07.07.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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When I adopted GNU/Linux the impetus to change was the persistent failure of that other OS to run through a single 45 minute period of class time without fail. Perhaps the latest vulnerability in that other OS will be the impetus for many more to migrate. This one is not a bug but a feature of that other OS to permit working with foreign character-sets. That other OS welcomes executable files to manipulate foreign characters and in the process allows the system to be owned by aliens. Malware is out in the wild exploiting this feature of that other OS.
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Desktop
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As a sidenote on Linux lack of success in China on the desktop, I have to mention a discussion end of last year with CS2C that has been doing OEM (original equipment manufacturer) deals for quite some time, which was just a way to avoid the Microsoft tax for some PC makers. For the first time in the company’s history, people are actually keeping the preinstalled Linux system and using it, “forcing” CS2C to start a customer support line.
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Fedora is second most popular Linux Distro next to Ubuntu. Even the Linux God Linus Torvalds uses it (an old claim, not verified). The latest Fedora 13 (Goddard) as usual has lots of goodies like OpenOffice, KDE, and much more. A versatile operating system for home and office users.
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In Windows, the process goes like this:
1. Temporarily Disable System Restore.
2. Reboot computer in Safe Mode.
3. Locate nice.exe virus files and uninstall nice.exe files program. Follow the screen step-by-step screen instructions to complete uninstallation of nice.exe.
4. Open the registry editor.
5. Delete/Modify any values added to the registry related with nice.exe.
6. Exit registry editor and restart the computer.
7. Clean/delete all nice.exe infected files :nice.exe and related,or rename nice.exe virus files
8. Delete all your IE temp files with nice.exe manually.
9. Run a whole scan with antivirus program.
10. Run the antivirus program in your USB drive.
Very easy, right? The process can take more than an hour (that is, if you know where to start!)
In Mandriva Linux, you say good-bye to Mr. Nice by doing this:
1. Select nice.exe from your USB drive.
2. Delete it. If you get a message saying you cannot do it,
3. Change the permissions of the file and delete it.
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Graphics Stack
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Qualcomm has found itself unwittingly annoying the open-source community by posting the source code for OpenGL ES 2D/3D Linux kernel driver for its Snapdragon chipset, as found in the Nexus One, Dell Streak and many other devices. However, while the kernel driver is open-source, Qualcomm’s user-space driver remains closed; that prompted David Airlie, who maintains the DRM for the Linux kernel at Red Hat, to tell Qualcomm – and anyone else considering doing the same half-hearted thing – “If you aren’t going to create an open userspace driver (either MIT or LGPL) then don’t waste time submitting a kernel driver to me.”
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Applications
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A new GIMP Plugin Registry version was released today in Debian – 3.5, which failed to build under Ubuntu (because of a Python bug in Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid). After exchanging lots of emails with Bernd Zeimetz, the Debian maintainer of the GIMP Plugin Registry, he was able to locate the issue and fix it so Ubuntu users can enjoy these new plugins already. That’s why he released yet another version today – 3.5.1. And as always, the latest version is now available in the WebUpd8 PPA.
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The Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard (VMPK) is a MIDI event generator – a program that converts mouse actions and keystrokes in your computer into MIDI events, which can be sent to other programs or devices that understand MIDI and produce sound. It also receives MIDI events from other programs or external devices, displaying note events as highlighted piano keys, indicating control change events by moving the knobs in the toolbars, and so on.
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The Linux Foundation’s Open A11y (Accessibility) Workgroup has announced the release of IAccessible2 for Windows version 1.2 under a BSD licence.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Winter Wolves which I posted about earlier, is a very friendly company towards GNU/Linux users and released many games for our beloved platform (and many are yet to come).
They are now working on a Japanese style Sci-Fi RPG game which resembles the old (2d) Final Fantasy games a little (at least in turn based battle mode gameplay).
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GNOME Desktop
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In the following Q&A, OSCON speaker and GNOME foundation executive director Stormy Peters discusses the risks of cloud computing, the continued importance of desktop computing, and the interesting relationship between new mobile form factors and free software adoption.
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I can’t think of a better way to learn something new by playing. Since the “spin era” has begun with Sabayon Linux by using molecule, it’s something new to learn. Joost has posted a quick run down of how to do a basic spin. I’ve been messing around with this molecule thing and have found that adding and subtracting packages is simple enough to do. I do find that specific customizations of the user and root accounts a bit more complicated. I’m still trying to figure that one out yet. Scripting isn’t my strong point at all. I understand what it needs to do, but assembling a script of commands and paths is like writing hieroglyphics. I’m not sure where the script should be placed at in my spec file nor when the script should be invoked.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva is one of the cornerstones of Open Source, a technological pioneer offering the sole independent Linux distribution on the European market. Nevertheless the company has been faced with a mounting financial challenge for several years due in part to its size and lack of a clear publishing strategy.
Mandriva also plays a strategic role in the Paris Saclay innovative ecosystem centred on the Pole System@tic Paris Region and Cap Digital. The company is involved in a dozen R&D projects in partnership with some 60 research and industrial laboratories working on themes such as the semantic desktop, Linux Real Time distribution, shared infrastructures or cloud computing.
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Red Hat Family
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Just Dial currently has more than 200 servers with its mission-critical Intranet and extranet applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
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Debian Family
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At keyring-maint, we got a request by our DPL, querying for the evolution of the number of keys per keyring – This can be almost-mapped to the number of Debian Developers, Debian Maintainers, retired and deleted accounts over time since the keyrings are maintained over version control.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I’ve been using Ubuntu as my distribution of choice for VM’s and server instances, and on a lark I took a swag at installing Ubuntu desktop onto a VM yesterday. I’ve got to say, it’s a pretty usable setup.
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Fixing poor descriptions of Software Centre applications is listed as a papercut milestone for Ubuntu 10.10 because, as one tester during Canonicals’ user testing day put it: “Software centre descriptions are geeky.”
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Robotics and artificial intelligence enthusiast Francisco Paz has launched a new open source robot called Qbo. Paz’s five-year-long personal project is an attempt to realise the recently stated goal of Tomomasa Sato, director of the Japanese Robotics Association, to develop “an open source Model-T robot in which all global standards may be applied to achieve a result as revolutionary as Ford’s Model-T was for the car industry.”
As with other projects in the growing open source hardware space, Qbo will be made, as far as possible, from off-the-shelf components, and all design plans, firmware and control software will be distributed under an open source licence.
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An estimated 20 billion ARM processors are installed worldwide, around four per person and up to four or five per device.
For Sophie Wilson (pictured at left), who wrote the original instruction set back in 1983 for what was conceived as a co-processor for Acorn’s BBC Micro computer, they are still a “little bit awe-inspiring.”
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Almost everything that ARM could be doing it is except for widespread use in PCs.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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The MeeGo open source project merging Intel’s Moblin project and Nokia’s Maemo into a single Linux distribution has just initiated what it is calling “Day 1″ of its MeeGo Handset User Experience Project.
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Android
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Android is now activated on 160,000 phones daily, that’s almost 5m every month, demonstrating a significant take-up of the operating system and Android app Marketplace. Google has also just announced plans to expand into emerging markets in a bid for a further slice of the mobile market.
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“Adoption of Android-powered devices is growing globally by leaps and bounds. We want our users to have the enhanced experience that the Galaxy S Android 2.1 offers, whether for browsing the Web or tracking important tasks on your phone,” said Cathy Santamaria, Globe brand head.
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Apple wins the battle with Android for hosting the most paid applications, which are also on the whole more expensive than its open source rival’s.
According to a report by Distimo, the iPad store boasts the largest percentage of paid-for apps, at 80%, with the iPhone commanding 73% of costly applications, in contrast to Google’s Android store where the majority of apps are free.
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Ever since Google officially launched their open source mobile operating system entitled Android, handset manufacturers like HTC and Motorola have seemingly been scrambling to get as many smartphones onto the market, powered by platform, as humanly possible.
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Adobe
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Adobe says it works directly making contributions to projects including the SQLite embedded relational database management system and the Eclipse software development environment, which is primarily rooted in Java but extensible to a variety of other languages via plug-ins.
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A new open source project dubbed frash will allow iPad users to experience Flash in the Web browser as Adobe begins demonstrating its own efforts to port Flash 10.1 to the newly released Android 2.2 “Froyo”.
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The Open Source Initiative has worked hard to show that open source software, which are products primarily known for offering access to software source code, can provide economic value and strategic advantages to business practices around the world.
Twelve years ago, open source was implemented by software developers, and the importance of this non-proprietary software has only been compounded as open source developers and users have tailored their codes to truly evolve and grow as needed by individual companies and users.
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According to the Open Source Initiative Web site, “the prehistory of the Open Source Initiative includes the entire history of Unix, Internet free software, and the hacker culture.” While the hacker culture may have been the birthing place of open source, different companies, users and communities have come to heavily rely on open source for several reasons.
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This may seem obvious to some, but there are lots of commercial open source companies that don’t grok the importance of the “support first” mantra. Many commercial open source companies spend a lot of time detailing the feature-specific advantages their products have instead of detailing support options. It’s a cart-before-horse issue. Like Red Hat, Cloudera, Acquia and other commercial open source startups increasingly understand all of this. Their understanding will definitely make a difference over time.
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Originally, it was called the Fedora Directory Server, introduced in 2005, but it was later renamed to 389 Directory Server. It can interface with Microsoft’s Active Directory, and since it is LDAP based it is extremely fast and powerful, and can be interfaced with from other devices that support LDAP authentication. Even client authentication is possible (in Linux, configuring PAM to use it as an authentication service). It also offers a full featured console for easy remote administration.
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Mozilla
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Last week the Mozilla community had quite a few releases, and the MPL team, not wanting to be left out, is excited to announce the first Alpha draft of the next version of the Mozilla Public License.
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SaaS
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Recently Adobe released Puppet recipes that they are using to automate Hadoop/HBase deployments to the community. InfoQ spoke with Luke Kanies, founder of PuppetLabs, to learn more about what this means.
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Oracle
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Through the deal, Oracle acquired the Java software language that underpins its Fusion middleware, as well as the Solaris open source operating system and open source database technology MySQL. The deal also saw Oracle acquire Sun’s hardware business including servers, storage and desktop workstations.
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CMS
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The Guardian has released a free tool that allows owners of WordPress blogs to publish articles from its archive onto their sites.
The free plugin, called The Guardian News Feed, allows users to browse the archive of Guardian content and then either post articles directly to their blog or store them in the drafts folder for later publication.
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Barebones CMS is an open source product. It is dual-licensed under both the MIT and LGPL licenses and is therefore free for both personal and commercial use. Financial donations to the project go toward future development.
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Healthcare
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Business
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By contrast, Schott notes, open source may cost time (i.e. money) to set up and evaluate, but you save that on the back-end, on lower subscription costs and no initial license cost. You have to sell yourself, in other words, but you save big.
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Semi-Open Source
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Don’t mention “open core” to Larry Augustin. Trust me, not a good idea.
He gets a small twitch in his face and enough clouds build that, even though I’ve got a few inches, a lot more pounds, and some martial arts training on him, I felt it prudent to take half a step back when I stupidly lumped SugarCRM in with open core products in a barroom conversation with him last month.
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Project Releases
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Following five release candidates, IPFire Project Leader & developer Michael Tremer has announced the release of version 2.7 of the IPFire open source firewall. IPFire is a Linux distribution that can be booted from a CD or USB drive, or installed to a computer’s hard disk drive.
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Foresight been using stable release of Gimp until 2.7.1 released. 2.7.0 was too unstable to update to.
Now users can easily use the “Single-Window mode” of gimp, it will make all windows in Gimp to be one. Looks more like photoshop.
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The Yorba developers have released version 0.6.1 of their open source Shotwell photo manager for the GNOME desktop. According to the developers, the latest update to their free digital photo manager includes a number of bug fixes, language support improvements and several new features compared to the previous 0.5 release from mid-March.
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Government
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But this can be taken one step further. By applying the principles of shared services to the exchange of best practice and technical knowledge, web teams from across the country can benefit from each other’s innovation and experience. And this is where open-source software is critical, particularly for applications such as web content management.
The question for local authority leaders is whether the enthusiasm for efficiency savings will be enough to overcome traditional barriers to open-source uptake. These have been well documented and include shortage of vendor support, lack of control and worries over cost transparency. Potential users can also be put off by uncertainties about product road maps and, with so many parties involved, over where responsibility lies when things go wrong.
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Jeremy Allison of Google and Terri Molini of Initmarketing, both presenting on behalf of Open Source for America (OSFA), joined us for the first Open Your World Forum. OSFA is organized to advocate for open source technology use in the US Federal government, and represents well over a thousand members, including tech industry leaders, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academic research institutions.
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Licensing
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As readers of this blog will doubtless know, Richard Stallman’s great stroke of genius at the founding of the GNU project was to use copyright when crafting the GNU GPL licence but in such a way that it undermined the restrictive monopoly copyright usually imposes on users, and required people to share instead.
That so-called copyleft approach has allowed a vast and thriving ecosystem to arise, but one that depends critically on the validity of the GNU GPL. If the GPL were shown to be unenforceable, then its terms would be void, and free software would have some problems. For that reason, every time somebody is threatened with legal action for allegedly violating the GPL, lawyers’ hearts beat a little faster at the prospect of a definitive ruling on whether it is valid or not.
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Openness/Sharing
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Google-owned video sharing service YouTube is creating a movie titled Life in a Day with director Kevin Macdonald and producer Ridley Scott, besides roping in hundreds of its online open-source contributors, reports said.
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This got me thinking that this social largesse was not unlike the open source movement. When left to their own devices people will help for free for the sake of helping and the social web helps drive this desire.
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Open Data
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As these examples show, the license under which data is originally released can have significant consequences on its downstream use and commercialisation. The open source software community has know this for years, of course, which is why organisations like GNU have two different licenses – GPL, which keeps software open by tainting other software that includes GPL libraries, and LGPL, which allows libraries to be used in closed/proprietary code. There is a good argument that by combining data from different open sources in a particular way valuable results may be created, but it should also be recognised that work may be expended doing this and a financial return may need to be generated (so maybe companies shouldn’t have to open up their aggregated datasets?) Just how we balance commercial exploitation with ongoing openness and access to raw public data is yet to be seen.
(The academic research area – which also has it’s own open data movement (e.g. Panton Principles) – also suggests a different sort of tension arising from the “potential value” of a data set or aggregated data set. For example, research groups analysing data in one particular way may be loathe to release to others because they want to analyse it in another, value creating way at a later date.)
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Open Access/Content
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The survey attempted to gather information from a broad spectrum of research institutions in developing and transition countries in order to get a better understanding of the current state of the implementation of open content licenses. Open content licenses or some explicit statement attached to the article when it is published in an open access journal or deposited in an open access repository help to refer to a specific type of libre open access.
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Open Hardware
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“That’s one of the beauties of open source,” said Bre Pettis, one of the founders of MakerBot Industries, a company in Brooklyn, NY. What are Makerbots? Inventor Bre Pettis talks about how a Makerbot is like Ikea furniture, here are the reasons why it may be the next personal computer.
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European Digital Rights has prepared a “frequently asked questions” document to explain the changes between the SWIFT agreement previously rejected by the European Parliament and the current text under discussion.
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Science
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Another study in 2007 showed that men who took two-hour walks in a forest over two days had a 50-percent spike in levels of natural killer cells, and a third study found an increase in white blood cells that lasted for a week in women exposed to phytoncides in forest air.
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Doctors have made their views about homeopathy clear, but their position on whether placebos should be knowingly prescribed is distinctly vague
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Business Models
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The role of the disruptor is not to make life easy for the disrupted. Swisher and these execs seem to be confusing the role of certain folks in the legacy industry with the overall entertainment industry itself. As noted, the entertainment industry is thriving. More movies, music and books are being created. More money is being spent. It’s just that it’s going to different players. There’s no reason to “figure out a way to keep talent from being dragged into the future.” The opportunities and wide open path are there. The problem isn’t that tech leaders haven’t made it easy for them. They have. It’s that these guys are so myopically focused on the way they used to make money they don’t realize that the new opportunities are already there and have been embraced widely by others.
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Longer hours, more pressure, decreasing quality and less enjoyable work. Old media is a dark, dark place for journalism – at least that’s the mood of many of the journalists who were interviewed for the annual Oriella digital journalism study.
There are some reasons to be cheerful, which include journalists not being quite as pessimistic as the previous year. Are things really that bad?
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Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. Time.com didn’t go behind a paywall this week and there aren’t plans for that to happen. Technically, Time magazine didn’t put one up for its online content either—that is, you can’t pay to read the contents of current issues of Time (NYSE: TWX) online. What the Time Inc. flagship did was slip on the magazine equivalent of a condom, a barrier between online readers and the full content of the magazine.
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Security/Aggression
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Britain’s fight against terrorism has been a disaster, because its “flawed, neo-conservative” direction alienated Muslims and increased the chances of terrorist attacks, a former leading counter-terrorism officer has told the Guardian.
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There’s a power struggle going on in the U.S. government right now.
It’s about who is in charge of cyber security, and how much control the government will exert over civilian networks. And by beating the drums of war, the military is coming out on top.
“The United States is fighting a cyberwar today, and we are losing,” said former NSA director — and current cyberwar contractor — Mike McConnell. “Cyber 9/11 has happened over the last ten years, but it happened slowly so we don’t see it,” said former National Cyber Security Division director Amit Yoran. Richard Clarke, whom Yoran replaced, wrote an entire book hyping the threat of cyberwar.
General Keith Alexander, the current commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, hypes it every chance he gets. This isn’t just rhetoric of a few over-eager government officials and headline writers; the entire national debate on cyberwar is plagued with exaggerations and hyperbole.
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What’s far, far more serious is the suggestion that the government be allowed to set up a National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. This sounds good. The plan is to create an Internet-based identity ecosystem, “where individuals, organizations, services, and devices can trust each other because authoritative sources establish and authenticate their digital identities.”
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Last month, we discussed a bill nicknamed “Katie’s Law” that would give states financial incentives to collect DNA samples from individuals arrested for certain crimes. At the moment, less than half of the states currently collect DNA samples from these arrestees. If Katie’s Law were enacted, the remainder of the states would likely expand the scope of their DNA collection practices, greatly increasing the number of samples collected.
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Environment
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As temperatures rise, smart-assed tweets about Al Gore from Republican senators appear to fall
Living in Berkeley, Calif., it can be difficult getting excited about the weather back East. Every blogger on the East coast in my RSS feed has been moaning and bitching about the record-breaking heat wave, but in Berkeley, I was wearing a sweater in the mid-afternoon and the thermometer hadn’t broken 60. And guess what, the exact same conditions prevailed during the great Snowpocalypse-ageddon earlier this year. So while Washington and New York convulse in cataclysms of sweltering heat and pounding blizzards, in the Bay Area we just hope the fog lifts, eventually.
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The launch of environmental disclosure rules was hailed as a turning point for eco-protection in China’s business world. But two years on, they have all but been forgotten, says Huo Weiya.
When chinadialogue organised a talk last May to mark the first year since publication of China’s environmental transparency regulations, “Measures for the Disclosure of Environmental Information” (or “Measures” for short) Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), said the biggest problem had been “the almost total lack of action from business”.
China’s firms may be unwilling to reveal environmental data, but when it comes to green marketing, there is no shortage of enthusiasm. In public, top executives never doubt the importance of environmental protection, nor do they deny their social responsibilities.
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Finance
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If you want to see what’s wrong with Africa, take a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The size of Western Europe, with almost no paved roads, Congo is the sucking vortex where Africa’s heart should be. Independent Congo gave the world Mobutu Sese Seko, who for 32 years impoverished his people while traveling the world in a chartered Concorde. His death in 1997 ushered in a civil war that killed 5.4 million people and unleashed a hurricane of rape on tens of thousands more. Today AIDS and malaria are epidemics. Congo, then, is not a place you’d normally associate with a yuppie.
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China tried Wednesday to allay concern about the political impact of its $2.5 trillion foreign reserves, saying they are not a “nuclear weapon” to control other nations and its vast holdings of U.S. Treasury debt “should not be politicized.”
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Agricultural Bank of China’s $22 billion initial public offering is making headlines as potentially the world’s biggest. It is also underlining the cash squeeze Chinese banks are facing after a massive lending binge.
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Financial shares pulled the stock market higher Wednesday after State Street Corp.’s second-quarter profit forecast topped analysts’ expectations.
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Unemployment in rich countries may have peaked – but there are still 17 million more people out of work than at the start of the crisis, the OECD said Wednesday.
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In one of the darkest tallies of the nation’s still-sputtering recession, experts say financial desperation has played a significant role in increased calls to suicide-prevention hot lines — and likely has led to increased suicide rates.
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The European Union’s executive says Greece is “broadly on track” with budget cuts and economic reforms linked to euro110 billion ($138 billion) in bailout loans from EU nations and the International Monetary Fund.
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In the study’s white paper, “When Executives Rake in Millions: Meanness in Organizations,” professors from Harvard, Rice and the University of Utah argue that rising income inequality between executives and ordinary workers results in “power asymmetries in the workplace such that top executives come to view lower level workers as dispensable objects not worthy of human dignity.”
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Some Wall Street firms aren’t waiting until the Volcker rule kicks in to shake up the trading desks that wager the banks’ own money.
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Goldman Sachs reported an increase in the number of signs of slowing U.S. economic growth and China. Specialists Goldman Sachs warned of worsening situation in the U.S. housing market. Regarding China, the experts reported that the intensity of the recovery of the Chinese economy is now the most important factor to which regulators should pay special attention.
