08.24.10
Posted in News Roundup at 11:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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CloudNAS is mounted directly into the Linux filesystem. It’s possible to use the CloudNAS system to encrypt (using AES 256-bit) but it’s not convenient.
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Server
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Screven said that there is one team that does development for Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM, not two different teams, and they are maniacally focused on performance. Thanks to paravirtualization for drivers for both Linux and Windows on Oracle VM, Screven says that the overhead imposed by the Oracle VM implementation of the Xen hypervisor can be as low as 5 per cent of CPU capacity, while other hypervisors are burning as much as 20 per cent of CPU.
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Purdue says its power saving mode can reduce power usage by 10 to 35 percent, with the largest benefits available in AMD systems. The software employs the Linux kernel’s Frequency Scaling driver, and was written for RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.0.
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On the other hand, many of the largest data centers — such as those run by the big Web companies — mostly run on Linux or similar operating systems; and run their own proprietary software. Such companies tend to be extremely cost conscious, and note that power often costs much more than the hardware itself. So if Smooth-Stone can prove it really can save a lot of energy while still providing the performance these firms need, that may provide a good market opening. From there, it will have to turn to the more mainstream providers of server-based software.
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Google
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A Chrome rival noted the paper trail aspect of the new registration fee, too. “Someone pointed out the $5 registration fee for Chrome Extension Gallery creates a paper trail, which is a good point,” said Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, in a Twitter message Thursday.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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Proprietary
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With the new software release for Linux, Cuelux is now a multi-platform lighting software package; Cuelux was already available on Mac OSX and MS Windows (with both 32 bit and 64 bit drivers available).
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Well, if you look at what GNOME 3 is attempting — we did that with the KDE Platform 4. Clean up the technology and introduce new interface and infrastructural technologies. They however took a very different approach. We redesigned our infrastructure but tried to build a familiar desktop on top. The current, default Plasma desktop, while fundamentally much more flexible, still follows the traditional panel setup. GNOME introduces GNOME Shell, a much more revolutionary desktop interface, but with far less flexibility. Of course these differences make sense — the GNOME developers had an entirely different vision with their Shell than the Plasma Developers. GNOME wanted to offer the best user experience possible, according to their design. Plasma is a technology to build user experiences… The Plasma Netbook and Plasma Mobile interfaces are examples of those and you could build a GNOME Shell like interface in a reasonably short time. Someone might do that at some point…
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New Releases
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An updated Parted Magic has released. Parted Magic 5.3 comes with several updated packages, but also brings some changes. Parted Magic is no longer released as a USB Zip file version and a GRUB4DOS ISO is no longer being made available.
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The 5.3 maintenance update is based on the 2.6.34.5 Linux kernel and features various adjustments that improve overall memory usage and several updated packages, including the latest 7.0 release of the open source TrueCrypt disk encryption tool. Other package updates include version 2010.8.8 of the NTFS-3G read/write driver, FreeType 2.4.2 and version 1.17.1 of the BusyBox tool collection. The UNetbootin utility for creating LiveUSB systems has been updated to the latest 471 release.
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Lunar Linux 1.6.5, codenamed “Mare Ingenii,” has been released, the latest version of the source-based Linux distro. The new release brings a new Linux kernel and support for the EXT4 filesystem as well as hybrid ISO.
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Trinity Audio Group Inc.’s audio operating system and professional music recording software, designed for the Pro Audio crowd, releases it’s most mature version to date. Linux’s open source component makes it possible to offer free updates for life. Newest version 4.0 available as free upgrade for all existing customers.
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The following Linux-based operating systems have been announced last week: Trinity Rescue Kit 3.4, Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, Parted Magic 5.3, Lunar Linux 1.6.5 and Frugalware 1.3. In other news: Canonical announced that Ubuntu 10.10 will support gestures with multi-touch; the Debian Project celebrated its 17th birthday; the KDE Project announced the KDE Plasma Mobile Tablet edition; Mark Shuttleworth announced Ubuntu 11.04 a.k.a. Natty Narwhal; the GNOME Project released the first beta version of the upcoming GNOME 2.32.0 desktop environment; Canonical uploaded the Ubuntu 11.04 release schedule; Google launched Linux video and voice chat plugin for GMail; RHEL 3 gets three-year optional support program. The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the latest updated Linux distributions, and the development releases.
