Horizons Regional Council “would be remiss not to investigate alternatives” to Microsoft on the desktop, as it has a responsibility to the ratepayers that fund it to spend their money wisely, says William Gordon, IT team leader at the council.
Horizons, covering a large area of the mid-North Island, has agreed to participate in the Public Sector Remix project, devised by the NZ Open Source Society.
“We’ll be trialling the Ubuntu-based desktop devised for the Remix project, initially on six to eight PCs,” Gordon says.
The council expects to start the trial within the next two months. There is no firm plan for project duration, but it will probably last between four and six weeks, he says. Horizons wants to have a month-end included in the test, to test the open source systems’ ability to handle regular peaks in workload.
The main driver for Horizons to consider open source was the failure of the government’s G2009 negotiations for bulk purchase of Microsoft software last year.
“That caused us to realise that we should be investigating alternatives for the next three-year cycle.”
In this article I shall attempt to relive my experience finding, beginning to use; and finally full conversion into a GNU/Linux desktop user. I will enumerate both the frustrations and the pleasures experienced during this first year of use. In an attempt at full disclosure my opinions and bias will be sprinkled throughout; after all this is written entirely from personal perspective. In the end the purpose of writing this is to provide the experience of one local (eastbay) user to any and all people who have started to use, or contemplated using Linux (shortened from Gnu/Linux for brevity) for any reason.
Recently there has been a discussion on the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) mailing list about why LPI does not publish its own training materials to help students prepare for their tests. I started to answer in the mailing list, but instead I decided to answer here.
LPI, of course, is a non-profit organization that creates certification exams for Linux systems administrators. It is distribution neutral, and tries to be comprehensive in its tests.
Most people should use ALB (mode=6) for NIC teaming their Linux server because it is the simplest method to achieve fault-tolerance and load balancing. If you require higher bandwidth, and you have an internally redundant switch, and you can configure your switchports to use LACP, then you should use LACP (mode=4) for NIC teaming.
Yesterday Luc Verhaegen gave a talk at FOSDEM on reverse engineering a motherboard BIOS, but today we finally have X@FOSDEM for the last time. Luc has just begun his talk on unifying and simplifying the free software desktop’s graphics driver stack. Here are his slides and we will be back with more updates and videos on Phoronix as the presentation progresses.
For many Linux users one area where Linux needs some improvement is money management. Yes there is the very powerful GnuCash (check out GnuCash in my article “GnuCash: Open source Accounting/Financing goodness“). But many users find GnuCash to be too much power for what they need. There is also the slick KMyMoney, but that depends upon KDE. So what do the non-power, non-KDE users have? One option is HomeBank.
Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) is a modified version of Ubuntu specially for the netbooks. The latest version of UNR runs Ubuntu Karmic in the backend, but the interface has been heavily customized to make it looks/functions good in small screen. Recently, I installed UNR on my netbook (as a replacement for WinXP). While I like the interface, I find that there are still many places that can be improved for better usability and performance. Here I will highlight several of my own customizations.
Let’s face it, we sit at our computers for hours on end. Be it administrating, working, or just plain killing time. Everyone knows that the interwebs is a sure-fire time killer. But what happens, gasp, when those interwebs are down and you’ve no way to pass time? You shrivel up and die right? No! You waste your time coding, writing, or playing games!
One of the Unknown Worlds developers, Max has posted a blogpost about the GNU/Linux port for their upcoming game Natural Selection 2 :
“Beat Wolf asks: What platforms will be supported? (Linux, OS X, XBox, etc..) The web page still mentions Linux and OS X as target platforms, but there have been many doubts with the inclusion of Steamworks and because the question seems to be avoided for some time now.
What is the usual you do in cases like that? Of course, you write a Plasmoid that checks the web-service periodically and informs you when your passport is ready. This plasmoid – PersonalKwery – can be seen in screenshot 1.
Last time it was a great decision by Tex and the Gang to stick with KDE 3.5.10 on their 2009.2 release. They played safe for the welfare of the community and the users, while many desktop-wannabes plunged into KDE4 line. Now that KDE 4 has become a lot more stable and feature-complete, it’s time for a release.
I got this little Toshiba Libretto for myself for Christmas as a tinkering project, as I’ve mentioned previously. I like to tinker with computers, and I wanted a machine that I could use to experiment with a full installation of Linux. I also wanted to restrict myself to a command line interface only to internalize the use on the console.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #179 for the week January 31st – February 6th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Open source industry veteran Matt Asay joins Canonical as COO, Lucid Translations now open, Ubuntu Developer Week Re-Cap, Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS Maintenance release, Lucid Ubuntu Global Jam Announced, Project Awesome Opportunity, New Ubuntu Review Team: Reviewing bug with patches, Jane Silber Interview, Dustin Kirkland Interview: Encryption in Ubuntu, Nicaraguan LoCo Team’s Third Anniversary, Report on Launchpad down-time of 4th Feb 2010, January Team Meeting Reports, and much, much more!
Last week, I made note of one of the more intriguing software packages I have come across in a long time: Portable Ubuntu. I said at the time that, as a means of bringing the convenience of Unix utilities to my Windows workstation…
In the continued interests of making Ubuntu a rocking platform for opportunistic developers, today we formulated the plan for Project Awesome Opportunity. The goal is simple: build an opportunistic development workflow into Ubuntu. You will install one package from Universe and your Ubuntu will be hot-rodded for opportunistic application development, making development more fun and more accessible for a glorious itch scratching smackdown.
The Lucid (10.04) development cycle has some really interesting … er … developments with regard to … uh … the development landscape. Wow. That was an awful sentence.
I then decided I’d test the “upgrade” feature when Ubuntu 9.10 came out, and let it upgrade itself via APT. That was interesting, but a few things didn’t work quite right. I’ve never been one to upgrade an OS because of this. I’m a clean install kind of guy. So when things didn’t work quite right, I wiped it and installed my next project. Linux Mint 8.
Mmmm, Mint
Now, back in September-ish, I rebuilt my main desktop machine at home. I had initial plans to install Slackware 13, but since Slackware now doesn’t fit my needs, I decided to go with something else entirely, so I ended up installing Linux Mint 7 on it.
My desktop is still running happily on Mint 7, and while that process came with its own issues (the default kernel didn’t like my DVD-ROM drive, plus I discovered massive problems trying to set up Mint 7 on a machine that uses both IDE and SATA drives together), once I got everything set up, it’s been really great.
The final release of Linux Mint 8 (Helena) KDE Community Edition is available for download. I wrote about the Release Candidate of this a couple of weeks ago, so I won’t add too much more now. I’m still more of a Gnome desktop user than KDE, but as KDE 4 gets better and better, and combined with the excellent integration with Linux Mint, this one is a real alternative for me.
[...]
It may be that this is the same one used by Kubuntu, I haven’t installed that in quite a long time so I don’t know what it looks like any more. But this is nice, clean, easy to use and easy to understand.
Palm Inc. (PALM) shares advanced Tuesday after an analyst raised his price target on the stock, citing strong potential for the company’s wireless devices as well as a takeover possibility.
But I have to admit, the Nexus One is a winner. I wasn’t enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge. I’ve wanted to have a GPS unit for my car anyway, and I thought that google navigation might finally make a phone useful.
The Nexus One ships with a 2.6.29 kernel but if you like living on the bleeding edge you can install your own kernel (e.g. the experimental 2.6.32 kernel). Below you’ll find an update image I built which includes a 2.6.32 kernel, su, scp and ssh.
The venture has launched two handsets, the Nuvifone G60 with a Linux OS on board and the Nuvifone M20 with Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. The M10 will be its third smartphone, and the company is widely expected to announce its first smartphone with Google’s Android mobile OS on board at the Mobile World Congress, which opens in Barcelona on Feb. 15.
In my opinion, the ideal OS for a tablet PC would be a Linux-based OS running the Elive distribution. This distribution would be lightweight enough, yet have plenty of 3D eye candy for a modern desktop. The Elive desktop would be ideal for a touchscreen-based hardware. Yes, this is me showing favoritism, but if you really put some thought to it, the E17 desktop is perfect for the touchscreen. If you’ve not experienced Elive, download a Live CD of it and try it out. Once you have it running, imagine it being used on a tablet PC. The only hitch would be how to initiate some of the compiz features without having the keyboard handy. Of course, after seeing what the Elive team has done so far, any hitches to tablet migration would be minor.
Similar as it may sound to Android’s promise, there are major differences, says Williams. “About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more,” says Williams. “And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary.”
“Space: the final frontier.” The folks at the OpenLuna project take that line to heart. OpenLuna is an open source, wiki-based attempt to design a leaner, meaner, public driven moon mission. As with any open source project, they encourage everyone to participate. When they run into questions, problems and challenges, they pose them to the crowd and invite people from every field to weigh in.
credativ, a global open source service and support company, announced today a partnership with OpenLogic, Inc., a provider of enterprise open source software solutions. Together the companies are able to offer credativ’s in-depth third level support to OpenLogic’s customers throughout Europe and North America.
Olliance will be running a series of CEO Interviews throughout the year. I sat down with Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft ( www.jaspersoft.com ), to get his thoughts on Open Source software and current market trends. This is the first in a two part series with Brian where he shares his thoughts.
Open-Xchange will offer its e-mail and groupware in cooperation with hardware manufacturer Pyramid as pre-configured and ready-to-run appliances for up to either 50 users or 300.
Proprietary vendors are using “anti-features”, features that no user would ever want, to protect intellectual property, Benjamin “Mako” Hill, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the linux.conf.au open source conference last month.
But IP protection is only one of several reasons vendors introduce such features into their products.
An anti-feature serves the interests of the vendor, he says, not the user. A typical example is the set of limitations placed on the Home Basic version of Microsoft’s Vista operating system; these restricted memory and disk-storage support and limited the user to at most three concurrent applications using the graphical user interface, Hill says.
IBM has released Lotus Symphony 3, the latest version of its office productivity suite which is based on new code that supports Microsoft Office applications.
IBM has upgraded its free Lotus Symphony productivity suite, adding several features that make its word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications work with Microsoft documents. Launched in 2007 to chip away at Microsoft Office, Symphony failed to budge Office’s share of 500 million seats. Instead, Symphony has acquired a more potent rival in free, Web-based platforms such as Google Docs. IBM is working to build the Web-based version of Symphony under the Project Concord banner. Concord will initially allow Web-based editing for documents and proceed to Web-based spreadsheets and presentations.
The announcement, which was actually a planned webcast, reassured those worried over the fate of two open-source Sun products for small business: the database software, MySQL and the productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. The acquisition might make MySQL and OpenOffice.org even more competitive against costly Microsoft counterparts (SQL Server and Microsoft Office).
With all of its newly acquired Sun intellectual property and R&D in hand, Oracle is now moving headlong into the server, storage, processor, networking and, yes, even the switch business. But the most hotly debated factor in the acquisition has been the MySQL database.
On Friday, Jacobs announced his resignation from Oracle to key members of the MySQL team via e-mail. Jacobs, a 28-year Oracle veteran and one of its first 20 hires, has been Oracle’s liaison with the MySQL community for the past several years, ever since Oracle acquired the popular MySQL storage engine, InnoDB.
The memo, sent Tuesday under the subject line “Thanks for a great 28 years,” has more genuine emotion than you’ll see in a year’s worth of official communications from most corporate leaders. And even as he departs the Sun stage, he couldn’t resist sprinkling in a number of characteristic barbs–even taking his beloved auto industry to task.
The only bet Oracle had to make was that it could run the business profitably. Given Sun’s bloated infrastructure and broad range of unprofitable products, I don’t think it’s that hard a task. Both Oracle and IBM have become adept at running legacy businesses for profit rather than growth.
[...]
Personally, I’ve enjoyed my time with MySQL and Sun. It was a heckuva ride. I’ve never had as much fun as we did growing MySQL from a few million in revenue to more than $100 million, with a community that measures in tens of millions of users around the world. The one side effect of working for a high-growth startup is that it can be quite addictive.
I have to admit that I was one of those people who sat through the entire 5 hours of the Oracle/Sun presentations the other day (it seemed longer!) In a way it’s sad to see Sun finally set over the horizon, but in another way it has been inevitable for a while and the whole process of the acquisition really couldn’t have been drawn out much longer. So there we are: gone is Sun and in its place is Snorcle (or is that Oracun?) But where does this leave the industry as a whole? Well Sun had quite a portfolio of hardware and software, so unlike the BEA or PeopleSoft acquisitions this has potential wider ramifications. But if you listened to the presentations then it’s almost as if Sun hasn’t really gone away but Oracle is just injecting a lot more cash (and people) into the business.
With the EU’s approval of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, Oracle is acquiring a major hardware and software player, and perhaps most significantly, they are now taking stewardship of the Java platform. As Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison said shortly after the acquisition announcement in April of last year, Java is “the single most important software asset we have ever acquired.”
When Oracle lays its cards on the table to present its road map for the combined Oracle and Sun Microsystems organization, one thing developers can expect is consistency as far as Java is concerned, according to an Oracle executive.
To understand Texas Tech’s bold new classroom, one must first shake away the wholesale confines of reality and its pesky restrictions like space and time.
Project Wonderland developers say they will continue working on the virtual world platform, despite being laid off after Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems.
In the wake of its merger with Sun Microsystems, Oracle is discontinuing access to Project Kenai, which was developed by Sun as an open source project-hosting site.
Ingres is inviting data munchers to take a bite out of its planned software architecture targeting high-performance analytics.
The open-source database company has released alpha code for its VectorWise project, a high-performance storage engine computing-intensive data warehouses running on standard Intel boxes. A first beta of VectorWise is planned for the current quarter.
Laszlo Systems, builder of integrated internet applications for email, workplace dashboards, calendaring and other services, has brought in $3 million in new funding, according to Dow Jones VentureWire.
San Francisco recently established a new policy requiring open source software to be considered equally with commercial software within the city’s procurement process.
Cuban Enterprise software DESOFT has reported that the U.S. impeded home users access to Source Forge, the largest repository of open source projects online.
Sources from the Cuban company that is dedicated to finding solutions within and outside the island, said the U.S. restriction strengthens Washington’s hostility against Havana.
The developers of the Ruby on Rails framework have, as promised, made the first beta of Rails 3 available within their scheduled time frame. Rails founder David Heinemeier Hansson announced that more than 250 developers contributed to the release, submitting a total of 4,000 commits since the current 2.3 development line.
Today, the blog Chromium Notes, which is written by a developer who works on the open source project (that Google Chrome is built on top of), posted a very interesting graph: one that shows the number of code commits to WebKit. Notably, it appears that Google has overtaken Apple as the organization that contributes the most commits to the open source project.
This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence.
This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.
Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard said search engine will release a version of Google Voice for businesses, roll out Google Wave to all users who want it, and may deliver as much as 200 new features to Google Apps this year. Google Voice offered as part of Google Apps could be a powerful combination for businesses in the market for a UCC (unified communications and collaboration) suite, particularly at a time when companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for UCC from Microsoft or IBM. Google will also release Google Wave, the company’s real-time collaboration platform, for all consumers and businesses in 2010.
I was a bit distracted from the Apple iPad news due to the marathon Oracle conference Wednesday on its shiny new Sun Microsystems acquisition.
But the more I thought about it, the more these two companies are extremely well positioned to actually fulfill what other powerful companies tried to do and failed. Apple and Oracle may be unstoppable in their burgeoning power to dominate the collection of profits across vast and essential markets for decades.
Service or organizational systems are quite different. While they also include extensive infrastructures and lots of technologies, people constitute the major part of their components, if not the most distinctive.
The British Homeopathic Association has been accused of misrepresenting scientific evidence on alternative medicine in documents it gave to a parliamentary inquiry.
The Serious Fraud Office said in its announcement yesterday that some of the £30m penalty BAE was to hand over in the UK would be “an ex gratia payment for the benefit of the people of Tanzania”.
There has been a massive increase in the funding of US war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and private military contractors are flourishing in its wake, even though their reputations are at an all-time low.
Jurors found Nuevelle guilty of unlawful entry, stalking and second degree burglary. Prosecutors alleged that Nuevelle broke into the home of her former girlfriend, Magistrate Judge Janet Albert of the D.C. Superior Court, in an attempt to harass her after their breakup, and inundated her with e-mails, text messages and phone calls. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said Nuevelle could face a maximum of 16 years in prison.
The “backdoors” that Cisco and other networking companies implement in their routers and switches for lawful intercept are front and center again at this week’s Black Hat security conference. A few years ago, they were cause celebre in some VoIP wiretapping arguments and court rulings.
Cross revealed a collection of security weaknesses in Cisco’s architecture that he says add up to a lawful intercept system that could be easily hijacked by a skilled cybercriminal. When hackers try to gain access to a Cisco router, the system doesn’t block them after failed password-guessing attempts and it doesn’t alert an administrator. Many Cisco routers are still vulnerable, he said, to a bug that was publicized in June 2008, since some administrators haven’t implemented the patch that Cisco later released. And once data has been collected using the lawful intercept, it can be sent to any destination, not merely to an authorized user.
In late January, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a report that provided startling new details on illegal operations by the FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit (CAU) and America’s grifting telecoms.
For years, AT&T, Verizon, MCI and others fed the Bureau phone records of journalists and citizens under the guise of America’s endless, and highly profitable, “War on Terror.”
EPIC has filed a Freedom of Information Act Request, asking for records pertaining to the partnership. That would certainly help, because otherwise we have no idea what’s actually going on.
Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google — and its users — from future attack.
New York attorney general files civil charges against the bank and its former chief executive, Ken Lewis, over last year’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch
Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline.
On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections—a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international.
The decision heralds even further corporate takeover of the U.S. political system.
The most complete and eloquent account of Lessig’s views is The Nation piece. Here he picks up on the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which would make any limit on campaign contributions unconstitutional. “… the clear signal of the Roberts Court is that any reform designed to muck about with whatever wealth wants is constitutionally suspect.” He despairs of getting the Congress, (that he calls the Fundraising Congress) to do anything. He proposes instead a Convention to amend the Constitution as the only possible avenue.
Computer scientists in the US have discovered ways to “re-identify” the names of people included in supposedly anonymous datasets.
In one example, a movie rental company released an anonymous list of film-ratings taken from its 500,000 subscribers. Using a statistical “de-anonymisation” technique, the academics were able to identify individuals and their film preferences.
A federal appeals court today agreed that a high school student’s parody profile of his principal was protected free speech.
Justin Layshock, who in December 2005 created a MySpace profile of then Hickory High School principal Eric Trosch, filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the school district, claiming the administration had no say over the online parody.
Internet companies and civil liberty groups have voiced alarm over a proposed Italian law which would make online service providers responsible for their audiovisual content and copyright infringements by users.
Taking a few moments to secure a residential wireless network with a password is a good idea, a fact recently noted by the Federal Trade Commission. An open network is an invitation for piggy-backers and data thieves.
Who knew that password-protecting a wireless router also had constitutional significance? According to a recent court decision from Oregon, the failure to password-protect a wireless network can diminish the extent to which the Fourth Amendment protects computers and information on that network from government searches.
In a definitive defeat for film studios—and in a first case of its kind worldwide—Australia’s Federal Court has ruled that ISPs have no obligation to act on copyright infringement notices or to disconnect subscribers after receiving multiple letters. If copyright holders want justice for illegal file-sharing, they need to start by targeting the right people: those who committed the infringement.
The ruling handed down today by Judge J. Cowdroy aims to be nothing less than magisterial: in 200 pages, it examines the issue from every possible angle because of the “obvious importance of these proceedings to the law of copyright both in this country and possibly overseas.”
The 7th round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations begins tomorrow in Guadalajara, Mexico. The negotiation round will be the longest to-date, with three and a half days planned to address civil enforcement, border measures, the Internet provisions, and (one hour for) transparency. Over the next five days, I plan to post a five-part ACTA Guide that will include sourcing for much of the discussion on ACTA, links to all the leaked documents, information on the transparency issue, and a look at who has been speaking out.
The Open Source/Linux Development survey series finds out exactly what’s on the minds of developers active in Open Source development. This survey consists of over 400 in-depth interviews with Linux developers and covers topics such as: languages and Linux distributions; what type of apps are being created for servers and for clients; how many Linux apps will be released next year; what are the major obstacles to Linux and to Open Source Software (OSS); how different types of development tools rate; security concerns with Linux; preferred chipsets, licensing issues, and development tools.
NoMachine has been nominated as a finalist based on the solution they provided Schwaebisch Hall, the first German Council to migrate to Linux. NX eased the transition providing 32 branches, 17 mobile workers and 16 Kindergartens remote access to both Linux and Windows applications from Linux desktops and thin clients on the network or directly from the Internet.
In the past week, The H had the latest news on how, even without cookies, web browsers and users can be identified, the latest Linux kernel developments with the Kernel Log, yet another vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser and more…
Attendees at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) will be able to go “UpSCALE” on Friday, Feb. 19, as the expo provides a series of lightning talks that evening. Based on the O’Reilly Media “Ignite” talks which have occurred at OSCON, the UpSCALE talk is a presentation in which participants are given five minutes to talk on a subject, accompanied by 20 slides which are displayed for 15 seconds each. If you think you’re up to the pace of a quick presentation and can wow an audience in five minutes or less, UpSCALE is for you.
The 2010 edition of linux.conf.au was held on January 18 to 22 in Wellington, New Zealand. A number of the talks from this event have been covered elsewhere on LWN, with more to come; this article will talk about several other sessions and your editor’s impressions of the conference as a whole. In brief: it was a highly successful event which easily lived up to the high standards set by LCA.
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) issued a call for volunteers to assist in the development of its world leading Linux certification program. Volunteers are sought for participation in a Job Task Analysis (JTA) survey for the organization’s new specialty exam LPI-304 (High Availability and Virtualization).
Which reminds me of computers. I’ve been using them for a long time. For the past six or seven years, I’ve been a devotee of Linux. Linux, or more properly GNU/Linux, is a free, open source computer operating system. Several tech-savvy guys recommended it to me, and I invested many hundreds of hours in exploring it.
The good news: it works, it’s fast and powerful, it is immune to all extant viruses, and it’s free. The bad news: it was a steep learning curve, although more current “distributions” or brands of Linux are easier.
Six months after launching its Penguin on Demand (POD) cloud computing service, high-performance Linux cluster provider Penguin Computing said up to 200 of its 2,000-strong customer base are using its on-demand offering, including some new customer wins in the life-sciences sector.
Zarafa, the fastest growing groupware company in Europe, expects an exponential uptake in the community now that two major community distributions have decided to package Zarafa’s Collaboration Platform (ZCP).
The final version of ZCP 6.40.0 release, scheduled to be launched in March 2010, will be available through the Canonical Partner repository for the popular Ubuntu distribution.
I lost count of the number of times someone told me I was nuts for wanting to compile a new kernel Why not get a new different distro of Linux that works on a specific machine? What is wrong with the kernel that comes with the distro? In many cases, the default kernel works just fine. Conversely, there are reasons for compiling a new kernel.
For this article, I am focusing on the PC architecture. A 32-bit PC can vary from a slightly ancient 386 to the latest chip from different manufacturers. While the range is not as a great, the same is true for 64-bit chips.
ffA (‘Foster Findlay Associates Ltd’), a world leading provider of 3D seismic analysis software and services to the oil and gas industry, has released the latest advanced 3D seismic analysis and volume interpretation applications, SVI Pro and SEA 3D Pro 2010, on Windows and Linux platforms.
Jono Bacon provides an overview of PiTiVi, an open source video editor for the Linux desktop.
For many of us, using Linux is like being a kid in a candy shop. Want office productivity? Check. Want to listen to and watch multimedia? Check. Want to get online and communicate over a raft of mediums? Check. Among the many shelves, stocked with treats aplenty, has been one strangely lacking shelf: that of video editing.
If you don’t want to bother with that, or if you occasionally boot from a USB device (which is, by the way, a great way to play with Linux if you’re not ready to install it onto your hard drive), then simply unplug any flash drive, external hard drive, or MP3 player before booting. And if you forget and your PC fails to boot, unplug the device and reboot.
Gnome 3.0 promises to give Linux the desktop polish it needs.
It’s been a long time in the coming but this year Linux will get a makeover, thanks to the Gnome project. In September the Gnome team, makers of one of the most popular desktop interfaces for Linux, will release version 3.0 of their desktop environment and they are promising “big user-visible changes”.
If you’re running the GNOME desktop environment and you want to make Google’s Gmail your default mail handler, you’re going to need to specify a script to do the handoff. Gnome Gmail integrates Gmail into mail links and commands on your GNOME desktop. Once it’s in place, when you select a mailto URL, or select Send Link… from Firefox, Gnome Gmail opens a Gmail browser screen with a composed message, ready to send. Gnome Gmail also supports file attachments and the Nautilus file “Send To…” command.
Each year over Columbus Day weekend, GNOME developers — especially North Americans — gather for a casual hackfest in Boston, Massachusetts. The atmosphere is friendly and informal; most of the attendees know each other from other GNOME events. There are no booths at the event; companies are only represented by their employees.
This year’s Summit was especially productive. With a clear goal in sight (GNOME 3.0), everyone seemed to be on-task. Discussions were cordial and not too tangential. Ideas were rapidly brought up and filtered. New objectives were set and agreed upon. And, perhaps best of all, this Summit was very cohesive: almost everyone was able to attend every session that they needed to.
Paul Cutler interviews Jonathan Thomas, creator of the OpenShot video editor. OpenShot is a non-linear video editor with support for many audio and video codecs, GNOME drag and drop support, titles, transitions video encoding and transcoding and more.
The story of Vala begins with Jürg Billeter. He noted that writing and refactoring GObject-based code in C required a lot of extra work that more modern languages automated. He also noted that these modern languages do not produce libraries that can be easily used in other environments. He wanted a full-featured object-oriented language that could produce C-style interfaces automatically. (See the Gee collection class for a perfect example of Vala solving this problem.) He mentioned his idea to fellow student Raffaele Sandrini, who jumped in to help build the early compiler.
Ever experienced a computer crash the day before you have to turn in an important project? As we all know, backups are your best friends in such situations. There are several types of back-up systems out there today. One method is to clone your hard drive, so that you can restore everything as it was in the event of a crash. There are a few software packages, both commercial and free, which help you to do this. Norton Ghost is probably the most commonly used solution for years. But let’s take a look at Clonezilla, which is an open source alternative that gives Ghost a run for its money.
All in all, Pardus is an excellent distribution, a pleasant surprise to people like me who like to pick random distros on distrowatch and try them. I almost had a religious experience with it, amazed at how well a distribution could be made at great detail. Back in the Pardus 2009 days, I remember all linux distros failed to bring an out of the box stable KDE 4 system that looked nice, but Pardus did that, and now with KDE 4.3 it’s even better. Unfortunately their lack of packages made me switch to another distribution after a couple of days, but it is perfect for people who don’t demand a big collection of packages, the everyday man/woman who just want to work using the usual tools. If you want to recommend a very nice, stable and functional KDE distribution you should really take Pardus into consideration.
As usual all your feedbacks are really important to help in improving global quality of distribution. You can report improvements proposals and/or bugs in Mandriva Bugzilla.
Today’s enterprise IT organizations are intimately familiar with the pain of change. Under pressure to do more with less while accelerating velocity and responsiveness, IT is finding software systems harder than ever to provision and maintain.
Cloud computing is getting its very own Linux flavor based on the Red-Hat distribution designed expressly for optimizing virtualization technologies like VMware or Xen. CloudLinux (also the name of the startup) can be installed with a single kernel, operating system, and library, and requires only a single copy of Apache which comes bundled with the new distribution.
The Ubuntu server is the most innovative distribution for servers. It enables administrators to gain access to cutting edge technology and implement that with new ideas. If you are looking for the latest and greatest, this is the server option for you.
All in all, I am very pleased with the clean look and speedy performance of Ubuntu 9.10 on the Dell D820. Linux has come a long way, and now looks totally professional, especially on a high resolution screen. It certainly feels like I’m using serious computing power, and the fact that it’s open source, free, and so adaptable – is just inspiring. Thanks to the leagues of open source developers out there who created an amazing system, which in my opinion is clearly superior to Windows on the basis of speed, flexibility, and cost. I’d like to hear from others if they also have similar opinions on the speed issues – and if so – why isn’t everyone switching to Linux on the basis of that metric alone.
Cisco has announced a new wireless router in India that promises to do a lot more than just enabling wireless internet access. The Linksys WRT160NL comes with a processor and OS of its own to allow users to harness the full potential of the device as a router and as a media server.
Top Global develop the Linux SDK for our Gobi Router MB7900 by leveraging our SmartDriver technology which was developed over the last 10 years and can support over 100 Aircards, USBs, and embedded modules from all the vendors around the world. Top Global’s Gobi SDK works with processors such as ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC. The SDK is fully tested and proven in our own products which are in high volume production.
Palm hits the gas pedal: with a six-figure monetary award for the most downloaded webOS applications the California company wants to heat up the app development market.
In a nutshell, just because it’s free doesn’t mean you can’t make money from it. As most consumers only keep applications on average 3-4 weeks on their phones and aren’t willing to shell out money for applications, AppCreatives believes free Android applications are the way to go. Then again, the company does stress that premium paid-for apps will have a role to play if the content is branded and of exceptional quality.
According to the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix Blueprint, the Ubuntu community have decided to drop OpenOffice from the default installation of Ubuntu Netbook Edition for the upcoming Lucid Lynx release, atleast for now. Now documents will be opened by default in Google Docs.
We have previously told you about Gimp being dropped from Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu replacing Google with Yahoo as the default search engine.
Leeenux is a light weight Linux distribution based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It takes up just 1.2GB of disk space and has a user interface that’s designed for netbooks with screens as small as 7 inches. In other words, it plays well with first generation Asus Eee PC models.