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Apparently there’s massive growth ahead for nappies, but we’re not sure if Goldman’s Ontex will target young children or European debt traders.
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TPG Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s (GS) private equity business are close to buying Ontex NV, Europe’s biggest private-label nappy manufacturer, for more than EUR1.2 billion. The deal to purchase Ontex from Candover nearly collapsed when Goldman Sach’s original equity partner pulled out, but the late addition of TPG has kept the deal alive, and the belief is the deal could be completed as soon as this week.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Google Inc (GOOG.O), which runs the world’s largest search engine, is in a pickle as it could lose its licence to operate a China-based search page, while trying to hold onto its anti-censorship stance.
In a bid to appease Beijing and keep its China license, Google said this week it will stop automatically redirecting China users to its uncensored Hong Kong site.
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Australians may not be censored online after all.
Under new leadership, the Oz government’s commitment to instituting what’s euphemistically called a net ‘filter’ is starting to look a little shaky.
Mandatory ISP filtering legislation will be “out by November”, Aarnet has the scheme’s frontman, Stephen Conroy, stating. And “Sooner rather than later.”
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Labour overstepped the mark on civil liberty issues, leadership candidate Ed Miliband has admitted.
The shadow energy and climate change secretary made the comment in an interview with Liberal Conspiracy in which he came close to endorsing gay marriage and branded himself a feminst.
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Army Specialist Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst who leaked the “Collateral Murder” video of US pilots shooting down Iraqi civilians (including two Reuters photographers) in cold blood, is finally being charged. For revealing to the American people the truth about what’s going on in Iraq, Manning faces horrendous legal consequences – nearly sixty years in prison if convicted on all counts. One of the charges, incredibly, is espionage. He was a “spy,” according to the US government – for letting Americans in on the “secret” that we are committing war crimes in Iraq, and around the world.
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Copyrights
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The major digital issue, with the still to be resolved Google Book Settlement, is Orphan Works. These are works that are still in copyright but where the rights owner can’t be traced, or fully determined and many believe is a goldmine of works that can’t be legally digitised today. Different countries have different rules over length of copyright and the criteria under which they get impacted. Some claim the number of titles impacted is relatively small and that there is little value in them, other would suggest the opposite. Now a review involving responses from 22 cultural institutions and published by the European Commission claims, that not only books are affected but that there is a significant high percentage of orphan works among photographs and audiovisual collections and the numbers are high.
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We’ve pointed out many times just how ridiculously complex various licensing collection agencies are in the music space, especially when multiple collection societies cover the same music. The whole system seems designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to actually play music legally. Take, for example, this situation in the UK, pointed out by reader mike allen, involving a hairdresser who had paid for a license from PRS For Music just to be allowed to turn on a radio in his shop… only to discover that he failed to pay the other UK collection society, PPL (home of the infamous CEO who insists that “for free” is a bogus concept). So even though this guy thought he was legit, he still ended up with a fine for £1,569.
CLUG Talk 29 September 2009 – Virtualbox (2009)
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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According to the figures, 87% of computer using patients in Mental hospitals used linux as their main operating system. According to the mental health professionals, the mental collapse is caused by the overwhelming strain of installing and using Linux. This OS forces a person’s brain to short circuit. The deeper they go with the OS, the more they become catatonic. They first begin to exhibit signs of helplessness, suffer depression symptoms as the operating system pushes them to the limit, and every step of the way they find themselves unable to grasp the terminology used and this undermines their self esteem and importance as a person.
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After wiping the hard drive and reinstalling Windows XP countless times, the computer refused to get to the Windows loading screen. So I decided to take the plunge and borrowed a buddy’s Mandriva Linux disc — and things actually worked.
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Ballnux
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LG announced an LG Optimus Series of mobile devices, including two Android 2.2 smartphones — the Optimus One and Optumus Chic — and promised an Android-based Optimus tablet. Meanwhile, a rumor about an Android 3.0 “Gingerbread” platform split-up has been squelched, and a photo of the Android-based “HTC Vision” emerged as the device’s manufacturer announced robust 2Q financials.
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Applications
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We have all read stories about people who have experimented living without spending any money whatsoever. By growing their own food, washing in the river, using a solar panel to provide electricity, and bartering for certain goods and services, these adventures have met with limited success. However, for us mere mortals the simple fact is that we need money. Money to buy food, to purchase clothes, to pay our bills, as well as indulging in our other infinite wants and desires.
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VIPS is an image processing system designed with efficiency in mind. It is good with large images (images larger than the amount of RAM in your machine), and for working with colour. It can perform many image manipulation tasks much faster than other packages such as ImageMagick and the GIMP and includes some special features such as creating single “mosaic” images from multiple parts.
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Qmmp is a simple, fast and versatile Winamp or XMMS like music player for Linux. It is written primarily with the help of Qt library. Qmmp supports almost all kinds of music formats out there and it is down to earth simple to use and configure.
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Many Linux enthusiasts associate desktop Linux with their repetitive daily routine. Same old, same old.
Looking to mix things up a little, I thought it’d be fun to take a more entertaining look at what we can do with our Linux boxes. I’m listing ten noteworthy Linux applications that I find very fun to use.
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It seems like I have a lot to talk about these days when it comes to digital media, and this article is no exception. As I discussed in a previous article, I feel that physical media (CD’s, Blu-Ray, DVD) is going away and in the future digital media will rule all. While this is a blessing since less shelf space would be taken up by stacks of media, it is also a curse since companies will likely push DRM. However, what if you wanted to adopt digital media on your own terms, using free software? Well, Handbrake is here to take care of digitizing your DVD collection.
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The description of Rekonq is simple: the Konqueror browser using the WebKit engine. But it’s not quite that simple. Rekonq will be the new default browser for Kubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). This is a new project that will, hopefully, overcome some ofthe shortcomings of the current Konqueror browser. And in this article we will take a look at this new browser so all the Ghacks readers will be prepared when it lands on the new KDE desktop.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals
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Two popular Linux distributions recently released new developmental versions on the road to their finals. One is early in its cycle and the other is about to cross the finish line.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Today, virtually all of the free software available can be found in packaged form in distributions like Debian and Ubuntu. Users of these distributions have access to a library of thousands of applications, ranging from trivial to highly sophisticated software systems. Developers can find a vast array of programming languages, tools and libraries for constructing new applications.
This is possible because we have a mature system for turning free software components into standardized modules (packages). Some software is more difficult to package and maintain, and I’m occasionally surprised to find something very useful which isn’t packaged yet, but in general, the software I want is packaged and ready before I realize I need it. Even the “long tail” of niche software is generally packaged very effectively.
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In this video, Jerone Young, Partner Engineer at Canonical explains the status of software optimizations and development to make ARM Powered Laptops and Desktops a reality. He tells about some of the fascinating challenges where Canonical is working together with the their partners at the Linaro group of companies (ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST Ericsson, Texas Instruments…) to realize a full desktop experience on ARM Powered devices, including full and fast web browsing and full access to most of the most useful Ubuntu applications.
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That Linux is a significant player in the enterprise comes as no surprise: Enterprise customers are a lot easier from which to generate revenue. It makes economic sense: if you have a business product to sell, it’s far easier to sell 1,000 products to one or two big companies than to do all the footwork to sell 2,000 products to 2,000 companies. Or even among 100 companies.
For some time, the big commercial Linux vendors have been happily wandering orchard of low-hanging enterprise fruit, almost completely eschewing markets such as consumers or small- to medium-sized businesses.
That single-minded focus may not serve them well against a relative newcomer to the enterprise Linux market: a newcomer that has quickly obtained a large percentage of the desktop Linux market and–more importantly–the hearts and minds of Linux developers.
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Android
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In April, we learned HTC expected to ship 4.5 million handsets worldwide which would be responsible for raking in a hefty $1.6 billion in pure revenue. Today, it’s been revealed that they surpassed their own estimation by posting an astounding $1.88 billion in revenue in the second quarter of the year (April, May, and June).
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Imagine you are there on the day of Open Your World forum and listening to all the talks that day, seven hours so far with a few fifteen minute breaks. You are learning, things are clearer, but all the ways of applying the open source way outside of software may have you feeling a bit lost in a sea of new ideas.
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LinkedIn
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That, in its turn, has allowed all kinds of new businesses to be created that hitherto would not be economically viable. Alongside Google, there is Facebook and Twitter, both of whom have been vocal in their support of the software they depend on. But I hadn’t realised that LinkedIn was also part of this growing club until I read the following…
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At LinkedIn, we love open source. We’re committed to contributing to Hadoop and Pig and giving back to the open source community through projects like Azkaban and Voldemort. We are determined to provide the open source community with the complete and painless data cycle that we enjoy – to enable even casual hadoop users to analyze data from their application at scale, to mine it for value and store it easily and reliably so that it can drive use and close the data loop. Look for new open source tools and projects from LinkedIn Analytics in the coming months that will help make this possible!
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now ready to download and test! This first version gives an early look at what’s planned for Firefox 4. Stay tuned, because there is more to come and we plan to release new beta versions every two to three weeks. Your feedback is essential to help shape the product which is why we’re launching now to hear from you early in our development process.
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Mozilla released the first beta for Firefox 4 on Tuesday, introducing a new interface design to a wider Windows audience, support for multiple technologies that aim to be essential to Web browsing in the future, and a plan for updates far more aggressive than those of the past.
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Ads and banners are a staple of the Internet. We know this, and many just try to ignore them as they surf along. And while ad revenue helps out the providers of the site you are visiting, they don’t necessarily help you — often they will hinder you because waiting for those ads to load tends to slow down the entire page. AdBlock Plus is a great add-on to get rid of them. When you first install it you will get to choose a subscription list to use, which is a list of filters to block. The “EasyList (English)” list, if you do your browsing in English, is a very good list of filters that auto-updates and should cover the majority of your needs.
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SaaS
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There is no doubt that the cloud is relevant for some businesses and some applications, but this is a market that is still evolving. A suppler who can offer a hybrid can give the best advice and make sure you only pay for what you need without being locked in.
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A survey finds “54% of those surveyed either currently use or plan to use cloud computing within the next 12 months for their applicatons”. (TFA comes from Google’s cache because the original site seems broken now…)
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It’s a chicken and egg thing. Will GNU/Linux take major share because consumers lap it up in stores or will GNU/Linux take major share because businesses adopt it widely? IT shifts can spread either way from the consumer space to business or the other way round. It seems to me that many businesses running XP are clinging to XP because they can keep it working but are exhausted from the effort and want nothing more to do with M$’s high cost of maintenance.
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Databases
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I am happy to see that SkySQL, a new home for MySQL talents, is being formed.
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With the impending release of version 9.0 of the open-source Postgres database, due in mid-August, the developers behind the project are hoping that the new features will attract more interest from enterprises.
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CMS
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I really only want two things for my website: (1) I want the software that runs my website to be high-quality and (2) I want my website’s content to be high-quality. It sounds easy and straight-forward but I assure you it isn’t.
I want the software that runs my website to be stable, efficient at handling my website’s traffic, and flexible. Good content management systems meet these requirements, but it took years to get where we are today, and we still have a really long way to go. Fortunately, all my websites run Drupal, so the first part of my requirements presents no problem. If you want, you can have a Drupal site too — it’s free! 
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Government
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This news is also great for the open source world: if I understand correctly, the French government is aiming to boost quality of service while reducing costs. And to succeed, I don’t see many other alternatives than relying on open source solutions! I cannot imagine a government – which is planning to cut costs – deciding to select expensive and inflexible systems offered by proprietary vendors.
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Openness/Sharing
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Free software may stem from a research mind-set, where shared results lead to a greater good. Free software has built this around various licenses such as GPL and BSD. The ideals behind free software have spread beyond software and can also be seen in other areas: documentation, game mods, illustrations, music – all types of content creation can be licensed in an open and free way.
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Open Data
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My blog post on Friday about the local spending information, the open data that isn’t, and the agreements that some councils seem to have struck with Spikes Cavell raised a flurry of tweets, emails, and a reassuringly fast response from the government’s Transparency Board.
It also, I’m told, generated a huge number of emails among the main protagonists – local and central government bureaucrats and private companies, who spent much of Friday and the weekend shoring up their position and planning counter attacks against those working for open data, and thus threatening the status quo.
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The new Government will be working with local government not only to put online information on spending, tenders and contracts over £500, but also to publish job vacancies online, in an open and standardised format, for anyone to use, re-publish and ‘mash up’ without charge. There will be no public sector monopoly – the jobs data can be used by anyone, from commercial recruitment, newspapers to pressure groups.
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The following guest post is from Hjalmar Gislason, an open data activist, member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on EU Open Data, and founder of structured data start-up, DataMarket.
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Secretary of State for Communities & Local Government Eric Pickles followed this up with a letter to councils saying, “I don’t expect everyone to do it right first time, but I do expect everyone to do it.” Great. Raw Data Now, in the words of Tim-Berners Lee.
Now, however, with barely the ink dry, the reality is looking not just a bit messy, a bit of a first attempt (which would be fine and understandable given the timescale), but Not Open At All.
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Open Hardware
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For electronics hobbyists, the open source chipset BeagleBoard that packs as much punch as a smartphone processor might seem like the key to paradise.
Yet it is the relatively underpowered 8-bit microcontroller Arduino that has captured the attention of DIYers.
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Science
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Last week, the hilarity was that Rand Paul refused to say how old he thought the earth was. The new chew toys are creationist apologists for ignorance trying to justify it, while also refusing to state how old they think the earth is. The amusement lies in the way these guys puff themselves up into a state of moral superiority while claiming that scientists are dogmatists…because, you know, they know stuff.
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The discovery in Gabon of more than 250 fossils in an excellent state of conservation has provided proof, for the first time, of the existence of multicellular organisms 2.1 billion years ago. This finding represents a major breakthrough: until now, the first complex life forms (made up of several cells) dated from around 600 million years ago.
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Security/Aggression
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141 arrested from 30,000 – or 0.47% of those stopped – is a disgraceful return. Just like Section 44, the overwhelming feeling we get is that thousands of people have had their journeys interrupted because the police needed to hit a target – we are little more than a statistic.
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A pub boss has hit out after being cleared of an offence under the Licensing Act.
Police claimed Tony Griffiths, managing director of Wylam Leisure, failed to hand over CCTV footage to Northumbria Police after an incident at city centre bar The Glass Spider.
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Workers’ Protests
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Police in Bangladesh using bamboo staves, teargas and water cannon fought with textile workers demanding back pay and an immediate rise in monthly wages on the streets of Dhaka today.
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Zhang Liwen found out that she was about to go on strike over a breakfast of steamed buns and congee rice porridge at her factory dormitory. Fifteen minutes later, she was taking part in industrial action for the first time in her life.
“I was worried, but everyone was excited and determined,” recalls the 21-year-old migrant worker at the Denso car parts plant in China’s southern province of Guangdong. “We started our shift at the normal time, but instead of working we just walked around and around the workshop for eight hours. The managers asked us to return to our jobs, but nobody did.”
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Environment
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Greenpeace has filed a Freedom of Information request with Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office asking for records of his communications with climate change ‘skeptics’ and ‘conservative’ organizations such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Cato Institute. Greenpeace is seeking to expose some of the inner workings of the network of denialists who are attempting to discredit the work of certain climate scientists and stop EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, SolveClimate reports.
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PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has found no errors that would undermine the main conclusions in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on possible future regional impacts of climate change. However, in some instances the foundations for the summary statements should have been made more transparent. The PBL believes that the IPCC should invest more in quality control in order to prevent mistakes and shortcomings, to the extent possible.
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Barack Obama’s hopes of leveraging public anger at the Gulf oil spill into political support for his clean energy agenda fell flat today after he failed to rally a group of Democratic and Republican senators around broad energy and climate change law.
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Climate scientists in the US say police inaction has left them defenceless in the face of a torrent of death threats and hate mail, leaving them fearing for their lives and one to contemplate arming himself with a handgun.
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The White House Thursday enacted stronger rules to prevent the media from showing what’s happening with the oil spill in the Gulf Coast.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported that evening, “The Coast Guard today announced new rules keeping photographers and reporters and anyone else from coming within 65 feet of any response vessel or booms out on the water or on beaches — 65 feet.”
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Earle, explorer in residence at National Geographic, believes it may have been the largest such congregation ever observed by scientists in the northern Gulf of Mexico. “It was an ocean full of whale sharks. I can’t even begin to count the fins,” she said. “We almost had them bumping up against the boat.”
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Friends of the Earth said it was astonished that BP was not planning to completely change all aspects of its business. “This [the BP statement] is sticking two fingers up to those who care about climate change and believe we should invest in low carbon technologies,” said Mike Childs, head of climate change. “It is saying its ‘business as usual’ and the share price falls may continue also.”
BP faced intense criticism over the tar sands from Greenpeace and socially responsible investors including the Coop with 620,000 votes cast at the oil group’s annual general meeting to review these operations.
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Here’s a consequence of climate change you probably haven’t thought of. Space buffs know that Earth orbit is littered with junk, including defunct satellites, spent rocket boosters, and other random debris–about 11,500 objects bigger than 4 inches across, according to NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office (it’s their graphic you’re looking at). It’s a worry: every one of these speeding bits of hardware could potentially damage, or even smash up a working satellite. The latter could create a lot more debris, potentially triggering something called the Kessler Syndrome, in which fragments of a smashed satellite go on to smash more satellites, creating fragments that go on to smash more…and so on.
What does this have to do with climate change? Maybe a lot.
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It’s very important, incentives to keep the forest rather than cutting it. Right now there are laws all over the tropics that say once you cut your forest you own it. Logging is encouraged by the governments. We have to reverse that somehow. We need laws and compensation for preserving forests and biodiversity.
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A revolutionary scheme backed by the World Bank to pay poor countries billions of dollars a year to stop felling trees is the best way to stop logging and save the planet from climate change, according to wealthy countries and conservationists, yet documents seen by the Observer show the plan is actually leading to corruption and possibly more logging.
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Well this becomes more entertaining by the moment. Those who staked so much on the “Amazongate” story, only to see it turn round and bite them, are now digging a hole so deep that they will soon be able to witness a possible climate change scenario at first hand, as they emerge, shovels in hand, in the middle of the Great Victoria Desert.
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Finance
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Two-thirds of U.S. counties became economically healthier in May, thanks to more manufacturing jobs in the Midwest and fewer home foreclosures in the Sun Belt, according to The Associated Press’ monthly analysis of conditions around the country.
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My starting point: a BBC report on Who owns the UK’s debt?
From there, I ended up finding loosely related data at:
National Statistics – UK Accounts
UK Debt Management Office Quarterly Review
Bank for International Settlements
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This looks like just another attempt at creating positive PR. The moratorium is just until the financial reform laws are passed. So, if financial reform happens tomorrow, then the moratorium is lifted. However, this new report by Charlie G. is worth watching. He does make some very good comments and observations. Watch and post your comments.
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Today, during the FCIC’s second day of hearings, Goldman CFO David Viniar was forced to provide additional data about the firm’s AIG CDS trades. Luckily the firm kept a record of all entry and exit points, and thus will be able to confirm just what the P&L of the associated trades is (and if not, we are happy to teach Goldman’s risk department how to use the Bloomberg CDSD function in conjunction with RMGR run scraping to build a real time CDS portfolio tracker)… Which is ironic, because when asked by Brooksley Born why the firm has not yet provided a break down of its derivative revenue Mr. Viniar by all accounts perjured himself. As Bloomberg reported: “We don’t have a separate derivatives business,” Viniar told the panel. “It’s integrated into the rest of our business.”
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The recovery has hit a wall. In June, the U.S. economy lost jobs for the first time this year. Existing home sales plunged 30 percent in May. Time to pump money into the economy!
But wait. The national debt is projected to jump to 62 percent of the economy by the end of this year. That’s the highest level since just after World War II. Time to cut back!
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With the financial reform bill likely to hit President Barack Obama’s desk in coming weeks, Wall Street’s top political players are warning Democrats to brace themselves for the next phase of the fight: the fundraising blowback.
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Debt-hobbled Greece may see a slightly milder than expected recession this year and aims to issue bonds again on international markets in 2011, the finance minister said Monday.
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Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club chain is teaming up with a lender to offer loans of up to $25,000 to its small business members.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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When the anger of a prominent young thinktanker causes one of the world’s largest web-hosting companies to shut down a site that monitors lobbying and transparency, it is time to start asking questions about online free speech and censorship.
Last week, as Hugh Muir reported in the Guardian diary, the website SpinProfiles was taken down by the domain name registrar, 1 & 1 Internet, following a complaint from Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, son of journalist Christopher.
SpinProfiles, run by sister organisation Spinwatch, aims to stitch together publicly available information to provide a detailed picture of who’s who in the shadowy world of lobbying. It features close to ten thousand profiles of think tanks, lobbying organisations and those associated with them.
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A quick analysis of the present charges against Bradley Manning. I’m not a lawyer, but I can read statutes. Mentions here of WikiLeaks and the identification of the video as “Collateral Murder” are my own interpolations.
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The American Civil Liberties Union plans to sue the U.S. government Wednesday on behalf of 10 citizens or legal permanent residents who have been placed on a no-fly list and, in some cases, stranded abroad.
In the suit, the ACLU accuses the government of violating the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Oh those jokesters over at the AP — the fun never ends! Last night, we wrote a post noting that Woot was (humorously) calling out the AP for not following their own ridiculous rules when quoting from content. By Woot’s calculation, using the AP tool, the AP owes them $17.50 (but Woot was nice enough to offer them the chance to buy some headphones off of Woot instead). The AP didn’t like that story — neither our’s or Woot’s.