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Tor 0.2.2.15-alpha fixes a big bug in hidden service availability, fixes a variety of other bugs that were preventing performance experiments from moving forward, fixes several bothersome memory leaks, and generally closes a lot of smaller bugs that have been filling up trac lately.
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Red Hat Family
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Shares of Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) are higher on the session by 2.21%, currently trading at $33.26. The stock has been moving largely higher over the past six months and is nearing its 52-week high of $33.99.
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The Hatters continue to report strong profits and revenues, thus continuing to stoke the takeover talk.
Given the recent surge in high-tech mergers and acquisitions, such as the $1.5 billion battle between Dell and HP over 3Par, and big firms looking to diversify, why wouldn’t Red Hat be a promising target?
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Fedora
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As always, Fedora continues to develop and integrate the latest free and open source software. The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora. For more details about other features that are making their way into Rawhide and set for inclusion in Fedora 14, refer to their individual wiki pages that detail feature goals and progress. Features for this release are tracked on the feature list page.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Today we are very proud to announce the Ubuntu Developer Summit event for Ubuntu 11.04, where the entire Canonical development team and members of the Ubuntu community gather together to share knowledge, discuss and design the next version of the Ubuntu operating system!
“The Ubuntu Developer Summit is the seminal Ubuntu event in which we define the focus and plans for our up-coming version of Ubuntu. The event pulls together Canonical engineers, community members, partners, ISVs, upstreams and more into an environment focused on discussion and planning.”
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Jorge O. Castro, External Project Developer Relations for Canonical, will be speaking about Low-Hanging Fruit of the juicy software variety. Jorge works with getting really hard bits to integrate with Ubuntu, recently and namely Google Voice with video support. He will show us how we can all help by packaging and bug fixing. Yummy.
Next will be the outstanding Amber Graner of Ubuntu User magazine. She will discuss how it is possible to contribute to Free software, even if you are not a developer. Amber knows because she has done it all without compiling a single code or hacking a single kernel. You go girl.
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The Unison Operating System offers an ultra tiny embedded POSIX environment for ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller (MCU) based development that is also Linux compatible.
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IGEL Technology today announced that it has integrated the IBM 5250 client into its Linux thin client firmware to provide IBM users direct access to IBM Power Systems™ such as the AS/400, iSeries and System i™.
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IGEL added 5250 support to its Linux distribution, called IGEL Linux, in April with IGEL Linux release 4.03.1. IGEL Linux is available on all five major thin client offerings, including its UD2, UD3, UD5, UD7, and UD9 series. The company gets its terminal emulation technology from Ericom.
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RoweBots is providing its Linux compatible RTOS named Unison for Actel’s SmartFusion FPGA mixed signal FPGA devices.
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The Parrot iPhone Drone aka AR.Drone is a very clever quadricopter that is controlled by your Apple smartphone (iPod Touch & iPad), the AR.Drone has a very powerful Linux platform computer that can detect targets, which gives you a great gaming experience.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Pictures have surfaced in a Chinese forum that reportedly show a prototype Nokia handset. Rumored to be the N9, the device closely resembles the N8 but has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The most compelling aspect of this leak is that the device appears to be running the MeeGo Linux platform rather than Symbian.
Nokia recently confirmed that its first MeeGo-based product will launch this year, but the company hasn’t officially revealed any specific details about the form factor or other characteristics. It’s possible that the leaked photos of the alleged N9 handset offer the first real look at Nokia’s upcoming MeeGo product.
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Nokia and Intel said on Tuesday their venture to create a new cellphone software, seen as crucial for Nokia to re-assert itself as the leading producer of high-end handsets, had made a solid start.
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Amid much talk of paradigm shifts, Heikki Huomo, director of the University’s Center for Internet Excellence, co-founded by Nokia, said: “We are starting the research and we believe we are able to find new use paradigms beyond the current use paradigms.”