“Although netbooks are small today – maybe ten per cent of the PC market at most – we believe over the next several years that could completely change around and that could be 90 per cent of the PC market,” the ARM CEO, Mr. Warren East, says. “We see those products as an area for a lot of innovation and we want that innovation to be happening around the ARM architecture.”
Ubuntu wordmark officialImage via Wikipedia
This post is directed to a friend that asked about getting a new netbook and putting Ubuntu on it. Facebook ate my homework and gave me nothing but a server error in response, so I decided to put the answer up here and just send him a link.
Thinking of installing Ubuntu on a Netbook we’re going to buy as I’ve heard it’s pretty lightweight in comparison to Windows 7. What are your thoughts on this in general? Also, it is free right?
First of all, I want you to know that I use Ubuntu every day. All of the computers in my house (and there are many of them) use Ubuntu or some relative (like Debian). Not only is it free (as in liberty), it’s also free ($), and it does everything that I want and more, though there’s sometimes a little pain involved. My experiences with Windows don’t involve any less pain, though the part of the eye the needles get stuck into isn’t necessarily the same.
The Chrome OS, which runs on top of the Linux kernel, is a direct challenge to Microsoft’s(MSFT Quote) dominance in the PC market and will also intensify competition between Google and Apple. Chrome is expected to launch in the second half of the year and is an extension of Google’s Chrome Web browser. It will initially be targeted at netbooks — and tablets.
Despite being similar in name and appearance, X2 has seemingly gone in the opposite direction to Apple offering not only a range of hardware configurations but also support for both Windows and Linux.
One of Apple’s key selling points for the iPad (and iPhone, and iPod Touch) is an app store with over 140,000 applications designed to run on the devices. Of course, there are also thousands of applications designed to run on Windows, Linux, Windows Mobile, Google Android, and other platforms. But the app store paradigm has really caught on for mobile devices, because it turns out it’s much easier to find and download all of the programs you want to run from one place rather than scouring the web. Who knew? (Other than Linux distributions that have been using a repository and package management system that’s arguably a lot like an app store for years, I mean).
Lastly, the open source SIeSTA operating system which is based on Debian Linux poses a threat to iPad. Don’t you think that this is a better option than the Apple’s iPad?
Inside Contactless, a manufacturer of near field communications (NFC) chips, is releasing “Open NFC,” an open source version of its NFC protocol stack for mobile platforms including Linux and Android. Meanwhile, Juniper projects that NFC will play a growing role in a mobile-ticketing market that will reach 15 billion tickets by 2014.
With the Obama Administration gutting NASA’s return to the Moon program, we need to look to private industry to lead the way in returning humans to space. Open source could be the ticket to get us there better, faster and cheaper
There is an article by Mark Webbink, Esq., “Packaging Open Source”, in the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, Vol 1, No 2 (2009) that I think you’ll find interesting. It compares various FOSS licenses and how they handle compilations and collective works. The context of the article is specifically packaging Linux with an application into a software appliance, but the descriptions of the licenses and how they work are broadly useful in other contexts as well. I am republishing the article here because many of you face choices about what license you will use on your works, so you also need to understand, and others of you are lawyers who would like to understand FOSS licenses better.
This week’s show is brought to you by Bang Bros and Adobe, we also talk about the iTampon, Defective by Design, Ubuntu switching to Yahoo for search, Sourceforge blocking whole countries and much more…
*Matt Asay moves from Alfresco to Canonical
*GPL fade fuels heated discussion
*Apple’s iPad and its enterprise and open source impact
*Open source in data warehousing and storage
*Our perspective on Oracle’s plans for Sun open source
NBC Universal management gets more and more ridiculous every time we come across anything they do. While they’ve left most of the more ridiculous statements to their chief lawyer, Rick Cotton (who is worried about the poor corn farmers harmed by movie file sharing), CEO Jeff Zucker has made his fair share of whoppers. While he got a lot of attention last month for his cowardly handling of the whole Leno/Conan mess, his latest move is to flat out lie to Congress. In a hearing in front of Congress as a part of NBC’s effort to merge with Comcast, Rep. Rick Boucher asked Zucker about Hulu being forced to block Boxee (a battle that’s gone back and forth a few times).
Personally, it is Sun’s involvement with open source software that will be most missed. Having bought StarOffice back in 1999 from German company StarDivision, Sun in 2000 released the code for StarOffice under an open source licence and the name OpenOffice.org. Over the years community and Sun developers pushed OpenOffice.org closer and closer to its goal of being a fully free alternative to proprietary office suites, something that it has largely achieved.
For Thunderbird fans with a sense of adventure, Mozilla has released ‘Lanikai’ Alpha 1. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X is supported in a variety of languages.
Weave has matured considerably over the past few years and has become one of the most powerful and compelling solutions for synchronization that is available for the Firefox Web browser.
MariaDB 5.1.42, a new branch of the MySQL database which includes all major open source storage engines, myriad bug fixes, and many community patches, has been released. We are very proud to have made our first final release, and we encourage you to test it out and use it on your systems.
Melody is an open source content management system for bloggers and publishers where its community of users and contributors is its most important feature.
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Melody extends on Movable Type’s legacy in four basic ways. Take what already exists in Movable Type, keep what’s best about it, remove from the core product features which make things substantially more complex but which are only used by a minority of users anyway, and move Melody forward in ways that show the developers are directly attuned to the needs of the new user (and developer) base.
Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University, and founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, spoke about “Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing” on Friday, February 5, 2010, 7-9 pm.
It seems as if most people are for OpenSource but against any other form of distribution/development. For example, Microsoft maintains ownership of the software that they sell on store shelves. No one owns a copy of Windows except for Microsoft. Well, good for them, but when Microsoft’s products became dominant due to market demand people starting making noise because Microsoft wanted to put their own software on their own software (Internet Explorer on Windows)… so even though it’s Microsoft’s property on both accounts, they apparently did wrong by bundling the two together? Now, in the realm of current events we are seeing something similar with Google.
Like the mayor, California’s IT leadership recognizes that open source could be a money-saver. But it’s apparent that the state isn’t touting open source with quite as much gusto as Newsom. “It’s not like we’re giving agencies carte blanche to throw up any kind of OSS (open source software) that they want,” Farley told Government Technology last month. California’s policy “normalizes” the state’s use of open source software, giving “a framework for departments to use OSS out of the shadows, more or less,” he explained.
The state’s more cautious approach likely stems in part from wariness about security. Mark Weatherford, the state’s chief information security officer, recently wrote in a blog post on Govtech.com that he has been on both sides of the argument about open source.
Oracle has announced the latest release of Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse is a free set of certified plug-ins that enable developers to build Java EE and Web Services applications for the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform where Eclipse is the preferred Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
Assessing how successful an IETF standard has become should help the Internet standards body, and its working groups, better understand the impact of the work it is doing, said Dave Crocker, an IETF member and a principal at the Internet consulting firm Brandenburg InternetWorking. Crocker led the creation of the wiki.
A UGA employee is accused of trying to bilk money from students in exchange for covering up alleged computer violations, according to university police.
While many of the illustrations of dinosaurs we see in movies and books are striking, the truth is that much of the way we depict our jurassic friends is based on educated guesswork. But a few teams of scientists now say they have been able to determine a dinosaur’s coloring with more precision. And one dino, in particular, has been color-mapped from head plume to toe.
Last week, I wrote about a revelation buried in a Washington Post article by Dana Priest which described how the Obama administration has adopted the Bush policy of targeting selected American citizens for assassination if they are deemed (by the Executive Branch) to be Terrorists.
With each passing day, it becomes more and more astonishing to encompass the fact that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their henchmen from the prior administration have managed thus far to escape any accounting whatsoever for the massive battery of criminal activity committed during their time in office. More than a year has passed since these men had their hands on the levers of power, and evidence of their myriad crimes and frauds is laying all over the countryside, yet nothing has come of it.
The British government has been running a wide-ranging inquiry into the manner in which the UK and United States were led to war in Iraq by then-President Bush and then-Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Americans have largely stopped thinking about Iraq, even though we still have approximately 110,000 troops there, as well as the largest “embassy” on the planet (and still growing). We’ve generally chalked up our war in Iraq to the failed past, and some Americans, after the surge of 2007, even think of it as, if not a success, at least no longer a debacle. Few care to spend much time considering the catastrophe we actually brought down on the Iraqis in “liberating” them.
Clare Short’s failure to resign before the Iraq war drew criticism. This week, she was applauded after giving evidence at the Chilcot inquiry. Now about to leave parliament after 27 years, does she have any regrets?
Police are using controversial car-surveillance technology aimed at catching criminals and terrorists to target members of the public in order to meet government performance targets and raise revenue, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
Police whistleblowers also claim that intelligence stored on the national Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) database is “at least 30 per cent inaccurate”, which has led to the wrongful arrest of innocent motorists and the seizure of their cars.
Glynn Moody discusses what a bogus concept it is, and why a new EU report is massively discredited in simply taking the claim at face value:
I’ve noted several times an increasingly popular trope of the intellectual monopolists: since counterfeiting is often linked with organised crime, and because counterfeiting and copyright infringement are vaguely similar, it follows as surely as night follows day that copyright infringement is linked with organised crime.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’”
When DVD Jon was arrested after breaking the CSS encryption algorithm, he was charged with “unauthorized computer trespassing.” That led his lawyers to ask the obvious question, “On whose computer did he trespass?” The prosecutor’s answer: “his own.”
If that doesn’t make your heart skip a beat, you can stop reading now.
When I was growing up, “trespassing” was something you could only do to other people’s computers. But let’s set that aside and come back to it.
“Falcon” poses a considerable risk to filesharers who want to retain their privacy and this version continues a long line of denying users their software freedom. If the program were free software, groups could set up competing services based on trustworthiness; we could have other remote control services running in competition with the uTorrent.com-based remote control service. You wouldn’t have to reveal your filesharing to parties except those you trusted while retaining the convenience of a small program running quickly. You could use whatever metric of trust to determine who those trustworthy parties are, if anyone. Instead, proprietary software pushes you into a monopoly for this service. This remote control protocol could be a commodity, improved and built upon as BitTorrent protocol itself is.
Trading away your software freedom is never a good idea.
The Indian government has moved to establish its own body to address and monitor science surrounding climate change, saying it “cannot rely” on the official United Nation panel.
Nobel Peace prize winner Rajendra K. Pachauri attends the opening of the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009, also known as COP15, at the Bella center in Copenhagen December 7, 2009.
The move is a severe blow to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) following the revelation parts of its 3000 page 2007 report on climate science was not subjected to peer review.
That’s exactly what hackers went after last week when they obtained unauthorized access to online accounts where companies maintain their carbon credits, according to the German newspaper Der Spiegel.
Forget about all of those ubiquitous police surveillance cameras in your city: the new sheriff in town is that shifty Google Maps camera wheeling through your neighborhood.
The problems of proliferation, climate change, and oil dependence share both a nuclear non-solution that confounds U.S. policy goals and a non-nuclear solution that achieves them.
American International Group plans Wednesday to pay another round of employee bonuses, worth about $100 million, said several people familiar with the matter, a year after similar payments at the bailed-out insurance giant infuriated many Americans and inflamed Washington.
Explore the various facets of the government’s budget and see how revenues and spending have changed over time. Explore the various facets of the government’s budget and see how revenues and spending have changed over time
With more than a twinge of irony, Murray Hill Incorporated, a liberal public relations firm, recently announced that it planned to run in the Republican primary in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District.
The solution to that disagreement is democracy. We should begin the long discussion about how best to reform our democracy, to restore its commitment to liberty and a Republic, by beginning a process to amend the Constitution through the one path the Framers gave us that has not yet been taken — a Convention.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision that enables corporations to become full-throated participants in our political process by protecting their right to free speech raises a vexing philosophical question: if corporations are to get the same rights as people, why can’t they vote?
According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama’s nominees hostage until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer dollars to his home state get back on track. The two programs Shelby wants to move forward or else…
President Obama is coming under pressure from Democrats and civil liberties groups for failing to fill positions on an oversight panel formed in 2004 to make sure the government does not spy improperly on U.S. citizens.
South Australia’s thin-skinned candy-ass politicians passed a law prohibiting any anonymous political commentary on blogs (but not “real” news-sources) prior to elections on penalty of a fine of AU$1250. Defending the measure, South Australia’s Attorney General, Michael Atkinson claimed that a poster on AdelaideNow, Aaron Fornarino, was a fictional construct created by his political opponents to smear him. Turns out that Mr Fornarino lives just down the street from Atkinson’s office. Humiliated, Atkinson rescinded the censorship law: “From the feedback we’ve received through AdelaideNow, the blogging generation believes that the law supported by all MPs and all political parties is unduly restrictive. I have listened. I will immediately after the election move to repeal the law retrospectively… It may be humiliating for me, but that’s politics in a democracy and I’ll take my lumps.”
The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.
Remember what put the debate over net neutrality into high gear? In 2007, EFF and the Associated Press confirmed suspicions that Comcast was clandestinely blocking BitTorrent traffic. It was one of the first clear demonstrations that ISPs are technologically capable of interfering with your Internet connection, and that they may not even tell you about it. After receiving numerous complaints, the FCC in 2008 stepped in and threw the book at Comcast, requiring them to stop blocking BitTorrent. The Comcast-BitTorrent experience put net neutrality at the top of the FCC agenda.
Love him or hate him, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), former employee of NBC, made Comcast’s befuddled CEO Brian “Comcatastrophe” Roberts look like a complete tool during yesterday’s hearing on the proposed Comcast/NBC mergepocalypse.
We don’t actually know if Brian “Comcatastrophe” Roberts is generally as confused and awkward as he appeared to be while trying to explain why Comcast would testify that FCC regulations provide adequate safeguards for consumers — after it just argued that the same rules were unconstitutional . Maybe he’s usually pretty sharp. We really don’t know.
What do the authors of the children’s book “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” and a 2008 book called “Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation” have in common?
Both are named Bill Martin and, for now, neither is being added to Texas schoolbooks.
In the discussion on our recent post about CwF + RtB business models and how they work, one of our regular critics has been filling the comments with links that supposedly “disprove” this model. I find it fascinating that this person — who claims to spend time helping musicians — spends so much time in our comments constantly insisting that the examples that we show that work couldn’t possibly work.
Of course, this just shows how far gone AFACT and its members (Hollywood studios mainly) are out of touch with what this ruling is saying. The ruling points out, quite clearly, that the problem isn’t with the law and it’s not with the technology. Changing the law doesn’t fix things. The problem is with how the big movie studios have failed to adapt, and are now blaming totally blameless parties for their own failures.
The Vancouver Island, British Columbia, huckster is looking for donations or even a partnership in hopes of reviving the site that has become infamous for its mocking portrayal of the RIAA, which consists of Vivendi Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music.
Someone who prefers to remain anonymous sent over this odd story of a musical duo who put up a notice on the band’s website claiming that, due to “piracy,” they were no longer going to sell CDs. But the reasoning makes no sense at all:
NOTICE: Due to uncontrolled Music Piracy, [Our album] will no longer be sold to the general public. We refuse to cater to thieves and criminals. When the Worldwide Piracy problems is solved, then we will begin sales once again.
Separately, the CNN article is incredibly weak in that it makes the mistake of implying that the recording industry is the entire music industry. It completely ignores the fact that the overall music industry has actually been growing as sales of recorded music have dropped. People have just shifted their spending habits, and that likely would have happened whether or not any licensing deal had been worked out in 1999.
First, on the title, let’s get serious. Every time someone claims “piracy is stealing” it suddenly becomes that much more difficult to take them seriously, because it shows they’ve put no thought into their argument and are parroting specious arguments that have nothing to do with reality. Stealing means taking something away. Making a copy of something means there’s two such things, not one, and nothing is missing.
Wal-Mart is boxing out Redbox. Wal-Mart (WMT), the world’s largest retailer, has imposed strict limits on the number of DVDs any one customer can buy at a time, making it harder for movie-rental kiosks such as Coinstar’s (CSTR) Redbox to get their hands on large numbers of newly released discs.
While father Rupert Murdoch decries the “theft” of his news content, is his daughter Elisabeth admitting that some piracy must actually be accepted?
“Fans remain the best salesmen of our content, even if that behavior is on the borderline of piracy. Danger of the new world is that we must concede that we’ll lose some control,” Murdoch, who owns TV producer Shine, said in a speech to the NATPE TV conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday. That must take us to “the borderline of piracy”, she said, according to Broadcasting & Cable.
Smelling blood in the water after Amazon caved to Macmillan’s demand to stop selling e-books of their titles for only $10, News Corp Chief Rupert Murdoch says he, too, wants that deal.
As the latest episode of “the ebook wars” continues, there’s still lots of chatter about last weekend’s Macmillan/Amazon fight. Apparently a lot of authors are angry at Amazon for this. While I can understand how the fight might hurt some authors — and they’re justifiably worried about Amazon’s dominance in the ebook market today,
Here, Newsday’s counterpoint to the embarrassing report earlier this week about their dismal online subscriber numbers. That is not even part of their strategy, jerks.
So, with the New York Times going metered and rejecting a proposed membership model that would have been much more CwF+RtB-ish, I thought it might be worth looking at Mike’s list from the perspective of newspaper publishing. Though some of the ideas are more suited to musicians, it still qualifies as Ten Good Reasons to Buy.
Danny Sullivan comes to the rescue by pointing out that while Cuban is telling sites that Google traffic is worthless, he’s invested in Mahalo, an aggregator site that lives off of Google traffic and still tries to do some similar aggregation efforts, such as IceRocket.com (which is a direct competitor to Google News… though no one uses it). Meanwhile, an old interview dug up by Michael Arrington has Cuban talking about how much he’d like to invest in TechMeme — a similar aggregator. Clearly, Cuban is playing some sort of trick on media companies.
The Digital Economy Bill that is wending its glacial way through the UK parliament has produced an interesting row between the BPI (representing the interests of the major record labels) and the ISPs, telco’s and mobile network operators. They are arguing over who should pay how much to fund remedial measures to clamp down on illegal file-sharing. The BPI is in a tough place since the cheaper they argue the cost will be, the more the ISPs respond by saying “well then you can pay for it.” Minister Stephen Timms recently suggested the split should be 75/25 (with the BPI paying the greater amount).
The blog, if you didn’t know, basically found awkward stock photo images, but did so in a very promotional way, linking back to the original, and always including the original watermark. In other words, it was helping to advertise some rather unique iStockPhoto images — and as the site notes, lots of other sites have done the same — and even received book deals for it. It seems like iStock’s parent company, Getty Images, totally overreacted to a site that was only helping them, and not harming the company at all.
According to Hipple’s blog and conversations I had with Hipple and Mackie yesterday, Hipple submitted the photo to a stock agency around 1999/2000. When Mackie heard about the photo being sold, he got his lawyer to send Hipple a letter asking for the photo to be removed. According to Hipple, that happened within two days of when he received the letter.
Typepad administrator Jen has given Herald a deadline of January 29th to gut our coverage of the Second Life Justice League Unlimited’s wiki, citing a Typepad Terms of Service violation for “displaying copyrighted text and images without permission”. The Herald has declined to remove the disputed materials, setting the stage for a new media showdown between the press and an embarrassed group of Second Life avatars brandishing copyright claims.
UPDATE: Geoff Gerber, an IP lawyer has an interesting blog post about this. He writes, “There is no absolute defense to a right of publicity claim based upon parody,” and “It should also be noted that it is not clear that Celebrity Showdown would be considered a parody.” This is getting interesting. I’ve reached out to Antarctic Comics, the artist Brian Denham, and Olivia Munn for comments about this story, but have so far not gotten a reply from any of them.
Either way, this lack of concern for fair use is common: A music publisher tried to silence a critical podcast. A blogger sought to block an advocacy ad. Opponents of same-sex marriage looked to remove an unflattering YouTube clip. These and other “Takedown Hall of Shame” inductees likely think that it is difficult to punish a copyright holder for failing to consider fair use (it’s hard to prove), and probably take comfort in the fact that many ordinary Internet users lack the knowledge, time, or resources necessary to challenge the takedown.
ADM has, top it mildly, been the subject of considerable ire, criticism, and even criminal prosecution for price fixing (the subject of Matt Damon’s recent film The Informant and Fair Fight in the Marketplace, an excerpt of which appears below’s Woertz’s blathering), political corruption, destruction of the rainforests, and the forced labor of children.
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This is outright copyright abuse. Criticism is fair use. When anyone asks whether in fact fair use is grounded in the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech, all you need is to think of a situation like this — one can appropriate copyrighted works to criticize and parody the copyright holder. And to use the copyright laws to silence that critique has nothing to do with protecting intellectual property and the rights of a creator to profit from his, her, or its creation: it’s unconstitutional censorship! (Peter Bouchard wrote a good summary yesterday on ” The Battle against Bogus Takedowns, a topic I’ve touched on in the past.”
You gotta love snarky legal filings. We’ve already covered the ongoing saga between the clothing company behind The North Face and a teenager who started a parody line of clothing called The South Butt (short version, TNF got mad and despite lots of public outcry in favor of TSB, TNF’s parent company sued). You already knew that the folks behind The South Butt wouldn’t necessarily respond in a conventional manner. They had already set up a Facebook app to see if people could tell the difference between a face and a butt.
The real issue here is that, once again, you have people making rules who think they understand what copyright is for, and they don’t recognize what it really means at all.
“In Princeton, we picked up 9 inches of snow, Billerica had 7,” the weatherman said.
“The biggest amount that I could find … almost as big as me,” Bouchard said as he stepped closer to the camera, shifted his eyes sideways and added, “About nine 9 inches.”
The video quickly became an Internet sensation, leading many to believe Bouchard was making an off-color joke.
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Channel 7 yanked the clip off YouTube citing a copyright claim, and the station doesn’t intend to address the blooper on air.
Documents leaked late last year containing sections of the draft agreement led to speculation that the treaty would focus more on copyright reform, in light of increased digitization, than on trademarks and the fight against counterfeiting (see “Leaks drive fears over ACTA”).
Three-strikes style measures to tackle illegal file-sharing are being secretly discussed at the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) talks in Mexico.
Okay. Pick your jaws up off the floor. That last sentence is so ridiculous and so false; it’s amazing he thought that he could get away with it. Exactly which governments have “sought public comments” on ACTA? The answer? None. Why? Because no government has yet revealed what ACTA is officially. Hell, in the most recent ACTA negotiations, held in Mexico, the government wanted to force the public to sign NDAs just to attend a public meeting, and then had industry representatives mocking public concerns and demanding that a blogger leave the proceedings for live Tweeting the meetings. Yes, “sought public comments” indeed. Does he think that if he says day is night people just believe him? And the idea that the government is “far from keeping [ACTA] secret” is pure hogwash. A comparison of ACTA secrecy to similar negotiations suggest that ACTA is being kept exceptionally secret.
A UGA employee is accused of trying to bilk money from students in exchange for covering up alleged computer violations, according to university police.
This is going to be a rant against windows. If you don’t like hearing negative things about windows then don’t read this. Seriously, don’t read this. On the other hand, if you like hearing about windows problems then please continue
So many times there are people who waffle on about how windows just works. How everything is all plug and play and automatic. Us Linux people like to call it plug and pray In this particular case it was trying to get windows to recognize a simple little Kingston USB memory stick.
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Compared to windows, maintaining Linux is an absolute breeze. Want to delete a lot of drivers? Just select them all and delete them, simple. Want to reinstall drivers? Just reinstall the package, simple.
People wonder why I don’t like windows. This is a prime example right there. A simple little memory stick problem caused hours of wasted time and effort. The necessary drivers were already installed. The configuration file was in the rightful place. It was just that the operating system itself couldn’t see what was right under it’s nose. Ok, lets be fair and say that the drivers were not on the system. An example of that happened that evening with a laptop and a web camera. A simple little web camera with no driver disk. Not a real problem I thought. Just go to the manufacturers web site and download the drivers. No drivers on the chipset (pixart) manufacturers site. Googling came up with the drivers, oops you have to either register or pay for the drivers. WTD!! (short for “What The Duck!!” Just another way of scamming people out of their money. Suffice it to say that this particular web camera didn’t work on that laptop. Under Linux it worked just fine, with no black magic needed to be performed.
In this episode: Three quarters of the Linux kernel code is written by developers being paid to do so and Facebook transforms PHP performance. We promise to give up the command line for two weeks and ask whether Ubuntu is wrong to switch the default search engine in Firefox from Google to Yahoo. Plus, we introduce two new sections.
Registration is open to the public for Texas Linux Fest 2010, to be held at the Monarch Event Center in Austin Texas. The conference sessions and expo hall will be open all day Saturday, April 10th. Evening social events will take place on Friday night (April 9th) and Saturday night (April 10th).
In order to do that, we not only had to count on caring volunteers, we counted on a world-wide community to put together the distro that works best for us. That would be Linux Mint. We had to count on donations provided by The Linux Community to fuel the vehicles needed to transport the equipment…something we still count upon. We had to rely upon scripts written by people around the world to do the network installations.
Since the release of its previous version in May 2009, at least 30 additional flash chip families and half a dozen variants for each family are now being supported by Flashrom.
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Aside from Linux (which flashrom already has binary packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, and openSUSE) flashrom already supports FreeBSD, DragonFly, Nexenta, Solaris, and even Mac OS X.
Ubuntu makes it even easier. There, all I had to do was to tell the operating system’s built-in Update Manger that, “Yes, I would like it to move me up to Ubuntu 9.10,” and I could get on with unpacking KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) units. In both cases, within an hour that didn’t require anything else from me, I had upgraded two operating systems.
I don’t know about you, but when I half-a-dozen other things going on and my brain is working at half-speed, these are my kinds of upgrades.
The Linux Foundation has announced that the Call for Papers deadline for LinuxCon 2010 will be the 31st of March. Registration for the non-profit organisation’s second annual conference, which will take place from the 10th to the 12th of August, 2010 in Boston Massachusetts, is now open. Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation said that, “LinuxCon has quickly become the destination for collaborating in person on all matters Linux”.
The next version of Linux is not only the first to offer the Nouveau KMS graphics driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware, it also comes with a multitude of improvements for the two AMD/ATI and Intel graphics drivers which support Kernel-based Mode Setting (KMS).
NVIDIA has been at work on the 195.xx driver series for some months already and has delivered beta releases to the public that offer VDPAU improvements and new features along with faster X Render performance. This evening they have published a new beta driver for the public, this time it’s 195.36.03.
By now, most MakeUseOf readers should know all about BitTorrent, the most popular peer-to-peer technology on the web. We’ve talked about the protocol more than once, and even released the Big Book of Bittorrent—a great place to start if you find bittorrent too confusing for your use.
There are thousands of BitTorrent clients on the market; that is, thousands of applications you can use to download files using BitTorrent technology. If you’re curious which BitTorrent program is the best, everyone has their own favorite – but today, we’re going to profile what I believe is an underappreciated piece of software: Deluge.
Luckily, most any of today’s Linux workstation products can run most any Windows program, including all the common genealogy programs (The Master Genealogist, Legacy Family Tree, Ancestral Quest, Family Tree Maker, etc.). Anyone who uses Linux does not need to feel left out.
Several Windows emulators or virtualization products are available for Linux users. In fact, WINE (which stands for “WINE Is Not an Emulator) is very popular. WINE has the advantage of running Windows programs without purchasing a copy of Windows. WINE is available free of charge at http://www.winehq.org.
Many of us enjoyed comic books in our teen years. Some of us have never outgrown them. While some people read an issue and toss it (or put it in a polypropylene bag to sell in 20 years), others like to keep their art archived and online. To help manage such collections, Bradley Swartout has created CBViewer, a program that lets you view compressed comic book archives.
What is nice about the gnome-shell concept, is the use of virtual desktops, I know they have always been there, but it makes it a natural intuitive task. Switching applications from one desktop to the other is a pleasure, that makes it easy to configure your desktops the way you want it quickly…
Gnome 3.0 promises to give Linux the desktop polish it needs.
It’s been a long time in the coming but this year Linux will get a makeover, thanks to the Gnome project. In September the Gnome team, makers of one of the most popular desktop interfaces for Linux, will release version 3.0 of their desktop environment and they are promising “big user-visible changes”.
Ubuntu user Brian Vidal thinks so and set about creating a framework for just that; introducing new users to their new desktop via a slick informative ‘tour’.
It seems that even the cat is using Ubuntu… the kids have seemingly seamlessly adapted to Open Source Software. My computer has also taken sides and is so slow it’s definitely trying to tell me something.
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This is an excerpt from my ramblings on going over to Open Source Software. My husband (The Open Sourcerer) has persuaded me to put it on here but I’ve really no idea why. He said “people will be interested, you’ll be surprised.”
….surely they have better things to do??? I’d be interested in the work/chore that is so bad you’d rather read this than do it.
Why did I order this laptop? It is one of many companies, known and less-known, who offer their hardware with Linux installed, instead of a version of Microsoft’s Windows. You can read about the beginning of my research and these companies in my previous blog, “Buying a Linux Laptop …”
I’m feeling right at home with Mint 8: It’s a highly professional, carefully thought-out distribution with the kind of polish that really makes it shine, and I highly recommend it to you, whether you’re a Linux newcomer or a seasoned veteran.
It comes with a strong selection of default software and because of its Ubuntu links, there’s little you could ever possibly need that isn’t just a few clicks away.
Don’t ask me what this is all about, because even I can’t figure out what’s going on here. China Mobile just released the 2.0 version of their Android based OMS mobile OS today. Among the new feaures supported like SVG and voice regognition the comany also claims that “Windows Mobile API” are now part of this update (!?).
I was reading yesterday this article of an interview to Warren East, one of the top guys at ARM.
He goes on about how ARM will succeed with or without Windows (not ME) supporting it once it starts being pumped into markets in the shape of a new architecture for netbooks.
