To ease my paranoia, I’m guided to this article by techthrob.com. Truth be told, it’s hard to reverse the brainwash Windows has done, therefore, I’m still not 100% convinced.
All operating systems have problems. All operating systems have benefits and weaknesses. I think that’s an important point to remember. The reason that Linux isn’t mainstream isn’t because some doofus had a problem installing Firefox, it’s just lack of marketing, bad press, lack of commercial games, and user ignorance. On the plus side, Linux is a wonderful platform filled with thousands (millions?) of helpful people that share a common interest: they just want to use their computer, darn it. I think that’s ultimately why Linux will always be “mainstream” in my book.
The Linux Foundation announced a free webinar series on topics ranging from Linux administration to performance tuning. The Linux Training Webinar Series will launch with a webinar on Linux contributions on March 1 by Jon Corbet, while future sessions feature Linux Foundation technical advisory board (TAB) members and leading community developers.
Who says you don’t get something for nothing? Certainly not the good people over at The Linux Foundation (TLF) who’re offering free Linux training. TLF is doing its part for the worldwide Linux community by offering this free training plus the Linux Jobs Board and all of its other services. I paused to write this post before going there to sign-up for the whole list myself.
XGI had worked to provide a full open-source driver stack for the Volari 8300 series, but that graphics card never ended up being widely available. As XGI faded away, IBM worked on the XGI Linux driver and wrote the XG40 GPU support along with other changes as some XGI graphics processors wound up in some IBM systems. Ian Romanick was the one working on this unpopular Linux driver at IBM, but in 2008 he went to work for Intel, which meant a final blow to XGI’s Linux support.
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Providing support for the ARM architecture so late in the game is rather interesting, unless XGI Technology is looking to revive itself by providing GPUs for new mobile/netbook devices. XGI’s most recent press release is from May 2009 where they announced the Volari Z11 GPU for embedded ARM-based systems such as the Marvell Kirkwood.
Linux/Live CD/DVD: It’s one of the five features we desperately want in Ubuntu: a video editor that the average user can stitch together simple movies with. OpenShot 1.0 is mostly there.
That’s not to say the interface has much polish, or that you don’t have to install non-free multimedia codecs in your Linux system beforehand. Then again, unless you’re a FLAC/OGG music purist, you probably already installed your MP3 and other file supports.
This one I find myself coming back to quite frequently. I must agree that the standard disk usage command for Linux is a bother. If all I want to know is the amount of space a folder is taking up on the drive, I have a long and arduous string of flags to tack on to du before I can get the information I want.
KDE’s default web browser is Konqueror, and many users love it for its speed, integration with KDE, and its host of features. Nevertheless, some sites do not perform as well as they do in Mozilla Firefox, and some users prefer the large number of available Firefox add-ons. Furthermore, users who move from Windows to Linux might prefer Firefox for its familiarity
This scattered series of posts has been about the RDF support I’m working on for KOffice. The ODF document format lets you store RDF/XML data inside the document file, which in turn lets both a human reader and a computer know about things that comprise an office document. You can refer to a person, place, or time and have the computer know what you are saying without having to resort to heuristics.
Over the last 12 months, netbook and mobile Linux has made massive advances in features and install base. This is primarily thanks to two netbook distributions – Moblin and Canonical’s Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR).
Both have built on the massive potential that was unlocked by the Asus Eee PC but led nowhere, as its operating system failed to inspire a new generation of Linux users.
For those wondering, working on magazine content takes a lot longer than writing a blog, but is rewarding and worth while to me, as I want to support the community, which I feel involves all, including beginners that like to buy magazines with DVDs attached. I tried to cover things like installing Mandriva, setting up dual boot ( Transfug drake does need some improvement ), personalization of the desktop, multi users including parental controls and installing new applications.
I looked at Zenwalk 6.0 back in June and Zenwalk 6.2 is now out. I’m going to do a mini-review just comparing 6.0 to 6.2 to see what has changed. This may end up being very short if it’s mostly the same. One difference right away is that it’s using ext4 instead of XFS. The install was basically the same.
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So, what do I think about Zenwalk 6.2? Basically, as the version number indicates, it’s an incremental update on Zenwalk 6.0.
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.
Among the efforts that JBoss will be pushing this year are improvements to its JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS) . JBDS began its life as a closed-source technology from vendor Exadel, called Exadel Studio Pro, which was open sourced in a joint development with JBoss in 2007.
What you may not have realized is that for Red Hat, open source is not just about business. The company turned a tiny open source business into a stunning amount of shareholder value in the waning days of the dot-com boom a decade ago – remember in the months after Red Hat went public and the company had a $26.9bn market capitalization? – and despite the euphoria over open source and the desire to get rich by Wall Street investors, Red Hat has steadily grown that Linux business so it almost fits its much smaller $5.2bn market cap.
No doubt, channel partners can weigh in on each of those topic areas. But The VAR Guy wishes Red Hat built an area on opensource.com that specifically discusses issues and opportunities for solutions providers.
I know the value of pi (Π), the irrational number you get when you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter, as far as 3.14159; after that, I’m clueless. Recently, French software engineer Fabrice Bellard calculated the value of pi to 2.7 trillion numbers — with a souped-up but otherwise ordinary home PC running Red Hat’s Fedora Linux.
If you are a fan of Fedora then you absolutely need to check out this great directory of spins from the Fedora community. Fedora, for those unaware, is an open source spinoff from Redhat. Spins are different versions of Fedora offering various different sets of applications that differ from the main Fedora release but are based on the core.
Irritated with my Desktop after an upgrade gone bad and an incident with the nvidia noveau driver that left me x less, I decided it was time to re-install. I turned to my bookshelf to find Ubuntu Unleashed 2010 Edition. Normally by the time a book hits my shelf the material is outdated, not necessarily useless, just not the most up to date. This is an exception. The Ubuntu Unleashed 2010 Edition was updated with an Ubuntu 9.10 DVD and a “Free Upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04″ which I found out that if you buy the book before the end of 2010 you can get an upgrade kit in the mail.
The missing second tier support is probably just a mechanic of the people we’re dealing with. Good programmers and admins are much less likely to hang about in the ubuntu forums or in the #ubuntu channel. So the standard support channels don’t help, it’s true. I can’t remember the last time I went to the forums or #ubuntu and I’m community, more likely to help when asked.
Now, ARM CPUs are invading the first tier. Earlier this month, for example, Lenovo introduced both an ARM smartbook called the Skylight (below left) and a hybrid smartbook/tablet called the IdeaPad U1 (below right). Both devices employ Lenovo’s Skylight Linux distribution, running it on a ARM-based, 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, though the IdeaPad hedges bets by including a dual-core Pentium as well in its detachable keyboard/base unit, which runs Windows 7.
Mindspeed announced a system-on-chip family designed for mobile broadband 3G/4G basestations, including femtocells and macrocells. Mindspeed’s Transcede SoCs, starting with the 600MHz T4000 and 750MHz T4020, integrate dual ARM Cortex-A9 processors, 10 DSPs from Ceva, plus 10 DSP accelerators, and come with Linux BSPs, says the company.
Axiomtek announced a fanless, Intel Core 2 Duo-ready in-vehicle box computer that supports Linux. The eBOX310-830-FL resists vibration, can be switched on and off by a car’s ignition switch, and complies with E-Mark E13 and ISO-7637 standards for vehicle manufacturers, says the company.
What is worse than this, I feel, is the fact that people have come to expect to be locked out of their own hardware by default. Since I’ve gotten my N900, I’ve lost track of the number of people who asked if I plan on “jail-breaking” the device. I always respond with “No”. A large contributing factor to my purchase of Nokia’s latest internet tablet (that’s right it is a computer first and phone second) was that they allow the user unrestricted access to the device with out any hacks or cracks.
One of the most fascinating thing about open source is that it allows the collaboration between entities that are in many ways anomalous. One of my favorite examples of this are the Sakai and Kuali consortia, created by large universities dissatisfied by their proprietary software systems. They found it more economical to pull their efforts together and create something new instead rather than simply continuing to pay for something that delivered less than expected. The process ended up creating something of value to themselves and to other universities and groups; it also provided the basis for a profitable business for those companies selling consulting services.
Both are owned by corporate parents that have large market shares in their respective product categories: Linux servers for Red Hat, and corporate data center virtualization for VMWare, respectively, which allows the two subsidiaries of the parents to exert some sort of free-wheeling and experimentation with messaging, such as JBoss’ new non-Java EE push through other languages, and SpringSource’s anti-Java EE push through their own language, of sorts….but make no mistake about the competition, it boils down to a heavily intensive fight for the mindshare of Java developers worldwide, with the eventual victor controlling what is left of the corporate IT spend that does not go to Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle…this is major terrain for the once-small start-ups to undertake….
When OpenBravo — an open source ERP company — launched an open source exchange earlier today, The VAR Guy had a case of deja vu. From Digium to Red Hat to xTuple, numerous open source companies have launched online marketplaces for their customers and VARs. But can open source exchanges really stir application sales? Here are some thoughts.
Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:
1. Free Redistribution
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
Have u checked my previous post Worlds smallest linux computer and linux networking server ?
After seeing the popularity of that post, i thought it would be good to inform you about worlds smallest Operating system too. Being a great Linux fan, i always support Linux.I am glad to inform you that the smallest OS is a linux based OS.Its actually not a linux, but its a Linux variant.
If you see a company which “owns” an OSS project, you can be 95% certain that they are pursuing at least one of the Ten Ways, and most often several. One audience member claimed to be “ten for ten”. Where companies are generally not screwing up, it’s usually because they’ve hired a battle-tested community adivsor or manager to steer them away from the obvious mistakes.
Back when the EU started the investigation of the Oracle-Sun deal, I made a bet. The bet hinged on whether Oracle would make concessions to get the EU’s approval. Please review the arguments, pro and con, and help us settle the bet.
EnterpriseDB, the enterprise Postgres company, and PostgreSQL co-founder Bruce Momjian today issued the following statements regarding the EU committee’s decision to approve Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, which includes ownership of the MySQL open source database project.
Oracle (ORCL) said this morning that it has received unconditional regulatory approval from the European Commission for its acquisition of Sun (JAVA). Below, the all-hands memo Sun CEO Jon Schwartz sent to employees following the announcement.
Firefox 3.6 was released late last week with which came some notable improvements and features like Personas and support for HTML5. I also noticed some improvement in speed and the overall feel of the browser. However, comparing Firefox to Google Chrome, I still think there are some things Firefox would do well implementing in their next release.
Google has released a new Windows version of its Chrome browser with what it says are two of the most requested enhancements: extensions and bookmark sync, and a significant performance boost.
Procter & Gamble (P&G) is a Fortune 500, multinational corporation that manufactures a wide range of consumer goods such as Gillette, Ariel, Pampers, Duracell, Braun and much more. With annual sales in excess of $83 billion USD, they are the 8th largest corporation in the world by market capitalization. Guess what? They are using Drupal for a microsite at http://www.pgsupplier.com/. The site provides easy access to information for prospective and current Procter & Gamble suppliers. The site doesn’t look pretty, but given Drupal’s bottom up grassroots adoption, this could be a big deal nonetheless.
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) receives this year’s Theodor Heuss Medal for its extraordinary work for equitable participation in the information society. Since 2001 FSFE has been committed to the freedom to use, investigate, modify and redistribute software in all parts of society and politics. Theodor Heuss Foundation states: “FSFE as a forward thinking organisation contributes to the development and establishment of rules for good global governance.”
“Free Software is an indispensable component of a free society in the digital age. It ensures equal access to the information society for everyone, ” says Karsten Gerloff, President of FSFE, commenting on the award.
The Inverse Team [External] is pleased to announce the immediate availability of SOGo 1.2.0. This is a major release of SOGo which focuses on new features, improved stability and which includes many bug fixes and several small enhancements over previous versions.
When I received the news of youtube using html 5 for their video streaming I was interested. When I tested it out and saw how much better it worked for me than the flash video I was excited about this new development. My excitement quickly turned to concern when I learned why Mozilla is not supporting this new streaming video format in their Firefox browser.
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At least right now their is some competition. Not the kind of competition that the open source community would like to see. But as long as the h.264 codec exist then Adobe is not left to control the market entirely and as long as the Adobe flash format is in existence they force MPEG-LA to find a way to be competitive.
At its apex, the white colonists were supplanted by a new ruling class, made up largely of black and mulatto officers. Though these groups soon became bitter political rivals, they were as one in their determination to maintain in independent Haiti the cardinal principle of governance inherited from Saint-Domingue: the brutal predatory extraction of the country’s wealth by a chosen powerful few.
Looters and scavengers have moved into the downtown commercial district, taking what they can from the ruins as bulldozers demolished damaged shops and warehouses.
If you’re a Twitter user, congratulations: You’re also a Huffington Post contributor! For a few hours last night, it appears practically all of Twitter was republished on HuffPo. But now our tweets have disappeared from the site. What’s going on?
Vast state investment in schools, universities and research programmes has driven the rapid growth, with academic discoveries rapidly tapped for commercial potential. Chinese scientists are particularly strong on chemistry and materials engineering, both considered central to the country’s industrial development and economic future.
Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs, could be floating on Neptune and Uranus, according to a recent article in the journal Nature Physics.
The White House has decided to begin funding private companies to carry NASA astronauts into space, but the proposal faces major political and budget hurdles, according to people familiar with the matter.
Not only did Dr David Kelly die in suspicious circumstances – but now, thanks to Lord Hutton, the medical evidence about those circumstances will not be revealed for 70 years.
Lord Hutton’s inquiry ruled that Kelly had killed himself. And Hutton heard all the evidence. If the medical evidence supports that conclusion, why seal it for 70 years?
Iraq’s health ministry said it has no specific figures but it estimates the number of physically and mentally disabled people at between 2 million and 3 million.
But speaking days before his predecessor Tony Blair testifies to Britain’s Iraq war inquiry, Brown — who will face the probe himself within weeks — insisted that the war was justified by a previous UN resolution.
Snooping powers have been exercised hundreds of times by Lancashire County Council over the last five years.
Cleaners who repeatedly failed to show up for work, and a care assistant who claimed too much on travel expenses, were among those caught through surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).
“Jamie and I were kitted out in fake utility belts, we had the whole bulletproof flakjacket thing, we’ve got hairdryers in our belt, a kids’ £1.99 walkie-talkie, hairbrushes and all that kind of stuff, and we were being followed by a camera crew and a boom mike and we get literally pulled over by four policemen and we were issued with a warning ‘under the act of terrorism’.”
Jamie Rickers, 32, added: “We were stopped, not arrested, but they had to say ‘we are holding you under the Anti-Terrorism Act because you’re running around in flak jackets and a utility belt’, and I said ‘and please put spangly blue hairdryer’ and he was, like, ‘all right’.”
There is little connection between the use of stop and search powers by the Metropolitan police and reductions in knife crime, according to new figures analysed by a leading criminologist.
The US Department of Homeland Security says that its “government brainiacs” are on the verge of rolling out an airport bag scanner which would avoid the need to separate frustrated travellers from their “liquids, gels, sprays” and even “spreads”.
Police and prosecutors won’t give up their license to steal.
Around 3 in the morning on January 7, 2009, a 22-year-old college student named Anthony Smelley was pulled over on Interstate 70 in Putnam County, Indiana. He and two friends were en route from Detroit to visit Smelley’s aunt in St. Louis. Smelley, who had recently received a $50,000 settlement from a car accident, was carrying around $17,500 in cash, according to later court documents. He claims he was bringing the money to buy a new car for his aunt.
In the wake of a recent speech by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemning countries that censor the internet and engage in hacking, China has lobbed a return volley and accused the United States of hypocrisy and initiating cyberwarfare against Iran.
An editorial in the People’s Daily — the primary mouthpiece for China’s Communist Party — accused the United States of doublespeak and of using “online warfare” to instigate violent unrest in Iran with Twitter and YouTube following that country’s national elections in June.
“In my opinion, the use of this unique CRC implementation in Hydraq is evidence that someone from within the PRC authored the Aurora codebase,” Stewart wrote here.
Applications to join the ID card register are running at 50 a day, meaning the Labour government will achieve its aim of chipping the entire population of these islands in somewhere between 136 and 3,342 years.
There are many more features that make PostgreSQL well-suited to the enterprise. Security is huge, but PostgreSQL’s support and focus on data integrity, granular access controls, ACID compliance, and other core focuses, really explain why PostgreSQL is so highly favoured amongst many database administrators.
One-quarter of all the maize and other grain crops grown in the US now ends up as biofuel in cars rather than being used to feed people, according to new analysis which suggests that the biofuel revolution launched by former President George Bush in 2007 is impacting on world food supplies.
The legal claim accuses the US’s minerals management service, part of the federal interior department, of waving through permission to allow Shell to drill wells on the basis of an “abbreviated and internal review” of the environmental dangers of exploration.
The truth is that Americans are still losing jobs, the Fed is still inflating, and more regulations are in the works that will prevent jobs and productivity from coming back. We are on this trajectory for the long haul. The claim has been made many times that this administration has only had a year to clean up the mess of the last administration. I wish they would at least get started! Instead of reversing course, they are maintaining Bush’s policies full speed ahead. They are even keeping the Bush-appointee in charge of the Federal Reserve! They are not even making token efforts at change in economic policy. And for all the talk of transparency, we hear that some powerful senators will do all they can to block a simple audit of the powerful and secretive Federal Reserve.
So it’s not just un-Americans we need to fear but the Polluter-Americans, Pharma-mericans, Bank-Americans and Hedge-Americans that could manipulate campaigns while hidden behind corporate veils. And if so, our future elections, while nominally a contest between Republicans and Democrats, may in fact come down to a three-way battle between China, Saudi Arabia and Goldman Sachs.
Money from Exxon, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer and the rest of the Fortune 500 is already corroding the policy making process in Washington, state capitals and city halls. Now, the Supreme Court tells these corporate giants that they have a constitutional right to trample our democracy.
Southern California’s Menifee Union school district has banned the Merriam Webster’s 10th edition from use in fourth and fifth grade classes, over this salacious definition of “oral sex”: “oral stimulation of the genitals”.
However, the BBC notes that there were three ManU players who were believed to have real Twitter accounts, and all have suddenly disappeared — which suggests the real issue is that ManU banned players from using social networks to connect with fans. If that’s true, it seems incredibly short-sighted. Yes, players need to be careful when communicating publicly, but blocking them off entirely doesn’t help make fans any more loyal.
Rep. Howard Berman (who represents Hollywood and is sometimes referred to as “the Representative from Disney” given his longstanding support for any law that increases the scope of copyright law) is apparently speaking out against “repressive internet regimes” such as those in China, while at the very same time being a strong supporter of ACTA which could push for very similar “secondary liability” rules for ISPs in the US that are the foundation of Chinese internet censorship.
Here’s a nice little introductory article on TOR, The Onion Router, a privacy-enhancing technology that helps you to circumvent national, corporate and school firewalls and enhance your anonymity. Originally developed by the US military to help communications get in and out of countries that heavily filter their networks, TOR is free/open software and is maintained by many volunteers around the world, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Earlier today my fellow iTWire writer Stephen Withers reported of a campaign to place a “black-out” pop-up page over 500 Australian-based web pages in protest against the Federal Government’s Internet Filter proposal.
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We have to engage in a conversation with the general public, not continue to shout at them. So, as I started this piece, what will it prove? The answer unfortunately is very little.
“Buying You: The Government’s Use of Fourth-Parties to Launder Data about ‘The People’,” a paper by Columbia Law School’s Joshua L. Simmons in the Columbia Business Law Review, describes the way that US government agencies circumvent the fourth amendment and privacy statutes by outsourcing their surveillance to private credit reporting bureaux and other mega-databases. He argues that the law should ban the use of this improperly gathered information, binding paid government informants to the same rules that the government must follow.
The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception. Since copyright protection is granted only with respect to original forms of expression, the vast majority of data, information and ideas produced worldwide at any given time belongs to the Public Domain. In addition to information that is not eligible for protection, the Public Domain is enlarged every year by works whose term of protection expires. The combined application of the requirements for protection and the limited duration of the copyright protection contribute to the wealth of the Public Domain so as to ensure access to our shared culture and knowledge.
Last week, the U.S. House Science and Technology Committee’s Roundtable on Scholarly Publishing (on which we served along with 10 others) released a report* arguing that journal articles derived from federal research funding should be made publicly available as quickly as practicable—generally in a year or less after publication—and in ways that will improve scholarship by maximizing the scope for interoperability across articles, among disciplines, and internationally.
Library database vendor EBSCO now has exclusive deals with content providers — Time, Inc., and Forbes. Libraries who had been getting access to this same content through other vendors will have to pay up or lose electronic access to popular titles such as Sports Illustrated, Time and People. Gale, a competing vendor, has responded with their Fair Access campaign including the Librarians for Fair Access facebook group.
The music industry will have to make some very tough choices within the next week about file sharer Jammie Thomas-Rasset.
The Recording Industry Association of America wants to put the Thomas-Rasset affair behind it. The Brainerd, Minn., mother–who refused to settle with the RIAA for $5,000 over copyright infringement allegations, instead fighting it out in court–has been found liable of willful copyright infringement by two different juries and was ordered to pay damages of $222,000 in her first trial (a decision later thrown out) and $1.9 million last June in her retrial.
Earlier this week, Pharrell Williams told the MidemNet conference that illegal file-sharing is “just taste-testing”. It’s fair to say that Chris Morrison – who manages Gorillaz, Blur and other artists – doesn’t agree.
In fact, he said so himself at the MIDEM Manager Summit this afternoon, responding directly to Williams’ claim. “It’s not [like taste-testing]. It’s like giving them the whole bloody meal!”
Morrison said he was fairly ambivalent about file-sharing until recently, when Stylo, the lead single from the new Gorillaz album leaked, mere hours after the first CD pressings were made.
We’ve seen all sorts of attempts to get around Section 230 safe harbors by various companies — almost all of which have failed. But they keep on trying. Paul Alan Levy alerts us to a new case, in which he (and Public Citizen) are helping out, that involves a company called Vision Media TV, whose business has been heavily criticized in the press. According to the various reports, the company calls organizations to get them to take part in a TV show with a semi-famous host, which they claim will be shown on TV.
Often overlooked in the hoopla surrounding the three-strikes provision in France’s Creation and the Internet law passed last year that established a procedure for cutting off Internet access for repeat copyright infringers, were other measures strictly regulating release windows for movies in France. Under the law, any movie released theatrically in France must be released on DVD and Blu-ray, as well as made available for authorized downloads, exactly four months after its theatrical debut.
Parents can be legally responsible for the unlawful behaviour of their children using home internet connections, a German court has ruled. It said that a woman had a duty to monitor the use to which her internet connection was put.
Negotiations in the 7th round of the ACTA talks open this morning in Mexico with civil enforcement issues on the agenda. Yesterday I posted on the developments to-date, including a chronology of talks, issues, and leaks that have led to this week’s round of discussions.
LinuxTag is the most important place for Linux and open source software in Europe. Last year, LinuxTag had over ten thousand attendees, and over 300 speakers. This year, the 16th LinuxTag will be June 9-12, 2010 at the Berlin Fairgrounds in Germany. LinuxTag seeks exciting and suitable proposals for presentations in the conference tracks.
A New Zealand high school running entirely on open source software has slashed its server requirements by a factor of almost 50, despite a government deal mandating the use of Microsoft software in all schools.
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The implementation uses Ubuntu on the desktop and Mandriva for four key servers (one firewall, one storage and two KVM hypervisors). Mandriva was selected because of the ease of using Mandriva Directory Server to manage the school’s LDAP directory, but Brennan said either desktop or server OS could easily be replaced.
The Linux.conf.au conference in Wellington is not all about keynote speakers. Some of the most interesting sessions come from the Birds of a Feather (BOF) gatherings, where people come together to talk about all things open source.
The ad hoc sessions are designed as a meet and greet for people with similar interests and experience to share ideas and issues.
In a press release the LSE told the financial markets that the Linux based software will bring significant benefits. The new trading system will give it “high performance” trading, as well as an “agile, efficient, in-house IT development capability”, it said.
After being in development for many years, GRUB 1.97 was released this past October as a major development release towards GRUB 2.0. GRUB 2.0 brings forth many new features and has already been picked up by Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. The GRUB 1.97 release though was quickly outdone by a point release to address some bugs and a security issue and since then it’s been a quiet few months. Robert Millan though has made a Sunday afternoon release of GRUB 1.97.2.
This week there was the release of QEMU 0.12.2 (and the subsequent release of KVM-QEMU 0.12.2) with support for block migration, but this point release was mostly made up of small fixes and tweaks. IBM’s Anthony Liguori though has begun making plans for the next major release of this open-source processor emulator. QEMU 0.13 will be the next big release and Anthony is hoping it will be completed by June and boast a large number of new features.
Fedora 12 and Debian GNU/Linux (2010-01-14) were tied with each having seven wins. Behind the Linux distributions, OpenSolaris 2009.06 and FreeBSD 8.0 were tied with each having two wins. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and FreeBSD 7.2 each had one win.
Jerome Glisse, a long-time open-source ATI driver developer who now works for Red Hat, has shared that he’s finished up cleaning the initial R600/700 winsys API for which the R600/700 Gallium3D driver will be based. Once it is all cleaned up and ready, it will be hooked up into the Gallium3D pipe driver for the ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series hardware. In the context of Gallium3D, the winsys binds the state tracker and pipe driver together with the underlying software stack on the operating system.
