12.31.09
Posted in News Roundup at 4:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It’s been over a year since I wrote about my conversion to a Linux based digital media environment, and since it’s the holiday season (or just after) I thought it was time to update the story, and describe some new Linux based devices I’m using that others might find useful.
In the original essay I spoke about converting all my physical CD’s to digital files into the patent-free FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) format. At the time I was looking at the Sonos multi-room music system to play the files. I took the plunge and ended up buying a four room system last year. They aren’t cheap, but they’re the most robust devices I own. They never crash (and for a device as sophisticated as this that’s a real pleasure). I’ve owned televisions that fail more often than the Sonos boxes.
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Linux is, for the average user, no easier nor harder to use than windows. It is more configurable and flexible than windows will ever be and this gives power users more of an opportunity to tweak and twiddle than their windows brethren. Those who don’t tweak and twiddle have the same computing experience with Linux that they have with windows. The caveat here is, of course, that they must use the operating system as it is designed to be used. You don’t drive a manual car like an automatic so to speak.
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What does that tell us? That the trend toward mobile computer devices — smartphones, netbooks, etc. — is going to continue, and that the traditional PC desktop will be a niche technology by 2019. By 2005, computer vendors were making more money from laptops than desktops. In the last year, more laptops were being sold than desktops.
It won’t stop there though. Google, with its Linux-based Chrome OS, is pointing the way not just to making the traditional Windows desktop obsolete, but putting the whole concept of desktop-based computing in the junk pile. Google is taking a lightweight operating system, adding cloud-based applications and storage, and creating a world where any netbook or smartphone can do 95% of what most people do every day with a Windows-powered desktop.
It’s not just that this kind of Internet mobile computing is going to displace older-style desktops and bring entertainment to anyone, anywhere on any device. No — there’s a whole new set of services that will be taken for granted by 2019 that no current static computing device can duplicate. It will be a combination of LBS (Location-Based Services) and AR (Augmented Reality) that will transform how we use computers.
With LBS, your applications use GPS and related technologies to determine where you are at any given moment. Armed with this information, applications can tell such things as where the nearest subway or closest steak house is. The next step, which is already being taken, is to update that information in real time. So, for example, you’ll soon be able to know that your buddy is waiting for you at the coffeehouse two streets away.
LBS is already changing how we get around, and AR will take it one step further. Instead of looking at a map, you’ll be able to look at the world through your smart device’s camera viewer to see a virtual golden brick road to where your friend is staying. You can already use it in applications like SPRXmobile’s Layar Reality Browser 3.0, which can already serve as virtual tour guides with your Android, and soon your iPhone 3Gs phones.
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This is a Live DVD – you simply place the DVD in the computer’s DVD drive and reboot the machine from it. When the machine comes up, you will be running Linux. Normally, the software won’t write to your computer’s hard drive unless you specifically ask it to.
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Server
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The latest SafeSquid Linux version – ntlm-RC2.0, now supports NTLM authentication, or Single Sign On. NTLM uses a challenge-response mechanism for authentication, in which clients are able to prove their identities without sending a password to the server. This allows access to clients using Windows Integrated Authentication in Microsoft-centric Networks, without an authentication pop-up.
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Applications
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Phatch
(http://photobatch.stani.be/)
Now how many time did you have couple of photos and needed to do the same editing on them. It could be just resize or something other, but you needed to open every single one and repeat that action. Now there is one cool program for photo and batch, Phatch. You can do: resizing, adding watermark, text, shadow, rotate pictire, … But there is no crop, I needed it couple of time but isn’t there.
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After a wonderful week in England with family celebrating Christmas, Erica and I flew home to the East Bay. We were sat at Heathrow having a cup of coffee and I was thinking of what I occupy myself with on the plane ride over. Unfortunately, Lernid hacking was out of the question as I had no net connection on the plane, so I got to thinking of something else. After some busy hacking time at 35,000 feet I am proud to show of the results of my labor: a little program called Acire.
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Instructionals
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Games
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This tutorial series steps you through the process of creating a 3D shoot’em’up game using the popular and powerful Ogre 3D engine.
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OpenLieroX
Free, 2D graphics, http://www.openlierox.net
Players alternately take charge of an army of worms that are armed to the teeth in an unfriendly terrain. As in the game Worms, the surviving team wins.
Puzzles
Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection
MIT license, 2D graphics, http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles
A good puzzle solver will find his collection rewarding. A number of good examples await.
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GNOME Desktop
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I get a lot of questions as to how to make the GNOME desktop look better. This question can be approached from numerous angles: Compiz, Emerald, Metacity, Window borders, etc. I have covered Compiz here on Ghacks (see Compiz on Ghacks) as well as Emerald (see Emerald on Ghacks). But I have yet to cover the basic theming of the GNOME desktop. As of this tutorial, that will all change.
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To understand the significance of these links, one must go back to 1997 when GNOME was set up by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. The only rationale that they had for setting up a project to create a second desktop environment for a small number of users – KDE was a thriving desktop by then but it used a non-free library for development – was that it would be totally free.
GNOME was set up under the aegis of the GNU Project. The name says it all: the GNU Network Object Model Environment.
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Ubuntu is an easy version of Linux. It is not windows,but it is almost user friendly like windows. No all applications have graphical interface. Many applications force users to use commands to run them.Commands are mandatory to work with Linux and Ubuntu is not an exception.
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The Broadcom Crystal HD video decoder is a card that you can slip into a netbook to enable HD video playback on computer with an Intel Atom processor and integrated graphics. Broadcom has supported Windows since day one, and the Broadcom BCM70012 and BCM70015 cards play well with Windows media Player 12, Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta, ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre and CyberLink PowerDVD. Linux, on the other hand, has been a different story… up until now.
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As well as detailing my solution, I have also written some very basic general Linux/Networking guides – basically stuff that I learned whilst getting the Internet Acceleration Appliance working.
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I’ve been using one such program, HyperSpace from Phoenix Technologies, on a Samsung NC10 netbook for the last couple of weeks, and even starting up cold, the speed is impressive. Press the power button and in 15 seconds the Linux-based HyperSpace presents you with a customizable screen including a Web browser, a notepad application, and RealPlayer media software, along with news, weather, and stock information. I jotted a quick note, watched videos on YouTube (GOOG), and made calls using Skype, all without launching Windows.
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Phones
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In 2009, mobile consumer devices including netbooks, e-readers, tablets, MIDs, PMPs, and mobile phones were increasingly dominated by embedded Linux or the Linux-based Android. LinuxDevices presents four updated showcases of story summaries for netbooks, phones, and other portable devices, recalls 2009 highlights ranging from the Kindle to the Droid, and looks in on new rumors about the Google Nexus One and Chrome OS netbook design.
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Paul over at Modaco forums has managed to successfully root his Nexus One, running the latest Android 2.1 version on the said device. He has cooked a custom ROM for Nexus One with the method, which he is referring to as Superboot.
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Sub-notebooks
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The hardware end of the netbook world was quiet, but the software side exploded with the release of the source code for Google’s forthcoming open-source, browser-based operating system Chrome OS. Within hours of release, enterprising hackers had managed to put together a working version that could be run in a virtualised window, so we had a play with it and found it to be a little lacking – just a browser window and nothing else. Hopefully Google can do a little better before it’s finally released in 2010.
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New Year predictions are of course a licence to speculate. What’s more the normal boundaries of sanity are loosened sufficiently to make the predictions fun rather than libellous.
‘Predictions’ in the above context are merely extrapolations of what has occurred already, (genuine sight of the future is best left to the psychics), so it’s not really that hard to do if … you look closely at what is going on now. But, the other component of a prediction uses what I call ‘white space’ analysis which involves looking for gaps and silences. In other words looking for lack of information. This is important.
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We’re happy to present to the eyeOS community the result of more than six months of work together with the great IBM US team, where eyeOS will be the Sample Workload of the new System Z serie Solution Edition for Cloud Computing. System Z is the IBM brand used to produce their mainframe servers, used worldwide by governments, big companies and thousands of organizations.
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Pixelize is a program that will use many scaled down images to try to duplicate, as closely as possible, another image.
Pixelize works by splitting up the image you want rendered (or duplicated) into a grid of small rectangular areas. Each area is analyzed, and replaced with an image chosen from a large database of images. Pixelize tries to pick images that best match each area.
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Unlike in previous years where each new release of a Linux distribution or an application was met with expectations of it being the killer app, this years OSS developments were more low-key, more circumspect. The idea that Linux is suddenly going to hit a critical mass and turn into the Microsoft-killer is fading, to be replaced with a more rationale view that Linux, Mac OS X and Windows will co-exist, even if uncomfortably, for many years to come. Linux is not going to wipe out Microsoft’s dominance any time soon, just as Mac OS X is unlikely to turn the tables on Windows in the coming year.
And yet, there was much progress in 2009 that open source fans can celebrate. It was a year in which open source software became even more deeply entrenched, even if users weren’t completely aware of the change. Even Microsoft started embracing open source software, albeit cautiously, with a few carefully thought out moves.
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Open source code firm WSO2 has launched WSO2 Business Activity Monitor to provide visibility into services oriented architecture-based services, transactions, and workflows.
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Anybody can use open source. You might depend on open source software if you’re responsible for IT in a large enterprise or as a consumer who prefers FOSS apps for her own personal computing needs. That’s true whether you’re simply a software developer contributing code to the open source project, a techie who customizes software that just-so-happens to be open source (such as a web developer building sites using Drupal), or an end user who appreciates the price (free!) and quality of FOSS apps.
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The problem that techies have is that they want to talk about and use technology, and they hate having to “sell” anything — particularly themselves or their skills. Often, or at least to begin with, the work comes to them, either because they’ve developed a reputation for excellence (“My brother-in-law says you’re good at creating websites”) or because of a relationship with another techie who needs assistance (“A client asked me to take this on and I’m already busy; could you write the back-end code and I’ll deal with the company?”). That’s fine — and with the right connections you can make a living that way.
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CMS
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More royal Drupal goodness. This time her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is using Drupal: see http://www.queenrania.jo. Queen Rania is well-known for talking about using social media to help change the world — follow her on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.
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Openness
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Possibly the most compelling of the new opportunities for breakaway brokers is a Chicago firm called HighTower. It offers brokers with at least $100 million under management what it describes as an “open source” alternative to firms like Merrill and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.
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Programming
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The flexibility that Java brings through its open source framework, has made it more popular. .NET in its complete form can only be installed on computers running a Microsoft Windows operating system, whereas Java can be installed on computers running any operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, Mac OS or Windows.
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In a year of dramatic change and mergers for the data storage industry, it should come as no surprise that the most-read stories on Enterprise Storage Forum this year were about … dramatic change and mergers.
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We don’t have many details, but we can confirm that AMD plans to launch two six-core desktop CPUs next year. This should happen in Q2 2010 and if AMD holds on to this date, it might come a bit later than Intel’s Core i7 980X.
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Security
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When Big Brother Watch released our first report earlier this month – a study into the huge number of council controlled CCTV cameras – we condemned the enormous rise of almost 200% in 10 years for several reasons.
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Innocent people face a postcode lottery in the way police treat requests to remove their records from the national DNA database, according to figures published today.
The huge difference in the way police forces across England and Wales deal with requests is described as a “shambles” by the Conservatives.
Some police forces refuse to remove any records once a case is closed and the person declared innocent, while others comply with 80 per cent of requests for deletion.
Damian Green, the Shadow Immigration Minister, said the huge disparities in the way police deal with requests showed that the system was in chaos.
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Finance
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On the surface, many of the moves undertaken by investment banking behemoth Goldman Sachs look respectable, but a bit more digging reveals some ulterior motives at play. While Goldman repaid the money it took from Uncle Sam as part of the TARP program, many taxpayers are still angry that the government’s taxpayer-funded bailout of AIG indirectly benefited Goldman, who had billions invested in complicated trading deals with the troubled insurer.
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The SEC and FINRA are investigating conduct by Wall Street investment banks, which bet against securities which they created ahead of the implosion of the housing market, according to reports from the New York Times.
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Congress and financial regulators are probing several Wall Street firms for bundling bad debt, selling it to clients, and then profiting from betting that those same securities would fail, insiders say. Clients at Goldman Sachs and other firms lost billions of dollars on the mortgage-related securities as the housing market collapsed. The firms and some hedge funds made billions from the negative bets.
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Thomas Adams, a lawyer at Paykin Krieg and Adams, LLP, and a former managing director at Ambac and FGIC is backing up the charges that Janet Tavakoli has been making against Goldman Sachs. In fact, he is taking her charges one step further and stating that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury aided and abetted Goldman Sachs in “committing financial and ethical crimes at an astounding level.”
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Goldman Sachs (GS.N) was one of the foreign banks, along with Citigroup (C.N), Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley (MS.N), blamed by the state assets watchdog for providing “extremely complicated” and difficult to understand derivatives products.
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First, Kosman states and characterizes the institutions involved in these derivatives trades as “brokers” when, in fact, they participate as PRINCIPALS. The amount of risk involved when one trades as a principal is materially larger than when one acts as a broker or agent. Of course, if Kosman had bothered to read the rest of the Report, he would have known that these trade COULD NOT HAVE BEEN BROKERED because the report tells us there are empirically NO END USERS FOR THESE PRODUCTS…
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Step 1: Sell mortgage-related securities that are absolute junk to trusting clients at vastly overinflated prices.
Step 2: Bet against those same mortgage-related securities and make massive bets against the U.S. housing market so that your firm will make massive profits when the U.S. economy collapses.
Step 3: Have ex-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the U.S. government so that bailout money can be funneled to entities such as AIG that Goldman has made these bets with so that they can get paid after they win their bets.
Step 4: Collect the profits – Goldman Sachs is having their “most successful year” and will end up reporting approximately $50 billion in revenue for 2009.
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The New York Times published a Christmas Eve expose of Goldman Sachs’s so-called “Abacus” synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). They were created with credit derivatives instead of cash securities. Goldman used credit derivatives to create short bets that gain in value when CDOs lose value. Goldman did this for both protection and profit and marketed the idea to hedge funds.
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But certainly the economic damage to the USA that resulted from Lloyd Blankfein’s “work for God”, and that of his disciples, was much more than the economic damage inflicted on that country by the activities of Osama bin Laden.
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According to the New York Times, Congressional and SEC investigators are examining if these firms knowingly created disastrously performing securities, sold them to investors and then proceeded to short the same securities. Essentially collateralized debt obligations were sold to investors. Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche and other firms sold these securities and then proceeded to short the same securities, in effect hedging against a loss in the value of the securities.
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Ace biz blogger Henry Blodget has a shrewd take on it, “The Goldman Housing Scandal Isn’t A Scandal: It’s Inevitable.” Blodget’s argument, as always, is that this is how business is done. And he’s right. And he should know. A dot-com bubblegummer, Blodget didn’t get banned for life from the securities industry for being stupid.