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At first glance the N900 seems impressive. It has a 600MHz Arm Cortex CPU, 256MB of ram and 32GB of onboard storage, with a high resolution, crystal clear 3.5in screen. Naturally, it also has all the basics for a smartphone of this calibre, which means 3G, Bluetooth 2.0, USB connector, and 802.11g wi-fi. The N900 even has a built-in FM transmitter for listening to your music over your car stereo wirelessly. But does this combination make for a decent phone and a usable netbook?
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Android
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Until now, Milestone owners could do nothing but to envy Droid users rocking the Froyo upgrade; however, according to Motorola’s recently published timeline, the former device is now slated for the same dessert party in Europe and Korea in Q4 — specifically, “beginning at the end of this year,” which could well mean the majority of users won’t get the update until 2011 (!). Meanwhile, said upgrade is still “under evaluation” for Canada, Latin America, Mexico and Asia-Pacific sans Korea.
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In the fifth spot, sales of smartphones based on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile stayed at 3.1 million units, with market share dropping from 9.3% to 5%.
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Sub-notebooks
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I won’t be using it much, because “social networking” is not a significant part of my personal activity. But I will keep it in mind for systems I prepare for others. If you do use Facebook, Twitter, and such, and you want to use Linux, Joliclouc might be just what you are looking for.
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No idea on pricing or a roll out date, but the progress reports seem to indicate that “sooner” is a better bet than “later”.
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Tablets
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Remember the $35 tablet that the Indian government promised to deliver? While it is a good year away from its targeted delivery date (which can change at a moment’s notice, mind you), Bangalore-based Allgo Embedded Systems has come up with a prototype of their own tablet which is touted to cost approximately $50. Yes, the STAMP tablet will be Android- or Linux-powered (to keep the costs down, and with the rising popularity of the open source operating system, why not?) while featuring a 7″ touchscreen display.
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WHY HAVE ONE when you can have five seems to be Archos’ approach with the announcement today that it will showcase Android-based “Internet tablets” with screen sizes from 2.8-inches to 10-inches.
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GNU/Linux is probably the biggest thing ever happened with Open Source. Richard Stallman, founder of Open Source movement, spearheaded a project to build a “complete Unix-compatible software system” based entirely of free software(free as in freedom).
Project was called GNU(GNU is Not Unix). During the same time Linus Torvalds built a Kernel(which is otherwise known as the heart of an opearting system) and made it Open Source. He named it Linux. The Linux kernel and GNU tools(libraries, compilers, text editors etc) combined to become GNU/Linux operating system(popularly known as ‘Linux’).
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AdroitLogic Private Ltd. announced today that it is open sourcing the code of its Enterprise Service Bus the UltraESB, under the GNU Affero General Public License. The UltraESB first announced in January, becomes the first Open Source ESB to claim support for Zero-copy proxying of requests with Java Non-blocking IO and Memory Mapped files to support extreme levels of performance.
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Oracle
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When Oracle sued Google over its use, or as Oracle would have it, Google’s misuse of Java intellectual property in Android, the first questions were why and what did Oracle hope to gain?
My only pet theory is straightforward and simple: Oracle wants to skim big-bucks from Android. But, even if a miracle happens and Oracle wins every one of their claims, we’re still talking years before Oracle sees a single red-cent.
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3) MeeGo: MeeGo, the Intel-Nokia open-source Linux for devices, doesn’t have the cash to give Larry Ellison a big present, but this group owes him one too. I think that MeeGo, which uses the traditional Linux desktop development tools instead of Android’s Java-based interface, now, has a real chance to get some of the smartphone market. Before Oracle’s lawsuit, the best I’d hoped for MeeGo, given Android’s popularity in smartphones, was to carve out its own niche. I thought it might do well, for example, with car entertainment and navigation systems. Now, I think it has a real shot in phones as well.
4) Patent Litigators: Some people have said that Oracle is acting like a patent troll. I disagree. Patent trolls sit on patents and wait for someone to mistakenly spend money building something from a forgotten idea and then jump on them to rip them off for millions. Oracle makes billions by actually creating software; it’s just that the company would like to make a few hundreds of millions by jabbing Google in their soft IP (intellectual property) belly as well.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Software freedom activist and founder of the GNU Project Richard Matthew Stallman will deliver a lecture on ‘Free software and your Freedom’ at the St. Joseph’s College of Engineering and Technology (SJCET), Pala on 9 September 2010.