Fishing Cactus the developers of many games meant for digital distribution platforms have announced that they are porting their game engine Mojito to GNU/Linux…
The feat greatly expands the functionality of the box by allowing it to run unrestricted versions of Linux and a wide range of games that are currently forbidden.
I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I’ve also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip.
Linux has a strong do-it-yourself tradition. Although new users are transitioning rapidly to the desktop, that tradition remains. Even on the desktop, users expect to be able to administer their systems directly, and to work in an environment customized to their tastes and needs.
As the leading desktops for the operating system, GNOME and KDE reflect this tradition. Both are more adjustable and flexible than any version of Windows.
Today, KDE has released the second release candidate of the next version of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). KDE SC 4.4 Release Candidate 2 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.
Going into this review I was curious to see if Hymera would bring anything new to the community. More specifically, does this distribution provide anything special which would make it worth purchasing? One thing I will say for Hymera is that it doesn’t fall into the trap some commercial distributions before it have: it doesn’t try to be Windows.
Red Hat has launched opensource.com as a community site for open source. The Drupal powered site has been created by Red Hat but Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s President and CEO, says “This will not be a site for Red Hat, about Red Hat.
The most important is probably Venkatesh Hariharan (right), who goes by the screen name Venky and is listed as head of open source affairs at Red Hat. I see him as key because Venky is a journalist, thus I assume the editor here.
He has already done grand work bringing a South Asian perspective to the open source community through his own blog. He is co-founder of IndLinux, the team that localized both GNOME and KDE for the Indian Linux community and has been a Knight science journalism fellow at MIT.
As the CEO of Red Hat, this is a day I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time. In my travels, I often find myself talking to people from all walks of life who see opportunities for the lessons of open source to be applied broadly to the world around us.
At Red Hat, we’ve used open source principles as the backbone of a successful technology company. We know there are opportunities to apply the open source way broadly in business, in government, in education, in the law, and throughout our lives.
Red Hat just launched OpenSource.com on Drupal. The site will focus on exploring what happens when the open source way is applied to the world, beyond technology. The site has 5 main channels: business, education, government, law, and life. In each channel, they’ll explore how open source is having an impact on each of those areas. The content is meant to be very conversational and participatory, making Drupal a natural choice. Needless to say, it is great to see Drupal being used to promote Open Source way beyond technology. It is also rewarding to see Red Hat, the mother of all Open Source companies, using Drupal.
Red Hat has just launched a new portal at opensource.com – for information and articles about open source. The site uses the Drupal open source content management system and it looks like Red Hat has been working on the site since at least October.
To rate an application in Lucid you will be asked to sign in with your Ubuntu ‘Single Sign-On’ account – better known currently known as a Launchpad account. (This account will have uses further along the line with the Ubuntu Music Store. Stay tuned!)
I’m sure the community can think of plenty of other ways to stir up a frenzy for Ubuntu 10.04. But it has to start now. The seed of desire must be planted before the sun ever shines on this patch of dirt. I am calling out the Ubuntu community and throwing down the gauntlet. You help make this, you help sell this. If you love your distribution as much as you say you do, then it’s time for you to take your distribution to the masses. And to do that, you are going to have to give to Linux what Linux can’t give to Linux – marketing. It’s the Achilles’ heel of Linux.
Many users have refrained from using the cloud storage solution thus far due in part to the lack of cross platform syncing. As such, the UbuntuOne team will be running a ‘sprint’ at PyCon 2010 to provide just that.
The firm did not list figures for other OSes, but noted that Android will benefit from “having a growing footprint of handset vendors supporting it.” As for Symbian, it will continue to stay strong due to Nokia’s strength outside the U.S., says IDC, which made no mention of the impact of Symbian’s transition to open source.
According to the report (which is called BoomBox), Android pulled far ahead of the iPhone in terms of traffic this year. “Visits from users on the Android operating system grew almost 350% from December 2008 to December 2009, compared to iPhone visits which grew 170%,” it stated.
Motorola has opened a new store for Android applications in China called SHOP4APPS or Zhi-Jian-Yuan, to purchase and download applications designed to customise Android-based Motorola phones.
In addition, the company also introduced a new feature on their Android handsets enabling users to customise their Android devices by selecting their own search provider. Users will be able to select their search experience from a number of providers including Baidu and others, with whom Motorola has signed strategic agreements.
The announcement on Thursday of a partnership with Google’s arch-rival Baidu, China’s No. 1 search engine, and Motorola’s promise of more search deals, follows Google’s threat to exit China due to a cyber attack and censorship dispute.
With the Google Nexus One winging its way over here, and Android phones being perhaps the most customisable smartphones around in all their open-source loveliness, we’ve come up with a selection of ways to personalise your Android phone, inside and out. So, let’s get creative and pimp those phones right up…
Packt – the UK publishing company specialized in books on software running yearly the open source CMS award – published “Funambol Mobile Open Source“, the first ever book on Funambol server.
The company leverages Asterisk (News – Alert) Open Source IP-PBX telephony platform to design and produce its hardware telephony solutions for commercial installations.
While celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King a few days ago, it seems we still have a long journey to walk against discrimination in all its ugly faces, even with having the Open Source and OpenNet initiatives. It is kind of misleading to hide behind political considerations or terrorism threats to justify those acts of discrimination (which are not that different from the Third World governments’ justifications of Internet censorship), as those acts would only affect, if they would really do, normal peaceful people. Actually, the only effect I see is not simply an increasing feeling of prejudice or suspicion among the computing society, but more remarkably, distrust and losing faith in initiatives raising shiny mottoes with supposedly great ethics behind, such as “Software Freedom”. When a student or an academician in one of those banned countries read a report like “Access Denied” or know about OpenNet Initiative [4], they feel a bitter irony. They believe that the people behind such efforts should pay more attention to the behavior of their own government, which is leading the “Free World”.
Arabcrunch has accused major open-source repository SourceForge from blocking all access to software projects it hosts for anyone in Syria, Sudan, Iran, North Korea and Cuba.
Not surprisingly, this policy comes in for a fair amount of ridicule over there. Filtering out the political rhetoric, and the main point is: Either open source is “open” or it’s not.
One of the big success stories in the wake of the Haiti earthquake is being driven by open source. (You can help.)
Partners in Health has been on the ground in Haiti for 20 years. During that time it has learned many lessons about delivering IT resources in an environment without infrastructure. Most of its communications are satellite links.
An open-source MDM (master data management) suite from Talend is now available, giving companies a lower-priced option to proprietary products from the likes of Tibco, Kalido and IBM, the company announced Monday.
Functionally, the enterprise version of Talend MDM has the features that you would expect from an MDM product; it is based heavily on Java and Eclipse, and uses JBoss for event management.
Obsidian Systems and its media partner, ITWeb, are hosting quarterly Free Beer Sessions to provide the IT industry with insight, networking opportunities, and free beer – all in the name of open source.
Playing on Richard Stallman’s famous explanation that free software is “free as in speech, not free as in beer”, these sessions are aimed primarily at open source enthusiasts and businessmen looking to incorporate open source solutions within their organisation. The Free Beer Sessions will have a technical and a business speaker.
Another open-source mobile development platform is PhoneGap. Its development is led by Nitobi, a decade-old company coming into mobile from the wider software development world. PhoneGap is similar to Rhomobile’s Rhodes product, but is based on HTML and Javascript.
Until recently Maven allowed for two ways to upload an open source project to the central repository. One could file a request for a manual addition which would take forever to get fixed (the last time a batch of manual requests was processed happened two months ago) or, alternatively, one could setup an rsync repository and request an auto-sync — which was the preferred way. The auto-sync procedure was covered in this blog entry by Torsten Cudt.
Shaun Nichols: When people like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds created the pillars of the open-source software movement, they did so with the fundamental belief that software and digital data should be open and accessible to all users. This is, of course, quite conflicting with the basic tenants of tyrannical rule.
One of the great things about open-source software is that it can be opened up and tinkered with by just about anyone who wants to. Additionally, open-source tools and applications can be more or less shared freely on the web. This allows people who may otherwise not have access to the resources to both use the software and learn how to build and tinker with it themselves.
In other words, the judgments should come from the mind, and not the heart. Your heart should be put into improving the Open Source application. That will certainly help Open Source grow.
ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, announced today that The Farmington Libraries, of Farmington, CT. has partnered with them for the implementation of the open source community version of the Koha integrated library system.
Mozilla is now embarking on a new development and release model for its flagship Firefox open source Web browser. The model will meld both fast-moving Agile and more traditional “waterfall” development methodologies in an attempt to more quickly iterate new features while maintaining backwards compatibility, security and overall code quality.
Mozilla’s new Firefox 3.6 is about 15% faster than its predecessor, Firefox 3.5, but still is a slowpoke compared to the current speed demons, Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome, benchmark tests show.
According to tests run by Computerworld , Firefox 3.6, which Mozilla launched on Thursday, is the third fastest of five Windows browsers tested. Firefox renders JavaScript three times faster than Opera 10 and more than four times faster than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). It’s also 14.5% faster than Firefox 3.5, the Mozilla browser that debuted in June 2009, a slightly larger speed increase than Mozilla has claimed.
“Firefox 3.6 is more than 20 percent faster than Firefox 3.5 and includes extensive under the hood work to improve performance for everyday Web tasks such as email, uploading photos, social networking, and more. It also delivers new features like customizable browser themes called Personas, a ground-breaking Plugin updater, improved JavaScript performance, and enhancements to familiar favorites like the Awesome Bar for a better, more personal Web experience,” announced Mozilla via their blog on January 21.
Firefox downloads boosted by new release and Internet Explorer security scare.
Mozilla’s open source browser experienced a healthy boost in popularity last week on the back of a new release and security concerns about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
I do see how arguments arise about whether Ubuntu (or any other Linux) is user-friendly. In this case I considered it user-friendly because it allowed a user with very little experience the latitude to muddle about until he found a route to the result he wanted. I can also see the viewpoint of a user in a hurry who is upset because it takes more than one push of a button to achieve his goal. It’s a sensitive balance between ease of operation and scope of control.
Of course, vendors that fit into both the open source and cloud-related categories will be among the most attractive targets. And truth be told, a startup in 2010 is more than likely to use open source to drive developer adoption and monetize that adoption in the cloud. As a result, it’ll become increasingly difficult to distinguish an open source vendor from a cloud vendor. Either way, the exit potential for these vendors looks bright.
A JUBILANT Oracle is gearing up to relocate its Scottish headquarters from Edinburgh to Linlithgow, following the European Commission’s approval of its £4.5 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes ended several months of uncertainty last week, saying she was now satisfied that the proposed takeover of one US technology giant by another will preserve competition and innovation.
Cheminformatics firm Schrödinger announced last week that it had reached an agreement with the estate of the late Warren DeLano to continue developing, supporting, and selling DeLano’s open source PyMOL molecular modeling software.
SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin said open cloud innovation will be primary focus for the new year. The company has partnered with Microsoft to provide SugarCRM applications on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. The company also released its Community Edition on Amazon EC2, allowing developers to access, test, and develop Sugar code.
Following the GeoServer 2.0.1 update that was released last week, OpenGeo today released OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition 1.0, the complete package of open source mapping software that OpenGeo will professionally support.
A number of members of the European Parliament are about to start an informal cross-party working group on ‘New Media, Free and Open Source Software and Open Information Society’. The intergroup is expected to begin in February 2010, with the support of the European People’s Party (EPP), the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats (Alde) and the European Greens.
So what does it mean for San Franciscans? Not much, yet. It will probably be a few years before the city realizes significant savings, much less improved efficiency and interoperability. And for open source developers in San Francisco, it will probably be a long time before city IT employees (or citizens) are enabled or empowered to contribute to the codebase of open source software on city time or for the city’s benefit. But hey, the taxpayer-funded Web site built for Newsom is apparently powered by open source solutions, so there’s that.
While there is no way most cities can compete with national and state governments in terms of scandal and sleaze, there are many ways they can enhance public awareness and involvement. One innovative way to do this is by adapting open-source software.
San Francisco recently enacted the nation’s first open-source software policy for city government, and Austin should follow because it will save the city millions, lead to greater public involvement and improve how our city runs.
Open-source software is software for which the source code is free to access and modify and not copyrighted. Essentially, it means that anybody who wants to can access the software and improve upon it. This is ideal for city government because it allows the public to collectively utilize its talent to improve the way the city runs.
Last night, I was catching up with a friend who is as far from me in lifestyle outlook as you could possibly be. She is a extremely left wing type working for an environmental advocacy organization in DC. I, on the other hand, am an entrepreneur with one foot planted firmly on the right and one foot firmly planted on the left.
The open source community behind the Riversimple project works together at the 40 Fires Foundation, which has been going for about a year now. 40 Fires intends to become a registered charity for people to donate to in order to “provide a platform for the development of energy efficient vehicles to benefit society and the planet.”
Bioengineers from Stanford and UC-Berkeley are ramping up efforts to characterize thousands of molecular players and processes critical to the engineering of microbes.
With seed money from the National Science Foundation, bioengineers from Stanford and UC-Berkeley, are ramping up efforts to characterize thousands of molecular players and processes critical to the engineering of microbes, so that eventually researchers can mix and match these “DNA parts” in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or chemicals. They’ll do this in a lab in Emeryville, Calif., called BIOFAB.
Poppler has a CMake ebuild now. Given how poppler is used it seems to me quite a bad move, poppler is small and used in system that may not have cmake already installed.
Yana from Oxfam sez, “I thought you’d enjoy watching this short animation from Oxfam America that follows our gas dollars, to show where they really go. Oxfam has been working hard to deliver aid to victims of Haiti’s earthquake, but they’re also working to achieve transparency about oil and gas companies’ payments to foreign governments – Empowering people living in resource-rich developing countries to demand that such revenue can be used to address basic needs (education, clean water, health care, etc). The animation was done by Talking Eyes Media.”
Top American boffins have warned that the US government’s efforts to prevent global apocalypse caused by meteor strike are inadequate. The scientists add that nuclear weapons are the only practical means of defence against large, planet-wrecker sized asteroids.
You’ve heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world’s new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up Earth–physicist say that’s impossible–and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein’s theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole.
Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ”routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.
YET more delays have hit a “blighted” CCTV system which was meant to be installed next week.
Braintree Council agreed to give Halstead CCTV back in September 2007, but wrangles over cost, camera positions, red tape and then snow have meant it has missed three promised dates.
The Wycombe CCTV Lay Panel will present its annual report to the district council on February 15 and there will be an opportunity for members of the public to ask questions.
“Terrorism is a crime, and to treat terrorism that takes place far from any battlefield as an act of war is to propose that the entire world is a battlefield, to give criminals the elevated status of warriors and to invest whoever the current president may be with the authority to imprison a broad category of people potentially forever, without ever being afforded an opportunity to defend themselves,” noted ACLU’s Romero.
Using the same lines as in Manchester, where the pilot was started, young people are told the card will help them buy booze, cigarettes, mucky movies, travel to Europe and even open a bank account.
Young Londoners are to be the first in the capital to be issued with ID cards, the Home Office announced today.
People aged 18 to 24 will be able to spend £30 on a biometric photocard that can be used to prove their age when buying alcohol or age-restricted goods, to gain entry to a nightclub, or even to travel in Europe.
Breathtaking: Luxor Temple, a 3,000-year-old testament to endurance at the heart of the ancient capital of the Egyptian empire; the genial anarchy that prevails at the Pyramids of Giza, a Wonder of the World strewn across a gigantic car park and camel-rental location; and the fact that, when I flew from one to the other last weekend, no-one paid attention to the security risk I might pose.
New genetic findings suggest that early humans living about one million years ago were extremely close to extinction.
The genetic evidence suggests that the effective population—an indicator of genetic diversity—of early human species back then, including Homo erectus, H. ergaster and archaic H. sapiens, was about 18,500 individuals (it is thought that modern humans evolved from H. erectus), says Lynn Jorde, a human geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. That figure translates into a total population of 55,500 individuals, tops.
James Hoggan, the director of the James Hoggan & Associates public relations firm, has authored a book titled Climate Cover Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, in which he describes PR techniques that industry groups use to create the impression of a scientific controversy about climate change.
Stolen emails and erroneous predictions have damaged the image of climate science, leaving many wondering if global warming is real. But this seemingly rational doubt, says the author of ‘Climate Cover Up’ James Hoggan, is not founded on facts but on a sophisticated campaign of disinformation.
Last week, President Obama said that as part of his radical banking reforms, he wants to ban US lenders from investing in hedge funds to limit their exposure to risk. At the same time, Brussels is debating proposed legislation that would cap the amount hedge funds can borrow, and limit ownership.
Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down rules limiting corporate spending in elections, the Center for Media and Democracy’s Lisa Graves stood up to spin by Citizens United about the ramifications of the case.
Professor Hansen has been driven into a strange situation, and produced a strange book. For one-third of a century now, this cantankerous scientist has been more accurate in his predictions about global warming than anyone else alive. He saw these disastrous changes coming long before others did, and the U.S. government has tried to censor or sack him for his prescience. Now he has written a whistle-blower’s account while still at the top: a story of how our political system is so wilfully, deliberately blind to environmental realities that we have no choice now but for American citizens to take direct physical action against the polluters. It’s hardly what you expect to hear from the upper echelons of NASA: not a call to the stars, but a call to the streets. Toss a thousand scientific papers into a blender along with All the President’s Men and Mahatma Gandhi, and you’ve got this riveting, disorienting book
The bankrupt Tribune Co. wants to give up to $45 million in bonuses to hundreds of their managers. A bankruptcy judge in Delaware is waiting for objections to their proposal and is set to make a final decision this week.
[...]
The Chicago-based Tribune Co., which owns 25 television stations and major newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2008. They faced what chairman Sam Zell called a “perfect storm” of forces troubling the media industry, along with $13 billion in debt.
Talk about bankster envy! What’s a failing media conglomerate that has slashed staff and frozen salaries doing giving such golden parachutes to management, while ad revenues plummet? It must be hard for the top dogs to take a critical look at the big bankster bonuses when they are pressing hard to line their own wallets. I must confess that I do have a bias, having seen some great investigative reporters I know laid off by the Tribune’s “cost-saving” measures, which apparently do not including saving millions of dollars at the top.
Oil and tobacco companies and other businesses hoping to press their agenda in the California legislature picked up most of the tab for a gathering of about 25 Republican state legislators and a dozen of their aides at a luxurious beach resort in Santa Barbara, California.
Companies pressing an agenda in Sacramento, including oil and tobacco firms, funneled $120,000 to a group that covered much of the three-day event at a luxury resort in Santa Barbara.
Five Web sites run by Chinese human rights activists were attacked by hackers over the weekend, as a separate row continued between Google and China over political cyberattacks.
Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn’t that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated — we knew that already — it’s that the U.S. government inadvertently aided the hackers.
In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.
Google’s system isn’t unique. Democratic governments around the world — in Sweden, Canada and the UK, for example — are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.
According to the Associated Press this morning, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Industry claimed that, not only did the Chinese government have nothing to do with the attacks, but its anti-hacking policy was transparent and consistent. “Any accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyber attacks, either in an explicit or indirect way, is groundless and aims to discredit China,” he said.
China has denied any state involvement in alleged cyber attacks on Google and accused the US of double standards.
A Chinese industry ministry spokesman told the state-run Xinhua news agency that claims that Beijing was behind recent cyber attacks were “groundless”.
It’s Australia Day tomorrow, and the country’s subjects are using it to mark a week of protests against government plans for compulsory internet censorship.
www.internetblackout.com.au/ is calling for opponents of the government’s plans to black out their profile picture on social networking sites, black out their websites, write to their MP and join a real world protest too.
Unlike advanced Western countries, Chinese society is still vulnerable to the effect of multifarious information flowing in, especially when it is for creating disorder.
Western countries have long indoctrinated non-Western nations on the issue of freedom of speech. It is an aggressive political and diplomatic strategy, rather than a desire for moral values, that has led them to do so.
The DMCA has been used to invade the privacy of Internet users, harass Internet service providers, and chill online speech. The subpoena and takedown powers of Section 512 are not limited to cases of proven copyright infringement, and are exercised without a judge’s review. The following is a small sampling of abuse, overreaching, and mistakes in the use of Section 512(h) subpoenas, Section 512(c)(3)(A) notices, and equivalents. Judicial oversight could curb these abuses without interfering with copyright enforcement.
It’s been 18 months since O’Reilly, the world’s largest publisher of tech books, stopped using DRM on its ebooks. In the intervening time, O’Reilly’s ebook sales have increased by 104 percent. Now, when you talk about ebooks and DRM, there’s always someone who’ll say, “But what about [textbooks|technical books|RPG manuals]? Their target audience is so wired and online, why wouldn’t they just copy the books without paying? They’ve all got the technical know-how.”
Scherlis and other advocates of FCC regulation are encouraging gamers to support net neutrality out of a very real fear that your ISP may begin limiting access to select websites or imposing bandwidth caps in the near future.
A Federal judge has dismissed a complaint against the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Bush-era warrantless wiretapping programme, prompting suggestions the US government is now able to mount mass surveillance operations unhindered by the courts or constitution.
Due to the length of the interview, there is also no new hacker word of the week this week.
The feature this week is an interview with Danny O’Brien on ACTA. I was inspired to contact Danny after hearing him on FLOSS Weekly. In the course of the interview, we mention Michael Geist, Knowledge Ecology and Public Knowledge. Visit EFF to learn more about ACTA and the other issues on which Danny is working and take action at their action center.
Bob Pisano, MPAA president and chief operating officer since 2005, will become interim CEO, and the search for Glickman’s replacement continues. Pisano came to MPAA after heading the Screen Actors Guild, and serving at several major movie production companies.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to all of the technologists that participate in the New Music Seminar is to correct that issue so that great music can rise to its true potential regardless of politics, power or money. I believe that the next decade will bring improvement to the music web that allow that to happen. In the meantime, artists can still make a very good living without selling 10,000 albums by careful cultivation of their fan relationships. This is another theme of the New Music Seminar…redefining the music business around the artist/fan relationship…how to manage it…how to monetize it. Records are no longer currency in the next music business…fans are.
Here’s the list of the 12 artists that sold over 10,000 albums in 2008 for the first time. Remember these are 12 albums out of 105,575 new album releases that year.
BON IVER
Record Label: Jagjaguwar (US/CAN)
Album: For Emma Forever Ago 103,112
TMI BOYZ
Record Label: TMI Entertainment
Album: Grindin’ For a Purpose 29,119
Instead, let’s let the magic of the market continue to work. New technologies are making it easier than ever for musicians to create, distribute and promote music — and also to make money doing so. In the past, the music business was a “lottery,” where only a very small number made any money at all. With these models, more musicians than ever before are making money today, and they’re not doing it by worrying about copyright or licensing. They’re embracing what the tools allow. A recent study from Harvard showed how much more music is being produced today than at any time in history, and the overall music ecosystem — the amount of money paid in support of music — is at an all time high, even if less and less of it is going to the purchase of plastic discs.
This is a long and drawn out answer. It isn’t a simple question.
I’ve been using computer systems for more than twenty years, from micros to mainframes, so I’m no beginner. I was in on Microsoft operating systems from DOS 3.2 and I dabbled with Linux for a number of years. It was only recently that I made the full switch.
The drive towards Linux has been partly because of what Linux offers, but more because of what Microsoft doesn’t, or rather how their company works. Apple are the same.
Enter an old Dell Dimension XPS R400 PC that has been gathering dust in the closet. It has an 80GB Western Digital IDE drive, a Startech 10/100 NIC and 192MB of RAM in it. I received this old PC from a client that bought a new, custom built system from my company in October 2007. He no longer needed the Dell and was just going to trash it. Instead I convinced him to let me wipe the drive, install Mandriva 2008 on it and try to sell it on eBay. It did not sell when I listed it. The client did not want it back, so I just stuck it in the IT junk closet with several other old systems and flaky monitors. I decided to make this old Dell PC into my “new” router. Since it already has Mandriva 2008 on it I figured I could use that to get routing going and then upgrade the Mandriva later.
Amarok has plugins that directly consume content from popular web sites and displays them to you as you play music. For example it can look in Flickr for photos of your currently playing track’s artist and display them in a nice slide show to enhance the mood, or display a Wikipedia page about the artists, or look up the lyrics of the song, or even look up similar Youtube videos and offer to play them – inside Amarok. Think you need a web browser to browse Youtube? Amarok has changed that! And this is what it is about – enhancing the power of desktop applications by giving them the ability to consume from similar web services. The possibilities are endless. Fact is that we have come to rely on the browser for too many things, and if you really stopped to think about it it’s really rather senseless. When I’m listening to music, why do I need to open an extra browser window just to find lyrics or look up artist/album information? When I’m writing a document, why should I have an extra browser window to look for material? When I’m writing a program, why should I have an extra browser window open just to look up API references? The browser is today trying to do too much! This awkward work flow needs to change – we need to make our desktop programs more ‘web-sensitive’ and independent of the browser. (Remember the documentation widget I built into PlasMate?). At KDE we have already identified this as a critical path in the evolution of the desktop, and are already setting plans in motion to this end. We even have a cool codename for the movement – Project Silk.