Probes are supposedly under way, the NYT story says, but that won’t mean much. One of the smaller firms that peddled these CDOs and then bet against them was Tricadia, whose parent firm is controlled by Lewis Sachs, now a special counselor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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One big reason readers choose e-books over ink and paper versions: The digital ones are cheaper.
That wasn’t the case when e-books first appeared a decade ago. But Amazon has made a point of selling its Kindle titles at a discount to physical editions, even if it means losing money.
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 18 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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12.30.09
Posted in News Roundup at 10:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Even Bill Gates has famously said:
“And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
Except… of course, Microsoft has been pushing hard to “stop” that kind of “piracy” in China, and it may be having an unintended effect. Slashdot points us to the news that a group that had been offering pirated copies of Windows is now offering a copy of Ubuntu Linux, designed to look just like Windows XP.
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Curiously, though, the October press release doesn’t mention 64-bit support at all, and the announcement of the latest beta includes only a passing link to “the latest alpha refresh” of the 64-bit Flash Player 10 prerelease for Linux.What about Windows or the Mac? Sorry, folks, no news to report.
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Users have been waiting a long time for open source video drivers that match proprietary ones feature for feature. But by the end of next year they may actually arrive. Intel drivers are already solid, and are used on about twenty-five percent of open source computers.
However, the Linux 2.6.33 kernel is supposed to include increased support for both ATI and NVIDIA cards, so major improvements are a certainty by the end of next year. At the very least, if features are still missing, they should be come by mid-2011.
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Kernel Space
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The merge window is normally a bit of a hectic time for subsystem maintainers. They have two weeks in which to pull together a well-formed tree containing all of the changes destined for the next kernel development cycle. Occasionally, though, last-minute snags can make the merge window even more busy than usual. The unexpected merging of the Nouveau driver is the result of one such snag – but it is a story with a happy ending for all.
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Instructionals
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A 200MB dynamo built on Slackware, Slax offers one seriously awesome feature you won’t find with any of the other options mentioned here. You can customize you ISO before you download. It’s as simple as choosing build Slax and then browsing through the massive inventory of packages available to plug in. Bonus points: you can even drop Google Chrome into your personal build.
Slax has long been a favorite of Linux users looking for a feature-packed but lightweight desktop OS, and it’s been downloaded more than 2 million times.
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I had heard abοut ArchLinux back from the early days that I started experimenting with GNU/Linux distributions. It caught my attention for two main reasons:
1. The mentality of Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) and lightweight.
2. It’s a rolling distro, which means you don’t need to upgrade every now and then to newer versions to keep up to date. Just update your way into everything new out there.
To be honest, I had attempted installing ArchLinux on an old laptop back then, but I failed miserably in completing the task. Same disappointing results on Virtualbox on my desktop PC. Although Arch has extremely thorough documentation available, I was stuck somewhere between manually setting up the system files and installing and configuring a working desktop environment. As an newbie I couldn’t handle the pressure, so I gave up. But not for long.
To my great pleasure, I recently stumbled upon the Chakra Project. Chakra is as the title suggests, a brand new distribution which is based on Arch Linux and KDE 4, but it comes extra with its own tweaked package set of KDE called KDEmod and some very handy tools.
I was extremely happy to see that it features a graphical installer, and the fact that it supports automatic hardware configuration made it irresistible. I just had to download and see with my one eyes. It was about time I get rid of that Windows XP dual boot with Ubuntu after all.
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New Releases
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Ubuntu Linux may get the majority of attention from Linux watchers but there are many good alternatives available. One of those is Mandriva Linux, a version of Linux formerly known as Mandrake and long considered one of the most user-friendly of Linux versions.
Mandriva 2010 focused heavily on netbook users and other alternative desktop users. Boot time was also a priority for Mandriva, as it is for most other operating system makers, and the developers said that Mandriva 2010 shuts down, hibernates, suspends, and resumes faster. The bootup procedure on Mandriva 2010 is managed by Plymouth, which also makes for a more attractive, graphical boot up process.
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Parted Magic 4.8 fixes “Live” mode and direct ISO booting with GRUB4DOS. No programs were upgraded.
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Debian Family
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Ease Of Installation & Use: 5/5
Stability: 5/5
Speed: 4/5
Community & Documentation: 4/5
Features: 4/5
Overall: 5/5
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We covered Spaz webOS, a microblogging client for Palm devices, when it was still a babe in the woods. The project has grown considerably since then and this week its developer, Ed Finkler, announced the release of Spaz webOS 1.0. It’s an important milestone that includes a slew of new features that ought to satisfy anyone looking for an open source microblogging app for their Palm device.
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Nightshade is available for Linux and Window, and the project is currently looking for developers to help build a package for Mac OS X. According to the project team, the decision to break from the Stellarium project was based on a desire to depart from Stellarium’s desktop-heavy focus and plans to implement a new graphical interface.
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BSD
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FreeBSD is a free, open-source and UNIX-like operating system. Though relatively unknown, it’s a performing and powerful work-horse, capable of coping with massive work-loads whilest remaining fast, ultra-stable and rock-solid. Blogging about FreeBSD and operating systems based on this versatile, safe and secure OS, I want to generate more interest in FreeBSD and its dependants. If you need a reliable, rock-solid and performing system for either your desktop or servers, consider FreeBSD!
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Security
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WH releases all visitor logs for first time ever
In an executive order issued Tuesday, President Barack Obama ended a Bush-era policy that allowed the head of the US’s intelligence agencies to have the final word on the declassification of documents.
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This corruption of our legal system, if history is any guide, will not be reserved by the state for suspected terrorists, or even Muslim Americans. In the coming turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many others, who are not Muslim, will endure later. Radical activists in the environmental, globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements—who are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism—have discovered that his fate is their fate. Courageous groups have organized protests, including vigils outside the Manhattan detention facility. They can be found at www.educatorsforcivilliberties.org or www.freefahad.com. On Martin Luther King Day, this Jan. 18 at 6 p.m. EST, protesters will hold a large vigil in front of the MCC on 150 Park Row in Lower Manhattan to call for a return of our constitutional rights. Join them if you can.
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PR/AstroTurf
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The health insurance lobby is laying the groundwork to block federal health care reform by working through think tanks to pass state laws invalidating federally-mandated reforms. Conservative and libertarian think tanks have started encouraging states to amend their constitutions to block federal health reform measures, including a mandate to purchase health insurance.
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Lobbyists lay ground
Regardless of when the fight happens, the health care industry has already laid lobbying groundwork across the country.
A New York Times story Tuesday showed that companies and individuals with a financial interest in the health care debate have already given heavily in state races. Data from the Institute on Money in State Politics show that while not a leader in the debate, Colorado is part of that trend.
Colorado ranks second in the Rocky Mountain West in the amount of political contributions accepted from the health care industry in the past three election cycles — $1.9 million — though nearly half went to support the 2005 ballot initiative Referendum C, a timeout on the revenue limits of the state’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.
The years of sustained contributions point to a history of political involvement by health care interests and not necessarily a flurry of new activity, said Nathan Newman, director of liberal group Progressive States Network. And local health care lobbyists said they are waiting for the final version of federal legislation before wading into any state fights.
“States are the ones who are going to continue to spend the most of the money on health care,” Newman said. “Where they’re spending money, the lobby is already there.”
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Censorship/Civil Rights
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The romantic comedy “It’s Complicated” arrived at the multiplex on Friday complete with an R rating, ranking it in the same category as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Basic Instinct” in the eyes of the Motion Picture Association of America.
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However, as Michael Geist points out, in the rush to pull down the sites, the ISP also took down 4,500 other websites. Seems like quite a bit of unnecessary collateral damage. Of course, this is exactly what the Yes Men want. For every takedown, they get another burst of publicity.
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It may have given the world the Kama Sutra and the Bollywood wet sari scene, but it appears that India is not yet ready to be exposed to the delicate subject of sex on the internet.
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Internet/Web Abuse/DRM
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There is one other problem with DRM protected books. When the reading device reaches its end of life, you have to assume all the content you purchased will be lost. If, for instance, I went with a Kindle, all of the content I purchase can be used only on devices supported by Amazon.
When, several years later, it comes time to replace that Kindle I may get a new Kindle — but I can’t assume that. Maybe somebody else will have a better device at that time. Or, maybe Amazon went bankrupt or evil or stupid and I need to switch to another vendor. There are any number of reasons I might like to switch my e-reader. If I do, I have to assume I won’t be able to use any of the content I purchased for the Kindle.
Thanks to DRM, when my e-reader reaches its end of life, I will have to pay to acquire replacement books for the material that’s locked out of the new e-reader. I call the amount of that purchase the “DRM tax” — an added cost imposed by DRM restrictions.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Increasingly, media moguls, national journalists and Wall Street experts are predicting that cable provider Comcast’s acquisition of NBC will lead to the end of free broadcast television. Numerous outlets have reported that Rupert Murdoch, founder of Fox News Channel’s parent company NewsCorp, is actively pushing to end the long-time television business model where advertising dollars pay for programming.
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Famine isn’t a worry for most journalists in the developed world. But the information workers who toil at the core of the news business do resemble the stocking-makers of Nottinghamshire in other ways.
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This is a big issue. As we’ve seen over and over again, many of these collections societies use sampling and counting methods that greatly overvalue big stars (who need the money less) at the expense of up-and-coming artists. It’s like the poor get to pay the rich.
From there, Wilhelm’s letter goes on in great detail responding to claims from SoundExchange and debunking them one by one. SoundExchange claims that they’re now going to be much more open and respond to these types of questions. We’ll be interested to see what they have to say.
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One of my favorite things about the emerging new music industry has been the realization that there is no longer a single best way to do much of anything anymore. That pioneering spirit is leading to wonderful experimentation including this great twist from indie artist Christopher Bryant.
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ON Hulu, the popular Web site that streams free television shows and other video, users have proved to be perfectly willing to watch short commercials, and a new site is betting that the same willingness will apply to downloading music.
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The judge presiding over the Viacom-YouTube copyright lawsuit has allowed Viacom to withdraw infringement claims for around 250 clips — including approximately 100 that were uploaded to the site by Viacom employees or agents.
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That alone should show how ridiculous Viacom’s claims are in this lawsuit. There is simply no way for Google to know if clips are uploaded legitimately or not. Oddly, however, the court has now allowed Viacom to withdraw those clips, but lawyers like Eric Goldman are questioning how this isn’t a Rule 11 violation for frivolous or improper litigation. But, more importantly, it demonstrates that even Viacom has no idea which clips are infringing and which are authorized. Given that, how can it possibly say that it’s reasonable for Google to know?
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Evidently Youtube wants me to take this down, because of course a 4 year old dancing to a McDonald’s happy meal song (that was included with a happy meal) is too much for the copyright holder to handle.
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 17 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I’ve been writing about the Loongson chip for three years now. As I’ve noted several times, this chip is important because (a) it’s a home-grown Chinese chip (albeit based on one from MIPS) and (b) Windows doesn’t run on it, but GNU/Linux does.
[...]
Because GNU/Linux distros have already been ported to the Loongson chip, neither Java nor OpenOffice.org needs “adapting” so much as recompiling – hardly a challenging task. As for “releasing it all under a free software license”, they had no choice.
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The coming year should be a good one for free software. Desktop environments are maturing, technology is improving. A lot of the ground work done in many areas over the past twelve months should propel free software further.
While things are looking good, 2010 still won’t be the “Year of the Linux Desktop” (whatever that means).
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Google
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Google and its applications are fast becoming the backbone of the internet. They seem to be solving everyone’s problems with free stuffs. Just when you get happy with something like Firefox, Google comes along and makes a browser that’s fast, super secure and has all kinds of add-ons and themes to personalize it.
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Kernel Space
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For this comparison we used Ubuntu 9.10 on a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook running an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, 4GB of system memory, a 100GB Hitachi HTS7220 SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M. We were using the Ubuntu-supplied kernels that are based off the Linux 2.6.31 kernel in Ubuntu Karmic. Other packages that were maintained included GNOME 2.28.1, X Server 1.6.4, NVIDIA 195.22 display driver, GCC 4.4.1, and we were using the default EXT4 file-system with all other defaults. With Ubuntu to properly address 4GB or greater of system memory you need to use a PAE kernel as the Physical Address Extension support through the kernel’s high-mem configuration options are not enabled in the default 32-bit kernels.
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Drivers
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Yes, I’m helping to advertise for this vendor because they deserve my support for their explicit Linux support. senyum
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So when I go shopping for hardware, it sucks to be me. I haven’t tested all this stuff, and I don’t know how much of it works perfectly out of the box. What I need is to decide what software I’m going to put on it,n and have hardware recommendations per price point from the software distributor, so that I can just go to my local Surcouf, FNAC or whatever, and just look at one label & say “That’s only 90% supported, no custom from me!”
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The drivers are available for 32, or 64-bit Linux versions.
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Applications
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Have I ever told you all how much I love byobu? I have always used screen, though I really never tweaked it all crazy like many did. Recently I typed screen at the command line and I was presented with this thing called byobu. I went ahead and gave it a shot, and at first I will say I was rather annoyed with the bar at the bottom of my screen, and my scrollwheel didn’t work with byobu the way it did with screen. I went ahead and changed my workflow in order to get used to byobu. A couple of weeks ago, I got nosey, and wanted to know how byobu was doing its thing. After a while of messing around, and seeing everything it could display, I wanted more! And since quite a few of you on IRC wanted it, well here it is.
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A while ago Duncan made a video on “Ninite“, a cool website that allows you to combine all of your favorite apps into one single installer. While Ninite is great the only disadvantage is that it only works with Windows and me being an Ubuntu user I had to look for a worthy alternative, so i came across this website called Allmyapps.
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Instructionals
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Ailurus is a system enhancement application. It helps to install software which is outside official repository. It helps to add/remove third party repositories, and to change system settings.
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Félix Ontañón, a very good friend and hacker from my company, has just released a new versión of a systray application which help to configure and manage the Wii remote control on Linux. The application is called WiiCan and is hosted on Launchpad.
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Games
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More games for Linux and open source – a large choice for every taste. Strategy, chess, and more.
[...]
LordsAWar
[...]
LGeneral
[...]
MegaMek
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The Speed Dreams team has announced that its first release 1.4.0 is out:
Speed Dreams is an open source motorsport simulator. It was forked in late 2008 from the famous open racing car simulator TORCS, in order to implement exciting
new features, cars, tracks and AI opponents, to make a more enjoyable game for the player, as well as constantly improving visual and physics realism.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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A few days ago The Dot received an invite for the KDE community to FOSS Nigeria. FOSS Nigeria 2010 will be the second Free Software conference in Nigeria, following the successful event last year (as reported on The Dot). Again, Free Software developers and community members from around the world, but of course especially those from Africa and Nigeria, are invited for a 3-day conference in Kano at the Bayero University Kano.