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Project Releases
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After 9 months of development, Inkscape 0.48 is out. This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings a new Spray tool, multipath editing, superscripts and subscripts in text, as well as numeric control of text kerning, tracking, rotation and more, several new extensions for web developers and first take at adaptive user interface.
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OpenSSH 5.6 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at http://www.openssh.com/ shortly.
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The open source community has worked hard to develop apps with professional-level features. One of the shining examples is Inkscape, a free drawing application that uses X11, a way to run Linux apps on the Mac without a lot of trouble. When you start Inkscape, X11 loads automatically. The menus do not match the Mac’s normal user interface but when you save files, they are saved to the Finder.
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Security/Aggression
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Sweden’s prosecution service was urged to investigate if an employee had colluded to smear the founder of the Wikileaks website just days before he planned to use the country’s internet infrastructure to publish confidential US military material.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig used by BP, has accused the British oil firm of withholding key data including computerised records and digital measurements. BP denies the accusations.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Every content industry bounds into digital media vowing not to make the same mistakes of the music industry, an industry which spent a decade setting the global standard for “doing it wrong”. Ironically, the music industry has been slowly getting its act together – with a few exceptions – in recent years, while the books business, the film studios and the TV companies have doddered in, acting like they want to make it as hard as possible for anyone to enjoy their content and giving the impression that they really hate their customers.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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That seems to undermine the claims that of course people knew it was illegal, doesn’t it? Not surprisingly, the Sherman interview is chock full of other bizarre statements. Even just this one little quote is pretty funny with him trying to somehow redefine the lawsuits as a successful PR strategy. Of course, if they were actually successful in educating people, then wouldn’t there be fewer people accessing unauthorized music today than when they started? Of course, the exact opposite is true. The rest of the article is filled with similarly laughable attempts by Sherman to pretend that the RIAA’s strategy over the past decade has been successful, rather than a complete disaster that has helped the major record labels speed up their own demise.
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Teachers and students across Canada are trying to stop what they say is an attempt by private industry to cash in on research in the digital age, the consequences of which, they say, could radically redefine how research is conducted in and outside academia.
The case will be heard this fall in front of Canada’s Copyright Board and is expected to highlight the complexities of updating an analog-era copyright law to cover works for an academic community that’s adapting quickly to the digital era.
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Obviously, this seems to go beyond just Google’s book search, in showing that greater access can certainly lead to greater revenue and profits for those who embrace it. Definitely another worthwhile paper to read on the subject.
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ACTA
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The Recording Industry Association of America said on Monday that current U.S. copyright law is so broken that it “isn’t working” for content creators any longer.
RIAA President Cary Sherman said the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act contains loopholes that allow broadband providers and Web companies to turn a blind eye to customers’ unlawful activities without suffering any legal consequences.
“The DMCA isn’t working for content people at all,” he said at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum here. “You cannot monitor all the infringements on the Internet. It’s simply not possible. We don’t have the ability to search all the places infringing content appears, such as cyberlockers like [file-hosting firm] RapidShare.”
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The 10th round of negotiations on the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was held in Washington, D.C. from 16 – 20 August 2010, and was hosted by the United States of America. United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Deputy United States Trade Representative Miriam Sapiro welcomed the delegations and thanked them for all of their work in the negotiations.
Pandora: Internet on TV with Mouse, Keyboard and 3G
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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That is the question these days. Which, the most obvious answer to this question is yes. Whether this is a emphatic yes or a ho hum yes is, however, up to you. In any case, Linux is ready for prime time and here are three reasons why.
The first reason is that Linux can perform almost any computing task that either a Windows or OS-X machine is capable of. More importantly, Linux is also compatible with both Windows and OS-X environments. For instance, a document written in the OpenOffice Linux version can be opened in Windows Word. Likewise, a person using Evolution as an Linux email client can sync with Microsoft Exchange. Indeed, when it comes to tasks that the can’t be performed on Linux the list is now very short. As time goes along, that short list will disappear completely.
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May be that I have very little imagination or I’m very close minded about Windows (or perhaps both). May be that the real strength of Linux is that once you start using it, after the initial difficulties, you aren’t willing to go back fro no reason.