The stand received financial sponsorship from Red Hat, Linux IT, University of London Computing Centre and The Learning
Machine (Ingots) for which everyone is very grateful. Canonical, the commercial entity behind Ubuntu very kindly provided us with 600 Ubuntu 9.10 CDs (500 Desktop and 100 Server) to give away (thanks Larry) and there were a similar number of CDs containing a great collection of Education-centric Open Source desktop applications for Windows from Free Software for Students that was compiled and produced by Peter Kemp and David Wilmut. That’s around 1200 CDs in total full of completely Free goodness and fun. We encouraged all the recipients to copy, share and pass them on too! At the end of the show we had only a few (quite literally) of each remaining.
Wellington’s Convention Center this week hosted 700 open source software engineers – i.e. geeks – for a festival of discussion of all things linux at Linux.Conf.Au the annual Australasian Linux conference. Carl Suurmond was dispatched to catch the atmosphere with his camera on the final day. Tomorrow the conference will open its doors to the public for an Open Day for all things linux from 11am to 2pm.
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.
She took the plunge and immersed herself in the world of open source in 2001, perceiving it was a culture worthy of academic study.
Simmtronics Semiconductors Ltd. has entered into a global agreement with IBM Corp. As per the agreement, IBM has authorized Simmtronics to preload its IBM Client for Smart Work software solution in the Simmbook on Ubuntu operating system. This includes Lotus Symphony office productivity software which is made available at no charge to Simmbook customers.
Since churches and ministries are always looking for ways to save money, learning as much as you can about free computer software alternatives is a good idea. Operating systems like Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux do pretty much the same things, but in different ways.
Cost and licensing
Linux operating systems are published under open source licenses that make the source code available to everyone. Microsoft products, including Windows Vista and XP, are protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. As for cost, most Linux distributions are free and can be used on an unlimited number of computers. Windows operating systems are expensive, and legally each license can only be used on one computer.
Second: Remember that the way software is installed/maintained in the GNU/Linux world is completely different from Windows’. In Windows, as the writer said, you grab the software from internet (hopefully form a reliable location…. but we know that’s not always the case, is it?), click on it, maybe will have to restart your computer…. a couple times (why the hell installing Adobe Reader requires you to reboot Windows? Is Adobe Reader the equivalent for Windows of glibc or something?) and then finally you are done with the software. In GNU/Linux, at least in Ubuntu (and every other distro that prides itself of being such), you have to wait for the maintainers of Ubuntu to review software to make it available. That’s right…. they do that job for you, the user. And it’s not just firefox that they maintain… they take care of thousands (literally) pieces of software to make them fit together and not mess with each other when you installed them on your beloved Ubuntu-powered box. And that not only sounds like a dauntin task… it really is. And what would be the equivalent of that in the Windows world? It would be like waiting for Microsoft to review the software when it’s made available by its developers (have you seen how long it takes Microsoft to work on their own bugs? How long would it take them if they had to review other people’s software as well?) and make it available to you through the centralized software they provided Windows with so that their beloved customers don’t have to go leaping from site to site to grab the latest piece of malware-infested piece of software… oh, but there’s no such thing for Windows, is there? Such a shame, you know.
I run Mandriva 2010 at the moment on my desktop system here at the ERACC Intergalactic Spaceport and Karaoke Bar, otherwise known as my home office. I have been running releases of Mandriva for several years now. At first I too wanted to always have the latest, cutting edge release of every package out there. After a while I came to understand that if Mandriva package maintainers saw that a patch was necessary for an application I run then they would patch the version in the distribution and release the patched version in the update repository. If there were a new version of a software application that had security implications for a desktop user, then after testing the new version it would be included as an update for the life of that desktop release, usually 12 to 18 months. Long term desktop releases would get these updates if needed for their lifetime as well, usually 3 years. Then the next time I install updates I get the patched or new version.
I was really having fun! At one site, I found a laptop with Windows 7 installed, but also with a selection to have none and an instant price-reduction when the “No OS” choice was made. That felt good!
I finally found a computer which met all my needs; weight, size, quality of hardware and Ubuntu installed (one of many choices) at LinuxCertified.
I hope others will join me in buying your next computer this way. You will find competitive prices and the satisfaction of not paying the Windows tax.
Panasonic has signed a deal with IBM to migrate its global workforce from Microsoft Exchange to IBM’s hosted LotusLive service. IBM will initially migrate 100,000 employees to LotusLive iNotes, increasing to 300,000 over time. This is one of the largest commitments to cloud services by a global enterprise to date, and is a feather in the cap for IBM in its struggle with Microsoft for email and collaboration seats. However, in our opinion this is as much about delivering commodity services from the cloud as it is about IBM’s win over Microsoft.
Even though it recently landed a giant software deal with Japanese electronics firm Panasonic Corp., IBM Corp.’s Lotus unit, based in Westford, is still playing catch-up against archival Microsoft Corp.
Google last night released the second version of its Google Voice Chrome extension with some very notable new features. If you are using the Mac or Linux versions of Chrome, you’ll need to be running a beta version of Chrome that supports extensions.
An office suite is a collection of related software for business and other uses. The software is distributed together in a single package, with a consistent graphical interface, and with strong interaction between the different components.
The types of software included in an office suite typically consist of word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database and much more. For many users the office suite (together with a web browser and email client) represents the cornerstone of their computing day. A high quality office suite is therefore a necessity for any computing platform.
Back to the 0.9 version and the developer himself describes the release a more of a “polish” than packing in shiny and “mind-blowing” new features. As such it fixes many issue users – including myself! – have found troublesome.
On the whole, Alarm Clock is an excellent application that can be used for so much more than just alarms. If only it could sync with one of the online calendar or scheduling web apps, it would be truly awesome. That being said, if you can find a use for it in your day to day work, it can prove to be much easier than using a combination of cron and zenity to remind you of tasks that need your attention.
Liferea (Linux Fead Reader) works on Linux and Unix, and is definitely our favourite. Rated 4 stars, it provides great functionality, including optional pop-up notification of new items. News items with headline, image and summary can be browsed easily in its clean GUI (see image at the top of this article), and it provides various options and great functionality.
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We also tried the Blam feed reader, rated 2 stars by the Ubuntu community, but did not get good results with it. Canonical does not provide updates either. However, this may be a work in progress and the Blam developers site could be checked for any future developments.
Two weeks ago I was at the annual KDE PIM meeting at Osnabrück. It was the eighth time that this meeting took place, and it was a blast, once again. This is amazing, so I’m taking the opportunity to reflect a bit on what makes this meeting so successful, how it evolved over time, and what we all can learn for running great developer sprints.
Day 2 of Camp KDE kicked off with a bang when Frank Karlitschek announced the start of a significant new KDE project. The ownCloud initiative will complement the Social Desktop and Get Hot New Stuff efforts which are already dealing with social and collaborative data. Like those, the ownCloud initiative strives to combine the rich desktop interfaces made possible by the Qt and KDE libraries with the large amount of social information and data users are putting online.
In my Slackware 13 review mfillpot gave some suggestions to improve the Slackware experience and I thought I would give them a shot. First off, changing the init level to 4 to allow KDM to show up instead of this startx business. I was happy to note that Slackware had emacs. So many distros have vi and I never really learned how to use it well. So I changed the value to 4 and restarted.
Overall, I am really happy with Arch, although to be fair, I haven’t been using it for more than a day yet. However, the documentation is great and the installation was relatively quick and painless, so I am pretty pleased at this point. I look forward to getting more comfortable with it and switching my other machines as well.
DigAnTel-2 is a FREE Digital / Analog VOIP Telephone system utilizing CentOS Linux (RedHat), Asterisk 1.4.22, FreePBX 2.6.0 with VoicePulse module, Openfire, vtigerCRM with click to dial, PostFix, OpenVPN, and automated Polycom Phone suppot. DigAnTel is the glue to bind these technologies thus creating a unified telephony system for your home or small business. The installation is completely automated and doesn’t require a working knowledge of Linux or Asterisk.
The novelty in this is not in the desktop arrangement; I’ve been slowly tweaking and adjusting this setup for the better part of a year. In fact the fun part of this is that I’ve never been able to arrange it on this machine, even though I wanted to for quite a while.
Test runs at 120Mhz suggest this is a clean and brisk way to browse without overburdening the machine to a point of unusability. Firefox with Flash it is not, but if you are an unbeliever and demand a graphical browser on a Pentium Pro, this will satisfy. Furthermore, adding fbi to your system brings along fbgs, which allows you to display images and pdf files, respectively. For the reverse, try fbgrab and share your desktops with the world.
Now that Alpha 2 of Lucid Lynx is available (it was posted late last week) it’s easy enough to install that code onto the same PC test bed and measure the results. This version of the Ubuntu 10.04 beta booted up in — wait for it — 15 seconds. If you were around during the days of Windows 3.1, the concept of a 15-second boot time would be almost unfathomable. Come to think of it, it would be tough to imagine during the days of Windows Vista.
I’ll get to Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 later, but the “safe graphics mode” boot option in that very Ubuntu live DVD helped me figure out how to get Sidux 2009-04 to boot on my Intel 82830 CGC (aka Intel 830m) graphics-running Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101.
Over the course of two computing sessions I experienced both the Alpha 2 of the upcoming Ubuntu LTS release as well as the Sidux take on Debian Sid, circa early last year, both of which I’ve wanted to do in order to “plan” this laptop’s future when I decide to leave Debian Lenny behind.
Ubuntu Lucid isn’t even in the beta stage, let alone a release-candidate or fully baked release, and on my hardware it’s looking very, very good. I’m no fan of free-software hyperbole, but Ubuntu Lucid really does look like the best Ubuntu LTS release ever, and I’m anxious to see it at release time in April.
The Ubuntu User Days Team would like to announce the first Ubuntu User Day, on January 23, 2010. This will be a very informative one day session geared towards beginner and intermediate Ubuntu users, as well as people who are interested in using Ubuntu. We have 14 classes covering topics ranging from installing Ubuntu, finding help, equivalent programs, using IRC, getting involved in the Ubuntu Community and more. We have enlisted the help of many talented people to lead these classes throughout the day.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #177 for the week January 17th – January 23th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Developer Membership Board election results, Ubuntu User Days A Big Success, Bugs and hugs, Ubuntu Developer Week: January 25th – January 29th, 2010, Canonical Blog: ISV support for Ubuntu Server Edition widens, January 20th America’s Membership Review Board Meeting, Ubuntu LoCo Re-Approval Process, LoCo Stories: the Ubuntu Honduras School Tour, Launchpad 10.1 roll-out 09.00-11.30 27th January 2010, Anonymous Access to the Launchpad Web Service API, Introducing Ubuntu Electronics Remix 9.10, and much, much more!
The Ubuntu Manual Project has stirred up veritable carnival of publicity over the last few months, signifying a huge appetite for such a document within the community.
I decided to find out more on the project and its origins by interviewing the manual project leader (dare i say creator?) Benjamin Humphrey – also known as HumphreyBC.
Ubuntu 9.10 also offers its Server Edition, which provides the performance and security of Linux for the enterprise servers. Ubuntu Server Edition easily integrates with a user’s existing networks while providing a low total cost of ownership. The Server Edition goes further to offer multiple life cycle scenarios for users to choose from, and is supported by free life maintenance.
Version 6.1 of the system and network monitoring suite GroundWork Monitor Enterprise is now available. For this release the development team focused on improving performance and have also added support for Ubuntu Server to the monitoring solution. GroundWork Monitor Enterprise supports both Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and the latest Ubuntu 9.10 release.
Recently I popped down to the BT Young Scientist Exhibition here in Dublin. This is for secondary school students/ High school junior students in Ireland. It’s pretty amazing to see the enthusiasm they show for science and technology at an early age.
The process starts months ago, students submit a one page proposal on a topic, if it’s accepted they research and come up with the results, prototype or something to show from it all. It also gives Industries who are based over here to come and show case their projects and encourage students into those areas. IBM, Google, Analog Devices to name a few all took part and all have offices here in Ireland.
ÜberStudent is a free, Ubuntu-based operating system for higher education and emerging-generation high school students, those who wish to learn to excel at the tasks and habits of top students and researchers, and anyone who can benefit from easy-to-use yet powerful computing. Like Ubuntu, ÜberStudent is a complete operating system with programs for everyday computing tasks, but comes with an additional core of expertly configured programs, and many user-friendly extras, designed to increase your academic success. It’s Software Explorer enables you to easily extend ÜberStudent still further for specific academic disciplines, and it doesn’t stop there. Music and movie lovers, gamers, budding graphic designers, and those who insist on an ascetically eye-popping user interface will also be very pleased.
Linux is gaining popularity in the mobile phone industry, thanks to Android. Sony Ericsson has also joined the Gnu-Linux club and announced the launch of their first Android-powered phone — The Xperia X10.
The Xperia X10 phone, named SO-01B, will be launched in Japan in April 2010 with NTT DOCOMO. This Xperia phone creates a unique Sony Ericsson user experience by combining best-in-class entertainment features with signature applications.
The lead engineer for Google’s Chrome Operating System told Ars Technica the emerging product and its Chrome Web browser sidekick will have a complete media player that approximates the functionality of Windows Media Player. Chrome OS boots up a netbook in a fraction of the time it takes to start today’s existing computers. With Google’s Chrome Web browser, Chrome OS loads Web applications in just a few more seconds.
The latest AdMob metrics report is out today and it’s nothing we haven’t seen yet. To sum it up quickly, Android continues to grow both here in the US and abroad. In the span of one year Android traffic (in the AdMob network) has grown from 1% overall to 16% for North America and Western Europe.
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This time last year year, Windows Mobile accounted for 12% whereas now it sits at 3% right next “other.” Ouch.
Google has just dropped Android software 2.1 (which the Nexus runs on) into the open source trough, making it rife for hacking and modding. This is the first, and is described as a simple job. Chris Paget of H4RDW4RE, describes the tweak as “very much low-level Linux kernel hacking as opposed to a full on ROM.”
I’ve seen many similar reports that talk of Linux overtaking Windows for UMDs in a broadly similar timeframe. One thing’s for sure smartbooks and the like are here to stay.
Despite the current developments and the latest advancements in x86 chips power efficiency, analysts seem to think that, even though Intel currently controls the netbook market with its new Atom chips, this dominance may be short lived. ABI Research suggests that the ARM architecture may make a strong incursion into this segment, likely taking away most of the mobile market share from Intel’s units.
Horizons Regional Council will take open-source software for a spin on its desktop computers early this year under a push to bring free software to public sector PCs.
New Zealand Open Source Society president Don Christie says NZ Post and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet will also trial the software as part of the Public Sector Remix project.
Fourteen government agencies have signed up for the project, and as of Wednesday 32 firms had responded to a survey seeking to identify the number and capability of New Zealand companies providing and supporting open-source software.
The code refactorings and clean ups that have been made to enable single-window mode to be implemented has also resulted in improvements to multi-window mode. The most significant is the support for multi-column dock windows, as you can see used in the screenshot above. People having dockables on one screen and an image in full screen on another will probably find this useful, for example. Before this, you could only have one column of dockables inside a dock window.
We’ve discussed the singlewindow GIMP before – even telling you how to install it! Now GIMP developer Martin Nordholt has revealed that the ‘target’ release date for version 2.8 (AKA ‘Single Window GIMP) is December the 27th 2010.
I have uploaded a pre-release version of IceCat 3.6, if there will not be major problems, at the beginning of next week I’ll make an official release. Please report on this mailing list any problem you may encounter.
However, permissive licences don’t ensure the ongoing freedom advocated by Richard Stallman, which underpins the FOSS philosophy. Significantly, though, Stallman is himself beginning to accept that they are sometimes necessary, as evidenced in a recent article in which he admits to having mixed feelings on selling licence exceptions. Could this shift in Stallman’s thinking be evidence of a fundamental change in the broader licensing landscape?
The Obama administration on Friday is posting to the Internet a wealth of government data from all Cabinet-level departments, on topics ranging from child car seats to Medicare services.
The mountain of newly available information comes a year and a day after President Barack Obama promised on his first full day on the job an open, transparent government.
When you combine the two, you elevate the art of literal misinterpretation to a higher form of genius. In Dr. Pun’s latest article, you will learn all about writing scripts using Python, just not the Python you may expect. The calembour or the equivoque is so potent here, that essentially a bad idea becomes fantastic. Follow me.
Recently, Vimeo and YouTube announced that they were moving to support the HTML5 video tag, as DailyMotion did last summer. This is an important step in making video a first-class citizen of the modern web, and that is great news. Unlike DailyMotion, however, Vimeo and YouTube chose to rely on the patented H.264 video encoding, rather than an unencumbered encoding like Ogg Theora. This means that the <video> pages on those sites will not work with Firefox.
The proprietary flash player has left alot to be desired for Linux and Apple users. Especially if you are running with accelerated 3d and with compiz fusion. Finally it is possible to watch youtube videos in html 5 format instead of the flash player. And I have found an easy way to take advantage of this new feature. This experience for me at least has been so much better. No more low quality jerky video, but instead with html 5 the video can be viewed in high definition and still be smooth.
Jack Straw, the justice secretary, today disclosed that he offered Tony Blair a last-minute way out of the war in Iraq by drafting a secret contingency plan that would have seen Britain support the US-led invasion but not send troops.
The Swiss Federal Administrative Court [official website, in French] ruled [judgment, PDF, in German; press release, PDF, in French] Thursday that an American taxpayer’s financial information at Swiss bank UBS [corporate website] may not be disclosed to the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) [official website] pursuant to an August 2009 agreement [text, PDF; JURIST report]. The court ruled in favor of an undisclosed American taxpayer, who appealed a November decision by the Swiss Federal Tax Administration (AFC) [official website, in French] that would have allowed the disclosure.
We present Albert Edwards’ latest in its complete form as it must be read by all unabridged and without commentary. These are not the deranged ramblings of a fringe blogger – this is a chief strategist for a major international bank.
As Peter Wallison argues in his great book on party finance, the real evil of American politics is that politicians must beg interest groups for the money to finance their campaigns. What we need is not “less money” and CERTAINLY not less speech – but more distance between donor and recipient. The mechanism for that is the political party. Reformers should be focusing on lifting limits on the flow of money from parties to candidates and restoring the role of the parties as the funders of campaigns. Instead of Candidate Smith asking Donor Gonzalez for money – and Donor Gonzalez asking for a favor in return – party chairman Robinson will ask thousands of donors for money on behalf of a slate of candidates, who will never know precisely whose gift was directed to them. That step will diminish corruption and the appearance of corruption.
President Barack Obama took a populist tone Saturday, denouncing the Supreme Court’s decision to ease curbs on big business spending on election campaigns.
Battered by a stunning Republican win this week in the liberal bastion of Massachusetts that robbed Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority, Obama defended his political agenda and vowed to continue fighting against “the special interests in Washington”.
“In my first year in office, we pushed back on that power by implementing historic reforms to get rid of the influence of those special interests,” the president said in his weekly audio and video address.
In a Special Comment, Countdown’s Keith Olbermann envisions a future United States in which today’s Supreme Court ruling permitting unbridled corporate campaign spending purchase all the power greed can afford.
The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the constitutional right to a public trial in criminal cases means that jury selection, including questioning of prospective jurors, should not be done behind closed doors.
Google Inc., clashing with the Chinese government over Web censorship, praised U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for calling for an unrestricted Internet where people can operate without fear of repression.
“At Google we are great believers in the value to society of unfettered access to information,” the company said in a statement today. Google said it will work with governments, human-rights organizations and bloggers to promote free expression and increased access to information.
Remember the Russian cop’s YouTube narrative on police corruption? Reader Max_W writes with the news that Alexei Dymovsky, the cop whose videos started a movement, was arrested (Google translation; Russian original) on January 22, 2010. He is in prison in the south of Russia. Max_W adds: “It seems only a president is allowed to have a video blog in Russia.”
“Paypal has as of 23rd of January 2010 frozen WikiLeaks assets. This is the second time that this happens. The last time we struggled for more than half a year to resolve this issue. By working with the respected and recognized German foundation Wau Holland Stiftung we tried to avoid this from happening again — apparently without avail.”
Suffice to say that it, ‘clixpy’, records everything I do when online to the text portal, key strokes, mouse movements, selections made etc., as shown by a live demo on clixpy.com, if I use a web browser. So it appears to be very intrusive and I’m extremely concerned for my privacy.
What is the reason for ‘clixby’s presence? Is it a consequence of new UK laws or EU regulations, or is it something else. WHATEVER, I *DON’T* LIKE IT! Makes me think of PHORM.
Russia’s police force was today at the centre of another national scandal after a journalist beaten in custody died in hospital from his injuries.
Konstantin Popov, 47, was arrested two weeks ago in his home town of Tomsk, Siberia, after neighbours complained that he was drunk and playing his guitar too loudly.
How is that possible? It cannot be found out because the mandate is not made public. Magic, it reminds me of the charlatans who say they live without food and water supply, and it is their personal secret what makes them survive.
The Obama administration is backing $675,000 in damages a Massachusetts student must pay the Recording Industry Association of America for file sharing 30 songs.
Recently many Software Freedom activists have started to question bundled operating systems. If one goes to buy a PC, you will have to pay for the pre-installed Microsoft Window. Today there are many alternatives to Microsoft Windows — GNU/Linux based Ubuntu is one of the most popular Operating Systems. It is not only free in terms of cost, but also free in terms of control that the user has over his or her computing. GNU/Linux operating systems are very much more secure than Microsoft technologies.
If you want buy a branded PC from HP or any other major player and you want to run GNU/Linux on it then what are your choices? Irrespective of what software you want to run on your machine, you will have to pay the cost of pre-installed Windows, even if you are going to remove it and replace it with GNU/Linux. Will Mrs. Clinton take measures to save citizens from paying forced Microsoft Taxes?
With the ever increasing user-friendliness of Linux, the fact that its not as demanding on the hardware, the fact that more and more companies are making programs for Linux and the strides of companies like Canonical with their Ubuntu product, I see the popularity of Linux doing nothing but growing.
This two-day introduction to Linux broadens attendees horizons with a detailed overview of the operating system. Attendees learn how to effectively use a Linux system as a valuable tool. They get familiar with the architecture and various components of the operating system, learn both graphical and command line tools, and learn to do basic networking. This class is scheduled for January 28th – 29th, 2010.
Dell no longer has desktop systems available on their Linux system page. Only laptop and netbook systems are now available. This is the second time in the past few months that Dell has dropped Linux desktop systems. Attempts to contact Dell to ask about the status of desktop Linux systems have so far been unsuccessful.
Google has confirmed that its upcoming lightweight, browser-centric Chrome OS operating system will include a built-in media player. In an interview with ArsTechnica, Matthew Papakipos, the engineering director for the Chrome OS project, says that the developers are currently working on “integrating a whole media player into Chrome and into Chrome OS”. The Chrome browser, for example, already includes support for Flash and HTML5 audio and video playback, however, users also need to be able to “play JPEGs and MP3s and PDFs and all that stuff when you’re off line” said Papakipos.
Sometime in 2010, Google will release Chrome OS, its take on a netbook operating system. It will be far more than just that though. It’s an entirely new take on the desktop operating system. While a final version is still months away from release there’s already enough of Chrome available that we can begin to see what it’s going to look like.
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You also won’t need to be on the Internet to view or play some media files. We already know that Chrome OS will be able to read Adobe PDF files and play Adobe Flash videos. Now, we know that Google is integrating a media player into Chrome OS that will play at least MP3 music files. It will surely play other media file types as well, but exactly what those will be we don’t know yet. We do know that you won’t need to be on the Internet to play them. So, for example, if you have an MP4 movie on a USB stick, you’ll be able to watch it even if you’re not online. Again, the intent isn’t to have you click on a movie file and have a media player pop-up to play it. Instead, the movie will start playing in a browser window. Chrome OS is all about integrating everything into the Web browser experience.
Not a lot of fixes, LCA rather slowed down the patch flow. There’s a number of patches in the queue for master, so I expect 1.7.4.902 to be a bit more exciting.
The Swedes from Gothenberg that run Craft Animations have announced the first-ever Linux release of their Craft Director Studio software. Craft Director Studio, which is an advanced real-time 3D animations tool, is now officially supported under Fedora Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– A number of fixes in AVI file support.
– Several MSXML improvements.
– A few MSI fixes.
– Various bug fixes.
The Bordeaux developers have announced the release of version 2.0.0 of Bordeaux for Solaris and OpenSolaris. Bordeaux is a GUI configuration manager add-on for Wine and is also available for Linux 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.
The third day of talks at Camp KDE was somewhat shorter, due to the afternoon Cmake training provided by Marcus Hanwell of Kitware. However, in order to provide complete coverage of the talks for the readers of the dot, summaries of the third day’s technical talks are provided within.
I have been really lazy to write anything here for quite some time now. I enjoyed the simple life away from the blogocube (it’s actually a dodecahedron, but blogododecahedron is a mouthful) but now I’m back.
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The next step was the /fork/ from the title. The data models (aka every item list you see in Lancelot) are moved into a separate library called liblancelot-datamodels. Both libraries (liblancelot and liblancelot-datamodels) now reside in kdeplasma-addons/libs so that they can be used by any other plasmoid (or any other program for that matter).
This is a way of saying “liblancelot is now considered stable enough to be used even outside of Lancelot”.