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Great. Pre-processing is done. It’s time to use the second part of this plugin and to fuse bracketed images to a pseudo HDR image. On this new window, you can see a preview area on the left, and on the right, the bracketed images stack on the top, all Enfuse settings on the center, and finally, all processed images generated on the bottom. For each enfused image, you can choose which input bracketed images you want to use. Selecting a processed image on the bottom will load it to preview, to easy compare results. You can zoom in/out and pan preview if you want. To save processed images, just press Save button, and all selected items from processed stack will be saved to the current digiKam album.
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TOMOYO is also in this version of Mandriva. TOMOYO is the new security framework used by default instead of AppArmor. It promises quite a lot just now but should mature rapidly, as do all GNU/Linux-based security applications. On the Mandriva community wiki, you are advised not to use the RC1 or RC2 version to upgrade an existing Mandriva Linux installation. There are unresolved issues with KDE and GNOME and other windows managers, which is likely to result in a system upgraded from any stable release to this version being unable to start a desktop or rendering it useless for most people.
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Red Hat Family
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“We considered a number of operating systems as the platform for our business-critical SAP applications, and after much testing and evaluation, we selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform on HP ProLiant servers because it met our requirements and provided the best overall value, stability and performance,” pointed out Mohit Agarwal, CIO of Carnation Auto.
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Debian Family
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One problem I run into a lot when recommending Ubuntu to complete Linux newbies is they aren’t used to installing codecs or using the terminal when they want to play DVDs, MP3s and other file types. Explaining the legal situation is something I make a point of doing but some people “just want it to work”. This is what has led me to Super Ubuntu or SuperOS as it’s now called. Once the recently released SuperOS 9.10 was adequately seeded I downloaded this enhanced version of Ubuntu and took it for a spin.
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[bunnie] posted this pretty slick way of getting composite video out of a Chumby. The Chumby is an open source connectivity device that has already seen some decent hacking. This modification, done by [xobs] isn’t too difficult. It only requires patching into some pads on the motherboard and loading a custom kernel to support the external output.
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Phones
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Palm has launched an update to its web OS, which comes with enhancements to its App Catalog and improvements in battery life optimisation when in marginal coverage areas. It is available for Palm Pixi and Palm Pre smartphones, both of which are exclusive to the Sprint Nextel network.
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Android
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This morning, a carefully selected slice of the tech press received a short but sweet invitation to the announcement event. In the long-standing tradition of milking product announcements for every drop of suspense, the invitation doesn’t mention the Nexus One specifically, but merely reads:
With the launch of the first Android-powered device just over a year ago, we’ve seen how a powerful, open platform can spur mobile product innovation. And this is just the beginning of what’s possible.
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It may be the moment the tech world’s been waiting for: Google has just officially announced plans for an Android-related media event to be held next Tuesday, January 5, at its Mountain View campus.
If recent online chatter is to be believed, the event could have something to do with the Nexus One — the highly anticipated HTC-built handset seemingly under development by Google.
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The quality of applications available on Google’s Android platform is improving by leaps and bounds. Whereas most of the apps that Google showcased last year in its first Android Developer Challenge
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In the final show for the year and the decade, Dan and Fab look back at 2009 and the major news stories of the year. We also try to decide what this year was all about. There’s even some special funny content as a little bonus.
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Sub-notebooks
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Most smartbooks, which are expected to be built by both PC makers as well as manufacturers of cellphones and consumer-electronics, will run versions of the Linux operating system and low-cost chips based on designs licensed by ARM Holdings PLC.
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Freescale’s research focused on the future because most smartbooks have yet to hit the market. The company has collaborated on one smartbook to date: the NetWalker from Japanese manufacturer Sharp. Qualcomm has also unveiled one smartbook, made by Lenovo. Both companies expect at least a dozen smartbooks incorporating their chips to debut in early 2010.
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We have been waiting for the smartbook revolution to take hold for some time now. Well it looks like it will kick off in earnest from the first quarter of next year. According to President Kim Yung-sup of ARM Korea, “20 companies in the world are preparing for release of smart book. And we will see them from 1Q.”
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As this is the holiday season, and things are slow, I have finally taken the time to follow up on some very good advice that Jake gave me, and learn to produce blog entries with pictures. Of course, there is no better way to start than with the specific subject that Jake (and others) said they would like to see pictures of, so here is a quick review of some of the most common Netbook-centric Linux distributions.
[...]
Overall I am quite impressed with the KDE Netbook desktop, and I am anxious to see how its development continues. The last I heard it was scheduled for an initial release in early 2010, so I will be watching for that.
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This week, Advogato gets up on his soapbox and dispenses advice to free software neophytes.
I’ll take the risk of demonstrating my advanced age and give some advice for new free software developers. With luck, this post will get some discussion rolling. What are some of the worst mistakes you’ve made as a free software developer. What has worked well for you?
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Best distro release: Knoppix 6.x
After a long hiatus, the venerable Live CD Linux distribution emerged in a new version redesigned from the ground up. The latest version sports a brand new accelerated boot procedure which significantly reduces the boot time, and the LXDE lightweight graphical desktop environment. Unlike previous versions, Knoppix 6.0 comes with a trimmed software bundle, but key productivity applications like OpenOffice.org, Iceweasel (aka Firefox), Icedove (aka Thunderbird), Pidgin, and the GIMP are still there. The latest version of Knoppix features a new flash-knoppix tool that allows you to install Knoppix on a USB stick or a flash card.
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And try the OpenOffice.org, instead of paying for Microsoft Office.
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A few weeks ago I finally realized my old wish: I bought a real camera for me: a Nikon D40 – which is, according to many, many people, is the best DSLR out there. At least for non-professionals.
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The good part is that Pranav is planning to make available this software as open source so every one can benefit. Since it will open source, anyone can add features or modify the software as he wishes. The hardware costs for this system are relatively low.
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Mozilla
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8. Firefox Optimizer: Firefox Optimizers for Mozilla Firefox v1.x / 2.x / 3.x was developed for an easy and fast optimization of your browsing experience with Firefox. It is based on a collection of popular and well working optimization settings used and tested by the experts.
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Databases
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Fear #1 is that Oracle will kill MySQL, which Oracle is said to see as a threat to its cash-cow relational database management system. One might respond that similar fears were expressed after Oracle’s acquisitions of Innobase and Sleepycat Software, but that things have not turned out that way so far. One might say (as Eben Moglen has) that keeping MySQL healthy is in Oracle’s economic interest. One might also respond that Oracle could arguably do more damage to MySQL by breaking off the acquisition and allowing Sun to simply die. But what is most interesting about this particular concern is the lack of faith it shows in our community’s ability to cope with such an outcome.
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BSD
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Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool which allows you to write web code using an easy-to-understand plain text format. Markdown text is then converted to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). Markdown is used all over the web — it’s even understood by the content fields and comment forms within most popular blogging platforms, including WordPress and Movable Type. It’s been ported to Python, Ruby, PHP and other popular languages.
However, the original Perl script has remained largely unchanged since its release in 2004. In his post, Atwood takes Gruber to task for what Atwood calls “bad parenting,” an indictment of Markdown’s lack of bug fixes, updates and improvements.
Markdown was released under a BSD-style open source license, meaning the community can do pretty much whatever it likes with the code, so long as it respects the copyright notices and naming rules. Indeed, many ports of Markdown enjoy rather widespread support with numerous contributors and an aggregate community of active developers that the original Markdown lacks.
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Openness
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In terms of the blogs on my blog roll there are many that will be familiar (Deepak Singh’s BBGM, Jean-Claude Bradley’s Usefulchem, John Wilbanks’ Common Knowledge, Neil Saunders’ What you’re doing is rather desperate). I keep an eye on Richard Grant (The Scientist), Jenny Rohn, and Martin Fenner at Nature Network. Some other blogs that may not be as familiar to the regular sciblogger community but are well worth the effort are Greg Wilson’s The Third Bit, Mike Ellis’ Electronic Museum, PT Sefton’s blog and Nico Adams’ Staudinger’s Semantic Molecules.
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“picons” is short for “personal icons”. They’re small, constrained images used to represent users and domains on the net, organized into databases so that the appropriate image for a given e-mail address can be found. Besides users and domains, there are picons databases for Usenet newsgroups and weather forecasts. The picons are in either monochrome XBM format or color XPM and GIF formats.
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Programming
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A long time ago when I first started at IBM I used an editor named XEDIT that ran under the VM/CMS operating system on mainframes. It was a fullscreen, line-oriented editor that looks primitive now but was quite sophisticated in its time. One of the best things about it was that it was scriptable: you could write very sophisticated programs that could manipulate files and their contents. XEDIT really became powerful when used with the REXX programming language and many of my thoughts and philosophy about embedded languages were formed during my use of REXX.
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In 2010, developers will learn to let go and adapt to a centralized resource pool, continuous testing will eclipse continuous integration, coffee breaks will get shorter, open source CI tools will buckle in big shops, and distributed software configuration management tools will cross the chasm from open source projects to the enterprise.
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Applications
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Digitalis Education Solutions, Inc. is pleased to announce the official launch of Nightshade, open source astronomy simulation and visualization software specifically tailored to digital planetarium and educator use.
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The primary goal for Firebird 2.5 was to establish the basics for a new threading architecture that is almost entirely common to the Superserver, Classic and Embedded models, taking in lower level synchronization and thread safety generally.
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The co-founder of Wikipedia is once again calling on internet surfers to adopt good manners online.
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Google’s complaint that the domain name groovle.com is confusingly similar to its own is without foundation, an ICANN-approved arbitration body has ruled.
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Crime
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A former employee of Seagate Technology claims that the company destroyed evidence that could have affected a long-standing patent infringement lawsuit filed against it by engineering company Convolve Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In a court document obtained by the New York Times that was filed late last month, the former employee, Paul A. Galloway, claimed in an affidavit that Seagate deliberately destroyed the source code pertaining to a disk driving using Convolve’s intellectual property and “failed to preserve” Galloway’s PC containing all of his work during development of the drive.
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Police State
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A PREGNANT mother was horrified to see live pictures of her BED on a travel news website.
A camera meant to be monitoring traffic was instead pointing directly at Megan Franklin’s bedroom.
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A nine-year-old boy was separated from his mother and kept in a van for several hours by UK Border Agency officials while she was treated in hospital.
The agency held the boy – known as Child M – in a vehicle for three hours after an early morning deportation raid, and said that he had not been distressed. The family, however, said the child repeatedly asked to see his mother and was terrified during the incarceration.
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Ever since Rodney King was famously videotaped receiving what many saw as an over-the-top thrashing by Los Angeles lawmen back in 1991, video footage of alleged police misconduct has time and time again come back to haunt overzealous boys in blue.
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Security
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Fascinating study done by Northrup Grumman Corporation for the US government’s US-China Economic and Security Review Commission about the Chinese government’s Cyberwar capability.
In fact, it presents techniques in such a way as to offer a “How To” guide for aspiring state-sponsored hackers.
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We’d do much better by leveraging the inherent strengths of our modern democracies and the natural advantages we have over the terrorists: our adaptability and survivability, our international network of laws and law enforcement, and the freedoms and liberties that make our society so enviable.
The way we live is open enough to make terrorists rare; we are observant enough to prevent most of the terrorist plots that exist, and indomitable enough to survive the even fewer terrorist plots that actually succeed. We don’t need to pretend otherwise.
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Environment
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According to Peter, humanity has probably been in overshoot of the Earth’s carrying capacity since it abandoned hunter gathering in favor of crop cultivation (~ 8,000 BCE). The problem is that soil needs tightly woven natural ecosystems to properly recycle nutrients and prevent soil erosion.
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It’s worth going back every so often to see how projections made back in the day are shaping up. As we get to the end of another year, we can update all of the graphs of annual means with another single datapoint. Statistically this isn’t hugely important, but people seem interested, so why not?
For example, here is an update of the graph showing the annual mean anomalies from the IPCC AR4 models plotted against the surface temperature records from the HadCRUT3v and GISTEMP products (it really doesn’t matter which). Everything has been baselined to 1980-1999 (as in the 2007 IPCC report) and the envelope in grey encloses 95% of the model runs. The 2009 number is the Jan-Nov average.
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One of the central underpinnings of neo-classical economics is trade. And one of the central tenets of trade is the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage. Trade (in theory) benefits both parties because both are better off after the exchange. But our international trade system has, by baby steps, become completely dependent on twin enablers: crude oil and credit. By air, water, land or rail, petroleum accounts for 95% of all transportation energy. As we move up the complexity chain in the products that make up our daily lives, are we moving further into a Chinese finger trap where there is no backing out?
This post will examine the theory of international trade and the hierarchy of goods transport, production and consumption. It is quite possible that in the next decade, the increase in price (or the decreasing availability) of oil and financing, will offset the benefits of many types of trade.
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Internet/Web Abuse/DRM
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A frequently asked question that seems appropriate this time of year (given the number of e-books that are likely to appear in people’s Christmas stockings) concerns what one is legally allowed to do with documents on one’s own e-book, particularly one that is protected by some form of digital rights management.
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So, 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the technology, and well over a decade after the Web became a mass medium, and the British Library *still* isn’t archiving every Web site?
History – assuming we have one – will judge us harshly for this extraordinary UK failure to preserve the key decades of the quintessential technology of our age. It’s like burning down a local digital version of the Library of Alexandria, all over again.
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The FrostWire P2P client promotes music of starting and independent artists through its FrostClick service. The service has been running for over a year and is a great success. To celebrate the first million downloads of 2009, a compilation album has been released, featuring free Creative Commons-licensed tracks from 21 artists.
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The Italian Supreme Court has ruled that ISPs can be forced to block BitTorrent sites, even if they are not hosted in Italy or operated by Italian citizens. According to the decision by the Supreme Court, sites offering torrent files that link to copyrighted material are engaging in criminal activity.
[...]
The fact that a site is not hosted in Italy or operated by Italians is irrelevant according to the court. The site is visited by many Italians who (in part) use it to share copyrighted material, the Supreme Court argued.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Given that the UK government seems happy for huge sums of money to be spent on this fool’s errand, why not spend it more effectively, in a way that sustains businesses, rather than penalising them, and which actually encourages people not to download copyrighted material from unauthorised sources?
This can be done quite simply: by giving everyone who wants it a free Spotify Premium subscription. These normally cost £120 per year, but buying a national licence for the 10 million families or so who are online would presumably garner a generous discount – say, of 50% – bringing the total price of the scheme to around £600 million, pretty much the expected cost of the current plans.