This morning, Paul Colford, the Director of Media Relations for the AP sent emails to both me and Woot CEO Matt Rutledge.
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Copyrights
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Loreena McKennitt published an op-ed supporting copyright reform in the Winnipeg Free Press over the weekend that focuses on the harm of infringement and the need for C-32. The piece raises at least a couple of issues. First, there is the claim that “even popcorn sellers are struggling to stay alive” in light the current state of Canadian copyright law. This claim arises from some declining interest in big music tours, which is taken as evidence that performances are not a viable alternative for many musicians. What copyright reform has to do with concert venues, performers or popcorn sellers is anyone’s guess – promoters of struggling music tours say it has everything to do with a tough economy, competition for the entertainment dollar, and high ticket prices rather than music downloads or IP enforcement. Copyright reform won’t change the financial dynamics of the touring industry, which will presumably still leave those same popcorn vendors struggling to stay alive.
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French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the man who shepherded the French version of ACTA’s Three Strikes element (HADOPI) into law on behalf of Hollywood and the Big 4 Record labels, has been accused of receiving 150,000 euros (C$199,081) in illegal party financing.
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NDP MP Charlie Angus has issued a lengthy letter to Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement that challenges them on the digital lock provisions in Bill C-32. In a release on the letter, Angus states “the digital lock provisions will subject Canadians to arbitrary limitations on their legal rights of access. The government is trying to create the impression that this unbalanced approach to digital locks is necessary in order to bring Canada into compliance with WIPO and the Berne Convention. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
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ItsHidden is a VPN service that was set up with torrent users in mind, allowing them to hide their identities from ‘third parties’ who choose to snoop on their activities. The service launched less than a year ago, but with the increased demand for anonymous BitTorrent it has already amassed 300,000 members.
CLUG Talk – 13 May 2008 – The Conary Package Manager (2008)
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Send this to a friend
07.06.10
Posted in News Roundup at 9:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This press release is to announce that for the month of July 2010 ERA Computers & Consulting (ERACC) is following the idiomatic phrase, “Put your money where your mouth is!” when it comes to our Linux PC sales. What do we mean? Read on.
For every PC purchased from us in July 2010 with any Linux distribution preinstalled ERACC will donate 5% of the sale to the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) project of your choice. As with most such offers there are caveats. These are:
* The PC must be ordered and paid for within the month of July 2010.
* The PC must be configured with at least the minimal configuration to have a working PC (case, power supply, motherboard, cpu, ram, hard drive, video adapter and operating system). You can choose to use your existing monitor and input devices.
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When it comes to GNU/Linux, even though I was a late adopter amongst geeks, I am still an early adopter compared to many. I found another article describing the experiences of a non-geek with GNU/Linux. The important points I get from stories like these:
* non-geeks can use GNU/Linux well
* they do appreciate some of the many advantages of GNU/Linux
* they do appreciate some help from family, friends or whoever sold the PC
* if we all helped our friends migrate to GNU/Linux, the share of GNU/Linux would be pretty decent
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Desktop
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The first step was booting Ubuntu 10.04 from an USB hard disk to check the Linux support. Using Ubuntu, everything worked out of the box, including stuff like HDMI audio support or output switching. An exception may be the DVD drive, which only works if you set the SATA mode to compatibility. Non-DVD media also works in AHCI mode, but only if you start with a disc inserted in the drive. Playing DVDs requires setting a region code using setregion(8) [otherwise they do not work at all] and SATA compatibility mode [otherwise they only work partially].
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LXDE is desktop environtment like KDE and Gnome. But it’s lighter than KDE and Gnome. But it’s still need middle spec computer like pentium 3/4 and with Minimum Ram 128-256 MB Ram. LXDE is simple, but for newbie user like me it’s still little hard. LXDE support compiz fusion for eyecandy your desktop. My First LXDE Linux distribution was PCLinuxOS 2009.1 KDE. I install PCLinuxOS 2009.1 then install task-lxde, then remove kde 3.5.10.
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Server
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The new virtual server service uses the KVM – Kernel-based Virtual Machine software from The Linux Foundation, based on the Canonical Ubuntu Server.
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Audiocasts
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Kernel Space
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Like most community-run events, the second SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) featured the standard set of positive talks on Linux and open source. It also featured a somewhat more controversial talk about failures to get some features merged into the Linux kernel by Ryan “icculus” Gordon.
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So go out and test -rc4. It fixes a number of regressions, a couple of them harking back to from before 2.6.34. Networking, cfq, i915 and radeo. And filesystem writeback performance issues, etc. It’s all good.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of several stable kernels: 2.6.27.48, 2.6.31.14, 2.6.32.16, 2.6.33.6, and 2.6.34.1.
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Applications
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A flashcard stores information on a set of cards, with the information being typically portrayed as words and numbers. The purpose of flashcards is to enable individuals to store verbal and visual information, often as a learning drill by way of spaced repetition. The Leitner system is a popular method of studying with flashcards using spaced repetition.
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But now Kupfer 201 has been released featuring loads of new plugins but also some important bugfixes. An important bug fixed in Kupfer 201 is the one I was telling you about above, so the Twitter, PicasaWeb and Gmail plugins finally work – just make sure you give it some time to authentificate after entering your credentials. Unfortunately this bug is only partially fixed.
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Text editors on Linux. Few things conjure up more images and memories of heated flame wars. Sure, you have the classic KDE vs. GNOME, and today’s Firefox vs. Chrome, but those battles pale in comparison to the mother of them all: the Emacs vs. vi wars. Who won? We all did.
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If you are a movie junkie like me, chances are you have quite a number of movies on your computer that would be nice watching on your DVD player or home theater system, mobile phone or portable multimedia device.
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Me TV is a digital television viewer for GNOME. Me TV was developed for the modern digital lounge room with a PC for a media centre that is capable of normal PC tasks (web surfing, word processing and watching TV). It is not designed to be a full-blown media centre, such as MythTV, but will integrate well with an existing GNOME desktop.
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Proprietary
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In other changes, Bing finally makes it onto Opera’s default search options list, and Opera has tweaked the “O” logo menu that debuted in Opera 10.5 by adding the word “menu” to clarify what it’s for. The Windows changelog, Mac changelog and Linux changelog are available at the Opera website.
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The Wine development release 1.2-rc6 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Many translation updates.
– A lot of bug fixes.
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Instructionals
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In this tutorial our aim will be much lower. All we are going to look at is how to use Javascript with the help of Jetpack to create a Firefox “hello world” addon. We are not going to be generating a complete UI but adding to the existing Firefox UI.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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After a successful first day of talks and the Akademy party, hundreds of KDE contributors returned to the University of Tampere for the second day of the conference. Already, the slides and videos are starting to be uploaded on the Akademy website, for those of you who couldn’t make it to Akademy or are here but couldn’t attend two presentations at once.
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This year’s general assembly of KDE e.V., the non-profit organisation that represents the KDE Project in legal and financial matters, is also taking place today during the event. The annual Akademy KDE world summit is taking place in Tampere, Finland. It began on July 3rd and runs until the 10th of July. All of the latest files are available to download from the Conference Program page.
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KDE SC and Plasma:why?
We still hear again and again that KDE is to heavy and too bloated to run on any modest hardware. Of course technically the situation can be improved and it will, for instance the platform profiles that are being cooked right now will be able to provide a law fat (as in Kevin words you will find information about that in the upcoming future on the planet.
n the other hand, complaints are often not completely true, we need better communication about what the advantages of a KDE based solution are, and where the problems are: we pushes the edges of what all the layers of our platform can do, Being Qt, X, or graphics drivers, due to our hard beating the quality of the whole stack is really increasing (and this funningly enough is benefiting non KDE users as well).
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Top Kubuntu developer Aurélien Gâteau (agateau) has been honoured with an Akademy Award for 2010. The Akademy Awards are given out each year at the annual KDE Akademy conference; the jury being formed of previous prize-winners.
Aurélien won the award for his work on Gwenview, the image viewing application which ships with Kubuntu. He was also commended at Akademy for his work in getting the KDE Status Notifier specifications adopted by the Ubuntu project, where they are known under the name Application Indicators along with necessary DBusMenu additions.
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GNOME Desktop
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The Slackware-based Absolute Linux 13.1.2 was release yesterday. Absolute Linux features the IceWM window manager which is very fast and lightweight. This version of Absolute has opted for the popular Chrome web browser where previous versions included Firefox as the default. Numerous other features, enhancements, and security fixes can be viewed on the Absolute news page.
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I will point out though that almost all of the distributions have done a good job of lowering memory usage with system updates, which is very commendable. Also it’s important to note that even though RAM and disk space increase with updates so might performance so it’s all about which metric you hold as most important.
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New Releases
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· Announced Distro: Linux Mint 9 KDE RC
· Announced Distro: Dreamlinux 4.0 Beta 6
· Announced Distro: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 Beta 2
· Announced Distro: SystemRescueCd 1.5.7
· Announced Distro: Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 2
· Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3 RC2
· Announced Distro: Absolute Linux 13.1.2
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva has confirmed that the next major release of its Linux distribution, originally expected to arrive on the 3rd of June, has once again been delayed. In early June, the French Linux distributor surprisingly issued a second release candidate (RC2) and postponed the release date for the distribution indefinitely. According to a post on the Cooker mailing list by Mandriva Director of Engineering Anne Nicholas, the delay was caused by “internal organisation and some hardware problems”.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the second Alpha release of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system, due for release in October 10th, 2010. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 10.10 development.
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As the 10.10 development cycle rolls along various user-created themes are submitted for potential inclusion in the ‘Community Themes’ package.
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Flavours and Variants
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EeeBuntu Linux has been one of the most popular independent Linux distributions for netbooks for the last few years. And when I say independent, as the name makes clear Eeebuntu started out as a modified version of Ubuntu Linux — which is maintained by a nice big institution called Canonical. But Eeebuntu releases typically pack a number of customizations that make Ubuntu run better on low power netbooks with small displays. The latest release wasn’t even based on Ubuntu anymore, instead using Debian Linux as its base (Ubuntu is also Debian-based).
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Open-source software has also been maturing for the last decade, and now has passed Microsoft in keeping up with usage trends, according to Michael Kress, senior director at Canonical Ltd., a provider of support, engineering services and hardware and software certification for the Linux-variant Ubuntu.
“We are taking the best of all the open source software available today and bringing it together into a single platform. Linux continues to evolve, coming out with a new version every six months, unlike Microsoft which is much slower to respond,” said Kress. “We think that Linux is the one—with Android, Amigo and Ubuntu leading the smart devices revolution.”
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Android
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One of the core features of Linux has always been the ability to switch to a different distribution in the eternal pursuit of something shiny, new, and different. Linux on handsets should be no different. Someday, with any luck at all, we’ll be able to change between systems like Android and MeeGo on a single handset. For now, the options are a bit more limited, but there are still toys to play with. Your editor took the CyanogenMod 5.0.8 announcement as the perfect opportunity to avoid real work for while. In short: CyanogenMod is a classic demonstration of what can happen when we have control over our gadgets.
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Google plans to push its Android mobile software in India and China and is exploring ways for developers to make more money from applications, stepping up competition with Apple and Nokia.
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That’s right. The HTC HD2 can now run Android as well as Ubuntu with the official XDA Developers blog confirming that early builds of the OSes are working fine on HD2s.
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Sub-notebooks
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Yes, we are getting to it. It is in the world of open source that most of the operating systems, that are tailor-made for netbooks, have emerged. While Ubuntu had always been in the lead, with the Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) Netbook Remix, Intel is also inching forward with its much celebrated Moblin (recently out of beta and now launched as v2.1). Th en there is one of the most interesting distributions we have come across—JoliCloud, developed by Tariq Krim ( founder of Netvibes), and based upon Ubuntu Netbook Remix.
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Tablets
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The table computer trend continues with the announcement of Cisco’s Cius Android-powered tablet. The device is targeted at business users providing them access to a wide range of Cisco mobile communication and collaboration tools that include HD video streaming, multi-party conferencing, email, messaging, web browsing, and creating, editing and sharing content or files stored locally and in the cloud.
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There are so many off-the-shelf web solutions out there, many website owners are asking: Why should I bother building it myself? When thinking about their eCommerce platform, a site owner faces three key choices: the Software as a Service hosted solution, download and install an open source or purchased solution, or just build it yourself.
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Events
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Ubuntu has released the schedule of this year’s Ubuntu Developer Week. The event will take place from July 12, 2010 to July 16 2010 and will cover several aspects of Ubuntu development, from crash-courses in getting started with working on Ubuntu to more advanced topics.
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SaaS
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Cloud computing represents the rise of the Internet of services. As digital technologies are increasingly penetrating every nook and cranny of the economy and society in general, we are seeing an explosion in the volume and variety of cloud-based services flowing through the Internet. Consequently, the cloud computing model requires a highly disciplined approach to the management, delivery and consumption of services for individuals and companies.
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Oracle
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With entering the timeline for the new feature release OOo 3.3, a new master workspace (MWS) was created: OOO330. In HG (Mercurial) the OOO330 branch can be found here: hg.services.openoffice.org/hg/OOO330. It was branched off from DEV300 m84 and will help to stabilize the new milestones towards 3.3. The first milestone is scheduled soon.
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Business
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Project Releases
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Licensing
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From Version 0.8.18 (the next release) on Denemo is going to be GPL v3 (or later) instead of GPL v2.
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Openness/Sharing
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Using these tools, any number of geographically distributed users can collaborate simultaneously on scientific projects, using the same virtual machine, the same analytic tool, the same data.
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Open Data
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Also, dear NMBS/SNCB, please provide us with an API. Clearly, I’m not the only one interested in open data and APIs. This would make small projects like this quite a bit easier and would greatly increase the end quality. Data scraping just doesn’t fit web2.0.
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Web
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The Overbite Project is an open-source effort to produce browser plugins and client applications that enable support for Gopher, an early network protocol that preceded HTML and the contemporary World Wide Web. The lead developer behind the project is retrocomputing enthusiast Cameron Kaiser, one of the few remaining champions of gopherspace. His latest undertaking is a mobile Gopher client for Google’s Android operating system.
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There was a moment, sometime near the end of the last century, when it rather suddenly became clear that Apache’s web server was going to cement its position as the dominant webserver — what the Web ran on. This meant that a loose nonprofit affiliation of moonlighting, largely unpaid volunteers had just massacred the giants of Silicon Valley — Sun, Netscape, Microsoft — on their own turf, on their central battleground, a space on which those corporate giants (I knew from reading their annual reports) had focussed their full attention and hundreds of millions of dollars.
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Global web server usage: The Apache server leads by some 55 percent share serving 112,663,533 web sites.
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A new donation pool has been created to raise funds for development of the Ripple project, with an initial contribution of $500.00. The final amount will be donated to the Ripple project to support the development of a standalone Ripple server to provide open decentralized payment through the Ripplepay site as well as other services using Ripple. All content created will be released under an open license.
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At least $9m (£6m) was corruptly paid during the “endgame” in Iraq and Indonesia, simultaneous court hearings in London and Washington were told in March. According to court documents, Octel bribed at every turn. Brown envelopes with £1,000 “pocket-money” were slipped to various officials visiting London. Octel even agreed to pay $13,000, purportedly for a top Iraq oil ministry official to honeymoon in Thailand in 2006.
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Figures released by the National Population and Family Planning Commission have estimated China’s population will reach 1.39 billion by the end of 2015, with those aged 60 or over topping 200 million people. Over the next five years, China’s urban population will also surpass its rural counterpart, with city dwellers expected to exceed 700 million.
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On the other hand, there are no real technical flaws or an absurd selection of workloads that the Intel crew, under captain Victor W. Lee, could be accused of. The fourteen benchmarks they used are classics, mostly taken from the scientific sector: SGEMM, FFT, Lattice Boltzmann (LBM), Ray Casting (RC), Search & Sort, Collision Detection (GJK), Constraint Solver (Solv) and so on.
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Environment
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In criticising Dr Richard North, below, for not having checked [ eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/and-now-for-amazongate.html] whether there was a reference to the claim that up to “40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” in the WWF Report, I was unaware of, and therefore omitted to mention, that Dr North had himself later spotted that there was a reference to the 40% figure in the WWF report. His initial mistake had been corrected on another page [ eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/corruption-of-science.html ] (before the Sunday Times article had been written) and he had added a cross-link to the original page, which I failed to note. Apologies.
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River currents could be harnessed at four bridges across the capital
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Reintroduction of species that Charles Darwin saw raises conservation hopes for other wildlife
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Environmental groups are nevertheless saying the Wabash River discovery creates a new threat to Lake Erie’s fishing and tourism industry and that safeguards must be put in place to keep the carp out of Ohio.
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BP
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Methane at 100,000 times normal levels have been creating oxygen-depleted areas devoid of life near BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill, according to two independent scientists
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Are environmentalists putting the Louisiana fishing industry in peril by overstating the potential disastrous consequences of the Deepwater Horizon spill? That might seem like a crazy question to ask on the same day that the Associated Press reports that the BP disaster may have just passed the 1979 Ixtoc gusher as the worst oil spill in Gulf history. But that’s the message conveyed in a Financial Times article this morning, claiming that while the fish will surely come back to the Gulf, the fishing industry may be permanently damaged.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Farmers markets are hot right now — so hot that big supermarkets want in on the act. But attempts by local Safeway stores to host so–called farmers markets have created an uproar.
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On May 13, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer appointed a task force to address flagging tourism amid the backlash created by Arizona’s strict new law on immigration enforcement. The task force recommended that Arizona undertake a public relations campaign to reassure potential visitors that Arizona is “a safe and welcoming destination” and promote the idea that boycotts against the state hurt “the most vulnerable employees.”
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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media law promulgated on 25 June 2010 will further restrict media freedom in Fiji and perpetuate violations of people’s right to freedom of expression, warns Amnesty International.
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Developing countries should be able to adopt a ‘polluter pays’ principle for ecological disasters – just like the US has with BP
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Iran’s ministry of culture has released a catalog of government-approved hair styles, in an effort to eliminate the menace of “decadent Western cuts.” According to the Islamic Republic News Agency, forbidden ‘dos include ponytails, mullets and spiky hair. But styles resembling those of Elvis Presley, Simon Cowell, or eighties-era floppy fringes are totally fine. Also, hair gel in moderation is acceptable. With the exception of goatees, facial hair is frowned upon.
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Lisan Jutras was on the streets of Toronto this weekend taking in the events and watching the many demonstrations. In the end, she was one of the citizens held at Queen Street West and Spadina Avenue on Sunday night, only to be released just before 10 p.m. Lisan works at The Globe and Mail and although she wasn’t accredited for the summits or on assignment, globeandmail.com was using some of her tweets in our live coverage.
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Finance
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And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world – most recently at the weekend’s deeply discouraging G20 meeting – governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.
In 2008 and 2009 it seemed as if we might have learned from history. Unlike their predecessors, who raised interest rates in the face of financial crisis, the current leaders of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank slashed rates and moved to support credit markets. Unlike past governments that tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer.
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It was billed by Barack Obama as the toughest crackdown on Wall Street since the great depression. But top US banks could be given until 2022 to comply with the so-called Volcker rule, which is supposed to restrict financial institutions’ risker trading activities.
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Were A.I.G.’s credit-default swaps — which were supposed to be insuring billions of dollars worth of AAA subprime securities — fatally flawed? Did the collateralized debt obligations — those infamous C.D.O.’s — that Goldman was creating and A.I.G. was insuring offer anything of value to the larger society, or were they simply a means by which Wall Street made giant, useless, bets? Given that the taxpayers have put out $185 billion to prop up A.I.G., these are certainly questions worth asking.
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Banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest derivatives dealer, have provided estimates to investors. The top five U.S. commercial banks, including Goldman Sachs, generated an estimated $28 billion in revenue from privately negotiated derivatives in 2009, according to company reports collected by the Federal Reserve and people familiar with banks’ income sources.
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A federal commission questioned whether the investment bank deliberately discounted prices to push markets lower because it had bet on a decline in the value of subprime mortgage-backed debt.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A report that attempts to force the hand of the European Parliament on IPR enforcement – including a possible weakening of the Telecoms Package outcome – has been temporarily stalled.
The Gallo report dealing with copyright and IPR enforcement has been stalled following a vote today in the European Parliament in Strasbourg. The Parliament voted 140 to 135 in favour of postponing it until September, which will allow more time for scrutiny of the text.
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Copyrights
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Despite a pending lawsuit against 5,000 Hurt Locker downloaders and the promises from its makers to sue even more, the film is still being downloaded by thousands of people every day. Interestingly, the makers do not seem to be sending takedown notices to torrent sites, most likely because that would ruin their business plan.
In recent years copyright holders have been trying to find creative ways to turn piracy into profit, with some success. One way to make money from file-sharers is to collect the IP-addresses of the people sharing a particular file, get a court to subpoena ISPs to reveal the identity of the sharers, and then ask the alleged sharers for a settlement of several hundred dollars to avoid a $150,000 fine.
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Men At Work have been ordered to pay 5 per cent of royalties for plagiarising part of their 1980s hit Down Under.
In February the Federal Court ruled the iconic Aussie band plagiarised part of the song, which was penned in 1979 but only achieved worldwide success after a flute riff was introduced to the track two years later.
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Gotta love those guys at Woot. They just sold to Amazon for $110 million, but that’s not stopping them from calling anyone out as they see fit. In this case, we particularly love it because they’re calling out the AP — and they’re doing so right on their highly trafficked homepage.
