05.02.10
Posted in Mail, Microsoft, Novell, Vista 7, Windows at 4:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“[The partnership with Microsoft is] going very well insofar as we originally agreed to co-operate on three distinct projects and now we’re working on nine projects and there’s a good list of 19 other projects that we plan to co-operate on.”
–Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO
Summary: “Everything Microsoft” inside Novell SecureLogin 7.0 SP1; Novell’s own installbase on Windows continues to decline
BASED on new posts such as this one, it is easy to see why Novell develops and promotes Mono and Moonlight while occasionally boosting Vista 7. Here are the latest SecureLogin “enhancements”:
The new enhancements include:
* Next-generation integration wizard for faster application enablement and a shorter, error-free deployment
* Support for .NET applications, Winforms & WPF
* Support for Microsoft Windows 7 (32 & 64 bit)
* Support for Citrix XenApp 5
Judging by the above, Novell is not much of a GNU/Linux company. It’s not.
Novell’s loss of big clients has been covered by the following sources over the past week:
IDG: Oregon Schools To Use Google Apps–And Why Microsoft Should Worry (more here and here)
The City of Los Angeles recently announced plans to migrate its 30,000 employees from Novell GroupWise to Google’s collaborative suite.
The Inquirer: Los Angeles snubs Microsoft for Google
The city has been using Novell Groupwise collaboration software but has found that its mailbox sizes are too small for its needs.
Washington Technology: The City of Angels soars into a cloud
The companies are building a cloud e-mail system to replace the existing Novell GroupWise service for the city’s municipal agencies using Google’s suite of Web-based productivity tools.
The Ithacan: ITS to switch campus server from Novell
Information Technology Services is putting the final touches on plans to migrate student and faculty users off the Novell network operating system onto a new system, making campus computer use more efficient.
As long as Novell loses business, a sale of Novell becomes more inevitable. The worth of Novell keeps declining though. The workforce is also being moved to India and to the far east. Sandeep Menon, Novell’s Country Head in India, was speaking to the Indian press some days ago, but this issue did not come up. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 4:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Original photo by Matthew Yohe, modified by Techrights for humour
Summary: Apple and Microsoft share tactical moves in their fight against common enemies, notably Linux and disablers of software patents
Increasing amounts of analysis and interpretation, not just anecdotal evidence, may suggest a correlation between Apple’s action against HTC/Android and Microsoft’s action against HTC/Android. At the very least, Apple and Microsoft fight against the freedom of software and the low cost which hits proprietary software’s business paradigms at their very core (no software acquisition costs, as opposed to costs associated with services and no revenue from patents on codecs for example).
Yesterday we wrote about Apple shutting down Lala shortly after acquiring it. We explained that it could have something to do with Apple's relationships inside the copyright cartel. Apple is also promoting software patents and working against Ogg Theora. Hugo Roy’s open letter, which shows this rather clearly, has just received a lot of attention, starting with his blog post that reached Slashdot.
May I remind you that H.264 is not an open standard? This video codec is covered by patents, and “vendors and commercial users of products which make use of H.264/AVC are expected to pay patent licensing royalties for the patented technology” (ref). This is why Mozilla Firefox and Opera have not adopted this video codec for their HTML5 implementation, and decided to chose Theora as a sustainable and open alternative.
[...]
From: Steve Jobs
To: Hugo Roy
Subject: Re:Open letter to Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash
Date 30/04/2010 15:21:17
All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.
Sent from my iPad
Since it was an open letter, I think I have the right to publish his answer.
Xiph already has a response about Apple: “It would only strengthen the pushback against software patents and add to Apple’s increasing PR mess.”
To quote more fully:
Here is Montgomery’s response:
Thomson Multimedia made their first veiled patent threats against Vorbis almost ten years ago. MPEG-LA has been rumbling for the past few years. Maybe this time it will actually come to something, but it hasn’t yet. I’ll get worried when the lawyers advise me to; i.e., not yet.
The MPEG-LA has insinuated for some time that it is impossible to build any video codec without infringing on at least some of their patents. That is, they assert they have a monopoly on all digital video compression technology, period, and it is illegal to even attempt to compete with them. Of course, they’ve been careful not to say quite exactly that.
If Jobs’s email is genuine, this is a powerful public gaffe (‘All video codecs are covered by patents.’) He’d be confirming MPEG’s assertion in plain language anyone can understand. It would only strengthen the pushback against software patents and add to Apple’s increasing PR mess. Macbooks and iPads may be pretty sweet, but creative individuals don’t really like to give their business to jackbooted thugs.
The FFII’s president says that “MPEGLA will go after Theora, Apple and Microsoft, along with a host of tech companies, are also members of MPEGLA” (MPEG-LA's CEO Larry Horn is a patent troll who extorts 'on the side').
Here is some of the press coverage about the implicit threat from Steve Jobs:
• Steve Jobs: mystery patent pool to attack Ogg Theora
• Patent Pool to Thwart Open Source Codecs
• Apple May Be Gunning for Open Source Codecs
• Patent challenge looming for open-source codecs?
If authentic, a new e-mail from Steve Jobs indicates that Apple and Microsoft–of all bedfellows–could be preparing to challenge the validity of open-source video codecs.
Jobs’ e-mail to Hugo Roy of the Free Software Foundation Europe, coupled with a similarly worded announcement from Microsoft on Friday, is a shot across the bow of backers of the open-source Ogg Theora video codec, used by Mozilla to bring HTML5 video technology to Firefox. Both Apple and Microsoft plan to use the h.264 codec in their HTML5 strategy, which is governed by a licensing body called MPEG LA. Apple and Microsoft, along with a host of tech companies, are also members of that group.
On a separate note, Apple’s (or Steve Jobs’) hypocrisy which we mentioned the other day is being exposed and criticised in Ars Technica which writes:
Pot, meet kettle: a response to Steve Jobs’ letter on Flash
[...]
Part of the reason why Flash and iPhone OS are proprietary is that Adobe and Apple agreed to the terms of the H.264 patent license. H.264, despite Jobs’s claim, is not a free standard—patents necessary to implement it are held by a group that requires all users to agree to a license with restrictive terms. Those terms have previously even been unavailable for examination online. We are publishing them on fsf.org today in order to comment on their unethical restrictions. The fact that H.264 is a commonly used standard does not make it a free standard—the terms of its use are what matter, and they require all licensed software to include the following notice:
THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER TO (I) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD (“AVC VIDEO”) AND/OR (II) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM
You’ll find similar language in the license agreements of Final Cut Studio, Google Chrome, Mac OS X, and Windows 7.
A Red Hat-run Web site covered this conundrum and so did another which went with the headline: “Meet the Hypocrites: Steve Jobs”
That led to the following paragraph:
Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
Notice anything curious about that paragraph? It’s a perfect description of Apple’s own business practices! Just replace “Adobe” and “Flash” with “Apple” and “iPhone”, “iPad”, “iPod/iTunes”, or “Mac” and you get a nicely worded four sentence critique of Jobs’ own company. Seriously… How can Jobs talk about openness when his notoriously secretive company is not only hypocritically on the warpath against Adobe, but recently goaded police into initiating a criminal investigation over the disappearance of Apple’s fourth generation iPhone prototype, which was lost by one of Jobs’ own employees!?
For some background about this, see [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. Apple has spin on the sin.
Adobe is already drifting towards Linux by “giving employees Android phones with Flash,” according to Apple Insider.
Following Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ public attack on Flash this week, Adobe is now reportedly planning to give its employees Android phones running Flash.
Three sources familiar with Adobe’s plans told CNet that Adobe plans to give its employees mobile phones powered by Google’s Android mobile operating system, and running a new mobile version of Flash created for the platform. Adobe reportedly has not yet decided which Android phone it will give its employees, though “various HTC phones and the Nexus One” were specifically mentioned.