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It is extraordinary how copyright has turned from an obscure, dusty corner of the law to one of the flashpoints of the digital age. The reason is simple. Copyright is an intellectual *monopoly*, and like all monopolies tries to limit access to a given good. But limiting access to digital goods is a forlorn hope: as Bruce Schneier expressed it so memorably, trying to make digital files uncopiable is like trying to make water not wet. The battle over copyright is therefore a manifestation of a far deeper struggle between two ways of looking at the world: one based on scarce analogue objects, the other on abundant digital ones.
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Hardly a day goes by without yet another news story about creative uses of copyright, the DMCA, and generic attack lawyers to stifle free speech, criticism, and competition. It seems that money can buy all kinds of creative “justice.” For example, in the increasingly bizarre Apple vs. Psystar drama, in which Psystar commited the awful crime of selling a tool to help customers install Mac OS X on the hardware of their choice, Apple have prevailed yet again in court, and Psystar cannot do this anymore.
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 16 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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12.29.09
Posted in News Roundup at 9:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Thiruvananthapuram: All 141 legislators of the state assembly were Tuesday given a brand new HCL laptop each.
Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan handed over one laptop to Leader of the Opposition Oommen Chandy at the banquet hall of the state assembly.
It is yet to be decided if the legislators would be charged for the computers, speaker of the assembly K. Radhakrishnan told.
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Ubuntu 10.04, a.k.a. the Lucid Lynx, is set to hit the Web in April. Lucid will be Canonical’s third Long Term Support release, and I expect it to break new ground for the organization in the server space, owing in large part to its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud functionality.
Toward the end of the year, I expect to see devices shipping with Google’s Web-centric Chrome OS, which may well set the stage for a new batch of rich Web applications in 2011 and beyond.
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Diagnosing With Linux
One last bit of advice. Sometimes you might suspect that a piece of hardware is defective but, you don’t have a utility available to actually test the device. For example, I had a client complaining that the network adapter on an HP workstation had gone bad. I replaced the motherboard (which had an integrated network adapter).
When I got back into Windows I tried to access the Internet, but the network adapter still wouldn’t work. So I reloaded drivers, verified IP settings and performed numerous other tests. Still, I could not get this PC online. I concluded that something inside of Windows was causing the problem, and the only thing left to do was to reinstall Windows. The client wasn’t willing to redo a system based on a hunch, so to test my hypothesis I booted the system using an Ubuntu Live CD.
Ubuntu Live CD is a version of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system that runs completely off of a CD without having to install it to the PC. This let me boot into a completely different operating system on the same PC, without modifying the current Windows configuration.
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Getting the Windows look is only another step in the same direction. We’re going to try and ape the current generation of Windows – the newly released Windows 7 – and merge some of its features into the Linux desktop, and we’ve decided to use KDE to do it.
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Was 2009 the year of the Linux desktop? It’s a rather silly question, honestly, and a Google search will show that for the last number of years, there have been constant predictions that that year was the year of the Linux desktop. And, guaranteed, in January there will be more predictions that 2010 will be “the year of the Linux desktop!”
But why this focus on a particular point in time? Recent distributions already prove that Linux is more than capable for the desktop, and this has been true for years. 2009 brought about GNOME 2.28 and KDE 4.3, both forward-progressing desktop environments. Are they perfect? Of course not. But let me pose this question: Is Windows on the desktop perfect?
Linux on the desktop is entirely subjective: For some, the year of their Linux desktop was 2009, or last year, or the year before that. For others, Linux won’t be good enough until 2010, or 2011, or even further.
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I’ve been wondering about this particular issue for a few years now. I’m secretly hoping that Chrome with it’s cloud based storage will finally push OS developers in the right direction and will make them start thinking about finally separating system and data files by default. Or maybe not.
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This might make me sound like an old fogey, but I really do miss the old games like Space Quest, The Curse of Monkey Island and Return to Zork. The problem isn’t that I don’t have the games anymore, but rather that they were designed for my 386 computer running DOS. Thankfully, I’m not alone in my fits of nostalgia. The developers over at www.scummvm.org have reproduced the “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion” developed by Lucas Arts and packaged it into a virtual machine (thus, ScummVM). That virtual machine is open source and available for just about any platform you can imagine.
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Server
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PacketFence is a free and open source network access control (NAC) system. This Linux-based application primarily provides network access control, monitoring, and intrusion detection.
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Applications
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The GIMP is a multiplatform photo manipulation tool. GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. The GIMP is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction.
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Instructionals
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New Releases
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BrowserLinux is a relatively new distro and has good features but not a good developer community as of yet.
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François Dupoux announced on December 28th the immediate availability of the SystemRescueCd 1.3.4 operating system. The new release is powered by Linux kernel 2.6.31.9, with an updated Btrfs filesystem from Linux kernel 2.6.32 and Xorg Server 1.6.5.
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Hacktolive.org announced today, December 29th, yet another version of their Ubuntu-based Linux distribution… with “super powers.” Super OS 9.10 (formerly known as Super Ubuntu) includes patches, tools and technologies that are missing from a standard Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) default installation.
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Debian Family
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The new Karmic Koala contains more updates than any Ubuntu release in some time. Users will certainly notice one thing from the start: The system boots up much more quickly. The reworked design also stands out. While it still features the brown tones for which Ubuntu is known, it also reminds one a bit of the Mac OS interface.
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At the moment Canonical seem set to release the next version of their OS in late April 2010, this latest version will be version 10.04 and is named Lucid Lynx, this is their first major release since Karmic Koala which was released in late October 2009.
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I wanted to detail the the wallpaper challenge that Charles and I announced in the latest http://mintcast.org (episode 28). Please post here or email the podcast with any questions. Good Luck!
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We hooked up the appliance’s LAN and WAN ports, and from the tidy web interface set up the firewall to perform NAT on the WAN port. A failing of many competing products has been their inability to hide the underlying Linux kernel for management, but Igaware has made a good job of this, so Windows users don’t need to know about Linux.
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Android
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Now bitter industry rival SK Telecom is looking to generate just as much buzz by getting out of the gate early on premium phones powered by the Google-backed Android operating system.
SK Telecom, the country’s biggest mobile telephony operator, currently plans to release its first Android phone, produced by Motorola, sometime around mid-January, industry sources said.
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AndroidSpin, an Android focused news site, has reported that the very first Android based smartphone, the T-Mobile G1, will be getting an over-the-air update.
This will upgrade its software with Android 2.0 or possibly Android 2.1, which incidentally is the operating system of soon-to-launch Nexus One also know as the Google Phone.
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Notion Ink, a Hyderabad-based technology start-up, has developed the first touchscreen tablet which uses Google’s open source operating system Android, Nvidia’s yet-to-be launched Tegra processor chips and a power-saving display screen from the US-based fabless developer Pixel Qi.
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Breaking News! Notion Ink, a Hyderabad-based company, has developed the first touchscreen Tablet PC, which uses Google’s Android Open Source Operating system. The tablet PC was developed by six IITians and an MBA. It will be displayed at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in January 2010.
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If you’ve got some free time on your hands this holiday season, check out these open source versions of popular games you grew up playing. They’re loads of fun, but don’t blame us if they make you a little nostalgic.
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On Sunday 27th of December at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) in Berlin, security researchers published open source instructions for cracking the A5/1 mobile telephony encryption algorithm and for building an IMSI catcher that intercepts mobile phone communication.
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For the last year we have compiled monthly statistics on the top Open Source eCommerce programs, including several free or nearly-free proprietary programs that are sold for less than some OSC programs. “Open Source” means free to look at and to modify, not free of cost: about half of the top OSC programs reviewed are sold for a fee.
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McObject’s eXtremeDB is based on its open source system, Perst. Perst is designed to be embedded in Java, Java ME, and Microsoft .Net applications. The ExtremeDB commercial version of Perst comes in a high availability version that includes transaction logging.
MyYearbook.com, an early user of eXtremeDB, was launched in 2005. It is also a user of the open source PostgreSQL system for relational database work, Harris said.
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2. Innovation is killed in free software.
The common perception is that if everyone can copy ideas, innovation will be stifled. In fact, freedom is often the key to innovative and successful software.
* Anyone is allowed and encouraged to work upon it;
* Many people are willing to participate;
* There is no need to re-invent everything, ideas can be improved upon directly.
Non-proprietary software stands out in many areas: consider, to name just a few:
* Applications: Firefox (web browser), Inkscape (vector drawing).
* Complete systems: Apache (web server), OpenBSD (os), and of course, GNU/Linux.
* Formats and protocols: HTML (web pages), BitTorrent (file sharing), ODF (office documents).
* Server applications: Drupal (Content Management System), WordPress (blog).
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has delayed the release of Firefox 3.6 until the first quarter of 2010.
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About two weeks ago, it became clear the final version of Firefox 3.6 would be pushed back to early 2010 . And we’ve known since September that Firefox 4.0 wouldn’t ship until late 2010 — although according to Mozilla’s most recent meeting notes 4.0 may be pushed back to early 2011. But while we wait for the official versions of these browsers to come out, let’s take a look at what’s in store for the world’s second-most popular browser.
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Fog Computing
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Technologies such as virtualization that underlie Amazon EC2, along with open source software like MemcacheD used heavily by Facebook and other large web-shops, have been important enablers of cloud services.
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Rather than offer the applications to clients and leaving them to get on with the task of integrating them with cloud services, however, Sun is customising the software to work with mainstream cloud service providers such as Amazon and Eucalyptus.
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Databases
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MySQL co-creator Michael “Monty” Widenius has launched a web campaign to try and prevent Oracle from gaining ownership of the open source database which is part of the properties it acquired along with Sun Microsystems in April.
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In a desperate last gasp bid to stop Oracle buying Sun Microsystems and its precious MySQL kit and kaboodle, the database’s co-creator – Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius – has launched a campaign to “help keep the internet free.”
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If you’re like a lot of IT organizations, you’ve got servers from Hewlett-Packard, routers from Cisco, operating systems from Red Hat and Microsoft – and you may even have Solaris from Sun somewhere. For good measure let’s throw in a few databases from MySQL that occasionally take a virtual table or two from your SQL Server farms – and let’s not forget to mention the Oracle database that runs your CRM software. To top things off you’re running a slew of other open and closed source software that all together keeps your business running.
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CMS
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Questionmark, a provider of testing and assessment software and support services, announced recently that its Moodle Connector can now be accessed free of charge as an open source Community Edition as part of Questionmark’s Open Assessment Platform initiative.
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BSD
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There are other reasons to doubt the importance of a graphical installer as the big reason BSD Unix systems do not get the “love” that is heaped on Linux. The answer to why Linux gets more hype and attention is much more complex than that, and includes such concerns as marketing power — in large part because its community is full of people who will talk about how great it is without even understanding half of what they are saying. That is true of anything popular, and says nothing bad about Linux itself, of course.
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Openness
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Speaking of electronic texts, we’re talking open source here. If they don’t exist as Flexbooks or some other format that my teachers and students could easily use, then I want my teachers to be subject-matter experts who can generate open content. There, of course, is another dividend of corporate sponsorship: contribution to a growing store of high-quality educational content.
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The GENIVI Alliance, an automotive industry association driving the development and adoption of an open in-vehicle Infotainment (IVI) reference platform, will be demonstrating the initial implementation of the GENIVI 1.0 platform in Las Vegas during International CES 2010, January 7th – 10th.
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Of course, these aren’t the only problems with the bill. Most glaringly, both the Senate and House bill would leave millions uninsured,6 a far cry from the vision of universal coverage so many of us have fought for. That remains a long-term goal.
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‘Tis the season for predictions, so “Information Age” bravely goes out on this limb: Most technology predictions for 2010 won’t come true. The more we learn about how innovation happens, the less straight the lines of advance look.
“Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments,” said Roman engineer Julius Sextus Frontinus in 10 A.D. This end-of-progress view has been echoed many times, including by Charles Duell, commissioner for the U.S. Patent Office, who in 1899 said, “Everything that can be invented has already been invented.”
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For the last 40 years, Unix operating systems have helped to power mission-critical IT operations around the globe. Now, as Unix enters middle age, its backers are busily developing the new specifications that they hope will carry the OS forward into the next age of computing.
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I spoke to a number of people quoted in the article, but I thought it was also worth sharing at length what Chris Messina, a designer and open source advocate, told me.
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Security
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U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a “neutron initiator” for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.
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Environment
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It’s been several days since the chaotic end to the Copenhagen climate conference but the aftershocks from its failure are still reverberating. As John Prescott points out in his letter to the Guardian, the pointing of fingers in the blame game does not help the regaining of trust needed for the positive resumption of talks early next year and to complete them by December 2010, the new deadline agreed to in Copenhagen.
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The researchers call this the “licensing effect”. Buying green can establish the moral credentials that license subsequent bad behaviour: the rosier your view of yourself, the more likely you are to hoard your money and do down other people.
Then they took another bunch of students, gave them the same purchasing choices, then introduced them to a game in which they made money by describing a pattern of dots on a computer screen. If there were more dots on the right than the left they made more money. Afterwards they were asked to count the money they had earned out of an envelope.
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Finance
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Please sign our New Year’s petition calling on Congress and the President to “Repo the Dough” by taxing speculation and putting Wall Street to work rebuilding Main Street!
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Dimon feels the tax would unfairly penalize the US bank and stressed that JP Morgan paid British taxes and did not receive a UK taxpayer bailout, thus should not be subject to extra taxation.
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And remember, JPMorgan’s CEO is Jamie Dimon who is also closely tied into the Obama team. He is often listed as one of the lead candidates to replace Geithner or take over other leading economic positions within the Obama administration. Remember this the next time his name is floated to replace someone. He’s obviously terrified of the impact the tax will have on his business, but he’s also again showing how he is part of the global problem in the banking industry. Where is their sense of responsibility for the problems they created? If only this crowd worried as much before the crisis as they do now we may have avoided such a deep recession.
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J P Morgan is threatening our Chancellor that it will withdraw from moving to London if the government does not stop its attacks on The City.
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“It’s a joke, it’s lobbying. People are dreaming if they think the London investment banking world is going to move. There is more office space in Canary Wharf than in the whole of Switzerland,” Tim Dawson, an analyst at Geneva-based brokerage Helvea, told Bloomberg.
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PR/AstroTurf
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Listen, and you’ll hear a spokesperson for the new Helena, MT, chapter of the Coalition for Chemical Safety being interviewed while handing out Coalition literature in the state capitol rotunda during an event organized by the chapter. She describes her concern as a mom over the use of BPA in kids’ products, and even criticizes the Food and Drug Administration’s past reliance only on industry studies to conclude BPA is safe. You’ll also hear the reporter note that the Coalition wants to “ban BPA and other chemicals that could be harmful.”
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Building an experimental power plant in Illinois isn’t just about finding land, erecting a facility and flipping a switch.
Just as Illinois taxpayers were billed more than $450,000 for Washington D.C.-based lobbying efforts to bring the high-tech, coal-fired FutureGen facility to Mattoon, the FutureGen Alliance is now spending money to lobby state lawmakers and the Quinn administration in Springfield.
