powered by a 3,000 mAh battery.
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The Gear Fit is the first wearable device from a major manufacturer to truly look like it’s come from the future, though its warm reception was colored by one universal complaint: the orientation of the screen. Displaying the time, messages, and all your health data horizontally makes the wrist-worn device somewhat awkward to read, but Samsung hasn’t been deaf to the criticism. The company’s issued a patch to enable vertical display orientation, making for a more familiar reading experience when consulting the fitness band. This could be a great boon in Korea — where the updated UI first appeared on Samsung’s official store blog — but the narrowness of the screen may pose a challenge when displaying longer pieces of text in the Latin alphabet.
Project Ara
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Just days before its first Project Ara Developer Conference is scheduled to begin, Google has released the device’s Module Developers Kit (MDK), a set of plans and documentation designed to get hardware hackers started building modules for the componentized, mix-and-match experimental smartphone.
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Google’s Project Ara is an effort to create a modular smartphone that’s cheap and ridiculously customizable. Want a new processor? Just pop out the old one and pop in a module with a new chip. Need long battery life but don’t care about removable storage? Just replace the microSD card module with an extra battery module.
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Security
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Disturbing reports about fake Android apps are nothing new, but the latest one involves an app called Virus Shield. It sold for $3.99 and promised to improve the security of Android devices. Unfortunately, as Android Police discovered, it actually did nothing at all except to fleece users of their hard earned money. The app has since been pulled from the Google Play store, but the damage has already been done.
Misc.
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Android 4.4.3, also known as KitKat MR2 (Android 4.4.1 and 4.4.2 are known as KitKat MR1), has entered the dogfooding stage and has started rolling out to 1% of Google employees outside of the Android team. Currently, the dogfooding rollout is limited to the supported Nexus line (Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7 2012, Nexus 7 2013, and Nexus 10), with GPE and Moto X updates to follow.
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It isn’t easy being an Android smartphone maker these days. Your flagship handsets are scrutinised for cutting-edge features, yet they’re criticised if these features seem to be unnecessary, or are unnecessarily complicated.
Ever faster multicore processors are sometimes deemed by reviewers to be faster than needed, with the trade-off between power consumption and responsiveness often cited. Higher-resolution screens can be dismissed, as there comes a point where pixel count goes beyond being a factor in smooth text and graphics rendition. What’s a manufacturer to do in the face of such criticism?
Chrome OS
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Chromebooks are also getting support for folders in launcher. What it means is that now, like Android, you can create folders and club your apps in a much organzied manner. Google has also implemented the “OK Google” search feature with the launcher and the voice search can be triggered with hotword “Ok Google”. Google has also implemented support for ‘Captive Portal’ which makes it easier for users when they try to connect to the wireless of cafes, hotels, airports, and other locations which requiers them to go to an authentication page.
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As Chromebooks–portable computers based on Google’s Chrome OS platform–continue to carve out a healthy niche for themselves, there are strong signs that we are soon going to see Chrome OS tablets. This, of course, has been in the rumor mill for some time. Last October, I reported on a developer-focused version of Chrome OS that included an on-screen keyboard, which of course would be ideal for use on a tablet. Now, the Chrome OS team has confirmed that the latest Stable Channel version of Chrome OS has such a keyboard, and it’s likely we’ll see tablets based on Google’s operating system soon.
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What I am trying to highlight from this post is that if you use a Chromebook you have given yourself a great chance to remain safe from viruses but it doesn’t mean you should go gung-ho and believe that you are invincible online.
Chrome
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It is unclear what they mean by ‘technical issue’ and how come Google has blocked the website. At the time of the writing, visitors are still presented with the malware warning message. Wired says it is waiting for Google chrome to remove the warning.
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Today’s Chrome Beta channel release includes a slew of new developer features to help you make richer, more compelling web content and apps, especially for mobile devices. Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to Chrome for Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS.
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Google Chrome, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, has been upgraded yet again, has just received a new update, promoting the 35 development branch to Beta.
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Google today released Chrome version 34 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version includes support for responsive images, an unprefixed version of the Web Audio API, and importing supervised users. You can update to the latest release now using the browser’s built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome.
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According to a lucky reader of ours, Google opened up a beta test for its Chrome Remote Desktop app on Android within the last few days. The beta is invite only at this time, with invites rolling out to those who “expressed interest” in helping Chrome improve their remote desktop client. Like the Chrome extension, this app does indeed give you remote access to your desktop computers, only this time through Android devices (both phones and tablets).