A reader of ours wrote just to say that “Adobe responds to Apple on Flash” and that it “Just goes to show what happens when you do business with a closed source company.” From the BBC he quotes a report which says that “Adobe confirms plans to move away from Apple” and in it Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is quoted as saying that “when you resort to licensing language” to restrict development, it has “nothing to do with technology”.
“Our view of the world is multi-platform.”
–Adobe CEO Shantanu NarayenFurther it says: “He said it was now “cumbersome” for developers who were forced to have “two workflows”.
“Mr Narayen said the problems highlighted by Mr Jobs were “a smokescreen”.
“He added that if Flash crashed Apple products it was something “to do with the Apple operating system”.
“He said he found it “amusing” that Mr Jobs thought that Flash was a closed platform.
“”We have different views of the world,” Mr Narayan told the Wall Street Journal. “Our view of the world is multi-platform.””
Our reader also made us aware that “Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 shuns open video”, which shows quite clearly that Microsoft’s ‘embrace’ of HTML5 was an embrace, extend, and extinguish move (who didn’t see that coming?). Microsoft may have embraced <video> only to ensure that Theora is not supported in it. For shame, Microsoft. Apple does the same thing and it's not surprising. Here is Microsoft’s spin in Slashdot and the original post that says:
H.264 is an industry standard, with broad and strong hardware support.
Define “industry standard”. What about software patents?
Our reader has insisted that Microsoft merely embraces “open ‘standards’ [with scare quote]” and that “Microsoft [is] yet again playing the ‘open standards’ shuffle.” He argues that Microsoft is more or less saying: “You can use our open codecs but only on our closed proprietary system, and as long as you pay us our royalties.”
“Microsoft [is] yet again playing the ‘open standards’ shuffle.”
–Anonymous readerApple and Microsoft are very much together in this. To them, Free software is a common enemy which is very strong and at the very least forces Microsoft and Apple to keep their prices down.
Here is a new article titled “In Mobile Video Standards Fight, Consumers Are Poised to Lose” and signs that Korea finally learns its lessons from ActiveX [1, 2] and moves further away from Internet Explorer, which does not support Theora, either. From Mozilla we learn:
For those of you who have followed my blog, you know that it has been 3 years since I first reported on the fact that Korea does not use SSL for secure transactions over the Interent but instead a PKI mechanism that limits users to the Windows OS and Internet Explorer as a browser. Nothing fundamentally has changed but there are new pressures on the status quo that may break open South Korean for competition in the browser market in the future.
[...]
Dr. Keechang Kim of Korea University has been working tirelessly for many years to try to change the status quo in Korea around browsers and the reliance on a PKI mechanism that is tied to one platform. With concern being raised by different parts of the Korean government, including the Korean Communications Commission as well as the Office of the President of Korea, Keechang has gathered a very interesting panel of presentations for April 29th in Seoul. The panelists will be addressing the (Korean) Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) which is the regulatory body in Korea that is currently mandating the PKI mechanism that is in place today (which requires Active-X, etc.) Unless the FSS relaxes or changes their regulations, Korean banks cannot offer other mechanisms for Korean users to bank online, etc. In short, unless the FSS changes their stance, nothing will change in Korea.
[...]
Thank you to Keechang and everyone in the OpenWeb.or.kr community for your tireless efforts to try to break open the Korean market. Thank you also to Channy Yun who has put aside his own schedule in order to participate and guide Lucas in Seoul. There is still a long road to walk to an open, competitive market in S. Korea for browsers, but I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Speaking of security, Netcraft writes about security issues and points out that “Windows users are vulnerable to flaw in Java Web Start”. Korea ought to change its preferred platform too.
One might argue that Apple’s big sin here is that it’s greedy and that the same applies to Microsoft. But in fact, both companies misbehave in ways that go beyond this. “Boycott Apple,” says a new headline from LinuxToday’s editor, stating the case against Apple for its abuse of bloggers.
This is an abuse of police powers, an exercise in intimidation. The message is clear: annoy Apple, and Apple will crush you like a bug. A more appropriate response would have been dueling lawyers firing subpoenas at each other and racking up the appropriate number of billable hours. The most appropriate response would have been “Oops, we goofed, we let one of our trade secrets out, we need to be more careful.”
Trade secrets are exposed all the time. Execs lose things. Employees blab. Some journalists feel it is beneath their dignity to take advantage of such lapses. But it is not our job to protect their trade secrets, and especially not in this era of intellectual property madness where the balance of power is tipped heavily into the hands of big business, and every last little thing that displeases the corporate overlords is criminalized.
[...]
At best, in my un-legal but common-sense opinion, this is a minor civil matter, and surely not a criminal case that warrants a door-busting raid and possible felony charges. Both Mr. Hogan and Mr. Chen face possible felony charges, which is utterly insane.
Attacking messengers seems to be Apple’s unofficial way out of it after it bullied Gizmodo and received bad press (context below). █
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Posted in Apple, Europe, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 2:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft may have actually threatened to sue HTC in order to sign a patent deal covering Android for unnamed patents
“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, sue,” said Canonical’s COO Matt Asay. Further he said: “This is the clearest indication of MS’s irrelevance: it’s now the hapless litigant” (whose products are being cancelled, Courier being the latest example).
He said pretty much the same thing about Apple when it sued HTC.
Florian wrote about Microsoft software patents in Europe, alluding to the bizarre new decision regarding FAT (at the core of the TomTom lawsuit).
Last week the Federal Court of Justice of Germany upheld a Microsoft patent related to the Windows file system named File Allocation Table (FAT). As H-Online mentioned in this context, European software patent critics dread the notion that rulings such as that one could elevate the status of software patents in Europe, where different national courts have different approaches to how to interpret the European Patent Convention and its exclusion of patents on “programs for computers [as such]“.
So Microsoft has just gone after HTC. Some articles suggest that there was a settlement and therefore a possibility that Microsoft threatened to sue in order to sign a patent deal (like in Melco’s case).
Some more thoughts about the HTC settlement have come from various influential GNU/Linux users, some of whom wait for software patents to be ultimately abolished.
I believe Bilski will be decided this year and software patents may be kicked into the garbage heap where they belong.
The other day we wrote about Klausner's latest round of patent trolling (against HTC). Here is another interesting perspective about what Apple and Microsoft did to HTC (and to Android by inference).
Microsoft claims that the Linux operating system infringes 235 Microsoft patents, and Android, which is Linux-based, violates Microsoft patents, too. Microsoft has convinced HTC to pay royalties for the alleged Microsoft technology in Google’s operating system.
Why would HTC do that?
Well, Apple is suing HTC for violating 20 Apple patents covering a wide range of technologies. One theory is that with both Microsoft and Apple claiming patent infringement, HTC has to pick sides. It chose Microsoft because the company also makes a wide variety of devices that run Microsoft operating systems. Because it has an extensive relationship with Microsoft, and none with Apple, choosing to work with Microsoft solves its Apple problem. In court, apparently HTC will be able to say that it’s already licensing the technology Apple claims as its own, but from Microsoft. That would imply that Apple’s beef is really with Microsoft, not with HTC. Case closed!