Their task: Convince the state to buy all the electricity the plant produces. Such a move would help FutureGen secure federal funding needed to build the near zero-emissions plant.
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Like about a dozen other states, Florida is debating a proposed amendment to its state constitution that would try to block, at least symbolically, much of the proposed federal health care overhaul on the grounds that it tramples individual liberty.
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Censorship/Civil Rights
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The government of Canada has used strong-arm tactics to shut down two parody websites criticizing Canada’s poor environmental policy, taking down 4500 other websites in the process.
The two websites, “enviro-canada.ca” and “ec-gc.ca”, are “directly connected to a hoax which misleads people into believing that the Government of Canada will take certain actions in relation to environmental matters,” wrote Mike Landreville from Environment Canada in an email to the German Internet Service Provider (ISP) Serverloft. “We trust you appreciate the importance of avoiding confusion among the public concerning Canadian governmental affairs and that you will assist us in preventing this hoax from spreading further.”
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A New Jersey judge has ordered the shutdown of three H-1B opposition Web sites and seeks information about the identity of anonymous posters.
On Dec. 23, Middlesex County Superior Court Judge James Hurley ordered firms that register domains and provide hosting services — GoDaddy Inc., Network Solutions, Comcast Cable Communications Inc. and DiscountASP.Net, to disable the three sites, ITgrunt.com, Endh1b.com, and Guestworkerfraud.com. Facebook Inc. was also ordered to disable ITgrunt’s Facebook page.
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The whistle blowing site is taking time out until 6 January to ask for support in many forms, not just donations. Wikileaks is appealing for help from volunteer coders, offers of free legal assistance and hosting support as well as cash donations. The site has promised not to accept corporate or government finance in order to protect its integrity.
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A former policeman who accused senior officers of corruption in a series of video blogs will himself face prosecution for abuse of office, Russian investigators said on Monday.
Former police major Alexei Dymovsky became a household name in Russia earlier this year when he used YouTube to appeal to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to tackle corruption in the police force.
A criminal case will be brought against Dymovsky for “fraud committed by a person using his official position,” the Prosecutor-General’s investigative committee said in a statement. It gave no further details.
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 15 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The article admitted that the #2 and #3 “application programs” (“Adobe” and “Microsoft”) reported were “closed source” and that “open source” programs tend to show all the blemishes, not just the ones reported by their customers, and reflected back through visible reports by the companies. To be even fairer, I would point out that comparing “Firefox” with all of the applications that Adobe has and all of the applications Microsoft has is a bit like apples and oranges….but that is not the main concept I will try to get across in this blog entry.
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This new benchmark, which can be found in the Phoronix Test Suite once its released, will focus on SDR/HDR performance. This should end up being a rather nice test profile as right now it’s completely slaughtering the ASUS Eee PC 1201N and other systems being tested remotely through Phoromatic.
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Mac clone maker Psystar is retrenching after succumbing to a barrage of copyright litigation brought by Apple, abandoning its Mac offerings in favor of a move toward Linux systems.
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Server
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Supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics has inked a deal to build the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing – which has the rap name TPAC – at the University of Tasmania on the eponymous Australian island state. The gig: creating a new x64-Linux cluster for climate research.
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Applications
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Today i will discuss Gwibber which is a good social networking client for Linux. It works on Ubuntu and a few other distributions and is available in your local repositories so go ahead and grab it.
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Financial
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If you’re just beginning to learn to record your personal finances, there are reviews that point out that Buddi is one of the tools to check out. Why? A lot of them say that it is quite easy for beginners to use and understand compared to other software like GNUCash. That’s why I ended up checking Buddi. Also, Buddi has installer files on its project site and you could verify if the distro you’re using is supported. In any case, there’s always the generic Unix and Linux which is basically a script that you could run.
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The KMyMoney team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.95. After 8 months of hard work, this release is the first version developed upon the KDE 4 Platform. We are confident that it is stable enough for use by early adopters. We would like to get much needed feedback from the community in order to make the new KMyMoney as rock-solid as previous releases.
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Graphics
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The latest release of Inkscape namely version 0.47 adds many new features to an already powerful toolset. Some of them being numerous enhancements to the existing tools – pen and pencil tool, eraser tool, tweak tool, text tool, and so on. Inkscape -.47 has gained new extensions, and new filters that add special effects to your images, SVG improvements, and interface enhancements.
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If you are using Ubuntu like me, you have add the PPA to your Ubuntu software sources. The PPA is located here.
Unfortunately GIMP 2.7 beta is not available for Mac, so Mac users have to wait until the final release comes out.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Some are probably asking at this point, what is Wine? The Wine project was started in 1993 to allow Windows applications to be run under Linux. Wine takes the Windows API (Application Programming Interface) and implements it in the Linux user space. Since Wine is running in user space and is not a part of the Linux Kernel, it relies on the wineserver daemon to provide your basic Windows kernel functionality as well as other various tasks of X integration.
As a quick recap, there are two basic goals we want to complete in this article. First we want to compare performance and functionality of games between Linux and Windows. Second, we will look at the performance and functionality differences of Wine/Cedega/Crossover Games.
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I’ve been in a gaming mood of the late and I much prefer to be able to run my games under Linux as opposed to having to reboot into Windows. That being said a game I’ve really enjoyed playing is Devil’s Tuning Fork. It is a very unique first person indie game in which your character “sees” with their ears. It is being developed by a team of students at DePaul University in Chicago and it is a free download from the game’s homepage.
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Version 7.33 of Alien Arena has been released. The new edition of the open source first-person shooter has been updated with following new features:
* In-game IRC client
* Player rankings in server browser
* Skill level matchmaker on server info
* Vastly improved anti-lag code
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Christmas is a time for rest and contemplation. To intersperse the period with some distraction on long winter evenings, a number of Linux games can prove some diversion, as this article will show.
The sports event of the weekend will be going into winter break, and to while away the time, we assembled a short list of interesting but little known games that have been brought to our attention over the last few months. The recommendations cover lots of different game genres, so there should be something for everyone.
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Primal Carnage is planned to be released for GNU/Linux as well as other platforms.
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Here’s the Linux beta game client for Heroes of Newerth, S2 Games’ upcoming multiplayer fantasy game based on Defense of the Ancients (DotA).
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So, we’re close to 2010 and Entropy is about to celebrate its third birthday. It’s been a very long road, full of obstacles but hey, we’re getting closer to 1.0! 2010 will be the year of Entropy 1.0 bringing a basic set of features and ideas tossed into the wild software jungle.
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As everybody^wnobody know, Hervé YAHI is no longer the CEO of Mandriva. So I decide to rip off an article from The VAR Guy to issue an open letter to the Mandriva direction. So here are 9 priorities for the new Mandriva staff
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The games you see in the screenshot above are all included by default on Sabayon 5,1 Gamers live DVD. Some popular titles include Battle of Wesnoth, Foobillard, Freeciv, Frozen Bubble, GNOME Games, NeverBall, Nexuiz, OpenArena, Pingus, Pychess, Scorched 3D, Spring, Stepmania, Torcs, Tremulous, Warsow, Warzone 2100, and Wormux.
Here’s some screenshots from Sabayon 5.1 Gamers
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is hoping to boost its partner engagement with its recently launched hypervisor, Rev, based on the Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology.
“Initially, we are looking at 25 VARs for Rev. But, eventually we will expand that number,” said Jaideep Kumar, Head, Channels and Distribution, Red Hat India.
According to Kumar, Rev has been very well received by partners. At Red Hat’s recently held Asia-Pacific partner summit at Singapore, the hypervisor generated a huge interest.
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Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) CFO Charles Peters sold 50,000 shares on 12/23 at $31.64 after exercising options that were set to expire in 2014.
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Debian Family
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If I was forced to provide some quantitative milestones for Ubuntu Women, I would probably offer, along with a grain of salt:
* Break 5% of Ubuntu Membership held by women (currently 4-point-something)
* Increase Women ~ubuntu-dev membership by 50% (from 4 to 6)
* Increase Women ~ubuntu-core-dev membership by 100% (from 1 to 2, because dealing in fractions of people is illegal in most places)
* Increase active mentors by 100%
Since these are supposed to be figures for the inaugural term of 6 months, the success of these figures relies fairly heavily upon women who are already involved. This is a critical caveat. Incentives to take the first step to participation, counsel and mentoring will be the most important activities Ubuntu Women undertakes, and will set up the opportunity to aim for better milestones beyond the inaugural 6 month term.
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All in all, 2009 was not a revolutionary year for the Ubuntu community. There was no LTS release, as there was in 2008 and will be in 2010, and the focus was on incremental development.
Nonetheless, it’s clear that Ubuntu gained some useful new features, and the community received interesting news, in 2009. Let’s hope the improvements we’ve seen in the last year solidify and expand going into 2010 and the Lucid release next April.
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Ubuntu actually does all right by these criteria, so perhaps to some degree the conflation of “Internet” and “Web” is driven by the complexities of installing third party apps on Windows, and all of the problems this can cause one’s computer as different versions of shared libraries and such are copied in.
[...]
Ultimately, I suppose that I would love it if LifeArea had the Gwibber-like ability to post. There are still other posting tools to try in any case, so I may find one yet. I’m installing Drivel atm.
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But you can’t beat Windows by offering a Windows-looking clone. Because people will still want their Office and their whatever. You may claim that people will have a free Windows alternative available and will flock to it. Well, they already have a free Windows alternative. It’s called pirated Windows and it’s rampant.
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Speculation is a part of technical news as prophecy is to religion. Its only important, valid or genius if it turns out to be true. However, we dare not have technical news without any speculation at all since this will surely hinder the creativeness of individuals and corporations to explore avenues influenced by ideas expressed in speculation. If any of that made sense to you, good. Because this was the reasoning I used in order to explore and develop the idea to create this article. In other words I have no factual evidence that anything of the sort would occur.
[...]
If Mozilla and Ubuntu/Canonical pulled together they should have enough combined resources to really compete in the market place with Google or anyone else. However they can not sit still and do nothing because other larger companies will push them out of the market they helped create. Now is not the time to “See what happens”. Its time to prepare for the future and make essential friends.
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There you have it, you now know the secret of where all the Ubuntu games are. It’s just a matter of searching before you find a game you want.
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As we count down to end of 2009, the emerging star of this year’s holiday shopping season is shaping up to be the electronic book reader (or e-reader). From Amazon’s Kindle to Barnes and Noble’s forthcoming Nook, e-readers are starting to transform how we buy and read books in the same way mp3s changed how we buy and listen to music.
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Openmoko, the company that first gained attention for its Linux-based phone platform, launched a new pocket-sized open source product in time for this holiday season, the WikiReader. The WikiReader is an inexpensive ($99), low-power, 4-inch square touchscreen LCD display device pre-loaded with the text of three million Wikipedia pages on a microSD card. In the smartphone era, skeptics might dismiss the device as woefully underpowered, but to the open source community the more pertinent question is what else can it do?
[...]
For today, however, the product makes for a fun stocking stuffer for the family hacker. Openmoko is positioning the device in its advertising as a way to get content into the hands of the “75% of the world [that] is offline” — including people in airplanes or on beaches, and “most everywhere.” The WikiReader certainly does that; several online reviews have praised its value in museums and tourist locations, where data plan charges would make a connected device prohibitively expensive to operate.
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Sub-notebooks
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For the past 12 months or so, we’ve heard a lot of talk about mini-laptops running ARM-based processors. These so-called “smartbooks” feature low power ARM processors which means that while they can’t run Windows XP or 7, they can run Linux, last for a very long time on a charge, and some feature integrated 3G connectivity and HD video acceleration features. You also get the ability to receive emails, instant messages, and other data even while the computer is in sleep mode. In other words, they’re like a cross between a smartphone and a netbook, which explains the whole “smartbook” name.
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Asus’ upgraded Eee PC netbooks sport Intel’s new Atom N450 processor for over ten hours battery life, plus the quick loading ‘Splashtop’ pre-boot Linux OS.
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All over the web are warnings that netbooks are doomed.
[...]
No. This is about wishful thinking by the monopolists who need high retail prices to hide the price of their part of the PC, CPUs and licences for software. If prices for netbooks rise, fewer will be sold. Fortunately entrepreneurs all over the world continue to make less expensive netbooks. ARM will dominate netbooks in 2010. You can trade a lot of day-long battery-life for some hair-drying CPUs anytime.
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The rather interesting element is the fact that these are white-box models. This means that the devices will bear the brands of other companies, which implies that Foxconn may have already completed its marketing plans concerning the PCs. If the company has already decided on which companies will sell its product, the actual availability may ramp up over the next couple of months or so.
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I mean sure, it has an 8.9 inch 1024 x 600 pixel display and can run Windows or Linux.
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Google
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Rumors of a Googlebook mirror the speculation that preceded the emergence earlier this month of Mountain View’s HTC-manufactured, Android-powered Nexus One smartphone.
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An Nvidia Tegra chipset (given the late 2010 rumoured release one guesses Tegra 2.0) powered by an ARM CPU and replete with 64GB SSD and 2GB RAM will drive a 10.1 inch HD-ready, 1,280 x 720 resolution touchscreen screened device. The usual array of extras such as WiFi and 3G, Bluetooth and Ethernet are also on the reported tech spec list.
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Believe it or not – the tech specs of the rumoured Google Chrome OS-based netbook are already out and by the sound of it, the netbook looks to me like a high performance machine.
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This netbook will reportedly have a 64 GB solid-state hard drive and 2 GB of RAM.
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Furthermore, the netbook will also probably be powered by an ARM CPU, and will feature Nvidia’s Tegra system-on-a-chip for notably enhancing the audio and video capabilities of the device. However, it is not certain whether all the upcoming Chrome OS-based netbooks will strictly adhere to the rumored specs.
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Open source is already solidly main stream – 2010 will see that become more obvious to more people.
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Proprietary ERP companies make connecting to ERP complex. Like Edison and Tesla, they don’t work well with competing systems. Conversely, open source is about unifying things.
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Last week, Google banned my PHP port of JSMin from Google Code due to a quibble over a line in the license stating that “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil”, which they believe makes the license non-free. When I asked Google’s Chris DiBona whether all Google Code projects including JSMin would be subject to bans due to this clause in the license, he replied, “Sadly, yes”.
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Google’s Chris DiBona emailed me this morning to tell me that unless I removed a specific line from the license of my jsmin-php project (a PHP port of Douglas Crockford’s JSMin), Google Code would no longer host the project.
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Databases
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CMS
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After the Emmys, the Grammys are onto it as well. That is, the new Grammy.com is using Drupal — and Pressflow to be specific. The Grammy Awards, or Grammys, are presented annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for outstanding achievements in the music industry. Cool!