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Google officially released the Chrome 34 web-browser this afternoon and with it comes new features.
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The Google Chrome 35 development branch, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, has been upgraded yet again, but this time it’s only a very small update.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
MongoDB
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On Friday I tagged the newest release of my primary responsibility at MongoDB, the new C driver. The driver is split up into two libraries, libbson[1] and mongo-c-driver. It feels like a natural split, since there seems to be a lot of interest in BSON outside of MongoDB.
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OPEN SOURCE DATABASE MongoDB reached version 2.6 on Tuesday after a six month developer test.
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MongoDB has officially released the latest version of its namesake NoSQL database, which introduces a number of changes designed to make it simpler to manage and operate, as well as making it easier to add new features in future.
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NoSQL
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AppDynamics’ Spring 2014 Release includes new support for NoSQL Big Data stores including MongoDB and Hadoop, Couchbase and Cassandra through its extensible API framework.
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Database giant Oracle is attempting to create a NoSQL standards body, The Register has learned.
The puzzling move was disclosed to El Reg on Friday by multiple well-placed sources at multiple database companies, who were each familiar with the matter.
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NoSQL database platform company MarkLogic is having a successful period of growth and says that MarkLogic release 7 is marked out for its elasticity, tiered storage and semantics capabilities.
MySQL
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The products are based on MariaDB 10, which became generally available on Monday
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Four of the titans of hyperscale Web applications – Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter – have teamed up to create a set of common extensions aimed specifically at running the open source MySQL relational database at scale.
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There is something of a war of words (and code) going on between the NoSQL and SQL database camps.
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The latest release of MariaDB Enterprise removes the need to choose between different database technologies, says SkySQL
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For the next release of its open source MySQL, Oracle is making a number of changes designed to vastly boost the speed of the open source relational database management system.
Such a sizeable performance bump could help organizations save money in server purchases, because it would require fewer servers to run large jobs. Or, it will allow them to run complex queries that might have taken too long to run on earlier versions of the database system, said Tomas Ulin, Oracle vice president of MySQL engineering.
On Monday, the company released the latest development version of the software, MySQL Development Milestone 5.7.4, along with a number of associated programs for managing the database. The last major version of MySQL, version 5.6, was released in February 2013.
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London, United Kingdom – 31 March 2014 – The MariaDB Foundation, an independent body which promotes the popular open source database MariaDB, today announced the much-anticipated general availability of MariaDB 10, providing today’s generation of application developers with enhanced performance and functionality.
WebScaleSQL
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The open-source WebScaleSQL branch of MySQL 5.6 was announced by Facebook on Thursday, and uses version 2 of the GNU General Public License. Engineers from Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook have contributed to the project, although the group is inviting other interested parties to join as well.
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CitusDB. Oracle, PostgreSQL…
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CitusDB, a database analytics startup that is hoping to take on big boys like Oracle, today announced the release of CSTORE, a columnar store extension for PostgreSQL. The open-source tool, which the company says is the first for PostgreSQL, is available for a free download starting today.
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AMD has migrated terabytes of information from an Oracle Database installation to an Apache Hadoop stack, claiming Oracle’s pricey software was suffering from scaling issues.
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This is a guest post for Computer Weekly Open Source Insider written by Sandor Klein of EDB, a provider of enterprise-class products and services based on PostgreSQL.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Sharing textbooks
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These open-source textbooks have different features that electronic versions sold by traditional publishers
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Why not jump aboard the open source bandwagon since the world does seem to be moving in that general direction as well in tech matters? That is what the University of Maryland is currently considering, to make use of open source textbooks since textbooks happen to be the single fastest growing expense for college students, apart from the constant twin thorns of rent and cost of living. Many other universities too, are looking for a solution when it comes to textbooks, and the University of Maryland would not be the first to implement such an idea since both the University of California and the University of Washington have already kicked off programs to offer their students a catalog of free and freely available open source textbooks.
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Eben Upton is best known as the man behind the Raspberry Pi, a tiny, $25 computer designed to help turn kids into programmers. Upton priced it at $25 because he thought that’s around what an average textbook cost: “I now understand that’s an incorrect estimate. If we had a better idea of what school textbooks cost we would have had an easier job with the engineering over the years,” he joked to Wired years later.
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Fed up with academic textbooks making constant but minor updates, adding unnecessary chapters and providing unwanted worksheets, Scott Roberts was desperate for a new way to teach his PSYC 100: Introduction to Psychology class.