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Pint-sized popstar Prince will be giving his latest album away for free in a UK newspaper this week. Declaring the Internet “completely over”, iTunes nor any other online store will get access to his music. “Computers and digital gadgets are no good,” he declared in an interview, just as millions of file-sharers line up to use their hopeless number crunchers to suck his latest offering down the pipes.
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ACTA
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A round of negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) just finished last week in Luzern, Switzerland. While the negotiators expressed their will not to release any further draft of the text, the European Parliament has now a unique opportunity to oppose both the process and the content of ACTA. There is just a few days left to collect 110 signatures from Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to Written Declaration 12. Will you spend 5 minutes to help defeat ACTA?
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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement rolls on. Negotiators have just wrapped up another round of talks this week in Lucerne, Switzerland, and more than two years into the ACTA process, have actually started to meet with civil society groups to talk about the actual ACTA draft text. (Many governments have previously asked for comments on ACTA, but before releasing the full text.)
CLUG Talk – 29 Jul 2008 – Open Source advocacy, awareness and community building in Europe, with emphasis on women in IT (2008)
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Send this to a friend
07.05.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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On Friday I was honored to sit in front of a group from the Techrepublic community and talk open source. The driving force of the debate was open source vs. proprietary software. The ever-present subtext of that debate is Linux vs. Windows. The audience was pleasantly surprised when the debate never turned sour. Why is that? So many asked. The answer, although one-sided, is simple.
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Every now and then, I receive emails from people who are asking me to explain the benefits or advantages of using Linux. I just answered them with a link or two to articles that could give a good explanation regarding the subject matter. But since I realized that it would be better if my response were based on my own experience, I finally decided to write a simple list that I could use to answer those who want to know the benefits of using Linux.
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Linux is not an OS, it is actually a kernel which is the middleware between your Apps and Hardware! The Better the Kernel, the better the system responds! and better error handling!
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I created this video to give a few extra reasons why Linux doesn’t have viruses besides the common ones that get thrown around, like “linux is not popular enough” or “linux distributions each use a different kernel that is recompiled with every release”.
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For me, the Linux desktop is all about being efficient. Yes, I do enjoy the eye candy as well. But having an incredibly efficient desktop just makes for much faster, more reliable work. And much to the surprise of most users, Linux should be hailed as the king of desktop efficiency. There are many ways to have an efficient desktop in Linux, but I have narrowed the list down to these five tips. Even if you employ only a couple of these techniques, your desktop experience will become far more efficient.
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I am writing this out of my close association with GNU/Linux for quite sometime.I have had been using it everywhere to do my day to day work.
First I have started or introduced to the UNIX system way back in 1996 during my Diploma classes.One day I was sitting in front of a blank and black terminal in the classroom ;so my instructor came to me and said ” why are you sitting idle”…I replied back with a pretty confusing face that ” I am not able to understand what to do with this(the black and blank terminal)..with small cursor blinking on it”. My teacher/instructor smile at me(rightfully) and said ” Bhaskar it is challenging you to play with it and waiting for your intervention”..that spark me!! From that day onward I fall in love with that fellow called “UNIX”.Yes,it was SCO UNIX ..those days it was used in almost all the academia.Oh yes before that incident happen I was given a book or two about UNIX operating system and I went through them ..but little infer.
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Basically corporate houses buy or run something which is quite stable and proven track record and should have paid support.The reason behind this is that business data are absolutely crucial to the business and which will fetch revenue with that.
I had have the exposure of handling production box running RHEL(Enterprise version of REDHAT), SLES(SUSE Enterprise version),CentOS(derived from RHEL source) and to my surprise! Gentoo for one of my job assignment.And in the very same place Debian for hosting server.
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Desktop
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I won’t talk here about the awful user interfaces (supplied by the carriers and you must use them) which make your eyes hurt, brain explode and usability die (compared with them NetworkManager is a breeze). My problem here is with making them both work together on the same computer, which on Linux is natural: you add the connections in NM (with a wizard) and just select whatever you want from a menu.
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Ballnux
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Yet another electronics manufacturer has announced plans to launch a tablet computer powered by Google’s Android operating system: LG. According to The Wall Street Journal, the device will launch in the fourth quarter of this year, though no other details were immediately available.
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Applications
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This is the first unstable release of the Compiz 0.9 series. This release represents a complete rewrite of the 0.8 series from C to C++, brings a whole new developer API, splits rendering into plugins, switches the buildsystem from automake to cmake and brings minor functionality improvements. This release represents the first developer and tester preview of what will eventually make the 0.10.x stable series. Please note that as such, it is not yet ready for general use as there are a number of known issues, regressions and incomplete functionality.
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If you’re running lucid, you should have the latest version 3.6 of Firefox from Mozilla.
Here are some hidden features disabled by default, similar to Compiz expo and shift-switcher.
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Ailurus is cross-Linux-distribution GPL software, which aims at making Linux easier to use for beginners. Rather than a Ubuntu Tweak alternative, Ailurus is the kind of app you can use along Ubuntu Tweak. Ailurus is available for Ubuntu, Fedora and Mint while Ubuntu Tweak is a dedicated Ubuntu only application.
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Linux users are already spoilt for choice when it comes to free online cloud storage. UbuntuOne and Dropbox both offer 2GB for nothing whilst newly announced project SparkleShare aims to better both of these.
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Awesome way to control applications, installed operating system, sound recognition text typing without using mouse or keyboard. working on multi platforms, user interface KDE, Qt.
Also including Simon add ons download center support many applications Media centers, Web browser, text editor, Multimedia applications, and utilities application such as Gnome Screenshot tool.
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Back in May we reported on the Lightspark Flash Player that was developed by a free software developer using Adobe’s released SWF/Flash documentation and has hit a point where its ActionScript 3.0 support is nearly complete, has a JIT engine that leverages LLVM, supports OpenGL rendering, and boasts various other features as an open-source Flash Player alternative to Adobe’s binary plug-in. Today a new release candidate of Lightspark 0.4.2 is available.
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Instructionals
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I gave a presentation this week at Hack in the Box in Amsterdam about hacking wireless presenters (slides here. My demo showed how I could abuse vulnerabilities in the product to get a Metasploit payload on to the PC of someone using a wireless presenter, by just sending keystrokes to it. This article describes how I did it and why you may be at risk if you use any wireless input device (such as a wireless mouse).
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Ubuntu does not ship with in-built support for various media formats such s .mp3, .mp4, flash and Java files. Ubuntu restricted extras will add codec and file to support them and enable you to enjoy your music collection without any hassle.
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At the request of our readers and because today is Independence Day in the United States, we have decided to revive our old desktop customization tutorial for the Ubuntu OS and other major Linux distributions powered by the GNOME desktop environment.
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Games
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A new game has been brought to our attention called LettersFall which is a cross between between Scabble(R) and Tetris(R). This game offers the following items to the Linux community.
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A new version of MegaGlest will be released sometime today! Once it is head over here to download it! A short changelog can be found here.
MegaGlest is a relatively recent fork of the quite well known FOSS Game Glest, which ceased development some time back. Now that Megaglest has taken up the development, things have advanced quite quickly (in contrast to the other promising Glest fork GAE) and Glest now finally has the long deserved cross platform multiplayer and a proper master-server with a games lobby! Furthermore Megaglest includes all the factions known from the Megapack before, bumping the total number up to 5.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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After many years of successful meetings in great locations, Tampere has a lot to live up to as this year’s Akademy host city. On the basis of the first day at least, it has not disappointed. After the opening keynote by Valtteri Halla a series of other talks followed and we have had plenty of discussions in the open spaces between the conference rooms. Read on for an impression of the first day of the biggest and coolest Akademy ever!
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In Tampere, Finland, the pre-Akademy party kicked off the conference last night. Hundreds of KDE contributors were there, meeting old and new friends and enjoying the party. Rowdy Brazilians and Dutch cheered on their teams as their countries battled each other in the World Cup on the big screen. Others spent time reliving their childhood on the classic arcade machine.
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Not only does he help Akademy organizing teams year after year on the march towards success (and this year’s Akademy has been a roaring success this far!), but he’s worked to get videos up for the keynote presentations in a timely fashion. His poor little netbook churned all night long to encode four videos: the opening, the first keynote, my keynote and the Telepathy presentation. More videos are coming as they get encoded and you can find them on the conference program page, starting right now with the four aforementioned videos.
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As 6 people are female who completed the questionnaire there must be 18 male people who completed it as well (one was missing ;-). Of the 25 people 11 were already in Switzerland and for 14 it was the first time. The average age was 29 years. The group distribution shows 8 people from amarok, 10 from the kdeedu team, 1 from the games team and the remaining 5 ticked off “multimedia general (other)”. Now to the rating questions where I always indicate the average rating (scale: 0 = not good, 1= could be better, 2 = good and 3 = very good).
1. Accommodation: Bedrooms: 2.32
2. Accommodation: Group and meeting rooms: 2.417
3. Location (house) in general: 2.6
4. Location (area, geographically): 2.8
5. Food (Breakfast, lunch & dinner): 2.917
6. Transport/travelling to the meeting: 2.375
7. Infrastructure: Power: 2.28
8. Infrastructure: Network (cable): 2.318
9. Infrastructure: Network (wireless): 1.76
10. Information about the meeting beforehand: 2.36
11. Organization staff friendliness: 2.96
12. Organization staff competence: 3
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GNOME Desktop
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The GNOME foundation provide Amazon referral links for your browser. That is, every time you search for a product using the referral link and end up buying something GNOME get a paid a referral fee based on the amount you spend. The best bit is that it costs you absolutely nothing extra but helps keep GNOME in servers, ballpoint pens and developers.
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On this, July 4, 2010, the day the United States celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I thought I would take a moment to celebrate that same day with a toast to those Linux distributions that shirk all non-free software. This means EVERYTHING on these distributions is protected under, at least, the GPL.
There aren’t tons of these distributions and some of them are threatened, daily, to disappear from lack of support. So it is my honor to hopefully introduce the Ghacks audience to these distributions.
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Switching to Linux has many reasons – Security, Stability, Performance, and of course, Cost. Be whatever the reasons, performance becomes the eventual priority for desktop as the viruses, malwares and breakdowns don’t come in the linux-users way.
How to get the most out of a Linux desktop? Well, there are so many tricks, tweaks and hacks such as using a just right, well customized kernel, removing unnecessary services, apps, packages, paralleling boot process, using a lightweight window manager and desktop environment….and a dozen others. A long time user often dabbles to do these things of which the first, and perhaps the most important is hacking the kernel fitting impeccably to his/her hardware and working requirements.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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All Magazine Issues
* Welcome From The Chief Editor
1. KDE 4: The KDE Netbook Interface
2. World Population Day: July 11, 2010
3. Reclaim Your Background: The Widget Dashboard
4. Xfce 4.6.2: Xfce Settings Manager, Part 2
5. Screenshot Showcase
6. Double Take
7. Mark’s Gimp Tip
8. ms_meme’s Nook: Deep In The Heart Of Linux
9. OpenOffice: Writer
10. Xfce 4.6.2: Customize Your Xfce Panels
11. How Teenagers View PCLinuxOS
12. Xfce 4.6.2: Panel Plug-ins
13. Alternate OS: Haiku, Part 1
14. Game Zone: Osmos
15. Create A Basic RPM Package For PCLinuxOS
16. Create A PCLinuxOS Packaging Environment In Phoenix
17. ms_meme’s Nook: That Ol’ Linux Call
18. Forum Foibles: ByteS From The Bunkhouse
19. Command Line Interface Intro: Part 10
20. Getting Started With folding@home
21. Computer Languages A to Z: Netlogo
22. Configuring and Using Epson Stylus NX415
23. KarlM: The Loss Of A Friend, Supporter
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I’m not a huge fan of third-party branding. One of my (minor, when put into perspective) gripes about PCLinuxOS is that they sorta go nuts with it. One of the apps that’s the target of their branding is Firefox. If you are equally bugged by this, debranding the default profile used as the template for new profiles isn’t that hard.
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Red Hat Family
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That’s certainly borne out by the recent top500 supercomputer listings, where 91 per cent of the world’s fastest supercomputers run some form of GNU/Linux (Windows runs on 1%), the fact that the open source Apache Web server well over half of the Web – as it has for the last 10 years – and the near-parity in Europe of Firefox’s market share with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
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Fedora
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Our new Fedora Project Leader has been named: Jared Smith. The announcement stated that he is gone but not when he’d return: Right now, Jared has limited email access until next week. He’ll be around next week and a lot more when he returns from his LATAM travels (more on them below).
Jared will be making a blog post when he returns and it will be listed on Fedora Planet. He will be traveling together with Paul Frields to the Red Hat Raleigh, NC office for orientation, and they will be meeting up with Max Spevack while there. Jared will also be introduced to various folks around the Red Hat Raleigh office.
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This build brings us more inline with the work being done for the XO-1.5, as well it includes several changes incorporated from the Paraguay builds.
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Debian Family
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Here is a short update on my my Debian Lenny-)Squeeze upgrade testing. Here is a summary of the difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I’m not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when aptitude try because of missing conflicts (#584861 and #585716).
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Spring Design Alex
Although powered by Google’s Android OS, I’m still including this dual-screen e-book reader in this list. After all, the original Android was based on Linux. So what do I mean by “dual-screen”? Well, some e-book reader manufacturers like Spring Design have recognized the advantages of a brightly-colored touch screen and the superior reading qualities of a gray-scale e-ink screen.
Hence, Spring Design decided to put together these two screens into one device. The 3.5-inch touchscreen LCD screen is for browsing, while the 6-inch e-ink display is for reading.
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Android
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- Android stands out as the platform most popular among mobile developers. Survey results suggest nearly 60 percent of all mobile developers recently developed on Android, assuming an equal number of respondents with experience across each of eight major platforms. Second in terms of developer mindshare is iOS (iPhone), outranking Symbian and Java ME, which were in pole position in 2008.
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Just before a small community of distraught developers gear up to sue HTC in an effort to get that kernel source they’re required to release for the HTC EVO 4G, they’ve done it. It’s been a month since the device has launched, and – compared to how long it took HTC to offer up the goods for the HTC Hero – I’d say that EVO owners and developers are lucky to be getting the source so soon.
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Most of the news and photographs on the pages, and the layout of those pages themselves, were prepared for publication without using the usual newsroom software for writing, editing, toning, cropping and paginating.
Instead, all this work was done using free software available to anyone on the Internet. And yes, it was hard work. The proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relative fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper. The free substitutes, not so much.
[...]
But between us, producing today’s paper wasn’t easy for the newsroom. News Editor Paul Tackett has been working days and nights, on top of his usual job, to set up most of the day’s pages in a layout program called Scribus.
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The Saratogian tried an experiment for Independence Day – run free software for a day, to produce the July 4 2010 issue of their (web and print) newspaper. They called it the Ben Franklin Edition *. The free software experiment is part of the Ben Franklin Project of the Journal Register Company, which owns The Saratogian.
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In the open source republic, the hacker is your representative. He codes on your behalf, and should his idea find favor, the project leader approves the idea, and the idea becomes part of the code base. Should your ideas and the hacker’s ideas differ, you are free to contact someone else on the dev team. If nothing is done to your liking, your are free to secede from the union and fork the code. In the real world, information is free for the taking, and where law forbids the exchange of ideas we see rather inventive means of circumvention come to fruition. In most free nations around the world, people were supposed to be at the forefront of government. In the USA, politicians were once called public servants. The open source community is much the same. While many do make money off of open source software, the motivation to create open source software and to open source already existing projects was initially the want to help others, make a better product, and lower development costs by allowing anyone to contribute. Only one of those three motivations has anything to do with monetary cost.
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Open source software developer Exist Global foresees a 100 percent revenue growth this year to $4 million on back of a vibrant US market and local companies’ willingness to pay for high-valued software.
The company believes this year is the start of sustained profitable operations from a slowdown in the US market after it was adversely affected by the global financial crisis.
“As far as Exist is concerned, I think the worst is behind us. We’re receiving a lot of requests, indicating that the second half is going to be healthy. We’re beginning to focus on hiring again,” said Winston Damarillo, Exist Global founder, in an interview at a company celebration for its first half performance.
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Today’s a legal holiday in the US, but we like to post an entry in the blog every weekday to keep you from getting bored. I can’t promise to relieve the boredom today, because today’s entry is about me.
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Events
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The organisation behind Australia’s flagship annual Linux conference has requested formal proposals from parties interested in hosting the event in their city in 2012.
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Mozilla
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Over the last several weeks of the beta, members of the mobile team have written blog posts about most of the new features and improvements you’ll find in the browser. Here, with quick summaries, are links to all of them – enjoy!
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With the popularity of Android phones, it seems strange that it was not released there first. There is a massive Android user base already, who are apparently hungry for a well known browser that is familiar to the one they use on the desktop. This is shown in the success Opera Mobile has enjoyed and one look at the comments in the marketplace suggest that it is widely favored over the default browser that is packaged with the users phone. Speaking as an HTC Desire user, I certainly prefer Opera to the native browser and even though I cannot set it as default, I would much rather use that than the default offering.
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Oracle
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GSteamer and its libraries are installed by default on many distributions, like Ubuntu and its derivatives, and is contained in the repository of many others. It has become very stable in recent versions and supports most multimedia codecs. If already installed, users need not take any further action to enjoy the benefits of GStreamer in OpenOffice.org, one of which is much better performance. Distribution developers can disable this support by choice if desired and cause OpenOffice.org to revert to using Java.
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Education
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We are going to have to face a very uncomfortable fact in the coming weeks and months. This new Coalition Government is out of love with ICT in schools.
I am certainly not the only pundit who has noticed the resounding silence surrounding matters ICT amongst the noisy plethora of other announcements concerning educational reform.
All we know so far is that virtually the very first act of this government was to abolish Becta, an act they had uniquely signalled months in advance of coming to power and carried out with a ferocity resembling a pogrom.
Something about it, taken in combination with stories from ex-Becta employees who (subsequently) complained about apparatchik style cronyism within the organisation makes me think that ICT has been linked deeply with the previous administration..and not in a good way.
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Business
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Is Mark suggesting that OSI intended to facilitate less freedom for the code and end users than the GPL offers, that this was an OSI goal, that “software freedom for the software user” isn’t and never was an OSI goal? Does freedom mean only the right to fork the code? If so, I’d like OSI to say so clearly and on the record. If so, it might provide insight into why OSI is struggling and provide indisputable proof that they were foundationally wrong. I hope they’ll weigh in on this debate and plant their flag, because if that is what OSI stands for, maybe it’s time to let them float out into outer space without the community, thus making it clear there really is no connection between the real FOSS community and OSI any more.
If that is not what OSI stands for, I’d like to hear them say so. I hope it isn’t. But the community wants to know where they stand, and for what.
For myself, I believe that OSI, in order to be relevant, needs to reinvent itself and restructure to represent the entire community with its license list and its definition. Enough with the old divisions and the debates. The community needs to face the world more unitedly now, as a broad spectrum, including those who had the foresight to realize that VC guys and proprietary types would be coming along someday and would try to close down the freedom of the code and the freedoms of those using it just to make a buck.
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Openness/Sharing
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Since, as Larry Lessig famously pointed out, “code is law” (and vice versa), it’s natural to try to apply open source methodologies in the legal world. Indeed, a site called Openlaw existed ten years ago:
Openlaw is an experiment in crafting legal argument in an open forum. With your assistance, we will develop arguments, draft pleadings, and edit briefs in public, online. Non-lawyers and lawyers alike are invited to join the process by adding thoughts to the “brainstorm” outlines, drafting and commenting on drafts in progress, and suggesting reference sources.
Building on the model of open source software, we are working from the hypothesis that an open development process best harnesses the distributed resources of the Internet community. By using the Internet, we hope to enable the public interest to speak as loudly as the interests of corporations. Openlaw is therefore a large project built through the coordinated effort of many small (and not so small) contributions.
Despite this long pedigree, open source law never really took off – until now.
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Open Access/Content
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The good news is that she is starting from a solid base: Wikipedia runs on GNU/Linux, Apache, Squid and MySQL. The bad news is that – unbelievably – Wikipedia is essentially run out of Florida (plus that troublesome caching site in Amsterdam). For such a globalised project – just think of all the languages supported – to be running like this is, frankly, bonkers – and makes outages like today’s almost inevitable.
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Science
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Using super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet, researchers from Washington State University (WSU) have created a compact, never-before-seen material capable of storing vast amounts of energy. Described by one of the researchers as “the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy,” the material holds potential for creating a new class of energetic materials or fuels, an energy storage device, super-oxidizing materials for destroying chemical and biological agents, and high temperature superconductors.
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The picture is the first full-sky image from Europe’s Planck telescope which was sent into space last year to survey the “oldest light” in the cosmos.
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The paper, “Increased Food and Ecosystem Security via Perennial Grains,” points out that perennials have longer growing seasons and longer, denser roots than annuals. Those longer roots, which can reach down 10 to 12 feet, allow the crops to reach and hold more water and nutrients, reduce erosion, and condition the soil. Because the plants grow for a greater length of time, they also sequester more carbon from the atmosphere.
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In a study published in Nature Methods, they describe how they were able to capture fruit fly development on film, and were the first to clearly record how a zebrafish’s eyes and midbrain are formed. The improved technique will also help to shed light on processes and organisms, which have so far been under-studied because they could not be followed under a microscope.
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Security/Aggression
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Hidden cameras in areas of Birmingham with large Muslim populations will be removed and any counter terrorism involvement stopped, police say.
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A SCOTTISH company has created a new personal CCTV system which could offer safety protection for frontline public service workers.