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Openness
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Most of the offers can be broadly categorized into collective intelligence, crowd-creation, voting/opinion and research. Procter & Gamble’s NPD program Connect + Develop, My Starbucks Idea and AT&T’s “Mark the spot” are all great examples of collective intelligence and, of course, everyone knows about Linux. They harness the power of interested parties to provide ideas and thoughts as they happen, like a permanent, active, feedback loop.
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Applications
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The Maker 1.0 is ready for download from the project page in versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Python source code for Linux. The license is GPLv3.
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Today the Icinga Team releases the Icinga Core 1.0. This is a milestone for both the team and the project as a whole. After many months of hard work we are proud to bring you a stable, alternative monitoring solution. This release includes many changes as suggested by the community and in particular the inclusion of Oracle in IDOUtils.
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The H1N1 pandemic, the Copenhagen climate talks, the restart of the world’s biggest experimental device—2009 sped by many scientifically relevant mile markers. The year also celebrated several important past events: It saw the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species; the 40th anniversary of the first humans on another world; and the 400th of Galileo’s report that proved not all heavenly bodies circle the Earth. The year also marked the first occasion in which the science Nobel Prize committee honored more than one woman—four, in fact.
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Security
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A German computer scientist has published details of the secret code used to protect the conversations of more than 4bn mobile phone users.
Karsten Nohl, working with other experts, has spent the past five months cracking the algorithm used to encrypt calls using GSM technology.
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Finance
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Through the detailed and vivid conversations, you get the keen sense of overwhelming desperation and preservation that overtakes the executives of the sinking financial system. Some of the chief participants failed, some were triumphant, and some were pathetically bailed out. History will ultimately be the true arbiter of whether government and Wall Street averted, mitigated, postponed, or contributed to the financial collapse. Regardless, Sorkin brilliantly encapsulates this emotional panicked period in our history that will never be erased.
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Shenzhen Nanshan is among 68 Chinese state-controlled companies including China Eastern Air Holding Co. and China National Aviation Holding Co. that lost money on derivative products sold by banks including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Citigroup Inc., according to the State- owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.
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Betting against their own securities has prompted numerous investigations of Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street institutions. Prior to the financial collapse, Goldman and others figured out a way to package risky securities, such as subprime mortgages, and sell them to investors who were told they were buying sound investments. Little did the investors know that the firms selling the synthetic collateralized debt obligations (or CDOs) turned around and bet that the CDOs would fail—costing pension funds and insurance companies billions of dollars.
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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and brokerage regulators are examining how Wall Street firms bet against mortgage-linked securities to profit as their clients took losses, people familiar with the matter said.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which polices broker-dealers, is looking into whether firms such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. broke rules when selling products known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, one of the people said. The people declined to be identified because the inquiry is confidential.
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How charitable. This is the bank that intends to distribute about $22bn in remuneration to its employees this year – more than $700,000 each – at the height of the worst recession since the war. Money, of course, partly earned through government support of the US banking sector paid for with taxpayers’ funds.
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But Obama, unlike Paterson, is being disingenuous; aside from a few snotty remarks, the president hasn’t done much to get the banks lending right now. In fact, his policies have fostered an environment that allows Wall Street to make money — bundles of it as demonstrated by Goldman Sachs’ $20 billion bonus pool — at the expense of helping Main Street. Obama has supported Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s near-zero interest rate policy; he’s basically declared every big bank Too Big To Fail, meaning the federal government will save the likes of Goldman Sachs if it should somehow bet wrong in the trading markets, as it did last year.
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Fast forward 20 years and switch from Salomon Brothers to Goldman Sachs. At this time, Goldman sellers were offering their customers a new product, “synthetic collateralized debt obligations.” Synthetic CDOs allowed the buyers to bet heavily on the continued health of the housing market. In a synthetic CDO, however, Goldman was fundamentally making the opposite bet. The buyers were in essence an insurance company. They received regular payments from Goldman as long as the housing market improved. These payments were analogous to the premiums paid on an insurance policy. Like an insurance company, however, the investors were also on the hook for a big payout if the housing market collapsed. Which it did. (For more details, see “Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won.”)
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This choice says a lot about the malaise in global finance. It also seems to say a lot about the “collusion” of media and big business and their desire to pull the wool over the eyes of sane people everywhere–sort of like Blankfein’s words that the investment bank was “doing God’s work.”
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Well, here’s an interesting one. There were reports last week claiming that Reuters had spiked a story about hedge fund big shot Steven Cohen after Cohen complained to Reuters management. While Reuters has since strongly denied the charge, it is interesting to note (as sent in by reader JJ) that at least one Reuters blogger complained quite vocally about this decision.
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Reuters editors last week killed a story by investigative reporter Matthew Goldstein about hedge fund trader Steven Cohen after Cohen complained to top Thomson Reuters executives that he was being persecuted by the news agency’s reporting, sources at Reuters said.
Goldstein’s story was an “incremental” advance in the reports swirling around Cohen that he engaged in insider trading during the 1980s, Reuters sources said. There have been reports that Cohen is next in the sights of the SEC following the Galleon case, which featured SEC wiretapping the conversations of hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.
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What else will shape the housing market in the next decade? One of the biggest questions is how the government will extricate itself from control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two companies, which were on the brink of failure in the fall of 2008 and seized by the government, own or guarantee about half of all home mortgages.
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Finally, you can ask, how much of the stimulus money has been spent? For that you want to look at “Cumulative”, and compare it with the final total for that column.
[...]
And when the spending begins to tail off, the effect on growth turns negative.
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By any measure, the last decade was a rotten one. It started with a stolen election and the worst terrorist attack in American history. It is ending this week with the United States mired in two wars and deep into a catastrophic recession.
It’s hard to imagine that the next decade could be worse, but could it?
There are worrisome signs. An increasing number of economists are saying that without major government intervention, the next ten years could be a “jobless decade.” “It will be the mother of all jobless recoveries,” predicts economic historian John Steel Gordon.
[...]
While the stimulus package passed by Congress was big and slowed the pace of job loss, the problem was even bigger. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the Obama stimulus bill has created or saved between 170,000 and 235,000 jobs per month starting in the second quarter of 2009. Yet, Princeton economist Paul Krugman says that the country would have to produce an additional 300,000 jobs per month for five years to achieve full employment.
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PR/AstroTurf
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Despite proclaiming a need to cut medical costs, the Senate health care reform bill contains a provision that will benefit large drug companies while hurting manufacturers of generic drugs. As it is now written, the bill will keep less-expensive generic drugs from entering the market for fully 12 years, far longer than the five to seven years President Barack Obama had advocated.
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The massive U.S. Senate healthcare reform measure passed on Thursday with support from the multibillion drug industry, but makers of cheaper generic rivals are feeling left out in the cold.
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Censorship/Civil Rights
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And here is Boing Boing’s response to Ms. Moore’s attorneys (PDF), prepared by Marc Mayer of the law firm MS&K. The letter is a thing of beauty, and I encourage you to read it in full.
The letter from Moore’s attorney, Martin D. (“Marty”) Singer, claims that we set out to slander Moore (Boing Boing did not, nor did Mr. Citrano). The letter also includes denials from people involved in the production of the W Magazine cover who insist that the image was not manipulated at all.
Since receiving this letter, we have discovered that an alternate, and seemingly more anatomically correct version of the W magazine cover (with more hip-flesh) was published in W’s South Korean edition. We have also been informed that Ms. Moore’s attorneys have sent similar letters to other blogs that discussed the possible digital alteration of the US cover image. The story is now being covered by a number of other news organizations and blogs.
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Internet/Web Abuse/DRM
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Many ISPs fail to expand broadband to all of their potential customers, which is sometimes understandable given the expense. However, we’ve documented countless times how those same ISPs often then lobby to have laws passed or engage in sleazy activities to prevent those towns and cities — or anyone else — from wiring those un-served regions. ISPs get their cake and eat it too — saving money on expansion, while avoiding a future competitor should the local incumbent someday change their mind and decide to service that market. It shouldn’t work that way — but it does, and all too often.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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But Bittorrent can’t be used for any legitimate purpose, right? And musicians can’t possibly embrace what the technology allows? Once again, we’re seeing why those who embrace what technology allows will do just fine moving forward. It’s only those who think that the answer is to bring out the lawyers and try to hold back progress who will find themselves struggling to create business models that work.
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Almost a decade after the major labels launched their legal assault on Napster, courts are still writing the rules of the road for the music business’s digital future.
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Barry Sookman’s most recent post titled Toying with funny math to downplay Canada’s role as a piracy haven is, at best, inaccurate. Since I’m suffering from a nasty head cold I’m only going to cover the most noticeable errors – and then go back to suffering.
In paragraph three, Barry claims that Mininova is down. A quick visit to the site shows that he is in error, that Mininova is still in operation. He also claims that the court ordered it shut down. This is incorrect. The court ordered that certain torrents be removed. Nothing more. Nothing less.
In paragraph four, Barry claims that a court ordered that the The Pirate Bay be shut down. He does not mention that an appeal has been filed. In a later paragraph he claims that The Pirate Bay will be shut down shortly, however the shut down order is on hold until the appeal is complete. To the best of my knowledge a court date has not been picked as yet, and since the shut down cannot take effect until after the appeal, his claim that it will be shut down shortly is specious at best.
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In an effort to be subversive, I forwarded the email to Fred with a note that said “Wild how the music licensing stuff is stupid.” He responded immediately with “Yup. Rights holders fuck everything up.” I wonder what the machines think of that?
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 14 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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12.28.09
Posted in News Roundup at 4:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“My New Year’s resolution is to retire gracefully, but I keep getting job offers,” blogger Robert Pogson told LinuxInsider. “Perhaps I will find some career change with which an old man can live.
“Perhaps I will do part-time work or write full-time instead of teaching,” he added.
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First there was the cheap revolution. That was all about using commodity parts, such as Intel’s ( INTC – news – people ) processors, to knock down the price of computing power. Then came the free revolution. That was all about free software, such as Linux. Now there’s “less than free.”
Article Controls
The best example: Google’s ( GOOG – news – people ) strategy of sharing ad revenues with hardware partners that are building devices around the Internet giant’s Android smart phone operating system. That’s helped Google grab a respectable chunk of the smart phone software market in a hurry. Now Google could do the same with its Chrome OS software for netbooks, making already-cheap devices cheaper.
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Desktop
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Mac clone maker Psystar last week indefinitely suspended sales of its only product, a $50 utility that lets customers install Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system on generic Intel-based computers.
The company also said it would resume selling systems “in the coming days.” Those machines will run Linux rather than Mac OS X.
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We suspect that Redmond is having a few words with Chinese authorities about the cloning.
We feel sorry for all the Ubuntu developers out there who must be looking at their Open Source child twisted and corrupted until it looks so much like the proprietary enemy.
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Server
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In those pre-Web 2.0 days, the community concept behind Linux and open source in general was mystifying to many. They were surprised that IBM had so strongly embraced Linux and were wondering what its relevance would be to the world of business. We spent a lot of time explaining that we were supporting Linux because it was an excellent operating system that ran on every single hardware platforms regardless of vendor or architecture, and would thus facilitate the integration of systems, applications and information over the Internet.
A number of companies were also concerned about using software developed by an open, distributed community, as opposed to a single vendor, as was typically the case. So, we further explained that the open community developing Linux included some of the top programmers and computer scientists around the world. A number of IBM employees were already involved with this community, and several more would now be joining it as part of our new IBM Linux Technology Center. In any event, IBM and its partners would provide support for the Linux-based offerings we sold regardless of how they were developed.
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Kernel Space
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Today is the birthday of Linus. Although that’s essentially a private event for him, there’s an interesting historical link to the creation of the Linux kernel, too.
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Graphics Stack
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Compared to past years when recapping the AMD/ATI Linux advancements over the past calendar year, 2009 was not quite as exciting, which can be viewed as both good and bad for their Catalyst Linux driver. There were many advancements this year on AMD’s open-source side, but in 2009 there wasn’t as many milestones for their Catalyst driver like in the past with the introduction of CrossFire, OverDrive, same-day Linux support, the AMD Catalyst Control Center, and other new features. Here is our 2009 year in review look at AMD’s advancements to their proprietary Catalyst Linux driver along with our annual benchmarks.
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Applications
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But I do know, and believe in, this: Open source software has many beautiful and amazing advantages over the closed-source model. And only one of those benefits is the idea — no, the proven principle that, 10 or 20 or even 50 years down the road, someone might pick up some crusty old tarball off a backup server somewhere in a forgotten university somewhere on the planet, take a look at the source code and add a new spark of life to an otherwise lusterless, forgotten application.
Old programs don’t die, they just patiently await reincarnation. 
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Being from the United Kingdom, the week between Christmas and the New Year is usually a work-free zone for me. So here’s a few Linux command-line Easter Christmas Eggs for you to while away a little time if you are unfortunate enough to be back at your desk already.
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Themes
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Amongst them are the utterly gorgeous looking ‘Plastic Glass’ theme designed for use in Docky’s 3D mode and an “inlaid” theme that perfectly suits Docky’s Panel Mode. The themes also come with replacement tooltips – a great addition that really makes these themes complete.
DeviantArt-ist kshegzyaj has created some stunning new themes for use with premier Dock application Docky.
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KDM (KDE Display Manager) is the K Desktop Environment replacement for XDM, the X Display Manager. KDM allows users to pick their session type on a per-login basis using different themes and user photos.
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KDE-Look.org is part of a family of desktop websites, all under the umbrella of OpenDesktop.org. With each release, KDE is moving closer to complete integration with OpenDesktop.org, where the installation of new themes and visual improvements are seamless.
There are already several visual components of the K desktop environment that are already integrated. Among them are: desktop wallpaper, Plasma themes, KDM themes, KSplash, color schemes, icon themes, emoticons, and widgets (plasmoid scripts). What this means is that a user can open the dialog to change one of these elements, download new themes, and apply them without ever having to leave the window.
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Just in time for Christmas 2009, digiKam 1.0 have been released. But the future is already there. Next digiKam 1.1 is planed for end of January 2010, as a bugfixes release, to consolidate code with users feedback after production using…
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Instructionals
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Games
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When first looking at Syntensity, one might infer that it is an FPS game. Nothing could be further than the truth. Syntensity’s main achievement is the Intensity Engine, which is a significantly modified version of the Sauerbraten/Cube2 Engine with a focus on online content. One could even draw parallels to proprietary gaming and say that this might be a FOSS answer to Valve’s Steam service and their Source engine.
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AssaultCube retains a movement bug from the original Cube engine that allows players to utilize straferunning to move at a faster speed. This was left intentionally unfixed by the developers because it was considered an enjoyable feature of Cube, similar to bunny hopping in Quake.
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When it comes to Linux shooter games, there isn’t only one choice. Games like Nexuiz, OpenArena or Sauerbraten were a good fit here too, but I decided upon World of Padman.