With the launch of Apple’s new iPad this week, everyone seems to have their eyes tuned into the tablet market. Well jump on over to Gizmodo for the full review and comparison of the iPad, HP Slate, JooJoo, and a few Android tablets (Notion Ink Adam, Dell Mini 5, Archos 7 Android).
The Free Technology Academy is a “joint initiative from several educational institutes in various countries” that attempts to offer an online masters-level course in Free technologies.
1. the Introduction to Free Software and Open Standards;
2. the GNU/Linux Operating System;
3. Network Technologies;
4. Web Applications development;
5. Economical models;
6. Legal aspects of the Information Society;
7. Software development and
8. Case studies.
Mouse events sort of work, toplevel windows sort of work, keyboard doesn’t work yet but shouldn’t be hard to hook up. This is running in an emulator at the moment for ease of debugging, but it’s working just fine on physical hardware as well.
Firefox too mainstream for ya? Bored with Chrome or Opera? Linux users with a wandering eye can find plenty of browser alternatives, from the super-useful to niche browsers that offer moderate improvements on existing browsers like Firefox. We look at some of the “alternative” browsers on Linux that we’ve found interesting and useful over the years.
The Symbian Foundation is a non-profit organization that stewards the Symbian platform, an operating system for mobile phones and smartphones. The Symbian Foundation was founded by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics and AT&T. Today, their website runs Drupal.
The GNU General Public License (or GPL) seeks to codify the Four Software Freedoms coined by Richard Matthew Stallman — specifically:
1. The freedom to run it.
2. The freedom to study and adapt it.
3. The freedom to redistribute it.
4. The freedom to improve it.
It’s important to note that under the GPL authors can still release software commercially — that is, charge for it. But unlike most commercial software the end user is free and clear to modify what they’ve paid for, and even charge for the result should they so desire.
And although Symbian is already the most widely used mobile operating system in the world, its decision to open up its source code is more likely an attempt to push back a challenge from Android than to undercut the proprietary mobile operating systems such as iPhone and BlackBerry. Android is projected to become the second-most used mobile operating system behind Symbian by the end of 2012.
In recent news, the Symbian Foundation announced that “All 108 packages containing the source code of the Symbian platform can now be downloaded from Symbian’s developer web site”. This is great news!
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Either I’m too stupid, or I am unable to find any source code for those two components. I’m quite sure something essential like the API’s for making phone calls are considered part of the Symbian platform.
But carriers are already looking to connected devices to shore up slimming voice margins, and a variety of new tablets will come to market this year. It may seem odd to hear that the 10-year-old Symbian platform is targeting the new wave of devices, but it’s a smart move for an operating system that continues to lose market share — especially now that Nokia’s long-term hopes for high-end handsets hinge on Maemo.
On Thursday, the Symbian Foundation announced that it had completed the open-sourcing of its mobile operating system — the largest such migration in software history.
ZDNet UK spoke to Lee Williams, chief executive of the Symbian Foundation, to learn more about the implications of the open-sourcing process for the venerable OS and find out what people can expect from upcoming versions.
Export is easier to imagine. Given the range of things that can be done in WordPress posts and pages, I would think that only a relatively small subset of ODF would be needed beyond the packaging and some straightforward text markup. Here I would take as my model “what would this WordPress page look like if I printed it, and what ODF file would I have to create to generate equivalent output?”
At the very beginning of this year, we reported on rumors that a WordPress Android app was on its way. Today, that rumor became a reality: WordPress for Android 1.0 has been released to the Android Market.
Right after WordPress launched their Android app, the WP crew finished the final touches on their Blackberry app that rivals the one they built upon Google’s mobile OS.
It is not controversial to assert that Emacs is an environment all its own. You can find libraries and packages that allow Emacs to acknowledge and talk to outside environments, so it’s not a closed environment, but it’s different enough that there’s some fiddling involved to get it chatting with the outside world.
The LLVM developers have announced that their open source Clang compiler is now capable of compiling itself and LLVM correctly.This process, called self-hosting, is a major landmark for any compiler technology as it means that the compiler has become self-sufficient in terms of support for its own functionality.
On the heels of the Open Government Memo of January 21st, 2009, the Obama Administration has issued the Open Government Directive. The Directive tells agencies what they must do to meet the expectations set by the Memo. The directive names many deadlines for agency compliance, most of them around reducing FOIA backlogs and increasing the amount of agency data released to the public.
Last month saw the launch of http://www.data.gov.uk web site not only built on Open Source Technology but designed to give UK-data back to the UK-people. Number one amongst the endorsers was the most celebrated Knight and famous Wizard, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In the same month both UK political parties restated their total commitment to Open Source software.
Yesterday I had an interesting chat with Paul Clarke, an advisor to government departments on digital strategy, and a man with fingers in many interesting pies, about open government. The central issue we were ruminating upon was how to help those within government who want to open up, given the huge inertial forces operating against them.
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I think it comes down to realising that open government is really all of a piece with open source – that the ideas behind openness, collaboration and sharing are universally applicable, and not just limited to the realm of writing code. This means that once a company has begun the open source journey, and started to understand what that implies in terms of how software is created and used, they are then far better placed to work with governmental implementations of the same approach when they appear.
Several public administrations in Spain are sponsoring the development of Zorb, an open source extension to Nagios, an open source network monitoring tool. Zorb allows users to fine-tune the processing of events generated from the monitored instances, hosts and services. Zorb has just been published on the OSOR Forge.
Could you please tell us a bit of your background? What kind of scientist are you, for instance?
I started off in what was at the time fairly conventional metabolic biochemistry doing an undergraduate project looking at what food molecules platelets selected from plasma when given the choice. Then I moved more towards biophysics and biotechnology during my PhD, looking at ways to manipulate DNA to make what were then large libraries of variants of the gene specific protein, trying to figure out how to make protein copies of all of those genes and then select the one or two out the billions that did what we want. The theme since then has really been about developing new ways of applying physical techniques from physics and chemistry to looking at protein structure and function.
My current job at the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the UK is an interesting mix of developing new techniques, using these to tackle specific structural problems, and working with the scientists who come in to use our facilities to help them solve problems. I enjoy working with other people and this job gives me a good opportunity to do that and for that to be valued, something that is often missing in university settings.
Many of you have heard about California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative that launched last spring, which called for submissions of free digital textbooks in math and science for use by the state’s schools. Of the 16 textbooks submitted last year, 15 are openly licensed under one of the Creative Commons licenses—and all 10 that passed 90% of CA’s state standards are CC licensed.
When research findings are apparently called into question by leaked emails with opposing views, you can forgive those not involved in academic research for being a bit sceptical. After all how can people presented with the same data come up with findings that are diametrically opposed?
So, can citizen science help, and what might it mean? The idea around open science and citizen science is to have a sensible, grown-up, debate in a public arena and engage everyone in the research process.
It allows those who are not involved on a daily basis with research to hear opposing views and be engaged in the argument rather than being presented with only one view.
As regular readers of the Open Knowledge Foundation blog will know, bibliographic metadata is a subject close to our heart (see e.g., here, here and here). Hence we were delighted to see today’s announcement that CERN Library are releasing their bibliographic metadata under an open license!
In June 1994, Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist at the University of Southampton in the U.K., posted a message on a mailing list that called on fellow researchers to make their papers freely available on the internet. The message became known as the Subversive Proposal.
When I think about the political fortunes of open access, I find that I compare them privately to the political fortunes of clean energy. I know there are differences, but I keep returning to the similarities.
I’m not ready to say that the similarities are more salient than the differences. But it’s time to get these analogies out in the open.
One of the important roles of museums and galleries is education: helping the public to discover and explore the masterworks in their collections. So you would have thought that they would be only to happy to have images of those works exposed in the greatest online gallery of them all, Wikipedia. And yet there has been a certain resistance to this in some quarters, thanks – of course – to a crazy obsession with “copyright”.
Veridiana Sedeh and Jose Roberto de Toledo spoke with me from ABRAJI’s headquarters in Sao Paolo. During our conversations, Veridiana and Jose Roberto emphasized the importance of creating a public memory through smart journalism informed by access to government record-keeping. I met Veridiana through her work as a peer reviewer on the upcoming Global Integrity Report: 2009, and that led me to ABRAJI.
Today, as the globe struggles with an historic economic decline, it’s time for a new revolution. I’d like to advance a hypothesis: Today’s great competitive challenge isn’t going from Good to Great. For people, companies, and countries, it’s going from great to good.
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Call it the First Law of 21st Century Economics: today’s great challenge isn’t making the same old toxic junk, whether CDOs, Hummers, or soda, more efficiently — it’s making stuff that’s not toxic junk in the first place. That’s the challenge of going from great to good — and becoming what I’ve been calling a “Constructive Capitalist.”
When Google launched Extensions for Chrome in December, they had around 300 of them ready to go in their gallery. A day later, that number was already up to 500. By now, there are a few thousand available, and that number just got multiple by several times as Google has announced that the latest official version of Chrome, version 4, now natively supports Greasemoneky user scripts.
Adobe’s Flash technology has been taking a beating lately. Apple still won’t support it on its upcoming iPad or its iPhone. Steve Jobs calls it buggy and crash-prone and dismisses Adobe as being lazy. Adobe is trying to fight the negative vibes emanating from Cupertino and elsewhere. It has already pointed out that it will be easy to convert Flash apps into iPad apps, and now CTO Kevin Lynch is weighing in to defend Flash.
If you’re reading this article, chances are you don’t need to be convinced about the importance of anti-virus software. But since the “Do I really need it?” question does frequently come up, let’s address it right off the bat.
Under the “if people really don’t understand a subject bombard them with as many documents as possible in as short a time as possible” theory, today has seen a blizzard of statistics and data released on MPs’ expenses.
BAE Systems will pay fines of £280m in a deal with US and UK authorities to settle investigations into its actions in Saudi Arabia and Tanzania.
The firm will pay £250m in the US after admitting misleading authorities about payments that had a “high probability” of being used to help win contracts.
And it will hand over about £30m in the UK – a record criminal corporate fine.
Two of Japan’s most authoritative newspapers, Asahi Shimbun and Nikkei Shimbun both put a very similar notes on their front editorial on January 29th, which made net users upset.
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In Japan, traditional media take more confrontational attitude against the Internet, if you compare it with west. One reason is that their readers demographics is on older side, whilst the Internet is welcoming younger people.
The world-class (by number) gigantic newspapers are supported by those old generation who believe that those newspapers are the right information source. Any critics on the Internet is favoured to the majority of the readers who dislike the Internet.
For her part, Schroder, functioning as a journalist, seems to have expected the editorial to be treated as a piece of journalism. The fact that is wasn’t shows just how little understood the dual roles of a FOSS journalist really are.
Essentially, FOSS journalists are fellow-travelers, allies of FOSS developers but with concerns and constraints that often differ. Without exception, every one of them I have encountered has a lively interest and sympathy in their subject.
But they are also journalists, which means that they are not always going to act like other FOSS supporters. Sometimes, in the name of journalistic integrity, they are going to mention inconvenient truths and voice unpopular sentiments.
Playwright David Hare brings Craig Murray’s Murder in Samarkand to life in play for Radio 4
He drank a lot of whisky and had a shamefully leery eye when it came to women but, as our man in Tashkent, Craig Murray also exposed the brutal tyranny and torture of a regime which had little regard for human rights.
[...]
Murray is portrayed as an intelligent but slightly naive diplomat given the ambassador’s job, aged 43, in Uzbekistan, a country ruled then and now by the human rights-ignoring Islam Karimov. The play is set in 2003 when the “war on terror” was at its height and information obtained by the regime’s torturing of Muslim terror suspects was proving useful to the west.
Other organizations, such as a train company and a hotel chain in the UK, and a hamburger chain in Germany, are also testing liquid glass for a wide range of uses. A year-long trial of the spray in a Lancashire hospital also produced “very promising” results for a range of applications including coatings for equipment, medical implants, catheters, sutures and bandages. The war graves association in the UK is investigating using the spray to treat stone monuments and grave stones, since trials have shown the coating protects against weathering and graffiti. Trials in Turkey are testing the product on monuments such as the Ataturk Mausoleum in Ankara.
Technology should not become the “religion of counter-terrorism”, according to Civil Liberties Committee MEPs discussing the use of body scanners in the European Union (EU) yesterday.
Several MEPs argued in a debate with the EU’s counter-terrorism co-ordinator Gilles de Kerkhove that better information sharing among governments and security agencies should be at the forefront of the fight on terrorism.
The Highways Agency is assessing a system that will monitor the movement of traffic, by tracking drivers’ mobile phones, it has been confirmed.
The agency already uses cameras for similar data, as well as detection systems under the road, but wants to supplement the information and “fill in any gaps”.
The Home Affairs Committee was having another evidence session about the National DNA Database (NDNAD). This time, it was short as the committee had only two witnesses and they talked about their personal experience, so there was none of that litany of errors and misunderstandings that riddled the previous session.
Here’s a rather disturbing article published by CNN today. Apparently, many “states mandate that newborns be tested for anywhere between 28 and 54 different conditions, and the DNA samples are stored in state labs for anywhere from three months to indefinitely, depending on the state.”
If you are an innocent who happened to have been arrested in England or Wales, you’re unlikely to be able to go to the United States of America, ever again. Retention of DNA is not the only long term effect of an arrest. Having been arrested also disqualifies one from the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). The alternative is attempting to obtain a visa to enter the USA, a long and costly process with an uncertain outcome.
It’s not news that Britain has a lot of surveillance cameras, with around 60,000 run by local authorities alone. However, most cameras record only images, which are normally kept for a few weeks. Unless and until facial recognition technology improves significantly, these are not capable of creating a database of people’s movements.
Tony Blair has been accused of warmongering spin for claiming that western powers might be forced to invade Iran because it poses as serious a threat as Saddam Hussein.
Sir Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador to Iran, accused Blair of trying to make confrontation with Iran an electoral issue after the former prime minister repeatedly singled out its Islamic regime as a global threat in his evidence to the Iraq war inquiry yesterday.
At the Chilcott inquiry Tony Blair claimed the risk of terrorists being supplied WMDs by “rogue’ states justified a policy of invasion rather than containment and deterrence. Unlike Blair’s more reasoned cases for humanitarian intervention in countries like Kosovo and Sierra Leone, the former Prime Minister’s recent argument for the invasion of Iraq was less robust.
China may not only be breaking into Google’s network, but giving people deliberately bugged technology gear. Can we trust any technology that comes from China?
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According to the Sunday Times, “A leaked MI5 document says that undercover intelligence officers from the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of Public Security have also approached UK businessmen at trade fairs and exhibitions with the offer of ‘gifts’ and ‘lavish hospitality.’ The gifts — cameras and memory sticks — have been found to contain electronic Trojan bugs which provide the Chinese with remote access to users’ computers.”
The country’s EU membership has put pressure on the authorities to contain the greed of firms building on protected sites, Bulgarian environmentalists said. Dnevnik, EurActiv’s partner publication in Bulgaria, reports.
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND The World Economic Forum is the last place I would have expected to encounter the new populism. But when a venerable European central banker, a man whose very bearing connotes the old capitalist values, told me privately that he is now convinced that the financial system is too important to be left to the free market, I knew we were wandering into new territory.
I don’t know why, but for some reason perfectly sane people go to Davos and then write a curious type of article – not quite sure how to describe it but words like smug, supine, surface level and subservient all come to mind. Its like biting the hand that feeds, but without teeth, and giving the fingers a grateful little lick at the same time. These two articles are typical of the genre – I had them on the spike for shafting, as it were – as to my mind they show this particular issue off quite well.
First, Alan Rusbridger on “Google is another country”:
Google is not unlike many other countries (Britain, say) which turn up at Davos with half the cabinet. Schimdt was flanked by his senior team – including David Drummond, Nikesh Arora, Marissa Mayer, and Chad Hurley. All presidents or vice-presidents, and worth a few billion between them. They are sitting on mountains of cash and no debt. So, not very much like most countries.
Luntz, who has been reprimanded by American Association for Public Opinion Research for his misleading polling work, advises Republicans to keep it simple: 1) Never minimize the pain of those suffering from the crisis; 2) Acknowledge the need for reform that ensures it never happens again; 3) Then lie, lie, lie. The killer lie? Characterize any meaningful Wall Street reform legislation as “the big bank bailout bill.”
Nine months after he penned a memo laying out the arguments for health care legislation’s destruction, Republican message guru Frank Luntz has put together a playbook to help derail financial regulatory reform.
The Center for Media and Democracy and BanksterUSA are pleased to present our Golden Throne Award to T. Timothy Ryan Jr., President and Chief Executive Officer of the Securities Industries and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA). SIFMA is the leading behind-the-scenes lobby group representing big banks and investment firms, as well as broker-dealers and other peddlers of financial instruments, which Warren Buffett labeled “weapons of mass destruction.” SIFMA lobbies Congress and financial regulators, and handles securities-related press for some of the biggest players in the financial crisis–Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Fidelity Investments.
With 27 million Americans unemployed or underemployed, we are in a big hole and it is going to take big ideas and, unfortunately, big money to climb out of it. I would prefer that these funds come out of AIG’s pocket, and not mine.
Megabank CEOs didn’t have time for President Barack Obama when he gave a major speech on Wall Street in September, but they had no trouble making it to Capitol Hill this morning to plead their case to the 20-something staffers who can help them stop reform in its tracks.
Kicking off a two-day event designed to “help” legislative aides who will be writing the rules designed to rein in and reform Wall Street, the CEOs made it clear that they would be there “anytime” a young, confused congressional aide needed help understanding a complex topic.
Via The Hill, here’s House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) telling Fox News yesterday that the extended debate over Democratic priorities (ie, health care reform) has created an uncertainty in the business community that has hobbled economic recovery.
A hospital trust branded the worst in Britain by the NHS regulator actively discouraged staff from expressing fears about the safety of patients, an independent inquiry is expected to conclude.
The Italian government is moving ahead with its plans to hold YouTube accountable for its users’ copyright infringements. According to new regulations that have recently been proposed by the Italian government, YouTube would have to get a TV license to operate in Italy. Should Italy move ahead with this regulation, YouTube would have to follow the same rules and regulations as traditional broadcast channels. These new rules would eliminate the “safe harbor” rules that currently shield services like YouTube.
Following the ethnic unrest in Xinjiang in July 2009, internet access in the region has been severely restricted – far more than in other parts of China.
The situation is gradually improving, but an American blogger living in the area says many sites are still strictly censored.
The spectre of broadscale Internet censorship in Australia has been covered previously here on The Next Web before, but many outside Australia may wonder: why should you care if you don’t live in Australia.
If you’re not aware of what’s proposed, the short version is that Australia is proposing to introduce a compulsory firewall that filters content based on a blacklist of banned sites.
What’s going to be on that list is even now still somewhat confused. The Censorship Minister Stephen Conroy has stated that all Refused Classification content will be banned, which in Australia would extend to computer games unsuitable for children (Australia has no adult (R18+) rating for computer games,) small breasts, information about euthanasia, discussion forums on anorexia, as well as the usual nasties of child porn. To complicate matters, a site may be refused classification in Australia if it links to a site that is refused classification, which could literally result in half the internet being blocked.
In the past, we’ve seen various attempts by people to claim they had some sort of intellectual property right over a TV show or movie about them, but those claims rarely get very far. We’ve also seen people in prison with too much time on their hands suddenly claim IP rights over their name or likeness.
On Jan. 14, the violinist Hilary Hahn scored a rare gig for a classical music performer: She appeared on “The Tonight Show.” And not just any “Tonight Show,” but the “Tonight Show” during the final days of Conan O’Brien’s brief tenure as host. Everybody was watching. So it came as no surprise that Hahn’s new album, “Bach: Violin and Voice,” debuted that week at No. 1 on the Billboard classical charts.
This is the second year that I was privileged to attend (and speak) at Midem, the big music industry conference that takes place each January.
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Instead, the word that I kept hearing was “quiet.” Almost everyone you spoke to mentioned how “quiet” Midem was this year. Attendance was down (apparently about 10% from last year, when I remember them saying that attendance had also been down about 10%), but that’s not too surprising given the state of the economy and the general turmoil of the industry.
The EU is reportedly on the cusp of undermining Internet users’ fundamental freedoms for good as the European Council is putting pressure on MEPs to agree to a watered-down version of the telecoms package tomorrow (4 November), making it possible to cut off the Web connections of suspected illegal downloaders without a fair trial.
“To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, but will be back soon,” it says. “We protect the world — but will you protect us?”
I can’t claim p2pnet has been protecting the world, but I’ve done my best to unspin some of the vested interest corporate spin, and expose a few of the lies and corruption.
I launched p2pnet close to 10 years ago and in that time I’ve published thousands of pages on topics ranging from Big Music’s black-hearted persecution of its own customers, through the CBC’s amazing new US licensing plan to Is Michael Bublé a pot head? and The Wonder that is iPad!, to quote from some of today’s posts.
Unfortunately, in the copyright realm, the Obama administration had devoted itself, like its predecessors, largely to a content industry agenda which has given us mind-numbingly long copyright terms, intrusive legally backed digital rights management, and even a new proposal to cut individuals off from the internet simply for being accused, three times, of illicit downloading.
The cognitive capitalism and New Growth Theory models are an updated version of Daniel Bell’s “post-industrial” thesis. The problem is, post-industrialism is self-liquidating. Technological progress destroys the technical prerequisites for capturing value from technological progress.
Rick Edmonds, over on Poynter Online, notes that the classified ads sector dropped to $6 billion in 2009. This compares with $10 billion in 2008, and $19.6 billion in 2000.
In November 2009, an indie movie received unprecedented worldwide attention after becoming a massive hit on BitTorrent networks. ‘Ink’, which was downloaded well in excess of 400,000 times, shot into the top 20 movies on iMDb. In a new interview, the creators talk about their experience and the future of movie distribution.
This is a lengthy and complex ruling, but it is remarkable that it has fallen upon a judge that seems to get the importance of the ruling in the wider context, and also who got the technical complexities involved. Cowdroy J has managed to wade through the technical issues with exceptional clarity, and has produced a ruling that should become an instant classic. The judge accurately identifies that the case hinges on two simple questions. Have the iiNet customers infringed copyright directly? The answer is yes.
With the conclusion of the 7th round of ACTA negotiations in Guadalajara, Mexico last week, participating countries issued the now-standard boilerplate statement that merely repeats the agenda items and provides no real insight into the progress of the talks. While the statement is does little to advance the desire for greater transparency, reports from New Zealand and Sweden shed far more light on where things stand.
[Updated:] The Chamber issued a statement last week supporting transparency within limits and describing the talks as trade negotiations. “Given the importance of this agreement to our economy and to consumers, we must not allow ACTA to be derailed by a minority opposed to protecting the rights of artists, inventors, and entrepreneurs,” it said. “The US Chamber has also been supportive of greater transparency in these talks. We recognise the constraints of international trade negotiations; however we urge the administration to ensure the congressional committees of jurisdiction – as representatives of the American people – are fully briefed on the scope of the ACTA negotiations and why concluding this agreement expeditiously is in the country’s best interests.”
It’s been amusing watching the entertainment industry lobbyists try to come up with talking points in support of their most favored trade agreement du jour, ACTA. A popular one is that nothing in it can or will change US law. But, of course, if you talk to the folks who know how these things work in DC, you quickly learn that’s hogwash. There wouldn’t be any ACTA at all if it wasn’t out to change the laws, and it wouldn’t be so secretive if it was just designed to keep the status quo.
Via Michael Geist, we’re pointed to a short interview with a representative from the US Trade Reps office, where the issue over ACTA concerns is raised, and the response is almost comically ridiculous. Stan McCoy, the assistant US Trade Representative for intellectual property and innovation, responds to complaints by saying that there has been a lot of misrepresentation about ACTA and that it really has a lot about counterfeiting and isn’t just about copyright. And….? Well, that’s it.
The saga of the misleadingly named “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” has only gotten more ridiculous since I decried it in November.
For those of you whose eyes (understandably) glaze over at any mention of multilateral trade agreements, ACTA is an attempt by the United States and dozens of other countries to write new rules to combat counterfeiting of trademarked goods, as its name suggests, and to stop copyright violations as well, a goal left out of its moniker. (If you’ve got a spare 90 minutes, you can watch a video of a panel discussion I led about ACTA at Google’s Washington offices last month.)
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That level of secrecy has begun to draw criticism from groups that were early proponents of ACTA. For example, in November the Motion Picture Association of America wrote a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk requesting greater transparency and public participation. And at the end of January, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce voiced similar thoughts in a press release — sentiments that went unsaid in a June 2009 endorsement of ACTA.
Sorry to rattle on about ACTA, but it seems there’s something of a concerted campaign to “counter” all the noise we little people are making. Here’s a line that might sound familiar, this time from Stanford McCoy, “Assistant United States Trade Representative for Intellectual Property and Innovation”:
Intellectual property protection is critical to jobs and exports that depend on innovation and creativity. Trade in counterfeit and pirated products undermines those jobs and exports, exposes consumers to dangerous knock-offs from toothpaste to car parts, and helps fund organised crime.
Ah-ha: what this reveals is that the reason ACTA won’t “rewrite” the rules is because the rules are *already there*, according to this interpretation: ACTA will simply foreground them. It’s tacitly admitting that there are latent ACTA-like provisions in the eCommerce laws; the big difference is that ACTA will activate them, so to speak.
The London Stock Exchange will switch on the first module of its Linux and Unix-based trading platform in September, replacing existing Microsoft .Net architecture.
IBM will be required to meet security standards established by the government’s Information Assurance guidelines for all networks. The Air Force says its network manages the operations of nine major commands, almost 100 bases and 700,000 active military personnel worldwide.
The X.org and kernel developers are working on drivers to support the DirectX 11 graphics cards in AMD’s Radeon HD 5000 series. While the proprietary AMD drivers have been supported for some time, not even the latest, recently released version co-operates with X Server 1.7, which has already been available for several months. The kernel developers have released numerous new stable kernels and are discussing the integration of utrace in great detail.
Now the size of a stock Linux kernel and the size of the initrd in a vanilla installation of Ubuntu 9.10 are not necessarily related, but I could swear this was never a problem before now. I am more-or-less certain that I have installed minimal Ubuntu systems on computers with only 32Mb of memory — some within the past couple of years — and they started up fine. And Debian runs without complaint on the machine, although I haven’t needed to check the size of the initrd in Debian, so it might be different. (It appears to be less than 8Mb for initrd.img-2.6.32-trunk-486.)
Two days ago we reported on hybrid graphics coming to Linux in a crude form that allowed switching between graphics processors on notebook computers that utilize dual graphics processors, one that’s meant to deliver the best energy efficient performance while the other GPU is for maximizing the graphics performance in demanding environments. Just 24 hours after this kernel patch hit the Internet it already went through four revisions by Red Hat’s David Airlie, which delivered better switching and greater notebook compatibility. Since yesterday this patch has already undergone a few more revisions.
If you liked Winamp and thought you had to stop using it under Linux, well, think again. XMMS is a very light yet powerful audio player that looks and works very similar to Winamp.
I mentioned a script yesterday, so I’ll mention another one today — another sort of “download manager” for the console. This isn’t nearly as feature-ful as fttps, but since it approaches the issue in a concise and straightforward way, I thought it worth bringing to attention.
One of the most radical and highly-anticipated changes that is documented in the specifications is a new single-window mode, an optional view that brings together all of the floating windows and converges them into a single cohesive user interface. To get a hands-on look at this feature, I compiled GIMP 2.7.1 and its core dependencies—GEGL and Babl—from source code, which can be obtained from the GNOME git repository.
Since the invention of PDF format in 1993 PDF documents have become extremely popular tool for exchanging information across the Web. Even now PDF beats more recent DJVU and various e-book formats in terms of popularity.
I have used this toy to author a few documents and I must admit it is not half bad. You type in words, press some buttons and things happen. Unlike a WYSIWYG garbage-tron Lyx won’t just let you press enter a million times in lieu of proper vertical white space management. If you want to have vertical separation you need to break up your text into paragraphs, sections or insert special vertical space markers (as shown above). The environment gives you access to most of the popular commands you can pick from the drop down menus. It also ships with bunch of style templates you can load up and use. I don’t think you can directly import packages into your documents, but I guess the point of this tool is to keep things simple and easy.
Backing up data can be difficult, especially when you only want to copy files that changed since the last backup. It can be even more troublesome when you have to remember to start the process manually,or you have to delete old backups to make room for new ones. Because of these difficulties, some people decide not to back up data at all, and feel the pain when they accidentally delete the wrong file or their system crashes. TimeVault is a backup utility for Ubuntu that addresses these problems.
I look forward to hugs and beer over the weekend. However, it’ll be an unusual experience for me this year… This will be the first time that I am at FOSDEM “on business”. Much of my time during the event is already preallocated to various meetings. Sadly this leaves very little time for attending talks…
And yes, I’m just the sort of person who likes to mess with Alphas, so I downloaded the Kubuntu and Ubuntu versions, for the sheer unparalleled joy of seeing what’s new under the hood.
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Your Kubuntu and/or Ubuntu system comes with document readers that support a host a number of different formats. KDE has Okular, which I use to read the countless PDF manuals that envelop the information I need from time to time. It can also open JPG and PNG files, open document text files (ODT), but it can’t open plain text.
What kind of document reader doesn’t support plain text?
And before you GNOME users get too comfortable and start pointing fingers at KDE, allow me to point out that Evince, the multi-format document reader that comes with GNOME, does not support plain text either (click on the Figure to the right).
I like dabbling in web development and design and so I was quite happy to be able to participate in the redesign of the new KDE.org website due to release in conjunction with KDE SC 4.4 on February 9th. This was what I was working on during the past week and I must say I’ve learned and experienced quite a lot from trying to contribute.
With KDE Software Compilation v4.4.0 tagged and going through final release engineering processes, early reviews and discussions about it are appearing around the Internet. It’s great to see the interest bubbling around it all.