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The USSR, as Russia once was, used to epitomise the police state.
After the G20 civil rights violations, Canada could almost make the claim.
But in fact Britain is the country which has undeniably become the poster child for Big Brother among allegedly democratic countries.
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The cyber-attacks on Estonia in 2007 and on Georgia in 2008 (the latter strangely happened to coincide with the advance of Russian troops across the Caucasus) are widely assumed to have been directed by the Kremlin, but they could be traced only to Russian cyber-criminals. Many of the computers used in the attack belonged to innocent Americans whose PCs had been hijacked. Companies suspect China of organising mini-raids to ransack Western know-how: but it could just have easily been Western criminals, computer-hackers showing off or disillusioned former employees. One reason why Western governments have until recently been reticent about cyber-espionage is surely because they are dab hands at it, too.
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The truth is, we could have left whenever we wanted but the goal was to make some sense of the contradictory policies in place regarding photography at the Metrorail stations.
But instead of getting answers, we were told we would never be allowed on the train again. For the rest of our lives. We were told we would be arrested for trespassing If we dared set foot on any Metrorail property for as long as we live.
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Environment
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Besides the oil already spilling into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of up to 60,000 barrels daily, a group of British scientists says one can expect to see elevated levels of arsenic as well.
The research, published in the journal Water Research, showed that oil prevents naturally-occurring arsenic from being filtered out of the water by the sediment on the ocean floor. Oil coats the individual sediment particles and blocks the arsenic making contact with the minerals that would ordinarily bind to it.
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Copyrights
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In less than two years the RIAA has sent copyright infringement notices to 1.8 million Internet subscribers and 269,609 to colleges and universities. Despite this staggering average of more than a million infringement notices every year from the recording industry alone, the effect on file-sharing levels seems unnoticeable.
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Today the Pirate Party can announce the launch of our new community blog, PirateShip.org.uk.
The Pirate Ship is what is known as a “blog aggregator”, which takes posts from the blogs of party members and presents them all together in one website, allowing you to keep up to date on the latest political issues and debates without ever having to leave the page.
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GateHouse sued a company that sells reprints of articles — including articles from the Register Star — on fancy plaques to the people who are featured in those articles. Since GateHouse has its own reprint business, it views the defendant’s work as a competitive threat.
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During the last few weeks many file-sharing sites have been taken down by threats, legal action and police raids. From the mighty Pirate Bay to lesser known torrent sites across Europe and streaming giants around the world, the theme isn’t capitulation after a setback, but getting back online as quickly as possible.
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The following guest post is from Séverine Dusollier, who is a Professor in Law at the University of Namur and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain. She recently completed a Scoping Study on Copyright and Related Rights and the Public Domain commissioned as part of the WIPO Development Agenda (particularly its recommendations 16 and 20). We asked her to write about her findings…
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There’s a new meme in town these days: “rights of the artists”. The copyright industries have worked out that cries for more copyright and more money don’t go down too well when they come from fat-cat monopolists sitting in their plush offices, and so have now redefined their fight in terms of struggling artists (who rarely get to see much benefit from constantly extended copyright).
Here’s a nice example courtesy of the Copyright Alliance – an organisation that very much pushes that line:
Songwriter, Jason Robert Brown, recently posted on his blog a story about his experience dealing with copyright infringement. Knowing for a long time that many websites exist for the sole purpose of “trading” sheet music, Jason decided to log on himself and politely ask many of the users to stop “trading” his work. While many quickly wrote back apologizing and then removing his work, one girl in particular gave Jason a hard time.
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ACTA
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The 9th round of ACTA talks concluded last week in Lucerne, Switzerland. I briefly noted the official statement last week, but a subsequent news report makes it clear that the most important development to come out of the meeting is the breakdown of a consensus on transparency. Following the New Zealand meeting in April, there was consensus achieved on the need to release a draft version of the text. It is now clear that the overwhelming majority of countries favoured continuing this approach by releasing updated versions at the conclusion of subsequent meetings. That did not happen after the Lucerne meeting, however, with both the Swiss and European Commission delegations indicating that they favoured releasing the text but that one delegation did not. It is a safe bet that the U.S. is once again the key holdout on the transparency issue.
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CLUG Talk – 12 August 2008 – The Process Model of the Transputer (2008)
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Send this to a friend
07.04.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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While at the HP Technology Forum 2010, a particular breakout session stood out in that it was all about Linux. In fact, I’ve stolen the title of the presentation and made it the name of this article. Bdale Garbee, a very comprehensive and impressive individual (also the HP Open Source & Linux Chief Technologist), gave a talk on the basics of Linux and HP’s involvement in it.
He outlined the community development model (in his words: “no one company in charge; a range of contributors with varied interests, abilities, and motivations”) and the freedom of choice (“users have flexibility in how they acquire support for open source technology; any user can become a developer or pay someone to develop or support… on their behalf; if ‘upstream’ ever behaves unacceptably, developers have the power to ‘fork’”). He said that, to profit while maintaining the openness of open source, HP needs to add unique value that customers want to pay for.
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There has been no official announcement from Dell or Google about a deal but “talks” are underway. If an agreement is reached Dell would be the third manufacturer to build a future netbook with Chrome OS. The other computer manufacturers that plan on releasing netbooks or other computers with Chrome OS are Acer and HP.
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In the past twelve months Windows market share went from 88.09% to 83.11%. The Windows XP product, which continues to hold the largest market share went from 69.74% to 49.95% of the total desktop operating system market share. The trend is showing as people divest from older Microsoft technologies, they do not “upgrade” to Windows Vista or Windows 7.
The next 12 months will bring a new breed of tablets and notebooks which will run Ubuntu on ARM. These will sell like hot cakes so that people can watch Google’s youtube and play games of Facebook. The desktop is over, even in the corporate sector.
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Desktop
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Operating system: I’m using Ubuntu, a version of the free and open GNU/Linux operating system that is designed to be easy to use and maintain for non-techy people. I was once a Unix sysadmin, but it has been a long time, and I wouldn’t hire me to do it today. Ubuntu Just Works. I recently had cause to install Windows XP on an old ThinkPad and found that it was about a hundred times more complicated than getting Ubuntu running. When I transitioned to Ubuntu from the MacOS, I had a week or two’s worth of disorientation, similar to what happened after we renovated the kitchen and changed where we kept everything. Then the OS just disappeared, and it has stayed disappeared, breaking in ways that are neither more severe nor more frequent than any other OS I’ve ever used.
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Server
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My interest in benchmarking has a practical side for HPC. As everyone is well aware, the Linux HPC ecosystem changes rapidly with updated kernels (drivers), libraries (MPI), and applications. Early on, I would ask myself this questions, “What influence do these updates have on performance?” It is naive to think that all updates always lead to better performance. In order to quantitatively measure these changes, I put together what I called the Beowulf Performance Suite. My intention was not to create a benchmark, but rather a way to measure the effects of change.
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It would be hard to find two technologies that would seem to be more diametrically opposed in the data center than the IBM mainframe and the open source Linux operating system. But the combination of the two, which then-IBM president and now IBM chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano championed (or more precisely, gets credit for championing within Big Blue regardless of whose idea it may have been), saved the System z mainframe business.
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Ballnux
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But of course, the humdrum reality is that ’tis just an Android 2.1 replacement for the entry-level Tattoo — same 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7225 processor, 3.2-inch 320 x 240 capacitive LCD touchscreen instead of 2.8-inch resistive, 384MB RAM instead of 256MB, and a 5-megapixel camera instead of 3.2 (although quality matters more, obviously). So can this affordable handset provide enough bang for the buck to satisfy Europeans and Asians? Can the aging processor keep Sense UI well oiled? All will be revealed after the break.
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Graphics Stack
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Instructionals
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Back in May, we provided a step-by-step guide to sorting out and shoring up a digital audio library. As several readers noted, audio collections aren’t the only media stores that can get out of control. Your digital photos may also be an unsorted mess, split up over several directories (or even machines), with inconsistent file names, duplicates, and a host of other problems. This weekend, why not sift through the clutter and get the whole collection in top shape before the camera comes home with a full memory card from the next big cookout?
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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The switch to KDE (4.4) came as a surprise to me. I was very happy with the Gnome offering of Netrunner and thought it was an excellent grounding for future versions. I’ve never been a fan of KDE, whilst many users rave about the DE, Ive often said that I don’t feel in control with it, it feels plastic and is far too Vistaesque for my liking. Maybe I subconsciously yearn for an XP type DE or maybe it goes back further to Workbench 1.3, but my DE of choice has always been Gnome with a top+bottom taskbar and the more traditional menus. It’s worth noting that whilst the taskbar and desktop are obviously KDE, the menu systems have a very Gnome look to them. Is this an intention by the devs to please both KDE and Gnome users? Maybe, although I don’t keep ontop of the latest KDE releases so I’ll stand corrected if its the default setting for the new version.
With that in mind though the distro is excellent, speedy and simple to install (thanks to its Ubuntu origins) with very little fuss “out of the box”. As I remarked previously, theres very little to find fault in Netrunner, although I still stand by the original comment that the name of this distro undersells its true potential. When I was informed of this new release by email, I instantly thought of a net kiosk distro (since Ive looked at many distro’s since the original review) Of course Netrunner is far from being a net kiosk package (although it will play very nicely on a netbook or limited spec machine) and also think the title since “Netrunner” implies something more net/cloud orientated, which compared to say Peppermint, its not. Netrunner has menu links to Twitter and other online services, but instead of providing these services through Prism, they merely open up a new instance of Firefox (if one is not open, or simply open in a tab). One has to ask the question, are they really needed? and if so could these shortcuts not simply be in a favorites menu within Firefox, rather than taking a desktop submenu up? – Only you can be the judge of that.
[...]
would ever notice it’s absence from Netrunner – unless of course they were fans of Gbrainy! 
in which case they will be devastated! What the removal of the Mono packages does do is free up space to include more popular products and that can only be a good thing.
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The TonidoPlug falls into a relatively new category of “wall-wart” form factor computers. They are generally defined as being cheap, low on power consumption (in the single watts range) and fanless. Most plug computers, as they are also called, are based off of the Marvell SheevaPlug reference design. The difference between the TonidoPlug competitors like the Ctera CloudPlug, PogoPlug and Globalscale GuruPlug comes down to the bundled software and services. While they all essentially run on the same hardware, each has its own set of pre-installed applications in addition to services (some are paid) that do things like facilitate file and media sharing from outside the home network.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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The posting from Anssi Vanjoki also stated that, “I am committed, perhaps even obsessed, with getting Nokia back to being number one in high-end devices. Achieving this will require performance and efforts over and above the norm. This is a role I’ve personally been preparing for over the last 20 years. We have all the assets — including R&D and product development – at our disposal under one roof – to produce killer smartphones and market-changing mobile computers.” End of Quote
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Android
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He specifically namedrops Ricky Cadden — who yesterday shut down Symbian-Guru because he’d lost faith with the company — and clearly considers grassroots support like that an important aspect of how Nokia’s success will be judged.
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Apparently, the phone is designed in a way that allows the user to decide how to hold it. Just another example of Android’s freedom of choice.
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So let’s get this straight. According to Apple, Droid, Nokia, and RIM are all examples of phone categories. In referencing Android devices as Droids, Apple’s PR department is showing a severe lack of understanding for the world of smartphones that they are claiming to be so authoritative in. Clearly having been sucked into Verizon’s Droid Does campaign (pretty impressive on Verizon’s part, if I might say so myself), Apple clearly doesn’t “get” that Android is a platform that resides on over 60 devices worldwide.
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When we broke the news that Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile had stopped their Droid X pre-sale after hitting their alloted inventory number in just 5 days, we didn’t expect them to restart it. Well, guess what? They have…sort of.
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The desktop market was won by Microsoft in large part because of its appeal to the broadest segment of the developer population — cue the Steve Ballmer fight song, complete with sweat stains and manic enthusiasm.
In mobile, Microsoft is AWOL because it has failed to attract developers in meaningful numbers. Instead, Apple and now Google claim the biggest share of mobile developer mindshare.
Why? Well, because of money, of course.
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When we broke the news that Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile had stopped their Droid X pre-sale after hitting their alloted inventory number in just 5 days, we didn’t expect them to restart it. Well, guess what? They have…sort of.
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Release fast, release early. That is what I am trying this time so don’t get too excited. I only added one feature. Yes one.
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According to a June 23rd Tweet by cyanogen, his infamous ROM v.6 is targeting the Nexus One (which seems to be his favorite since its release), the Verizon Droid, the HTC Dream, Magic, and Desire, as well as the HTC EVO4G by Sprint. He later tweeted the Hero would get some love too.
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Paul O’Brien, the genius behind MoDaCo, has just released an updated “superboot” rooting method for the dell streak. According to Paul, this root method differs a little from what we’re used to seeing, but still gets the job done for those who want superuser access on Dell Streak handsets.
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Verizon Wireless will begin upgrading its first Motorola Droid to the new OS by July 13, said the Brighthand blog, which noted “unofficial but stable versions of this ROM have already appeared on the Web.” Droidforums.net said the Motorola Droid X will receive Android 2.2 over the air in August. Android 2.2 features significant speed improvements over Android 2.1, as well as new enterprise capabilities for Microsoft Exchange and Gmail, WiFi hotspot enablement and tethering, and a cloud-to-device messaging API.
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The latest numbers from mobile app store monitor Distimo show major differences in apps’ prices in Google’s Android Market and Apple’s App Store. While the majority of apps on the Android Market are free, only about a quarter on the App Store are. Advantage Android or advantage App Store? Debatable. Consumers might prefer free apps, but developers want a marketplace where it’s commonplace to charge.
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Two of the most anticipated projects in development at Google should be rolled out in a coordinated fashion rather soon. Android product manager Gaurav Jain indicated in a recent interview that Google Music and Android 3.0 will come out together in time for the holidays.
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We reported at the start of June that Intel reckons it’ll have the latest version on Android on its Moorestone smartphone. The timing means that will probably be Gingerbread, whether Google calls that Android 2.3 or 3.0.
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A job listing for an “Android Video Playback Expert” under Partner Product Development has been spotted on the Netflix job listing page (via BGR > Nerdcast).
Under the description of the position, Netflix says it’s looking for “a great engineer to help us build Instant Streaming client implementations on Android devices.”
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Web Browsers
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Google Chrome last week unseated Apple Safari for the first time as the third most used Internet browser in the United States, according to figures released by StatCounter.
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Users running the latest Chromium and Google Chrome dev builds can enable the feature by adding a command-line flag (–new-wrench-menu) to the application’s shortcut. On Mac OS X systems, the current version 6.0.447.0 dev release of Chrome includes the unified menu by default.
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Business
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Cloudera – the commercial Hadoop outfit – has unveiled its first for-pay product: Cloudera Enterprise, an augmented version of the open source distributed data crunching platform designed specifically for production environments.
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Open Data
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I am not a data scientist. Nor am I a programmer. I’ve got an inclination toward technology, but my core skill set very much resides in the humanities domain.
I offer this biographical sketch up front because I think I have a lot in common with the people who work around and near tech spaces: academics, business users, entertainment professionals, editors, writers, producers, etc. The interesting thing about data science — and the reason why I’m glad Mike Loukides wrote “What is data science?” — is that vast stores of data have relevance to all sorts of folks, including people like me who lack a pure technical pedigree.
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The Department of Health and Human Services continues its rapid roll-out of new data initiatives that bring ordinary Americans digitally into the heart of the health care system. Today, HHS announced the latest in these open government projects, which collectively provide excellent examples of the goals behind opening up data–not data for data’s sake, but data as a tool people can use to get more involved in policy, have an impact on civic life, and hopefully make their own lives better along the way.
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Programming
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The two most important new features of this release are:
* pushable bookmarks. This lets you synchronize bookmarks between repositories using push and pull.
* a powerful new revision query language.
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How dumb are we?
Apparently, pretty dumb.
At least according to a new Marist poll, which says 26% of people in this country don’t know that the U.S. declared its independence from Great Britain.
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Police launched the investigation as school officials blasted what they said were incorrect reports by Fox News that the School Committee had banned the pledge in Arlington schools.
[...]
School Committee members said they would look into enacting a pledge policy this summer, and on Tuesday, Arlington High principal Charles Skidmore told the Globe he would lead the pledge in the school’s auditorium every morning for students who wished to say it. Harrington said he still wants the pledge broadcast into each classroom.
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A California appeals court Friday upheld Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to reduce some state workers’ pay to the federal minimum wage until a budget is passed, but the official in charge of paychecks said he won’t comply with the order.
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THE POWER DRAWN by wireless links is far too high and the industry has a “duty” to cut it, ARM president Tudor Brown has warned.
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Members of Britain’s show-jumping set lost tens of thousands of pounds to a playboy who infiltrated their society parties masquerading as the son of one of IBM’s founders, a court heard.
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The ACLU of Indiana filed a lawsuit in Indianapolis alleging the State delays in processing unemployment appeals is contrary to federal law. Under federal law, the Indiana Department of Workforce Development is required to issue at least 60% of decisions on unemployment appeals within 30 days of the date of an appeal request, and at least 80% of decisions within 45 days of the date of an appeal request.
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Foxconn, the Taiwanese assembler of iPhones and other gadgets for many major electronics companies, has signed an agreement to turn over management of dorms used to house workers at massive factory campuses in Shenzhen, China, to two Chinese firms, it said Sunday.
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BBC
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Well this is embarrassing for the BBC. The corporation’s new Olympics site has launched with a bit of (we assume) placeholder text left intact.
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Splendid. That’s a BBC photo of a BBC building all right, and here for the record are some other photos of BBC buildings not by the BBC, with the exception of the second one, which was taken by the Television Centre teaboy on an iPhone.
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The TV licence payers among you are going to like this: The BBC has apparently turned to Getty Images for a stock photo of its own building…
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Science
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A NASA space probe famous for bombing a comet five years ago made a final “flyby” past Earth last night, changing its orbit around the Sun with the aid of the planet’s gravity. The renamed “EPOXI” craft (formerly “Deep Impact”) swooped low just 19,000 miles above the South Atlantic at 11pm UK time last night.
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The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted the Terrafugia Transition, a flying car (and a roadable airplane) the classification of Light Sport Aircraft, even though it is a little heavier than required.
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Since we’re coming up on the Fourth of July, and towns everywhere are preparing their better-than-ever fireworks spectaculars, we would like to offer this humbling bit of history. Back in the summer of 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in outer space, some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean
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Security/Aggression
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A security expert has identified flaws in the design of some automated teller machines that make them vulnerable to hackers, who could make the ubiquitous cash dispensers spit out their cash holdings.
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When Lonnie Tinsley’s 86-year-old bedridden grandmother refused to take her medicine, he called emergency services in El Reno, Oklahoma and requested a medical technician. Instead, a dozen armed officers arrived at the scene.
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Two police officers stopped a teenaged freelance photographer from taking pictures of police cadets marching in an Armed Forces Day in London. The officers claimed (incorrectly) that it was against the law to photograph minors without parental consent. Then they pushed him down a set of stairs and detained him. The photographer recorded the incident, including the officers claiming that they didn’t need any law to detain him.
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Law enforcement agencies in Northern Virginia say you have no right to know what they’re doing.
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This would be the mandatory angry blog post about my harassment in Romford yesterday. I was told by the police I was breaching the terrorism act, public order act, various misc copyright and child protection laws and otherwise being an “Agitator”.
The incident started when I took an image (not a very good one it seems :p) of a Police Cadet unit forming up to take part in an Armed Forces Day parade. I was quickly and aggressively stopped by one of their adult officers asking me who I worked for. I responded that I was a freelance and upon being told I needed parental permission to photograph them, I explained this was a public event in a public place and that I didn’t for editorial use.
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On Monday the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies to states and cities as well as the federal government. Judging from their objections, the four dissenters were still reeling from the Court’s landmark 2008 decision recognizing that the amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.
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Former prime minister Tony Blair has been named as the 2010 winner of US award the Liberty Medal for his “commitment to conflict resolution”, his office said Thursday.
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But the hat ran afoul of the district’s no-weapons policy because the toy soldiers were carrying tiny weapons.
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Moscow communicated with a ring of alleged spies in America by encoding instructions in otherwise innocent-looking images on public websites. It’s a process called steganography. And it’s one of a slew of high-tech and time-tested methods that the deep-cover agents and their Russian handlers used to pass information — from private Wi-Fi networks to buried paper bags.
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Now the Toronto police have admitted that the law used to harass and search many of those demonstrators wasn’t a real law, just something that they made up.
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Four journalists have filed complaints with Ontario’s police watchdog, with allegations that police physically assaulted or threatened to sexually assault the females when they were arrested during the Toronto G20 summit.
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Lisan Jutras was on the streets of Toronto this weekend taking in the events and watching the many demonstrations. In the end, she was one of the citizens held at Queen Street West and Spadina Avenue on Sunday night, only to be released just before 10 p.m. Lisan works at The Globe and Mail and although she wasn’t accredited for the summits or on assignment, globeandmail.com was using some of her tweets in our live coverage.
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The Russian ring charged this week with spying on the United States faced some of the common security problems that plague many companies — misconfigured wireless networks, users writing passwords on slips of paper and laptop help desk issues that take months to resolve.
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A former IT worker for the Bank of New York has admitted to stealing personal information of 2,000 employees and using it to steal more than $1m from charity bank accounts, city prosecutors said.
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Users of a popular Cisco Systems wireless access point may be setting themselves up for trouble if they leave a WPA wireless migration feature enabled, according to researchers at Core Security Technologies.