Based on the Quake 3 engine, World of Padman is a fun, cartoon-style first-person shooter with maps, weapons and characters inspired from the Padman series. It features nice, colourful graphics, popular modes like FFA, TDM or CTF, and weapons which will definitely make you laugh the first time you’ll see them.
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Christmas is a time for rest and contemplation. To intersperse the period with some distraction on long winter evenings, a number of Linux games can prove some diversion, as this article will show.
The sports event of the weekend will be going into winter break, and to while away the time, we assembled a short list of interesting but little known games that have been brought to our attention over the last few months. The recommendations cover lots of different game genres, so there should be something for everyone.
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There are many communities based Mandriva derivatives, but few of them are known. So here is a ( not comprehensive ) list of some Mandriva based derivatives or projects :
* One 64 community : 64bits edition of the Mandriva One LiveCD. A KDE edition and GNOME one are available for download.
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Red Hat Family
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In partnership with Red Hat and Oracle; and in their endeavor to lead the market towards a more proficient, secure and better performing infrastructure solutions; Savvytek was chosen by Middle East Payment Services (MEPS) to implement their new core application, RS2, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle technologies
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Red Hat Inc., the Linux software maker whose sales and profit in the latest quarter exceeded analysts’ estimates, said demand for its products is reviving, especially in North America.
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We can start with Red Hat (NYSE: RHT). The Linux-based provider of enterprise solutions delivered a profit of $0.17 a share, ahead of the $0.16 a share that Mr. Market was banking on.
Red Hat’s success was the result of a 21% surge in its bread-and-butter subscription revenue.
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that WorldNet has become the first Red Hat Virtualisation Specialist Partner in the Middle East.
[...]
“Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation aims to enable our customers to easily move applications and hardware platforms to virtualised computing and cloud computing. We believe that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, especially the management components, will allow customers to use virtualisation pervasively. We hope that our Virtualisation Specialist partnership with WorldNet will be the first of many in the region,” said Anuj Kumar, General Manager, Middle East and North Africa at Red Hat.
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Debian Family
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No one cares that their TiVo devices runs Linux. It just does. No one cares that the Kindle runs Linux, either. They care about the functionality these devices deliver. That’s the way it should be.
Canonical’s opportunity is to make Linux so easy that it becomes completely invisible to the end user. And Canonical may well be the best positioned to do this, among its open-source peers.
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Kindle/Swindle
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Amazon.com on Saturday released its annual post-Christmas statement on holiday sales and made one thing clear: the Kindle was king, perhaps fueled by continued shifts in plans for shipments of Barnes & Noble’s competing Nook e-reader.
“We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history,” said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
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But, again, since this is the Kindle we’re talking about, shouldn’t Amazon make the distinction between purchased and rented?
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Nokia
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Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia launched during the ongoing year its first handset running under the Maemo 5 operating system, the Nokia N900, a phone that is expected to arrive on the UK market as soon as January 14 is here. However, enthusiasts in the UK won’t have to wait until then to grab one of these beauties, as the handset has been already put on sale via Carphone Warehouse, though a contract agreement with Vodafone is still required.
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Got a Nokia N900 Maemo device ? You can watch the updates in your Twitter timeline drop onto your screen as snow flakes.
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Sub-notebooks
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Battery life on Linux is in excess of 10 hours, for Windows rarely more than three.
Machines sporting Arm chips are also likely to be thinner as they will not need the heat sinks demanded by processors used in desktops.
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No Windows!
There was just no way I was going to get my step daughter a Windows netbook for Christmas. No way, no how. I couldn’t find a good way to articulate why, and so for a couple weeks I was just responding, “No Windows!” to my wife’s questions. I hadn’t expected it to be controversial but I did eventually have to explain myself.
[...]
So far the netbook as been a resounding success.
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Jolicloud soldiered on, raising a high profile $4.2 million venture round and finally, earlier this month, releasing a public beta of the product at Le Web in Paris.
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There’s a rumor going around that Google isn’t just developing an operating system for netbooks (which we already know is true), but that company is also in the process of developing an actual netbook. While Google isn’t exactly known as a hardware maker, this rumor falls into the plausible category, since Google is also widely reported to be developing a cellphone running Android OS. And as Apple has demonstrated time and again, if you want your operating system to run smoothly on hardware, your best option is to design the hardware.
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I’m excited about the upcoming VideoLAN Movie Creator! I’m also excited about making bulleted lists lately!
1. Pedigree
The related-project VLC Media Player is a well-known cross-platform project that inspires confidence in the VLMC. I’m not sure exactly how to quantify “name-brand” power as a factor of success (or even if such a thing can be quantified), but this is a good thing.
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First, free software appeared among the hacker community, where price was irrelevant, since the culture was largely one of sharing. From there, it seeped into companies, usually unbeknownst to management, which only found out about the fact later. By that time, the open source applications – notably GNU/Linux, Samba and Apache – had not only proved their technical quality, they had shown that something that cost nothing could, indeed, be worth much more than its nominal price tag.
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Stop: How did you discover Free Software?
Dean: I stumbled across Free Software programs for typing, geography, hangman (spelling) and crossword and soon realized that I could actually make educating my son fun using Free Software that was primarily Linux driven.
Stop:Did you have to learn programming to use this software?
Dean: No, I am not a software developer. I am a “post-frustrated Microsoft user” that did the math and figured the amount of time I spent trying to fix things that could not be fixed in Windows would have been spent wiser learning a better operating system (Linux Ubuntu in my case, but there is also a version, Edubuntu,, already preconfigured for school usage). I am happy enough that I want to try to convince other homeschoolers in my area to follow my path.
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Google
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Google is one of the biggest companies supporting OpenSource movement, they released more than 500 open source projects(most of them are samples showing how to use their API). In this article I will try to write about most interesting and free releases from Google, some of them might be abandoned.
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Bangalore: Since almost 10 years, companies have known the benefits of adopting open source for business. Few have followed but the rest have stayed away from it. With the global economic slowdown forcing companies to rethink strategies, there has been one thing which has motivated companies the most, that is, Google extensively using open source.
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CMS
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After a while I discovered that there was even a Drupal Taiwan website. So I got in touch with the site admin and head organizer, Charles Chuang, and he let me know there would be a meetup in late December. The gathering would be at a local cafe in central Taipei and the topic would be new features, discuss strategy, and socialize to make new friends with like-minded souls.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU
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In case you missed it: GNU Emacs is on Bazaar now. Please see http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BzrForEmacsDevs for how to (re)obtain your development sources from Bazaar.
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Government
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These administrative shifts, from proprietary to open source systems, toward routine transfers of medical data, could have happened anyway. They have accelerated thanks to Administration statements endorsing open source systems like VistA. The environment has shifted.
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Democracy
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A newly-issued Congressional Research Service (CRS) study (pdf) on the activities of the community group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) found no evidence the group has engaged in fraudulent voting or violations of federal financing rules over the last five years. Two members of the U.S.
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LABOUR has allowed the creation of a massive army of state snoopers who can enter anyone’s home at a moment’s notice, it was revealed yesterday.
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Environment
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More than 125 whales have died in two separate strandings in New Zealand, conservation officials said Monday.
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Open Energy Info is a platform to connect the world’s energy data. It is a linked open data platform bringing together energy information to provide improved analyses, unique visualizations, and real-time access to data.
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With the threat of development on Titnore Woods fast approaching now is the time to rise up and resist the destruction of our natural environment by corporate greed.
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In his important speech at the high-level segment of the conference, Premier Wen reiterated the consistent position of the Chinese government. He called on all sides to build consensus and strengthen cooperation to advance the historical process of combating climate change. Confronted by the complicated situation in and outside the Bella Center, Premier Wen was undeterred. With the strongest political will and patience, he shuttled between participating leaders and engaged them in dialogue and consultations. At the critical moment when the negotiations faced the risk of a breakdown, he personally talked to various parties and helped the conference reach the final accord with his painstaking and thoughtful efforts.
History will remember the important contribution of the Chinese government to the success of the Copenhagen conference.
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Finance
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GRETCHEN MORGENSON and LOUISE STORY add more detail to the story of the collapse of our financial system and how it was brought down by the gang of financial innovators at such respectable financiers at Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, as well as smaller firms like Tricadia Inc. link here
The article strongly suggests that the bankers knew what they were doing. They created bundles of mortgages and sold them off to credulous investors. Then they cranked up mortgage creators to market still more toxic mortgages on which to sell more credit default swaps (CDSs).
When that didn’t satisfy the demand from investors, they came up with synthetic swaps. They knew the many of the mortgages were toxic and after selling them, bought swaps against their failing. When the demand for these grew too large, they created synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and bet against them as well.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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uTorrent – the preferred Bittorrent client for many BitTorrent users – has been doing really well in 2009. Contrary to reports claiming that BitTorrent and P2P usage has been declining, in the last year uTorrent nearly doubled its userbase to 52 million unique users a month.
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Lawyers who told thousands of individuals that they held proof of their illicit file-sharing, have made a surprise announcement. ACS:Law, who help companies generate revenue from porn movie copyrights, say they are dropping many cases because litigation is neither viable nor beneficial to their clients.
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Proposals to suspend the internet connections of those who repeatedly share music and films online will leave consumers with a bill for £500 million, ministers have admitted.
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Threatening to cut off people’s net access is therefore seen as a vastly disproportionate punishment, almost akin to cutting someone’s tongue off. While young female voters also tend to vote Pirate Party, compared to older voters, they do so less than male voters. The Pirate movement’s task, therefore is twofold: to get women to vote for us in the same numbers that men do (which should be doable, since women use the internet as much as men), and to make sure that each years’ intake of new 18 year old voters supports us, while existing supporters continue to support us. If we do that across Europe, we’ll win.
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This is the reason why I don’t create single copies of my photographs or limited editions. I want people to enjoy my photography not because it’s scarce, but because they like it. I do sell signed and numbered copies (limitless editions only), but only for the people who voluntarily want to financially support my art. Don’t buy it as an investment – buy it because you enjoy it and want to see more of it! Everyone else is welcome to just download and use (non-commercially) my photographs any way they like it – on your computer desktop, on your blog, by printing and hanging it on your walls!
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I’ve noted before that at the heart of the ACTA negotiations there is a con-trick being played upon the world: insofar as the mighty ones deign to pass down any crumbs of information to us little people, it is framed in terms of the dangers of counterfeit medicines and the like, and how we are being “protected”. But, then, strangely, those counterfeit medicines morph into digital copies of songs – where there is obviously no danger whatsoever – but the same extreme measures are called for.
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 13 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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12.27.09
Posted in News Roundup at 6:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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So what of Windows? Could its closed source nature be eventually the death of it? Quite possibly, one only has to look at the wealth of FOSS projects that are providing alternative solutions to many of Microsoft products. Even Microsoft themselves are alleged to use GPL code (and allegedly violate it albeit by a third party)
Remember Mr Ballmer’s cancer comment in regards to Linux?
Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches
But then should we really pay any attention to him? he was alleged afterall to also say that Google was a house of cards and iPhone had no chance of getting a significant market share. I bring this up since GoogleOS is built on Linux so its rather relevant that the first “mainstream” steps of this concept are being taken by that which Mr Ballmer seems to have a low opinion of. Talking of cancer and IP, I wonder if he would like to retract that since Microsoft China are alleged to have taken code from another companies product and attempted to use it as their own. For more information on this, read the article here.
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I like Linux. I like it a lot and I think it is the best thing since sliced bread. Better even, I don’t make any money off of sliced bread, just a bigger belly. I know that many of you out there like windows. You like it a lot as well and probably make money off of it too.
When we like something we tend to gloss over the flaws. There is another saying that love is blind. That is also very true. Not just in looks but in every aspect. On the other side of the coin. When we dislike something we tend to exaggerate the flaws. This means that when somebody is gushing about Linux or ranting about windows then perhaps we should take off our rose shades and try to see things from their point of view.
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May 2002: OpenOffice.org 1.0
Few would consider using Linux if there wasn’t the semblance of Microsoft Office compatibility. Sun Microsystems bought, renamed and released its own broadly compatible office suite for free, in what it must have hoped would be a flanking attack on Microsoft’s dominance. A tactic it revisited with the re-licence of Java in 2007.
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Ylmf OS appears to the casual user as XP. Currently the Ubuntu based distro has no English translation. What does this mean for Microsoft? Well if it becomes the “protest choice” of China then quite alot, its got a 10 million strong user base to attract. You can visit the website of this distro here and I would ask if anyone knows of either a translation for the distro itself and/or the homepage, please let me know!
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Server
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Habl Consultancy, an open source and linux solutions provider headquartered in Dubai Silicon Oasis, promises to announce a revolutionary network server solution in January 2010. The exact details of the server solution are currently under wraps, however it will help companies save an enormous amount of money.
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Applications
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Written in Java, RSSOwl is a powerful feed reader for Linux, with support for RSS, RDF and Atom feeds, with a lot of features and customisation options.
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The QT-ing of OpenTumblr has resulted in most of OpenTumblr getting a visual shakedown. Whilst many windows need some usability-guidelines applied, everything works as it should.
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Instructionals
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Sabayon 5.1 is really another good as well as a newbie friendly distribution for average computer users. It may not be as easy as Ubuntu or OpenSUSE but a person with 6-9 months of knowledge in Linux can easily manage Sabayon.
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Okay, if you’re looking to install this on your main computer, I really wouldn’t advise doing that. Having a lightweight operating system is well and good, but to run a system as stripped-down as this, you’re going to run into something that’ll need an application not available for your OS. Better stick with a bootable flash drive if I were you.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Ubuntu 10.04’s Alpha has been released. We decided to install it on one of our netbooks to see what is new in it. Canonical claims that many new things will surface with the release Ubuntu 10.04 and some of them have been implemented in the alpha release.
[...]
Right now, there is not even a basic paint alternative. gpaint which although looks a lot like MS paint, but cannot even crop a picture. So, if GIMP is removed, I don’t think there is a worthy MSpaint alternative in Linux
Office
* Dictionary
* Evolution mail and calender
* OpenOffice Presentaion
* OpenOffice Spreadsheet
* OpenOffice Word Processor
Sound and Video
* Brasero Disc Burner
* Movie Player
* Rhythmbox Music Player
* Sound Recorder
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One important feature is the new software centre, Kissling says. A bit of background: modern Linux distributions all possess a so-called package manager. This is a utility to help users install new software not included with Linux itself. Instead of searching through the web for a specific program, the package manager handles the heavy lifting.
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Complete with customized artwork and a big collection of Muslim-specific software, Sabily (formerly Ubuntu Muslim Edition) is a robust operating system for Muslims all over the world, be they Arabic speakers or not.
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All in all another pleasant experience with Sansa products under Linux. I have an older e250 myself and had another even before that, all of which worked well with Ubuntu. For a quality music/video player for use with Ubuntu I can highly recommend the products from Sansa. Most can be purchased for less then $75 and refurbished ones like my last two for well under $50.