Can anyone confirm that Microsoft pressured and intimidated HTC (with a lawsuit) in order to sign that latest extortion deal [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]? Microsoft tried to paint it as something signed in good faith, but it’s beginning to seem doubtful. █
Update: Florian wishes to correct that last reference by saying (via E-mail):
The “interesting perspective” you quote from the Datamation article on HTC is actually legally wrong. I’ve already contacted the author of that article and here’s the information for you as well:
Every patent stands on its own. Every patent is a little monopoly. So if Apple has some patents that read on HTC’s software, HTC can’t defend itself in court by saying it has a license from Microsoft. That’s legally impossible as a defense. Not only is it very likely that Apple’s patents read on different features (touchscreen etc.) than Microsoft’s patents (there may be some overlap but it’s just impossible that two such large players would have 100% overlapping patent portfolios), but even if that unrealistic scenario of both patent portfolios covering the same functionality that HTC needs was the case, then that still wouldn’t change anything about the monopoly rights connected to each single patent. If Apple has a patent on, say, selecting a menu on a touchscreen and Microsoft has one as well, and if there aren’t differences in the details of the “methods taught”, the fact that there are two patents on the same thing doesn’t mean you get a license to one of them and don’t need the other. Instead, it would have to be sorted out whether one of those patents is prior art based on which the other (newer) patent could be invalidated. Only in that case would it be sufficient to obtain only one patent license.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Patents at 2:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: 4 new items covering the absurdity of the patent system and resentment against it
• A conference on software patents and free software (Jonathan Corbet went to the University of Colorado to study these issues)
A survey was done back in 2008, with 15,000 surveys sent out to a large number of firms. 1,333 of them – representing over 700 companies – came back. The numbers that came out were interesting, if arguably unsurprising.
According to this survey, 65% of software companies have no interest in software patents; they do not see patents as an important part of doing business. That compares with 82% of non-software companies which said they were working toward the acquisition of patents. It is worth noting that companies with venture capital backing had a higher level of interest in software patents than those without.
• Film, new media and music featured at Connecticut Film Festival workshops (the film “Patent Absurdity” was already mentioned in [1, 2 3, 4, 5])
The Connecticut Film Festival will also feature the world premiere of the film “Patent Absurdity,” which explores the case of software patents and the history of judicial activism that led to their rise, and argues that programmers are finding it increasingly difficult to write programs for which they won’t be liable to be sued.
• Amazon Patents Selling Used Goods At Starbucks, Barnes & Noble Or Other Locations (we have a new reference page about Amazon)
theodp writes “Having already been burned by Amazon’s 1-Click patent, one imagines Barnes & Noble will be fuming to learn that the USPTO granted Amazon a patent Tuesday covering the use of Barnes and Noble’s physical stores to fulfill orders placed for used goods on Amazon. The e-tailer was awarded U.S. Patent No. 7,702,545 for its System and Method for Facilitating Exchanges Between Buyers and Sellers, legal-speak for arranging a place to meet to exchange cash for used goods ordered online. From the patent: ‘In an exemplary embodiment, buyers and sellers are permitted to designate exchange locations in the system 100. An exchange location may be a location that the user regularly visits. For example, users may designate locations such as health clubs, schools, coffee shops, book stores, and so on, as acceptable exchange locations.’”
• Meat claimed as invention by multinational company of Monsanto (we wrote about Monsanto in some of our previous posts because of Microsoft/Gates connections [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8])
*Stop patenting the food chain!
Multinational seed corporations are following a consequent strategy to gain control over basic resources for food production. As recent research shows not only genetically engineered plants, but more and more the conventional breeding of plants gets into the focus of patent monopolies: International patent applications in this sector are skyrocking, having doubled since 2007 till end of 2009. Further on the multinationals expand their claims over the whole chain of food production from feed to animals and food products such as meat. In a pending patent application from Monsanto even bacon and steaks are claimed: Patent application WO2009097403 is claiming meat stemming from pigs being fed with the patented genetically engineered plants of Monsanto. A similar patent is applied for fish from aquaculture in March 2010 (WO201027788). Far reaching patents on food are even already granted: Monsanto received a European patent (EP 1356033) in 2009, which the chain of food production from seeds of genetically engineered plants up to food products such as meal and oil are covered.
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05.01.10
Posted in Courtroom, Microsoft, Novell, Patents, Red Hat, SCO, UNIX at 8:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The two companies in red defended themselves against a Microsoft-associated patent troll, but details about the trial remain limited even after its conclusion; no statement from Novell yet
YESTERDAY we shared the press release from Red Hat as soon as it arrived. The short story is that Acacia gets defeated as GNU/Linux triumphs, again. It is a different story when companies with software patents actually name the patents rather than engage in racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
Anyway, this morning in the news we found just 3 articles which discussed the case right after the press release. Boston (near Novell) has the following almost-identical pair of articles:
Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc. won a verdict in a case brought by a Texas company that claimed their Linux-based products infringed patents for ways to share icons across computer workstations.
Waltham’s Novell and Red Hat of Raleigh, N.C., won a federal verdict in a case brought by a Texas company that claimed their Linux-based software products infringed patents for ways to share icons across computer workstations.
The press near Red Hat does not even mention Novell in the opening:
Red Hat has won a legal fight with a small Texas company that claimed the Raleigh-based software maker infringed on its patents.
Is it possible that Red Hat did most of the work to thwart the lawsuit? It did appear that way at times. There is no word from Novell, either. Did Novell do less in this case or is it just bragging less? It is worth adding that Novell’s defense in the SCO case can be seen as selfish from Novell’s point of view; UNIX copyrights are probably worth a lot of money. Added below are the latest stories about SCO vs. Novell. █
_____
[1] Unix copyrights: SCO want a new ruling
[2] SCO: jurors too busy Facebooking to rule on Unix claim
[3] Circular Arguments
[4] Daily Dose – HP to Buy Palm
SCO Won’t Give Up on Unix Copyright Battle
After a US judge (in 2007) and later a jury (a few weeks ago) ruled that Novell owned the copyrights to Unix, SCO still wants to continue the legal battle that has caused themselves to go bankrupt.
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 7:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s huge list of dead products and divisions expands further as an attempt to challenge GNU/Linux (and Apple) falls short of arrival
THE “Courier”, which we called "Vapourware" just two months ago, never existed. No, really, it didn’t. Microsoft does not want anybody to know about this failed experiment, which was mostly about buzz and showoff at the time. Microsoft does not want the world to know that it runs away with its tail between its legs because GNU/Linux and hypePad are too strong a competition, so the news about “Courier” dying only came through unofficial sources. Gizmodo is cited by everyone as the original report.
According to sources familiar with the matter, Microsoft has cancelled Courier, the folding, two-screen prototype tablet that was first uncovered by Gizmodo.
We’re told that on Wednesday, Microsoft execs informed the internal team that had been working on the tablet device that the project would no longer be supported. Courier had never been publicly announced or acknowledged as a Microsoft product.
Will Microsoft start bullying Gizmodo like Apple does (to identify leakers, for example)? Or it is more familiar with the ‘Streisand effect’? As a recap, see:
We have more on that string of stories coming shortly.
Anyway, the big news is that Microsoft has just declared/rendered another one of its products “dead”. It’s part of a trend as the company goes deeper into debt and it cannot afford to bring to market ideas that are too risky (as they would almost certainly fail).
Surface failed badly in the market and Microsoft wanted to axe it before its arrival too; it only survived because Bill Gates personally insisted on it, despite Bach’s advice (a correct intuition in retrospect).
Speaking of failure, Microsoft loves to tout just one product as a success these days; it’s called Vista 7 and just like Windows Vista it leads Microsoft to bragging with fake numbers (which we explained in [1, 2, 3]). “Success Delayed is Failure,” is what Pogson called the tricks Microsoft uses.
The last quarterly report looked good only if you ignore the inclusion of deferred licences from other quarters for “7″. The next quarterly report will be more honest. I look forward to the end of April.
The failure of “Courier” is not necessarily a great sign for hypePad, which is overpriced when one considers what Apple does for price fixing/price elevation in so-called ‘content’. As Slashdot put it yesterday, “Apple Raises E-book Prices For Everyone”
“Tablets and E-readers which run Linux are coming from many directions right now, including ASUS and Dell.”Slashdot says that Apple is also shutting down Lala, only months after it acquired it. Too much of a competition? A few months ago we explained that Microsoft (and Apple) promote the MPEG-LA-LA Land and that Apple would destroy Lala. We turn out to have been right all along now that Apple is mercilessly killing Lala, which poses a challenge to Apple’s other business models and partners. A friend told me today about Apple killing or blocking applications that give people access to low-cost or no-cost literature (I had not heard about the company that he mentioned until then). Apple is essentially fighting for Hollywood and against the developing world, as it would keep access to knowledge limited, even with strictly proprietary and patented codecs. It’s not entirely surprising given Apple's connections in the entertainment industry, which in turn offers positive coverage for the hypePad (it’s a reciprocal relationship and Apple usually appeals to the mass media).