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New York’s Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center is notifying patients that their personal information may have been compromised after seven CDs full of unencrypted data were FedExed by a hospital contractor and then lost in transit.
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Environment
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At the same time the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper mill will dump millions of cubic meters of industrial wastewaters into Lake Baikal. This will certainly increase the negative impact on the lake: the contaminated area on the bottom of the southern Baikal that has developed since the mill was put into operation, has reached 130 square kilometers and will certainly keep growing if the mill is re-launched.
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A revolutionary scheme backed by the World Bank to pay poor countries billions of dollars a year to stop felling trees is the best way to stop logging and save the planet from climate change, according to wealthy countries and conservationists, yet documents seen by the Observer show the plan is actually leading to corruption and possibly more logging.
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Then, open source all of their thinking. Have them put their ideas on the web as they evolve. Get anyone involved who wants to try to help solve the problem. MIT has long been a leader in using the web for education – most recently with MIT Open Courseware. MIT and BP already have a longstanding relationship – let’s take it up a level.
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BP denied on Monday that its chief executive Tony Hayward was set to resign over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill which is costing the embattled British energy group about four million dollars an hour.
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Dissatisfied with what he sees as tepid effort on behalf of oil giant BP to stop the flow of petroleum from an exploded well in the Gulf of Mexico, a New York-based video producer named Adam Quirk has started raising money for a stunt designed to irritate its executives.
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Two environmental groups have announced plans to file suit to prevent BP from burning alive endangered sea turtles in the cleanup of the Gulf Coast. In a widely circulated video, Gulf Coast boat captain Mike Ellis says BP has prevented rescuers from saving turtles trapped in the middle of controlled burns.
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Environmental groups, BP (BP.N) (BP.L) and the U.S. Coast Guard reached tentative agreement on Friday on measures to prevent sea turtles from being incinerated alive in controlled burns of spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
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The error was caught by an auditor for the Southern Ute Tribe, who first notified BP America and then reported it to federal officials.
“It is simply unacceptable for companies to repeatedly misreport production, particularly when it interferes with the auditing process,” said BOEM Director Michael Bromwich in a statement.
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If we want to anticipate the future of cities, we should look to China. China is urbanizing at a rate unprecedented in history. Between now and 2030, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, Chinese cities are expected to add more than 350 million people, swelling to a total urban population of more than a billion. By then, China will have more than 220 cities with populations of more than a million (by comparison, Europe today has only 35 cities with one million+ inhabitants), and 24 emerging megacities with more than five million inhabitants.
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They don’t know it yet, but the politicians who sat in last week’s G20 meeting and decided to backslide on their commitments to tackle climate change are no longer the most important voices on the planet. It’s the people who were outside that meeting calling for an energy revolution. It’s the people who have a better idea about what our world can look like, run by energy sources that don’t spill, burn, explode, poison, or destroy. Those are the voices we need to listen to, those are the investment paths we need to follow.
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The government’s former chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford, told a conference that massive helium balloons – or blimps – would replace aircraft as a key part of the global trade network as a way of cutting global warming emissions.
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In January, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) brought new optimism to the post UN Climate Summit blues – by stepping into the debate about the Czech Republic’s largest coal-fired power plant, Prunerov, owned by the energy company ČEZ.
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Second example: you’ve probably heard about the oil dispersants that BP has been using in the Gulf, in the vague hope of breaking up the oil and have it, well, disperse more easily (not that the oil goes away, it’s just less visible and less of a PR nightmare for BP). It turns out the company that makes these has just hired top lobbyists in Washington, DC:
Illinois-based Nalco Co., manufacturer of dispersant Corexit 9500, recently hired Ramola Musante to run the company’s Washington lobbying effort. Musante previously worked at both EPA and the Department of Energy. Nalco also recruited Ogilvy Government Relations, whose lobbyists include Drew Maloney, past assistant to former House Majority Whip Tom Delay (R-Texas).
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Science has been changed forever by the so-called “climategate” saga, leading researchers have said ahead of publication of an inquiry into the affair – and mostly it has been changed for the better.
This Wednesday sees the publication of the Muir Russell report into the conduct of scientists from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), whose emails caused a furore in November after they were hacked into and published online.
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Finance
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The overhaul of the U.S. financial system took a big step toward becoming law Wednesday evening when the House passed reform legislation 237-192. As a result, it’s also looking more likely that brokers may soon be held to the same standard of care as investment advisers.
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Ratigan concluded that it’s time to create an “alternative investment structure” that would allow people to invest their money without putting it “into the obviously corrupt stock market in this country.”
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Advertisers are wrong to say that websites can comply with a new law governing internet cookies by relying on a user’s cookie settings, Europe’s privacy watchdogs have said. The Article 29 Working Party has published its interpretation of the new law.
Prior consent is required, according to the privacy watchdogs. However, consent can be given to advertising networks covering thousands of websites and need not be given to every individual site, the regulators said.
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In 1848, the discovery of gold brought hordes of prospectors to California. In 1889, millions of acres of free land set off a rush of settlers into Oklahoma. Today, we are told, the chance to get U.S. citizenship for their unborn children is rapidly filling the country with illegal immigrants.
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Google Inc. said some Web search features have been partially blocked in China as the company awaits a decision from the country’s government on whether it can keep providing Internet services there.
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Google, which has been redirecting Google China visitors to its search page in Hong Kong for three months now in order to avoid censoring its results, is trying a new strategy. The company says it can no longer automatically redirect Google.cn users to Google.com.hk lest its commercial website license won’t be renewed.
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A Turkish Internet rights group opened a court case on Monday to end what it says are illegal restrictions on Google services, the latest step in a debate over Internet freedom in Turkey.
Turkey has clashed with Google before and closed down Google’s (GOOG.O) video sharing platform YouTube in 2008 for videos it said insulted the country’s revered founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
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Pakistan has blocked 17 Web sites and is closely monitoring seven other sites and search engines for content considered offensive and blasphemous, according to a spokesman of the country’s telecommunications regulator, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA).
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The site used an obscure Google search page, originally designed for the IE 6 side bar, which had remained unchanged until this year.
[...]
Both ixquick and Yauba tout themselves as alternatives that respect privacy. Of the two, ixquick seems to have less Web2.0rhea.
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The hypocrisy is breathtaking. After listening to two years of unambiguous opposition to the Internet filter proposal, Senator Conroy invariably falls back on the paedophile defence. Shame on you Sir, shame on you.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The music rights group sent out a political mailing to its members, demonizing “free culture” groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, Public Knowledge and “public companies with deep pockets,” by which I guess it meant Google.
As with most political mailings this one took some liberties with the truth. saying its perceived enemies were “mobilizing to promote ‘copyleft’ in order to undermine our ‘copyright.’”
As Wired notes, the mailing went out just as the government was trying to shift focus on copyright policy, acknowledging fair use, drawing praise from both sides.
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Last week, we posted about how ASCAP was attacking EFF, Public Knowledge and (most bizarre of all) Creative Commons, as part of its fundraising drive. As we pointed out, this showed ASCAP’s true colors. For an organization that presents itself as trying to supports artists’ rights, it’s downright ridiculous to attack a group like Creative Commons that only looks to give musicians more choices in what they do with their own rights. In following some of the reaction to the article, I saw a tweet from musician Eric Young, where he publicly declared plans to quit ASCAP over this fundraising appeal:
#FUCKASCAP #iQuit … this is the 1st public anncmnt of my resignation from ASCAP. this is bullshit.
That left me wondering how other ASCAP members were feeling about this, and thankfully, Slashdot points us to a blog post on the Mind the Gap blog that discusses this issue (towards the end). In the comments, though, a number of ASCAP members express their displeasure with the organization.
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The stakes are high for anyone identified in USCG’s slipshod cases. USCG’s strategy appears to be to threaten a judgment of up to $150,000 per downloaded movie — the maximum penalty allowable by law in copyright suits and a very unlikely judgment in cases arising from a single, noncommercial infringement — in order to pressure the alleged infringers to settle quickly for $1,500 – $2,500 per person. Earlier this month, EFF, the ACLU, and Public Citizen filed an amicus brief in three of these cases, outlining how the lawsuits flout the legal safeguards that protect individuals’ rights.
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Paton told me he was looking at having to spend $25 million just to get the company’s technology up to date. Hold on. We took to the white board and brainstormed how one could publish a paper today using Google Docs, Flickr, and WordPress. Paton, as is his habit, took my bull(shit) by the horns and ran with it. His staff found other, better free tools to do everything (even advertising). He printed one test edition of a paper to prove it could be done. Then he decreed that all his dailies would do this on one day, on July 4. More important, he used this as a means to get the staffs to think differently about their relationships with their communities, to act differently in how they made journalism. And they did it. Theyr’e not dealing in some theoretical future of news talked about by consultants and professors. [cough] They are building it.
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Copyrights
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Doctoral research into media education and media literacy at the University of Leicester has highlighted how increased legislative control on use of digital content could stifle future creativity.
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For a long time now, there’s been an effort underway to craft important copyright exceptions for the visually impaired, which would do things like give them the right to convert a written work into an audio work through text-to-speech software. While it seems like this should be allowed (after all, isn’t reading a book out loud legal under copyright law?) some have claimed that such text-to-speech efforts violate copyright law. There are some other areas, too, where copyright law makes life more difficult for the blind. To deal with this WIPO has been discussing a treaty that would create some copyright exceptions for these specific cases. Not surprisingly, the entertainment industry came out very strongly against helping the blind with such a treaty, as they fear any effort to add more exceptions to copyright law, even if it means the blind are more likely to consume their products.
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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is known to be quite litigious in protecting its Oscar rights. But dare we say it has outdone itself this time with a whopping 134-page lawsuit against domain registration giant GoDaddy.com and its subsidiaries for trafficking in unauthorized trademarks.
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There’s no question of the infringing activity or its scale. The only question in the case is whether YouTube, as the provider of a platform for uploading and hosting video content, shares any of the liability of those among its users who uploaded Viacom content (including clips from Comedy Central and other television programming) without permission.
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The cable news network is battling Kenneth Stadt, who owns the rights to the Madoff video. In early 2009, Stadt gave Fox News an exclusive license to his footage for 45 days in return for $10,000. The network later re-upped for another 45 days in return for $50,000 more. According to the complaint, the term then expired, but Fox allegedly kept using the footage anyway.
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After several weeks of delays, the Balanced Copyright for Canada site revealed its funding and advisory board late on Tuesday night, hours before the Canada Day holiday. The primary source of funding is not a surprise – as I suggested in my first post on the site – this is a Canadian Recording Industry Association production. As the public questions about the site mounted, the regular response was that this was an effort of “employees, unions, artists and creators” and that the all-Canadian Advisory Board would be announced soon. The fact that the site was really a CRIA attempt to create “grassroots” support for C-32 was not acknowledged.
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A friend of mine, and respected colleague, has written a piece over on LinuxToday that bears mentioning: Editor’s Note: Copying is Stealing. Though I agree with the spirit of the piece, I have to take issue with the conflation of stealing and copying.
I really hate it when people conflate copying with stealing.
I see my work plagiarized or copied on other sites all the time. Sometimes it’s automated by spammers, occasionally it’s deliberately copied by other authors thinking they can pad their own work or build their own blog with other people’s content. It annoys me to no end. It’s copyright infringement, and I will go after people who do it — but it is not stealing.
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After two appeals, a file-sharing case in Norway with important privacy implications has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. The whole process has been shrouded in secrecy, with the results of each stage kept from the public. Now the final decision has been made available and for both file-sharers and privacy advocates alike, the result is unwelcome.
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ACTA
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Sean Flynn from the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University, sent over the list of questions that he and a group of others concerned about ACTA are planning to ask the ACTA negotiators today in a meeting in Switzerland, where the latest round of ACTA negotiations are under way. The meeting is set to take place at 7pm Swiss time, which should be about 10am this morning California time.
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CLUG Talk 24 March 2009 – Split Routing (2009)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.03.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts
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This show covers the single window mode of GIMP 2.7.1 with a video (which sat some weeks here) from nachbarnebenan. I just installed the new version on my machine and I like it.
Then I scratch an itch I had – Printing DVDs with GIMP.
The sound in this episode in not as good as usual. Sorry.
00:20 Berlin and you
01:45 Single window mode demo
06:00 Printing on CD/DVDs
06:50 Defining the media size in Turbo Print
08:20 Defining a new image template
11:30 Starting a new image from the template
12:20 A layer with guide lines
16:15 New layer(s) for content
16:50 Inserting a source image
17:40 Scaling down of the new layer
20:00 A gradient background
21:00 Blending the layers with a mask
24:20 Adding text
25:50 Printing
28:50 Recap and more background about units
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The podcast is in MP3 and OGG formats. You can either play the podcast in-browser if you have Flash and/or Java, or you can download the podcast with the link underneath the player.
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Patrick L Archibald of hacker public radio interviews his sister Wynn Godbold who recently starting using Ubuntu Linux. She is a kindergarten teacher in South Carolina.
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Kernel Space
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-The first news for this week is Jan Kara’s pull request fot linux-fs (ext2 and ext3 in our case) aimed at -rc4, Frederic Weisbecker posting his pull request for the perf tree and Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo’s pull request for perf/core targetted at 2.6.36 .
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Graphics Stack
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Various users and developers have expressed their views on the matter within this discussion thread (along with the usual bickering between David and Luc) but as it stands right now there is no user-space Linux graphics driver for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon graphics core that is open-source. Nor is it likely we will see a complete open-source Qualcomm Linux driver in the immediate future.
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Applications
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Calcurse can operate in three modes. The first is the non-interactive mode, where you have to pass arguments to the program and get the output on the terminal. The second interactive mode has the interface in ncurses and you have to use your keyboard to run a menu-driven application. The third is the background mode or the daemon mode.
Non-interactive mode: In this mode, you have to pass arguments to the application from the shell and run it. This
mode does not start the ncurses-based user interface but only dumps the output to STDOUT (in this case, the shell). You’ll find a list of all valid arguments along with their descriptions in the man page.
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No-one goes out of their way to lose their laptop let alone have it stolen. Usually in these situations there is but a slim chance of finding, locating or recovering your laptop unless it has your address scrawled on the back like a label in 5th graders’ coat.
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One of the major selling points of Eee PC netbooks is their impressive battery life which is achieved by utilizing the Asus Super Hybrid Engine (SHE) technology. While it’s designed to work under Windows, you can take advantage of this technology if you’re running a Linux distro on your Eee PC, courtesy of the Jupiter utility. Although this tool is designed primarily for Eee PC netbooks, it works well on pretty much any notebook. So if you want to squeeze as much battery life from your machine as you can, Jupiter is worth a try.
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This is the list of some of the best Lightweight applications available in Linux . I hope you like it . Please give your feedback in comments .
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Twitter is a popular social networking utility which has gained enormous popularity as a micro-blogging tool, With millions using the service across the globe. Indeed, Twitter is pretty much constantly in the news. It enables friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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Qt/K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Two weeks ago I announced here on Labs that we were committed to an Open Governance model for Qt and related projects. I have read all the comments posted on the blog and those sent to me by email. I even had the chance to meet Robin Burchell in person and we had a very nice chat about the process, and the issues we’re facing. He also had some constructive suggestions.
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I downloaded the .iso of Kubuntu Netbook Alpha 2 and installed it in Sun’s, I mean Oracle’s VirtualBox. The virtual machine is running with 2 GB of RAM with 2 processors. Included are some screenshots taken from the VM and some comments along with it.
[...]
Looking forward to Maverick and more changes coming down.
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GNOME Desktop
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A few days ago, I took the risk of setting off alarm bells on the GNOME developer training sessions planned for GUADEC this year. It was a risk, and comments from the naysayers reminded me that it’s easier to do nothing than it is to take a risk. I’m happy to say that the risk paid off.
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Red Hat Family
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Coming from an airline, the 42-year-old Mr Whitehurst is an unlikely CEO for a technology company, and more so, a company that makes profits from selling free software.
When he left Delta, he was approached to do a lot of additional turnarounds, but Mr Whitehurst said rather than trying to fix something, he wanted to build something, where there was a buoyant canvas to be painted, and Red Hat fit that bill. Red Hat was also looking for someone from a non-tech background and Mr Whitehurst’s profile, with his interest in geeky stuff, matched it well.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu Satanic edition brings together the best of free software and free metal music. This is especially awesome if you are an avid dark theme fan boy. Moreover the latest Ubuntu Satanic edition brings in a brand new icon theme and some stunning wallpapers as well. There is a complete distro called Ubuntu Satanic Edition, but here we will concentrate on installing Ubuntu Satanic themes and other eyecandy in your native Ubuntu machine.
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The idea of a Linux Mint desktop based on top of Debian Testing is quite seducing. It’s much faster than Ubuntu and the current Linux Mint desktops, it uses less resources, and it opens the door for a rolling distribution, with a continuous flow of updates and no jumps from one release to another. It’s something we’ve always been tempted to do. Needless to say, whether it’s been because of our lack of communication on that topic or not, this has been a source of numerous rumors within the community.
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Remember when netbooks hit the market about three years or so ago? Some people considered them a fad, but I saw their potential. And, in a move that was very uncharacteristic of me, I bought a first-generation netbook. An Asus Eee PC 701. Seven inch screen, 4 GB solid-state hard drive, and 1 GB of memory (which I bumped up to 1.5).
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Not to get all patriotic on you, but I wanted to deliver a simple message as many of us head into this 4th of July holiday weekend. We are celebrating American independence (and our Canadian friends just celebrated Canadian independence). The idea of being free to make our own choices runs deep in our culture. In that spirit take a moment to reflect on what the FOSS (free and open source software) movement has meant to you and to the IT industry.
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Events
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Databases
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Open source database vendors acknowledge insufficient third-party security tools is a concern but point out that more support from security companies and the open source community are imminent.
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Oracle has announced that it has joined the SQLite Consortium. The move came, according the BerkeleyDB’s Senior Product Manager Gregory Burd, “to show our commitment to the community which built SQLite and demonstrate our sincere desire to be a good citizen and partner”. Oracle acquired Sleepycat Software, the makers of the open source BerkeleyDB, in 2006.
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Oracle/MySQL
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For the past few weeks I have been working on changing the User Interface and adding public domain tools for the Open Office plugin. In my previous post I introduced a new UI for adding creative Commons License, which is more simple and less confusing. In the same way I tried to make the UI for public domain tools as simple as possible.
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Monty Widenius, a leading open-source software proponent, lodged an appeal on Friday against the European Union’s antitrust authorities over their decision to green-light Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems at the beginning of this year.
The appeal was filed to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. Widenius was one of the co-developers of MySQL, the open source database software owned by Sun, and now by Oracle.
The merger was completed on Jan. 27, just six days after the European Commission, Europe’s top antitrust regulator, signed off on the deal. Widenius’ appeal is not likely to have any bearing on the takeover itself, but may put pressure on the Commission for more transparency in its decision-making process.
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Recently I was invited to go on the Oracle TechCast video show to talk about community within the context of MySQL.
I was joined by Luke Kowalski, Oracle VP in the Corporate Architecture Group, and we discussed a range of topics. The primary message I took to the show was that (a) we should not pre-judge Oracle yet for their stewardship of the MySQL based on the fear of what could happen, but I also made it clear to Luke that (b) Oracle needs to make a firm commitment to acting within the culture and ethos of Open Source to have an effective, fulfilling relationship with the MySQL community.
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MySQL users now have another choice for support besides Oracle, which acquired the open-source database through its purchase of Sun Microsystems.
SkySQL plans to offer “enterprise class support & services for the MySQL ecosystem,” according to its Web site. Its CEO is Ulf Sandberg, ex-senior vice president of global services at MySQL, and “all core members” of the company have also worked for MySQL.
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‘Open’ Core/Business
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In the interest of transparency, I work with over twenty open source companies, most of who were funded by venture capitalists and the vast majority of which use the “open core” model. These companies have provided significant value to end users through the software licensed under open source licenses. Simon states: “But to use the package effectively in production, a business probably won’t find the functions of the core package sufficient, even in the (usual) case of the core package being highly capable.” This statement is simply incorrect. I have sat through many Board meetings and, in fact, the conversion rate from “open source” to “commercial” licenses is generally less than 10% for these companies. Thus, more than nine out of ten end users find the functionality of the open source version satisfactory.
Simon says that open core does not provide software freedom for “end users”. Yet, nothing prevents the end users of the open source version to modify it and distribute it or otherwise exercise the rights under the license. In fact, Compiere demonstrates the fallacy of this position because it created two different forks. Simon complains about the lack of access to the “commercial extensions” of open core programs.
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To be or not to be, free. That is the question. Well the answer is not 42. Or maybe it is. Forty two is the answer to life according to Arthur Dent yet he didn’t know the question. The question is probably too big for us to understand or even ask so I guess we will never know. Perhaps one day at the restaurant doing some pasta equations while watching the end of the universe we will know but until then…..
[...]
The meaning of the word free in the Open Source context is freedom (who doesn’t have Mel Gibson shouting that in their heads right now :). What freedom though? Freedom to devalue the hard work of companies and programmers trying to make a simple living? No! Open Source freedom is freedom of knowledge. Freedom to understand and freedom to learn. Advocates of Open Source are free to freely share their knowledge and freely learn from others.
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Simon Phipps has articulated why this strategy does not meet the approval of software freedom advocates, but in doing so, in my opinion, mischaracterises the relationship between open core vendors and open source.
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Funding
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Today I’m very happy to be able to tell our community that mySociety is to be the recipient of $575,000 of grants from the US based Omidyar Network.