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Cherrypal on Tuesday announced a no-frills laptop called Cherrypal Africa, which includes hardware usually found in smartphones. It can run the Linux or Windows CE operating systems, which are also found on cell phones.
Priced at $99, the laptop is targeted at those looking for an inexpensive PC to surf the Internet, said Max Seybold, founder of Cherrypal. It is a “no-thrills” laptop that could find an audience in developing countries and low-income groups in the Western world, he said
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The Samba 4 code has been worked on for over five years, and the Active Directory code is reaching a state where it’s being run in production at several test sites.
When the Samba Team met at the CIFS conference this year, we had a meeting to put together a plan for shipping a production Samba 4 code-base. Here’s how we think it might work.
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The conference was the third such event in the region, organized by the International Open Source Network (IOSN) and InWEnt-Capacity Building International of Germany.
Earlier camps took place in Bangalore, India in 2005 and Sukabumi, Indonesia in 2007. It is based on the source camp template of the Tactical Technology Collective, an NGO that consults for other NGOs on technology.
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I just came across some Open source projects by Google, which were really unknown to me.
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Mozilla
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We all know that due to the copyright of the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation/whatever-it-is, that the Debian project decided awhile ago to drop the copyrighted logos and names from the very popular Mozilla products, hence:
Firefox = Iceweasel
Thunderbird = Icedove
Seamonkey = Iceape
And it turns out the Mozilla standalone calendar application Sunbird as well as the Lightning version of that app that works inside of Thunderbird/Icedove has its own Debian-dubbed name:
Iceowl.
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The email programme Thunderbird is available in a new, highly revised version, its developer Mozilla Messaging has announced. Thunderbird 3.0, an open-source email client, includes more than 2,000 revisions and improvements, according to the California-based company which is also behind the Firefox browser.
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Openness
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In 2008, legislation was passed requiring all NIH-funded researchers to submit their papers to an openly available repository within a year of publication. Even this modest step towards full open access was immediately attacked by rent-seeking scientific publishers.
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It’s not obvious that you would. Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that’s the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background.
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Finance
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The New York Times published a Christmas Eve expose of Goldman Sachs’s so-called “Abacus” synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). They were created with credit derivatives instead of cash securities. Goldman used credit derivatives to create short bets that gain in value when CDOs lose value. Goldman did this for both protection and profit and marketed the idea to hedge funds.
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Under other circumstances, this would have been a year to savour in the long, rapid ascent of Lloyd Blankfein. Goldman Sachs, the investment bank he has led for three years, not only navigated the 2008 global financial crisis better than others on Wall Street but is set to make record profits, and pay up to $23bn (€16bn, £14bn) in bonuses to its 31,700 staff.
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“The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”
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But while the FT may agree that Blankfein is doing “God’s work,” others view the bank as indicative of exactly what is wrong with Wall Street. Indeed, Blankfein himself apologized last month for Goldman Sachs’ role in the financial crisis. And Goldman Sachs’s trading practices are currently under investigation by the federal government.
In response to the FT’s decision to honor Blankfein, noted bank analyst Christopher Whalen has canceled his subscription to the paper. “Mr. Blankfein and his colleagues at Goldman Sachs, in my view, have done more to damage the reputations of global financial professionals than any other organization in 2009, yet you applaud them,” he wrote in a letter to the paper.
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Censorship/Civil Rights
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One of China’s most prominent human rights activists was condemned today to 11 years in prison, prompting a furious backlash from domestic bloggers and international civil society groups.
Liu Xiaobo, the founder of the Charter 08 campaign for constitutional reform, was given the unusually harsh jail term on Christmas Day in an apparent attempt to minimise international attention.
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From Venezuela, a group of social organizations and human rights, students and academic groups as well as different individuals, launch this call for a campaign to defend the right to protest, which today is being systematically violated by the government of Hugo Chávez.
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 12 (2004)
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12.26.09
Posted in News Roundup at 6:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I love Suse – 412,000
I love Fedora – 1,180,000
I love Uubntu – 4,040,000
I love OS X – 28,100,000
I love Linux – 81,600,000
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Desktop
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> > Linux should not compete with windows! Linux should compete with itself!
> > We choose Linux because it is NOT windows. It does things better! To be better means you have to be different, ie not the same as windows.
> > We should develop our vision and execute on that. Let Microsoft do their thing, and let the people decide which they want to use.
> > For Linux success!=”world domination” (or even desktop domination).
> > Success is different for each person, but maybe its something like “it does what I need it to do”.
> Well said !, I agree as a Linux user being tired of this Windows BS.
You both got there before me. Windows, as bad as it is, is held up as some sort of Gold Standard, largely by people who are resistant to change – the devil-you-know mentality prevails.
I see this daily in other projects where the hardware is open source 100%, but the software is a complete mush of bits and pieces that fit only with Windows and where the few of us who are using Linux, the solution is very simple and works. The Windows solution often receive the comments on the niceness of the GUI look after they’ve gone through the hoops to get the bits knitted together.
I’ve stopped looking at Windows problems for anyone as it’s a pain and I tell anyone who asks, including my daughter, go elsewhere as I just don’t want the hassles.
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It’s all over the intanut tubes. My system is better than your system. Nyah, nyah, nyah! Usually with a response along the lines of sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me. The endless fights between windows and Linux advocates never seem to end. Both factions accuse each other of being FUDmunsters and zealots and both factions defend their own actions aggressively.
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Server
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In 2006, when Amazon introduced the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it was a watershed event in the quest to transform computing into a ubiquitous utility, like electricity. Suddenly, anyone could scroll through an online menu, whip out a credit card, and hire as much computational horsepower as necessary, paying for it at a fixed rate: initially, 10 cents per hour to use Linux (and, starting in 2008, 12.5 cents per hour to use Windows).
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Domino dynamo: this 20-year veteran buys you more bang for your buck than ever before. Martin Leon tells you about the virtues of Domino and how much mileage you can get out of this dynamo of an application platform.
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Kernel Space
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.. or wahetever it is you’ll be celebrating today/tomorrow.
And if you aren’t celebrating anything at all, but instead sitting in your dark basement feeling lonely and bored, you can at least try out the latest -rc kernel. Because it’s better than moping around doing nothing.
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Clutter Gesture attempts to identify gestures generated from input events and then where applicable to send off these recognized gestures to the application that has focus. This framework is flexible to allow all sorts of gesture algorithms to be built-in and it can also be extended from the application side as well, but the currently supported set of input gestures include slide up, slide down, slide left, slide right, and touch&hold. Supported from the multi-touch side is the pinch/rotate gestures.
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Graphics Stack
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The second (and likely last) release candidate for 1.7.4 is now available. Dave has backported the fb patches to 1.7, as said in the commit it’s multiple commits from master squashed into one to help bisecting. That issue should hopefully be fixed now but if it comes back, I’ll cut another RC before 1.7.4.
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Applications
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Syntheway is proud to present Virtual Sitar, a VST instrument software designed to emulate the Indian Sitar. Available for Windows and Linux O.S.(*)
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It is OK, if you don’t know what is VLMC because it hasn’t been released yet. VLMC (VideoLAN Movie Creator) is a free video editing software, offering features to realize semi-professional quality movies, but with the aim to stay simple and user-friendly.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Nexuiz is one of the most popular shooter games which emerged after the open-sourcing of the Quake 3 engine, featuring a fast-paced game style and several game modes, like the popular DM or CTF. Nexuiz is a free, GPL-licensed, first-person shooter developed online by the Internet-based team Alientrap, and it comes with ports for Linux, Windows and Mac.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Today, the first version of polkit-qt-1 and polkit-kde-1 have been released to the public. Thanks to these tools, KDE applications now integrate nicely with the new polkit-1 with a native authentication dialog. An authorization manager, the equivalent of the Polkit Authorization System Settings module, will be included in future releases. Find out more about PolicyKit on Freedesktop.org..
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# Based on one, and only one, desktop environment. I’m seriously thinking of KDE 4 (seriously). There is a strong reason for this, primarily that KDE uses Qt, which will make a good foundation for another choice I have in mind.
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New Releases
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George Vlahavas from the Salix OS development team proudly announced two days before Christmas that Salix 13.0.2 was available for download on mirrors worldwide. The good news for all the fans of this Slackware-based Linux distribution is that it now has a 64-bit edition, which is backwards compatible with the Slackware64 operating system. Salix64 offers an easier way to install the XFCE desktop environment, and a software repository with lots of packages. The Salix developers also prepared a software repository with dependency information for both 32-bit and 64-bit Slackware packages.
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We are glad to impart the new KahelOS Linux Installer developed to make it much more simple, easier and refreshing to use.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat itself sells a commercial version – complete with technical support – of the Linux operating system. But Linux was created as an open source software and any developer can contribute code to the program. It can be downloaded from the Web, free of a purchase licence.
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Debian Family
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Along the same lines as the above, I use a much higher percentage of the software that comes pre-installed on Ubuntu. And none of that software has been deliberately crippled in order to convince me to buy a non-crippled version. As I recently experienced with my new Blackberry Tour, there’s nothing that develops an immediately antagonistic relationship between me and my operating system like spending an hour stripping it of a bunch of useless software so I can more easily find the applications I care about.
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This is a real deal Linux server that has been shrunk to a miniscule size, making it small enough to be installed onto radio-controlled cars, where you can then control it from a standard Web browser or using a client program for the iPhone (which is currently under development, seeing action only sometime next year). While the Joker Racer R/C Server is not for sale at the moment, it could have plenty of potential especially in a tie up with Tamiya or other notable R/C car manufacturers.
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Phones
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But Linux smartphone business is not all about Android. Other phone makers like Nokia and Palm have developed their own Linux-based operating system that has been quite successful. Nokia has Debian-based Maemo, which powers the N900, while Palm created webOS for their multi-featured Palm Pre smartphone.
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A leak claims that more than 50 percent of the 8 or probably 10 smartphones scheduled by Acer to be released next year will not use Windows Mobile, but Android. The company has acknowledged that the mix of operating systems will be more balanced towards Android that has equipped only one phone in 2009.
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Sub-notebooks
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Jolicloud is no doubt turning out to be one very good Netbook centric OS.
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The people at the Free Software Foundation asked me to do a short pitch to support the Free Software Foundation, and I’m happy and honored to do that. Indeed here in my office at Harvard Law School you can see one of the posters I most proudly have up is the award I got, the Free Software Foundation’s freedom award, which was an extraordinary honor that I received for ideas that I felt like I was just copying and spreading from Richard Stallman.
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Open source has long been an important development methodology. The biggest surprise of 2009, however, was just how quickly it took center stage as a business strategy in the larger software economy.
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Mozilla
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The fact that browser distribution is not randomly distributed across European countries, but appears to closely follow traditional regional boundaries is somewhat surprising and suggests that there are significant cultural factors that affect browser choice. Note for example the large gap that StatCounter shows between Germany with ~60% Firefox and ~25% IE (so over 2:1) and its neighbors France with 55~60% IE and 30~35% Firefox and Denmark ~60% IE and ~25% Firefox (basically the opposite).
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Mozilla Messaging has published a proposed schedule for Thunderbird 3.1, the next release of the popular e-mail client. The organization is refining its development process and could potentially shift towards shorter release cycles and a more incremental approach to development.
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Instead of bringing you Firefox-related news from the last seven days, this is an entire recap of Firefox in the year of 2009. It’s been a big year for that cute little red panda and 2010 will be just as exciting if not more so!
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The script should work with Firefox, Safari, Opera, Epiphany and Google Chrome.
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This past year felt like a rebuilding year for Firefox add-ons, with two new frameworks implemented to help guide the future of extensions. Personas gave Firefox on-the-fly theme-switching, and users can expect it to be part of the stable version of Firefox 3.6 when that gets released. Jetpack takes a similarly-minded approach to feature add-ons, allowing programmers to create feature-rich add-ons from little more than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Expect JetPack to eventually be part of Firefox by default.
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The first release of Chrome browser was held in 2008, then a new Google project looked quite weak and very few people saw him as a serious competitor. Nevertheless, for the year the situation has changed dramatically, if not, it is very much in mass Chrome 4.0 implemented improvements and even the opportunity to install extensions. So how Google is developing its own browser, suggests that with each update it looks increasingly to Firefox. Now, these programs do not seem competitive, even according to Net Applications, they do not affect the market share of each other.
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The latest version of the popular open-source desktop email client, Thunderbird 3, was finally released a few days ago and it sports a range of new or improved features like better search and a tabbed interface (download site: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird). It had been in the making for about two years.
The organisation behind it is Mozilla Messaging, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that promotes the web browser Firefox. Most heavy email users might find managing the voluminous inflow and outflow of messages a daunting challenge. The latest version of Thunderbird has come up with a new search interface, which includes filtering and timeline tools that help users dig out fast the messages they were looking for.
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Databases
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My view on the role of the GPL in this situation has been strongly contested by my friend Monty Widenius and others who work for Monty or who are otherwise in sympathy with his position. So far as I have seen their expressions of their views, no one has disagreed with my positions on the GPL in general.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU
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SRE: Your Master’s Thesis dealt with the concept of storing personal encryption certificates in DNS. While still not a common practice, you wrote in a recent blogpost that some work has begun to happen in the area. How do you currently regard the promise of this way of distributing keys? Have keyservers in general improved since your thesis was written?
SJ: The problem is not so much about technology here, but social matters. The person responsible for managing DNS for an organization is typically not the same person responsible for managing user certificates for an organization, and people have been reluctant to change their habits here. After all, DNS is a pretty critical piece of any company’s infrastructure. So I haven’t seen much uptake in this, even if it continues to be a interesting possibility, especially for the OpenPGP world. One part of my thesis was about the privacy issues around the then-current DNSSEC standard, the so called NXT record. I identified and explained that it will lead to problems when people can enumerate entire DNS zones, and even wrote a IETF draft on how to solve the problem using hashing of the names instead of storing the names directly. People in the IETF felt that the threat didn’t exist, and thought they were ready to roll out DNSSEC quite soon anyway (this was in 2001/2002!) so they didn’t want to change DNSSEC. I gave up on the draft, but years later people who were actually deploying this identified the same problem, and ended up re-inventing my solution, which is now standardized (the NSEC3 record). So at least some of it ended up being used, although not in the form or way I anticipated.
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Openness
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The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has launched a “public consultation on Public Access Policy”, to see if research funded by U.S. grants should be made available as open access results. I think this is important — I believe publicly-funded unclassified research should actually be made available to the public.
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Finance
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In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.
Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.
Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.
Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.
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Censorship/Civil Rights
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The Supreme Court of Canada transformed the country’s libel laws Tuesday with a pair of decisions that proponents say will expand the boundaries of free speech.
Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 11 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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