Hot on the heels of digiKam 1.0, Gilles Caulier announced the 1.1.0 release of the popular open source photo management application. While the main focus in version 1.1.0 was on squashing bugs, the new release of digiKam does sport a couple of new nifty features and improvements.
I remember recently trying the latest version of Kubuntu simple because I was getting sick of compiling with Gentoo. Well Kubuntu was fine and dandy. But when it came to install software I had to use the new KPackageKit and that was fine, it didn’t bother me. What came to bother me was that it’s a bloody pain in the arse to mess with.
Welcome to part 2 of our overview of the KDE 4.3 System Settings panel, the replacement for the old control panel of KDE 3.5. Today we’re going to look at two more master sections. Namely, Personal and Network & Connectivity. So sit back and enjoy.
Looking for other software sometimes makes try out a whole lot of different things. In this case I saw Bilbo, a blogging tool in KDE and so I was intrigued. The thing is that I wanted to go beyond trying out Bilbo. I ended up downloading KDE. There’s a Kubuntu desktop package in the repository so I decided to get it. There’s nothing to lose by trying out KDE anyway, [...] For two days’ worth of being in KDE, it is getting a little better by the second day, with all these things getting cleared up and working for me. The widgets aren’t so bad, really. I like it that I don’t have to install Tweetdeck and I also love the picture slideshow widget which gives me random images from an image directory in my laptop.
The GNOME Foundation is happy to announce a substantial donation from the Mozilla Corporation to benefit the GNOME Project’s accessibility efforts. The donation will help continue the collaborative efforts between GNOME and Mozilla on Accessibility.
I recently did an interview on Python with the Pardus Linux magazine. Pardus Linux is a distribution developed in Turkey (by the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology) with the goal of being usable by “normal” people rather than just geeks.
Pardus are great supporters and users of Python. A while ago they chose Python as their standard language for custom package and configuration management tools.
There are various approaches to answering this question. The broad answer is: “any of them,” but that’s not very helpful if you’re just looking for a place to start.
The problem is, there never can be one best Linux distribution for everyone, because the needs of each user tend to be unique. Telling someone who’s looking for a good introductory distribution to try Gentoo, for instance, would be a mistake because for all its positive qualities, Gentoo is decidedly not a beginner’s distro.
What is Linux? It’s a free operating system that does everything Windows will do. Disclaimer: Linux is free in the sense of freewill more so than free beer! Any computer that is capable of running Windows is usually capable of running Linux. Linus Torvalds invented the original Linux kernel (the heart of the Linux operating system) in 1991. He released the source code and made it publicly downloadable. Anyone is free to download the Linux kernel and make their own version (or distributions as they’ve come to be called) of Linux. There are hundreds of distributions currently available.
The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the development version 1.9.60
We are very close to the next stable Version of Elive 2.0! These are the last development versions coming so you are more than welcome to report bugs NOW! If you are an Elive-translator this is the moment to finish all the remaining Messages to be translated. Thank you!
I very excited about this release of VortexBox. We are moving from being just a media server to a music player as well. This version of VortexBox includes VortexBox Player. You can use your internal sound card or external USB DAC to play your music. VortexBox Player supports music recorded at up to 24-bit/192kHz. This is higher then most players support including the Sonos and SqueezeBox line of hardware players.
When Jim Whitehurst was named CEO of Red Hat, some Wall Street analysts had doubts because of his lack of experience running a software company.
Those doubts have been erased by the Raleigh company’s performance since Whitehurst, previously the chief operating officer at Delta Air Lines, took over in 2007. Throughout the recession, the company posted double-digit revenue growth. Its stock, meanwhile, has doubled since last March.
According to the Statistics page on the wiki, last week we passed 1 million IP checkins for Fedora 12 systems! This is roughly on par with where Fedora 11 was at the same time after its release, although it’s hard to discern the actual number of installations worldwide.
The credits for the catchy title go to legendary Thomas Dolby, but the real thanks go to the team of scientists, engineers and geeks at CERN, who developed this distribution.
If you’re into science, you will, sooner or later, run into Linux. Any serious mathematical, computational work is done on Linux. From amazing 3D movies to simulating the Big Bang over to crunching sparse matrices in a cloud and folding proteins at home, it all comes down to using Linux. As a single host, Linux is merely a machine, but it starts to shine in its hundreds and thousands.
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I was tremendously pleased with Scientific Linux. First, it’s a RedHat distro, which means you get the classic Linux usage model, excellent stability and many years of support. Second, it has everything you need – multimedia, desktop effects, Samba sharing, anything.
When Debian issues a point release, as it just did with the current Stable distribution Lenny going from the 5.0.3 to 5.0.4, it’s no big deal. They happen. But you don’t need to throw out your Lenny install CDs or do any kind of reinstallation.
Amber Graner: This Ubuntu Women interview in the Women of Ubuntu Series is with Jane Silber, the current Canonical COO, but as of March 1st, 2010, she will be taking the reins of Canonical as the CEO. More about this announcement and Jane’s history with Canonical can be found here (http://blog.canonical.com/?p=307). First I want to welcome you Jane, and thank you for taking part in this interview series.
Canonical and the Ubuntu community are busy polishing Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), a major upgrade set to debut in April 2010. But before the new Linux distribution arrives, the Ubuntu community will host an Ubuntu Global Jam from March 26 to March 28. The big question: Will customers and partners also join in the Jam? Should they? Here are some thoughts.
While desktop Ubuntu shines as the leader among Linux distributions, with analysts estimating their share up to 95 percent of the Linux desktop market, Ubuntu’s server version lags. Expect huge advances in Ubuntu server installations during 2010 as a result of Ubuntu improvements, customer concern as SunOS comes under Oracle control, and restlessness among the Red Hat user base. Unlike Ubuntu server clients, Red Hat server clients must pay license fees, necessary because many applications remain Red Hat specific. Troy expects the Ubuntu server to make substantial advances attaining more application support and certifications.
So, we’re looking for your input: will you give Yahoo+Bing a try and help Ubuntu a little, or will changing to Google be the first thing you do on any 10.04 machine? Perhaps more importantly, is Canonical’s move a step away from its free software roots while also arguably providing users with inferior search results by default, or just sound business sense?
Rather than bashing the hell out of Canonical for its evil, evil attempt to make more money (SHOCKING, I know!), and given my foolish optimism that Mother Nature threw up on me, I prefer to look at the full half of this whole shenanigan (this word is AWESOME btw) glass thing. (the whole shenanigan, in case you are not up-to-date with the news, is that Yahoo will now be the default web search client in Ubuntu, replacing the unarguably superior Google).
Qnap Systems has upgraded two of its Linux-based, SMB-focused network-attached storage (NAS) systems to incorporate Intel’s D410 Atom processors. The two-drive, 4TB TS-239 Pro II and the four-drive, 8TB TS-439 Pro II also feature Qnap NAS 3.2 management software, with new iSCSI and virtualization features, plus support for VMware’s vSphere4.
Wind River has rev’d its embedded development tool-suite for Linux and VxWorks. Upgraded software is said to include: the Wind River Workbench 3.2 integrated development environment, now synchronized with Eclipse 3.5; the JTAG-based Wind River On-Chip Debugging 3.2, which adds multi-core and multi-target support; and the Wind River Compiler 5.8.
U.K.-based Anders Electronics announced a Linux-ready ARM Cortex-A8 COM (computer on module) with up to 256MB of RAM, 512MB of flash storage, 10/100 Ethernet, and integrated WiFi. The CM-T3530 comes with Texas Instruments OMAP3503 or OMAP3530 CPUs clocked at up to 720MHz, has a touchscreen controller, includes a camera interface, according to the company.
Via Technologies announced a baseboard designed to integrate a previously released, Linux-ready Pico-ITXe board into a car’s instrument panel. The Epia-P710-D offers three Mini PCI Express slots, a SIM slot, SD card reader, plus USB, IDE, and SATA ports, according to the company.
Open stacks based on Linux, Qt and similar tools are in a much better position simply because more people and companies can participate and therefore create a larger pool of shared resources that is hard to impossible for a closed platform to match without joining in. (Let’s not forget that S60 is opening up, either, and bringing Qt along with it too.) I don’t know what the ultimate role Maemo itself will play in all of this, but in an open ecosystem it doesn’t need to be IKotH to be successful either, anymore than any of the Linux distributions need to be IKotH in the server space for server side Linux to flourish.
Nokia’s N900 is not a phone, OK. Well, it is a phone, in that it has a SIM slot, and you can use it to make voice calls. And it supports HSDPA and has a front facing camera so you can make video calls. But actually it is more a mini computer than a mobile phone.
The N900 runs a new operating system, Maemo 5, which is based on Linux and so is open to application development by third parties. No, Symbian isn’t going away, and no, it doesn’t look as though Nokia will push out a slew of Maemo-toting devices during 2010, but yes, Nokia does think there is a place for very high end, very capable mini computers with telephony. And the N900 is its way of showing us that.
Motorola and Verizon Wireless announced a mid-range Android phone sporting the former’s MotoBlur UI. Due for a March launch, the “Devour” offers a 3.1-inch HVGA capacitive touchscreen, a side-slider keyboard, three-megapixel camera, CDMA/EVDO 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and a full complement of apps, including Google Maps Navigation, says Motorola.
Days after a hacker broke open the inner multi-touch capabilities of Google’s Nexus One, Google announced it is now offering pinch-to-zoom capability on the Android phone via a software update. In other Google news, the company has posted pictures of the Linux-based Chrome OS running on a tablet prototype.
Google announced on Tuesday it has issued an over-the-air free software update for users of its new Nexus One smartphone. The update will come via the telephone network instead of having to plug it into a computer and download the software.
China-based HiVision is readying an Android-based “PWS700CA” netbook with a 600MHz Rockchip ARM9 processor and a 7-inch, WVGA touchscreen, and according to one preview, it’s likely to sell for under $100. HiVision also recently introduced a Linux-based “PWS700B” netbook, as well as an “EB-0600S” e-reader, says the company.
ARM CEO Warren East believes that netbooks will come to dominate the PC market – and it won’t be that long before it happens.
“Although netbooks are small today – maybe ten per cent of the PC market at most – we believe over the next several years that could completely change around and that could be 90 per cent of the PC market,” PC Pro says he says.
Given the fierce competition in the market of the tablets where all the big companies in the sector: Apple, Google and Microsoft have an alternative in the market or in development, a Spanish company presents after Apple a cheapest option, based on free software.
With the Apple iPad buzz going around, there can’t be a better time to demonstrate the ‘tablet’ implications of Google Chrome OS. Google has not yet released this netbook centric OS yet, but they are constantly in the news with updates of their Chrome OS. You may also want to watch this awesome first glimpse video on Chrome OS UI.
Linux accounted for roughly a third of the 35 million or so netbooks to ship globally last year, according to Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI Research, and predictions looking ahead are generally rosy as well.
On smartphones, meanwhile, Android had snatched up 27 percent of the North American market by the end of last year, according to AdMob’s December Mobile Metrics report — and that’s surely increasing daily following the launch of Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Nexus One.
True, the concerns and issues around Android’s openness, or lack thereof, have significant implications. This is further illustration of how Google may be the open alternative juxtaposed against Apple, but by adding its own strings and closures, Google is also leaving the door open for another, more open alternative. Perhaps Palm and its WebOS are an example, but again, it seems no matter what a company or consortium does, they still leave opportunity for a relatively more open alternative.
We have to speed up energy innovation to the pace demonstrated in the growth of the Internet if we are to prevent irreversible climate disruptions that will irreparably harm the planet for our children and all those that follow. The scale and speed of change required to ward off disaster cannot be achieved using conventional models. We need to constantly compress seven years of innovation into one – the pace described as innovating on “Internet time”.
This requires government policy action now to drive the adoption of open source methods, and open standards for us to move quickly enough to ward off this crisis. These open models have proved themselves in creating the Internet and enabling the extraordinary pace of business and societal innovation around it.
As Oracle digests Sun Microsystems, plenty of pundits are wondering what will become of Sun’s OpenOffice.org and StarOffice efforts. On the upside, Oracle says it will keep promoting OpenOffice.org. But our resident blogger hasn’t heard much about StarOffice’s fate…
According to reports from InfoWorld and Wired, the Symbian Foundation will announce that, starting today, its Symbian mobile operating system (OS) will be completely open source. Larry Berkin, Head of Global Alliances and General Manager for the Symbian Foundation, said that, “We’re open-sourcing 108 packages that will be available at the source code level”. The source, more than 40 million lines of code, is scheduled to be available on Symbian’s developer portal at 6 am Pacific Time (2 pm GMT).
According to FSF, the Eclipse Licence makes this free software but incompatible with the GPL. Still, this is a good, competitive move to promote competition rather than to kill competition as M$ always tries. One thing is sure. This move will make the smartphone software environment much more interesting, vibrant and full of choice.
Karen and Bradley discuss an update on the Google Books Settlement, some follow up from 0x1F regarding feedback on the mobile phones show, and discuss Karen’s new position as General Counsel.
In this episode: Three quarters of the Linux kernel code is written by developers being paid to do so and Facebook transforms PHP performance. We promise to give up the command line for two weeks and ask whether Ubuntu is wrong to switch the default search engine in Firefox from Google to Yahoo. Plus, we introduce two new sections.
Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier speaks with Benjamin ‘Mako’ Hill, researcher at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media and the Sloan School of Management, as well as board member, contributor and advisor on open source projects from Ubuntu to Wikipedia.
These days everyone is familiar with at least the names of the most popular browsers, Internet Explorer, from Microsoft; Firefox, from the Mozilla Foundation; Chrome, from Google; Opera, from Opera Labs; and last on the list of well-known – Safari, from Apple.
One example of this is ISKME’s OER Commons, an open education network that focuses on the curation and federation of open content from over 200 content partners (such as NASA, MIT OpenCourseware, WGBH, and many others). This has evolved into the networking and professional development of teachers worldwide who collaborate on improving and creating open content. A key component of this work has been to help educate the educators about copyright and content licensing as well as to introduce social collaboration environments that serve as catalysts to encourage teachers and learners to the shift from a consumer culture of education (where teachers deliver and students buy) to one in which teachers and learners gain leadership and support to share and build expertise from within.
It’s amazing, the opportunities a disruptive technology can offer to those who take the time to learn it. If you know your Moodle, there are more than 100 jobs available, right now, today — and for some of them, you don’t even need to change out of your pajamas.
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Looking at some of the job descriptions gives immediate insights into why open source is so useful. Many of these job offers are for very specific modifications to Moodle. One can’t help but wonder how effective Moodle is, as a community, in reintegrating these kinds of efforts — but one thing is for certain: they’ve got a way better shot at it than Blackboard does.
FreeBSD is the most accessible and popular of the BSDs, has code at the heart of Darwin and Apple’s OS X, and has powered some of the more successful sites on the Web, including Hotmail, Netcraft and Yahoo!, which before the rise of Google was the busiest site on the internet.
The European Union’s Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR.eu) as of today is offering public administrations access to more than two thousand free and open source applications.
The OSOR is a platform where public administrations can exchange information and experiences and collaborate in developing free and open source software. The platform has managed to bring together more than 2000 such open source software applications in just sixteen months after its launch.
The Britain Loves Wikipedia scheme will see UK museums and galleries opening up to the free online encyclopaedia. Throughout February, volunteer authors can take part in special tours to document artworks and natural treasures at a total of 20 institutions.
More modern systems like SVN (subversion), Mercurial, Bzr (Bazaar) and Git offer developers newer opportunities to collaboratively develop software at scale. One of the companies caught in the middle of the evolution of version control is hosting vendor CVSdude, with more than 50,000 users.
It’s stuff like that that makes me wish I knew more about OOP. I am studying it on and off, but there’s still some concepts that I just can’t wrap my brain around at times, like exceptions. In my procedurally-attuned programming frame of mind, every time someone explains them to me, I think … “Well, if something *breaks* why don’t you just work with the return codes and work around that?” So, yah. Some stuff is still lost on me. I’m trying to figure it out though. Maybe it’s one of those things that doesn’t make sense so much when you apply it to PHP and it’s general usage of websites. A lot of the stuff I read about, I think how it would make much more sense if it were an actual application running.
A lot of commercial software comes with H.264 encoders and decoders, and some computers arrive with this software preinstalled. This leads a lot of people to believe that they can legally view and create H.264 videos for whatever purpose they like. Unfortunately for them, it ain’t so.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) draft for a “System Information API” specifies JavaScript functions for accessing the battery, CPU, sensors and other hardware characteristics of a device. For this purpose, the window.navigator object’s SystemInfo interface has to implement the get, set and watch methods. set can only be applied to some screen properties such as brightness and orientation, while all other hardware properties are marked as readonly. watch is used for monitoring readings, for example those of a heat sensor.
Between democracy and darkness stands the judiciary. It stands heads and shoulders above the judicial systems in Asia. But it is in rapid decline. Ahead is pitch darkness
Colin Gonsalves Delhi
In the 61st year of the republic, surely, India has transited into Kalyug. Surveys of the Union of India as well as expert reports published by the Arjun Sengupta committee and the NC Saxena Committee appointed by the Central government reveal that almost 77 per cent of the population in India are below the poverty line in terms of the food intake minimum standard of 2,400 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day, a standard set by the Planning Commission in 1979.
There are several classes of Boycotts, but I think that I may be the only person to boycott coke because they played and played a real crappy song in the radio some years back. I only ended that boycott when coke launched the Final Fantasy IX ad. This happened quite a few years back, but it serves as a perfect introduction for a boycott I started a few days ago.
I had been writing about the need to have an open codec associated with the new VIDEO tag present in HTML5. I had linked the petition to get youtube to support ogg/theora along with a second link that I later removed, a link to the same kind of petition for VIMEO
The House today overwhelmingly passed a bill aimed at building up the United States’ cybersecurity army and expertise, amid growing alarm over the country’s vulnerability online.
Security is rarely static. Technology changes both security systems and attackers. But there’s something else that changes security’s cost/benefit trade-off: how the underlying systems being secured are used. Far too often we build security for one purpose, only to find it being used for another purpose — one it wasn’t suited for in the first place. And then the security system has to play catch-up.
According to the New York Times, Google will be holding talks with Chinese government officials soon, which will likely determine the fate of Google’s operations in the country, and to what (if any) extent those operations will continue to exist.
Google, for good or bad reasons, has decided it would stop to gleefully agree to whatever the Chinese leglislators would dictate, and only a few commentators have so far realized the change it has been compared to any other companies.
For the first time in recent history, the lobbying, grassroots and advertising budget of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has surpassed the spending of BOTH the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee.
Davos is a small resort town in Switzerland best known for hosting the World Economic Forum (WEF), an annual meeting of global political and business elites. Every year the biggest boosters of the “neoliberal” economic policy agenda of deregulation, unfettered global trade and strict International Monetary Fund (IMF) rules for poor countries, convene at Davos to pat each other on the back.
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Fortunately, the famous pranksters, the Yes Men, were tracking events at Davos and jumped in to help with some of the “we have changed our ways” analysis the world was anxious to hear. They unveiled a fake WEF Webpage accompanied by paper and video press releases from some of the luminaries that frequently attend the forum.
Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) urged President Obama and all members of Congress not to attend this year’s National Prayer Breakfast, scheduled for February 4, 2010. The breakfast, designed to appear as if government-sanctioned, actually serves as a meeting and recruiting event for the shadowy Fellowship Foundation.
The problem is that it won’t work. Any design of the Internet must allow for anonymity. Universal identification is impossible. Even attribution — knowing who is responsible for particular Internet packets — is impossible. Attempting to build such a system is futile, and will only give criminals and hackers new ways to hide.
The site stopped publishing leaked documents in December in order to concentrate on a pledge drive, aimed at rising a minimum of $200,000 to keep the lights on, and $600,000 if staff were to be paid. Wikileaks also canvassed for technical support and legal help.
The other fallacy is the view at work here that there is no such thing as reputation, or even identity, absent trademark law. But this is incorrect. Of course people and firms can have reputations even if trademark law is nonexistent. All that is required is that people be able to identify other people and firms, and communicate. Pro-trademark arguments often implicitly assume that this is not possible, absent state-enforced trademark law, which is ridiculous.
I was at an Open Rights Group event in Edinburgh yesterday, about lobbying MPs regarding the DE Bill. One of the attendees, Hugh Hancock, pointed out that he will likely be harmed by the DE Bill, even though he is a creative person who is part of the digital economy, one of the very group of people this bill is ostensibly intended to help. (Of course, we all know that the DE is really there to protect the content distribution industry, not creative people).
For example, simplicity for newcomers: What about when you have a distro that doesn’t have Linux inside of it? Say, Debian’s hurd or kFreeBSD or NetBSD ports? Those are distros, but Linux is not to be found inside cause it (the kernel) has been replaced for another kernel. What are we gonna call them? Debian Non-Linux? Go figure how you will explain that to newcomers (“sure… it’s Debian Linux… but it has no linux… yet it is linux”. Priceless).
Some people have said that it’s out of Stallman’s big ego that he wants everybody to call it GNU. Well, I think Stallman hits the nail (at least on the funny part) when he says that “sure… and that’s why I ask people to call it Stallmanix”. So I think it’s not out of ego… but maybe if he had named the OS Stallmanix in the first place, we wouldn’t be having this argument as it (too) is more catchy than GNU.
The Linux Foundation has announced that the Call for Papers deadline for LinuxCon 2010 will be the 31st of March. Registration for the non-profit organisation’s second annual conference, which will take place from the 10th to the 12th of August, 2010 in Boston Massachusetts, is now open. Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation said that, “LinuxCon has quickly become the destination for collaborating in person on all matters Linux”.
So yes, I believe China is serious about Linux and open source (who is not nowadays?) and like everywhere else, closed-source companies are fighting as hard as they can to keep their current business model alive, even if that means allowing piracy in order not to lose against Linux.
Shut the Vaio E down, and the Web button fires up a browser without booting into Windows proper. Sony says this minimalist browser, which runs on top of Linux, won’t let you save data, but will eke out the Vaio E series’ battery up to three times longer than using Windows to hop online.
For some years now, Cuba has had an Executive Group for Software Migration. It’s made up by the Legal Group, in charge of establishing the regulations supporting the process; the Training Group, to train people for the change; and the Technical Group, which has prepared a migration guide book, a reference to arrange the process and identify the applications that will replace those in proprietary code.
“Him and that tall guy are brothers and they work in Asset Development here. We had a meeting Monday and I noticed that both of them were using Linux on their laptops. He was showing me how easy it was.”
I just smiled to myself and told him he needed to bring more of the female staff on the next boys night out. He said he would.
Sometimes the direct sell method isn’t the best way to close the deal.
How do you think the whole “play hard to get” thing got traction throughout the years?
That method is successful in any number of applications.
If that is not a promotion of GNU/Linux on thin clients, I do not know what would be more clear. Energy produced by fossil fuels runs many PCs. If we replace the PCs with terminal servers and thin clients we can save a lot of power consumption:
* typical thick client consumes about 100 watts apart from the monitor, keyboard and mouse
* typical thin client can be 20 watts or less
* the difference is about 80 watts saved per conversion to thin client, perhaps 75 watts because we need a terminal server which runs a bunch of thin clients
* 75 watts saved times 1000 million PCs is 75 gigawatts
It’s true. Linux made me feel dumb. It is not a nice feeling to feel dumb yet I did. Me, the great Locutus who prides himself on his technical wizardry and knowledge of all things involving electrons, had to resort to calling a help desk to solve a problem. The solution of which produced a Homer Simpson style DOH! and the aforementioned dumb feeling.
It happened like this. Recently our online banking authentication procedures changed. For the better I might add. While these security measures are far more secure they also prevented me from accessing our joint bank account whenever I wished. The end result was that I didn’t check the account status often enough and an automatic payment didn’t go through. Enough was enough I shouted out the window at two o’clock in the morning. After dodging a few smelly shoes and empty beer bottles I decided to set up my wifes phone to enable it to use the new security measures.
[...]
Thank you Linux for making me feel dumb. Thank you Linux for making me forget about that rebooting thing. Thank you Linux for being such a wonderful operating system even though you have your quirks and foibles. Next time I will try and remember to reboot after making configuration changes on anything that does not run Linux.
China is on its way to make a new indigenous supercomputer build with custom microprocessors developed at the Institute Of Computing Technology. This supercomputer, the petascale Dawning 6000 is a successor of the current fastest supercomputer China has, the Dawning 5000a. The Dawning 5000a has been running on AMD powered microprocessors and Windows HPC Server as it’s OS. The Dawning 5000a ranks 11th in the world. Apart from that, China also holds the #5 supercomputer in the top 500 list.
Work on the first stage of the contract, improving RBG Kew’s website and web content managemnt system using Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM), began last May. Running on Linux, the new website went live in October 2009.
The London Stock Exchange has launched a new electronic order book for retail bonds, temporarily basing it on its outgoing Microsoft .Net-based TradElect platform.
The new bond market will stay on TradElect until at least the end of the year, when the LSE’s Linux-based platform, called MillenniumIT, goes live.
At the Parallels Summit in Miami, CloudLinux has presented a beta version of its Linux distribution specifically aimed at web hosting services and data centres.
As the Android kernel code is now gone from the Linux kernel, as of the 2.6.33 kernel release, I’m starting to get a lot of questions about what happened, and what to do next with regards to Android. So here’s my opinion on the whole matter…
“Now branches in the Linux kernel source tree are fine” says Kroah-Hartman, “but this is much worse” noting that companies who create drivers and platform code for Android devices are “locked out from ever contributing it back to the kernel community”. These companies are now stuck, as Android-specific code cannot be contributed upstream which will give the companies a “much larger maintenance and development cycle”.
LWN tells us what is happening with the android kernel patches in upstream.
The short version: They are gone
As Greg Kroah-Hartman explains:
So, what happened with the Android kernel code that caused it to be deleted? In short, no one cared about the code, so it was removed.
This is a normal process, Microsoft was there before.
So far nothing special. However, as Greg correctly points out:
The Android kernel code is more than just the few weird drivers that were in the drivers/staging/android subdirectory in the kernel. In order to get a working Android system, you need the new lock type they have created, as well as hooks in the core system for their security model.
This separation of Gallium3D then makes it possible for one to just create a “mean and lean” implementation as José describes it in the mailing list announcement, an implementation with Gallium3D interfaces and auxiliary modules but no OS abstractions (for embedded platforms), and then the “everything” mix that is effectively Gallium3D now with all code enabled and is what’s used on Linux and Windows.
XvMC support came to Gallium3D through a Google Summer of Code project for 2008 that involved getting X-Video Motion Compensation running atop the Nouveau driver with NVIDIA hardware.
The past three releases of Ubuntu Linux have included unreleased ATI Catalyst drivers. It started with Ubuntu 8.10, which got an early-access driver as the official Catalyst Linux driver that was available to the public at the time had not supported X Server 1.5. With Ubuntu 9.04, AMD was running behind at supporting X Server 1.6 as found in the Jaunty Jackalope, so it too received an early ATI driver.
Hugin is another panorama software. The Open Source tool can be seen as the complex brother of Autostitch. Its functionality and options are very extensive which might keep inexperienced users away. Experienced users on the other hand have a software at hand that creates professional panoramas.
The Bordeaux developers have announced the release of version 2.0.0 of Bordeaux for Linux. Bordeaux is a GUI configuration manager add-on for Wine which is also available for Solaris, Mac OS X and BSD. Wine, which is an acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, is free open source software that allows users to run Windows applications on Linux and Unix by providing its own native versions of Windows DLLs.
VMware is built on a Linux kernel, so is Xen. Red Hat is naturally all about Linux and builds upon the open source KVM. I realize they’re all competitors, but they have a common model – a clean bare metal engine that provides a better platform to build upon.
Double-Take Software has released Double-Take Availability for Linux Version 4.6, which provides businesses with full-server protection and allows users to protect data, applications and the entire Linux system including operating system and application files.
Viruses. They happen to almost everyone. If they don’t happen to you, it’ll be your cousin Stan who get joins the malware-of-the-month club, and you’re the only person he knows who can fix a computer. The problem is, things are so screwed up that Windows won’t even start properly. And if it does, the virus has embedded itself so deeply that you can’t access the files and tools you’d need to remove it. Enter Linux. By booting from a Linux Live CD or USB, you can remove the offending programs manually or with a Linux-based anti-virus program. This guide will cover creation of a bootable USB Linux system as well as a comparison of the antivirus software options.
If you’re a Linux newbie who wants to learn a bit more about the command line, or if you want to chain a few commands together to get some special output, we have a new tool for you to try.
Diss, UK. charliesgames.com today announce the immediate release of Bullet Candy Perfect for Linux. Bullet Candy Perfect is a fun shoot-em-up game, with sharp, super smooth 3D graphics and a cool techno soundtrack. The game is all about honing your skills to perfection as you attempt the perfect run!
During the last two months Marcel and I ported all tree views in digiKam from Qt3 to Qt4 and its model view concept. These changes are now included in the svn trunk. The new code still needs some serious testing and we would appreciate your help on this.
KDE will be at FOSDEM this weekend, the largest gathering of free software contributors there is. We will have a KDE devroom on the Saturday with a packed programme of talks covering KDevelop, PIM, Designer and more.
The KDE Project is accepting papers for the Akademy conference, held this year in Tampere, Finland. Primary topics for this year’s gathering are centered around making it possible for users to connect with their data and other users in new ways. The event is being organized by COSS, the Finnish Center for Open Source Solutions, and KDE e.V..
The GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 was held at Quang Trung Software City in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam this past November. The event attracted more than 1,000 participants from 14 countries including Cambodia, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and the United States. 79 speakers — 34 from outside of Vietnam — held 109 talks, presentations and panels, and the slides are available for download. The event was supported by 138 volunteers, nearly 100 of whom were women. The combined number of all participants was 1465, with 60% women attendees. The organizing committee is very proud that our conference was such a welcoming event for women in the Open Source community.