The grants cover two areas:
* Building organizational capacity
* The provision of expertise to develop open source websites for transparency-focused organizations in Africa
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Soon after I took on this beat for ZDNet, I got a nasty gram from Richard Stallman (right).
I wish he’d put it in the form of a paper letter. I probably should have framed it.
In his note, as I recall it, Stallman made clear the difference between Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and open source as conceived by Eric Raymond and supporters in the business community.
FOSS is not just “free as in free beer,” he told me. Under FOSS software is free, not just for the user. The software itself has liberties.
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Government
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The Malaysian government has set an example for the Asia-Pacific region in its support for free and open source softwarei (FOSSi). In 2004 it launched a master plan for rolling out FOSS throughout the public sector. That plan is now in its second phase of “accelerated adoption”, which is intended to make the use of FOSS within government more pervasive. The overall aims of the programme are:
* increasing freedom of choice in software usage;
* increasing interoperability;
* increasing growth of the local ICTi industry;
* increasing growth of the OSS user and development community;
* increasing growth of the knowledge-based society;
* reducing the digital divide;
* reducing total cost of ownership; and
* reducing vendor lock-in.
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Openness/Sharing
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It’s also worth considering children’s own intellectual property rights. Whilst some bemoan young people’s attitudes towards copyright, particularly through peer to peer file sharing of copyright material, I wonder how much attention schools and teachers generally pay to the copyright of their pupils’ own work. Perhaps many are happy to photocopy, scan and upload children’s work, always with the best intentions, without seeking permission or acknowledging authorship. By way of contrast, I heard some very positive stories via Twitter of, for example, schools and teachers that buy art work off their pupils to hang. We could also help educate about copyright by doing more to encourage the acknowledgement, sharing and collaboration that underlies Creative Commons licensing, as well as much Early Years practice.
In short, part of citizenship, be it analogue or digital, has to be educating children about their rights and associated responsibilities. To avoid charges of hypocrisy, surely this means that we should take their rights, including those of free expression, of free access to information, of privacy and of intellectual property seriously, respecting these and defending these when others do not.
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Programming
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You might not find quite as many experienced Python developers as .Net or Java folks, in part because Python is younger than Java and hasn’t had the corporate push of .Net. Still, Python’s doing well enough in developer adoption to make it a solid choice. Another advantage in Python’s court? It’s vendor neutral.
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Do you ever read Make Magazine? If you don’t, you should. You’re missing out. Take this article for example, from the October 2007 issue. A simple, brief piece about using everyday household objects to build non-lethal mousetraps.
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The highly anticipated low-power 3Qi laptop displays from Pixel Qi were sold out on Thursday, just a day after the screens were officially announced and went on sale.
The 3Qi LCD (liquid crystal display) screens, which were under development for two years, can absorb ambient light to brighten screens and reduce power consumption to extend the battery life of laptops. The displays reduce the need for the backlight, which are used to light up conventional laptop screens.
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Science
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GENETIC tests may soon be able to help people pinpoint the villages their ancestors called home.
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Security/Aggression
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The United States’ global reputation as a champion of free speech is at stake. This is partly because the legal framework has not kept pace with the evolution of free speech, and also because the Freedom of Information Act is not being applied correctly. Today, the U.S. is in danger of losing its place as the bastion of free speech because other countries are stepping up and creating new ways to protect freedom of expression.
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The New York Times is one of the many newspapers which, after calling torture “torture” for generations, switched to euphemisms (“enhanced interrogation techniques”) during the previous administration. The prevalence of such language is summed up in a paper by Harvard University students, who found that its use became ubiquitous after prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib was exposed.
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Environment
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Fred Pearce’s book on Climategate and the events leading up to it (The Climate Files) has just been published. (Pearce kindly sent me a copy.)
Pearce has been involved in environmental reporting for the past 15 or so years and, like George Monbiot, is a strong supporter of climate policy.
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When a 3D TV is switched from 2D mode to 3D mode, the power usage can swing dramatically depending on the manufacturer, according to a new report from Cnet.
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As state’s see their budgets collapse and start a new round of layoffs, we should consider the fact that house price inflation masked the lack of wage growth in the United States. And now that house prices continue their descent for a 5th year, American workers are more fully exposed to the decade-long march higher in energy costs. They can experience this individually through energy prices, or more generally through the overall energy cost to the economy. Hence, the chart above.
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Missionary told to leave after helping Amazon tribes resist incursion of oil, gas and mining firms into the rainforest
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The BBC’s climate journalism has declined in recent months (see BBC asks CRU’s Phil Jones the climate version of “When did you stop beating your wife”). It just hit a new low in the half hour show, “What’s up with the Weather?”
All you need to know about how distorted and sensationalistic the BBC’s worldview has become is to read how BBC’s News editors describe the show:
To some, it’s a massive conspiracy to con the public. To others, it’s the greatest threat to the future of our world.
Over recent years, opinions about global warming have become increasingly polarised.
It came to a head late last year when hundreds of e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were published.
The so-called “Climategate” debate was born.
Despite governments, scientists and campaigners telling us the world’s climate is changing, opinion polls suggest growing uncertainty about global warming….
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Rep. Zoe Lofgren along with a list of other Congressional reps (from both parties) is introducing a new bill called the One Global Internet Act of 2010 (pdf), which is basically targeted at countries — like Afghanistan and Pakistan — that are seeking to block large parts of the internet from access, as well as countries like China, which for many years has tried to introduce its own, incompatible, standards for things like WiFi, DVDs, 3G cellular connections and more.
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Rarely does a lobbyist listen to someone and feel utterly impressed, no strings or cautious thoughts attached…Or at least, not an “old rot” like me…But today, just for a few minutes, I felt like “not all was lost”…that some sense would come out of the ongoing debates on how to “handle the Internet” if someone with the eloquence, brains and proven delivery record of Julius Assange could be invited to speak in a place such as the European Parliament, in the context of the ALDE organised debate on (Self) Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Europe.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Stephan Kinsella sends over a fascinating talk by Dr. Terence Kealey, a UK biochemist and professor, discussing why — contrary to what most people think, “science” is not a public good, and that government-funded science actually tends to do more damage than good for global economies…
CLUG Talk 11 May 2010 – Super Computing for Business (May 11, 2010)
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Prior to this, I used Mac OS but I knew that both operating systems are proprietary and want to limit the end user. I got tired of being manipulated to use a particular application and having bloatware already pre-installed on my computer. After searching the Internet for alternatives to Mac OS and Windows I found this really cool concept that is called Linux. I didn’t know much about the OS but gave it a shot.
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When a consumer installs a Linux system, this has various consequences for him, which are sometimes hard to estimate at first. I’ve written a little summary touching the differences to Windows and Mac OS X in drivers, open source and support.
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Google
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After reading a few articles about Google and their REMOVE_ASSET and INSTALL_ASSET ability and how they have invoked it already under a few circumstances. Its very fearful foreshadowing of our possible computing future, at which we may be at the point of no return already. Imagine you install it today and tomorrow Google says you don’t want that and removes it to replace it with their stuff.
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A few of us here at MTE have a bit of a crush on Chrome OS. It’s not just the system itself, it’s the fact that someone is finally taking the concept of an operating system in a new direction. We wrote a brief synopsis of Chrome OS shortly after the first announcement that showed how things stood at the very beginning, then more recently did a manual build guide. Building Chrome OS from source code can take several hours, and can be a somewhat challenging process even for an experienced Linux user. To help solve that problem, some developers have begun releasing custom Chrome OS builds with included installers and software tweaks. This guide will show you where to find the images and how to get the latest Hexxeh release, Flow, on to your netbook or VM from a Linux host.
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Ballnux
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Samsung is taking the shotgun approach with its latest Android smartphone, the Galaxy S: It will be made available on five U.S. wireless providers, though each version will use a different name and have a slightly different feature set. “This will either be one of the biggest home runs in wireless history, or it will be a confusing mess,” said telecom and wireless analyst Jeff Kagan.
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Kernel Space
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Benchmarks
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Graphics Stack
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Not a huge number of changes this week; a couple of bug fixes, some server log cleanups and some Xephyr changes.
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Applications
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I love niche programs, especially in the area of multimedia. If you’re like me, you probably have a folder full of MP3s and Oggs collected from the last ten years that’s reached the point where you’ve forgotten half the files in there. This month, I stumbled upon the charming little command-line program, audiopreview.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals
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GNOME Desktop
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The release announcement for Clutter 1.3.6 can be read on clutter-announce. Clutter 1.4.0, which will be the first stable release to incorporate all of these Clutter 1.3 changes, will be released in time for the GNOME 3.0 release in September. Clutter is used within the Mutter compositing window manager found in GNOME 3.0 and is also used by various GNOME Games and other projects.
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It should come as no surprise that there is now a new GNOME 3.0 test release seeing as in the past couple of days we have talked about new development releases of GNOME Shell and Mutter, GTK+ 3.0, and Clutter 1.3/1.4, along with a slew of other GNOME packages being checked-in.
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New Releases
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The Sabily team is proud to announce the release of new version of Sabily 10.04, codename Manarat.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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An update in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat today brings a changed look for the main Ubuntu Software Center pane.
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The Ubuntu development team have announced that the next Ubuntu Developer Week will take place from the July 12th to 16th. Several online workshops will take place during the week, run by a variety of Ubuntu contributors and community members.
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Flavours and Variants
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Summary: The distro for the damned has risen again and walks among us. It’s chock-full of amazing satanic grace and charm. Highly recommended for Linux users who are tired of being goody two-shoes and who want to take a walk on the dark side of Ubuntu Linux.
Rating: 4/5
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The KDE version of Linux Mint 9 (codename: Isadora), will instantly look and feel familiar to KDE users and comes packaged with new software such as Miro, which streams video from webistes in its own player, BleachBit, for hard drive cleaning, and Acetoniso, for converting video and images. Linux Mint 9 KDE features a new software manager that can handle more than 30,000 packages and remove and install applications asynchronously, making it possible to install separate applications at the same time and install applications in the background.
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Wind River announced a multi-year collaboration with LSI to co-market “tightly integrated” Linux-ready hardware and software for LSI’s PowerPC-based, multicore Axxia Communication Processors (ACP). Targeting telecommunications and networking infrastructure, the partners’ solutions will include Axxia-optimized board support packages (BSPs) for Wind River Linux, VxWorks, Wind River Workbench, and Workbench On-Chip Debugging, says the company.
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Merimobiles has begun selling a seven-inch tablet for $200 that dual boots Android 2.1 and Windows CE 6.0. The Witstech A81-E is based on an unnamed ARM Cortex-A8-based processor clocked to 600MHz, and is equipped with 256MB RAM, 2GB flash, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and an optional GPS receiver, says the online retailer.
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Palm
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No more fees and new promotions both hope to stimulate the Linux-based webOS ecosystem.
[...]
In July, Palm has plans for a new PDK Hot Apps promotion, which will distribute another US$ 1 million to developers, with an emphasis on C/C++ apps that were ineligible for the previous Hot Apps promotion.
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Hewlett-Packard has completed the Palm acquisition. And if you read between the lines it sounds like HP will leverage Palm’s technology for more than smart phones and tablet computers. Indeed, HP seems poised to deploy webOS on netbooks.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Red Flag Software has demonstrated a 10.1-inch tablet running its new MeeGo Linux version of Midinux 3.0 on an Intel Moorestown Z6xx processor, says Tech.qq. Equipped with Wi-Fi and 3G, the NPad tablet will go on sale in the third quarter, says the report.
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The MeeGo Project released the baseline source code for the handset version of the Linux-based mobile OS to the development community. This code is being developed as MeeGo 1.1, which is slated for an October release.
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Android
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The latest numbers from mobile app store monitor Distimo show major differences in apps’ prices in Google’s Android Market and Apple’s App Store. While the majority of apps on the Android Market are free, only about a quarter on the App Store are. Advantage Android or advantage App Store? Debatable. Consumers might prefer free apps, but developers want a marketplace where it’s commonplace to charge.
Some possible explanations for the discrepancy, according to Distimo: Currently, only developers in a fraction of the countries where Android is available can distribute paid apps on the platform. Only users from select countries can buy them. And users have to sign up for a Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Checkout account to buy an Android app.
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According to recent reports the Android operating system has an impressive 19.9% share of the US mobile web market. That’s still some way behind Apple iOS on 58.8% but the iPhone has been around for a lot longer. It should come as no surprise, then, that Yahoo! wants to get a piece of that Android action. Which is why it has now announced the continuing expansion of its reach with the immediate availability of Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger apps plus a Yahoo! Search Widget for Android.
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Google has begun dishing out Froyo, the latest version of the Android mobile operating system. The company has chosen to make its own Nexus One smartphone the first to receive the update, despite that handset’s relatively modest sales figures. Other advanced Android phones will likely get their own updates soon, once the new OS can be rejiggered to work with the customized interfaces various manufacturers have added.
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Amazon released its Kindle app for Android, while announcing a multimedia version for the iPhone and dropping the price of the Kindle, says eWEEK. Meanwhile, Android 2.2 rolled out to Nexus One users, but Sprint suspended its own rollout to the Evo 4G, says eWEEK, and Samsung announced plans for a Froyo update to its Galaxy S.
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Android 3.0 “Gingerbread” will be a high-end format supporting 1280 × 760 resolution and requiring a 1GHz processor, essentially splitting the operating system into two platforms, says UnwiredView. Meanwhile, HTC and Sprint are readying an Android smartphone with a 2GHz processor and 1080p video recording, says OzcarGuide, while TmoNews says HTC is prepping an Android phone for T-Mobile with dual 800MHz processors.
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Rumors are circulating about Google’s next version of Android, the open source, Linux-based mobile operating system. Version 3.0 (Codename: Gingerbread) will supposedly require a 1GHz CPU and at least 512MB of RAM onboard, making it a shoe-in for high-end smartphones. Gingerbread will also support a screen resolution as high as 1280×760.
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Tablets
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Expansys UK has begun selling a seven-inch WVGA Android 2.1 tablet from Huawei, making it one of the first available Android tablets. Priced at 300 Pounds (about $451) without a memory card or 370 Pounds ($557) with 32GB, the Huawei S7 offers a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 802.11n wireless networking, Bluetooth 2.1, and a two-megapixel camera.
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Cisco
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Cius signals the latest “anything but Microsoft” development in the emerging tablet market. Among the recent vendor moves:
* Cisco embracing Google Android for the Cius.
* Dell promoting Android on the Dell Streak tablet.
* Hewlett-Packard apparently scrapping work on a Windows-centric tablet and acquiring Palm and WebOS.
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The Cisco Cius looks an awful lot like an Android version of Apple’s iPad, but the two are really very different animals, according to In-Stat’s Jim McGregor. “Cisco is not trying to compete with Apple,” he said. “The two companies are targeting completely different segments and usage models. And like Apple in the consumer segment, Cisco offers complete solutions for businesses.”
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Cisco announced an Intel Atom-based, tabletop Home Energy Controller (HEC) device based on OpenPeak’s Home Energy Manager (HEM) design. Running Ubuntu Linux on a 1.1GHz Intel Atom, the HEC offers a seven-inch screen, networks via cellular, 802.11n, ZigBee, and ERT wireless, and works with back-end services enabling consumers to monitor and control energy use.
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According to Cisco, the Cius will also have access to the Android Market.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The answer to that question and more has been addressed in a new Mozilla Firefox Main Window Usage Study. The study data was collected on an opt-in basis from nearly 10,000 users of the Mozilla Test Pilot addon which surveys Firefox usage.
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Although Firefox is falling behind the alternatives in some key areas like performance, the open source browser still delivers peerless flexibility with a rich add-on system and unrivaled support for extensibility. Mozilla’s curated extension archive has over 60,000 add-ons that have been contributed by third-party developers.
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SaaS
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Fortunately this type of flexible software does exist. It is called Free and Open Source Softare (FOSS) and it is becoming ubiquitous. In fact, whether you know it or not, you are using FOSS software: Apache, the FOSS web server, runs this web site and indeed the majority of all web sites. WordPress, the blogging software we use here is also “everywhere” and you can purchase it from “cloud” utility providers or install, run, and modify it yourself. The list of important FOSS software goes on and on and this blog is dedicated to helping elucidate its importance as well as the issues involved in managing it.
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Oracle
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OpenOffice is released under version 3 of the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPLv3). The latest stable release of the OpenOffice open source office suite is version 3.2.1 from early June.
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Openness/Sharing
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I believe that, by sharing this information with you, it might better illustrate (or, perhaps illuminate) why I’m building another network security tool and what fundamentally motivated me to do so.
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You really would think, at this point, that any lawyer worth his or her hourly rate would strongly recommend to clients that they don’t go ballistic in filing lawsuits any time someone says something bad about you. Hell, there have been multiple stories recently about just how badly a similar lawsuit from a towing company has backfired on the company. But, yet again, we have a story of a business suing over a negative review. This time, it’s a woman in Chicago who wrote a negative review of a local cement company on the site Angie’s List because it refused to even give her an estimate, saying it didn’t work in her area. She was upset because the company was only based 5 miles away, and on Angie’s List, said it did work where she lived. So she wrote about her experience and rated the company an “F.”
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Recently an acquaintance at the next table in a Palo Alto, California, restaurant introduced me to his companions: three young venture capitalists from China. They explained, with visible excitement, that they were touring promising companies in Silicon Valley. I’ve lived in the Valley a long time, and usually when I see how the region has become such a draw for global investments, I feel a little proud.
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Environment
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Hear that choking sound? That’s the dying gasps of Climategate. The Pennsylvania State University’s investigation into allegations of misconduct by climate scientist Michael Mann found him innocent, specifically saying:
… the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.
Mann, as you may recall, was a key figure in the so-called Climategate fiasco, where leaked emails were purported to show scientists fixing data to make global warming evidence appear stronger. Since Day 1 of this I have been calling it a non-event, a manufactured controversy by global warming denialists trying to make enough noise to drown out any real talk on this topic. And time and time again I have been shown to be correct.
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Finance
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By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You’re wrong. There’s more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here’s the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.
It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn’t afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made actions.”
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A critical question in the U.S. government’s 2008 rescue of AIG is whether the deal amounted to a “back-door” bailout of Goldman Sachs (GS). Increasingly, the answer appears to be a resounding “yes.”
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executives repeated their position that disputes with American International Group Inc. over securities prices and collateral in 2007 and 2008 reflected the firm’s typical risk-management efforts.
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Goldman’s push to recover all it was owed on credit default swaps cost taxpayers billions, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission members say. Executives say Goldman would have received what was due in any case.
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A former top executive of American International Group acknowledged yesterday that his division more than tripled the amount of risky investments it insured in the three years leading up to the 2008 financial meltdown.
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Steven Bensinger, AIG’s former chief financial officer, and Elias Habayeb, former CFO of the division including the derivatives unit, told the panel they didn’t know of the provision until the third quarter of 2007, according to an FCIC document released yesterday. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. demanded $1.8 billion on July 27, 2007, saying the market value of the securities underlying credit-default swaps had declined.
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Mr. Benmosche, steward of an insurer brought to its knees two years ago after making too many risky, outsize financial bets and paying billions of dollars in claims to Goldman and other banks, said he would continue evaluating his legal options. But, in reality, A.I.G. has precious few.
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But financial experts said the Commission made a mistake in giving AIG officials a pass, in contrast to the tough questions lobbed at Goldman executives.
“AIG as a victim? This is a world of consenting adults,” said Lawrence White, a professor at the New York University Stern School of Business.
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Goldman was among the most aggressive players on Wall Street in marking down the value of mortgage bonds as the financial crisis brewed, and ultimately benefited in protecting itself from the housing downfall. A.I.G., on the other hand, had a large positive bet on housing through the billions of dollars of mortgage securities that it insured for Goldman and other banks.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. refused a request from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to reveal how much it makes trading derivatives, saying the bank doesn’t separate the figure from other businesses.
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The finance chief of Goldman Sachs said Thursday the firm made mistakes in the leadup to the financial crisis and was burned by losses on high-risk loans and mortgages.
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We’ve known for a while that the proposed new restrictions on hedge fund and private equity investing known as the “Volcker Rule,” would be tougher on Goldman Sachs(GS) than any other large bank, but have we really considered the extent to which this is true?
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The financial reform bill will change the way banks do business in everything from credit cards to credit default swaps. What it won’t do is fundamentally reshape Wall Street, and it doesn’t seem likely to prevent bad bets by bankers from causing another crisis. The legislation is “largely a fig leaf,” says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic & Policy Research in Washington. “Given where we were when this got started, I’d have to imagine the Wall Street firms are pretty happy.”
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The U.S. panel investigating the financial crisis is seeking funds beyond the $8 million Congress appropriated for its work.
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Is America supposed to believe that the economic crisis emanating on Wall Street and costing our economy trillions of dollars was all on the up and up and was merely a ‘perfect storm’? Although many on Wall Street and in Washington would have us believe just that, a true measure of ’sense on cents’ dictates that we not be so naive.
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Copyrights
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Starting this month, colleges and universities that don’t do enough to combat the illegal swapping of “Avatar” or Lady Gaga over their computer networks put themselves at risk of losing federal funding.
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Before Disney and Sonny Bono, copyright law was reasonable. Rights holders were granted a limited monopoly of 7 years, plus 7 more if they chose to renew, and then their works passed into the public domain. This had many advantages: Creators had a chance at making a living from their works. It gave an escape hatch to creators who signed bad contracts. It prevented orphaned works. It enriched the common culture. Now we have this crazy complex retroactive system of virtually-forever copyrights, perpetrated by corporate interests to protect what they ripped off in the first place.