Later on we are going to elaborate on Apple's fresh attacks on software freedom. Tablets and E-readers which run Linux are coming from many directions right now, including ASUS and Dell. We typically give such examples in our daily batches of links, but here we present 3 new examples separately.
ASUS has a Linux-powered tablet coming:
It looks as if ASUStek is coming back into the fold of FLOSS with a new product this summer, a tablet-format PC. If it runs Android, is it ARM-based? Amen! That may be the best way for an OEM to escape Wintel.
Dell has a Linux-powered “Slate” coming:
A leaked slide from Dell’s mobile roadmap deck shows 5 inch and 7 inch slates running Android and MeeGo, a 3G slate bundled by Vodafone plus two ARM-powered 11 inch ‘smartbooks’.
There is also JooJoo, which has just been covered by ZDNet UK:
The device is a rival to the iPad. It has a larger screen than Apple’s slate, with a standard 16:9 ratio. It also runs a version of Linux, unlike the iPad, which runs the same operating system as that used by the iPhone handset.
As Jan Wildeboer (of Red Hat/Fedora but speaking for himself) pointed out some hours ago, “nobody offers windows tablets. That’s the message.” █
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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# smartphones – Android growing fast, that other OS shrinking
# web servers – Apache with GNU/Linux riding high
# high performance computing – GNU/Linux wins easily – only 1% use that other OS
# LAN servers – who knows? Too closely tied to that other OS on clients
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How geeky are you? How well do you know Linux? Give yourself a point for each command in the list over page that you know and two points if you’ve used it.
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A couple of weeks ago you learned some user and group management basics with “User and Group Management 101.” This week you’re entering the Access Control List University (ACLU) for an overview of advanced user and group management through the use of access control lists (ACLs).
ACLs don’t negate standard user and group management; they enhance it by expanding and simplifying complex permissions needs. User and group management, including ACLs, can fill an entire book so this introduction attempts to whet your appetite for a more in-depth investigation and isn’t meant to provide a treatise on the topic.
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Desktop
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Then there’s LinuxQuestions.org that gets thousands of new members per month. Their logs show a high proportion of GNU/Linux users visiting the site:
http://jeremy.linuxquestions.org/2010/01/06/happy-new-year-browser-and-os-stats-for-2009/
Operating Systems
Windows 52.73%
Linux 40.94%
Macintosh 5.43%
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See what I’m getting at? What a stupid message! What a stupid policy to block Linux users! And how rude to not even tell us up front that we are being blocked! There are xx million Linux users in the United States. Nobody knows what xx is, but we’re pretty sure that the number of Linux users in the US is in the tens of millions. If you believe the hit counters that some web sites use to collect stats on visitors, perhaps 5-7% of us who cruise the web are running some flavor of Linux. The population of the United States is approximately 350 million people. Five percent of 350 million is around 17.5 million.
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A typical PC running GNU/Linux uses 1% CPU load per client while pointing, clicking and gawking so 30 clients working hard might reach 30% CPU load. Shared memory in a UNIX OS means only one copy of each application need be in RAM at once.
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We must be proactive and show people how their lives will be better using GNU/Linux. Today I showed a man and his niece with a non-booting PC what could be done with GNU/Linux. They are all for it if it saves them the cost of shipping their box by air yet again to the fix-it shop. The machine has been handled roughly too many times that way by its appearance. They have a nice machine but that other OS refuses to run. Chalk up another small victory for GNU/Linux.
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Audiocasts
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*Latest in enterprise Linux releases and developments
*Squiz combining open source WCM roots with enterprise search
*Open source attitudes, approaches differ by region
*NoSQL, White House.gov demonstrate open source contribution
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The Picture to the right is my Test Box that I recorded this Podcast on because my main box was busy working on updating itself. You will notice some popping from the microphone I was using in the picture.
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Ballnux
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An LG Ally promo video has hit the internet and it definitely has us thinking a release is merely weeks away. Check out the clip below and you’ll hear all sorts of wonderful references to Android apps including Latitutude, OpenTable, and eBay.
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Kernel Space
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Earlier this week AMD announced the Phenom II X6 processors that are designed to offer “unbeatable” performance thanks to its six physical processing cores while not being priced too high. However, should you not be interested in the latest high-end CPUs, there still is a plethora of lower-end AMD parts on the market. One of AMD’s low-priced offerings is the Athlon II X3 425, which is a triple-core AM3 processor that can easily overclock past 3GHz and is priced to sell at around $70 USD.
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Graphics Stack
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As mentioned yesterday, seven different systems are being used for this testing to get a good idea for the true performance of the different platforms rather than being bound to one or two different sets of CPUs and GPUs. On the system we used to represent Intel graphics was an Intel Core i3 530 quad-core processor that sports Intel’s newest integrated graphics processor, which is embedded onto the CPU.
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On Phoronix Global we have more than 25,000 benchmark result submissions from independent users around the world since launching the public version of the Phoronix Test Suite back in early 2008. As I have been hinting at for several months, with the launch of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 by the end of this year, Phoronix Global will be getting its long overdue overhaul and there are some revolutionary features being worked on as it concerns benchmarking and collaborative testing. This evening, however, there are some hardware statistics to share for the more than 25,000 existing result uploads.
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GPUs On Phoronix Global
NVIDIA: 46.642%
ATI: 30.023%
Intel: 10.972%
Matrox: 1.403%
VIA / SiS: 0.721%
VMware: 2.02%
XGI: 0.539%
Cirrus: 6.633%
VirtualBox: 0.734%
ASPEED: 0.282%
Silicon Motion: 0.03%
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Applications
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The default selection of applications in Ubuntu are great for most people but it would be foolish to think that one size fits all. To make it easier for you BLAH showing the most popular alternative to a default application…. install-on!
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Most of the Internet is probably absorbed with Ubuntu 10.04 right now, and that’s a good thing. When you get tired of messing with the location of the buttons, you can check out Krank, which is a rather unusual game.
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Krank is in the repos for Karmic and Lucid, and in AUR for Arch. When the luster of 10.04 begins to wear off, give it a spin.
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Their setup requires that I can connect to their PHP/MySQL/SVN setup through SSH. No problem with Ubuntu. But I am also required to have an IAX-compatible VoIP client so my boss and other programmers can call me. You see, most VoIP clients are only SIP-compatible. IAX and SIP are just two different protocols for running Voice over IP.
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Instructionals
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Games
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WING is a galaga knock-off arcade game. It features high quality pre-rendered graphics, dynamically generated stars in background, single player game against computer controlled opponents, 6 levels of play, digital sound effects, digital music streams, and a high score list.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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In my last article I introduced you to Gedit (see “Gedit: No more text-based editor for you!“) and, as promised, this time around we will examine the KDE equivalent…Kate. Kate is an interesting beast in that it is comprised of two parts: KatePart (which is the underlying editor that is also used in other KDE components that require an editor) and Kate (the actual text editor). Kate is a complete rewrite of the older kwrite. And, like Gedit, Kate offers a number of outstanding features. In this article I will introduce you to Kate.