The truth is, given the mature state of the free desktop and each distro’s undoubted wish to match the features of rivals, it is becoming increasingly harder to find features that make one stand out from the other. There are still significant differences in desktops. But when distributions use the same desktop, the way that Fedora and Ubuntu do, then the differences are likely to be unnoticeable to three out of four users. These days, you are even unlikely to find any differences in speed or stability unless you have some unusual hardware configuration.
That may be an unsatisfying answer to those who like to pick a side and defend it. But look at it this way: the lack of a clear victor shows the general sophistication of free software today. Now, in most cases, you don’t have to choose between major distributions — no matter what your choice, it is likely to be a reasonable.
The developers behind the Elive project cooked yet another unstable release of their Elive Live CD Linux distribution, now at version 1.9.60. Being powered by Debian, the Enlightenment E17 desktop environment and Linux kernel 2.6.30, the newly released Elive 1.9.60 offers a new driver for CD-ROMs, the ability to configure your touchpad and some other goodies. With this version, Elive gets closer and closer to a final and stable release: “We are very close to the next stable version of Elive 2.0! These are the last development versions coming so you are more than welcome to report bugs NOW! If you are an Elive-translator this is the moment to finish all the remaining Messages to be translated. Thank you!” – was stated in the official release announcement.
Ulteo is poised to offer commercial support for its free virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software, which the open-source start-up says will cost companies a fraction of established offerings from Citrix Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and VMware Inc., while offering, in some cases, more choice in platforms.
atsec information security is pleased to announce the successful Common Criteria Certification of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 5.3 at EAL 4 (augmented for flaw remediation) with the Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP). Under Common Criteria, products are evaluated against strict standards for various features, including security functionality, development environment, security vulnerability handling, documentation of security-related topics, and product testing.
Opensorce.com consists of several ‘Channels’ or avenues of discussions on topics like Business, Education, Government, Law and Life etc. The site already features articles that cover topics ranging from GlaxoSmithKline’s Malaria Plan to Black Holes.
I’ve been looking for a lightweight distribution to use on my Dell desktop with older hardware. While searching for a worthy candidate I almost immediately ran across last weeks release of PC/OS 10. With a familiar Ubuntu base and new improvements such as Google Chrome and Skype, I thought PC/OS Webstation was worth a look.
This small, but very pink Linux-based device publishes multimedia data both inside and outside the premises, routing via an external server for Internet access so as to avoid creating more security holes that could result were you to allow home users to configure things.
The argument that pitches open source competition against a closed dictatorship will probably never be satisfactorily answered. But given that Google’s play with Android is all about driving more people to Google’s ever-expanding suite of internet based services and applications, it is perhaps not surprising that the firm should look to exert a little more control than it was able to muster by simply lobbing a new OS into the development arena.
For text input, it has a full slide-out QWERTY keypad as well as a virtual keypad and hidden stylus, if needed. The N900 runs on Nokia’s latest Maemo5 OS, which is a Linux-based platform with 80 per cent open-source software, which means the N900 was built with software developers in mind.
Maemo runs a variant of Debian Linux, but not in the way that Android is Linux. If we equate Linux to a person, then Debian (and Ubuntu) desktop Linux and Maemo are more like cousins, like different races sharing the same DNA structure. Debian and Android, however, are more like the 99.5 percent similarity between man and chimpanzee. Which one has the extra 0.05 percent of DNA is up to debate. To complete the analogy, iPhone and Windows Mobile would be aliens who have the same general bipedal build but are not related to us at all.
The Android platform accounted for 10% of all smartphones sold in the Taiwan market in December 2009, higher than the global average of 4-5% in the same period, according to a survey of retail channels in Taiwan.
HTC’s been pretty good about celebrating the open-source spirit of Android. Whenever they release a new Android device, the source code for whatever goods they added on top of the stock firmware comes pouring in before too long.
WordPress has announced the launch of WordPress for Android (1.0). It is currently available in the Android Market. A lot of what we do on the web is now done from mobile devices, so it only makes sense that this would include blog management.
With all of this iPad buzz stirring up the tech world over the past couple of weeks, Chrome OS has almost been forgotten. That may have something to do with the fact that Google has yet to officially release the netbook-centric operating system to the public, but still, you’d expect a company like Google to keep the details flowing about a forthcoming operating system. Today it seems we’re getting exactly what you’d expect, in response to all the recent tablet fanfare.
When Google announced its Chrome OS last year, it intended this operating system to be for netbooks. Last week’s unveiling of the Apple iPad has made tablet computers hot, though, and Google is making sure its upcoming OS will have this class of devices covered, too.
While Apple’s iPad attempts to fill the gap between laptops and cell phones with the perfect hardware, Google will rely instead on a creative framework with its Chrome OS, according to CNET’s Stephen Shankland.
A few months ago, a widely used operating system received a major upgrade — and Microsoft and Apple had nothing to do with it. This upgrade came from the developers responsible for one of the most popular versions of the open-source Linux operating system Ubuntu.
Like earlier editions, Ubuntu 9.10 is free for anybody to use, should run on even old and slow Windows-compatible desktops and laptops and is immune to Windows viruses and malware. But 9.10 (the numbers refer to the year and month of its release, though you’ll also see it referred to by its cutesy development nickname of “Karmic Koala”) also sometimes requires a little more fiddling with the controls than you might expect or understand.
A few weeks ago I was chatting with one of our Clients, he owns a company that does hooks up for prospective Employers with prospective Employees in the Fitness Industry, and in the process makes a few bob. He was complaining about his Asus netbook, which had Windows XP loaded on it, and how it has been getting progressively slower over time and knowing I use Linux, in fact I had recommended last year that he get someone, or do it himself and install Ubuntu UNR. He asked if I would install Linux on his machine.
ARM chief executive Warren East has claimed that netbooks could swallow 90% of the PC market, in an exclusive interview with PC Pro.
The British chip design firm, which is the biggest rival to Intel’s dominant Atom processors in the netbook space, claims the low-budget laptops could transform the PC market. And East says the chip firm will succeed “with our without” Windows support for its processors.
This is a great opportunity to share the wealth and promote the hobby and what we are doing with Open Source. So speak up, send me your ideas and let’s see if we can make this the best darned source of information for both the communities! So tell your friends! Tell your clubs! And I will see what I can do about getting the first issue into your hands soonest!
In the spirit of transparency and community, the Library of Congress has established an internal process to create open source software. This will make it easier for software developers and sponsors within the Library to produce software that can be freely redistributed to users worldwide.
“The overall effect will be to clarify and streamline the process for releasing software as open source,” said Michelle Springer, a digital initiatives project manager at the Library, “allowing the Library and its partners to more fully participate in the open source development community.”
We have also used the latest open source technology such as Ruby on Rails and MySQL. These technologies are free and enable rapid software development. We have used IT extensively throughout our operations and done it a manner such that they are easy to use, highly automated and low on cost.
The country’s economy is recovering faster than expected from a global downturn and advocates of a “free the Internet” campaign hope to take some credit for that.
Both business and government have started using free software programs, saving as much as 80 percent in their operations, officials of the International Open Source Network (IOSN) said during a recent conference here.
One way of getting involved in the Ubuntu Community is by attending events. Most of the events throughout 2010 will have some element of the Ubuntu Community involved in them. There will be Ubuntu Community members speaking at main events or specialty events such as Women in Open Source, and/or Ubucon’s, some will be planners, others will be staffing an Ubuntu LoCo Booth, and others will be lending their support by attending these events. Let’s face it, without people attending there would really be no need for the the event now would there? Attending an event is contributing as well – don’t forget that! I can’t help but think of people who say, “If I had never gone to <insert Open Source Event> I would not be doing what I am doing today!” It’s an important step and one never knows where those steps will lead to.
But if this was really important to the market, Linux PCs would be much more popular. Besides, Apple has already proven that if people like your product, a closed system won’t keep them away–the iPod has about a 70 percent market share.
“We are seeing a ton of demand for skills around open source technologies and frameworks. Demand for Python, Ruby on Rails and PHP development skills far exceeds the number of people available with skills,” said Michael Kirven, co-founder and principal of IT resource firm Bluewolf, in a Network World interview.
COBOL has always been a language for mission-critical business applications. That has been true since the early days of computing and it is still a valid statement. But nowadays there are new environments that can host the applications, and with the use of COBOL-IT, mission-critical business applications can be brought into the world of Open Source.
So when does open source software become mainstream in IBM Power Systems i environments? It’s fair to say that mainstream is not even close to an accurate description today. But don’t think it’s disappearing from the radar screen. More people are discovering open source software, and you should expect this frontier to be well traveled sooner rather than later. Larry Augustin, chief executive officer at SugarCRM and open source frontiersman, uses the term “safe bet” to describe enterprise open source software at the dawn of 2010.
Open source drivers are a by-product of the design philosophy behind the RamSan PCIe SSD family. The core functionality of the RamSan PCIe card is in the hardware itself versus other PCIe designs where the driver does most of the work. This thin driver offers a simple control paradigm and is easy to port and manipulate as open source. It offers little burden to the host system and creates a nice division of labor between the host and the device allowing the host system to operate to its maximum potential.
Most of these new offerings have one common element, Open Source software. This has enabled such rapid speed to market.
The vast majority of the solutions at CES have embedded Open Source software. Three Open Source Software features drive this trend:
• Cost; if you can lower the cost of manufacture, you have a more competitive offering.
• The simplicity of Open Source software legal contracts and terms of use. Most organisations now fully understand how to properly integrate Open Source software into their offerings and can bypass long and tortuous negotiations with proprietary software vendors.
• Finally the sheer scale and pace of innovative contribution that is harnessed through the Open Source community.
Remember, it was only a few years ago that consumer technology vendors were terrified of using Open Source in their offerings. Today, if you don’t, you lose.
Noting that the industry has been lacking an event dedicated to open source development, Obsidian MD Muggie van Staden, says: “Linux user groups have been around for ages and the Linux Professional Associated died down years ago. We needed something more fun that combined technical and business discussion.
Packt specializes in Open Source topics for developers and IT professionals, most notably jQuery, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! All new Packt Open Source publications will be available in an online subscription library exclusively through Safari Books Online.
Portland seems to be where all the cool kids are gathering to meet and discuss opens source this summer. O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) is , and the organizers behind Open Source Bridge 2010 announced their conference will take place in Portland, June 1-4, 2010.
Developing a browser for mobile devices is no easy task, just ask the good people at Mozilla. Late last week, Mozilla released Firefox Mobile 1.0, but don’t run to your Apple, Android or Blackberry AppStore just yet it is only available for the Nokia N900 and its Linux-based Maemo platform.
The mobile version of Firefox web browser has been finally released. But don’t get too excited because as of the moment, it is only available for Nokia’s Maemo5 platform. This means that the owners of Nokia N900 smartphone are the lucky few who can download, install, and experience Firefox for Mobile in action.
Mozilla announced last week the availability of Firefox for Maemo 1.0, the first official release of Firefox Mobile for Nokia’s Linux-based smartphone operating system. It offers adequate browsing performance, support for add-ons, and a finger-friendly user interface that includes popular Firefox features like the AwesomeBar.
Typically when a new browser release comes out, the end-user features get a big press lovefest and the developer goodies are generally glazed over. While the obvious bits are good to know about, the developer story is every bit as important.
A lot of the goodies in Firefox 3.6 aren’t for users at all. Well, they are but they’re things that users will see or interact with directly, or notice. Of course, when I say “users,” I mean “users who aren’t Web developers.” Web developers have quite a few things to like in Firefox 3.6. Let’s take a look at some of the under-the-hood improvements in 3.6
Some see this criticism as an elitist way of looking at things – born of the hacker world’s resentment at the loss of power the democratising iPad implies. As Fraser Speirs puts it:
The Visigoths are at the gate of the city. They’re demanding access to software. they’re demanding to be in control of their own experience of information. They may not like our high art and culture, they may be really into OpenGL boob-jiggling apps and they may not always share our sense of aesthetics, but they are the people we have claimed to serve for 30 years whilst screwing them over in innumerable ways. There are also many, many more of them than us.
Mozilla – makers of the popular open-source browser Firefox – has announced the launch of the mobile version of its browser – codenamed Fennec (a big-eared fox) – initially on Nokia’s Linux-based platform for high-end mobile phones: Maemo.
MySQL was tackled early in the presentation. Oracle’s chief corporate architect, Edward Screven, said the company would integrate MySQL into Oracle’s software stack because many of Oracle’s large customers use both databases. “I think Oracle will do a better job of developing MySQL than has been the case over the past five years,” he added.
Josh Berkus is well known as a PostgreSQL hacker, but, as it happens, he also picked up some valuable experience during his stint at “The Laboratory for the Destruction of Communities,” otherwise known as Sun Microsystems. That experience has been distilled into a “patented ten-step method” on how to free a project of unwelcome community involvement. Josh’s energetic linux.conf.au presentation on this topic was the first talk in the “business of open source” miniconf; it was well received by an enthusiastic crowd.
“Oracle’s official ownership of MySQL simply further supports the fact that PostgreSQL is the only real choice for organizations looking to deploy an open-source database that is backed by a truly independent community,” Alston said.
Open source effort offers users a preview of version 7 with its new Drupal Gardens effort, aimed to simplify implementation of the popular CMS offering.
Joomla describes itself as an open source content management System (CMS) which has gained such popularity since it appeared in September 2005 that web designers and entrepreneurs increasingly regard sites built around it as standard issue.
The great advantage for any business updating or redeveloping a web site using a CMS is that once the site has been built, updates can be done in-house by staff with little or no technical knowledge. This means that companies which update content on their web sites regularly can save a great deal of money by using a CMS such as Joomla!
We’ve been working on an integration of the Magento e-commerce platform for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM, and some of our long-time users have also talked about integrating opentaps with Spree. I took a quick look at both and make some notes about them. Since we’re not developers of or service providers for either one, and we plan to support integration with both in opentaps, I hope you’ll consider this an unbiased if somewhat “bird’s eye” comparison of Spree vs. Magento.
February is a great time to visit Barcelona — the sights, the culture, the history, and of course, the Mobile World Congress. As an astute mobile enthusiast, you’ve probably noticed that open source platforms, applications and services are cropping up all over the mobile industry. It’s no secret that a few of us here are fond of Funambol, thanks to its cross-platform functionality and community involvement.
Last week Informatica, a leading supplier of data integration and ETL (extract, transform and load) technology, said it acquired MDM developer Siperian for $130 million. Earlier in the week Talend debuted its own open-source MDM software to complement its open-source data integration and data quality management software.
Open Tech and the Open Source Channel Alliance both hold promise on multiple fronts. For Linux solutions providers, the two distributor efforts could open the door to application opportunities. And for closed source application specialists, Open Tech and the OSCA provide disruptive and frequently lower-cost alternatives upon which to build solutions.
ECT: If I were an open source vendor, would I have a leg up in getting considered for a VC money award?
Guleri You would have a major step up over others if you were an open source company. Open source used to be a bit of a misunderstood business model. Now it is something that has picked up good momentum and is something that VCs love to see.
ECT: Are you seeing more requests from open source startups, or is that still a sparse field?
Guleri: It’s still a sparse field, and that’s a good thing because every discipline, be it software or hardware or data center, has an open source project that knocks them to death. So consequently, what happens is that the customers are not getting a value from a closed source like a McAfee or Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT). They would rather look for an open source company. And when that open source company gets to scale, then that open source company will come looking for money. So that field hasn’t become over-crowded. There are only a handful of companies that have reached commercial status following open source
Open source doesn’t overwhelm a proprietary system. It whittles away at its lead, slowly and sometimes unsteadily. It’s the old Aesop story of the tortoise and the hare, and open source is the tortoise.
For example, no traditional economist or policymaker could have predicted or planned for the open source revolution. “Ordinary people” make these things happen and they must be encouraged to do so in ever greater numbers and ways.
That’s why open source is health reform. Unlock a high enough flood of data and mere arguments will be blown away. Show people their own data, explain what it means, and people will demand the services needed in order to live and not just get well.
February 2, 2010 — Phoronix Media has announced the immediate release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 (codenamed “Lenvik”), as the latest update to their open-source testing framework that delivers immediate and measurable advantages to its customers. The Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 software is compatible with a greater number of operating systems, introduces support for mobile platforms, offers a new range of test profiles, and other features to further solidify its premiere position within the computer benchmarking industry.
I just released lm-sensors 3.1.2 as planned (well, almost… a few days late.) This is a maintenance release with many small bug fixes and improvements compared to 3.1.1. All users of lm-sensors 3.1.0 and 3.1.1 are encouraged to upgrade.
ICEpdf is a lightweight open source Java PDF rendering library that can be easily integrated within any Java-based client application, or deployed on a server in headless mode as a PDF Servlet (JSP or JSF). ICEpdf is ideal for providing PDF viewing and navigation, as well as PDF content conversion and extraction, without the hassles of Java-to-native integration issues.
If you know software programming well enough to write a new word processor with a secret file format, do it now, put it on sale and price it one million Euro per seat. Should that law be approved as it was presented in late January 2010, you’ll just have to send Christmas greetings to all Italian Public Administrations to force them to buy your software, since they will be required by law to “accept and process” the files they receive, in whatever format. With any luck, you won’t make as much money as Bill Gates: you’ll make enough to directly buy him.
ProjectForge is a pay-on-demand software service that allows software developers to manage software iterations, track issues and requirements, and collaborate with other developers. It is an offshoot of a similar service named SoftwareForge. While SoftwareForge is designed to work with open-source software, ProjectForge is for applications where proprietary products are involved or greater access controls are necessary.
Kate Stewart is the manager of the PowerPC team at Freescale. As such, she has a basic customer service problem to solve: people who buy a board from Freescale would like to have some sort of operating system to run on it. That system, of course, will be Linux; satisfying this requirement means that Freescale must operate as a sort of Linux distributor. At her linux.conf.au talk, Kate talked about a new initiative aimed at helping distributors to ensure that they are compliant with the licenses of the software they are shipping.
January has indeed been a month full of events. After attending Science Online 2010 and Linux.conf.au 2010, I am finally back onto my almost normal routine.
A week ago, I let ya’ll know that the core PHP team had been brought to Facebook’s main campus. That team were forced to sign NDA’s, and taken to a very quiet, secluded meeting room where some cool new Facebook-backed open source project was described.
HipHop for PHP isn’t technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features – such as eval() – in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP’s runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.
Our intention is to facilitate an ecosystem that upholds the user experience and continues to set the foundation for a platform that delivers substantial long-term opportunities for building or expanding a business.
Having done several years of Flash development and having worked with many Flash developers, the recent controversy between Apple and Adobe over Flash on the iPad is very amusing to me. First, there are a few arguments that I want to address directly:
But Flash is the only way to deploy a consistent cross platform solution!
Following the news that the iPad would not support the Flash plugin, some people have been clamoring for the death of Flash. Not so fast cowboy, that horse ain’t dead yet!. Although it is true that Flash is far from perfect it is currently a necessary evil because so many web games and web application are written in Flash.
The HTML5 specification came another step closer to becoming a Web standard today, as the first editors draft of the technology was released to the World Wide Web Consortium. HTML5 is the technology that makes up a significant portion of webOS, the new and improved Google Voice mobile web portal, YouTube and a few other notable Web services. This is great news for the Web as a whole and for the webOS platform in particular, but what are the implications for Adobe’s Flash technology?
Mozilla has already said that Firefox will not support H.264. Google’s Chrome browser does support H.264, but the company also recently moved to acquire On2, makers of another, competing video codec which means, if nothing else, Google isn’t completely satisfied with H.264 either.
Late Wednesday evening, Google employees posted an “Internet-Draft” outlining proposed changes to the DNS protocol that allow authoritative DNS servers to see the addresses of clients. This way, geographically distributed content delivery networks can tailor their answers to a specific client’s network location. So a client from California would talk to a server in California, while a client in the Netherlands would talk to a server in the Netherlands.
Flashed-based solid-state drives (SSDs) are becoming a big issue for enterprise storage users; a number of customers I work with are planning for this new “tier 0″ data storage for a number of reasons. It could be as simple as IOPS per watt, IOPS per dollar, or for some applications, bandwidth per GB/sec of storage.
In the continuing race to design the smallest silicon chips, Intel and Micron Technology have struck again. The duo, partners in flash development, were the first to reach 34-nanometer-process designs for NAND flash memory and have now reached the 25-nanometer barrier.
Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who claimed to have discovered a link between measles virus, bowel diseases and autism and thereby sparked widespread fear of the combined MMR jab, conducted unnecessary, invasive tests on children, the General Medical Council found today.
In late January, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a report that provided startling new details on illegal operations by the FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit (CAU) and America’s grifting telecoms.
For years, AT&T, Verizon, MCI and others fed the Bureau phone records of journalists and citizens under the guise of America’s endless, and highly profitable, “War on Terror.”
The Conservatives were accused of fiddling statistics today after they claimed that violent crime had soared in the last decade under Labour.
Gordon Brown, Alan Johnson and Jacqui Smith, the current and former Home Secretaries, went on the attack after a BBC investigation showed that both David Cameron and Chris Grayling were not comparing like with like.
Mr Grayling, the Shadow Home Secretary, has sent out press releases to every Tory constituency purporting to show how “violent attacks” have jumped in their area in the last decade.
The former prime minister blamed “the very near failure of the Iraqi occupation” on Iranian interference, misplaced assumptions and a lack of US troops.
That happened Monday, resulting in a maximum 90-day jail sentence on charges of solicitation and possession of illegal drugs. But when one of the agency people called the jail to make sure Robinson was held, he found that Robinson was already free — released due to overcrowding, much like the other times he was arrested.
Rich countries are raiding their aid budgets to bankroll a new global fund to help poor countries adapt to climate change, one of the world’s leading development campaign groups warned today.
A global deal to tackle climate change is all but impossible in 2010, leaving the scale and pace of action to slow global warming in coming decades uncertain, according to senior figures across the world involved in the negotiations.
“The forces trying to tackle climate change are in disarray, wandering in small groups around the battlefield like a beaten army,” said a senior British diplomat.
The switch to refrigerants that do not damage the ozone layer brought in a generation of chemicals with a greenhouse effect thousands of times stronger than CO2
Last week started with a conference in Montreal, called by a group of governments and international agencies calling themselves Friends of Haiti, to discuss the long and short term needs of the recently devastated Caribbean nation. Even as corpses remained under the earthquake’s rubble and the government operated out of a police station, the assembled “friends” would not commit to cancelling Haiti’s $1bn debt. Instead they agreed to a 10-year plan with no details, and a commitment to meet again – when the bodies have been buried along with coverage of the country – sometime in the future.
A few days later in Washington, Timothy Geithner, the US treasury secretary, came before the house oversight committee to explain why he paid top dollar for $85bn worth of toxic assets when he bailed out the insurance company AIG. Geithner said he was faced with a “tragic choice”. “The moral, fair and just choice is to protect the innocent,” he said.
Paying bonuses to executives all in stock is one thing. One could argue that the top dogs can afford to be paid in paper. As you move lower down the food chain, though, it becomes a harder sell. Cash is king for most.
Former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs chief Henry Paulson is the latest critic of Wall Street pay packages, which he now says are “out of whack.”
Tim Geithner is back on top in the Obama administration, and his deputies are making it clear that the “Volcker Rule” won’t seriously overturn the way business is done on Wall Street.
It was reported today that Goldman Sachs’s C.E.O., Lloyd Blankfein, is getting a $100 million bonus. Goldman Sachs denied it, saying, “Well, no figure has been decided on yet.” You know what that means? He’s getting more. Exactly.
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankenfein will reportedly get a $100 million bonus just one year after his company received billions in taxpayer money to survive a financial crisis.
Roy Smith, a finance professor at New York University and a former Goldman Sachs partner, argues in Paper Fortunes, his new history of Wall Street, that decades of financial innovation that seemed like positive evolutions at the time have turned our markets into scary places. In part, Smith says Wall Street is fixing its problems by reining in pay and lowering leverage ratios. But he believes Washington and regulators still need to intervene to make financial markets safer.
But the idea has fascinated Wall Street. One investment pro told Reuters: “Goldman is already in the process of figuring out how to go private. Goldman did not need–or want the TARP money to start with–and there is no reason for them to keep their bank charter and remain a public company.” Hedge fund manager Doug Kass, of Seabreeze Partners, told the news services he has made Goldman going private one of his “20 Surprises for 2010.” This may be a bit over the top. But it points to the public fascination with the idea.
Following the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to allow unlimited corporate funding of federal campaigns, Murray Hill Inc. today announced it was filing to run for U.S. Congress and released its first campaign video on www.youtube.com/user/murrayhillcongress
“Until now,” Murray Hill Inc. said in a statement, “corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.”
This information can be used as an electronic fingerprint to uniquely identify my browser and, theoretically, track my online behaviour. In practice, although my system configuration is diverse enough to be unique, it lacks stability. If I install a new font or yet another browser plugin, my browser’s electronic fingerprint will change.
Senior free and open source software figures in New Zealand have expressed reservations about the government’s plan to impose a centralised internet filter that it claims will block access to child pornography.
While Apple’s announcement got most of the attention, Oracle+Sun is of more interest to most in the Linux community. Specifically, after waiting something like nine months to move forward with the acquisition, it’s finally real and Oracle is discussing its roadmaps for all of Sun’s product lines. Or most of them, anyway.
Whether you are an experienced Linux Admin or a newbie gingerly stepping forth into the world of Linux, you will need to prepare. We all often become experts in whatever we use everyday, but the scope of subjects covered in the exam may encompass more than you know. Just reviewing the contents of the syllabus may do it for some but others will need weeks of even months of preparation. Going back to the classroom will provide a systematic and regular disciplined approach to the examination. They also provide hands-on practice and prove to be well worth the expense. Your instructor will also clarify any doubts you may have. However self-study books and on-line resources can do the trick if you are determined and self-disciplined enough to chart your own course through the deep waters.
Familiarity undoubtedly ranks among the largest barriers to open source adoption — software, like so many other things, is habit-forming. Much of that familiarity, at least among younger users, comes from the prevalence of proprietary applications in education, an area awash with government regulations, competitive bidding, and its own habit-induced hangups.
Enter Albany Senior High School, an Auckland, New Zealand-based unorthodox enclave of education. The school, which opened its doors in 2009, takes a different approach to learning, utilizing open principles that include open spaces, open interaction, open opportunities — and open source.
I have switched to Ubuntu for 2 days now. It’s awesome, I’m using awesome window manager. I’m more efficient than usual. I have got wireless to work(not manually), battery status to work, start up programs to work and more. It’s a interesting experience.
If you are looking at this software from an expert point of view, OpenShot is not definitely not up to par with professional video editing tool like Final Cut Pro or Cinelerra. However if you just want a simple, easy to use video editor that comes with plenty of useful features, then OpenShot will be the one for you.
A post on the Zero Ballistics forums has been posted asking how interested people would be in a free release of Zero Ballistics and what I believe is them stating they will release the game for free also. For people who do not know Zero Ballistics is a game that is a blend of first person shooter and tank combat, focusing on multiplayer gaming exclusively. You can check out the beta if you want to get a better feel for the game.
Akademy is the annual conference of the KDE community and open to all who share an interest in the KDE community and its goals. This conference brings together artists, designers, programmers, translators, users, writers and other contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and helps define the vision for the next year. In its 7th year, we invite all contributors and users to participate in Akademy in Tampere, Finland from July 3 to 10 2010.
Continuing the theme of “KDE Everywhere”, recently it was announced by the folks over at TiltOS that KDE applications are now available for download and use. TiltOS provides a repository and an easy to use application manager for the Haiku operating system, which is in turn aims to be an open source implementation of the BeOS operating system.
The KDEAP is a small on-line community of developers and other volunteers dedicated to ensure that our favorite desktop is accessible to all users, including those of us with physical handicaps.
Gstyle is a new full Gnome theme manager with some really great features which I am sure you will love if you like to customize your Desktop look constantly. Gstyle can automatically download and install wallpapers, Xsplash, GTK themes, icon themes, full themes, mouse pointers and more from gnome-look, deviantart, customize.org and others, or directly from the software source. But not only that, Gstyle can show you how a theme (any kind of theme: icons, Emerald, Metacity, etc.) actually looks, not just a preview. You will see what I mean in the screenshots below (3rd screenshot).
Stali is a new Linux distribution from Suckless.org that is based on a “hand selected collection of the best tools for each task, and each tool being statically linked (including some X clients such as xterm, surf, dwm, dmenu, mplayer).” Suckless has often delivered outstanding software, and I am eagerly awaiting an official release. So, what else is in store?
On occasion I have a need for a tiny, lightning fast Linux distribution to boot into in order to check various issues on a machine. Either that or I just don’t want to monkey around with someone else’ data. Either way, I will often grab for either a CD or flash drive containing my favorite “micro” distribution, Puppy Linux.
My Computer is quite older so I am thinking of using a light weight powerful Distro that comes in 250MB size.
It think that in future Linux maker will going to make such distro.
Red Hat’s JBoss middleware division is set to have a busy 2010 as it continues to improve its developer tools and Java servers. While feature improvements are always important for JBoss, this year’s focus will be on improving the way that developers work with their tools and servers.
Ars Premier 2.0 is our new and improved subscriber program that offers some fantastic benefits for subscribers. So far we’ve had chats with Mac OS X reviewer John Siracusa, Ars cofounder Jon Stokes, and Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann. Most recently, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell answered your questions about gaming, DRM, and more.
I also think mascot wallpapers are perfect for Alpha releases as a placeholder until the final artwork lands. Sadly this did not happen for this release either.
Let’s turn now to free software. People modify and redistribute it all the time, but to be honest about it, they shouldn’t do so under the name chosen by the original developers. Practice is very fuzzy in this area, where few developers trademark their work–it takes whale of an effort, because even after spending thousands of dollars for a trademark you have to police its use–and those that do often have liberal policies. (There’s a trademark policy for Ubuntu and a whole trademark organization for Linux.) Anderson and Dare go over the licenses of the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative and find a wide range of practices, or lack thereof.