I don’t see anything wrong with liberal personal use, like making multiple copies for different personal devices and in different formats, or making mashups for fun, or other non-commercial adaptations. One of the big problems with the current copyright enforcement insanity is it tramples personal use and invades our homes.
Just like back in the days of sharing mix tapes, modern file-sharing can be an effective form of promotion. I think that any kind of sharing that leads to more income for artists is somewhat justifiable, though this is an over-used excuse for copying and never paying. You and I both know freeloaders who have gigabytes of music, movies, and books they never paid a cent for.
[...]
We’ve been spoiled by decades of advertiser-subsidized entertainment. We’re not really getting TV and radio for free, we pay every day in torrents of shlock crowding out works of genuine artistry, creativity, and value. The advertiser-supported model is by its nature corrupting, and it taints whatever it touches. Isn’t it crystal-clear by now that this is the path to destruction? We get what they want to serve, which is only tools to sell crud, and boy howdy what crud it is. 95% of it could vanish tomorrow, with two immediate consequences: fewer yard sales, and garages with enough room to park cars in.
CLUG Talk 13 Apr 2010 – Grub 2 (2010)
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07.02.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Package managers and repositories were a lifesaver for Linux. As the package management tools grew in sophistication and popularity, their associated repositories grew with software that was mostly guaranteed to work, and not muck up your system. I called it “staying in the box”. As long as you stick with what was provided by the default package managers of your distribution, you more than likely won’t run into the kind of dependency conflicts that were common in the earlier days of Linux.
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A couple of systems have made the news recently that are targeting “scale out” cloud workloads, and Linux is likely to be the OS of choice on these systems. The SeaMicro SM10000 and the Quanta S2Q take different approaches, but the theory is the same: Cram a lot of low-powered cores into a system to handle workloads with massive amounts of small transactions. Sounds like a job for Linux!
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Desktop
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To be blunt about it, Gnome is my Operating System; it just happens to require a real OS to sit upon.
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Security
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It’s been a long time since I’ve had to install a piece of proprietary software because generally my needs are met entirely by Debian’s packages or at very least by tools distributed as source. Recently though I needed to temporarily install something for interoperability reasons in order to extract some information from an opaque blob of data.
The world has come on a long way since I last did this and the vendor in question had a Linux version of their software. So far so good. Unfortunately the install instructions for this piece of software were, to paraphrase, “download this binary and run it with root privileges, following the on screen instructions.”
I beg your pardon? You expect me to take some piece of code with no explanation of what it is going to do and run it, not just with access to my own files but complete unrestricted access to my entire system? Are you mad? Or more to the point, do you think I’m mad?
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A lot has been said about why Linux is inherently more secure than Windows. However, after reading this post (dated July 1, 2010) from PC Advisor, I realized that, right now, the security problems in Windows can actually be promoted by Microsoft. In fact, the security policy of the company has to do more with its business model than it does with costumer support.
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Server
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For operators having to upgrade billing systems, expensive hardware is often no longer an option, and for that reason they are looking to low-cost Linux-based systems that deliver more bang for the buck.
Growing demand for always-on connectedness and real-time rating and charging, for example, have made Unix a cost-prohibitive option, even though hardware costs have come down significantly. With that in mind, Intec today released performance numbers for its Singl.eView v7.0 charging, billing and customer care system. The purpose of the release is to demonstrate its performance on platforms that cost less than traditional Unix servers.
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Ballnux
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No further details were provided, but as noted, the earlier N210 and N220 were equipped with the Linux-based HyperSpace environment (created by BIOS vendor Phoenix but recently sold to HP).
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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The GIMP development team has unleashed today (not yet on the official website) another development release of their popular image manipulation software. The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) 2.7.1 comes with lots of improvements, new functions and many bugfixes. Among these, we can mention support for layer groups, support for multi-column dock windows, improved single-window mode, Photoshop CS4 keyboard shortcuts, RGB565 support, GEGL updates, and many more. Without further ado, we’ve listed below some of the changes in GIMP 2.7.1. Don’t forget to check out the installation part, for the Ubuntu 10.04 PPA.
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We would all like to think that, since we are using Linux, we will never really need a backup of our data. Now, let’s look at this realistically. Even if your OS is 100% rock solid, with nary a nanosecond of downtime, that hardware running that OS can not possibly give 100% forever. Add to that the irresistible urge to upgrade hardware and you have the serious makings for the need to back up.
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Want to write your story, create a screenplay, block out a storyboard, or create a comic? Put down the text editor, and pick up Celtx. Based on Firefox, Celtx is an all-in-one tool for media pre-production.
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Proprietary
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For me Opera 10.60 best opera web browser i used so far, and things listed up there are the main pros i noticed on Opera 10.60
Cons: i didn’t like the speed dials a lot cause it’s limited to 25 speed dial max, i usually use more than 25 speed dials on other web browsers like firefox and Google Chrome.
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Everyone in the Wine community is driving to release Wine 1.2 the newest and best version of Wine.
Its been two years since Wine 1.0, and weve really made huge strides. This version will include the beginnings of genuine 64-bit support, along with major Direct3D improvements, and improvements in a huge number of other areas.
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Instructionals
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* Mailbag
* News Bytes, by Deividson Luiz Okopnik and Howard Dyckoff
* Pixie Chronicles: Part 4 Kickstart, by Henry Grebler
* Tacco and the Painters (A Fable for the Nineties), by Henry Grebler
* Knoppix Boot From PXE Server – a Simplified Version for Broadcom based NICs, by Krishnaprasad K., Shivaprasad Katta, and Sumitha Bennet
* Procmail/GMail-based spam filtering, by Ben Okopnik
* Linux: The Mom & Pop’s Operating System, by Anderson Silva
* HelpDex, by Shane Collinge
* Doomed to Obscurity, by Pete Trbovich
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Games
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KDE has recently launched the “Supporting Membership Program” to raise funds for Developer Sprints, Akademy conferences and other activities of KDE e.V, the legal and financial representatives of KDE. President of KDE e.V. is Cornelius Schumacher and at the launch of Join the Game he made a pact with GNOME release manager and board member Vincent Untz that they would each join their rival’s support programme. And talk about it to the Dot. And so…
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Free thinkers. Curious people collaborating across borders. Pioneers pushing back the boundaries of what is possible. Teams building upon the work of others. People trying things just to see what happens.
Those are all phrases that could be applied to KDE – or to scientists. The scientific mindset shares a lot with that of free software and so it is no surprise that there are plenty of scientists within our community, nor that KDE has some strong applications in the world of science.
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New Releases
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After 64 prereleases, 626 commits, 52,742 lines of changes, and tons of work by many, many people, Syslinux 4.00 is now officially released.
Syslinux 4.00 is the first of a set of major code restructuring releases. The single biggest new features are btrfs and ext4 support, and support for disks larger than 2 TiB.
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Do you have an old PC that you want to “donate” to your children? Or are you looking for a way for them to use your PC without messing things up? Kiddix might just be the answer: It’s a Linux-based operating system with a child-friendly interface, software, and loads of parental controls.
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It is a great pleasure announce the first release of the Imagineos. Imagineos is born from GoblinX Linux following the same path started more than five years ago.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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A recent report in LeMagIT, claims that Arnaud Laprévote, the company’s chief executive, has found unnamed investors who are prepared to rescue the company, following months of rumours of financial turmoil, unpaid staff and other troubles.
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Red Hat Family
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Linux vendor Red Hat is out this week with the second major milestone for the next generation of its enterprise Linux release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL), as the Linux player ramps up development for its flagship operating system.
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Debian Family
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By shifting to a Debian base we have eliminated the mediocracy inherent within software developed in a meritocratic distribution. We believe in providing fit, finish, and stability while bringing the newest software possible meeting these guidelines. Usability is one of our core values. Our release philosophy is simple, it is released when it is ready. Patches, and software updates are rolled into the distribution on an on-going basis eliminating the requirement to “upgrade” the distribution every six months. Users will find respins released on a schedule which roll up existing updates making patching simple for new installations.
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# The ZonePlayers use embedded Linux as their internal operating system. Hey, what’s not to love about that!
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What’s a Pogoplug? Basically the device is a tiny, low-power, inexpensive ($129) device that runs a customized Linux-based operating system. In its normal modes of operation, it works in tandem with web services supplied by Cloud Engines at Pogoplug.com. Until now, the gadget’s main purpose has been to enable you to remotely access the contents of USB-connected hard or flash drives over the Internet, as illustrated below.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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The MeeGo project is happy to announce “Day 1″ of the MeeGo Handset user experience project. Many of you will remember this “Day 1″ concept from March, when we first made the MeeGo core OS source code available and started development towards the MeeGo 1.0 release. Today, the handset baseline source code is available to the development community. This code is being actively developed as MeeGo 1.1, which is scheduled for release in October. The team has been preparing MeeGo Gitorious with all the sources and infrastructure to perform the weekly builds for MeeGo 1.1 development. The MeeGo UI team has also been busy creating the handset reference user experience and preparing the MeeGo UI design principles and interaction guidelines. This milestone marks the completion of the merger of Moblin and Maemo as major architecture decisions and technical selections have been determined. Today, we are also opening the MeeGo Build Infrastructure.
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Android
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The more you look at Android today, the more you have to think back to the fact that early last year, people wondered whether Google’s mobile operating system would even survive. There were countless columns in March of 2009 trumpeting the fact that only one Android handset was shown at Mobile World Congress that year. Now, Android is spreading out far beyond just the many smartphones it appears on. This week, Cisco announced a new tablet based on the OS, and that’s just one new direction for Android.
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Laptop-like smartbooks with keyboards (like the AC100) are much better served with a full-desktop Linux due to the fact, that on these devices, buyers will expect full-fledged applications like OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox…etc. Android would be very limiting for the use cases expected from a netbook/smartbook (editing complex text documents, spreadsheets, using a full-fledged browser, email client…etc). Tegra2 with 1Gb of fast RAM could run OpenOffice and other desktop software with good performance. Instead, it will be reduced to run mini, Android versions of the real stuff (what is available for Android instead of OO and such).
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However, at the same time, there is one thing that I would point out as an Android, even at this time: the fact that an Android phone is a complete peer to the PC and not a slave to it in any way.
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Sub-notebooks
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This is the HP Mini 100e, a netbook which looks are fully customizable. There’s an option for SUSE Linux as the operating system. It’s nice to see something different in operating system options, too bad the other 2 options are windows versions (XP and 7)
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It reminds me of a set from Dr. Who or the original Star Trek – all those primary colors for every object in the room. Very cool in a flashback kinda way.
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Mozilla
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KidZui turns Firefox into fun, kid-safe browser and online playground for kids in the age group 3-12, with over a million kids games, YouTube videos, and websites. Or in other words, KidZui Firefox extension turns Firefox into a place where your kids would love to be. With Internet becoming such a useful tool for people of all ages, it is unfair to block Internet access to your toddlers and KidZui is exactly what you want to ensure safety of your kids from the hidden dangers of the Internet.
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SaaS
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Business
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“Open Core is the New Dual Licensing Model” is the last of a chain of interesting posts against or in favor of open core, coming from different realm of experience: the analyst guy Stephen O’Grady, the free software evangelist Simon Phipps, the hacker Brian Aker and last but not least the entrepreneur Mårten Mickos.
Let’s dig now deeper into what is open core to business, and why it is not a business model.
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Licensing
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Backup Copy
From Adobe reader (for Android)’s end user license agreement:
3.3 Backup Copy. You may make one backup copy of the Software, provided your backup copy is not installed or used other than for archival purposes.
[...]
Which leads one to wonder what, if any, point is served by using a service of a Certification Authority – which presumably is supposed to certify something – if you indemnify them when they stuff up.
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Open Access/Content
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Today, FooCorp announced a strategic alliance with OpenHatch to encourage wider adoption of free software and allow greater involvement with FooCorp developments.
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Note the similarities to the UC rationale, including the triple-digit price increase, the recession, and the importance of speaking out against the business practices that harm research.
It’s tempting to distinguish two phases of the serials pricing crisis. In the Early Crisis, universities resented hyperinflationary price increases and spoke out against them, but generally made painful cuts elsewhere to meet them. In the Late Crisis, universities lost their ability to cut further and spoke out against harmful and unsustainable business models, not just harmful and unsustainable price increases. UC is not the first sign of the Late Crisis, but it’s size and clout make it one of the most influential.
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Programming
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Following up on my post from a few weeks ago, I’d like to give you all some more statistics about our Google Summer of Code™ program participants this year.
• We have 69 student countries represented this year. New countries represented by students include Jamaica, Morocco, and Cambodia.
• For the first time we have mentors from Chile, South Africa, Taiwan, and Peru.
• We have mentors from 52 different countries this year.
• We had 3,464 students submit a total of 5,539 proposals in all. Last year we had 5,885 proposals submitted by 3,496 students.
• The open source organizations participating this year received an average of 36 proposals to review. We have 150 participating organizations this year.
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Many enterprise development teams often struggle with releasing software projects on time. That doesn’t seem to be the case with the multi-vendor open source Eclipse Foundation, which for the last seven years has consistently shipped releases from multiple projects on time.
This week, Eclipse Helios shipped with 39 projects in what is known as the Eclipse release train. How does Eclipse manage to organize so many projects and year-after-year hit their release targets? What’s the secret?
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The European Commission will ensure that devices with always-on connectivity, like Apple’s iPhone, don’t lock consumers in to proprietary technology, Neelie Kroes, EU commissioner for the ‘Digital Agenda’, told EurActiv in an exclusive interview. A yearly scorecard will measure the industry’s progress.
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A new web service Tweegle [J] by Usagifrask Co., Ltd. [J] looks very similar with Google Search, but it is a web-based Twitter client.
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Security/Aggression
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The equipment will remain under the protection of the feds. INC expect that new research data or technology could help them break the security codes. Opportunity Group reported that the two programs used in the equipment are available online. One is called Truecrypt and is free. The programs were used due to suspected espionage.
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Environment/Health
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Nearly 50 members of Congress warn State Deptartment against rubberstamping 2,000-mile tar sands pipeline as Obama insider John Podesta says fuel source “cannot be our energy future”
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British Petroleum has stooped to a new low, if that’s at all possible.
As if spewing over 80 million gallons into the Gulf of Mexico were not a sufficiently criminal activity, they are now attempting a cover-up and have facilitated, working alongside the police of New Orleans, a blockade of sorts of hard-hitting journalists from getting their hands on what’s actually taking place in the ravaged Big Easy. It is truly a sham of epic proportions.
[...]
The Tail That Wags the Dog: BP Telling the Louisiana Police Who’s Boss
In a situation resembling the nefarious military contractor Blackwater leading operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in place of the regular standing military, something that is probably much more commonplace than we will ever know as common citizens, BP’s private security has also been in the lead on “policing” efforts on the Gulf Coast in New Orleans. Yet, rather than policing the real criminals — BP — the Louisiana Police force has instead formed a quid pro quo relationship with BP and is policing the honorable journalists exposing the criminals. Indeed, they have things backwards.
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The Washington Post published a misleadingly-titled article June 30 about the environmental effects of dispersants BP is using in the Gulf. The Post article’s headline reads,”Oil dispersant does not pose environmental threat, early EPA findings suggest.” But neither the body of the article, nor the Environmental Protection Agency’s’s press release about studies the agency hastily performed on eight dispersants, indicates that there is no environmental threat from using them. The agency also gives no assurance about using dispersants in the quantities BP is applying them.
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Anyone else sick of living in a country with a government that is so clearly for, by, and of the corporations?
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US President Barack Obama has taken the fight to BP. But it is time that he picks a fight with the American public. American energy consumption is at the root of the Gulf of Mexico disaster, but Obama preferred to sidestep the issue in his Tuesday speech.
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Conservatives may have moved quickly to dissociate themselves from Representative Joe Barton’s apology to BP, but many on the right still believe that the establishment of a $20 billion escrow fund violated the legal rights of the company.
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A federal judge certified a class-action lawsuit yesterday that demands Philip Morris USA Inc. pay for chest scans to diagnose whether heavy Marlboro smokers have early signs of lung cancer, a ruling that a lawyer for the plaintiffs called the first of its kind in the country.
Nearly two years after lawyers for two named plaintiffs sought class certification, US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner granted the request and said she would let the case go to trial on claims that the cigarette manufacturer designed a product that delivered excessive levels of carcinogens. Certifying the class-action suit means the judge has opened up the legal action to other plaintiffs with similar circumstances.
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President Obama is calling a big part of the health care reform bill he signed into law last March a “Patients’ Bill of Rights”, suggesting that many of the consumer protections contained in the new law were the same ones the health insurance industry succeeded in killing time and again over many years through a fear-mongering campaign it secretly financed.
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Finance
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Yup, that’s right. The good old boys on Wall Street ramped up the gambling in energy and food commodities when the housing market went bust. They sometimes speculated on regulated exchanges. For instance, Goldman Sachs has a commodity index that helps investors gamble on foods like wheat, cattle, corn as well as natural gas and crude oil. But the real action was in the unregulated, “over the counter,” or dark markets. Harpers Magazine has an incredible story in its July edition exposing how Wall Street speculators bumped up food commodity prices 80% between 2005-2008 contributing to hunger domestically and around the world.
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Today, Goldman Sachs sent its second-highest-ranking officer to Washington, D.C. to tell the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that his company is staffed and managed by complete idiots. In an effort to evade investigation, Goldman Sachs Chief Financial Officer David Viniar claimed that his company really just doesn’t know how to do basic bookkeeping. It was a silly and transparent lie, but if it were true, every investor the world over would be pulling its money from Goldman as fast as possible.
At this point, Goldman Sachs execs have made clear that are very good at making themselves look like jerks. Viniar’s comments at yesterday’s hearing follow a series of, let’s say, unflattering public appearances over the past few months involving fraud investigations, “shitty deals” and “God’s work.” But Viniar still had some real whoppers ready for the FCIC:
“We don’t have a derivatives business.”
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“The government stepped into AIG’s shoes” and therefore had to honor its contract with Goldman, Viniar told the congressionally appointed panel investigating the financial meltdown.
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A Congressional commission questioned Goldman Sachs and the American International Group executives on Thursday about the way the companies set prices on complex mortgage securities during the financial crisis, when buyers for such assets were scarce.
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Economic forecasters say they believe that the Census Bureau eliminated about 235,000 federal temporary jobs in June. That huge cut in the federal work force will probably dwarf any hiring or firing elsewhere in the economy. The overall change in jobs — the headline number released in Friday’s report — could well show job losses. Beneath all those federal layoffs, though, glimmers of hope in the private sector might — or might not — emerge.
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Stocks fell Friday after a disappointing jobs report added to investors’ concerns about the economy.
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The U.S. economy created a modest 83,000 private sector jobs in June, adding to concern that the economic recovery is tepid at best and highlighting the political danger to President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats heading into a tightly contested midterm election cycle in which control of the House and perhaps the Senate are at stake.
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Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington announced Thursday that she’ll support a sweeping Wall Street reform bill, bringing Democrats one vote closer to securing Senate passage.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Remember Balanced Copyright for Canada, the shadowy “citizen’s group” that encouraged members to send form letters to media outlets skeptical about Canada’s new, US-style copyright law?
Turns out it’s a front for the big US labels.
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But now a growing number of doctors are warning that toning shoes don’t deliver on their marketing promises and could cause injuries by, among other things, changing a person’s gait, or way of walking.
Claims that toning shoes can significantly contribute to a person’s fitness are “utter nonsense,” says Barbara de Lateur, distinguished service professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine in Baltimore.
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I thought I’d seen everything when I read David Brooks saying out loud in a New York Times column that reporters should sit on damaging comments to save their sources from their own idiocy. But now we get CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan slamming our own Michael Hastings on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” program, agreeing that the Rolling Stone reporter violated an “unspoken agreement” that journalists are not supposed to “embarrass [the troops] by reporting insults and banter.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The European Commission this morning launched a consultation on key questions regarding the contentious issues of net neutrality and the open Internet.
The consultation covers such issues as whether ISPs should be allowed to adopt traffic management practices, prioritizing one kind of Internet traffic over another. This has become an issue with the onset of broadband and Internet services which require more bandwidth, such as VoIP or online TV. Essentially, the EC wants to find out whether these practices would create any problems (economical, technical or otherwise) and have ‘unfair effects’ for users.
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Copyrights
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After their former hosting provider received an injunction telling it to stop providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, the worlds most resilient BitTorrent site switched to a new ISP. That host, the Swedish Pirate Party, made a stand on principle. Now they aim to take things further by running the site from inside the Swedish Parliament.
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There’s a new meme in town these days: “rights of the artists”. The copyright industries have worked out that cries for more copyright and more money don’t go down to well when they come from fat-cat monopolists sitting in their plush offices, and so have now redefined their fight in terms of struggling artists (who rarely get to see much benefit from constantly extended copyright).
Here’s a nice example courtesy of the Copyright Alliance – an organisation that very much pushes that line:
Songwriter, Jason Robert Brown, recently posted on his blog a story about his experience dealing with copyright infringement. Knowing for a long time that many websites exist for the sole purpose of “trading” sheet music, Jason decided to log on himself and politely ask many of the users to stop “trading” his work. While many quickly wrote back apologizing and then removing his work, one girl in particular gave Jason a hard time.
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Digital Economy Bill
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Sections 11–18 of the Act were pushed forward on the basis of questionable figures and assumptions, will not significantly achieve their stated ob jectives of reducing copyright infringement, and are liable to have serious unintended consequences.
CLUG AGM 24 Nov 2009 – Interfacing with the real world (2009)
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