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We’ve been slowly working away at getting the system tray in order. The goal is deceptively simple: allow us to host the entries there in a way that meshes with the rest of the user interface. It’s actually been fairly complex due not only to the large number of existing applications that use (or, in many cases, abuse) the system tray, but because “meshes with” mean that the presentation and the interaction choices need to be done by the system tray. In the past it’s been the application that has been in control of this, leading to utter chaos. With the new D-Bus based system, which has been picked up by some distributors for GNOME as well (in particular Canonical), we are now free to show the system tray entries they way we want to. It’s been a long road, and we’re finally coming to the last few steps in it.
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Many people still like Amarok 1.4, in spite of the improvements in Amarok since 2.0 was released. Lucid has Amarok 2.3 in the repos, and it’s really nice, but there are still fans of Amarok 1.4 who may want to run that in Lucid.
We’ll be using Bogdan Butnaru’s Jaunty PPA. (Thanks, Bogdan!) Yes, I said the Jaunty PPA. Bogdan didn’t put one up specifically for Karmic, because there was no change to the packages. The Jaunty packages worked just fine in Karmic, and they work just fine in Lucid, too.
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Tniycore is … tiny: it’s 10MB, which puts it right at the bottom of the “small Linux” distros. It’s also very core. There are no apps. It boots to a minimal desktop (WM, built for Tinycore) with a small dock (Wbar), and nothing else. Oh, there’s a terminal, a control panel, and an app installer (using FLTK). It feels very much more “then” than “now.” Believe me, though, it boots fast. From my SD card, the desktop is fully functional in 3 seconds — my SD card is slow.
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New Releases
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Version 2010.04 of Grml Live Linux distribution, codename “Grmlmonster”, has been released. Grml is aimed primarily at administrators and users of text tools, such as awk, sed, grep, zsh, mutt[ng], slrn, vim and many others. The most important new features in the Debian-based distribution are automatic boot parameter-based configuration of host RAID devices and a VNC mode which can also be selected via the boot options, thereby facilitating remote maintenance.
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After a couple of years of silence, a new version of NimbleX, a light-weight, Slackware-based Linux distribution is now available. Still in testing, the NimbleX 2010 Beta has been released to all eager users. You can take it for a spin to see how it handles or to see what’s changed. The long wait may have been worth it, as NimbleX 2010 comes with a lot of changes and updates, completely overhauling the previous version.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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We are now very near from final release. Here comes the second beta release for 2010 Spring version of Mandriva Linux. As usual you will be able to test it as it’s available on your favorite public mirror:
* 32 and 64 bits DVD isos and mini dual iso (both 32 and 64 bits) for Free release (100% Open Source software)
* live CDs One isos for KDE and GNOME environments (One isos will be available on monday)
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Red Hat Family
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For years, Red Hat has been the leader in the enterprise Linux market. And as of today, it still is — but the market has changed. Up to about three years ago, Red Hat was the only Linux player on the enterprise market; currently there are at least three other companies you can consider for getting enterprise Linux:
* SUSE Linux Enterprise, currently owned by Novell
* Ubuntu LTS, supported by Canonical
* Oracle Unbreakable Linux, offered by Oracle
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced another endorsement of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a foundational technology for clouds. NTT Communications (NTT Com) in Japan has built its new cloud computing and hosting service offering, BizHosting Basic, on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and has become a Red Hat Premier Certified Cloud Provider. In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be offered as a guest operating system for the new NTT Com service.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that its Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware technologies, combined with the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite, are working with Fat Spaniel Technologies in an effort to quickly introduce new functionality to market, scale with business growth and enable the measurement and reporting of the return on investment (ROI) of renewable energy.
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Fedora
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I have just published a Fedora Kiosk Live Image.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Kiosk
This image is still under development (as is F13).
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Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 10.04 is out today, and there are quite a few improvements in “Lucid Lynx,” a long-term support release. What’s worth checking out, beyond the geeky guts? A pretty nifty social manager, a great music store, faster boot-ups, and more.
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Perhaps most notably, this Ubuntu release targets the demographic that software partners most want to reach — those monetizing the Web through use of social media. Among the many third-party software makers that already have developed tools or support for the release are Web-based video content aggregator Boxee and, of course, Mozilla’s Firefox. Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) already has a toolbar ready for the platform, according to Canonical.
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Richell also shared some grander revenue trends and business moves at System76. I’m still sorting through the information and plan to post a follow-up blog.
No doubt, some of Richell’s perspectives mirror those of ZaReason, another Ubuntu-centric PC provider that has launched Ubuntu 10.04 systems in recent days.
Separately, I need to check in with Dell to see if/when the PC giant plans to preload Ubuntu on netbooks. The fastest way to track Dell’s Ubuntu PC efforts in the U.S. is to visit http://www.dell.com/ubuntu — though in recent months Dell seems to have dramatically cut back on the number of Ubuntu-centric systems it offers.
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Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.4 is released, the new release comes with some nice features and many other improvements, the big news is that Ubuntu Tweak now added support to the Ubuntu based system : LinuxMint 9, for the other new features of this release we find : Singleton support for Ubuntu Tweak, you will never launch two Ubuntu Tweak instances, the Ubuntu Tweak Stable source will be enabled by default, so that you won’t miss the major release version.
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Phones
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Nokia
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The mobile market is growing tremendously and everyone wants to get a share of the pie of this growing market. Everyone pertains to the mobile players, and this includes the mobile handset manufacturers, telecommunication companies, mobile application developers, and the software industry in general – particularly the mobile operating system (OS) developers.
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Android
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Little is known about the platform so far; a report last month said Google had the ultimate goal of making it as “easy for TV users to navigate web applications … as it is to change the channel,” while an earlier report said that Google wanted to make it easy for people to search both TV content and web videos.
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Sub-notebooks/ARM
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Pixel Qi (pronounced “Pixel Chee”), which describes itself as a “fabless developer of a new class of screens,” is a spinoff from OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), where the former’s founder Mary Lou Jepsen is said to have invented the XO-1 laptop’s sunlight-readable display technology. Pictured below, the technology allows a portable computer’s screen to be switched from a standard, backlit color mode to a reflective monochrome mode, saving power and allowing the device to be used even in direct, strong sunlight.
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The computers run the open-source Sugar software suite, marking a return to OLPC’s roots after a flirtation with running Windows XP on its emblematic green-and-white XO laptops.
Sugar is now developed by a separate organization, Sugar Labs, which also offers versions of its Activities software for Windows, or on a bootable USB stick running on top of a Linux kernel.
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I always wonder about unnamed sources. It is very easy for Wintel or Wintel’s partners to put out false news. Alarm bells go off in my head when the sources suggest the good old days will return soon. You cannot put the genie of the netbook back in the bottle. Acer has the inside track distributing such gadgets to ISPs, banks, etc. The developing markets can absorb billions of these things running ARM and GNU/Linux, just not x86 and that other OS…
In physics, this is described as a “population inversion”. A higher energy level of atoms tends to drop to a lower energy level as conditions permit. That is the principle used by many lasers. One atom decaying triggers the others.
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DESIGNER OF CHIPS ARM claims that servers using its multi-core chips will go up against Intel within the next 12 months.
Talking to EE Times, Warren East, ARM Holdings’ CEO, said that while its chips have traditionally been used in “relatively low performance” roles the firm’s architecture can “support server application as it is”. East said that the company is cranking out multi-core chip designs running at “up to 2GHz”.
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A vendor provides the support that can’t be found in the open source community.
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Incumbents tried for decades to lock down content in walled gardens — but none tried to open it, unlock it, and free it.
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Wales: One of the key pieces there for me is that there are some business models around Linux, but those business models — like Red Hat — have tended to focus on the server market, where certainly in the web-surfing world, the LAMP stack [Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP] is dominant. And it is dominant in that area in part because there emerged business models that made it possible for people to do things in a sustainable way, whereas Linux on the desktop so far hasn’t really generated a business model. If you think about Android, it can be open source, or very nearly open source, and that doesn’t hurt its chances of succeeding simply because Google has a business model around it that has nothing to do with selling the software. They can fund it, they can support it, and it makes business sense for them to do so, in a way that it has never made a lot of business sense for anybody to really spend the money to get Linux on the desktop to that kind of polished state.