I used to have a silk dress shirt. It was a rich blue color, a bit loose fitting and just great for the hot and humid semi-tropical climate of Hawaii where I was living at the time. That isn’t the kind of silk this blog entry is about, however. Rather it’s going to be about KDE Silk which is a project which aims to deeply integrate online content and communication into the user experience.
To quote the KDE Silk wiki page: “The goal of Project Silk is deep coupling of the web with the user experience while overcoming limitations of the browser. “Freeing the Web From the Browser”, so to say. Project Silk takes the opposite direction of Google’s Chrome OS, instead of making the browser the Operating System, we integrate the content and the communication deeply into the desktop and application ”
When I was contemplating the topics for my “Key Quests for 2010″ list in December 2009, even before I had decided whether I’d share the list with others, the issue of KDE’s web footprint came up pretty quickly in the process. It is very often our first impression for people who would like to get involved or who would like to find out more about us. It is where people go before they know how to (or if they want to) communicate with us directly. It also has been something we’ve really struggled with improving.
The list of “Key Quests for 2010″ was alphabetical. It was a sensible ordering and it prevented me from having to prioritize them in some linear fashion that could never be definitive anyways: all the points are important, though often in different ways, for different reasons and even with different key audiences. So, alphabetical ordering it was! This meant that WebKit was going to be the last topic, and now here we are. (Honestly, I’m glad I’ll be able to get back to more “stream of consciousness, spur of the moment” blogging!
The first beta of what will become Element MediaOS version 1.0, an HTPC centric distribution based on Ubuntu 9.10, is available for testers and developers. Element is designed for HTPCs and aims to integrate GTK applications into a ten-foot user interface through a unique implementation of the XFCE environment. Its started as my own project to set up an effective media center for my own HTPC that would allow me to utilise certain GTK applications without straining my eyes to read the dialog fonts. I decided it would probably be beneficial to other users who were seeking something similar so I am hoping I can get an active community of media center enthusiasts to get behind it and support it.
While the recession has battered many U.S. software companies, Red Hat — which has staked its future on open-source Linux software, virtualization and cloud computing — has flourished. The company has a number of secrets behind its success, some of them unique.
Last month, more than 200 Fedora Project developers and contributors gathered in Toronto for FUDCon, the Fedora Users and Developers Conference. Paul Frields, Red Hat’s Fedora Project Leader, talks about FUDCon, what lies ahead for the next generation of FOSS, and how to address some of the lingering problems of Linux communities.
It’s been over a week now, and my wife is settling in to her new Debian system with no further problems. There were a few extras I needed to install when I first brought Debian up, and a few more I’ve needed during the last week.
Debian developer Alexander Reichle-Schmehl has announced that security support for Debian 4.0 (code named “Etch”) will end on the 15th of February, 2010. Debian 4.0 was originally released on the 8th of April, 2007 and included version 2.6.18 of the Linux kernel. After the 15th of February, no new updates, including security updates and critical fixes, will be available for Debian version 4.0.
The second alpha of Ubuntu 10.06 boasts 15-second boot-time, says an industry report. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu project posted a controversial survey about which proprietary apps might be considered for inclusion with the distro, and Canonical announced a support plan for IBM’s Ubuntu/Lotus “Smart Work” cloud distribution.
To be worked on for Ubuntu Server 10.04 Alpha 3 is migrating from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1, an upgrade to Eucalyptus 1.6.2, PHP/Python/Perl libraries for Amazon’s cloud computing platform, integrating Puppet and Etckeeper, boothooks and user based configuration for UEC/EC2, and various QA improvements.
Sams Publishing has published a 2010 version of its book Ubuntu Unleashed for Karmic Koala and Lucid Lynx releases. The publisher also launched an Ubuntu Linux Starter Kit combination book and boxed distribution, and has updated A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming.
Now that Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is out and stable I thought I would look into what is on the horizon for the next release of Ubuntu. There are a lot of questions that I have about the next release and I have found some solid answers, rumors and a lot of speculation as to what the next release will have.
Ubuntu has committed to have a regular release schedule. I came across a lot of mixed feelings about this idea/concept. Some people feel that this regular release gets in the way of how users see the distribution. Some users like to be on the edge of technology and what the developers have made for the release. Once people get used to that release it is about time for another release that uses new ideas and concepts.
Believe it or not, there are several distributions of Linux intended for use by children as young as 3 years old. Child-oriented Linux distros tend to have a simplified interface with large, “chunky”, colorful icons and a specialized set of programs designed with kids in mind.
The latest generation of devices are easy on the eye, lightweight and packed with some nifty features such as the ability to take notes, make lists and — for some — even watch video. They also offer far better battery life than any netbook or notebook, often come with an unlimited wireless connection for downloading new books, and give you access to libraries of e-books that can top a million titles. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, there were so many e-readers that they had their own special section carved out on the show floor.
Version 0.2 of both Flickr Addict and Flickr Addict Lite have been released on the Palm App Catalog, just three hours or so after submission, so kudos to Palm!
T-Mobile launched an Eric Clapton-backed Fender Limited Edition of its Android-based MyTouch 3G phone. Meanwhile, China-based Hisense announced an HS-E90 Android phone, Motorola is launching an Android app store in China, and Taiwan’s Gigabyte is rumored to be releasing an Android handset in Russia, say reports.
Pre-release downloads of Processing with built-in support for Android. Note that this code is incomplete and contains many bugs. It is not ready for widespread use. It should be considered “nightly build” quality. Do not use this code while operating heavy equipment. Do not rely on this code for thesis or diploma work, as you will not graduate. Do not use this code if you’re prone to whining about incomplete software that you download for free.
ARM-based systems introduces greater choice and differentiation for system vendors, although an estimated 90% of ultra-mobile devices (UMDs) shipped in 2009 were based on an x86 processor architecture, according to a new report by ABI Research.
The firm forecasts that annual UMD shipments of netbooks, MIDs, smartbooks and UMPCs based on ARM instruction sets will surpass x86-based UMDs by 2013.
ZSL, a leading ISV & Global Software Solutions and Services provider, today launched “PowerCube” DaaS (Desktop as a Service), an open source-based desktop collaborative solution with supporting ZSL consulting practice. Available today in the U.S., Africa, and India, “PowerCube” will help mid-market customers using proprietary platforms to migrate to the IBM Client for Smart Work on Ubuntu’s operating system.
At the Gran Canaria Open Desktop Summit in July 2009, the Open-PC project was announced. The statement said the project aimed to “cooperatively design a Free Software based computer by and for the community”. Further this PC would use only hardware for which there are free software drivers available. This would be a PC with the minimal compromise required for running a free desktop. In January 2010 the project announced the launch of its first product.
What you’re looking at above left is the construction site of the Cleopatra Water Courts project in Cairo, Egpyt, a shopping mall complex that’ll likely cost tens of millions dollars to complete. What you’re at looking above right is the architect’s conceptual model that got his design for it approved — not a real world model, not a watercolor painting, not even an AutoCAD file. Rather, it’s a build created in Second Life, which Los Angeles-based architect David Denton (known in SL as DB Bailey), showed his client, an Egyptian tycoon who funded the project. On that score, this is almost certainly the most expensive, ambitious real world project using Second Life as a platform.
linux.conf.au describes itself as a “conference about Open Source Software, including Linux that brings together the world’s community of Linux enthusiasts who contribute to the Linux operating system”. The description is apt because it clearly states how focused on the “open source” philosophy that conference is. Their views and conclusions would differ if they focused more on software freedom instead. “Free software” and “open source” are terms expressing different values and different values give rise to different conclusions.
Fidelity Information Services Free/Open Source GT.M Mumps database is gaining traction outside of private-sector Veterans Affairs VistA Electronic Health Record. Veterans Affairs VistA development in the private sector is proceeding at a furious rate. Companies such as M/Gateway, Astronaut (owned by the same conspiracy that owns Linux Medical News) Medsphere, DSS and others are making announcement after announcement of new development in the Veterans Affairs VistA Electronic Health Record or closely related space.
*Open source in consumer devices
*VMware-Zimbra deal highlights open source, cloud
*A capitalist’s guide to open source licensing
*Latest on Oracle-Sun-MySQL, M&A implications
This week there is only a little bit of GIMP, but a lot more about the free video editor Cinelerra. I use it to make a kind of slide show video used to illustrate a short “bumper” for Martin Bailey’s blog and podcast about his (mostly nature) photography. Martin is living in Japan and has a lot to tell about photography and Japan. Highly recommended!
I’m very grateful, personally, that the EU Commission cares about Open Source, but after its extensive investigation into MySQL, despite some misinformation, as I viewed it, it found, “The Commission’s in-depth investigation showed that although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment.” That is true.
Intriguing stuff. But the really interesting dialog begins in chapter two, where Burkhardt shares his views on Oracle’s buyout of Sun, and the potential implications for MySQL.
OpenStreetMap and Sahana are two free software projects that are facilitating aid to Haiti.
We wanted to call attention to two free software projects that have been involved in the Haiti humanitarian effort, both because of the usefulness of their work and because they can surely use the help of skilled volunteers.
PatientOS EMR is an open source health care information system with a comprehensive toolkit to customize the EMR to meet the needs of Hospitals, Clinics and Businesses seeking to integrate an EMR with their software.
This latest release includes a new AJAX web client for end users to access the clinical documentation through the browser. PatientOS Inc. worked closely with the Ila Trust foundation to create a light weight application which can meet the needs of seeing hundreds of patients per session.
This release candidate is the final step before the official release of opentaps 1.4, which is expected in the next few weeks, and there should be only limited changes to opentaps 1.4 before its release.
The San Francisco Committee on Information Technology has published a new software evaluation policy that requires departments of the city government to consider open source software solutions alongside proprietary commercial offerings.
In December the U.S. White House set guidelines for an open and transparent administration. The Open Source for America (OSFA) organization is now following up with tips for a governmental move to free software.
People are voting for Google to offer HTML5/Ogg video support on YouTube, in Google’s own product ideas voting space.
This piece of Ogg activism is getting some traffic on identi.ca and Twitter right now. If you haven’t already, you should jump in.
YouTube is, obviously, the largest source of videos in the world by far, so keeping pressure on Google to support web standards and free formats (over proprietary formats like Flash) is really important.
In early December a beta of Google Chrome for Linux was released (though Chromium could be built on Linux in an alpha form for months earlier) while just days prior was the first public code release of Google’s Chromium OS. Google’s Chrome web-browser has been quick to attract new users on Linux thanks to its speed and features, but some are having issues with this web-browser over its multimedia support.
When Google began soliciting feedback from users about what features they would most like to see in the next version of YouTube, the response was an overwhelmingly enthusiastic request for standards-based open video: users called for Google to support the HTML5 video element.
Both YouTube and Vimeo have announced that they are launching HTML5-based players on their video streaming sites, thus booting out the long-standing champ of multimedia delivery, Adobe Flash. With recent security issues plaguing Adobe products, it’s no surprise that media giants such as YouTube are jumping ship. What makes HTML5 special is that the new Web standard doesn’t require Adobe’s software to stream content to viewers.
So the question rises: “Why is there no OGG support in Youtube?” Numerous people claimed it is because Google is afraid of submarine patents for the Theora video format. While Xiph, the foundation behind Theora claims it is not patent encumbered but you cannot be sure until it is used by the masses and it would be an interesting target for companies. It’s only an interesting target if royalties for patents will generate enough income to justify legal costs. Apart from that there is also the mid-2009 discussion about which format offered the best video quality.
[T]hey only offer video in H.264 format, and that is not good news for free software. A lot of people have noticed that Firefox doesn’t support H.264, and apparently many people don’t understand why, or know what the problems are with H.264. This is a good time to restate the facts and re-explain why Firefox does not support H.264. I’ll be mostly recapitulating the relevant chunks of my talk. (Hopefully a full recording of my talk will become available from the LCA site next week.)
The basic problem is simple: H.264 is encumbered by patents whose licensing is actively pursued by the MPEG-LA. If you distribute H.264 codecs in a jurisdiction where software patents are enforceable, and you haven’t paid the MPEG-LA for a patent license, you are at risk of being sued.
I’m sure there will be a lot of exciting events this year. Google is planning to release a simple OS centered around web browsing and web apps. It is intended for netbooks, but will surely impact the web platform, by proving that the shift towards the web apps is already happening today.
The sugar on top comes through with web applications. No matter what platform I am running there are many online application suites that promise to bring us OS independent applications. Google and Microsoft are both working on this, and in the future we can expect more of it. What does this mean?
POLICE have apologised to a man after he was given two speeding fines from a camera outside his house – despite the fact his car was parked at the time.
A driver was twice sent speeding tickets after parking in front of a camera because police officers failed to notice his vehicle was stationary, it has emerged.
Mr Hussain is calling for a change in the law to favour victims of burglary and home intrusion who act as he did in defence of their families, homes and property and I hope that he gets it. We ought to be entitled to defend ourselves in our own homes, and to know that the state will back us and not the criminal intruder when we do so.
One of the suspects, Doni, was caught when he was about to withdraw money from a Bank Mega ATM on Jalan Enggano in Tanjung Priok. The police confiscated 20 cellphones, hundreds of cellphone SIM cards and Rp 120 million ($ 12, 282) in cash.
A TSA agent at the Philadelphia International Airport slipped a baggie full of white powder into an unsuspecting passenger’s baggage, then terrorized her when he “found” it, before announcing that he was just kidding. When she complained to airport security, she was dismissed because “the TSA worker had been training the staff to detect contraband.”
One of the most common ways of preventing insider security breaches is to have an auditing system in place, which monitors who is doing what within the system. Another method of preventing insider security breaches is to implement a system of job rotation or separation of duties. But Multi-Party Authorization is a better method for proactively preventing insider security breaches because, as Knowledge Center contributor Craig Palmore explains here, Multi-Party Authorization requires two or more people in order to allow access to certain sensitive files.
Charlie Mitchener is a 61-year-old general building contractor with an office near Patrick Lane and Fort Apache Road in Las Vegas. He holds permits allowing him to legally carry concealed weapons in Nevada, Florida and Utah.
Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal that the chief constable of Kent police, Mike Fuller, lobbied the power generation company E.ON UK to seek injunctions to counter protests against the proposed Kingsnorth power station.
A chief constable was tonight accused of undermining the public’s right to protest after documents revealed he urged the owner of a power station to do more to disrupt environmental demonstrators.
Last December, Congress approved a $290 billion increase of the debt limit to support the government’s borrowing through February. This lifted the total amount the federal government can borrow to $12.4 trillion.
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley lost her special-election for the Senate seat vacated by the untimely passing of U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy. Much has been said about the role of health care reform in the race. Apparently everyone in Massachusetts has health care and reasonable doubts about an expensive national plan that might not improve their services.
President Obama proposed Thursday that banks should be restricted from making investments that are not intended to benefit customers, an activity known as proprietary trading.
Though the roots of the financial crisis were in lax loan underwriting, followed by lax underwriting of derivative products containing those loans and a poor grasp on the exposures banks were amassing on their books, the administration is relying on populist outrage to regain momentum.
The Obama administration struggled on Friday to secure confirmation of Ben S. Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, underscoring the political upheaval as both parties tried to find their footing amid a powerful wave of populism.
President Barack Obama’s administration is scrambling to save the nomination of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke as more opposition emerges from members of the president’s own party.
Two Senate Democrats announced they would vote against Bernanke’s bid for a second term on Friday, underscoring a major populist shift in the political landscape after a Republican’s stunning Massachusetts victory ended the Democratic supermajority in the Senate.
Meredith Whitney, the banking analyst who forecast Citigroup Inc.’s dividend cut in 2008, said plans to limit risk-taking at financial companies will probably be approved and may “dramatically” reduce trading profits.
In what seems to be a relentless and increasingly dangerous mentality by Barack Obama concerning the banks of America, he continues to attack them from every angle as he suffocates the ability to generate revenue based on what looks like some type of inner torment from the failures of his first year in office as president.
Barney Franks and his House Financial Services Committee will open hearings today to discuss ways to impose limits on executive pay and the risks these bankers can take. Good for him. Will we skip the obvious question—what took Barney so long?—and wish him well.
One of Congress’ premier watchdog panels is investigating Goldman Sachs’ role in the subprime mortgage meltdown, including how the firm sold securities backed by risky home loans while it simultaneously bet that those bonds would lose value, people familiar with the inquiry said Friday.
The investigation is part of a broader examination by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into the roots of the economic crisis and whether financial institutions behaved improperly, said the individuals, who insisted upon anonymity because the matter is sensitive.
The crisis that began in 2008, with the near-failure of Bear Stearns, triggered a host of policies to shore up the investment banks. First, investment banks like Bear and Goldman were allowed to borrow directly from the Federal Reserve’s discount window—a privilege heretofore afforded only to commercial bank holding companies. After the failure of Lehman Bros., Goldman and Morgan Stanley hastily transformed themselves into bank holding companies, which allowed them to take full advantage of all the Fed’s and FDIC’s new programs. First, the FDIC boosted the amount of deposits it would insure, and then it offered to guarantee debt issued by financial institutions. Goldman was one of the biggest users of this new subsidy.
Buffett also told Fox Business that he doesn’t plan to sell off his holdings in Goldman Sachs, and that he foresees holding the shares at least five years.
With the impact of President Obama’s banking plan on Goldman Sachs Group (GS) far from clear, some analysts trimmed their 2010 Goldman forecasts on other worries following the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report.
Analysts have this morning scrambled to respond to President Obama’s surprise proposals for reform of the banking industry. Financial News summarises the views of some of the first to comment on the new regulations.
This move was applauded by public interest groups. “Ten years ago, the financial lobby convinced our leaders that the country’s most important banks should be allowed to operate like hedge funds. That deregulatory gamble cost us trillions in household wealth and millions of jobs. President Obama’s proposals greatly improve the reform package needed to prevent another crisis,” said Heather McGee from DEMOS.
When I look at Goldman’s staggering 2009 profits, I suspect some of their success comes from the fact that they have much of the field to themselves in the wake of Merrill Lynch’s collapse and the general retrenchment in the finance world. Regulations that crowd out JP Morgan and Bank of America would leave Goldman even freer of competition. This is how regulation often functions: driving out smaller competitors and keeping out new entrants, thus preserving profitability by alleviating competitive pressures.
To believe that the administration’s latest proposals alone are responsible for sinking the markets is to believe that what’s bad for Goldman Sachs is bad for America.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will benefit from President Barack Obama’s proposal to limit Wall Street risk because it may force its competitors to unwind trading operations, Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove said.
President Obama received a lot of support from Wall Street during his 2008 campaign. For the next election, he might want to plan accordingly without it.
Happy Goldman Sachs Bonus Day! As we mentioned earlier, Goldman announced today that its 2009 bonuses will total $16 billion, spread (very unevenly) among its 32,500 employees. We thought we’d take a look at how they spend our money.
Goldman Sachs’ decision to restrict its annual bonus pool to $16.2bn (rather than an expected $22bn or so) on the day that Barack Obama announced a sweeping set of Glass-Steagall like reforms that strike at the heart of its business model, turns out to be too little, too late.
As Goldman Sachs prepared to announce its fourth quarter earnings and employee compensation levels yesterday, the bank had bomb-sniffing dogs and police barricades on hand at its New York City headquarters, the New York Post reports.
New York isn’t alone among the cash-strapped states (read: all of them) in looking to take a tax sip from the nation’s “sugared beverages.” Today in New Hampshire, hearings are being held on soft drink taxes, and a bill is already in the pipeline. In Mississippi, a bill to impose a 2 cent per ounce tax is under consideration by the legislature. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson says he is getting increasingly serious about soda taxes as well. And the California Senate must not have given way to total despair, since they are working up a plan for taxing sweetened drinks. Because legislators and governors tend not to be too hot on math, the pro-tax Center for Science in the Public Interest offers a handy little calculator that shows how much money could flow into state coffers from a soda tax. And once they see those numbers—$400 million in free money!—it’s hard to forget them when it comes time to add up the columns on a budget spreadsheet.
If you care about fighting spin and you are concerned about the health of American democracy, I hope you will join me in saying the Supreme Court really got it wrong today, and this must be fixed. You can help put Americans — and people — before corporations by signing here today. It’ll only take a moment to say NO to the Supreme Court’s arrogant effort to elevate corporations “rights” and undermine the power of the people in our democracy.
Bowing to Pentagon concerns and an international outcry, a Michigan arms company said Thursday that it would immediately stop embossing references to New Testament Scriptures on rifle sights it sells the military.
Cruise giant Royal Caribbean plunged into a public storm last week, when it resumed bringing passengers to Labadee for daylong beach retreats.
How do you snooze in a rope hammock while, on the far side of those emerald mountains, tens of thousands of desperate human beings are still trying to extract their dead from wreckage?
The Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission this week link here. It declares that corporations and other groups have the same rights as live humans. The left considers this a great defeat which will lead to a flood of corporate money in elections to the detriment of the average voter while the right only sees a justified extension of corporations and other groups freedom to speak and spend money to affect political races.
MrJM sez, “The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC allows corporations and unions to pour unprecedented amounts of money into elections. Now more than ever, when Congress acts, we won’t be able to know whether it was because of reason or judgment… or only because of the need for campaign money. The system is broken, and we need to act.”
China blocks Web sites including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and has long forced domestic Internet companies to censor their own services. Blog providers, for instance, are expected to delete user posts that include pornographic content or talk of sensitive political issues.
Amazon dropped a bomb on the publishing world Wednesday morning by announcing a new royalty program that will allow authors to earn 70 percent royalties from each e-book sold, but with a catch or two. The move will pay participating authors more per book than they typically earn from physical book sales so long as they agree to certain conditions—conditions that make it clear that Amazon is working on keeping the Kindle attractive in light of upcoming competition. Still, authors and publishers are split on how good this deal really is.
Amazon tells The Reg that no-DRM was always the default with its Digital Text Platform – used by small publishers and authors as opposed to large publishing houses. In the past, the company says, if authors wanted to add DRM, they had to download separate software. Now, they can add DRM simply by checking a radio button.
But in a surprise buried at the end of the 289-page report, the inspector general also reveals that the Obama administration issued a secret rule almost two weeks ago saying it was legal for the FBI to have skirted federal privacy protections.
[...]
The telecom employees were supposed to be responding to National Security Letters, which are essentially FBI-issued subpoenas. But those Patriot Act powers say the target must be part of an open investigation and that a supervisor has to approve it. While they require some paperwork, FBI agents have been issuing about 40,000 such NSLs a year.
But an AT&T employee provided the unit with a way around some of those requirements. The employee introduced them to so-called ‘exigent letters.’ Those letters, first used immediately following 9/11, asked for information by saying that the request was an emergency and that prosecutors were preparing a grand jury subpoena. The letter falsely promised that the subpoena, which gives the telecoms legal immunity, would be delivered later, the report said.
What’s more, the report noted that the cozy relationship between the bureau and the telecoms made it hard to differentiate between the FBI and the nation’s phone companies.
“The FBI’s use of exigent letters became so casual, routine and unsupervised that employees of all three communication service providers told us that they — the company employees– sometimes generated the exigent letters for CAU personnel to sign and return,” the inspector general reported.
In fact, one AT&T employee even created a short cut on his desktop to a form letter that he could print out for a requesting FBI agent to sign.
Even that became too much. Agents would request “sneak peeks,” where they’d ask if it was worth their time to file a request on a given phone number, the inspector general noted. The telecom agents complied. Soon it graduated to numbers on Post-it notes, in e-mails or just oral requests.
A federal judge has dismissed Jewel v. NSA, a case from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of AT&T customers challenging the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls and emails.
“We’re deeply disappointed in the judge’s ruling,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “This ruling robs innocent telecom customers of their privacy rights without due process of law. Setting limits on Executive power is one of the most important elements of America’s system of government, and judicial oversight is a critical part of that.”
“General” Larry Platt — the musical mastermind behind “Pants on the Ground” — hasn’t seen a dime since everyone and their mother started singing his tune … and now he’s lawyering up in the hopes of finally raking in some cash.
Perhaps if you’ve been living under a pop culture rock for the past few years, you were unaware of the popular hobby of creating subtitled videos of an angry Hitler reacting to something going on in the world today, using a clip from the German movie Downfall.
A mother who doesn’t understand computers and forbade her children from downloading and sharing music on the Internet has been held responsible for their actions. A court in Germany ruled that parents simply banning file-sharing is not enough, and this has to be followed up to check compliance.
Once again the music industry has come out with disappointing results for physical music sales, which they blame entirely on file-sharing. What they failed to mention though, is that their findings show that music pirates are buying more digital music than the average music consumer. Since digital music is the future, pirates are the industry’s most valuable customers.
Have you ever heard one of the major movie studios complaining about the decrease in sales of VHS tapes? We haven’t. The music industry on the other hand continues to blame the decrease in physical sales on digital piracy, ignoring the fact that there’s a generation growing up that has never owned a physical CD.
Of course, right after the rumors, Glickman came out and announced that he would be stepping down at the end of his contract in September of 2010. So it seemed like maybe the studios would let him stick around to the end, since it was clear he wasn’t coming back. Apparently even that plan has been thrown out the window, as Glickman has now announced that he’s leaving as of April 1 in order to take over Refugees International, which seems like a worthy enough cause.