In summary, I’m not ungrateful to the Ubuntu Tweak developers. They have produced a useful application that has undoubtedly helped many a non-geek make the switch to Ubuntu. They’ve clearly identified areas where Ubuntu’s default user interface is weak, and have developed a solution.
Linux Mint is indeed a very nice distribution, a very stable one. It really just works out of the box and is perfect for people who don’t want to mess with their computer to make it work or for people who don’t like to customize it a lot. The menu and mint updater can be annoying, at least for me, but it does what it promises and looking sexy while at it. I perceive a very positive response from people about the distro and I feel it may actually become the most popular home Linux distro one day, which would only show that small communities with good ideas and dedication can yield a better product than sponsored or corporative distributions.
Today our good friends over at Woot! are selling the Leapfrog Didj, a low cost educational toy aimed at little kids. Lucky for hackers out there, the Didj is actually a linux device, and gaining serial console access is as easy as soldering two wires. The documentation out there is a little outdated, with a number of broken links and stale wikis, but $25 for a portable linux device is a hard deal to beat. A list of sites which might be helpful are listed after the break, as well as the hardware specs of the Didj.
IT SEEMS THAT Google’s Nexus One smartphone might appear on the T-Mobile network in the UK, according to a loose-lipped tweet by Robin O’Kelly, head of corporate affairs at T-Mobile.
A new version of Google’s Nexus One smartphone will apparently arrive soon for use on AT&T’s 3G wireless network.
Customers are already able to buy an unlocked version of the Nexus One for $529. But the Android-based phone, which was launched last month, supports GSM radio frequency bands. The only 3G wireless bands that it supports are on T-Mobile USA’s network.
Released by Akazawa, and imported by AudioCubes, Plen is billed as a “desktop hobby robot”. But unlike most miniature bipedal hobby robots, Plen can can be controlled via your Android handset.
Android is predicted to surpass the iPhone and Blackberry platforms by 2013 becoming the second largest smartphone platform. Only Nokia’s Symbian will be on more phones sold that year.
In the world of Apple, being a Netbook is a bad, bad thing. During Apple’s keynote for the newly announced iPad, the Netbook was called out by Steve Jobs, who said “they’re not better at laptops than anything, they’re just cheaper.” The affordable, tiny, and yes, often bare-bones Atom processor-running device we’ve come to know and love, or hate, as the Netbook is often clunky and frequently disappointing, true enough.
I had the chance to work for a couple of months with my friend Mike Dawson last year in Afghanistan. He is the core person behind the OLPC project in Afghanistan and pushes for Free and Open Technologies in Afghanistan. Solutions like LXDE with it focus on a lightweight and energy saving desktop or decentralised low powered networks like Freifunk offer new opportunities to give people access even in remote areas.
The free software movement has unwittingly presented the peoples of the world with an important tool to avail of, on the frontlines of democracy. Many of those previously and currently engaged in the free software movement are unlikely to be fully aware of the consequences and benefits of their work and may still be living in the fantasy belief world of neo-liberalism, free markets, trickle down economics, endless growth, domination and mindless consumerism. This is simply because many of the participants just do it ( -i.e. write code) and are not in any formal way a member of anything in particular, or politically motivated. Undoubtedly global capitalism has also fed off the free software movement and gained its own benefits, but on balance it would seem it has been positive to ordinary people too.
One thing holding back the greater adoption of free software in this country is free software.
Schools could use Linux and other open source technologies, but the Education Ministry very kindly negotiates on their behalf with Microsoft for a licence covering all New Zealand state and integrated schools.
Crafting Digital Media is not an attempt to enumerate and describe every relevant package for Linux. Some users may be disappointed to learn that their favorite program is not profiled or even mentioned, but that should not diminish the book’s value for those users. Above all, Crafting Digital Media is about maximizing the creative potential of Linux by organizing its productive software into a seamless workflow. The information and advice in this book is valuable to the creative user regardless whether he uses the recommended applications or his preferred suite of custom-built software.
There was a flurry of Puppet Versus Chef in last week or so. I don’t want to go into sorting all the details at this time, but I hope I add perspective and clarity to one of the subtopics.
If you’re looking for Linux automation solutions, or server configuration management tools, the two technologies you’re likely to come across are Puppet and Opscode Chef. They are broadly similar in architecture and solve the same kinds of problems. Puppet, from Reductive Labs, has been around longer, and has a large user base. Chef, from Opscode, has learned some of the lessons from Puppet’s development, and has a high-profile client: EngineYard.
Michael Bemmer, the former head of Sun’s software business, is now the general manager of the Oracle Office Global Business Unit and is in many of the clips. He said there will be a name change for Star Office and Star Suite, which will become members of the Oracle Office family.
A large percentage of small to medium sized websites depend on Mysql server to support their db infrastructure. Working with it is as easy is saying it and for some reason there are numerous web and non-web administration software written specifically to manage a Mysql server and sites running on it. This article lists quite a few of them which you may find useful.
1. NG-Admin – designed for the content management of MySQL databases. It allows the user to browse, add, edit, and delete data. It is somewhat similar to phpMyAdmin, but specializes in editing the content of Web sites, not the database structures. Its features are very easy to use and highly tunable.
This, ultimately, is the most reassuring aspect of the Great Oracle Experiment: if things go wrong, there is always the possibility of taking the code elsewhere (if Oracle doesn’t mind) or just forking it (if it does). In this respect, takeovers of companies that control open source projects are rather less nerve-wracking for users than those involving purely proprietary software – a fact that we can all be grateful for after the worrying uncertainty that has surrounded the Sun-Oracle deal during the last few months.
OStatic: Some people say it doesn’t matter in the long run what Oracle does with MySQL. It’s open source, so it will just succeed in forked versions if Oracle does nothing with it or kills it? Are they right?
No, a fork is not likely to save MySQL long term. I have outlined the reasons in detail in my blog.
In short, the GPL only guarantees that the code will be available, not that it will be developed. If things are not developed fast enough (according to the needs if its users), it will very rapidly be uninteresting for the masses and slowly die.
Unfortunately, FreeBSD is a great operating system with an unholy awful installer — compared to other operating system installers currently available. Some people are comfortable with text-mode installers, some aren’t.
They are nothing to be afraid of if you have a moderate amount of knowledge, but for those who absolutely require a more up-to-date installer, PC-BSD may be of more interest than FreeBSD. Having said that, the installation is probably the hardest part of using FreeBSD, so if you’ve made it through this, FreeBSD is a lot of fun to play with.
This was carried into the IT sphere. I did several stories at ZDNet Healthcare about efforts by private contractors to destroy the VA’s open source VistA system — starving it of funds, driving away the best employees, centralizing contributions, and eventually replacing it through contracts.
My sources were former government employees. The ex-VA employees stayed in touch with former colleagues and got the story out. This was not a big story, but it held a lesson, namely the risk inherent in having government employees building vital infrastructure.
In the last year I’ve been involved in two open data projects, Open New Zealand and data.govt.nz. I believe in learning from experience and I’ve seen some signs recently that other projects might benefit from my experience, so this post is a recap of what I’ve learned. It’s the byproduct of a summer reflection on my last nine months working in open data.
A new IETF working group has been formed in the Real-time Applications and Infrastructure Area. For additional information, please contact the Area Directors or the WG Chairs.
So, dear developers, please stop assuming we’re all idiots. Let us make the same mistake again and again and sooner or later we will learn to not make the same mistakes. Training wheels are for Windows.. leave us *BSD/Linux users out of this particular loop.
You know what’s really annoying? Teenagers. Even more annoying? Teenagers inventing legitimately useful things and getting awards for it. Meet Alexander Kendrick, the 16-year old inventor of a new low-frequency radio that allows for cave-texting, which isn’t some fresh new euphemism, it just means people can finally text while deep underground.
Advance-fee fraud (AFF), also known as 419 scams and Nigerian scams, exploded in 2009, with victims losing more money than ever before. This is according to the latest analysis from Dutch investigation firm Ultrascan—a company that has been monitoring the activities of 419 scammers since 1996—which says that victims lost almost 50 percent more money in 2009 than 2008.
Two Trustwave security consultants report they have uncovered hardware and software vulnerabilities in femtocell devices that can be used to take over the device. The duo will present their findings at the ShmooCon conference in Washington.
Researchers working for TrustWave will present details of their successful attacks against femtocells at the ShmooCon security conference next week in Washington. They will explain that they were able to gain root access to the Linux-based devices, which could then be tampered with to track users and intercept calls.
Laws banning cellphone use while driving apparently haven’t reduced crashes, according to a study released on Friday that compared the number of total crashes before the ban with the number after. The study found virtually no difference in the numbers, a finding that had the researchers scratching their heads.
Two weeks after hackers launched a cyber-attack on Google that has appalled security researchers for its degree of sophistication, the Christian Science Monitor has revealed that online criminals breached the systems of three U.S. oil companies in 2008 through previously unreported attacks.
We are witnessing an epic battle between two banking giants, JPMorgan Chase (Paul Volcker) and Goldman Sachs (Rubin/Geithner). The bodies left on the battleground could include your pension fund and 401K.
* Anonymous comments banned for SA election
* Michael Atkinson says speech still free
* Media says censorship is ‘draconian’
SOUTH Australia has become one of the few states in the world to censor the internet.
The new law, which came into force on January 6, requires anyone making an online comment about next month’s state election to publish their real name and postcode.
Of course, it’s also noted that Reporters Without Borders ranks the UK higher than the US when it comes to freedom of the press, leading the professor to claim that perhaps the UK press is a little too free when it feels comfortable making such totally unsubstantiated claims.
When it added Public Citizen’s defense of Julia Forte’s 800Notes.com to the Citizen Media Law Project database the Project took note of a bizarre motion filed by Vision Media, asking the court to prohibit any public discussion about its lawsuit, including blogging. The motion is an apparent response to my email to Vision Media’s counsel inviting them respond on this blog to my comments about their lawsuit.
Ubisoft does not have the best history when it comes to invasive—if not downright broken—DRM, but the company’s upcoming “solution” to game piracy is much worse than anything we’ve seen in the past. The gist is simple: every time you want to play your game, it has to phone back to Ubisoft before giving you permission to play. No Internet connection? You’re simply out of luck.
It seems like every year there’s some sort of controversy over trademarks and the Superbowl. Of course, the NFL has been famous for aggressively defending trademarks.
[...]
The Monistere brothers seem particularly annoyed by the NFL bullying small t-shirt makers, saying that they’re more than happy to grant licenses to those folks to produce Who Dat merchandise, and merchants have said that the NFL communication has been tremendously threatening and aggressive, while the Monistere’s have been quite friendly and accommodating.
Ten years after the publication of “No Logo”, Klein looks at how Obama created a brand that won him the Presidency. Will his failure to live up to his lofty brand cost him?
What makes it even worse, of course, is that the quoted/plagiarized/infringing bit might not even be accurate. As we discussed in our own post on the subject, there appears to be significant disagreement over whether or not embedding authorized content could be seen as infringing — and apparently, there is a widespread debate about it in Dutch legal circles as well, saying that it is far from readily agreed upon in the legal literature.
Greg Sandoval, over at News.com recently came across a grandmother who was falsely accused multiple times of file sharing, and her ISP, Qwest, was threatening to kick her off the internet. We had not heard that Qwest had signed on with a “three strikes” program, so it’s a bit of news that it’s one of the companies who will accept bogus accusations. Not only that, but Qwest even told her that no other provider would grant her service because Qwest would let those other service providers “know her name and what she did.” Thanks, Qwest!
Several UK Lords have criticized the practices of law firms that send out warning letters to alleged copyright infringers demanding big payments. These schemes have been labeled a scam, and the lawyers operating them accused of “harassment, bullying and intrusion” and “legal blackmail” in the House of Lords.
Canadian officials travel to Guadalajara, Mexico this week to resume negotiations on the still-secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The discussion is likely to turn to the prospect of supporting three strikes and you’re out systems that could result in thousands of people losing access to the Internet based on three allegations of copyright infringement. Leaked ACTA documents indicate that encouraging the adoption of three-strikes – often euphemistically described as “graduated response” for the way Internet providers gradually send increasingly threatening warnings to subscribers – has been proposed for possible inclusion in the treaty.
Secretive international talks about how to curb counterfeiting and Internet piracy are under way in Mexico this week. But instead of focusing on the subject at hand, negotiators will spend much of their time discussing transparency, or rather the lack of it in the whole process.
Except of course for those with a devoted heir, such as Grace Guggenheim. She was not willing to accept defeat. Instead she set herself the extraordinary task of clearing all of the rights necessary to permit her father’s films to be shown. Eight years later, she is largely done. About ten major works remain. Just last year, her father’s most famous documentary–Robert Kennedy Remembered, made in 1968 in the two months between Kennedy’s assassination and the Democratic National Convention, and broadcast only once–was cleared for DVD release through the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center.
Listening to Holly pleading with the masters he has alienated his rights to is heartbreaking. Decca had dropped him, apparently, but had the rights to sit on his recordings for 5 years. Although they had no intention of releasing the songs, they also would not give Holly permission to do so–the cigar-chomping executive kept saying “well, we got a lot of money tied up in them, Buddy!” But Holly offered to reimburse those costs; no dice.
On 5 January, the Independent’s website ran a photo uploaded to the Flickr image-sharing site by user Peter Zabulis. Zabulis flagged his photo of a snowed-over field as “all rights reserved,” and he took exception to the Independent’s use of the image without permission, and he wrote to them to tell them so.
Exception turned to outrage as a terse note from the Independent claimed that by posting the photo to Flickr, Zabulis had not asserted his copyright (whatever that means) and thus copyright had not been breached.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has signed up with iCopyright, the American copyright bounty hunters used by the Associated Press, to offer ridiculous licenses for the quotation of CBC articles on the web (these are the same jokers who sell you a “license” to quote 5 words from the AP).
An offhand comment the other day by a friend caught my attention—”Did you know that you can’t watch the Super Bowl on a TV screen larger than 55 inches? Yeah, it’s right there in the law.”
Yahoo has renewed its licensing deal with the Associated Press to post articles from the global wire service on Yahoo Web sites, the companies said on Monday.
Or rather, it is all about preparing for inevitable failures, and they are legion. Hardware failures, power failures, and most of all, storage media failures. Ever notice how fragile digital storage media are? Are we ever going to get digital storage media that can match plain old paper, and other analog media, for reliability and longevity? Let’s take the example of archiving photographs.
User-friendliness of computer operating systems is something that gets often discussed in open-source software circles. But adding features that are designed to attract more new users isn’t always viewed positively in some hard-core geek communities. This week’s feature story examines a case of a developer who was met with a hostile reception when he tried to present his easy-to-use live CD to an unforgiving group of OpenBSD hackers. In the news section, Sun Microsystems closes its corporate web site, but what does that mean for some of its popular products? Also in this week’s issue, we investigate the idea of converting the ext3 file system to the newer ext4, take a look at Ubuntu’s controversial deal with Yahoo, and link to an article that reveals a little-known, but useful Mandriva feature. All this and more in this week’s issue of DistroWatch Weekly – happy reading!
The New Zealand Post is one of three government agencies looking to rip out their Windows desktops and replace them with Linux and open source applications.
The rural district (Landkreis) Wittmund in northwestern Germany is using GNU/Linux to centrally manage computers usage at eleven of its schools, reports Univention, one of the open source IT companies involved in the project.
According to Webmasterpro.de, a German IT service provider, the open source OpenOffice suite and its derivatives, such as StarOffice or IBM’s Lotus Symphony, are installed on more than 21% of German PCs. A sample of over one million German-speaking Internet users showed that 72% of users preferred Microsoft Office, while 2.7% preferred Corel’s WordPerfect, 1.4% used Apple’s iWork, 0.3% selected SoftMaker Office and 0.03% chose KOffice. Among the surveyed German speaking Internet users, 17.1% did not appear to have an Office suite installed.
I slapped together an SELinux presentation for the BozemanLUG and some people said they wished they could have attended it but missed it, so I decided to record a quick screencast.
I haven’t updated this topic since September, but I’m very excited about the progress so far. You may remember that one develope, David Boddie, had done some work, with the result that I could build .png files to visualise my patterns within Dolphin, and that we were hoping that the other developer who had shown interest, Purple-Bobby, would join us. That’s exactly what happened. David and Robert Forsyth, a.k.a.Purple-Bobby, attacked the problem from different angles, which proved to be very informative, as they could feed on each other’s ideas.
MORAL OF THE STORY
Properly setup and customized for an individual’s computing needs, Ubuntu Linux can be used successfully and easily by anyone of any age and computing ability. AND, the problems associated with computing under the Windows environment disappear.
My only regret is that I did not start looking into and learning about Linux prior to 2006.
I get a lot of questions on Linux hardware: “What’s the best piece of hardware X for Linux?” “Should I go route A since I’m using Linux?” Of course not everyone builds their own computer. But there are a fair number of us out there that would rather keep as much control over the selection of their machines components as they can. And there is something to be said about hand-picking your components. But which video card? Which sound card? Which networking card? Processor? Motherboard? Will it all work with Linux? You know it will work with Windows…but with Linux there can be some gray area.
Honestly, Linux used to be hard to use. Ten years ago I could regularly be found sweating and cursing in front an unresponsive PC, willing the Linux software on it to do something, anything to validate the many hours I had sunk into getting it to run. It was a thankless task with little obvious reward but it somehow made sense. And when something did work right it was like being part of a secret club; a group of insiders who knew something more important than anyone else. Which probably has a lot to do with the way Linux is perceived now.
Recently I replaced my mother’s PC, and I thought I could switch her to Linux. She was previously using Windows XP with several Open Source applications (Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc), so I decided to install Ubuntu 9.10, since it seems that it’s most devoted to non-expert users (she’s over-sixty and not inclined to change her computing habits).
I think that this is an interesting question. Which came first, Linux or the device? What do you think? Is Linux providing the creative juices for devices? Are the devices conceived and Linux is the best choice for these devices? You tell me. Why are so many new gadgets from printers,phones, satellite boxes and just about everything under the sun using Linux?
New work on the Sandia National Laboratories Red Storm supercomputer — the 17th fastest in the world — is helping to make supercomputers more accessible. Sandia researchers, working hand in hand with researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico, socialized 4,096 of Red Storm’s total 12,960 computer nodes into accepting a virtual external operating system — a leap of at least two orders of magnitude over previous such efforts.
Jesse Barnes, one of the Intel developers responsible for working on their Linux graphics driver stack, has published a new patch that adds “dynamic performance control support for Ironlake.” Ironlake was Intel’s codename for the onboard GPU found on new Clarkdale / Arrandale processors like the recently reviewed Intel Core i3 530. This patch takes advantage of a hardware performance and power management feature to actually increase the GPU clock (or to “overclock” it in a Graphics Turbo mode) when needed to deliver better performance. This patch is fairly large and can be found currently on the Intel driver mailing list.
While the support for graphics processors on Linux in the free software stack has improved a lot over Linux, there still are entire areas of support missing, such as with supporting NVIDIA’s SLI or AMD’s CrossFire technologies. Additionally, NVIDIA and AMD as well as Intel have been plopping dual GPUs into notebooks. This is not to split the rendering workload, but rather to allow one lower-powered GPU to be utilized when not in engaging in any vigorous tasks and then another performance-oriented GPU to be utilized when such speed is needed. This solution basically provides the best of both words of having maximum battery life but fast performance when needed. However, Linux has not supported this hybrid / switchable graphics technology at all.
While the support for graphics processors on Linux in the free software stack has improved a lot over Linux, there still are entire areas of support missing, such as with supporting NVIDIA’s SLI or AMD’s CrossFire technologies.
NVIDIA’s Aaron Plattner has announced the release of libvdpau 0.4. From November of 2008 when VDPAU was introduced to September of 2009, the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix lived within NVIDIA’s binary display driver package. However, in September NVIDIA began releasing a standalone driver package to make it easier for other Linux graphics drivers to implement. A month later NVIDIA then pushed out a DRI2 patch that allowed choosing the VDPAU back-end implementation on a per-screen basis.
Back in mid-2008 we published two articles that looked at the contributors to the X Server and contributors to Mesa, which provided statistics as to the companies and developers contributing to these two important free software projects over the years. Since the start of the new year though I’ve been meaning to provide some other statistics about how the projects themselves have evolved over the year, but this morning I am finally pushing out these new numbers for the X.Org Server and Mesa.
David Airlie has called upon Linus to pull in a new set of DRM patches for the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, which should land with the Linux 2.6.33-rc7 release.
Months after the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series (known by the “Evergreen” family codename) was introduced, AMD has finally pushed out the first bits of open-source code. This morning if you are to checkout the xf86-video-ati DDX driver branch there is initial user-space mode-setting support for the Radeon HD 5000 series GPUs. The ATI kernel mode-setting support that we really care about these days is also about done, but it isn’t yet published. The open-source ATI driver currently offers no 2D (EXA) acceleration and the 3D support either through a classic Mesa driver or Gallium3D also is not yet available.
I have been a happy Compiz user in my Mint desktop. Sure it uses some resources, but as is true for many, my computer can handle this with little performance hit.
About 1 1/2 years ago, I began experimenting with another small use of resources, the various docks available to Linux which utilize Compiz’s 3D offerings. I saw this as one more way to add a “wow” factor to show off Linux to others.
What could be more frustrating than trying to install Ubuntu or Mint on a new CPU, motherboard, with a built-in graphics card and your display goes south. Here’s the scenario, after the initial flash screens, the screen goes blank. It seems that Xorg is using a screen resolution your monitor does not support.
Lomo-Gimp is a Photoshop quality script that tries to give your digital pictures the warmth of those taken by an old rangefinder analog camera. Think of it as a Kodak Instamatic or a Lomo Holga faking effect. It enhances contrast and saturation, and applies a light and a dark overlay, trying to emulate incorrectness in exposition. Please note this does nothing —still it does!— to emulate the chromatic aberration peculiar in pictures taken using a real Lomo.
I have used Logos Bible software, e-Sword, as well as other Bible study software in the past. Logos especially is a very good program. The only problem is that on an assistant pastor’s budget, it costs a large sum of money. I have to constantly be aware that I need to be a good steward.
Xiphos, on the other hand is open-source software. Simply, that means I am allowed to go into the program code myself and modify it to behave how i wish it too and use it in the manner I wish. I am legally allowed to share the software, and even encouraged to do so! And for the my bottom line – it is free. Free as in freedom and price.
As always, the OpenOffice.org source files and the outlines for the entire course are at the course page on my website – but please note that’s a rough outline; as we progress through the class I’m coming up with the more-solid lesson plans based on how far the students get each session. By the end of the course I hope to have the course page organized much better.
Video editing on Linux has long gotten a bad rap. A few years ago, the only real options for video editing were either deeply limited in features and polish, or incredibly complex to set up and use.
While Linux still lacks a direct competitor to tools like Apple’s iMovie or Final Cut Pro, the current crop of video editing tools are much more capable and easy to use. Two tools in particular stand out: PiTiVi and Kdenlive. Both suites are under active development and look promising. In this article, we’ll take a look at what both of these tools can and can’t do.
One of the basic utilities supplied with any operating system is a desktop calculator. These are often simple utilities that are perfectly adequate for basic use. They typically include trigonometric functions, logarithms, factorials, parentheses and a memory function.
I have been using Irssi for about 2 years now. Irssi is an extremely flexible text based IRC client. You can find out more about Irssi at www.irssi.org. During my two years with Irssi I have been introduced to many good add-on scripts. I am going to list my favorite scripts.
Wrapped into a small 117mb, Puppy Arcade is going from strength to strength. It bodes well for it’s future that so many improvements have been made and I would hope that Puppy Arcade not only ressurects many old machines for retro gaming but also is a showcase for the excellent Puppy Linux from which its derived from.
Next month I’ll start teaching GNOME and KDE programming at ETSI de Telecomunicacion at Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. This is the Application development for GNOME and KDE course we have developed for CENATIC.
February 1st, 2010. Today, KDE has released the third release candidate of the next version of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). KDE SC 4.4 Release Candidate 3 provides a testing base for identifying bugs in the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.4, with its components the KDE Plasma Workspaces, the Applications powered by KDE, and the KDE Development Platform.
The list of changes between 4.3 and 4.4 is especially long. Important changes can be observed all over the place…
Interested in trying out KDE SC 4.4 but don’t want to do a full installation, risking system instability? Before my presentation at Wednesday’s Phoenix Linux User Group meeting, it occured to me that I should bring a live image for folks to play with.
Hi Stephen. Your nickname “steveire” already gives away something about your origin. Could you introduce yourself so our readers get to know a bit more about you?
Sure. I’ve been using the handle steveire for a few years now on IRC and other places. For non-Irish people, it looks like a “Steve” and an “Ire” for Ireland, but in fact it’s a “Steve” and an Éire, so on the rare occasions that I say it, I pronounce it “steve-air-eh”. I moved from Dublin, Ireland to Berlin in summer 2009 to start a job at KDAB.
Social media has taken over the Web in a very big way. It has even been argued that social media is the new Web or “new media”. From social networking sites like Facebook to video sharing sites like YouTube, social media services occupy all of the top 20 most popular sites on Alexa.com, excluding search engines. Two of those popular social media sites are Blogger and WordPress, two sites that host free blogs for their users.
The new panel, in its new configuration, is broken into two main sections. Namely, General and Advanced. General is all of the things that are your day to day standard configuration options. Advanced contains, well, the more advanced features you’re not likely to touch more than once or twice a year, if at all. This simple separation of categories and sections really makes the System Settings panel much easier to work with.
Tokamak 4 commences on the 19th of February in Nuremberg. Novell will be hosting our band of merry developers, designers and dreamers. This Tokamak is going to be the biggest one yet with 25 participants, not counting the visitors we are expecting to swell those numbers even further.
The 4.4 release for KDE SC is coming along well. We’ve been hammering nasties, of both the crasher and general misbehavior sort, over the head at a reasonable pace, even though 4.5 is open and some work is going on there. I count 52 backport commits to the 4.4 branch in just Plasma-land in the last seven days.
There are many Linux distros and we have unique reasons to like them. To fully master Linux, start with the top of the list – the most user-friendly – and slowly choose the next one, until you reach the bottom of the list – the most challenging – where you can get your hands dirty.
Wow, feels like I haven’t blogged in a long time. Time is flying by with the new year heading into February already. I decided I would take a look at 5.1 x86 KDE edition since it’s been a long time since I have messed with x86 and KDE. I slotted myself some time, which was my first mistake as I was rushed to it and it came back to bite me. Silly mistakes when rushed can turn something into a much longer ordeal. I’ll give you the details.
There’s a lot of potential in this distribution. Speed and memory consumption make it a good choice for older hardware.
There is also hard work to do before final release. The choice of browser should be rethought (it should be tested on older hardware as well). An APM option would be nice and the configuration utilities need to be finished.
Pardus is a Linux, desktop-oriented operating system developed by Onur Küçük and his team from Turkey. At a time when nearly every new Linux distro is based on or derived from Ubuntu, Pardus is a rarity. It is an original, not based on or derived from any other distro. As such, its package manager and graphical management tools are custom-developed. This article is a review of Pardus 2009.1, the latest stable release.
The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the February 2010 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. Highlights include:
10 Beginner Mistakes To Avoid
Game Zone: Machinarium
Behind The Scenes: davecs
KDE 4: Konqueror or Dolphin?
KDE 4: Introducing Plasma
KDE 4: Plasma FAQ
Forum Foibles: Be My Valentine
Ms_meme’s nook: PCLOS a Smoocho
Computer Languages A to Z: Haskell
Command Line Interface Intro: Part 5
Gadgets & Gear: Canyon Notebook Stand
Screenshot Showcase
Testimonials
and much, much more!
It has been quite some time, actually years, since I started using Debian. Earlier I have used various flavors of Linux like SuSE, Red Hat, RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntoo but my experience with Debian has been so far the best. I just thought to write the reasons for which I really like Debian compared to other systems.
[...]
Debian is available for a variety of architectures and platforms, which further increases the user base as well as the support base. Ports of debian exist for most common architectures like ARM, MIPS, PPC, x86, x86_64 etc. There are variety of GNU/Linux distribution which are Debian based, most notable of them is Ubuntoo, which further increases the support and user base.
The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename “lenny”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems.
The fact that Yahoo! is going to be the default search provider simply means they offered a better deal over that of Google. What this actually means is that the Ubuntu brand is now more valuable than before. This is likely to go a long way to secure other lucrative contracts for Canonical. It also means that Ubuntu is actually becoming a brand over which the tech giants try to outbid each other in order to do business with. That is a good sign of success.
On Tuesday, Rick Spencer announced on the Ubuntu developers mailing list that Ubuntu has entered a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and will make Yahoo! the default search engine in the next Ubuntu release (10.04, Lucid Lynx). This sparked an extremely long discussion thread on the Ubuntu Forums about whether this is a good idea or not.
Generally speaking (with few exceptions), the reactions fall into one of two categories:
1. This is great. I won’t use Yahoo! myself, but if it makes money for Ubuntu, why not? How hard is it to change the defaults. Two clicks.
2. This is unacceptable. Yahoo! is in bed with Microsoft. This is wrong. If Ubuntu needs money, we should donate. Why wasn’t the community consulted?
I last looked at Ubuntu 9.04 a little over six months ago. So I decided it was time to see what has changed. Since I’m now testing on a 64-bit machine, I decided to test the 64-bit version of Ubuntu.
* Command and Conquer.
* How-To : Program in Python – Part 7, Create A Media Center with a Revo, Ubuntu and Boxee, and The Perfect Server – Part 3.
* My Story – Ubuntu in Public Education, and Why I Use Linux.
* Review – Exaile.