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The update was mainly confirming the continuing progress of Alfresco. According to the company, there have been more than 2 million downloads of the code, and Alfresco now has more than 1,100 customers, 150,000 community members, 74,000 live sites and over a million active users. It’s also been adding more big name companies to its portfolio.
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“Back in January of 2009, various news articles announced that former Sun CEO Scott McNealy was to become the Obama administration’s Open Source Technology adviser. Currently, however, a search for Scott on the whitehouse.gov website yields zero results. Searching a bit more, I found that Scott is currently working on CurriWiki, a kind of Wikipedia for school curriculum. So my question is, what happened? Did some lobbyist block the appointment? Did Scott decide his other activities were more important? Scott, if you are out there — please tell us what happened. There are many people working in government IT, such as myself, who were really excited about the possibilities of an expanded role for open source software in government, and are now wondering what went wrong.”
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That’s not as easy as it sounds: Open source support provider OpenLogic reports more than 330,000 open source software packages for enterprises to choose from.
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The “Embrace” Stage
In this phase companies begin to fully understand the benefits that open source brings and start to proactively consider open source technology and its benefits.
* Our company understands what open source we use and where it is deployed.
* Management has realized that open source can save us money on software costs, enabling us to get more done with the same budget.
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Isaac Newton, in his Principia, outlined his famous laws of motion, or in Latin “leges motus.” As you know, Newton was an avid computer gamer, so it’s fitting that a SourceForge project has adopted Leges Motus as the name for its 2-D multiplayer shooter. In this game, players attempt to travel across a zero-gravity arena while freezing the opposing team’s members in order to bring down the opponents’ gate. Game play combines fast-paced action with team tactics, yet the basics are simple enough that beginners can jump into it immediately. Its developers says it’s the only open source game that combines 2-D graphics, top-down shooter gameplay, and a zero-gravity environment.
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With a small development team, Partlan says it’s easy to coordinate work on the code by talking on IRC or in person, “but we would like to expand our team to speed up the process of development. We’re looking to make some really cool features happen in the future. We want to create more interesting weapons, such as a burst-fire machine gun that takes some time to charge up, and a melee weapon that fires a pulse of energy in a small radius around you. We also would like to create an AI client, so more players can try the game out without needing to wait for opponents. We’ll also be adding a keyboard mapping menu, among other things.
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Mozilla continues to plug away at Firefox.next, and one area they’ve been working at is the add-on system. Jetpack and Personas have already seen improvements, browser shutdown time has been reduced to almost nothing, and now there’s been a major update to the Firefox Add-on Manager.
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To prevent confusion, it seemed like a wise choice to get the storage engine, Maria, renamed. MariaDB is already making a name for itself, and the trademarks are owned in numerous regions. Monty has no more children (he suggests Lucy, the name of his dog!), so we decided that the next best thing is to rely on the community for renaming the Maria Storage Engine.
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Monty initially only planned to work on a next generation MyISAM called Maria, that would be crash safe, and eventually support transactions. Little did he know that in due time, he would not only be working on just another storage engine, but a complete branch of the MySQL database. Not coming up with a name almost immediately, he decided to call it MariaDB, named after his daughter, Maria.
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Cole concluded his keynote with a simple challenge: What changes do you want to see in government? In other words, I think it’s awesome that the Obama administration has an open source mentality that is driving change in Washington. But what good is making government more open and transparent if the citizens choose not to participate and hold governments accountable for their actions?
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I first heard about GNOBSD, a new fledgling, little known operating system, while reading a rather tragic story aptly named GNOBSD – killed by GUI-is-for-wimps hacker culture over at DistroWatch.com. Hacker culture, that sounds almost like haute couture. To cut the long story short, it turns out GNOBSD was about to bring a big change into the murky waters of UNIX and then, it hit the spiky wall of resistance and resentment of hardcore BSD fans. The developer was so dismayed that he removed the ISO file from his website, but then, after much popular demand, put it back. It’s alive and kicking now.
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GNOBSD is not a complete system yet. But it’s a beginning, a great beginning. Alongside its already graphical brethren from the UNIX world, PC-BSD and Open Solaris, GNOBSD could bring a breath of change into computing market. It will sure not shatter the foundations of Redmond and Cupertino just yet or dislodge the highly popular Linux distributions from their throne, but it does not have to be about total annihilation. This could be a benevolent, smart effort to allow UNIX fans a real competitive edge in the fluid, modern, gadget-oriented market. It’s never been about technology, but integration into the human society.
I love the concept and I hope it will flourish into a fully usable system that desktop users can enjoy as a viable alternative to other available operating system, with the comfort of security and stability of BSD.
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Compilers
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This month marked the release of GCC 4.5.0 and LLVM 2.7 with updates to the Clang compiler too, but the month is not over in the free software compiler world. Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat is uploading the GCC 4.4.4 packages right now for its release.
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Last week we compared LLVM and Clang against GCC following the release of GCC 4.5 and found the newer compiler infrastructure that’s sponsored by Apple to not perform as well as the GNU Compiler Collection in a number of areas at this time, but today LLVM 2.7 is out. Version 2.7 of the Low-Level Virtual Machine brings forward many improvements to both core LLVM itself and the Clang compiler front-end.
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Licensing
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From potential issues with licenses to evaluating the future development of a particular project, there are risks to consider before adopting open source software. As open source grows, so do the legal wrangles surrounding projects, licenses, and more.
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Openness
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“What would it take to map an entire country?”
With the growing visibility of Map Kibera, that question is coming more frequently, especially in Africa, where both OpenStreetMap and traditional mapping are widely absent. This is a massive question, which is going to depend very much on circumstances of that country, and on who is asking that question; and in the end may be better answered by a different question. In response to a couple queries, from Liberia and Malawi, I decided to write up a few blog posts to start off those conversations, and serve as reference for any of the other 200+ countries on this planet. To start, going look at a few examples to serve as models for answering the question.
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So a few weeks back, I was excited to see that BusinessWeek (now Bloomberg BusinessWeek) ran a special report called Eye on: Open Source that also embraced the wider usage of open source principles in technology and beyond.
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Open Access/Content
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London-based Mendeley is offering an open API and making a vast catalog of academic publications searchable, which, well, might make the cut.
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Open government data initiatives around the world are a big chance to make a change and present success stories and incentives to the public and policy makers. Of course, it will be a question of which data sets to open and what the consequences are. In a workshop with Rufus Pollock we could see that there are big differences between Austrian and Anglo-American and Scandinavian mentality: before we do something, we think out all possible (bad) consequences. Which is good, but firstly, this might take a while, secondly, we might think of more problems than there will actually turn out, and thirdly, sometimes the overall social benefit will just exceed costs.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Some wanted it to be called “OfficeDocument”, emphasizing its primary scope of use. Others wanted to call it “OpenDocument”, making its openness (a new thing in the office-document world at that time) more central, and acknowledging that its applicability was for more than just office editors.
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I usually don’t write about this topic often, but I thought it would be interesting -and perhaps enlightening- to explain a bit more what my company, Ars Aperta provides as a business. I think it’s the right time today, as we have almost finished our upgrade to Ikaaro’s new release. Ikaaro is developed by a french company called Itaapy, and you should watch these guys: Ikaaro is now able to produce content from and to ODF while using ODF document templates at the same time. You can try their demo online and see for yourself. But I digress, back to Ars Aperta.
We took the opportunity of this upgrade to clarify and revise the content on our website, and I think that what we offer as a team of consultants is now much clearer. Basically, we have three lines of business. The first, and the most generic one, is our consulting services. Ars Aperta provides client assistance and strategic consulting services (sometimes dubbed as “management consulting”) in the fields of information technologies, with a focus on Free & Open Source Software and Open Standards. Our existing customers have also worked with us on non specific Free and Open Source Software consulting project, so I guess one could say we tend to have a broader scope than our original focus.