But a year after the RIAA made its announcement, not one major ISP had acknowledged supporting the RIAA’s plan. The question raised by Henson’s statement is whether Verizon has quietly signed on. An RIAA representative declined to comment.
To date, not a single major ISP has publicly acknowledged adopting a graduated response, yet Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast have for some reason stepped up the issuing of warning letters.
I was interviewed yesterday by Mark Edge, as part of his “Edgington Post Interview Series,” for his Free Talk Live radio show, about my Mises Daily article, “Reducing the Cost of IP Law.”
The IP advocate’s argument is dishonest. He says, well, my IP rule limits your property rights, but so do all property rights. So what’s the big deal? The big deal is that the only limits we recognize are that you may not violate others’ property rights! Murder or normal theft or trespass is obviously an instance of this. But using my own property peacefully is not! The IP advocate needs to show that my use of my own DVD somehow interferes with his own property in his own scarce resources. Obviously, it cannot. So, it fall back on IP itself: it says, well, it doesn’t violate B’s physical property, but it does violate his intellectual property. Hellooooo–THIS is the circularity. The circular reasoning is done by the IP advocates, NOT by the libertarian who is simply a consistent opponent of aggression.
How does one make it through the fire from Linux newbie to a full-fledged user? The process is no harder than any other system — just different, argues Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. Switching to Linux is no harder than switching to OS X, for example — “just without the black turtlenecks and the cool ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ commercials,” she said.
Day four of the conference opened with a keynote entitiled “Hackers at the End of the World” by Glyn Moody. Glyn explored the history of sharing in science and art as inspired by the open source movement, and contrasted this with the anti-sharing ‘my gain is your loss’ culture of the global financial community. Glyn postulated that the sharing and indeed sharing of sharing that characterises the FOSS community held a tantalising glimpse of a solution to the global financial and environmental crisis.
A start-up teaming up with IBM to build “Microsoft-free” virtual desktops and deliver them through a cloud computing model has secured $4 million in first-round venture financing.
Virtual Bridges, founded in 2006, is part of IBM’s attempt to undercut Microsoft’s Windows 7 with a set of cloud – and Linux-based desktop packages.
I have been a Linux user for years now, and mostly I don’t think about the cost of software anymore. Just about everything I want to do has a free software app that does it. I only run one piece of paid proprietary software: TwonkyMedia UPNP server, which cost me $29 about four years ago. Considering how much I do with computers all day long, that is a trivial amount of paid software. Contrast that with a Windows box, where you can wind up paying over $1000 just to have an operating system and an office suite.
[...]
Most expert Windows users are irritated by the condescending attitude Linux users have toward them, but this is one of the big reasons why that attitude exists. The majority of web and mail servers use free software. I don’t see a compelling reason to buy software for these uses when I can do everything for free. Ditto with my desktop machines; all the things I need to do, I can do with free software. So I probably do come across a little condescending to people who are still in the paid-software paradigm. They’re not used to having people regard them the same way they regard AOL users: people who are paying to have someone bring them something they could get for free.
As purists are fond of saying, Linux is just the kernel running the operating system. The rest of what the average person calls a Linux distribution are the hundreds of other packages bundled up with the Linux kernel. This combination of packages is what is most commonly seen as and called Linux. Now every Linux distribution is different. They have a different, although similar, package mix and those programs are of differing versions.
[...]
For those who claim that windows just works far better or easier than Linux just google “windows problems” and then “Linux problems”. You will find that there are about the same number of results. I retrieved 151,000,000 for windows and 141,000,000 for Linux. Try the same with individual Linux distribution names or versions of windows, ie. “ubuntu problems” or “xp problems”. What did you get?
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the idea of grid computing, a type of distributed computing that harnesses the power of many computers to handle large computational tasks, was all the rage, at least among organizations with high-performance computing (HPC) needs. One of the most notable projects to make use of grid computing was SETI@home, which utilized thousands of Internet-connected computers to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (and still does).
This week, the Outlaws bring you a lot of Google/China hacking stories, a review of the Mustard microblogging client for Android, Microsoft DDoSing Perl hackers, Google hiring Ted Ts’o and the Hawkman is in the house too…
Hmm. I don’t think there is anything earth-shaking here, although the i915 KMS changes might be noticeable. Notably if you have eDP (“embedded DisplayPort” – I think mainly a feature you’d find on a new imac), in which case it now hopefully works, but more commonly if you saw the flickering on your laptop panel due to LVDS downclocking (which saves power, but is now disabled by default until that thing is resolved).
Plagued by duplicate files that clog up your system? Quantum, a company once known mainly for hard drives, yesterday unveiled a new version of its StorNext File System that it says optimizes storage efficiency by implementing automatic data deduplication. It’s part of StorNext 4.0, Quantum’s high-performance sharing and data management platform, which now can also automate data tiering and retrieve partial files based on timecode, for the video editor in you.
Linux 2.6.32 is to be maintained for 2 to 3 years within the stable series – the maintenance of 2.6.27, however, will probably soon be discontinued or at least downscaled considerably. The util-linux-ng tool collection now contains three additional programs; fdisk provides optimised partitioning. The configuration of X Server has become more flexible and now HAL is no longer needed.
Today kvm maintainers released qemu-kvm-0.12.2 based on upstream qemu 0.12.2. qemu-kvm provides the userspace component qemu with kvm specific enhancements. This means you can use this either with your default kernel kvm module or with the most recent kvm-kmod kvm kernel module.
Roderick Colenbrander, or better known by his Internet name of Thunderbird (not to be confused with the Mozilla mail client), will soon be announcing a new software project that is supposed to be rather interesting, according to him. Roderick is known for starting the NVClock project years prior to the existence of CoolBits support for Linux to enable NVIDIA graphics card overclocking (and other tweaking) with Linux.
Hopefully the Evergreen support with mode-setting and ShadowFB support will be here by FOSDEM on the 6th of February, but it will still be longer before there is real 2D acceleration (EXA) or any 3D acceleration within the open-source stack.
This afternoon two patches hit the xorg-devel list that were written by Robert Morell and reviewed by Aaron Plattner. Both Morell and Plattner are NVIDIA employees. One of the patches is to cleanup of use of improper types in size calculation with the RENDER extension. The second RENDER patch is more important and it adds PanoramiX wrappers for gradients and solid fills with Xinerama.
Shot of jaq is bloody awesome. Well us ubuntu people are a little bit biased here because its done by two people who make ubuntu awesome but still it is very cool.
Want to have some fun using a web-cam on Ubuntu? I suggest you get your hands on the Cheese application. You can grab it straight from the Ubuntu Software Centre in the applications menu by searching for the term “cheese”. This neat little program can be used to snap some still images or video shots with fancy effects applied in real time. I cannot possibly understate how awesome this program really is and you will be playing with it for hours on end if you are lucky enough to have so much time. One thing is for sure, your Facebook profile shots will never be the same.
PGP Corporation, a global leader in enterprise data protection, today announced availability of the latest version of PGP Desktop. This new release extends PGP’s leadership position in enterprise data protection and enables client convenience and compliance across all of the major desktop operating systems environments — Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux and Red Hat Linux. In addition to allowing disk encryption across mixed environments, PGP Desktop for Mac now also supports Boot Camp, so users can have complete protection for machines running dual Mac OS X and Windows environments.
As I’ve said in the past: I think Cedega is good software, however there is more to buying software than just the product itself. Here is to hoping Transgaming can get their customer service act together in 2010, because – while I like CXGames, competition is a wonderful driving factor in the business world.
Last night Sutor then shared numerous Linux gaming links about some of the best games for Linux along with others that are open-source. Some of the great Linux games out there include Nexuiz, Alien Arena, ET: Quake Wars, and soon we should have some Unigine-based titles available along with many others.
I have on several occasions been asked “why do you work on KOffice when OpenOffice.org already exists and does everything people need?”. Well, there are several reasons why OpenOffice.org (OOo) is not the end-all of free office suites. This blog is the first in a series that will outline why KOffice is necessary and why it may in fact be the real future of the free office suites.
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So, the combination of these two makes KOffice uniquely suited for non-standard platforms. Non-standard by desktop standards, that is. Most people today agree that mobile is the future. And maybe so is KOffice…
The approach? Think Google Summer of Code — complete with internships, mentors, and sponsors — with an emphasis on team contributions rather than stand-alone projects.
GNOME ran a similar outreach program in 2006, and received one hundred applications within two weeks. Because funds are (always) limited, great projects (and talent) had to be turned away — but Google was so was impressed by the proposals, it funded three additional projects. The 2006 Women’s Outreach Program had six participants, but organizers are tentatively planning on five participants this season.
Back in December Zeitgeist 0.3 was released with many changes and its engine was even largely reworked. Since then there have been a few point releases as GNOME Zeitgeist is in the process of being stabilized for a Zeitgeist 0.4 release in time for GNOME 2.30. Yesterday afternoon Zeitgeist 0.3.2 was released to deliver on more stabilization work along with better support for GNOME’s Activity Journal. The release announcement can be read on the mailing list.
Well Puppy Linux is a winner.
I decided to give the newer version a go.
This one is 431 which has support for my wireless internet.
I have a side bar like vista and all my browsing is done using firefox just as it was on windows.
So far I am loving it.
Pardus is a distro developed by (I quote) “The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey”. It is a KDE based distro with lots of tools designed so that it becomes a lot easier to use. Since its a government run project I’m guessing the idea is to stop Turkish money flowing out of the country and into Microsoft’s coffers, and well as gaining control over software running on the countries critical systems.
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All in all, I like Pardus. It is a system you could recommend to a beginner, and is very user friendly.
I have a place reserved in my heart that only Slackware Linux fills. Strange as it might be, Slackware was the first Linux distribution that seemed to understand me and, I it.
I recently read an article which brought to mind, the time that I started my venture into the Linux community as a new user.
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Slackware remains true to being the most similar to Unix of any Linux flavor available. Patrick Volkerding cleaned up a version of SLS for a professor at MSU to use in teaching LISP. This was the start of a beautiful thing. For many years, Patrick was the sole maintainer of Slackware Linux. This is still largely true to this day and has it’s advantages. Nothing goes into Slackware unless it’s ready. Packages must require little or no tweaking for maximum performance. Even Gnome was dropped because it required too much configuration.
Torrent downloads for Slackware 13 can be found here. I’ll be using the full DVD ISO for this article as it includes all the packages necessary for a typical install.
A large chunk of the wallpapers to be packaged up with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx will be drawn from the public “Ubuntu Artwork” group on photo sharing site Flickr.
I’ve been hesitant to plunder the talented depths of this Ubuntu Artwork pool on Flickr; pullling out some of the more ‘spiffing’ examples and presenting them here as I’m not too fond of pointless lists that come hand in hand with a meaningless adjective – “10 cool wallpapers”, “10 awesome wallpapers”, etc. Are those 10 wallpapers really “awesome” or are they 10 you found in a hurry and thought “Hmmph. They’ll do.”?
We are proud to present today a new Ubuntu-based (or Remix) Linux distribution, this time for electronics. Called Ubuntu Electronics Remix, or UER for short, it is based on the popular Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) operating system and comes as a Live DVD ISO image with lots of free electronics software. Except for the electronics software, everything else is exactly the same as in the original Ubuntu 9.10 distribution.
Canonical’s Tim Gardner is seeking comments regarding a new build of Ubuntu Server that he is proposing. Canonical is considering another build of Ubuntu Server (there is already Ubuntu Server 32-bit and 64-bit along with specialized builds for cloud computing with Amazon EC2 and UEC), but this one would be specialized for just 64-bit platforms that have low-latency requirements and on power consumptive systems.
Clement Lefebvre and the Linux Mint community are proud to present today (January 21st) the first release candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 8 KDE Community Edition operating system. Powered by Linux kernel 2.6.31 and built on top of the KDE Software Compilation 4.3.4, Linux Mint 8 KDE RC1 comes with many improvements in various areas of interest. It is now based on the Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Linux distribution.
Your editor has just completed an important transition: moving his Internet connectivity from one evil branch of the local telecom duopoly to the other, equally evil branch. This change required the acquisition of a new router; that, in turn, provided the opportunity to play with Linux-based router software, and Tomato in particular. Read on for your editor’s impressions of this impressive bit of (mostly) free software.
Having everything connected is a bliss. I bought a Chumby last week. It is an alarm clock. With a touchscreen and wi-fi connectivity. Built on open source (you can easily get root access in the Linux box), with a thriving community of developers building widgets for it. Therefore, it doubles as an Internet radio, an online picture frame, a weather station, it plays your Google Voice messages and a lot more.
Adeneo Embedded announced today a Linux Embedded training course in Paris, France, from March 15th to March 19th 2010. This event is a unique opportunity for software system designers to develop an application based on Linux Embedded, using Freescale’s i.MX25 applications processor solution. Freescale’s i.MX family, based on ARM® core technology, is engineered to offer Smart Speed, low-power consumption with MHz performance to spare and a high degree of integration to reduce your design time signify cantly.
A clever bunch of boffins have managed to port Android to an x86 platform, allowing people to run Google’s OS on Asus’ Eee PC netbooks as well as several other already tried and tested 32-bit (x86) platforms.
When it comes to the mobile Web, increasingly there are only two mobile platforms that matter: Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. According to market share data put out today by AdMob (which is being acquired by Google), the iPhone and Android combined captured 81 percent of U.S. mobile ad impressions on smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from a combined 55 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Most of that growth comes from Android, which nearly doubled its market share from the third quarter to 27 percent. The iPhone OS made up the other 54 percent. (Worldwide, the iPhone had 51 percent share and Android had 16 percent, for a combined total of 67 percent).
While we recently reported that Google’s Nexus One had a slow start coming out of the gate, the Android operating system, which is spread across a number of devices, is not having the same issues. A report by Myxer, a mobile entertainment company with over 30 million members, says that visits to its mobile site by Android users grew 350% in 2009, strongly outpacing the iPhone, which grew 170% during the same period.
To refresh your memory, the Touchbook is a ARM based device that has been released that has Linux installed on it. It was their own version of Linux called AI OS. However, today I noticed the Always Innovating site has been updated.
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which has developed a low-cost notebook computer to help children in developing countries improve computer and learning skills, has announced that it is looking for volunteers and interns to help out with projects in countries including Afghanistan and Haiti.
The good news for Microsoft users who need DOS compatibility brought to you by Open Source, not Microsoft. If this is you, check out DOSBox, FreeDOS, and VirtualBox.
Tendered to the Apache Software Foundation last year, the Pivot platform for developing Java-based Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) has become an Apache Top-Level Project (TLP). Although the foundation has only recently published a press release, this information has apparently been up on the project page for quite some time.
So what ReactOS will now start to do, is to leverage the work that the WINE project has been doing on the win32 system. It’s an idea that makes a whole lot of sense, seeing as WINE has been working at replicating win32 for years (with some success, just look at CodeWeaver’s CrossOver apps) while ReactOS has been focused on win32 as part of a larger open source windows implementation.
Out of all the operating systems we looked at, ReactOS is the one most likely to have Steve Ballmer tossing chairs. Originally named FreeWin95, the developers’ original goal was to create a completely open-source clone of, you guessed it, Windows 95. As time went on, however, there was little serious code to show and it was clear that the NT code base was the future for Microsoft.
In 1998, ReactOS rose out of the ashes of FreeWin95. Early progress was slow, but in 2004 version 0.2.0 arrived with a usable desktop and respectable, albeit very limited, Windows compatibility. Today, ReactOS is based around a home-grown kernel, but the project makes heavy use of the WINE libraries that are popular for running Windows applications on Linux.
Barely one and a half years after the initial plan, a new print UI has now found its way into OpenOffice.org with the integration of CWS printerpullpages into the latest developer milestone DEV300m70. This took a while longer than intended, but I think the result is worth the effort. Many thanks to all the many people who made this possible (in no particular order): Mathias Bauer (Sfx), Andre Fischer (Impress), Thomas Lange (Writer), Christian Lippka (Impress), Niklas Nebel (Calc), Christoph Noack (User Experience), Regina Henschel, Hasan Ilter (QA), Jörg Skottke (QA), Thorsten Bosbach (QA), Oliver Craemer (QA), Eric Savary (QA). (I hope I didn’t forget anyone).
I look forward working with “another you”, inside the broader Oracle Corporation, and I am sure that it will be exciting. So farewell, Sun. Hopefully your employees will not forget who you were, what you stood for: excellency in technology, freedom, genius, and inspiration.
The PluginCheck feature is made possible by a Web service that Mozilla launched last year which matches the user’s plugin versions against a remote database of plug-in information. The backend Web service, called PFS2, is also used to help users find the appropriate plug-ins to enable support for certain kinds of content.
With Firefox 3.6′s release earlier today you may be falling in love with your browser all over again – especially thanks to the integration of ‘Personas’.
A month or so back we posted the mocked up interface to Firefox 4 in Linux and the opinion on it was almost unanimous – it looked gorgeous!
Over the course of several days this week, a series of mysterious billboards popped up in New York and other cities showing romantic photographs of the co-president of Oracle with a woman.
On one of the billboards that appeared in New York on Times Square, the words “Charles & YaVaughnie” were posted along with “You are my soulmate forever!” The note was signed “cep,” referring apparently to Charles E. Phillips Jr., the Oracle co-president.
The Insecure.org developers have announced the release of version 5.20 of Nmap, their popular network scanner and mapper. According to the developers, this first stable update since Nmap 5.00, released last July, includes more than 150 “significant improvements”.
Moving forward, there is an opportunity to save millions of dollars in software costs by using open source software. We are only scratching the surface. We can and must do more in the face of historic budget deficits. Our new open source policy requires the City to choose new technology wisely.
This is just the beginning of the Open Gov movement in San Francisco, but our early efforts are paying off.
Since the launch of DataSF last summer, the City’s clearinghouse of government datasets, we have seen our tech community create new services and products never dreamed of within the walls of government. And now we are giving people access to technology systems like our 311 call center through open source, so they can decide how and when they interact with government.
Kaltura’s vision is sound and solid, and enabling more and more open source platforms is definitely an important part of their strategy, allowing a drammatically growing number of third parties to take advantage of Kaltura’s video platform.
WordPress founder and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg has just announced that his nonprofit, charitable foundation is officially an open shop. The WordPress Foundation is an organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the very mission of WordPress itself. Simply put, as on the Foundation website: “to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.” Everybody dance!
Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt unveiled Data.gov.uk today. The new website offers public sector data, ranging from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use. It is designed to be similar to the Obama administration’s data.gov project, run by Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer in the US.
We have drafted a simple and enabling set of terms and conditions for the site which means that the data available through data.gov.uk will be re-usable both commercially and non-commercially. These terms and conditions have been aligned so that they are interoperable with any Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence. The terms and conditions are also machine readable meaning that the licence is presented and coded in such a way that applications and programs can access and understand the terms and conditions too.
The Guardian quotes developer Ben Fry on the future of searching government data: “This is only going one way: there is no trend towards less data.”
Following an era when the quantity of data available online increased in orders of magnitude, thanks largely to easy publishing tools for end-users like blogging and social networks, many people expect the next era of development online to focus on strategic moves to make the most valuable data available in standardized formats that facilitate innovation by 3rd parties independent of the original sources of the data.
Number 10 has responded negatively to a petition signed by over 2,000 people that asked the government to convince the Royal Mail to offer a free postcode database to non-profit and community websites.
Sadly, a day is a long time on the internet, and following yesterday’s data.gov.uk love-in, Prime Minister Gordon Brown today returned to appeasing commercial interests.
Every time I explain something in the Modern Perl book under development, I have to change the way I think. I’ve spent a decade writing Perl 5, testing Perl 5, writing about Perl 5, editing writings about Perl 5, and thinking about how to do all of those. I still learn new things, but I haven’t been a novice for a very long time.
Mature projects need the perspective of determined and intelligent novices to help find gaps in tutorials and documentation. It’s too easy to assume that the mental model experienced users have is obvious for novices. After all, the design is clearly an effective design for the problems it has to solve.
An introduction to Flex and Bison gives an overview of how and why they are used to create compilers and interpreters, and demonstrates some simple applications including a calculator built in Flex and Bison – a good start to this volume, always useful for people who know nothing. Using Flex follows along with Bison. Parsing SQL is an invaluable part of the book.
We’re rolling out a new beta test today: the HTML5 player!
What’s the HTML5 player, you ask? Simply put, it’s an alternative to our current Flash player that looks and works almost exactly the same way. What are the benefits?
* The player loads right away — no more spinning butterfly thingy
* You can jump anywhere in the video, without having to wait for it to buffer
* Smoother, less jumpy playback (we hope)
An internal document seen by EurActiv shows that 11 out of the 26 spokespersons that have already been designated to the incoming European Commission are Anglo-Saxon. Of these, seven are English and four are Irish (EurActiv 21/01/10).
Most revealing – in the case of L’Express, the paywall is being delayed not by questions over whether readers would pay, but whether the paywall can come in at a reasonable cost. In the case of L’Express, online director Corinne Denis says that the model they are currently looking at would cost more to implement than subscriptions could bring in.
It is one of the great ironies of China’s rise on the international stage: a nation that reveres Confucius and the devotion to truth and learning symbolized by the great sage has become one of the world’s leading perpetrators of academic fraud. Cheating among Chinese scholars has reached such epidemic proportions that at least one leading academic journal will no longer consider their submissions.
This month, a prominent British medical journal, The Lancet, urged the Chinese government to take action against rampant cheating in scientific research. But that call is likely to go unheeded in a university system that has taken the maxim “publish or perish” to the extreme. For a Chinese lecturer aspiring
Just as countless Chinese people young and old study, live and travel internationally, so do people from countries throughout the world go to study, live and travel in China. They have been lured by the economic boom and employment opportunities, by educational opportunities, or just by the desire to see what is happening in a place that has been the talk of the world. Many I have encountered have found employment in big cities, or in teaching, or in entertainment, or in a host of other professions.
DNS Security Extensions is supposed to be the technology that helps to secure the Domain Name System, or DNS , against attack. Yet DNSSEC servers aren’t always infallible, as a pair of vulnerabilities proved this week.
Check out this German TV clip highlighting the failure of the new, privacy-violating full-nude scanners going in at an airport near you. As Bruce Schneier notes, “The scanner caught a subject’s cell phone and Swiss Army knife — and the microphone he was wearing — but missed all the components to make a bomb that he hid on his body… Full-body scanners: they’re not just a dumb idea, they don’t actually work.”
Nearly 200 men remain imprisoned at Guantánamo. In June 2009, six months after Barack Obama took office, one of them, a thirty-one-year-old Yemeni named Muhammed Abdallah Salih, was found dead in his cell. The exact circumstances of his death, like those of the deaths of the three men from Alpha Block, remain uncertain. Those charged with accounting for what happened—the prison command, the civilian and military investigative agencies, the Justice Department, and ultimately the attorney general himself—all face a choice between the rule of law and the expedience of political silence. Thus far, their choice has been unanimous.
The people of Manchester have either lost all interest in travelling abroad and drinking, or couldn’t give a monkey’s about the government’s lame duck ID card scheme, if a commons answer is anything to go by.
A Bronx pit bull attack that prompted the friendly-fire shooting of two undercover cops took a tables-turning twist Thursday when a gotcha video surfaced showing blatant police brutality.
Researchers said this was the first time peacemaking behavior has been observed in orangutans, which are, in the wild, loners. Basically, it looks as though this group of captive orangutans—forced to live together—have learned a behavior that’s previously only been known among more social apes, such as chimpanzees and gorillas.
Focusing on dolphins: the last decade of studies into dolphin behavior has highlighted how complex their communications actually are; so much so that it is difficult not to draw parallels to the complexities of human communication. Empirically, their brains have many key features associated with high intelligence. It would seem that we have long underestimated their capacity, and while their intelligence is different in form, it is difficult to dismiss that it exists.
Why is this move so significant? Because to date the public sector has enjoyed a near monopoly on the employment of the professionals who have expertise on drugs. Nearly all of the senior medics, civil servants, policy advisers, social workers, academic researchers, customs officials, judges, lawyers, and police, prison and army officers who should be contributing to the policy debate are either employed directly by government or depend on it for funding. The Nutt affair seemed to confirm the long-established principle that they put their careers at risk by speaking openly against the absurdities of prohibition. Politicians, fearful of a media drubbing and punishment at the polls, were always poised to come down on them like a ton of bricks.
Last week at the annual Australian national Linux conference in New Zealand, Waugh, a former self-styled open source advocate, was using loads of tired bizspeak to promote the so-called open government policy – but she avoided saying anything about the filter. When someone dd try to engage her on the subject, she did a deft sidestep.
Meanwhile, yesterday, at the closing ceremony of the same conference, the other half of the family, Jeff, was urging people to black out their avatars on their social networking sites to protest against the policy.
The prepared text of U.S. of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speech, delivered at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.
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But it’s also the smart thing to do. By advancing this agenda, we align our principles, our economic goals, and our strategic priorities. We need to create a world in which access to networks and information brings people closer together, and expands our definition of community.
Given the magnitude of the challenges we’re facing, we need people around the world to pool their knowledge and creativity to help rebuild the global economy, protect our environment, defeat violent extremism, and build a future in which every human being can realize their God-given potential.
Last June, a federal jury in Minnesota found Jammie Thomas-Rasset liable for willful copyright infringement and ordered her to pay nearly $2 million. Michael Davis, chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, chopped the amount to $54,000, or $2,250 per song.