In the fall of 2010, he found a solution that not only relieved his frustrations but also saved his students money.
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Holding a whiteboard, the University of Maryland-College Park students scrawled their complaints and posed for a picture.
“My name is Justin and I spent $114 on ONE textbook,” a student wrote. “My name is Jeff and I spent $736 on textbooks,” wrote another.
Academia
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Last month marked the one-year anniversary of the formation of the Readium Foundation (Readium.org), an independent nonprofit launched in March 2013 with the objective of developing commercial-grade open source publishing technology software. The overall goal of Readium.org is to accelerate adoption of ePub 3, HTML5, and the Open Web Platform by the digital publishing industry to help realize the full potential of open-standards-based interoperability. More specifically, the aim is to raise the bar for ePub 3 support across the industry so that ePub maintains its position as the standard distribution format for e-books and expands its reach to include other types of digital publications.
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We’ve been talking a lot about the power and importance of open access for academic (and especially government funded) research. More and more universities have agreed, with some even having general open access policies for their academics, requiring them to release research under open access policies. This makes sense, because one of the key aspects of education and knowledge is the ability to share it freely and to build on the work of others. Without open access, this is made much more difficult. So it’s immensely troubling to discover that one of the biggest science publishers out there, Nature Publishing Group, has started telling academics that they need to get a “waiver” from their university’s open access policies. The issue was raised by Duke’s Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith, though it’s likely happening at other universities as well:
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In the latest skirmish between academia and publishers over the costs of academic journals, the University of Konstanz in Germany has broken off negotiations over a new licensing agreement with the scientific publisher Elsevier. The publisher’s prices are too high, said university Rector Ulrich Rüdiger in a statement, and the institution “will no longer keep up with this aggressive pricing policy and will not support such an approach.”
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Deregulation
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…war has become an extension of politics as almost all aspects of society have been transformed into a combat zone.
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US
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Oh, and during that same week the FBI, the New York state attorney general’s office and the U.S. Department of Justice all coincidentally announced investigations into the potential improprieties and fraud associated with the topic of Lewis’ book, “high-frequency trading.” When Michael Lewis appears on “60 Minutes” and declares that the U.S. stock market “is rigged,” people pay attention.
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In the heart of New York, a forbidden island houses the corpses of America’s poor, homeless, addicted and abandoned – their graves dug by convicts – creating a landfill of poor people.
Every year, nearly 1,500 fresh corpses of America’s forgotten souls arrive for internment on this lonely island, says visual artist Melinda Hunt, who heads the Hart Island Project, which campaigns to make the cemetery visible and accessible.
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An examination of every score that Chicago students earned on state-mandated standardized tests last year reveals that charter schools — which Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) has been promoting — don’t perform any better than traditional public schools.
Workers’ Welfare/Basic Income
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New labour laws in France protect workers from responding to emails after 6pm, and a trial in Sweden is reducing work hours to just 30 hours a week. Do these initiatives sound like a good idea to you? Or what changes could help improve your work-life balance?
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Gothenburg’s public sector employees will have their working hours reduced while being kept on the same pay in effort to create a healthier, happier and cheaper workforce
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The inventor of the American suburban shopping mall was a socialist. Could his creation have been saved?
Protest
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Unions in Greece have called a national walkout in protest at its austerity measures, as Athens prepares to hold its first long-term bond sale since its debt crisis erupted
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At least 80 people – both police and protesters – have been injured as street battles broke out in Rome, with rocks being flung and police deploying pepper spray. Thousands took to the street to march against austerity measures.
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Officer Grantley Bovell alleges Cecily McMillan assaulted him on same day Austin Guest alleges Bovell injured him
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Climate Change
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In an earlier opinion piece, I characterized many otherwise caring folks who truly worry about the earth’s survival as “capitalism deniers” because of their unwillingness to utter the “C” word. This, despite the fact that blame for environmental degradation lies squarely with our growth-and-profit-at-any-cost economic system. The system’s apologists exist within and outside government and they will never be the solution.
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Sealife/Pollution
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There’s a ton of trash in the Indian Ocean.
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The UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ordered Japan to halt its Antarctic whaling program as it violates a moratorium on commercial whaling (which is in place since 1986). The court ruled that the whaling program was not for scientific research as claimed by the Japanese government.
Oilsands
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Journalist Dan Grossman and photographer Alex MacLean are in the middle of their week long tour of the Alberta oilsands. Their on-the-scene reporting is meant to bring greater public attention to the scale – and the stakes – of developing oil from the world’s largest deposit of carbon-intensive bitumen.