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With nearly a month to go before News International raises its first paywall in June, both Times Online and Sun Online have stopped publishing their user numbers through the ABC in the UK.
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Science
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The creation of a human outpost on Mars is still some way off, but that hasn’t stopped us planning the garden. At Kennedy Space Center on April 15, President Barack Obama announced the intention to send humans to Mars by the mid-2030s. If all goes to plan, NASA will kick off an era of space exploration not seen since the Apollo moon programme in the 1960s.
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The material shown in the picture above is just ice, right? Look again. Elastic water, a new substance invented by researchers at Tokyo University, is a jelly-like substance made up of 95% water along with two grams of clay and a small amount of organic materials. As is, the all-natural substance is perfect for medical procedures, because it’s made of water, poses no harm to people and is perfect for mending tissue. And, if the research team can increase the density of this exciting new substance, it could be used in place of our current oil based plastics for a host of other things.
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The paper is based on the genome of Stephen Quake (right), which was sequenced using the single-molecule platform developed by Helicos (I wrote about Quake’s genome publication at the time). This is a rather curious choice: of all of the genome sequences currently available for analysis, Quake’s is one of the least complete and accurate due to the very short reads and high error rates of the Heliscope. It’s also interesting to note that at least one of the other authors on the paper – George Church – has a substantially better-quality sequence of his own genome (generated by Complete Genomics) in the public domain.
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There’s no question that discovering a new species is very cool. But how about discovering a new phylum?
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Security/Aggression
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The pilots waging America’s undeclared drone war in Pakistan could be liable to criminal prosecution for “war crimes,” a prominent law professor told a Congressional panel Wednesday.
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Democrats in the US are pushing forward an Immigration Bill which may contain the foundations for a national biometric ID card scheme.
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Metropolitan police report released after 30 years says Blair Peach was most likely killed by elite riot squad officer
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Calls grew across the US today for a boycott of Arizona over its new law giving the police the most draconian powers in the country to deal with illegal immigration.
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Environment
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Dubbed the Desertec Industrial Initiative, it will create vast fields of concentrated solar power (CSP) plants – arrays of mirrors which focus the sun’s energy to turn water into steam, and so drive electrical turbines. From there, the power will flow through a network of low loss transmission cables to pipe electricity into the existing European grid, via Spain.
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Finance
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Prime minister George Papandreou says it is a ‘national and pressing necessity’ to call for financial rescue after Greece’s austerity measures failed to convince the markets
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Goldman Sachs and Wall Street banks are demanding Republicans filibuster Wall Street reform. As a result, every single Republican senator opposes pending legislation to rein in a U.S. financial sector run amok. Every single one. It’s shameful but true.
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Is there any way to change this now, so that the banks that remain the lifeblood of the U.S. economy are forced to think outside their walls? Yes, but only Washington can do it (as risky a proposition as that is too). It’s clear none of these big banks is going to able to grow a conscience on its own, not with the way the Street is structured today. That is why, along with new rules on capital and leverage and systemic risk, the forthcoming financial reform legislation—currently being held up by a Republican filibuster—should also include tough new rules on disclosure, transparency, and corporate responsibility.
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The Goldman case emerges as a symbol of all this brokenness, of a climate in which all financial actors are now supposed to expect to be burned and cheated, even by their own bankers, as a matter of course. (As part of its defense, Goldman pointed out that IKB is a “sophisticated CDO market participant” – translation: too fucking bad for them if they trusted us.) It would be nice to think that the SEC suit is aimed at this twisted worldview as much as at the actual offense. Some observers believe the case against Goldman was timed to pressure Wall Street into acquiescing to Sen. Chris Dodd’s loophole-ridden financial-reform bill, which probably won’t do much to prevent cases like the Abacus fiasco. Or maybe it’s just pure politics – Democrats dropping the proverbial horse’s head in Goldman’s bed to get their fig-leaf financial-reform effort passed in time for the midterm elections.
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Thousands of workers and union leaders marched on Wall Street on Thursday to express their anger over lost jobs, the taxpayer-funded bailout of financial institutions and questionable lending practices by big banks.
The rally was organized by the AFL-CIO and an association of community groups. It included a diverse mixture of union workers, activists, the unemployed, and homeowners threatened by foreclosure.
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“We’ve lost almost $11 trillion of household wealth in the last 17 or 18 months,” lamented Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, on last Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” as he urged Congress to proceed with speedy deliberations on a finance reform bill.
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The Wall Street reform bill that is before the Senate, now that Republicans have ended their filibuster, will make important changes to our laws to provide for the orderly liquidation of these trillion-dollar banks if necessary. Those changes are important but not sufficient.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Republicans are blocking a Senate vote on the Dodd bill, seeking to build public support by misleading the public. They’re claiming to want a stronger bill when in fact they’re doing the Street’s bidding by seeking a weaker one.
Evidence of their tactics comes in the form of a shady anti-financial reform group called “Stop Too Big To Fail” which today announced a new TV advertising push in three key states. The ad features an out-of-context quote from me to bolster its case to kill financial reform.
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The Washington Post introduced a new web page about politics called PostPolitics.com, and the site’s exclusive sponsor is the coal industry’s shady front group, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE). ACCCE is the group whose lobbying firm, Bonner and Associates, was caught forging letters to Representative Tom Periello (D-Virginia) in July, 2009, which urged Rep. Periello to oppose the Waxman-Markey Climate bill. The letters were supposedly from groups like the NAACP or Creciendo Juntas — on what appeared to be their stationery. ACCCE admitted that Bonner had been working on its behalf as a contractor to another PR firm, The Hawthorn Group.
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Maybe the Salt Lake Tribune and the people of Utah are missing the point. Currently, 49 states ban execution via firing squad, including Utah. However, Utah passed the ban against firing squads in 2004, and Gardner is one of about 10 individuals who were sentenced to death prior to the ban, so he has the option of selecting the firing squad method. Oklahoma is the only state in the U.S. that still allows execution by firing squad. While the death penalty thrives in many U.S .states, especially Texas, all western European countries and Canada are death penalty-free.
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Corporate Accountability International (CAI), a group that works to end irresponsible corporate behavior, is pressuring the McDonalds fast food chain to retire their promotional clown, Ronald McDonald, saying the clown is a threat to public health.
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“I welcome the introduction of this strong bi-partisan legislation to control the flood of special interest money into America’s elections. Powerful special interests and their lobbyists should not be able to drown out the voices of the American people. Yet they work ceaselessly toward that goal: they claim the protection of the Constitution in extending this power, and they exploit every loophole in the law to escape limits on their activities. The legislation introduced today would establish the toughest-ever disclosure requirements for election-related spending by big oil corporations, Wall Street and other special interests, so the American people can follow the money and see clearly which special interests are funding political campaign activity and trying to buy representation in our government. I have long believed that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and this legislation will shine an unprecedented light on corporate spending in political campaigns. This bill will also prohibit foreign entities from manipulating the outcomes of American elections and help close other special interest loopholes. I hope that Congress will give this legislation the swift consideration it deserves, which is especially urgent now in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Passing the legislation is a critical step in restoring our government to its rightful owners: the American people.”
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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KEVIN Rudd has put another election promise on the backburner with his controversial internet filtering legislation set to be shelved until after the next election.
A spokeswoman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said yesterday the legislation would not be introduced next month’s or the June sittings of parliament.
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The federal government has rejected claims it has abandoned plans to introduce mandatory internet filtering before the next election.
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A federal jury in Knoxville today has convicted David Kernell, 22, of two charges in connection with the 2008 episode where he accessed the personal Yahoo e-mail account of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and then initiated a worldwide rummaging of its contents.