The original bill had proposed ISPs and rightsholders split policing costs 50-50. But Timms, in a speech at the Oxford Media Convention on Thursday, said the government is issuing a “draft statutory instrument” that requires the likes of labels and studios to pay more. They will be the “primary beneficiaries” of the proposed graduated-response scheme, Timms said: “The benefits of what we are doing will go to the rightsholders. So I have not been convinced by the arguments of rights holders that the Internet companies should bear much of the costs.”
The global music industry trade group IFPI has released its Digital Music Report 2010, a 30-page document that makes a single argument: copyright infringement is a form of “climate change” for creative industries, and “we look to governments for action.”
According to this view of the world, the music business has now tried its hand at being “innovative” and “customer focused.” It disaggregated albums, it allowed music to go up on everything from Amazon to iTunes to Spotify to Last.fm. It sued users, it launched education campaigns. Nothing worked. It’s now time for governments to step up.
After months of waiting, the Ipredator anonymity service from the founders of The Pirate Bay has finally opened its doors to the public. For 5 euros a month users can now hide all their Internet traffic, including torrent downloads, from third party outfits who might want to spy on their downloading habits.
Along with the discussions, a lot of inaccuracies and lacks in the image of reality presented to humanity by RIAA, MPAA, MAFIAA and other corporate lobbyists appeared. Because I hate lies and injustice, I decided not to tolerate the false propaganda and to write this article which is a finial of few years of thinking, mentioned discussions and arguments used by both sides of the barricade.
Concluding the review of submissions to DFAIT regarding the Canada-EU Trade Agreement, the submission of the Canadian Publishers’ Council is important because it highlights the hopes of those lobbying for extensive new copyright reforms. The submission makes clear that those groups hope that CETA could force Canada into reforms such as copyright term extension and the creation of new database protection:
Recently many Software Freedom activists have started to question bundled operating systems. If one goes to buy a PC, you will have to pay for the pre-installed Microsoft Window. Today there are many alternatives to Microsoft Windows — GNU/Linux based Ubuntu is one of the most popular Operating Systems. It is not only free in terms of cost, but also free in terms of control that the user has over his or her computing. GNU/Linux operating systems are very much more secure than Microsoft technologies.
If you want buy a branded PC from HP or any other major player and you want to run GNU/Linux on it then what are your choices? Irrespective of what software you want to run on your machine, you will have to pay the cost of pre-installed Windows, even if you are going to remove it and replace it with GNU/Linux. Will Mrs. Clinton take measures to save citizens from paying forced Microsoft Taxes?
The ideal situation would be that one should be able to buy hardware with or without Windows pre-installed. There should also be policies to ensure that Microsoft doesn’t kill Linux offers by ‘subsidizing’ Windows PCs.
Thank you Mrs. Clinton for giving hope to citizens of the free world. Let’s see how much goes into practice.
Nine years after it first played host, Brisbane has been awarded the rights to host the Australian national Linux conference again.
The winner of the bid for the 2011 conference was announced at the formal closing ceremony of the 11th Australian national Linux conference, held at the Conference Centre in Wellington this evening.
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Linux Australia derives its yearly budget from the conference and thus things have to be on the plus side for the organisation to be able to plan any activities, apart from the purely ceremonial.
The Unix file system hierarchy has been used for decades and remains the model for most of today’s modern Linux systems, but one distribution, GoboLinux, is making software management easier with an innovative directory structure.
Speaking at this year’s Linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Wellington, New Zealand, GoboLinux developer Michael Homer said the standard Unix directory structure has survived for many years, but sometimes it is not optimal for contemporary computing.
A key question that emerged in government use of open source and open ICT standards is whether failures to date lies in a lack of policy or a lack of will to put the policy into effect.
“The policy is clear,” insisted former government CIO Laurence Millar, displaying policy statements from the e.govt.nz website “encouraging” agencies to look at open source software. “This is not about policy; it’s about changing attitudes.”
In a push to bring the open source software message to the non-hacker public, the Wellington open-source conference, linux.conf.au, is holding an Open Day at the Wellington Town Hall tomorrow.
More than 30 exhibitors from business, education and community groups will be demonstrating some of the software they have developed, organisers say.
The London Stock Exchange has begun a twelve-month migration to its new trading platform, based on Linux, as trading fell sharply.
In a busy three months for the exchange, it also agreed a framework plan for its newly-acquired controlling stake in Turquoise, a large volume ‘dark pool’ trading platform.
The LSE suffered a heavy fall in sales of real-time trading data. While the group’s IT revenues, from selling information and server hosting, grew three percent to £55 million in the three months to 31 December, real-time data sales fell nine percent, nearly three million pounds.
Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Millennium Global Investments (MGI), a specialist in developing and managing alternative investment products for institutional investors, has selected JBoss Enterprise BRMS (Business Rules Management System) for its mission-critical business rules repository.
Prial: The most important thing to do was to bring a complete IBM Linux solution-hardware, software, and services-to market. We had what was then the IBM PC Company supporting Linux machines, Linux on z, services around Linux, and a very varied portfolio of software running on Linux. We had IBM’s first major presence at LinuxWorld in 1999 and a consistent IBM story.
Our 2.6.32 file-system benchmarks compared the performance directly of EXT3, EXT4, XFS, ReiserFS, and Btrfs. These results remain relevant so check them out if you are interested in the performance of these other Linux file-systems. For this article we are simply comparing the performance of the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems using the Linux 2.6.33-rc4 kernel.
BAE Systems Bofors (Karlskoga, Sweden) has selected MontaVista Linux to power its latest naval and artillery gun systems.
The use of a commercial quality embedded Linux is intended to provide for rapid development, combined with the long-term support required for military applications.
Synology announced it is shipping a Linux-based network-attached storage (NAS) device called the DiskStation DS1010+, offering a dual-core Intel Atom D510 and up to 10 drive bays. Earlier this month, the company also shipped a single-bay (2TB) DS110j NAS aimed at SOHO customers.
The phone is Sony Ericsson’s first to be based on Google’s Android operating system and is part of an effort to carve out a name for itself with phones that include social networking as well as entertainment functions such as music and movies.
Operating under the moniker Cyanogen, the hacker released the updates on Wednesday. The hack came as Google formally made the Nexus One operating system, Android version 2.1, open source, paving the way for much more advanced modifications of the phone.
ViewSonic demonstrated an Android-powered 8.9-inch, 1024 × 800 tablet device at a trade show in Beijing, China, yesterday, reports Mobile.163. The VTablet 101 incorporates an ARM Cortex-A9 based Nvidia Tegra system-on-chip (SoC), plus WiFi, Bluetooth, and 4GB of flash storage, says the story.
Smartbook manufacturers will seek to minimise the cost of the devices by using a lightweight OS, such as Android or Google’s forthcoming netbook OS Chrome, that require a modest amount of processing power and memory to run, she said.
Free Software is defined by four freedoms, and intends to create ethical relationships in the digital age of society, based on trust, responsibility and freedom.
In a world where we rely increasingly upon Information Technologies such as software and networks, it is important to realize software is more than code. The effects of programs go beyond the limited scope of developers, and contribute to shape our future.
The Free Software movement aims at making this future possible for everyone by ensuring fundamental principles of freedom for all, equally.
Collaboration has not started working properly in our software development society. The main idea behind OSS is to create a platform where ideas and knowledge are shared productively, hence creating a broader base for development and innovations. It is still rooted in our attitude to maintain total ownership and control over whatever is ours. Sharing our original ideas such that others can contribute to it and thus be a part of its improved version is a thinking that is naturally alien to us.
We need a system that would facilitate open sharing of ideas and collaboration where innovations are supported, nurtured and protected. The only way we can come about this is if we believed that we should be proud of advances made in our local software terrain, whether little or massive. We need a true beginning.
The Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the state of California has issued an IT policy letter to formally affirm that open source software is acceptable for use by government agencies in California.
Twitter has been open about its use of Ruby on Rails as its foundation and Jabber/XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) instant messaging. These are both open source technologies. This means that open source products keep the social networks up and running.
A project of the MIT Media Lab, SourceMap aims to provide insight on the origins of the products we consume, tracking their every component. The open-source tool gives registered users a platform for building a database composed of the origin, carbon footprint, and other impact-relevant characteristics of manufactured items. The project provides analysis tools such that producers, businesses owners and consumers can gather information concerning the impact of various supply chains to guide sustainable decision-making.
You could even argue the point that the community of users around many open source technologies like MySQL, JBoss, or Apache are more significant than the technology itself. After all, there are plenty of open source databases, app servers, and Web servers to chose from. What made these particular products stand out in the marketplace? If you’re using open source or trying to build an open source business, how do you tap into that community?
At its core, I think of free software as about the ability of computer users to take control of their technology. Insofar as our software defines our experience of the world and each other, software freedom is an important part of what allows us to determine the way we live, work, and communicate.
Ifbyphone, a company offering a suite of its own web-based voice and phone applications, announced today that it has acquired Cloudvox to give its customers the tools they need to build their own open-source, customized phone applications to fit their business needs. No financial deals were disclosed.
Open Source Software reached critical mass in the decade of the noughties. The open source model caught on like wild fire among developers and quickly became adopted by entrepreneurs looking to build companies by providing services for these OSS technologies. And it worked. Marc Fleury founded JBoss around the JBoss application server and later sold the company to Red Hat for more than $350 million. Rod Johnson founded SpringSource around the open source Spring Framework, and last year sold it to VMware for $420 million. VCs saw an opportunity and began to get behind the best and the brightest. And organisations such as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and the Eclipse Foundation sprang up to, among other things, foster community involvement in various open source projects. Although the ASF was founded in 1999, it saw some of its best days in the noughties.
Dmitri, on the other hand, is a Linux developer. His power management code has been mainlined into the Linux kernel steadily over the last few years. He’s even been invited to Kernel Summit. Behemoth Consumer Products (BCP) employed Dmitri for the last three years, for work on their version of Linux that they embed in their devices. They, too, hit a rough patch, and Dmitri is out looking for work.
Luckily for Dmitri, his colleagues in the Linux community all work for companies who use embedded Linux. It’s easier for him to network, and employers don’t have to count on Dmitri for a description of his work. It lives in the open, in the kernel tree, for anyone to inspect. (He can even make it in the “Who Writes Linux” report that the Linux Foundation publishes every year.)
OpenGeo engineers will provide training on popular open source geospatial components including GeoServer, OpenLayers and PostGIS, as well as review courses on the new, integrated OpenGeo Suite. Training is available at OpenGeo’s new training facility in downtown Manhattan.
Sadly we met few children at this year’s show but any that ventured near met a sticky end in that the price for a lollypop was a free copy of Ubuntu and a ‘talk’ :). Also young teachers were thin on the ground. Maybe ICT is uncool?
Web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee has launched Data.gov.uk, giving access to a wealth of public data, and the Guardian launched a website to make finding that data easier
For developers, Firefox 3.6 supports the latest HTML5 specification, including the file API for local file handling, font support (in addition to OpenType and TrueType fonts, it supports the new Web Open Font Format), CSS gradients (linear and radical), and device orientation – it exposes the orientation of the laptop or device to web pages.
Customizing how Firefox looks has now also become easier, thanks to the integration of the Personas add-on directly into Firefox 3.6. With Personas, users can change the way Firefox looks without restarting the browser.
The Mozilla Labs Bespin project, to create a web based integrated development environment which makes use of cloud functionality, is undergoing a reboot aimed at making Bespin easier to work with and extend. Bespin was introduced in February 2009 by Ben Galbraith and Dion Almear. In September 2009, Galbraith and Almear moved to Palm, which in turn led to an opportunity to remodel the project. The reboot’s progress has been detailed in a posting by Kevin Dangoor on the Mozilla Lab’s Bespin Blog.
Oracle moved closer to sealing its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems Thursday, as the European Union’s antitrust body formally signed off on the deal following a three-month investigation into its impact on competition in the IT sector.
“I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned,” said EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes, in a statement. “Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products,” said Kroes.
Oracle will provide more details about its plans for Sun Microsystems at an event next Wednesday, the same day European regulators are expected to sign off on the deal.
CEO Larry Ellison will host the event at Oracle’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, California, where executives will outline Oracle’s strategy for absorbing Sun, including details about product road maps, Oracle said in a statement.
During his tenure as CEO of Sun, Schwartz was best known as the pony-tailed lover of all things open source, quixotically dressed on stage in pinstripe suits. I’m betting he has serious doubts about Oracle’s intent to advance Sun’s open source efforts.
I had a really good lunch the other day with Bob Suh, ex-CTO of Accenture, at the Four Seasons in Boston discussing his new venture OnCorps. (As an aside, the Four Seasons clearly believes we are out of the recession because with one hour of parking my burger cost $42.)
Liferay, Inc., the leading visionary for open source portal and collaboration technologies, today announced that it experienced tremendous growth in 2009, underscoring its impact and influence in a fast-growing and dynamic open source software industry. The company’s successful penetration into the enterprise market with Liferay Portal, its leading web platform for the enterprise, provides a strong basis for leadership in portal and collaboration technologies in 2010.
With the New Year underway, it’s common for many businesses executives to take time to reflect on the evolution of their industry and where their company stands today. And Digium, Inc. the Asterisk (News – Alert) Company, is no exception.
Danny Windham, president and CEO, Digium, Inc., discussed how the ever-changing telephony market reached its current model and how open source technology has played a role to help reduce margins and costs in the communications space at a keynote session at ITEXPO today.
With the launch of a new marketplace where vendors can reach out to integrators and solution providers, Asterisk sponsor Digium is says it will make available a range of products and services based on the open-source platform.
Sauce Labs, the Selenium Company, today announced that it has closed a $3.1 million round of Series A financing led by the Contrarian Group, Peter Ueberroth’s investment management firm. Founded in July 2008, Sauce Labs makes open source Selenium-based cross-browser software testing easy for businesses developing and testing web applications. Sauce Labs offers a cloud testing service called Sauce OnDemand, commercial support for Selenium, as well as commercial-grade versions with premium features. Selenium’s creator, Jason Huggins, is a co-founder of Sauce Labs.
Sauce Labs also uses cloud services to make testing with Selenium testing easier than running on your own server infrastructure. Sauce On-Demand, is a hosted offering that allows you to remotely test web applications across various browsers in the cloud.
Huggins said this is an intersection between open source and the cloud that makes sense. By offering a cloud-based version of Selenium, users have the ability to parallelize their test and use cloud resources on demand in order to take advantage of a large number of instances in the cloud and get test results and bug reports must faster.
As increasing numbers of applications move online, the need for functional cross-browser testing continues to grow, which is good news for the open source Selenium project—a popular automated application testing tool with nearly 3 million downloads to date.
The company chose to license a JMS server from an unnamed OEM because its customers were encountering reliability problems with Apache ActiveMQ, said CTO Ross Mason. MuleSoft customers had previously used ActiveMQ.
A South American startup, Chamilo is a collaboration platform and an open source e-learning solution. As they put it on the site, their objective is to bring people “the best e-learning and collaboration platform in the open source world”. As it stands today Chamilo can be installed anywhere, and educative contents can be easily created and implemented through it.
GroundWork Open Source, a provider of open source system and network management software, has released Monitor Enterprise 6.1. that includes enhancements to the GWOS platform for customers with heterogeneous IT environments.
I agree, license and copyright are factors in creating and fostering communities but I don’t think it’s the most important set of factors. License and community, while related are very much separate issues. Open source tends to fetish license and thus it’s over-emphasized in conversations where it at best a contributing factor.
The one point that really does need to be refuted is that he seems to believe that artificial scarcity somehow makes people pay. He talks about the importance of a “social contract” to have people “pay for others’ brains.” He says “people need to be secure that they’re earning their dignity and don’t need to sing for their supper every night.”
With seed money from the National Science Foundation (NSF), bioengineers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University are ramping up efforts to characterize the thousands of control elements critical to the engineering of microbes so that eventually, researchers can mix and match these “DNA parts” in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or chemicals.
The first way GSK plans to encourage drug research is by setting up an “Open Lab” in Tres Cantos, Spain, where as many as 60 independent researchers will be able to access the the lab’s data and scientific equipment. GSK is also seeding the lab with $8 million to help fund research projects.
The first departure from the conventional business plan is that the designs of the car will be released under an open source licence. This allows people to freely build on ideas and designs, speeding up innovation and enabling technologies to be quickly improved, meeting the needs of people rather than markets.
The design of everything else is up to you, and its modular nature means that it can be tailored to virtually any application – from futuristic connected tram systems for commercial fleets, to high-performance hot rods, to neighborhood-friendly EV’s perfect for a jaunt around town.
The 3D printers from HP are designed to be cheap, but will struggle to compete with open-source designs like the MakerBot.
[...]
Thankfully, other innovators are stepping up to fill the gap: from the completely DIY RepRap, which is built on the von Nuemann-esque concept of a 3D printer capable of printing other 3D printers, to the kit-form MakerBot which offers an open-source alternative to HP’s new range with kits starting at just $750 (£460).
Willow Garage group hopes to push forward the field of open-source robotics generally. It could allow researchers to draw on common hardware and software programs for robots instead of needing to start from scratch, hopefully advancing the field of robotics.
A while ago, YouTube launched a simple demo of an HTML5-based video player. Recently, we published a blog post on our pre-spring cleaning effort and your number one request was that YouTube do more with HTML5. Today, we’re introducing an experimental version of an HTML5-supported player.
HTML5 is a new web standard that is gaining popularity rapidly and adds many new features to your web experience. Most notably for YouTube users, HTML5 includes support for video and audio playback. This means that users with an HTML5 compatible browser, and support for the proper audio and video codecs can watch a video without needing to download a browser plugin.
YouTube on Wednesday announced that the popular video-sharing Website will now support HTML5 for video playback. HTML5, for the uninitiated, is an in-development Web standard that aims to add various niceties and enhancements to the modern Web-browsing experience.
Unfortunately…The World Wide Web Consortium, the people who draft and implement web standards, were coerced by a cartel of corporate bad guys like Apple, the RIAA/MPAA (the MAFIAA), and Google, to drop an unpatented, fully documented, public domain, royalty free set of codecs that *any* browser or user can use (Ogg Theora and Vorbis) in favor of the heavily patented, restricted license, royalty-encumbered h.264 and AAC, which only the aforementioned cartel can afford to implement or use.
Yes, I know that these codecs are widespread, and it’s mainly because Apple sells them on iTunes, but using AAC (or any other patented codec) in and of itself is nearly as bad as using a DRM-encumbered AAC that had everyone up in arms. (Yeah, I would say that MP3 is the least bad of your proprietary options, if you have to use proprietary. That doesn’t make it peachy.) Patent-encumbered codecs are the next best thing to DRM.
A Google spokesman indicated that the choice of H.264 over Ogg does not mean the company has picked H.264 for an eventual Flash-free version of YouTube. “Support for HTML5 is just a TestTube experiment at this time and a starting point,” he said. “We can’t comment specifically on what codecs we intend to support, but we’re open to supporting more of them over time. At the very least we hope to help further this active and ongoing discussion.”
I suspect that what’s going to happen now is that as the moment of truth approaches, bloggers will increasingly search around for the NYT’s replacement as online paper of record: the way that blogs work is that they’re backed up by links to reliable sources, and a link is worthless if the person clicking on it risks running straight into a paywall, unable to read the information in question. The NYT’s journalism might well continue to be reliable, but its website won’t be, any more. (For the record: I feel very comfortable in saying that Reuters stories are just as reliable as those of the NYT, if not more so, and that if a link to a story works for you, it will work identically for anybody else in the world.)
With many companies investing heavily in algae-based biofuels, researchers from the University of Virginia’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering have found there are significant environmental hurdles to overcome before fuel production ramps up. They propose using wastewater as a solution to some of these challenges.
The admission today followed a New Scientist article last week that revealed the source of the claim made in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was not peer-reviewed scientific literature – but a media interview with a scientist conducted in 1999. Several senior scientists have now said the claim was unrealistic and that the large Himalayan glaciers could not melt in a few decades.
Goldman Sachs has a new enemy—as if it needed another one.
Hank Greenberg, as we sit in his Park Avenue office, is telling me how to do my job, saying reporters need to get to the bottom of the events that preceded and followed the government bailout of AIG, the insurance company he built into a global giant.
In particular, they need to get to the bottom of the part played by the investment bank of Goldman Sachs. He waves a sheaf of press reports from the New York Times, Washington Post and McClatchy papers about the firm’s doings before and during the subprime meltdown. “We’re dealing with a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are not in the box. Bit by bit, we’re getting the pieces. The pieces are failing into place and the picture on the face of the puzzle is not a pretty picture.”
Let me get this straight. Is Mr. Greenberg saying the machinations of Goldman Sachs were responsible for the disastrous failure of AIG amid the recent financial crisis? “Well, it certainly wouldn’t be difficult to come to that conclusion.”
The enormous size of the thefts here (in the trillions of dollars) threatens U.S. national security, and global stability. We have seen the dollar implode, retirement accounts savaged, and major institutions brought to their knees and worse, much worse in many cases. These thefts have been implicated in the destruction of investor confidence, and there is no form of security that has not been impacted, from stocks and bonds, currencies, physical and forward commodities, agencies, to commodities, and more. These same thefts could never have been executed except with the wholesale cooperation of not just hedge funds, and investment banks, but only with the implicit cooperation, support and protection of every form of financial service monopoly involved in trading, clearance and settlement of securities globally in all forms of assets along with the major international money center banks, a pliant press, and a corrupt research industry perforated by criminal interests who pay top price for the purchase or sale of research for securities they specialize in. Oversight provided by our U.S. government branches and agencies hasn’t been deficient, it has been non-existent, a canard by every perspective.
As Democrats continued to grapple with the consequences of their loss in Massachusetts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday eliminated the most obvious avenue for completing health-care reform, saying the House will not embrace the version of the legislation already approved by the Senate.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) on Wednesday said the Massachusetts election was a “wake up call” for Democrats and that his party had better change course or it could suffer devastating losses come November.
“People elected Democrats in 2008 to change the country’s direction,” he told Raw Story in a nearly hour-long interview.
Clinton’s announcement that fighting Internet censorship would be a top priority for the Department of State is welcome news for dissidents in Iran, said Ashraf, co-founder of AccessNow.org, a group focused on providing Internet tools allowing freedom of expression.
Anyone hoping that 2010 was the year when they could produce smut or violence for direct release to DVD, without undergoing the tiresome process of having their work checked and classified by the British Board of Film Classification, can hit pause now.
Polish government wants to enforce Internet filtering to eliminate online gambling and child pornography. Everything for the benefit of our children, as this is the argument which is hard to stay against.
However, a notable group of Polish lawyers, journalists, academics, enterpreneurs, politicians and bloggers think otherwise and signed a letter (written by myself, btw) to President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, asking him to turn the law down (in Polish legal system, president has the right to do this, but the parliament can then overcome president’s opposition if 2/3 of the delegates vote for it).
For the record, here are the EFF’s four latest inductees:
* Peabody Energy, for issuing outstandingly spurious trademark claims against a spoof site criticizing their “clean coal” group;
* Yahoo, for an impressive attempt to return a cat to the bag after a leak of its guide to snooping services for law enforcement was posted to a whistleblower site;
* Perez Hilton and the Miss Universe Organization for endeavoring to stop a non-profit from airing an ad commenting on a public same-sex marriage controversy initiated by their videos; and
* Universal Music Group, for attempting to muzzle online criticism of the rapper Akon.
Amazon has added a new tool to its Kindle self-publishing service that lets authors and small publishers easily choose between DRM and no DRM when uploading texts to its online book store.
Amazon tells The Reg that no-DRM was always the default with its Digital Text Platform – used by small publishers and authors as opposed to large publishing houses. In the past, the company says, if authors wanted to add DRM, they had to download separate software. Now, they can add DRM simply by checking a radio button.
It’s that time of the year when the IFPI comes out with its annual fear-mongering report, and this year’s has really gone overboard into the ridiculous. The basics are pretty much what you’d expect (“piracy bad! industry dying! governments must break everything to protect us!”). However, the details are just downright laughable. The entire report seems premised on the idea that direct music sales is the only thing that really matters (a blatant confusion about the difference between the recording industry (which the IFPI represents) and the music industry (which the IFPI pretends to represent).
Tim Lash points us to a CNN interview with The Wiggles, the massively popular pop band for toddlers. The whole interview is interesting, but the most interesting part is the explanation of how the band went it alone.
John Kennedy, chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), said the industry is considering civil proceedings against Ellis in a second bid to collect the £180,000 it claims he made from running the invite-only file sharing website.
Alan Ellis, the ex-admin of the OiNK BitTorrent tracker, was cleared of Conspiracy to Defraud by jury of his peers last week. But now it seems that as one battle ends, another begins. IFPI says it is considering civil action, and is committed to reclaiming the money donated to the site in order to give it back to the artists.
We’ve talked in the past about some of the many rather innovative efforts by David Bowie to come up with new business models. He’s been a huge pioneer in embracing what new technologies allow — and also new markets and financial opportunities.
The government has refused to give MPs access to papers on international negotiations about copyright enforcement on the internet and at national borders.
Junior business minister David Lammy said he could not put documents about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in the House of Commons Library, because other countries wanted to maintain secrecy.