* MOTU Interview – Didier Roche.
* Top 5 – Synchronization Clients.
* Ubuntu Women, Ubuntu Games and all the usual goodness!
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #178 for the week January 24th – January 30th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Contribute with Ubuntu One Bug Day, Lucid changes to Firefox default search provider, Announcement: Ubuntu Server update for Lucid Alpha3, Interview With Ubuntu Manual Project Leader Ben Humphrey, Ubuntu Honduras, Back up old sources from PPA’s, Improved Bug Patch Notifications, Getting your code into Launchpad, Ubuntu Developer Week Recap, Canonical Voices, Ubuntu Community Learning Project Update, NZ school ditches Microsoft and goes totally open source, Full Circle Magazine #33, and much, much more!
I recently broke my usual trend of sticking to Debian (stable) with a KDE 3.5 desktop and decided to try Kubuntu. I then decided to write this review…
In the past it seemed that Kubuntu was an afterthought or some obscure side project (like Christian Ubuntu), but Kubuntu 9.10 really steals the show. As many others have said, Kubuntu seems better put together than Ubuntu in many ways. The “glitchiness” in Kubuntu 9.04 has been diminished greatly in this latest release. This is probably due mostly in part to a newer version of KDE 4 (that shows the great potential that KDE 4 has).
Over the last 12 yrs that I’ve been using Linux never has a distribution impressed me this good. I keep Linux Mint 8 is Perfect for meexperimenting with distributions when they are released. From Mandrake to Mandriva, Redhat to Fedora, SuSE to openSUSE and even Debian to Ubuntu… I thought I had seen it all. All the time I kept coming back to SuSE, but this time it seems different. I tried Linux Mint and I guess I will be sticking to it for long.
Finally got my new ebay-bought laptop up and running after a multitude of problems, and I’d like to say a few words to my fellow nerdy sorts, and any of those who dabble in other operating systems.
At the recent Consumer Electronics Show there was a flood of netbooks and Android based devices about to be launched into the market. The folks at the Linux Foundation couldn’t be more pleased about the incursion of Linux into this new generation of portable connected devices, but the software that appears on these devices often doesn’t look or feel like “Linux”.
These eight apps allow you to open a shell, run a shell script, tap the Linux command line, or otherwise put your Android-based smartphone to productive use. Most are available in free editions, and none will set you back more than a few dollars.
No one has made a great gaming phone. Sure, Apple sells lots of iPhone games but have you ever tried to play a first-person shooter or football game on an iPhone? It’s not a terrible experience but it’s nowhere near as good as playing those types of games on a Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. As for why Nintendo or Sony hasn’t released a gaming phone yet is beyond us but the demand for a device that bridges the gap between a smart phone and a portable gaming console is definitely there.
Nokia’s N900 is not a phone, OK. Well, it is a phone, in that it has a SIM slot, and you can use it to make voice calls. And it supports HSDPA and has a front facing camera so you can make video calls. But actually it is more a mini computer than a mobile phone.
It’s been a while since my last substantial review but I’m back with something a little different for you today. I’d like to talk about the Nokia N900 Linux-based phone I’ve been testing for the past 6 weeks. It’s the first Maemo powered device to feature phone functions. Does this move signal a new direction for Nokia? Nobody seems quite sure just yet, but the hardware and software are causing a lot of interest in the Linux community. Here’s my thoughts on the experience so far.
After the iPad successfully lowers resistance to non-Windows computing devices, Linux will have a much better chance of competing in the mobile computing market and, eventually, on the desktop.
The bottom line is that FLOSS is not about cheap software. It’s about control. If you have the source code then you are in control of the situation, although good support from the vendor is always welcomed. Cheap price comes with the openest/freedom, since you are not restricted to pay support to a particular vendor if you are not happy with him.
Why would people be so giving? The foundation of open source is belonging. Everyone to the hardest working contributor to the new user is equally entitled to their license. You do not need to pay thousands of dollars, go to a certain school, work for the right employer, or live in the right country. Open source is a free gift to all. Like grace, those who receive it want to share it. We stand together as neighbors living everywhere changing the world where we live.
Open source is not just a methodology for releasing software for people like Helios and I. It is a way of life that we pay for by giving back in abundance with the resources we have to our avail. So, when Helios posted that the founder of the website that him understand Linux was dying, I was happy to help again. This way the website: brunolinux.com and the “Bruno Knaapen Technology Learning Center” will leave a legacy.
A few weeks ago I was finally able to put down an English version of a short article I had written in October 2009 about the risks for Italian schools hidden in a deal between Microsoft and the Italian Government. Some days later, almost by chance, I discovered that that translation had been linked from Linux Today and that it had caused a couple of comments that really deserve an answer, for reasons that will be clear in a moment. The comments I refer to are those titled FOSS perception in Italy and ALL FALSE, both reported here for your convenience.
I’m a sucker for audacious ideas. Big, huge things with a hint of insanity. And if you put those ideas in space I get really interested. That’s why the Open Luna Foundation is right up my alley.
OSCON 2010 This nonprofit project wants to use open source technologies and private donations to build a permanent outpost on the moon. (This isn’t associated with the Google Lunar X Prize.)
“I work at a privately funded, open source, manned, return to the moon mission — Yes really, and Yes, we really are going to put man (and woman) back on the moon. Since we are open source, we want all of our tools to be, too. What we are looking for is CAD software that we can feed into Blender (or the like) to do 3D modeling with. Many of the engineers have tried working with Blender and Art of Illusion, but have not been pleased. They want to just draw the parts, then feed them to the art people who will run them through the 3D modelers for videos, illustrations and such. What is your preference?”
As a Second Life enthusiast, I really want the iPad to run Second Life. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t. As my friend Wagner James Au points out on the blog New World Notes, the iPhone already has a couple of rich, text-only Second Life clients, and the iPad now has the horsepower and screen size to support Second Life graphics.
Extensions: Who wouldn’t like if their browser wears a haute couture skins or the pleasure of viewing Megan fox images on a 3D wall with uncluttered black background or get to know if the weather permits you to tee over the weekend just by moving the mouse over or download all the links on a page with just one click! That’s the beauty of Firefox extensions! They not only make the browser look good, but provide the user with oodles of configurable plugins that makes browsing whole lot of fun.
We’re pleased to announce that Firefox is now available for Nokia’s Maemo platform. Starting today, Nokia N900 owners can enjoy many of the same Firefox features they know and love on the desktop on their mobile device.
The fact that Oracle has decided to do most of what Sun was doing, only better, is bad news for many other vendors. Its breadth now rivals that of HP and IBM. And that means Oracle is going to be a serious (or more serious) competitor on many fronts.
The GNU/Linux systems have reached an important level of maturity, allowing to integrate them in almost any kind of work environment, from a desktop PC to the sever facilities of a big company.
In the module called “The GNU/Linux operating system”, the main contents are related with system administration. This book is the main documentation for the module.
Sounds great doesn’t it? But rightfully so, many in the open source community say thanks but where is the beef here? Who is monitoring to make sure these policies are followed? What are the repercussions of not following these policies? Setting these policies at the cabinet level does not trickle down to the procurement office per say.
In an interview with IT Wire, Mark Shuttleworth argues that all copyright assignment systems are equal, saying further that what Intel, Canonical and other for-profit companies ask for in the process are the same things asked for by Free Software non-profit organizations like the Free Software Foundation.
I’ve written about this before, and recently quit using Ubuntu in part because of Canonical’s assignment policies (which is, as Mark correctly points out, not that different from other for-profit company’s assignment forms.)
The Danish parliament and the Danish minister for Science this morning agreed that the Danish state administrations should use open standards, including the Open Document Format (ODF), starting on 1 April 2011. A formal vote on the agreement is planned for next Tuesday.
Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings the Blues” is becoming a huge critical success, and may even succeed financially, which is unusual for any independent film, but virtually unprecedented for free culture films (“Sita” was released under the CC By-SA). There’s only one sad thing about this for free software fans, and that’s that “Sita” was made using proprietary software, and the “source code” is in a proprietary format: Adobe Flash’s “FLA” format, to be precise. Paley has posted these files on the Internet Archive, but she doesn’t know how to translate them into any free software friendly format (and neither do I). Can you help?
INSECURITY OUTFIT McAfee has named the US as the most likely source of cyber attacks, beating out the widely perceived favourites China and Russia.
McAfee conducted a study that questioned 600 IT and security executives from various countries to discuss, rate and rank their biggest Internet security concerns. Most of the report just states the bleedin’ obvious, except for the finding that the Americans are the most feared by the others.
Alex Deane, Director of Big Brother Watch, will be appearing tomorrow (Monday) on the BBC Breakfast Show (available on BBC One and the BBC News Channel) debating the government’s decision to roll-out full-body scanners to all UK airports.
In response, Alex Deane, Director of Big Brother Watch, who was inteviewed about this very issue this morning on BBC Breakfast, said:
“People are understandably afraid of terrorism. But we didn’t allow the IRA to impede our freedoms or change our way of life, and we shouldn’t change now either.
“Those upset by the prospect of undergoing these scans shouldn’t be forced to choose between their dignity and their flight.
“What kind of a free society does the Government think it is “protecting”, when it invades our privacy like this?
“When we are forced to expose ourselves at the airport in order to go on holiday, the terrorists have won.”
John Yates, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said that it was essential to use a range of “common sense” profiling methods to spot suspicious individuals at airports and in other areas sensitive to attack.
The total number of dollars rushing toward cloud computing is massive. The various top research firms – IDC, Gartner, et al. — all have eyebrow-raising forecasts about the growth rate of cloud-based computing services.
Russia urged China to dump its Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds in 2008 in a bid to force a bailout of the largest U.S. mortgage-finance companies, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said.
Paulson learned of the “disruptive scheme” while attending the Beijing Summer Olympics, according to his memoir, “On The Brink.”
The well-groomed brokers and traders bent on sticking up for Wall Street gathered on Wednesday in best-behaved form — no chanting, no shrill whistling, pretty much no noise at all — to mark the formation of the financial world’s modest alternative to the Tea Party movement.
Talk about spin by the Trib’s big thinkers! I don’t know about you, but two million would cover a lot of reporting salaries. Of course, that’s just one bonus. For $70 million or $45 million, how many reporters could a company that actually cared about reporting keep on staff for the next five years? I’m not sure, given the variation in journalists’ salaries, but I’m sure it’d go a long way. So, I for one am sure hoping the federal bankruptcy court throws the Tribune’s bonus request in the trashcan, where it belongs.)
The President understands that the Wall Street bailout was “about as popular as a root canal.” But if Democrats continue to peddle this type of rhetoric while neglecting meaningful reform as they have done this week, the Republicans will run away with the anti-bailout message and with the election in November.
The controversy over Wal-Mart’s attempts to break into the Chicago retail market has flared up again recently. Opponents argue that Wal-Mart drives down wages, destroys local businesses and leads to no net increase in jobs or tax revenue for the city. Wal-Mart and its allies contend that neighborhood residents deserve to have a say in what happens in their neighborhood, and people that don’t live there should stay out of the matter.
The day after President Barack Obama urged members of Congress to be more transparent about their interactions with lobbyists, the House Republican Caucus headed up Interstate 95 for a retreat where they will be able to mingle privately with… lobbyists.
When you get an invitation from the city’s hottest lobbyists for a dinner in honor of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, expect to pay.
But even with the promise of dinner prepared by “celebrity women chefs,” ticket prices ranging from $5,000 to $30,400 are enough to choke on. “Whatever,” Democrats will say as they fork over the money to attend the exclusive fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee at the home of überlobbyists Heather and Tony Podesta. And the truth is, this is now an annual event.
To all those devoted to the principle that, ” Greed is good,” Zaid Jilani on Think Progress covered the announcement that a Maryland Corporation intends to run for U.S. Congress testing the new principle that the Roberts Court enshrined by the decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission that corporations have equal rights as real persons including free speech.
Murray Hill has designated a human to fill out the necessary forms to apply for its run for office, and it’s political slogan is “Corporations are people too!” It has started a Facebook page and says it plans on using automated robo-calls, “astroturf” lobbying, and computer-generated avatars to win over voters.
When progressive historian Howard Zinn died on January 27, NPR’s All Things Considered (1/28/10) marked his passing with something you don’t often see in an obituary: a rebuttal.
After quoting Noam Chomsky and Julian Bond, NPR’s Allison Keyes turned to far-right activist David Horowitz to symbolically spit on Zinn’s grave. “There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn’s intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect,” Horowitz declared. “Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse.”
But NPR’s remembrance also included darkly insulting comments from conservative pundit David Horowitz: “There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn’s intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect,” Horowitz said. “Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse.” Horowitz called Zinn’s famous book, A People’s History of the United States, “a travesty.” While NPR arguably tries to balance news reports with views from opposing sides of issues, it has not consistently adhered to this principle in its radio obituaries.
As I watch the response to the State of the Union address, I cannot help but notice that Virginia’s new governor, Bob McDonnell, in his response to the President’s speech, has continued the George W. Bush PR stagecraft in setting the scene for his remarks. Like tokens, he has four supporters strategically positioned behind him to fit in the television screen: an African American woman, a white male soldier, an Asian man, and a young woman.
The Great Australian Internet Blackout campaign against mandatory ISP-level filtering has attracted twice as many websites to its cause as had pledged before it began.
WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website that allows people to publish uncensored information anonymously, has suspended operations owing to financial problems.
The Madrid Privacy Declaration is a substantial document that reaffirms international instruments for privacy protection, identifies new challenges, and call for concrete actions.
Viviane Reding, the EU’s Information Society and Media commissioner, said Thursday that she seeks to modernize the general privacy directive the EU has had in place since 1995, singling out social networks and RFID tracking tags as examples of technologies that have vaulted ahead of current statutes.
Ara Technica, citing a Freedom to Tinker blog post, has an interesting article about a research that-albeit some caveats- makes some really important points about the relationship between the level of restriction in an intellectual property and the level to which it is shared illegally, chiefly over Bittorrent.
To sum things up, the research discovered that digital media like movies and music that contained DRM were highly pirated than their non-DRMd counterparts.
“This past week Guadalajara, Mexico hosted the 7th secret meeting of ACTA proponents who continue to ignore demands worldwide to open the debate to the public. Piecing together official and leaked documents from various global sources, Michael Geist has coalesced it all into a five part ACTA Guide that offers structured insight into what these talks might foist upon the populace at large. ‘Questions about ACTA typically follow a familiar pattern — what is it (Part One of the ACTA Guide listing the timeline of talks), do you have evidence (Part Two), why is this secret (Part Three), followed by what would ACTA do to my country’s laws (Part Four)? Countering the momentum behind ACTA will require many to speak out” (Part Five).’”
Ever since Paul McGuinness, manager of the rock band U2, began lashing out at Internet Service providers for allegedly profiting from and encouraging illegal file sharing, U2 fans have wondered whether McGuinness spoke for the band.
The tactic of using IP addresses extracted from internet service providers to send scare letters to suspected pirates is not something the British music industry would consider.
About 15 Indian authors and publishers, and two organizations in the country, submitted their objections on Thursday to Google’s plan to scan and sell books online.
It was reported yesterday that Charles Dunstone, Chief Executive of Carphone Warehouse, said if the Digital Economy Bill is enacted he would be prepared to fight the Government in court.
Charles Dunstone, CEO of Carphone Warehouse, hasn’t given up on the dream of being a quad-player, after revealing plans to launch TV and mobile TalkTalk services.
The following Linux-based operating systems were announced last week: Android-x86 1.6, Linux Mint 8 RC1 KDE Community Edition, Ubuntu Electronics Remix 9.10 and Tiny Core Linux 2.8. In other news: the Ubuntu Manual team needs your help to make the upcoming manual, for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system, better and useful! The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the latest Linux distributions released/updated and the development releases.
Virtual machines are the entire state of a computer, frozen into a memory file, and saved. You can run them in the corner of the memory of your PC. Like a picture in a picture or a baby in a womb, a virtual machine is an entire, self-contained image of a computer, running inside your own computer. You can have as many virtual machines running as you want and that your computer can bear. I’ve seen Mac laptops running Windows 7 in one virtual machine, Linux in another. And that Linux image is, itself, running a simulation of the veteran Commodore 64 microcomputer, just to be perverse.
I found this site reports 4.4% GNU/Linux visitors from their webloag. The site is a dial-up ISP and co-location service so they may have more visitors who are techie but at least we know that up front. It shows MacOS at 4.7%. Now to find reports far and wide, wherever Debian goes…
This week on Linux Outlaws: Sun/Oracle deal approved, Zonker leaves Novell, Linux-powered roboboats to invade Wales, 17 year old flaw in Windows uncovered and much, much more…
Cisco today announced the launch of a new Linux-powered router, “the Linksys by Cisco Wireless-N Broadband Router with storage Link (WRT160NL)”, for the Indian market.
Cisco Systems Inc. has launched a new Linux-powered router, the Linksys by Cisco Wireless-N Broadband Router with Storage Link (WRT160NL) in India. This new product complements the existing Linksys by Cisco consumer router line-up and is essentially the next generation of the popular WRT54GL router.
In February 2009, Georgian College went into production with a four-node Oracle Database cluster running industry-standard servers and Linux powering enterprise applications used by students, faculty and administration.
Zarafa is a Linux-based groupware product which offers its own WebAccess web client, IMAP/POP3 access, a CalDAV gateway and native MAPI integration with Outlook.
“I created CloudLinux OS based my previous work developing the H-Sphere Control Panel. I could see the need to give providers a way to control the CPU and IO demands of individual users to achieve high level of server stability,” states Igor Seletskiy, CEO of Cloud Linux Inc. “This work is based on a lot of research that has been done over the years. We went deep into Linux kernel to achieve high level of resource isolation. We also wanted to be able to offer the OS with a professionally staffed, 24/7 support operation and at a low cost for providers. So on behalf of my team and after these many months of hard work, I am proud to be introducing this new technology here at the Parallel’s Summit.”
The Linux server market is proving to be big business for San Francisco-based Polywell Computers, a manufacturer and distributor of servers and desktops to the corporate market. In fact, the 23-year-old maker of low-cost PCs and servers has experienced a steady and significant rise in demand for Linux boxes over traditional Windows PCs and servers.
“Ten years ago, 99% of our servers were Windows-based, and today 99% are Linux-based,” says Polywell CEO Sam Chu (www.polywell.com). “We see all sizes of companies, and government, moving from Windows to Linux.”
We had all but given up on the FOSS MIS in UK schools and had resigned ourselves to virtualising an MS server instance on what otherwise would have been a pure Linux server stack just to run SIMS.
However, it seems to me now to be a MIS-take! To elaborate on this it is necessary to look at the trends in the market.
There’s news that the London Stock Exchange plans to move to GNU/Linux within 12 months. There is also a story on Groklaw about GNU/Linux meeting the needs of Intel better than that other OS ten years ago. GNU/Linux is a great OS.
Hitting back at Microsoft’s recent denunciation of Mobile Linux, the Linux Foundation’s outspoken director Jim Zemlin has defended the open source platform against charges of fragmentation.
The Linux Foundation is offering global training programs, including a free webinar series, to help prospective job searchers meet the rise in demand for Linux-related jobs.
Research shows the demand for Linux talent is on the rise with some firms reporting a 50 percent increase in Linux-related jobs just in the last year. This is certainly good news if you already know how to work with Linux, and perhaps better news if you are looking for a new technical role.
A little less than a year ago, the Linux Foundation launched a program to provide a variety of training opportunities for Linux professionals. Just a few months later, the Foundation moved the program online, offering web-based sessions of select courses to reach a wider audience. On Tuesday, they took it one step further, announcing the free — as in beer — Linux Training Webinar Series.
The courses are VENDOR-NEUTRAL. I think this is an important detail because the huge variety of distro’s, applications and the like are all running on top of a common kernel.
In my dressing down of Wine, I noted that users are unlikely to find Wine mentioned in their ISV’s support matrices, but, as I learned, two of the most frequently-recommended MySQL query tools I encountered, PremiumSoft’s Navicat Lite and the open source HeidiSQL, owe their Linux support to none other than the Wine project.
When I stumble into the kitchen table at midnight, I’ve been known to cry, “It’s a virtual dark room in here!” But that has nothing to do with darktable, which is virtual darkroom software that lets you develop your digital negatives (comparable to UFRaw), and also bundles in the same application a virtual light table to organize your image collections (comparable to F-Spot).
strace is a mighty tool. It’s so simple to use, yet it offers rewards almost instantly. I do admit it’s not for everyone, definitely not the majority of home users, but with some patience, basic investigative instinct combined with a curious soul and desire to learn, you can put strace to smart use.
People often ask why there are so many Linux distributions. No one seems to ask why there are so many items in a buffet spread or so much variety in a botanical garden. The large number of distributions sure makes it difficult to pick the right one for a particular task; but having picked the right distribution, you have it better adapted for the task at hand.
A Linkedin profile from Valve Software’s Chris Green reveals that the company is apparently “REALLY looking for senior Linux + Mac engineers.” As of yet there has been no official announcement of any upcoming Mac related projects. Valve is known for its Half-Life series as well as its Steam digital download service.
It seems as if Half-Life and Left 4 Dead developer Valve is looking for a few good men to engineer things for Linux and Macintosh. Several sleuth sites, as well as more than a share of Mac-focused sites, have been reporting on a rogue sentence not-so-tucked-away in Valve’s Chris Green’s LinkedIn profile, indicating that the studio is indeed doing as much.
As many of you know, I’m still quite interested in virtual worlds and 3D immersive environments though I certainly don’t spend as much time in Second Life as I did several years ago. So from time to time I poke around and see what people are working on, and tonight I came across the Sirikata project from the Stanford Virtual Worlds Group in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.
Akonadi is the central point of accessing PIM data for all KDE applications. It abstracts all the different implementation details of various sources so that the mail program or calendar application does not need to know the details of how to access the sources itself. However, Akonadi does need these details, which is where its resources come into play.
Last week, the KDE Community had their yearly Americas event, this year in sunny San Diego. Despite California not living up to its sunny reputation, the attendees certainly had a good time. The first three days featured talks about a variety of topics (day 1, day 2 and day 3), there were CMake and Qt development courses and of course several small meetings and work to be done. However there was more than sitting in the conference room at UCSD. We had a great time at Banana Bungalows on the beach, went out for a variety of food, had a few dragons and babies visit us and risked our lives getting to and from the university. Read on for some general impressions on the event, and for some motivation to attend Camp KDE 2011 next January, at a location still to be determined.
The booth will need to be staffed from 9am-6pm. The great news is that you will get into SCALE for free, and because you will not need to be at the booth the whole show, you can take time to check out the talks or visit other booths.
KDAB, the Qt Experts have issued a new release of the Qt Addon collection KD Tools. This release goes along with a significant extension of KDAB’s training course offering, now including in-depth trainings and more advanced topics. KDAB developer Stephen Kelly has been interview after he won the Qt Contribution Award. He, and all other KDAB developers are now Qt certified.
Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has announced the availability of version 2.8 of Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core is a minimal Linux distribution that is based on the 2.6 Linux kernel and is only about 10 MB in size. In addition to the usual bug fixes, the latest update includes a number of changes and updates.
The guys over at Linux Outlaws are always talking about Tiny Core Linux because it always seems to be releasing a new version. I was impressed back in the day that Damn Small Linux could have a working Linux distro in only 50 MB. I know that Tiny Core Linux is technically not a full Linux distro, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It came in a recent LXF disc and I decided to check it out.
On January 25th, François Dupoux released version 1.3.5 of the SystemRescueCd Linux-based operating system. The new SystemRescueCd 1.3.5 is now powered by Linux kernel 2.6.31.12, with an updated Btrfs filesystem from Linux kernel 2.6.32. The popular GParted application for partitioning tasks was updated, as well as the FSArchiver and NTFS-3G.
We are proud to announce that we have just released the newest release of PC/OS. PC/OS OpenWorkstation and PC/OS WebStation are the two editions released. These replace PC/OS 2009 OpenWorkstation and WebStation. This release is based on the Ubuntu 9.04 series. Some of the higlights that target the new release are as follows.
Yesterday evening, January 26th, Roberto Dohnert proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the PC/OS 10 Ubuntu-based operating system.
The idea of open source need not be limited to software — it can also apply to subjects like education, business, law and life in general. That’s the philosophy behind Red Hat’s new Web site, anyway. Could opensource.com be Red Hat’s attempt at reviving excitement in the open source movement? Perhaps the site was put up in an attempt to clarify the difference between open source and collaboration.
I’m kicking off my third year at Red Hat this month and would like to take a step back as we move into 2010 to reflect on the past year. In keeping with the U.S. presidential tradition of delivering a “State of the Union” address each January, I’d like to maintain a similar tradition at Red Hat and highlight some of our milestones from 2009.
Last weekend I went through a somewhat lengthy process of upgrading one of my servers from Fedora 6 to Fedora 12. The server is vital for a company that uses it, there is more than 2 TBytes of data on that machine, and I only had a weekend to go through the upgrade.
Fedora is a very dynamic distribution, with new releases coming out roughly every 6 month. An upgrade backward compatibility is maintained only for the last 2 releases. So, I had to first upgrade from Fedora 6 to Fedora 8, then from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10, and then finally from Fedora 10 to Fedora 12.
Several of the concerns about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun have revolved around how Unix technologies led by Sun would continue under the new ownership. As it turns out, Solaris users might not have much to worry about, as Oracle executives on Wednesday affirmed their commitment to preserving the efforts.
If you want to know what Oracle’s roadmap is for Linux, just watch what Red Hat does. Oracle Enterprise Linux is just a clone of RHEL. Getting a sense of what Oracle really has planned for Solaris – aside from deploying it in SMP systems and clusters – is going to take some time. Oracle’s plans for virtualization and system management are more clear.
Linux was referenced a lot. Larry is a Linux fan, and so are his colleagues — there’s no doubt. ZFS was referenced a lot as one of the most powerful filesystems (it can do snapshots), I really hope that Linux fans will be able to truly enjoy ZFS on Linux kernel level because as of now it works so slowly via Fuse (Filesystem in Userspace).
Ubuntu 9.10, code-named Karmic Koala, debuted in late Oct 2009. And unlike the commercial operating systems, Ubuntu is totally free;it doesn’t cost you a dime. Eric Geier tells you all you need to know about this nifty Ubuntu upgrade.
“The guidance at Canonical is that we encourage our employees to sign copyright assignment agreements for the projects they participate in (as far as I know we’ve done so for MySQL, Zope, FSF, Novell, Red Hat, Intel and others) in order to facilitate the upstreaming of their work. There are variations on the language used. Canonical’s was highlighted in a recent LWN article, but I think the article created the very mistaken impression that Canonical’s agreement is materially different from any of the others I’ve mentioned.”
The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, the fourth maintenance update to the Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, first released at the end of April 2008. The maintenance release of “Hardy Heron” includes 77 updates, covering several bugs, security issues and errors in the installation system. These issues include, Nautilus not displaying Samba shares for certain networks, specific hardware fixes for Dell computers and GRUB installation failures on certain non-Ext3 file systems.
Interestingly enough, the amount of open bugs has stayed relatively steady since Ubuntu 8.10, with Intrepid (8.10) containing 290 bugs compared to 272 in Karmic (9.10). In contrast to this, the last Long Term Support edition of Ubuntu (Hardy – 8.04) contained the most open bugs with a whopping 466 bugs remaining open to this day.
I have recently converted all but one of my personal computers to Ubuntu. To be more specific I am now using Ubuntu 9.10 on two desktops and one Netbook. Windows XP is only surviving on my laptop for support reasons and handling accounting backups on a program that only works in Windows. That conversion is also in development and sometime soon I have a very good feeling Windows XP will die on my notebook and Ubuntu will rise. Wait, I am being too harsh in my descriptive passage. Windows XP meant a lot to me over the years and it was truly great! But it is time to move on. It has been a gamble but so far so good.
A prime example: Back in April 2009, Austin told us Rezitech was leveraging Ubuntu Linux at the heart of his data center. Most folks consider Ubuntu a desktop operating system. But Rezitech spotted the server and cloud opportunities early. Now, Austin is looking to do the same in the MSP middelware market.
Mailspect is pleased to announce a new email defense and archive solution that instantly transforms any Ubuntu server into a highly scalable email security and archive device. With the introduction of our new APT installation a single apt-get command will install Mailspect and all related components on Ubuntu and Debian servers thus providing a substantial improvement over the open source antispam tools provided in Ubuntu.
Each day, the drumbeat for Ubuntu Server Edition is getting slightly louder. In recent weeks, a growing list of ISVs (independent software vendors) has vowed to support Canonical’s Linux server operating system. The latest example involves Mailspect launching antispam and email archiving solutions for Ubuntu Server.
Ecocyn today announced new Linux Ubuntu offerings for the Epoch iGx mainframe to help clients run smarter and more efficient data centers that maximize the use of IT resources and reduce energy costs.
I have previously described Linux Mint as “Ubuntu plus all the stuff you would probably add to it yourself after installing”. Of course, you need to be aware that a lot of the things which are added are proprietary or otherwise non-FOSS, so if you are a GNU/Linux/FOSS purist, you should be aware of that at the beginning. I am not of that persuasion, and Mint is one of my two favorite distributions (SimplyMEPIS is the other). Now, with the quality of Mint and the care that the Mint Community contributors have taken in adding KDE 4.3, this is sure to be an excellent distribution. If you are a KDE devotee, and you have been disappointed by Kubuntu (I know that a lot have), I would strongly encourage you to take a look at this distribution.
The PlayStation 3 up until now was the only one of the modern consoles that hasn’t been hacked. Reason for this, people often reasoned, was that Sony had already catered to the “hackers” needs by granting the ability to install Linux on the platform.