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Fracking/Gas
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Sparse public data on onshore oil and gas drilling makes full extent of failures in hydrocarbon wells unknown, experts say
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The way to beat Vladimir Putin is to flood the European market with fracked-in-the-USA natural gas, or so the industry would have us believe. As part of escalating anti-Russian hysteria, two bills have been introduced into the US Congress – one in the House of Representatives (H.R. 6), one in the Senate (S. 2083) – that attempt to fast-track liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, all in the name of helping Europe to wean itself from Putin’s fossil fuels, and enhancing US national security.
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Geologists have for the first time linked earthquakes deep under Ohio’s Appalachian Mountains to hydraulic fracturing, leading the state to issue strict permit conditions Friday on the gas extraction process.
Researchers found that five small tremors last month near Youngstown, Ohio were likely the result of the injection of sand and water that occurs during the hydraulic fracturing — or “fracking” — process, the Associated Press reports. Fracking involves injecting rocks with pressurized water or other liquids in an effort to extract gas which can be turned into usable fuel.
Because the geology of each shale formation is different, the discovery in Ohio may not apply everywhere across the country. However, other instances of fracking causing small earthquakes have been recorded elsewhere, including in Oklahoma, England and British Columbia, Canada.
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After his recent meeting with EU leaders Obama issued the incredible statement that the secret Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) that is being secretly negotiated behind closed doors by the major private multinational companies would make it easier for the United States to export gas to Europe and help it reduce its dependency on Russian energy: “Once we have a trade agreement in place, export licenses for projects for liquefied natural gas destined to Europe would be much easier, something that is obviously relevant in today’s geopolitical environment,” Obama stated.
That bit of political opportunism to try to push the stalled TTIP talks by playing on EU fears of Russian gas loss after the US-orchestrated Ukraine coup of February 22, ignores the fact that the problem in getting US shale gas to the EU does not lie in easier LNG licensing procedures in the USA and EU.
In other recent statements, referring to the recent boom in unconventional US shale gas, Obama and Kerry have both stated the US could more than replace all Russian gas to the EU, an outright lie based on physical realities. At his Brussels meeting Obama told EU leaders they should import shale gas from the US to replace Russian. There is a huge problem with that.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
DRM
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Keurig’s next generation of coffee machines will have a way to prevent any coffee not licensed by Keurig from brewing in the machine as early as this fall. Locking down a thing like coffee seems both trifling and difficult to accomplish—no one has yet described how Keurig can differentiate its own pods enough so that its machines would honor those pods and only those pods.
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Censorship and Links
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Payday lender Wonga has forced Twitter to take down a user’s parody advert by making a copyright claim.
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Megaupload
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Just three days after the Motion Picture Association of America brought a civil lawsuit against Megaupload, the Recording Industry Association of America has jumped in with its own case.
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Hypocrisy
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Every month, reports condemn the general public for downloading movies and TV shows without permission, but perhaps those industries need to look a little closer to home. A new survey among film industry professionals suggests that almost 40% have downloaded movies and TV shows illegally.
Internet
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There’s a European Election coming up. Voting starts in about one month, with the main election days on May 22-25. We’ve had many victories as activists and concerned citizens in the past five years to defend the net and its liberty, but the main showdown looks like it’ll come down in the next five years. Your vote is going to matter.
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On April 4th, 1994, Mosaic Communications Corporation was officially incorporated as a going concern. If you don’t recognize the name, that’s because the company would eventually change its name to Netscape Communications Corporation when the University of Illinois (which owned the trademark on the name Mosaic) threatened legal action.
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As the European Commission clearly stated in its Communication on Internet Policy and Governance of 12 February 2014, conflicting visions on the future of the Internet and on how to strengthen its multistakeholder governance in a sustainable manner have intensified recently. The next two years will be critical in redrawing the global map of Internet governance. Europe must contribute to finding a credible way forward for global internet governance; it must play a strong role in defining how the internet is run and ensuring it remains a single, un-fragmented network.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Voting/Government
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After spending tens of millions of dollars in recent years on ineffective voting systems, California election officials are planning to experiment with an “open source” system that may prove to be the cure-all for secure, accessible balloting – or just another expensive failure.
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ARM
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Sensor algorithm software company Sensor Platforms Inc. (SPI) is getting into the open-source movement by transforming its internal sensor platform into an open-source platform for sensor hubs. SPI’s Open Sensor Platform (OSP) is aimed at simplifying sensor hubs and data collection, and ARM is on board with the plan.