Lammy said he was “sympathetic” to calls for more transparency and had told his officials to press the point at the talks, but added: “Disclosure of any documents without the agreement of all our ACTA negotiating partners would damage the United Kingdom’s international relations.
Of course, BPI can’t accept those numbers, so its commissioned its own study which (of course!) claims that the cost to ISPs would be tiny. Hell, they’d barely be noticeable at all.
The first involves prisons in the UK who are refusing to pay the licensing fees, and thus are telling prisoners (hey look, real thieves!) that they can’t listen to music any more in any area where multiple people might be (the kitchen, workshops, restrooms, etc.) since others might overhear it. Yes, listening to music in a prison apparently requires a separate performance license.
The Olive Media Olive 2 is a network audio player to bridge the gap between computer and hi-fi.
[...]
You interact and select tracks from your music collection on the Olive Media Olive 2 through a black and yellow-themed screen interface, with text showing in white; behind the scenes, the Olive uses a Linux operating system. The graphical user interface could be slow to update as menu items were selected, and while we usually got to where we wanted to go eventually, it was neither slick nor intuitive.
If your New Year’s Resolution includes something along the lines of “be better organized,” choosing a task manager might be in order. Linux doesn’t lack for task managers, but good ones are few and far between. To help LWN readers boost productivity, we’ve picked a few to look at.
Avatar (2009)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
Shrek the Third (2007)
X-Men The Last Stand (2006)
King Kong (2005)
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003)
Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002)
Gladiator (2000)
The Matrix (1999)
Titanic (1997)
Both companies are largely (or in the case of Amazon – almost entirely) powered by Linux. In addition to these, it relatively safe to say around half the internet runs on Linux powered Apache servers.
I think I’ve covered just about everyone who uses technology at this point in some form or another. Does anyone still think you haven’t uses something Linux powered at least once in your life? No? Good.
Does anyone else know of some other common places Linux is used by the masses or another large retailer/company that is Linux powered that I missed?
Bharata B. Rao, one of the speakers at the 11th LCA, is an exception – he has come to Wellington straight from Bangalore and is just recovering from the jetlag. (His talk is titled “Using performance counters to optimize task placement on multi-core systems.”)
Rao, who is in his mid-30s, works for IBM as a senior staff software engineer in the India Software Labs Systems Group. What’s more, he writes code aimed at the Linux kernel.
Midway through the week that comprises the 11th Australian national Linux conference, the two co-organisers, Andrew and Susanne Ruthven, say they are extremely pleased with the way things are working out.
Shane Geddes is one of the first batch of students to enrol in New Zealand’s first high school that uses only free and open source software – the Albany Senior High School in Auckland.
It takes a lot of courage to set out on an unexplored course, especially when it comes to academia. There is nothing to compare with the withering scorn that one earns from this community if one sets out on an ambitious course – and then fails miserably.
Glyn Moody – Hackers at the end of the world. Rebel code is now 10 years old… 50+ interviews over a year – and could be considered an archaeology now I probably haven’t down the keynote justice – it was excellent but high density – you should watch it online
Glyn talks about open access – various examples like the public library of science (and how the scientific magazine business made 30%-40% profit margins. The Human Genome Project & the ‘Bermuda Principles’: public submimssion of annotated sequences. In 2000 Celera were going to patent the entire human genome. Jim Kent spent 3 weeks writing a program to join together the sequenced fragments on a 100 PC 800Mhz Pentium processor. This was put into the public domain on just before Celera completed their processing – and by that action Celera were prevented from patenting *us*.
Corbet took his typical potshot at Ubuntu, saying that LKML is now friendlier than the Ubuntu mailing lists. Thankfully two other speakers today (mako and mjg) mentioned the Ubuntu Code of Conduct as being both important and effective in the Ubuntu community. In my opinion, there seems to be an ever-growing trend of LWN.net attacks on Canonical and Ubuntu. I think I’ll dedicate a post on that topic soon.
The glorious weather that had punctuated the first two days of the conference held, heralding in the third day in a blaze of sunshine. The conference proper was introduced by a keynote by Benjamin Mako Hill on Antifeatures: Why your software works against you and why software freedom offers hope of a better future. Mako explored the concept of anti-features as deliberately included functionality or a lack of functionality that users hate so much they will pay to have them removed. Some classic examples included the gator spyware that was included with free version of p2p software on the windows platform – with a spyware-free version available for a fee.
LCA2010 delegates are invited to to make donations to the Life Flight Trust and be in to win an exclusive once-in-a-lifetime experience on Saturday 23rd January.
This year’s Linux.conf.au gathering has placed more emphasis than ever on the broader impact of free and open source software (FOSS), and how the models it utilises could benefit society in all kinds of other ways. It’s a fascinating argument and a worthwhile goal, but it’s still hard to escape the feeling that it’s not being tailored well for the non-geek community. The way the case is being presented at LCA 2010, Joe Blow won’t want to know.
New Zealand will begin a test of a homegrown free and open source desktop solution next month, with the Horizons Regional Council to be one of the guinea pigs, according to the president of the country’s open source society.
Linus Torvalds himself is known to attend – and was in Hobart for the first time last year – and multinational software companies like Google use LCA as a hunting ground for fresh talent.
The Birds of a Feather sessions include topics such as installfests and how to run them, Linus standard operating environment development and MySQL Sandbox.
I agree with Vincent Danen that wondering whether Linux is ready for the desktop is silly, even irrelevant — wider usage tends to foster growth in related sectors (think cloud computing and virtualization). But Koenning’s made a particularly strong (and strangely parallel) point that encouraging “non-technical” end users to use open source software is a great way to ease vendors into supporting non-proprietary platforms.
Three New Zealand government agencies will begin a pilot next month to replace their existing Windows desktops with machines running Linux and other open source software.
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Horizons Regional Council and NZ Post will all begin trialling the use of Linux desktops in February. NZ Post’s open source plans were outed by Computerworld in August last year.
A quick visit to Ubuntu.com, and I found Buying Ubuntu on CD and DVD. This links to authorized distributors all over the planet, and their pricing is rather different than WashingtonCD. For example, at On-disk.com CDs and DVDs are under $5.00US, and couple bucks for shipping. (WashingtonCD is not an authorized distributor.) Canonical will ship you a CD edition for free. Really free, not free + money.
Don’t wait, folks, get your unauthorized no-cost Windows killer for only $20 + $6 shipping now!
Lenovo’s Ultra portable Skylight smart book, is also powered by efficient cell processors most of us have never heard of. It runs on a Lenovo user interface on Linux, although you wouldn’t know it when using it. One battery charge gives you 11 hours on the go. It has WiFi and always – connected cellular 3G. It basically bridges what has been missing between smart phones and Netbooks.
The ASV Roboat has made a name for itself in many robotic sailboat competitions, and now a real research project is in store for the Linux-powered vessel.
Robotics company Willow Garage is giving 10 of its robots free to researchers in return for a promise that they will share their development efforts with the open-source community.
Any system administrator worth their salt has some kind of system for collecting and maintaining information about all the systems they’re responsible for. Gathering that info by hand, especially when the systems are inherited, can be time-consuming. Or you could try out boxinfo, a Perl script that gathers most or all of the information you’d want in a few easy steps.
The A8T84140-AMC is supported under Linux 2.6 and is supplied with RPMs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS. The card is compatible with the PICMG AMC.0 base specification with options for compact, mid-height and full-height versions, enabling the card to be installed into any AdvancedMC slot in an ATCA carrier or a ?TCA chassis.
This Linux-based IBM solution provides staple collaboration tools such as email, file sharing, and remote access and affords peace of mind through automated network security features, data protection, backup and recovery. With Engate, Lotus Foundations Start will offer a security suite that proactively protects SMBs from a diversity of email-borne threats.
There is much afoot regarding netbooks, as they continue to evolve and find their place in the computer world.
People criticize and laud netbooks in seemingly equal proportions. Some say they are inexpensive and provide just enough processing power for the average user.
Chromium hacker Hexxeh has released a faster, USB-bootable build of Google’s Chrome OS called Chromium OS Zero. Meanwhile, ArsTechnica interviewed Google’s Engineering Director for Chrome OS, Matthew Papakipos, regarding the past and future of Chrome OS.
Hexxeh’s final build of Chromium OS Zero follows earlier, well-regarded releases of versions including Chromium OS Diet and Cherry. Based on the open source Linux Chromium code that Google began to release in late November, with the goal of releasing a final Chrome OS for netbooks later this year, Chromium OS Zero promises major speed improvements “for many users,” according to Hexxeh’s blog announcement.
Today we are proud to announce a new operating system, a port of Google’s famous Android platform for the x86 (32-bit) architecture. Simply named Android-x86, this Live CD Linux distribution is designed mostly for the Eee PC netbooks, but can also run on any other 32-bit (x86) platform. The current stable version of Android-x86 is based on Android 1.6 (Donut) and it’s powered by Linux kernel 2.6.29 with kernel mode-setting (or KMS for short) enabled. It has support for the EXT3, EXT2, NTFS and FAT32 filesystems, and can be run directly from the CD (yes, no installation required)! But, if you like it and you want to install it on your hard drive or on a USB stick, we have a short tutorial for you at the end of the article.
To that end, on February 10, 2010 the Linux Foundation and the Open Source Initiative will host a Strategic Planning Session for lawyers active in support or adoption of free and open source software. At this meeting our legal community will consider what legal issues we anticipate may arise and what foundations we might be able to lay to support continued rise of free and open source software.
Forget lofty ideals about the open-source community: most Linux kernel code is written by paid developers at major corporations.
[...]
During a presentation at Linux.conf.au 2010 in Wellington, LWN.net founder and kernel contributor Jonathan Corbet offered an analysis of the code contributed to the Linux kernel between December 24 2008 and January 10 2010. (The kernel serves as a basis from which individual distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian or Red Hat are developed, though these will often add or remove specific features.)
As with the previous article, four journal sizes are tested to understand the impact of journal size on metadata performance. The four journal sizes are:
* 16MB (0.0032% of file system size)
* 64MB (0.0128% of file system size)
* 256MB (0.0512% of file system size)
* 1GB (0.2% of file system size)
Geany was just the text editor I was looking for after switching from Windows to Linux. I wanted a lightweight, nimble application with functionality that would serve my writing needs when a full-fledged word processing app wasn’t necessary — for me, most of the time. I found it in an IDE designed for programmers.
Nearly five months after the release of the first beta, the Skype for Linux developers have announced the availability of the second beta for version 2.1 of their Linux Skype client. In addition to several localisation updates and bug fixes, version 2.1.0.81 of Skype for Linux adds a number of new features that have been available on Mac and Windows editions of Skype for some time. The full release for Windows is currently at version 4.1 and for Mac OS X is at version 2.8.
Pytone is a curses based Jukebox program with advanced features like crossfading, multiple players (libmad,xmms,mpg321/123), prehearing with a second soundcard, search functionality, logging, mixer functions and an English and German interface.
On Ubuntu, the default text-editor Gedit works great, and has a few extra features that make taking plain-text notes a bit more convenient, like a side-bar file browser so you can easily open multiple files, and automatic time/date insertion if you’re keeping a journal.
It’s called Ubuntu tweak and you can get it from http://ubuntu-tweak.com/. The new version of Ubuntu tweak (0.5) came out about 2 weeks ago and has some improvements in it so go ahead and grab it from their website.
Back in 2008, I looked at Boxee on the Apple TV. Boxee, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a free and open-source media center app. It is now also available in beta form for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
I thought this was a good time to take a look at the last. This is not a formal review, just some initial thoughts on my experience with it. Please do not forget that Boxee is labeled “beta,” so if you try it out you may run into some bugs.
Boxee has great things on the way — some we can’t tell you about yet — but here’s one we can: video on demand in the form of the Boxee Payment Platform, bringing one-click payment for shows that will hopefully be worth your money.
The idea that Linux users would want to play old MS-DOS games might seem strange to some, whats even stranger for me is the fact that this task needs similar software to do exactly the same thing under the latest Windows versions.
After month of development, QuantZ is now available for Linux. For the record, QuantZ is a fun and innovative 3D puzzle and action game. In QuantZ you have to control a cube with your mouse and launch marbles onto it, create explosions of color, chain reactions and try to clear the cube using as less QuantZ (Marble) as possible!
According to the announcement, beginning next month a limited number of developers will be invited to begin working with the Kindle Development Kit, which includes sample code, documentation, and the Kindle Simulator, which helps developers build and test their content by simulating the 6-inch Kindle and 9.7-inch Kindle DX on Mac, PC, and Linux desktops.
The Haiku operating system, an open source remake of BeOS, has gained support for running a number of KDE applications, including the KOffice productivity suite. This was made possible by a native port of Nokia’s Qt development framework to the Haiku platform.
The first day of Camp KDE is behind us, with the first of the many presentations being well attended. A full summary of the talks lives behind the break, and videos will be online shortly. If you are in the San Diego region, feel free to join us for Camp KDE for talks and training.
The second day of Camp KDE was filled with many more interesting talks. This day’s talks were of the more technical nature versus the first day, and the KDE team took notes. As usual, the talks were recorded and videos will be available soon. A detailed rundown of the second day of talks are behind the link.
I have always been searching for some amazing stuff from the linux world.And this time i was thunderstruck by one of them and that is Nimblex Linux.It is a linux distribution that allows the users to select whatever they need from a long list of programs.The linux is so overwhelming that it is worth a nobel price.It enables us to create a custom cd from a mere 200 mb cd.It is based on live scripts .After you select the modules you need you can make an .iso image and save that to your harddisk.It is termed as the new wave of linux.
There is no shortage of Linux distros. For dozens, if not hundreds, of different tastes, there is a distribution made for you. And now, there is even a version of Linux that doesn’t even look like Linux at all. It looks like Windows XP.
I like Debian for being somewhere in between a beginner’s distro and an advanced distro. Many of the high-end, menial chores required by Crux et al. simply evaporate in Debian, and at the same time Debian doesn’t seem to “push your face in the plate” like Ubuntu sometimes can. You’re still responsible for managing a lot of what happens with your system … kind of like Arch.
Looking from a FOSS point of view, the inclusion of proprietary software within the Ubuntu library will be of concern to some. I can understand that point, however we have to be realistic. Ubuntu is arguably the most popular Linux distro, it has a legion of very happy users who champion the product. Unfortunately Canonical is a company and its a company that needs to generate revenue to stay in existence. If Canonical could “live” off good will and praise then it would probably be the most valuable company in the world. I have often said there is a place for proprietary software and if by offering titles that were traditionally the mainstay of a Windows platform will bring new users to Linux, then bring it on.
If you have ever introduce someone to Linux, you will know that they always ask “Will this software work? Will that software work?”. If you say “No they won’t work”, they instantly loose interest. For example, I have been asked if Photoshop will work when I try to get my friend to install Ubuntu. When I told him that it will not, no amount of convincing from me that Gimp is a great alternative could move him. However, if Windows (or Mac) users get to use their favorite applications in Ubuntu as well it will increase the number of Ubuntu users greatly.
From Canonical’s point of view too this makes a lot of sense. If they make paid softwares like Photoshop available in their repository, they are effectively acting as an online store. This can potentially be another revenue source for them.
I’ve finally got Plymouth up and running on Ubuntu Lucid. Well, up and partially running – I only get to see the new Plymouth at shutdown, but considering I have an Nvidia graphics card and only installed Ubuntu Lucid in VirtualBox so far, I’ll take what I can get.
Let’s take a look at the Ubuntu Lucid Plymouth themes (already included in Lucid). I should have made this post about the “Solar” theme only, as it’s the only one which is nice, the others are either static or just a “glow”.
The Ubuntu “Help and Support” system may be getting a overhaul in time for Lucid.
Developers feel the majority of users are either simply unaware that the help system exists or find it overly complicated to navigate and draw information from.
These videos can be a great way to demonstrate the power of Linux/Ubuntu to family members, friends or the hardened Linux sceptic. What better way to prove your OS is good looking, useable and feature-filled than to show your good looking, useable and feature-filled desktop?!
Most VPM’s are forged from hardened versions of Linux on a diet due to flash drive size constraints. USB 3.0, SLC flash, and larger flash drives have all, but removed this limit and embedded versions of more full featured, user friendly versions of Linux are popping up. While it may seem extreme, maintaining corporate intellectual property and securing assets from disgruntled employees can mean big bucks in today’s bleeding edge world. Look for the rapid proliferation of ideas like this in the years to come.
Operating system support was not detailed. However, other network appliances from Lanner, such as the FW-7580 announced last month, have supported Linux, Windows, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD.
There has been a fair bit of hand-ringing recently about free and open source software’s impact on mobile phones and other consumer devices. Lysandra Ohrstrom of the SFLC last week celebrated the increased use of FOSS on devices available at the Consumer Electronics Show, but lamented the fact that often the user does not get to “share, tinker, and adapt the devices”. Meanwhile Bradley M Kuhn recently warned that “we are in a very precarious time with regard to the freedom of mobile devices” while Glyn Moody questioned whether it is healthy that most Android applications are closed-source.
Android is an application framework on top of Linux. We will look at the details of the layers of the framework, shortly. It is supplied as open source code, but does not bind the user with the constraints of the GPL ” there is no requirement for developers to make public any code developed using Android.
Believe it or not, this electronic guitar is actually a Gentoo Linux box, running a 500MHz AMD Geode processor, an 8.4-inch, 800×600 LCD touch screen with an SSH server and a MIDI output. It is made of milled, solid plastic, and could probably be hooked up to Rock Band. But that is to rob it of the romance.
The Cool-er is based on a Linux OS and we’ve been informed that the entire OS will be made GPL in the near future, allowing developers to chop and change the firmware to add the features they require. It supports PDF, EPUB, FB2, RTF, TXT, HTML, PRC, JPG and MP3, so you’ll be able to view images and listen to music if you choose. Annoyingly, the Cool-er uses a 2.5mm headphone jack instead of the standard 3.5mm jack – although an adapter is included.
Nokia’s N900 is a Linux-based mobile device with a number of advanced features, including application multi-tasking, built-in VoIP support, stereo speakers, graphics acceleration, video output to a TV, and more.
I have had my N900 for about one month now. During that time I have enjoyed several “Wow!” moments. For example, being able to use the web just as if I was onha my desktop, including heavy javascript and flash sites such as Google Maps, Google Docs, GMail, Photobucket, etc. was amazing to me. Being a Linux user for many years, I really enjoy having access to a terminal application with access to root and to tools like the vi text editor. Being able to use Python to develop right on the device and to be able to use my own old Python programs, such as 7Squeeze, gave me that very warm feeling of validation. But, the N900 had one more big Wow! moment in store for me, one that I truly did not expect.
The first bugfix release for version 4.6 of Qt GUI toolkit, acquired by Nokia in 2008, is now available. Similarly, an update for the cross-platform Qt Creator development environment, version 1.3.1, is also available to download. Both combine numerous fixes with performance enhancements and revised documentation. Qt 4.6.1 contains more than 90 changes, whilst debugging (especially under Mac OS X 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’) and the C++ editor have both been revised in Qt Creator. Both technologies are available on the Qt project’s Git resource under the open source LGPL 2.1 license.
Entourage Systems is taking pre-orders for its dual-display, Android-based “Entourage Edge” e-reader, bundled with DataViz’s Documents To Go. In other recent e-reader news, Spring Design’s “Alex” will access Borders’ e-book store, Samsung announced two e-readers, Amazon announced a new Kindle DX model, and Amazon is broadening its Kindle self-publishing platform.
People who like to try new cell phones on a regular basis should brace themselves; this year, Motorola’s going to do its best to make it rain Android devices. In an interview today, one exec committed to releasing something like two dozen smartphones based on the mobile operating system.
Motorola this week unveiled its first Android phone for the South Korean market. The phone, called the Motoroi, looks similar to the Motorola Droid handset in the U.S. or the Milestone in Europe but without the slide-out keyboard.
You are probably already aware that Google has launched the Nexus one, aka “the Google Phone”.
The reviews are mixed from what I have read so far.
Early in the rumor mill — way back when there was first talk of a Google-backed device — the thought was that perhaps the Google phone would be “free” but laden with advertisements. The idea being that if you let Google display ads to you morning, noon and night on your mobile phone, you could enjoy free… everything.
HTC hopes it can encourage a wider audience to choose the Tattoo by offering customisable casing. At the point you buy you can choose pre-defined colours or use your own imagination and customise with your own designs. We couldn’t test this service before writing, but it sounds promising.
Without good usability none of this matters, of course, and there is both good and bad news on this front. In general we found working with the Tattoo comfortable enough. Its screen is a bit small at 2.8 inches, and its 240 x 320 pixel resolution is the lowest we expect to see from any finger-friendly smartphone. But for the most part it was good enough.
Schneider (pictured right, next to Flash Gordon) married up Javascript with the iPhone’s inbuilt support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open-source competitor to Flash, which hasn’t taken off to the same extent as Flash, due to the fact that Adobe had years of head-start in terms of getting the software installed on virtually all PCs.
Last month cloud computing and systems management expert John Willis published his best of Cloud Computing for 2009 list he calls the Cloudies. I am not an expert on the latest developments in cloud computing so it was nice to get a list of the best (in his expert opinion) cloud computing tools. I was especially interested in the latest open source software and I did a little research on each of these projects to see if they had active development mailing lists, regular releases and a real community behind them. At first glance my final list read like a cast of manga characters with names like Bitnami, CollectD, Enomaly, OpenNebula, RabbitMQ and Zenoss. However they all seem to benefit from a strong development ethic, a growing community of users and the ability to address challenges associated with cloud computing.
Both BT’s open source innovation capability, Osmosoft, and its open source governance unit, the Open Source Operations Team, aim to operate in as transparent a manner as possible. In support of this we contribute to initiatives such as FOSSBazaar and the European Legal Network, and where possible publish information about how we deliver using F/OSS technologies and how we implement the associated governance.
I am pleased to officially announce the 2010 revision of Nuxified.org, an alternative outlet for all Free Open Source Software users and fans. This revision proves that there’s still plenty of life behind this site and is a token of my continued interest in maintaining and improving it.
The slogan marking this revision is a “FOSS Clique” translating perfectly to a “community of people interested in Free Open Source Software”.
CompTIA — a large association serving the IT channel — has longstanding relationships with Microsoft and the traditional software industry. But one of CompTIA’s new board members could help to drive open source solutions across the IT channel. Here’s the scoop.
Oh dear. After the debacle with Microsoft Poland’s apparent racist photoshopping, Microsoft China went and got the company in hot water for allegedly “stealing” code. Yes you read that right: Microsoft and wholesale “theft” of code from another website. Of course it’s not “theft” it’s copyright infringement but tomayto/tomarto. Microsoft confessed blaming a vendor they had worked with. No surprise really but the damage to their name may have already been done. There’s more to discuss here than Microsoft’s already tarnished reputation though. The issue raises some important points in favour of free software and points to why more if not all code should benefit from free licencing.
At this week’s AsteriskWorld conference, Digium will officially launched Asterisk Exchange — an online marketplace that allows customers and channel partners to piece together solutions involving Asterisk (the open source IP PBX). If successful, Asterisk Exchange could expand the ecosystem for alternative VoIP and unified communication solutions. Here’s the scoop, including a FastChat video with Digium CEO Danny Windham.
Pika Technologies announced a GSM Module for its open source Asterisk- and FreePBX-based IP-PBX device. The dual-channel GSM Module for the Pika Warp Appliance for Linux enables PBX developers to offer connections to one or more GSM cellular networks, offering backup and LCR (least cost routing), the company says.
Modern PBX phone systems often have lots of capabilities that end-users never actually see, since they don’t actually directly use the PBX — they use the phones that the PBX enables. That’s a situation that VoIP vendor Digium is aiming to change with the new release of Switchvox 4.5.
Switchvox is Digium’s commercially licensed VoIP IP PBX and was last updated a year ago for enhanced unified communications collaboration services. Digium itself is best known as the lead commercial sponsor behind the open source Asterisk IP PBX effort, which also serves as the base for Switchvox.
The final development milestone of Firefox 3.6 has been released to web and is currently available for download for users of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Mozilla will release Firefox 3.6 on Thursday, the Mozilla Foundation said Wednesday.
The exact time for the Firefox 3.6 release will be on Thursday, Jan. 20, at 9:30 AM Pacific time, according to a note on the Firefox 3.6 “coming soon” page.
Just when you think you’ve got all the Firefox add-ons you’ll ever need, the developer community is busy dreaming up more. Here’s five add-ons you’ll love that also might solve some problems you didn’t even know you had.
Mozilla Labs has rolled out a major update to Bespin, an open source text editing engine that is built with standards-based Web technologies. The project has undergone a “reboot” with the aim of improving the ease with which it can be used and enhanced.
Bespin 0.6, codenamed Ash, reflects the significant effort that went into the architectural overhaul. The code is more modular and is designed so that virtually all of the core functionality is implemented in plugins. The developers have also made it considerably easier to embed Bespin in webpages, an improvement that will lower the barriers to adoption.
Early on in the first year of this blog, I got to investigating the use of Drupal for creating an article-based subsite. In the end, the complexities of its HTML and CSS thwarted my attempts to harmonise the appearance of web pages with other parts of the same site and I discontinued my efforts. In the end, it was Textpattern that suited my needs and I have stuck with that for the aforementioned subsite.