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Judge James Adair, who presided over the case and who would be granting the sentence, is sort of like your favourite teacher. He hated school, fell in love with the girl across the street, tried to be a prosecutor but didn’t much care for it, and now drives a little red Corvette around his tiny town, dodging questions at lunch counters from the very people whose lives he holds in his hands. He told us these things before he pronounced sentence, claiming that he couldn’t do his job without looking Peter in the eye one more time. He spoke very frankly, saying that he found Peter “puzzling,” and that he constantly had to ask himself, “Who is Peter Watts?”
At this point, I had to stifle a very Hermione Granger-ish urge to raise my hand and say, “I know! I know! Pick me! I know who Peter Watts is!” As I wrote at my own blog, Peter is “the person who dropped everything when I fainted at a blood donation clinic. The person who rescues cats. The person who fixed the strap of my dress with a safety pin and his teeth. The person who stands up for me in critiques even when he thinks I’ve fucked up the ending (because I always do), who talked me through the ideas of my novel. The person who gives the best hugs.”
[...]
Peter stumbled down the aisle toward us, blinking. “He did say no jail time, right?”
We all said it at once: “Yes.”
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Petitioners prowling parking lots and community college campuses tricked dozens of young Orange County voters into registering to vote as Republicans, an Orange County Register investigation has found.
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My name is Erik Moeller. I’ve been a Wikipedia volunteer editor and software developer since 2001. In 2006, I was elected by its volunteer community to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization which operates it; in 2007, I was reelected, and in 2008, I relocated from Berlin, Germany to San Francisco to join the Wikimedia Foundation staff as Deputy Director.
In May 2008, an anonymous defamer circulated a smear letter about me to various blogs, which resulted in a series of posts written by Owen Thomas for Gawker Media that defamed me as a “defender of pedophilia”. These posts did not attract much attention until April 2010, when Larry Sanger re-circulated reference to them as part of a false accusation that Wikimedia knowingly distributed illegal child pornography. This in turn resulted in a Fox News story, “Wikipedia Distributing Child Porn, Co-Founder Tells FBI”, which is prompting me to write this response. I am also now represented by a lawyer, and intend to take legal action.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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RLSLOG, one of the world’s most popular release news sites, has been pulled offline by its German hosting company following a takedown request from Universal Music. The site, which has never hosted any copyrighted material on its servers, is currently looking for a new home outside Germany.
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Copyrights
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The U.S. government has released its annual Special 301 report in which it purports to identify those countries with inadequate intellectual property laws. Given the recent history and the way in which the list is developed, it will come as no surprise that the U.S. is again implausibly claiming that Canada is among the worst of the worst. As a starting point, it should be noted that the Canadian government does not take this exercise particularly seriously. As an official with the Department of Foreign Affairs once told a House of Commons committee:
In regard to the watch list, Canada does not recognize the 301 watch list process. It basically lacks reliable and objective analysis. It’s driven entirely by U.S. industry. We have repeatedly raised this issue of the lack of objective analysis in the 301 watch list process with our U.S. counterparts.
This year’s report is particularly embarrassing for the U.S. since it not only lacks in credible data, but ignores the submission from CCIA (which represents some of the world’s largest technology and Internet companies including Microsoft, Google, T-Mobile, Fujitsu, AMD, eBay, Intuit, Oracle, and Yahoo) that argued that it is completely inappropriate to place Canada on the list. The technology giants reminded the USTR that “Canada’s current copyright law and practice clearly satisfy the statutory ‘adequate and effective’ standard. Indeed, in a number respects, Canada’s laws are more protective of creators than those of the United States.”
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The Pirate Bay is encouraging its users to oppose the Digital Economy Act that was recently forced through by the UK Government. The legislation “threatens the privacy and human rights of all web users,” they argue, but it’s not too late to turn things around for the better.
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Misconceptions abound, and not only about the publishing industry. In this posting, I’m going to talk a little bit about what it is to be a commercial fiction author.
Most people have a very romanticized view of what it is that authors do. Firstly, there’s a widespread perception that the workload involved is relatively easy — in modern western nations, the level of functional literacy is high enough that a majority of the population can read a book, and write (at least to the extent of thumbing a 160-character text message on their phone). Because there is no obvious barrier to entry as with music (where proficiency with musical instruments clearly takes practice), most people assume that writing a novel is like writing a text message — you put one word in front of another until you’re done. The skills of fiction composition are largely invisible, until you try to actually do it. Secondly, many people harbour peculiar ideas about how much money there is in commercial publishing — and when disabused of the idea that selling a first novel is a road to riches, they assume it’s because the evil publishers are conspiring to keep all the money to themselves (rather than the unpalatable truth — publishing commercial fiction is hard work for little reward). Finally, there’s the Lifestyle chimera.
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For all its mystifications, Avatar clearly sides with those who oppose the global Military-Industrial Complex, portraying the superpower army as a force of brutal destruction serving big corporate interests. The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, presents the U.S. Army in a way that is much more finely attuned to its own public image in our time of humanitarian interventions and militaristic pacifism.
The film largely ignores the big debate about the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, and instead focuses on the daily ordeals of ordinary soldiers who are forced to deal with danger and destruction. In pseudo-documentary style, it tells the story—or rather, presents a series of vignettes—of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad and their potentially deadly work of disarming planted bombs.
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Digital Economy Bill
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88 individuals from the music and entertainment industries appear in the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List. An elite half dozen or so are richer than the Queen. Is this who the Digital Economy bill is designed to protect?
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If a cybercriminal gains access to someone’s home WiFi, either due to the network being unsecure or a network password being cracked, then email accounts, social networking sites and even online banking can be broken in to.
Also with access to someone’s home WiFi, a cybercriminal can use the internet connection however they choose. The home owner may be completely unaware as the hacker browses obscene websites or illegally downloads copyrighted music, films or TV shows from their home network.
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The recent battle over the Digital Economy Bill has focussed renewed attention on the area of copying digital artefacts – music and films, for example. It’s a subject I’ve started writing and speaking about more and more; for example, here are some thoughts on why free software’s success is crucially important in this area.
But I have confession to make: that article is a bit of a cop-out. I didn’t address the even bigger issue of what happens when we can copy *analogue* artefacts. Yup, you read that aright: the time is fast approaching when we will be able to download a chair or a bicycle and just print it out. Clearly, this will make the idea of *analogue* scarcity rather more complex (although energy concerns will always place a lower bound on the cost of making such copies).
What’s under the hat? A sneak peek at Fedora 13 by Jesse Keating
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04.30.10
Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, Patents, Red Hat at 6:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The patent troll known as Acacia loses its case against Red Hat and against Novell
ONE vigilant reader has just sent us a heads-up regarding the decision announced below. GNU/Linux wins and Acacia loses in a patent case which is important. The press release from Red Hat is as follows and we will cover this in more detail later on. █
Red Hat Prevails in Federal District Court
RALEIGH, N.C., Apr 30, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Red Hat, Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!rht/quotes/nls/rht (RHT 29.87, -0.91, -2.96%) , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced that today a jury in federal court in Marshall, Texas, returned a verdict in favor of Red Hat, Inc. and Novell, Inc. in a case alleging patent infringement brought by IP Innovation LLC, a subsidiary of Acacia Research Corporation and Technology Licensing Corporation.
The patents at issue were found to be invalid and worthless.
“The patents at issue were found to be invalid and worthless.”“This is the result we expected and we are gratified that the jury recognized the tremendous innovative value of open source software. The jury knocked out three invalid patents that were masquerading as a new and important inventions, when they were not,” said Michael Cunningham, Executive Vice President at Red Hat. “We appreciate the jury’s wisdom and remain committed to providing value to our customers, including through our Open Source Assurance program. We also remain stalwart in resisting bogus shakedown tactics.”
For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions and a component of the S&P 500, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for six consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with virtualization, applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.
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