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Printers
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Guns don’t kill people, people kill people is what guns advocates say. But the guns, well, the guns do play an essential role in killing people. How much blame to place on objects of design is at the heart of MoMA’s Design and Violence ongoing online exhibition and was the subject of the series’ first debate.
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For those not in this niche of hobbies, embroidering your favorite image on something isn’t as simple as grabbing a crappy jpeg off the website and telling the machine “go.” You need an embroidery file, and making that file is called “digitizing.” It’s best to start with vector art, and then you need to understand things like stitch types and when the thread should be trimmed. It takes some effort to learn (like any skill), but to get better at it means sitting in front of that computer with the dongles in it. And with my travel schedule, let’s just say that doesn’t happen very often. I’m excited that now I can have the design software on my Linux laptop and work on digitizing anything anytime I want, whether I’m in an airport or a hotel or a beanbag in my house.
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A new type of open source 3D printer called the Mamba3D has been unveiled this week and its creators MyMatics are shortly set to launch a new Kickstarter crowd funding campaign to help construct the first Mamba3D 3D printers.
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Beehives
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With the help of Open Source Beehives, a do-it-yourself apiary kit, you can build a hive that encourages healthy bees. The hive comes with a sensor system that collects data so that you can keep an eye on the bees in real time.
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NASA
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NASA says it will publicly releases code for many of the systems the space organization has used through the years making your DIY satellite now closer than ever.
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By that time, the code was little more than a novelty. But in recent years, the space agency has built all sorts of other software that is still on the cutting edge. And as it turns out, like the Apollo 11 code, much of this NASA software is available for public use, meaning anyone can download it and run it and adapt it for free. You can even use it in commercial products.
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Robotics
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“The Glaucus, named after the Blue Sea Slug (Glaucus Atlanticus), is an open source soft robotic quadruped from Super-Releaser { http://superreleaser.com }. It is a proof of concept for a method developed at Super-Releaser that can reproduce nearly any geometry modeled on the computer as a seamless silicone skin. The company hopes to apply these same techniques to practical problems in medicine and engineering as the technology develops.
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There isn’t an engineer out there who hasn’t, at one point, wanted a robotic arm. Unfortunately, they’re quite costly. Dan Royer from Marginally Clever, however, has released an open-source 3DOF robotic arm that is sure to get many excited.
Drug Discovery
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India’s Open Source Drug Discovery programme is struggling for lack of expertise and a research ecosystem. However, the programme’s real contribution may be the creation of just such an ecosystem
Starck/Furniture
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…downloaded as data to be 3D printed at home.
Misc.
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If you don’t have a garden or a balcony but fancy growing your own herbs and vegetables you might be interested in a new smart indoor greenhouse called MEG, which has been launched over on the Kickstarter crowd funding website.
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In the open source community, we know the value of collaboration. It’s at the core of everything we do. Some of us are lucky to work for organizations that understand and embrace the power of collaboration. Yet, the silo mentality runs rampant in many organizations where collaboration and internal crowdsourcing is not valued. (Opensource.com readers who are pursuing open source projects on the side, but spend their days working at companies with silos are likely very familiar with this).
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This is especially relevant to software. When we forget to provide software freedom, a collaborative project becomes just another crowdsourced project. This isn’t just a matter of philosophy — it affects the degree and quality of collaboration too. A crowdfunded project will have to be created and maintained solely by the recipient of the funds, even if they claim to be creating an “open community”. Open source is unlocked by the equality of all participants in a given community. When that equality is constrained, the network effect that delivers the benefits the initiator is seeking will be inhibited.
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Though they’re on a trajectory without a clear future, their vision is crystal. To share what they’ve created with the world and allow the natural course of innovation and invention to change lives—without the obstacles of patents and the barriers of cost.
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There are a good number of nice programmable DIY guitar pedals out there. So, the pedalSHIELD is nothing new, except for the fact that I think we’ve strived harder than the rest to keep the project open, simple, supported, and affordable. The idea was to design a platform for Arduino users to learn about digital signal processing, effects, and synthesizers—also to experiment without a deep knowledge in electronics or programming.
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Skirmos Takes Laser Tag To The Next Level By Going Open SourceLaser tag is something that we might have played before in the past. The premise of laser tag is simple: aim for the enemy, pull the trigger, score some points. However a Kickstarter project b y the name of Skirmos is hoping to take a relatively simple game like laser tag to the next level by making it an open source project.
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