The Daemon series is an exploration of a could-be-now, constantly connected society. Suarez has taken cutting edge technology and inserted it into everyday life. It’s a great exploration of where our society might be headed. In many ways it reminds me Cory Doctorow’s excellent Little Brother. Cory’s young-adult novel is a great primer for hacker and maker culture. Daemon serves a similar purpose providing a primer for what a networked society that is structured like MMORPG will look like.
Admit it, when many of you think of open source you assume software. But new concepts of open source in hardware and design promise to transform many industries. Open Source’s allure of faster, more agile development, quicker innovation and accelerating evolution of technology doesn’t apply to software alone.
The first time I heard of open source hardware was when both my friend Brad Feld and Fred Wilson wrote about Bug Labs in their blogs. I was intrigued by the idea but didn’t quite grok it. I knew that if Brad and Fred invested in it there must be something to it and I would watch it develop. But the idea seems to have some legs.
Today we’re officially announcing the brand new jQuery Forum. We’ve been using mailing lists, and subsequently Google Groups, over the past 4 years to manage the discussion and community around jQuery. That particular solution has simply not been able to scale to our discussion requirements both in terms of participation and in managing spam.
Sauce Labs has released Sauce IDE, a record and playback system for Selenium tests that allows individuals new to Selenium do automated application functional testing on multiple browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera and multiple operating systems, all without writing any code.
I’m going to attempt to answer the number-one most common technology question on the web, and hopefully do it so I can just link people here. Wish me luck, I’ll need it!
(3) Of all things, you’re trying to sell me design in .NET/ .ASP. Now, can anyone see Idiot’s mistake? Ah, yes, in the second row. A website about Free-and-Open-Source Software? Hosted on a Linux server? With an email address with the word “Linux” right in the string? With numerous posts about coding in Python and PHP? Yeah, that does raise a red flag, doesn’t it?
Open source has bought us some great products, but even if you’re a programming genius, working out how to get involved in a project can be challenging. The TeachingOpenSource.org site offers a wealth of material to help you learn the basics.
I had done my best to sort out the why’s and wherefore’s of Google’s first consumer OS effort in my initial launch coverage but I still had many questions about the past, present, and future of the project.
[...]
EB: The way that we’ve thought about this for a while is if you read the Chrome OS blog post that we did in July, and you read the Chrome browser blog post that we did in September in 2008, they’re very similar. They’re essentially the same thing. And the reason is because when we were building Chrome the browser, we realized that everyone is spending their time online. So essentially we were trying to build something that mimics this operating system feel—there’s a task manager in Chrome, and that was one of the early additions to Chrome.
The publishers are claiming that Google is purposely degrading its results (and they can prove it!) and at the same time complaining that they can’t compete against those degraded results. Wow.
The calculator didn’t dehumanize math. The automobile didn’t dehumanize walking. And Google, most certainly, has not dehumanized intelligence. It’s only enabled it to do much, much more.
Top Chinese search engine Baidu.com has sued its U.S. domain registrar over a hack that took down the Web site, alleging negligence by the U.S. company, Baidu said Wednesday.
An internal audit found the FBI broke the law thousands of times when requesting Americans’ phone records using fake emergency letters that were never followed up on with true subpoenas — even though top officials knew the practice was illegal, according to The Washington Post.
The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.
Millions of motorists’ personal details have been sold to ‘parasite’ parking firms and even rogue clampers by a Government agency in a trade generating £43.9million so far.
This kind of error is unforgivably stupid. Not only is it irresponsible, there’s no conceivable excuse for this kind of administrative incompetence. Even worse, it makes it less likely that people will serve as magistrates in the future.
Students were evacuated from Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School in the Chollas View neighborhood Friday afternoon after an 11-year-old student brought a personal science project that he had been making at home to school, authorities said.
Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said the student had been making the device in his home garage. A vice principal saw the student showing it to other students at school about 11:40 a.m. Friday and was concerned that it might be harmful, and San Diego police were notified.
Unfortunately for Mr Chambers, the police didn’t see the funny side. A week after posting the message on the social networking site, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for almost seven hours by detectives who interpreted his post as a security threat. After he was released on bail, he was suspended from work pending an internal investigation, and has, he says, been banned from the Doncaster airport for life. “I would never have thought, in a thousand years, that any of this would have happened because of a Twitter post,” said Mr Chambers, 26. “I’m the most mild-mannered guy you could imagine.”
Warren Buffett opposes President Barack Obama’s proposed levy on financial institutions because firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. already repaid bailout funds, he told CNBC.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York paid French banks 100 cents on the dollar to settle trades with American International Group Inc. in November 2008, the same month an AIG competitor negotiated payments of less than a third of that to retire similar bets.
The hearings into the roots of the recession aren’t scaring Wall Street. What’s really frightening is public anger at the industry shows no signs of abating, and Lloyd Blankfein, the man leading the charge to turn that around, is only making matters worse—and possibly putting his job at risk.
According to the Post, “Goldman officials refuted the claim that Goldman was delaying the bonus information in order to avoid a PR flap, saying the delay was more the result of the bank changing the timeframe of its discussions with employees.”
It’s the biggest bank robbery in American history, but the banks are doing the robbing. I mean, just go through the facts. What, overnight in 2008 they turned Goldman Sachs, that venerable investment bank – how about casinos that gambled and lost – into a bank holding company. Why? Well, so that they could borrow at ridiculously low rates and they could be given approximately $10 billion dollars to put them on the road to gambling.
Hank Greenberg, former chief executive officer at American International Group Inc., said Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is responsible for the collapse of the insurer during the economic crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Hundreds of banks issued warrants to the government in return for government aid under the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, after a credit crunch caused financial markets to seize up in 2008.
Yves here. Admittedly, it is much easier telling Americans that the pursuit of lucre is a false god when most of the country is broke. But more is that FDR from the very outset set himself up as an opponent of rule by the banking classes. He depicts them as failures and calls them unscrupulous and selfish. By contrast, have were ever heard Obama even hint that bankers were less than ethical? Let’s see, last December, he called them “fat cats“! Ah yes, of course, everyone knows a cat will steal a sardine if you aren’t watching. Yeah, that Obama sure knows how to dress those bankers down!
As we discussed at greater length earlier this week, this new “get our money back” idea is pure three card Monte. Put the spotlight on the TARP so everyone will ignore all the other massive subsidies that the banks have gotten, continue to receive, and are abusing. Those who claim many banks have “paid back the TARP” are missing (more likely choosing to obfuscate) the point: the TARP calculus grossly understates of the gives and the gets here (although as we have said before and will say again, Obama’s focus on the TARP is pure political expediency).
As the Chinese government expands what it calls a campaign against pornography, cellular companies in Beijing and Shanghai have been told to suspend text services to cellphone users who are found to have sent messages with “illegal or unhealthy content,” state-run news media reported Tuesday.
Every year in China, Internet executives are officially rewarded for their “patriotism.”
Last November in Beijing, I sat in a large auditorium festooned with red banners and watched Robin Li, the CEO of Google’s main competitor, Baidu, parade onstage with executives from 19 other companies to receive the 2009 “China Internet Self-Discipline Award.”
The rhetoric was all about the “strength and confidence of the Chinese Internet” and “harmonious and healthy Internet development.” The reality is: China’s annual “self discipline” award is for private sector censorship.
A Vietnamese court today convicted four activists of trying to overthrow the communist government and sentenced them to up to 16 years in prison for promoting multiparty democracy.
How do the above fines compare to other crimes? Gapers Block uses the Illinois Criminal code to find that file-sharing is worse than arson, child abduction and second-degree murder, among others. This just shows how ill-conceived laws are sometimes, and copyright and patent law unfortunately provides too many examples.
Notably, in the category of recorded music (the realm of active copyright lobbyists) both countries show a declining compounded annual growth rate. But Canada’s decline is projected to -1% whereas its American counterpart shows -4.7%. Similar comparisons to U.K (-3.9%), France (-7.4%), and Germany (-1.9%) all place the Canadian music scene as more stable. This, despite the state of our copyright law.
How do you deal with an entrenched content industry that tries to pump its twisted values down your throat with ludicrously illogical emotional appeals? Well, one way is to fight fire with fire by making your own emotional appeals, and trust to the viral amplification of free culture distribution to get the message out. This is the essence of the “minute meme” idea from Question Copyright, and animator Nina Paley has fired the first volley with her one-minute animation “Copying Is Not Theft.”
This week we released a new album, and it’s our best yet. We also released a new video – the second for this record – for a song called This Too Shall Pass, and you can watch it here. We hope you’ll like it and comment on it and pass the link along to your friends and do that wonderful thing that that you do when you’re fond of something, share it. We want you to stick it on your web page, post it on your wall, and embed it everywhere you can think of.
We may soon finds out – at least for the metal genre. Metal label and digital distributor Metalhit has dropped the prices on 95% of its album releases and catalog to $5.25. The company represents dozens of underground metal labels and artists.
Update: Aaaaaaaaaaaaand, let the backtracking commence. Verizon is apparently now claiming (to Broadband Reports) that it was all an exaggeration and that Verizon only said that it “reserved the right” to kick users off:
I’m not aware that we’ve ever terminated anyone’s account for excessive consumption, although we reserve the right to do so. Verizon has no bandwidth caps. That part of the CNET story is wrong. I did not say “we’ve cut people off.” I said we reserve the right to do so.
Update 2: And, again, Broadband Reports comes through. It has a new update with Verizon now claiming that, no, it has never kicked anyone off its network for file sharing accusations. It might want to tell its spokespeople that for future reference.
Fortunately, Judge Gertner is an eminent Constitutional Law scholar, and has demonstrated time and again that she is anything but lazy, and that even when the lawyers in the case do a lousy job, she and her staff will actually do the research and find the applicable law.
I haven’t always agreed with her decisions, and the major body of her work in the consolidated RIAA cases has been very helpful to the RIAA, but she has demonstrated time and again that she is the best lawyer in this case. -R.B.]
For Bono is probably the person least likely to say “we need to find a way to have many more artists and performers make a decent living, while allowing people on below average wages, and their children, to enjoy as much music as they like within their weekly budget”. Or he might say it, in a sudden rush of blood to the head, but is surely least likely to do anything to make it happen.
The trial will see Virgin monitor about 40 per cent of its customers — none of whom will be informed of their participation. Virgin insists that the system seeks only to determine the amount of file-sharing traffic that infringes on copyright and that it will disregard data that can finger individual users.
We just announced our event line-up for 2010 and the Call for Papers for CollabSummit. I’m very excited we’re offering the continuation of events that have been with us for awhile (CollabSummit, Kernel Summit) along with the second year of LinuxCon.
The second day of the conference dawned just as bright and sunny as the first. The opening keynote was delivered by Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She spoke on the history of the FOSS movement as birthed by Richard Stallman and it’s paradoxical growth during the same period that governments and corporate bodies were pushing their agenda for stronger IP and copyright control. Gabrielle took the audience through the wrangling that forever forced the FOSS community into the political arena and created the biggest threat to the traditional concept of IP that exists today.
During a mini-conference on Wave at Linux.conf.au 2010 in Wellington, Google showed off its forthcoming Extension Gallery for Wave. While you can currently browse through a basic list of extensions and add them manually, incorporating an Extensions gallery link into Wave itself (which is already active on a small number of test accounts) is much simpler. The same approach certainly proved helpful with Chrome’s Extensions feature.
But in remembering this, it brings to mind what new Linux users may be going through…and more to the point, what we probably need to remember in teaching them.
Sure, we speak the language…it’s second nature for us. We think nothing of a file system with identifiers such as .etc and .var. Sudo apt-get and sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list rolls off our fingertips as if we were navigating the simplest of tasks. Some find the /.init/.d folder and subsequent commands second nature.
The Open-PC project initiated by KDE board member Frank Karlitschek has released the specifications for its first computer. The desktop with dual-core Atom processor is due to arrive in February 2010.
Otherwise, the 5-inch tablet will have multi-touch compatibility and a customized version of the Android 1.6 operating system. The device will be available in a few colors, including pink, black and red. It is also known the Mini 5 will have a 5-megapixel camera, and there is the possibility of a secondary, front-facing camera, though this is not confirmed.
Linux has long been popular in the datacenter, and Tier 1 vendors like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell have all had good lines of OEM Linux servers for several years now. IBM even puts Linux on mainframes. Traditionally these vendors have relied on Red Hat and SUSE Enterprise Linux, and mainly targeted the enterprise.
Now Ubuntu is showing up in OEMs everywhere, giving us more options than ever. Here is a roundup of five different OEM Linux servers for different tasks and budgets, from the home network to the mainframe.
However, there are other backup systems which are designed to be graphically managed. One of the most respected ones which does not seem to be straight out of a horror movie is called Bacula and is designed to pull the teeth out of your backup woes.
There are way too many Linux backup solutions available to mention in one article which is starting to creep up on the longish side so I leave you with a list of A-Z backup solutions thoughtfully provided by LinuxLinks.
Somewhere, at some point, you’re going to have to confront a new operating system. When you do, you’re going to appreciate the comfort of cross-platform applications (a fact not lost on the Ubuntu folks, who are trying to ensure popular but proprietary applications run on the open-source operating system).
Wicd is a wired and wireless network manager for Linux. Since, it doesn’t have gnome-dependencies it can be used on almost all the Desktop Environments and hence is a popular alternative to the default Network Manager. All the wicd users will be happy to know that wicd 1.7.0 is out now. Although the new version has released within 6 months of the last release 1.6.0, it still brings some new features.
This device is a real treat for the Linux and non Linux user alike. For Linux users uploading pictures and or video from this camera is as simple as plugging the camera into your system the system detects the camera and gives you the option to view the pictures.
One app I didn’t replace is Pidgin. Kopete works fine for me now (it used to complain that my password for MSN was wrong when it wasn’t), but it doesn’t have a couple of features I want. One I can forgive is that it doesn’t allow you to save and use other people’s moving smileys. However, I want to be able to cycle between chat-tabs using ctrl-tab, something I couldn’t even find in the Kopete shortcuts. That means that at the moment, I’m staying with Pidgin.
Aside from perhaps the web browser, an email reader is likely to be the first application configured on a new computer installation. And, if you are using a desktop, the default choice is likely to be KMail if you are using KDE, or Evolution if you are using GNOME.
Both KMail and Evolution are thoroughly modern email readers, with few differences in general functionality. However, if you had to choose between them, what parts of the user experience might change your mind?
To suggest an answer, I retraced the steps I made eight months ago when I moved from GNOME to KDE, comparing the two mail readers in everything from their interfaces to their features and configuration settings for accounts, contacts, message sending, and other functions. The result was a clear but not unqualified winner.
The KDE Project is taking a smart approach to reworking the KDE Website. Lydia Pintscher put out the call Sunday for contributors to pitch in with content and screenshots for one or more KDE programs by January 23rd.
KDE apps are broken down into three batches on the wiki. Contributors are asked to pick one (or more) apps and submit a screenshot, and basic information about a project such as its homepage, features, IRC channels, and so forth.
There are a few things in KDE’s desktop shell which have not changed for a very long time. For example I remember that the first KDE version I used (that was a 3.x with x << 5) had the same control module for window decorations as the one we will have in KDE SC 4.4. The interface displays a dropdown list with the names of the available decorations, a configuration panel for the selected decoration and a preview. This results in wonderful tabs inside tabs user interfaces – just look at the Oxygen configuration in 4.4.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #176 for the week January 10th – January 16th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx Alpha 2, Ubuntu Developer Week, Ubuntu User Day, new Ubuntu Women leadership, and Free Culture Showcase.
Just a quick note to inform you all that the day has finally come. Really! The Linux Mint 8 KDE Release Candidate was recently leaked and can, as of this writing, be downloaded either directly or via a torrent. If you download the torrent, please seed to at least 1.5x (150%). We will, of course, have a full review upon the return from CampKDE.
A new “Hardware module” was added to the Community website. This module allows you to register your hardware and to search for hardware devices based on multiple criteria.
Customizing and theming, or “skinning”, your open source browser is about to get easier, thanks to the integration of Personas in the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 3.6 release.
The Personas engine, which enables users to easily change the way the browser looks, had previously been available as a Firefox add-on, but will soon become part of the default browser itself. Other popular Firefox add-ons, including Weave and Prism might one day follow suit, as well as a new technology for add-ons called Jetpacks, Mozilla said.
The first two course books have just been published online for what is intended to become a university master programme on free and open source software and open standards.
The online master programme, Free Technology Academy (FTA) is organised by the University of Agder in Norway and two of Europe’s open universities, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain and the Open Universiteit in the Netherlands. Coordination is handled by the Free Knowledge Institute, based in the Netherlands.
Like in many countries, the first steps into open data came from the research and the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) communities. WikiMedia France and OpenStreetMap.fr are probably the most popular open knowledge projects in France. Early websites like Mon-Depute.fr — a vote monitoring project created by an archivist — or droit.org — a very active project from l’Ecole des Mines on legal publication — helped a lot to make democratic data available. Our work at Regards Citoyens on parliamentary activity with NosDéputés.fr and on electoral data is a new step for French open data for democracy and civil society.
Did I mention I hate flash? I do. It crashes a lot, and is overall a bad thing for the web, in my opinion. But I do enjoy watching videos on the web, and unfortunately, up to this day, flash is what most sites use to show videos. Months ago I read a couple of blog posts with nice hacks to make Firefox able to play youtube videos without using the flash player. Some recent discussions with colleagues at work got me itching to try my hand at something similar for Epiphany.
When a camera has been placed in location X, law enforcement’s resources flow away from X and towards Y. Often, as a result of this decision and the failures I’ve outlined here, a crime committed in X goes unsolved, with all the suffering and disappointment for victims that goes with that, because of the wholly false reliance that has been placed on those cameras.
I think this demonstrates the total pointlessness of the full-body scanners that are set to invade our privacy and humiliate passengers at our airports.
While children and families are being subjected to smirking staff with body scanning surveillance, everything these expensive machines should catch goes sailing through.
So there we have it: “sheer practicality” is all that stands between our current situation and the biometric data of every man, woman and child in Britain catalogued on a government database. Moreover, the 20-digit code is as close an approximation to the ‘actual genetic material’ as is possible. This is poor trickery by the government; the infringements upon our privacy remain in full view.
EXTRACT: The [US] report is an insult to Italian democracy, and to European farmers, food producers, retailers and consumers. It is also riddled with misinformation. (item 2)
NOTE: Over the last couple of years, GM supporters have gone all out to try and break down global resistance to GMOs, yet if anything they seem to be losing ground. Nowhere is this more the case than in Europe where the miniscule amount of GM crop cultivation has actually been shrinking, and a series of countries have introduced outright bans.
As the dreaded autumn wave ends and official deaths remain relatively low, the backlash against the H1N1 pandemic response is in full swing. Claims range from a massive overreaction by health authorities to a conspiracy cooked up by big pharma. But while swine flu may have boosted profits for vaccine manufacturers, the reality of the pandemic is more complicated.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday reversed its much-criticized position on BPA safety, saying it was concerned about the chemical’s effects on fetuses, infants and children.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is backing off its much-criticized position defending the safety of a ubiquitous chemical ingredient in plastics called Bisphenol-A (BPA). FDA now says it has “some concern” about the effects BPA has on the brain, behavior and prostate gland in fetuses, infants and children, and is offering the public tips on how to avoid the chemical.
The Tea Party money bomb has also blown up Obamacare, the President’s muddled health care reform plan. While many pundits point to local issues that helped Brown win, the fact is that Brown ran hardest against Obama’s health care bill, and won despite personal appearances in Massachusetts by Obama and Bill Clinton, and despite a desperate but failed Democratic effort to beat back the insurgency.
The explanation for Wall Street’s high pay lies elsewhere. Most of us are paid based on what we produce or, more realistically, what our employers produce. By contrast, Wall Street compensation levels are tied to the nation’s overall wealth. Investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms and many other financial institutions trade stocks, bonds and other securities for their own profit. They also advise mutual funds, pension funds, endowments and wealthy individuals on how to invest and trade.
President Obama’s proposal to tax bailed-out banks offers taxpayers a momentary thrill of retribution, but it’s not likely to change Wall Street’s risky behavior.
The fees would be imposed on about 50 of the largest banks, based on their liabilities. Among the targets are Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Corp., and Citigroup Inc. – firms with assets of more than $50 billion.
They robbed Americans of their future. They cost perhaps a generation of hard-working people a decent pay check. And they left millions of people with empty 401(k)s, with some seniors being booted from their retirement homes because there was no money left. And, yet, they still don’t get it–or maybe they truly don’t care.
Wall Street is threatening to sue the president over his quite modest proposal to tax the banks who created the greatest economic crisis in the past 50 years…
They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
Figuring that out means asking the likes of Blankfein or Dimon basic yet pointed questions such as whether their business model was, and possibly still is, broken. That didn’t happen. Instead we got Commissioner John Thompson asking Morgan Stanley’s Mack for suggestions on ‘how to think about innovation and managing the risks associated with innovation.’
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission today. He cited his strong statutory authority to go after the firms that had a role in the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. His team was tackling securities fraud, accounting fraud, financial discrimination and fraud related to the stimulus bill. It was an impressive list, but what was not impressive was the first case he touted – Bernie Madoff.
In 2005, Trijicon won a $660 million, long-term contract to supply the scopes to the Marine Corps. Spokespeople for the Army and the Marine Corps denied knowing about the biblical markings, even though numerous discussions have appeared about them in Internet talk forums and on YouTube since 2006.
U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious “Crusade” in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that President Obama’s signature financial reform, a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), was in trouble in the Senate.
Senate Banking Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) was considering dropping the idea of creating an independent, stand-alone consumer protection body, empowered to crack down on banking abuses, in order to get a regulatory revamp passed this year with bipartisan support. Dodd is apparently considering shrinking the CFPA into a division of an already existing federal agency (no doubt one with a proven track-record of failing consumers.)
A code which will act as the model for Ofcom, the UK regulator, to supervise the new copyright enforcement measures against peer-to-peer downloading, has been drafted by the UK government.
The Digital Economy Bill provides for the regulator, Ofcom, to supervise the new copyright enforcement measures targeting Internet users. The measures, which occupy over one third of the Bill, initially target peer-to-peer users, but in fact, the scope of the Bill looks set to go much wider. (I am still in the process of analysing it, but this is my current view.)
Florian from the UK Open Rights Group writes in with news of an upcoming set of workshops to help people who care about civil liberties and the open and free Internet talk to their Members of Parliament about the terrible Digital Economy Bill…
Oh dear. I hadn’t seen this post of Barry’s before he retweeted it. Um, how do I put this politely? Barry, you messed up.
Prof. Geist tries to taint the recording industry as blatant copyright infringers, without ever delving into the industry wide accepted custom for clearing mechanical rights. The pending list system, which has been around for decades, represents an agreed upon industry wide consensus that songwriters, music publishers (who represent songwriters) and the recording industry use and rely on to ensure that music gets released and to the market efficiently and the proper copyright owners get compensated.
But Barry, the recording industry are blatant copyright infringers. Or at least they sure give that impression. Let’s see:
Cher sues UMG over royalties
JoJo Sues Record Label
TIMBALAND SUES RECORD LABEL
Courtney Love Sues Record Label
Allman Brothers Band sues record company for $13M
Eminem Sues Record Label Over iTunes Royalties
Beatles to sue record label
Eurovision star sues record label over contract dispute
Smashing Pumpkins sue record label over use of songs in Pepsi promotional deals
Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly that “publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy” comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were “loaned” last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself.
Today I was informed by Peter Murray, Lorra-Lea’s assistant, that she had talked with CBS’ Vice President of Business Affairs, and “there are so many issues with those shows, that even if we took the time to figure it out, we still almost certainly wouldn’t do the deal.” So that’s it. Access to the Jack Benny television masters is sealed.
In 1964, James Aubrey told Jack Benny that his weekly television series was terminated with the words, “YOU’RE THROUGH, OLD MAN!” Sadly, 46 years later, CBS has repeated the sentiment by condemning these shows to permanent silence.
For a while now, we’ve tried very carefully to not make the mistake that is common in the press (and among politicians) to assume that “the recording industry” (i.e., the record labels) is “the music industry.” The two are quite different. In fact, by almost every measure, the music industry has been thriving over the past few years, while the recording industry is in rapid decline. And yet, the two are regularly confused.
The term ‘music industry’ is a misnomer. In reality the ‘music industry’ is not one industry, it is several independent industries. This is an important distinction because if we say that there is a “crisis in the music industry” it suggests an equal amount of misfortune for everyone (musicians, the recording industry, the live-music industry, Internet radio, etc.) and in fact this not true. Misuse of the term ‘music industry’ distorts the reality of the situation. For example:
* The RIAA occasionally misrepresents itself as being a figurehead for the entire “music industry” when in actuality it is a trade organization for a group of labels in the recording industry.
* Peter Jamieson, chair of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), attempted to speak about the “The Music Industry Crisis” at an industry convention in the UK in September 2003, but instead outlined issues particular to the recording sector.
[...]
While it may be difficult to completely eradicate the term ‘music industry’ from our everyday vernacular, journalists and media outlets should certainly be more conscious not to say “the music industry” when they specifically mean to say “the recording industry”.
I tried to cover things like installing Mandriva, setting up dual boot ( Transfug drake does need some improvement ), personalization of the desktop, multi users including parental controls and installing new applications.
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