I’ve gotten confirmation the exploit works on 3.10. Also I’ve heard about compile issues on Fedora. I did this in Ubuntu. I would really like someone to write up a nice tutorial
Enhance Technology announced an eight-disk, Linux-based network-attached storage (NAS) device, offering up to 16TB of SATA storage. The UltraShare NAS8000-P4 incorporates an Intel Xeon (Nehalem) CPU clocked at 2.0GHz, four gigabit Ethernet ports, and an optional gateway for expanding to up to 176TB.
MSI announced an ATX-format motherboard based on Intel’s P55 chipset that supports LGA1156-socketed Core i3, i5, and i7 processors. The “P55-GD85″ offers connections including USB 3.0, SATA II, SATA III ports, RAID , PCI Express, PCI, and FireWire, and offers a Linux-based fast-boot OS called “Winki.”
Kontron announced an “AM4020″ AMC module and a VPX format “VX6060″ computing blade, both equipped with Intel’s 32nm-fabricated Core i7 processor. The Linux-ready products are the first of many Core i7 systems Kontron plans to introduce this year in formats including AMC, CompactPCI, and COM Express, says the company.
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Kontron also announced a Linux-ready, VPX-format 6U computing blade for parallel data and signal processing applications. The Kontron VX6060 is equipped with dual Intel Core i7 processing nodes linked to an Ethernet and PCI Express infrastructure, says Kontron.
Xport Pro is available running Linux and IPv6, providing Linux developers with a compact compute platform, along with an industry standard development environment.
From a software point of view, the CM-T3530 is supported in the mainline Linux kernel from rev 2.6.33, and offers full Openembedded Angstrom Linux distribution and full support for Windows CE 6.0 R3.
The Motorola Moto ZN300 utilises a Linux/Java-based MOTOMAGX operating system, which makes it somewhat different from many handsets market. Reliability and stability are key elements and the use of this operating system provides that and more. The unit itself is aesthetically pleasing to the eye, as well as being a functional slider phone. Measuring 95 mm x 46 mm wide and only 15 mm thick it is somewhat compact. At only 103 g, this impressive social media handset is also lightweight.
To recap, the Mini 5 is a 1GHz Snapdragon-powered netpad (did I just coin a phrase?) running Android 1.6 with 5 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 3G mobile. It should be selling for $1,098 before carrier subsidy.
Cypress Semiconductor announced a touchscreen device driver for Android and Linux that supports Cypress’ TrueTouch touchscreen controllers, complete with “all-points” multi-touch signaling support. Meanwhile, “Cyanogen” has hacked a multi-touch interface for Google’s Nexus One phone, and Google is upgrading the Android-based phone’s spotty 3G support, says eWEEK.
A hacker called Brandon Roberts has worked out a way to dual-boot the native Maemo-Linux operating system on the Nokia N900 and also the Android operating system.
Nokia has announced its second Push N900 developer contest meant for developers to push themselves creatively by figuring out creative uses and hacks for the Maemo Linux based Nokia N900.
The Nokia N900 smartphone is the first open-source handset to use the pioneering Maemo 5 software, delivering a PC-like experience on a cellular handset.
This means you can adapt the phone’s software (built on Linux) to integrate many applications such as Facebook, Skype and open-source add-ons.
Do you want your computer to be adorable? If so, you might want to look into one of Haleron’s new machines. These tinier-than-netbook ‘Swordfish’ (via Netbooked) have a 7″ screen, VIA ARM 300 MHz processor, 128 MB of RAM (up to 256 MB) and 1 GB flash storage (up to 4).
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3G support is optional, and you can also choose to run Windows XP or Linux if you wish.
There is of course an Archos 7 Tablet on the Archos site running on Linux. This new scoop from ArchosLounge points to an Android-based Archos 7 tablet. The specs also indicates a flash-storage device instead of a hard drive one. It should be the same 7-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen tablet with WiFi. The Archos 7 Android comes with a 180 euro price or about 150 British pounds.
I ran my first Linux live CD in January 2007. I’ve been using free, open-source operating systems on my personal machines for much of my work for the past two years, more intensively in the last year.
New York University anthropologist Gabriella Coleman says the open-source software movement has emerged relatively unscathed from the economic downturn.
Ms Coleman was the opening keynote speaker at Linux.Conf.Au, a trans-Tasman conference held in Wellington last week that attracted more than 600 open-source software developers and enthusiasts.
Waiting for open source to give Microsoft a much-needed kick up the jacksie has seemed like waiting for Godot. We wait, we wait and we are still waiting.
The Editorial Committee of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is proud to announce the immediate availability of the publication’s second issue. IFOSS L. Rev. is a peer-reviewed biannual legal review dedicated to analysis and debate about Free and Open Source Software legal issues. It is published by an independent Editorial Committee.
The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes.
Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company, announced today that it has enriched the value of its Nuxeo Connect support and maintenance offering with the introduction of Nuxeo Studio.
In the world of product development, time-to-market keeps shrinking and demand for better quality keeps growing. Open Source, which is often thought to be the definitive solution to meet both objectives – faster development cycle and better quality, is on the mind of many OEMs and product companies.
In reality, the companies find it difficult to overcome the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) to make a final decision and say, “Yes, we will use open source in our product.”
In the product development process, at the one end are the engineering people – developers, architects, engineering managers – who are aware of open source and its benefits, but lack the power to take decisions. At the other end, are the management and the legal people, who can take decisions, but may not have sufficient ground-up information. How do we bridge this gap? How can the engineering team convince the management to boldly embrace open source?
Red Hat’s President and CEO Jim Whitehurst does a “State of the Union” blog (which I think should be a mandatory action for all CEOs) during which he talks about the company’s double-digit growth rates for both revenue and headcount throughout the course of the recession. Open source appears to have thrived in during the downturn (whether we are out of it or not) and I think that might just be because open source likes the going to be crunchy.
If you had to ascribe the terms ‘wealth and sogginess’ and ‘crunchy and on the edge’ to a) proprietary software systems and b) open source software – which way round would you put them? See what I mean? Open source is all about survival of the fittest rather than survival of the fattest. Now of course that’s doing proprietary vendors a huge disservice, but I am trying to make a point.
Kitware, a company that builds open source platforms and develops advanced research solutions to overcome the challenges of our time, today announced it is opening up the main infrastructure of MIDAS under a nonrestrictive license allowing freedom to install the MIDAS server on location and build on top of the platform for free.
Jackrabbit 2.0 has been updated to now require at least Java 5 and common components have been spun out into separate projects for better re-usability. Support for database connection pooling is now available for all supported database back-ends and a local data store feature is enabled in the default configuration.
In 2010, Eucalyptus is going to focus more on refining what they have and finding new business opportunities, Wolski said. But the eventual goal is to become to the cloud what Linux is to desktop operating systems: the free, customizable alternative platform that has the potential to put gray hair on the bigger, better-funded competition’s heads.
If you’re a solution provider, vendor, developer or technologist with a vested interest in open-source PBX and VoIP, particularly Asterisk, your time is now.
That was the resounding theme of last week’s Digium Asterisk World conference in Miami Beach, where a number of open-source devotees said the opportunity to push Asterisk platforms further into networking and infrastructure is pronounced like never before.
A web interface to BIANA providing basic functionalities is also available. The software can be downloaded under GNU GPL license from http://sbi.imim.es/web/BIANA.php.
How important is an open-source solution for HIE, when interoperability is required for compliance with federal mandates?
The Nationwide Health Information Network, and the fact that it is using open-source technology, really led us to start our own in-house project. Given that, it was a natural for us to move over to Misys.
Proponents of open-source health IT systems have some concerns about the recently proposed “meaningful use” rules, including the time frame for electronic health record certification and adoption.
After Maemo, Firefox Mobile (aka Fennec) is about to conquer another Linux-based platform – Android. This is not to say something’s wrong with the built-in Webkit-based browser, quite the contrary, but as you know – more choices are always welcome.
With the final version of Firefox for Maemo just around the corner, and with more stable versions of Firefox for Windows Mobile down the pipe, the guys over at Mozilla are also gearing up for the first release of Firefox for Android, it seems. The company already announced back in 2009 that they were considering a move in the Android area, and it seems that we are nearing the first step to be taken in this direction, with a usable flavor of Firefox for Android expected to arrive in February.
You’ve probably seen the news – the Sun/Oracle transaction has closed. With the passing of that milestone, I can once again speak freely.
Having had nine months to accelerate down the runway, there’s not a doubt in my mind Oracle’s takeoff and ascent will be fast and dramatic. I wish the combined entity the best of luck, and have enormous confidence in the opportunity.
“Kenai today is a good idea but we don’t think it is quite working” said Ted Farrell, Oracle’s Chief Architect and Senior Vice President for tools and middleware.The plan is to close the public facing version of Project Kenai and bring the project “inhouse” where, Farrell says, there are a number of internal projects which are a good fit for Kenai.
Oracle promised during its five hour webcast Wednesday to continue Sun Microsystems open source commitment by throwing money and support behind MySQL, Open Office, and Solaris, promising to make each offering better. As expected, open source users are skeptical.
Oracle executives have said they intend to use Sun Microsystems’ storage product portfolio to compete in the disk and tape business – in support of and outside of Oracle’s software applications — now that the sofwtare company’s acquisition of Sun is finally complete.
If yesterday’s epic five hour webcast discussing Oracle’s plans for its finally acquired Sun assets was a long time coming for the analysts listening in, you can imagine how much of a wait it’s been for those on both sides of the transaction. It’s been roughly nine months, remember, since the database giant announced its intention to acquire the one time dot com darling.
Several of the concerns about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun have revolved around how Unix technologies led by Sun would continue under the new ownership. As it turns out, Solaris users might not have much to worry about, as Oracle executives on Wednesday affirmed their commitment to preserving the efforts.
Among the new Zenoss Enterprise customers in 2009 were Hosting.com, Agilent Technologies, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Real Networks while leading organizations such as Carlson, Deutsche Bank, Rackspace Hosting, iStock International, and Motorola renewed their agreements with Zenoss.
Here’s some short but sweet (and lucrative) news involving money in the open source industry. Opengear, provider of an open source console server, scored its first $1 million deal in December 2009. Next up, Opengear has won a deal involving Linode, a cloud and VPS (virtual private server) hosting company. Hmmm…. are solutions providers waking up to these niche open source opportunities?
Translate.org.za are the proud parents of a new Zulu spell checker.
What makes us such proud parents? We’ve ported the spell checker from the Myspell platform to Hunspell. Which means what exactly? It means that we can now spell check Zulu text at much higher precision. It also puts the platform in place to ratchet up the checkers performance.
Mozilla has released Weave 1.0, the Firefox extension and service that provides Firefox user data synchronization among computing devices like laptops, desktops, and starting tomorrow, with Firefox for Maemo release, mobile devices. It is also great for users who dual-boot, and what don’t want to bother remembering where they did what.
In January, Acquia (news, site) announced its private beta launch of DrupalGardens.com, a hosted Drupal (news, site) solution. They also launched an Open Government program to help US government agencies meet the requirements of the Open Government Directive.
Popular Open Source Software offerings such as Linux and Open Office have seen substantial increases in market share as the recent global recession has prompted more and more organisations to look for additional value from their software. The UK Government is already heavily backing Open Source Software, accelerating its use in public services.
Technology services company East Summit, Inc (DBA ESI Web Services) has launched a campaign to reveal the true power of WordPress to the small and medium enterprises that can benefit most from its features.
I was greeted by the ominous discriminatory phrase “To join the Webinar, please use one of the following supported operating systems”. Oh, what a surprise. Linux isn’t one of the supported operating systems.
This is all the more incredible because the vast majority of Drupal installations are on Linux web servers.
Perhaps what Klause is currently best known for is being the man behind the move of Whitehouse.gov to open source Web CMS Drupal. He returned to the public sector during the run-up to the 2008 elections, and regardless who won, there would be a new administration.
Such an event requires that the outgoing administration’s final message be archived for posterity. You can see the results today in the US government archives.
The new U.S. Administration has demonstrated an immediate commitment to investing in green energy technologies and developing the new regulatory frameworks required to address the crisis of climate change. We have a unique historical opportunity to incorporate these open elements into the policy framework, but we must seize this opportunity now if we are to achieve the pace of innovation and adoption required to avert the climate change crisis. Government spending commitments and economic incentives of well over $100 billion for green technologies provide the necessary commercial leverage to drive an open innovation model, much as the U.S. Department of Defense’s spending on computer equipment in the 70s enabled it to drive the adoption of the Internet Protocol that led to the modern Internet. This leverage needs to be exercised now while contracts and governance for these large taxpayer investments are still being put in place and while policy frameworks for regulation and market mechanisms are being detailed.
Open Source for America’s Guidelines for Open Government Plans will help inform the different agencies about what policies and practices should be included in their mandated Open Government Plans. OSFA has opened this discussion on its website and plans to finalize its set of guidelines the second week of February, thus providing the agencies with sufficient time to take them into account before the April 7th deadline. Later in the year, the organization will issue a report card about the agencies, using these Guidelines as part of the process of the grading system.
Greens communications spokesman Scott Ludlam has called for the Commonwealth to better audit its software licensing and support costs and to encourage the adoption of open source software where a robust alternative exists.
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The Commonwealth is understood to spend more than $500 million annually on software licences and support.
Some 95 percent of Malaysia’s government agencies have adopted open source software (OSS), but the remaining 5 percent have not warmed to the concept–and is unlikely to anytime soon, according to a government official.
The UK Government has revised its 2009 Open Source strategy and will now require suppliers to show they have considered open source. Although the government says that the new strategy documentPDF “does not represent a wholesale change to Open Source Open Standards Reuse Strategy” they have taken account of feedback from writetoreply.org.
The UK government has rejigged its open source and open standards software procurement policy, following pressure from OSS vendors last autumn.
Early last year the Cabinet Office revised its rules on public sector open source software purchases, but many OSS players complained that the policy amendments didn’t go far enough.
Clearly, much of this is just words, words, words, as someone once said. Moreover, the time scales are depressingly long: 2015 is a generation away in technology terms. Still, the fact that open source is mentioned explicitly in the ways described above, and that there is a growing understanding of the problems it faces, gives me some slight hope that one day we might even start seeing free software being widely used by the UK government.
The UK government’s stance on open source is meaningless without any significant means of enforcement. That’s the view of the open source community which has bemoaned the lack of teeth in guidelines issued this week.
Although there was a broad welcome for the new Cabinet Office strategy document, particularly the passages affirming the support for open source, several commented that there was a need to go further.
The Cabinet Office seems to have got its PR strategy all wrong. The period leading up to the launch of the iPad would have been a perfect day to have buried bad news #169;Jo Moore but the new ICT strategy seems to be something to celebrate: a move that saves money, cuts carbon emissions, sets out a cloud computing policy and offers more to the open source community should be trumpeted loud and clear on a day free from any other distractions.
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So, if we accept that public procurement should be more loaded in favour of open source software, what can be done about it? Should we adopt a policy like Hungary’s where 20 percent of public procurement has to be open source? (although the open source community in Hungary is not entirely convinced it should be a poster-boy for European open source adoption) Should we adopt a policy like the Netherlands where open source has to be adopted, all other factors being equal? Or should it like France where there’s no set policy but open source has taken off to such an extent that 96 percent of public sector bodies are now using it.
The government’s revamped open source procurement policy will continue to lack teeth unless a single body is made accountable for enforcement, a member of the open source community have warned.
The measures, which have taken a total of five years to overhaul, are intended to promote open standards and encourage the reuse of software.
As part of its exploitation strategy, Telefónica I+D decided to release as Open Source a number of components developed during the research on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. These components will be integrated in the Claudia Platform that will offer a Service Management toolkit to deploy and control the scalability of service among a public or private IaaS Cloud. Telefónica I+D chooses MORFEO Project to release the software because it guarantees the access to the results of research beyond the end of the project.
I’m constantly amazed and heartened by the new domains in which free software is turning up. Here’s a nice one: setiQuest.
For centuries humans have looked at the stars and wondered “are we alone?” Now, setiQuest is an opportunity for you to help answer that question. In 1960, Frank Drake conducted the first scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Since then, scientists from many countries have conducted more than 100 projects looking for communication signals from other civilizations. With the spread of the Internet in the 21st century, it is now possible for humans around the globe to participate in a new SETI program.
You can participate as a software developer, signal detection algorithm developer, or a citizen scientist.
We are entering an era in which the mark of an open society is the way in which it guarantees access to open knowledge through the internet. It is therefore vital that liberal democracies do not send mixed signals to closed societies that seek to restrict internet freedoms for their citizens. The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement that is being discussed in Mexico might inadvertently do that, so may we have a debate in the House so that hon. Members can test that notion and find out more about our negotiating position?
We can only promote the commons as a new narrative for the 21st century if they are identified as a common denominator by different social movements and schools of thought. In my point of view, enforcing the commons would be not only possible, but strategically intelligent. Here are 15 reasons why:
1. The commons are everywhere. They determine our quality of life in great many ways. They are present (even though often invisible) in the social, natural, cultural and digital sphere. Think about the things we use to learn (read and write), the things we use to move (land, air and sea), the things we use to communicate (language, music and code), the things we use to feed and heal (land, water, medicine) or the things our reproduction depends on (genes, social life). The commons is about how we share and use all these things.
‘We are putting into practice the philosophy of open-source software: that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” So says Zakir Thomas, project director of Open Source Drug Discovery, or OSDD. Established in India, OSDD has established a novel open-source platform for both computational and experimental technologies to make drug discovery for infectious and neglected diseases cost effective and affordable to the people of the developing world.
Interaction design and strategy company ZURB focuses on helping businesses create Web sites that get noticed and keep visitors. The company recently launched a tool called Notable, an interactive method for teams to use internally while building a Web site.
As Ashlee points out, R is being used by academics, university students, and enterprises. If ignored, R could very well have become a threat to the SAS and IBM/SPSS franchises. IBM has a history of utilizing open source for competitive advantage. Instinctively, I thought SPSS decided to support R after being acquired by IBM. I’m encouraged to learn that SPSS made the decision to support R well before the IBM acquisition. It’s also great that SAS has followed suit.
Qt framework
Qt is a C++ framework for high performance cross-platform software development. Qt port (Qt 4.6) is available on Embedded Linux, Windows, WinCE, and Symbian. This means, any application that is developed on Qt for Linux will run on Qt for WinCE.
The GCC announcement comes a day after an separate announcement by Taylor on the golang-nuts mailing list that the Go licence would now include an explicit patent grant.
Today, just 11 years after the first release of XML, there are hundreds of XML languages, schema and supporting standards. Because of standards like XML (and HTML and the Unicode), the noosphere has morphed from a philosopher’s foil to a boundless resource to be mined by the great and the humble, the rich and the poor, wherever they may be.
XML will not be the last standard we will need to fully capture the promise of the noosphere. But it is one of the small set of foundational standards that have set us on our way into a future that could not have been imagined but a short time ago. Except by visionaries, like de Chardin, who were able to look past the horizon of time to imagine a world that it will be our privilege to experience first hand.
Witnesses could be charged with a misdemeanor for failing to report violent attacks in California under legislation approved by the state Assembly.
The bill by Democratic Assemblyman Pedro Nava of Santa Barbara follows the October gang rape of a 16-year-old girl outside Richmond High School’s homecoming dance. Investigators believe as many as 10 people participated while another 20 or so watched without calling police.
About 18 months ago, we published a graph showing that Unicode on the web had just exceeded all other encodings of text on the web. The growth since then has been even more dramatic.
Labour has introduced 14,300 new offences since taking office in 1997, with Gordon Brown’s administration inventing crimes at a rate of more than one a day.
The Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies released the results of a new national survey on public responses to climate change. This report finds that public concern about global warming has dropped sharply since the fall of 2008:
* The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening has declined 14 points, to 57 percent.
* The percentage of Americans who think global warming is caused mostly by human activities has dropped 10 points, to 47 percent.
As speculative pressure intensified against Greece in European financial markets on Thursday, senior figures in the Greek government sought to bolster confidence that it will repay its debts on time.
Representative Stephen F. Lynch grilled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on why regulators propped up AIG in the fall of 2008 when they let Bear Stearns fail earlier that year and why they allowed AIG to fully reimburse business partners, such as Goldman Sachs, with what was essentially taxpayer bailout money.
Yesterday’s release of detailed information regarding with whom AIG settled in full on credit default swaps (CDS) at the end of 2008 was helpful. We learned a great deal about the precise nature of transactions and the exact composition of counterparties involved.
When Goldman Sachs (GS) decided to pay out bonuses to the top 30 employees in stock, a big issue was where the strike price–so to speak–will be set. That is, how much stock would it take to get the bonus level. It depends of course on how the calculation is made.
The Obama administration may have made bankers’ pay a focus of criticism, but its recent initiatives may have actually helped boost the bonuses of firms like Goldman Sachs.
Today, Jim Cramer was getting hysterical on his defense of Goldman Sachs. Just like he did last Thursday when the stock was breaking the 160 level on CNBC. Now its close to breaking 150, so he’s upping it a noy=tch.
Senior executives from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. also got involved. Rainmaker James B. Lee, who serves as a firm vice chairman, and Jes Staley, who runs the investment bank, each placed calls to senators over the weekend urging support for Mr. Bernanke, according to a person familiar with the situation.
In the testimony of Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson about the decision to pay AIG counterparties full value on credit derivative contracts, Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) questioning disclosed that Goldman Sachs had not expected full payment on those contracts from AIG for over a year, and that Goldman Sachs was in fact exposed to up to $2.5 billion AIG losses once the Government stepped in to rescue the ailing company, contrary to Goldman’s public statements. The decision by the New York Fed to pay 100 cents on the dollar gave Goldman Sachs a better deal than it was legally entitled to receive.
Goldman Sachs Group, one of the biggest recipients of funds from the US bailout of American International Group, was seen by the public
as favoured by regulators, according to an internal Federal Reserve Bank of New York e-mail.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., one of the biggest recipients of funds from the U.S. bailout of American International Group Inc., was seen by the public as favored by regulators, according to an internal Federal Reserve Bank of New York e-mail.
Mr. Geithner, who was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during the A.I.G. bailout, said during the hearing that he was faced with a “stark, tragic” choice when the decision was made to pay off A.I.G.’s counterparties at par instead of at market value, but that it was the right one considering the circumstances at the time.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lashes out at Goldman Sachs today, writing, “The behavior of some leading Wall Street banks, particularly Goldman Sachs, has been utterly selfish. U.S. taxpayers saved Goldman by saving one of its big counterparties, A.I.G. By any fair calculation, the U.S. Treasury should own a slice of Goldman today.” This is a flawed line of reasoning, for at least four reasons.
This is truly remarkable. Three amazing things happened in a period of 6 minutes.
1. A Democrat is not closing ranks with his fellow Democrat
2. A Democrat from MA recognizes that the money the Federal Government is spending belongs to the American Taxpayer. You know, the American Taxpayer the one who pays the bills a.k.a “those rich people”. He states this repeatedly as well.
3. The Democrat from MA recognizes that the folks at Bear Sterns got a crew cut, but the folks at Goldman Sachs got 100 cents on the dollar. This is typically called “picking winners and losers.” Behavior that any resident of a banana republic would recognize.
Friedman said New York Fed staff kept sensitive information away from him and other officials with private-sector ties to avoid conflicts. He testified today before a U.S. House committee on what some lawmakers are calling the New York Fed’s “backdoor bailout” of banks, including Goldman Sachs, that did business with American International Group Inc.
Goldman Sachs’ speculation and profiteering was a major cause of the recession and now their CEO is giving out $16.7 billion in bonuses. They got a bailout, what do all of us get?
Recall the Rolling Stone description of Goldman Sachs (GS) as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” So is that good thing or a bad thing? For some, this is a virtue, as long as the blood funnel is properly jammed. It’s clear to many that the bank does not randomly throw its funnel around. It’s culture makes it as circumspect as could be, if you ask its supporters.
Wall Street is cutting back on cash bonuses, which means paper-rich banksters are forced to choose between preschool tuition and new wine cellars until their restricted shares mature. Goldman Sachs is lending a hand by offering mortgages to its staff.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has already taken a beating in the press and more blows are on the way.
Some of the punishment follows the less than impressive testimony on Wednesday by U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner about his role in rescuing AIG Inc., the failing insurer. The rescue resulted in a multi-billion-dollar payout to Goldman, which held credit default swaps with AIG.
Unless it dramatically changes the way it does business, Goldman Sachs will lose access to the discount window of the Federal Reserve under the new financial regulations proposed by Barack Obama last week.
The Volcker plan has not been fully sketched out, and it would on the surface appear to hit Goldman Sachs less than other banks that are more commercial-investment bank hybrids. Goldman Sachs doesn’t have a lot of FDIC-insured accounts, and it could always give up its bank holding company charter.
The transfer of financial data from Europe to the US ‘to fight terrorism’ may be unjustified, according to EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding.
In a speech marking Data Protection Day, she said that the amount of financial data being transferred to the US had ‘considerable privacy-invading potential’.
Let me contribute some open source intelligence on the SWIFT case. One of the leading SWIFT related software solutions providers is the German company Tonbeller AG. As we can see the company is specialised on business intelligence, risk analysis and financial profiling solutions. SWIFT itself seems to be their client or certification agency, here is the Partner profile from SWIFT.
Reding also urged greater privacy controls on behavioral advertising because “[u]sers are not always aware that they are being tracked whenever browsing the Internet.” In her view, data gathered without the users’ informed prior consent should not be used.
Think that turning off cookies and turning on private browsing makes you invisible on the web? Think again.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a new web app dubbed Panopticlick that reveals just how scarily easy it is to identify you out of millions of web users.
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The purpose of Panopticlick is to show you how much you have in common with other browsers. The more your configuration mirrors everyone else’s, the harder it would be to identify you. The irony is, the nerdier you are — using a unique OS, a less common browser, customizing your browser with plug-ins and other power-user habits — the more identifiable you are.
The House Democrat heading up the push for legislation that would set new online privacy safeguards that could dramatically reshape Internet marketing said he plans to introduce the bill shortly, with several Republicans likely signed on as co-sponsors.
MBC, a major Korean broadcasting company, announced (link in Korean) it will make nearly all of its content available to anyone for sharing. This means any individual or company can freely grab MBC’s original content and put it up on their server without any restrictions.
BitTorrent is popular because it lets anyone distribute large files at low cost. Which kinds of files are available on BitTorrent? Sauhard Sahi, a Princeton senior, decided to find out. Sauhard’s independent work last semester, under my supervision, set out to measure what was available on BitTorrent. This post, summarizing his results, was co-written by Sauhard and me.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation can’t believe it: the FCC’s network neutrality draft rules, if adopted in their current form, might give Comcast permission to flat-out block BitTorrent—precisely the scenario that led to the rules being drafted.
What seems clear is that Virgin may have a lengthy legal dispute in its hands if it insists on using DPI. While they have not stated it, Virgin might be taking this decision in order to pre-empt any potential legal threats as content owners insist more and more on making ISPs liable for illegal content shared in their networks. It will be interesting to see if other ISPs follow Virgin’s lead.
Charles Dickens was angry at those American publishers in 1842 when he arrived in Montreal following a trip to the United States. Stephen Leacock notes in his book Charles Dickens, His Life and Work, that Dickens wrote home:
Is it not a horrible thing that scoundrel booksellers should grow rich here from publishing books, the authors of which do not reap one farthing from their issue by scores of thousands; and that every vile, blackguard and detestable newspaper, so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a scullery doormat, should be able to publish these same writings…?
In 1880, the copyright issue was still around. In November, the Literary and Debating Society at the Mechanics’ Institute of Montreal had this item as a subject of debate: “Is the action of the American Publishers respecting copyright likely to advance literature?”
3. It seems like a gift economy would be a whole lot easier to operate than a barter economy. Would that advantage be the reason gift economies, rather than barter economies, were so widely adopted historically?
It would be absurd if the amazing possibilities of digitising museum and art collection holdings were squandered because of a short-sighted and misguided obsession with copyright. We need to nip this in the bud, and get some leading institutions to come out in favour of disseminating their holdings in this way. If we don’t we’ve decades of lock-down in front of us, just when things should be available to all.
I’ve noted several times an increasingly popular trope of the intellectual monopolists: since counterfeiting is often linked with organised crime, and because counterfeiting and copyright infringement are vaguely similar, it follows as surely as night follows day that copyright infringement is linked with organised crime.
Perhaps the folks at the IFPI don’t quite understand how the internet works (or perhaps that’s a given) but generally speaking, when you have internet access at your house, you don’t set up separate access accounts for every family member… And if others in the family have access, what’s to stop the “cut off” one from using the other’s access?
Apparently times are hard over at ECN Magazine. Rather than come up with compelling content to draw people in, its Technical Editor decided to pen the mother of all troll-baiting editorials. NSILMike points us to Jason Lomberg’s recent rant on The Internet Entitlement Mentality, which I think may set a record for repeating pretty much every long-debunked fallacy about online content and business models, as well as how it describes those folks who actually understand basic economics, and how free works as part of an economic ecosystem.
This week the condemnation of file-sharing “legal blackmail” lawyers ACS:Law has been widespread, with extremely harsh words coming from the country’s House of Lords. Despite this the law firm are unrepentant and say they will persist with their campaign. It is, however, possible to immunize your family from this growing threat.
Is it reasonable to question how data, as an unproven but potential revenue source for the New York Times, would compare to the direct monetization scheme currently proposed? Of course. But given that one negatively impacts users, and one does not, I know which one I would try first. Not that they need be mutually exclusive, of course, but I would exhaust all of my options before embarking upon a course of action that might materially and permanently impact my relationship with my customer.
I’ve marked some names in blue, and the reason I’ve marked them in blue is that Sound Exchange is supposed to be responsible to musicians, and the names in blue are remoras. For those who don’t know what a remora is, it’s a fish which attaches itself to larger marine animals, like sharks or whales to get a free ride. It offers nothing back to the animal is rides, nothing at all, and it couldn’t exist without it’s ride.
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