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Like Munich TFA describes a very gradual approach which requires much more work than is necessary. Lots of migrations are done very rapidly, say over a weekend, for projects that size. Extremadura did 80K PCs over a weekend. Things did not break because they had very little before and whatever they got was far superior. That’s an “easy” migration/leap. Having to treat every PC as unique in a system is much more likely in a small system because there is not a lot of redundancy whereas in a larger organization there may be groups of 50 or more users who can be migrated together.
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Kernel Space
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Kernel mode-setting (KMS) is useful for faster VT/X switching, VTs being always at the panel’s native resolution, the ability to thwart some security bugs in the X.Org Server (as shown earlier this week), presenting a cleaner and more flexible architecture, and allowing new and interesting projects to emerge (such as Plymouth and Wayland), but the benefits do not end there. When kernel mode-setting is combined with KDB, a Linux kernel debugger shell, you now have one powerful combination.
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Graphics Stack
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Yesterday was an exciting day for those Linux users interested in AMD’s open-source ATI driver work with the release of the Radeon HD 5000 series 2D/3D driver, Radeon HD 6000 series support getting underway, and many ATI R600 Gallium3D driver improvements over the past few days. If though you are a NVIDIA customer interested in open-source support, there’s great news for you today with the Nouveau driver that greatly improves the Gallium3D support.
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While X.Org Servger 1.9 was released less than a week ago (heck, it’s only been four days since releasing om time), the first interesting patch for X.Org Server 1.10 is already queued up and on the X.Org development mailing list for discussion. This patch, which was written by Tiago Vignatti and Fernando Carrijo, provides the “thread-ification” of the X Server input event generation code. Rather than being bound to the same thread as the X Server, the input event code with this patch is now running in its own thread, but this may only be the start of things to come with finally multi-threading the X.Org Server.
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Applications
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A customer service trouble ticketing (or help desk) is an information and assistance resource that helps the resolution of computer related problems. Companies seeking to offer better customer service often provide help desk support via the telephone, website, and or by email. Help desks may also be established simply for internal use, to provide help to a firm’s employees. The importance of the help desk cannot be overrated, and it represents a core part of a successful business.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.8 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD today. Bordeaux 2.0.8 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have updated firefox to 3.6.8, Updated to the latest winetricks release and fixed desktop shortcuts.
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Reviews
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Greenie Linux is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that provides a very user-friendly desktop, and is optimised for home users in Slovakia and Czech Republic. Because English is also supported, Greenie Linux is included in our coverage of new distros. This specific release, Geenie 7.1L, is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and features several imporvements such as the GreenieTree theme which is supported by new icons and wallpapers. A few new applications have been added as well including Ufraw, Fotoxx and Wine.
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Today we hit up our lightest of lightweight distros. It fits in 20MB less than Damn Small Linux, when installed uses 65MB of RAM, and boots in less than ten seconds (depending on hardware).
Yes. Today we try out Slitaz Cooking.
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Personally I think it is a brilliant execution of the super minimal distro. Yes it is lacking in some areas, and it is possibly one of the most limited-in-growth-potential distros out there, but let me say this – like any Linux, you can make this work for you.
If I read as overly generous I probably am, if you take the limitations into account that the builders of Slitaz had to work with you will realize that I feel very impressed. It is easy to come over as unfairly favoring Slitaz when compared to our writeup of Dreamlinux yesterday. They are two different beasts though – if you compare them directly Dreamlinux will win every time. Install them both on an old P11 with 64MB of RAM and Slitaz is the hands down winner.
For our application of finding something for Grandma and Mommy and their ancient computers we still like Linux Mint LXDE the best out of the six we tested so far.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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A live CD version of Mandriva 2010.1 XfceLive was released over the weekend. Please enjoy these screenshots of this live lightweight Mandriva release.
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Red Hat Family
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Brian Stevens, chief technology officer of Red Hat Inc., discusses the outlook for cloud computing.
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) rallied more than 1% on Monday on renewed speculation that the software company may be acquired by SAP.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A new video featuring footage of Canonical’s Ubuntu Unity interface has just been released to advertise the new netbook interface’s impressive new features.
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If you use or follow Ubuntu, a great way to see what’s happening somewhat behind the scenes is the Canonical Design Team site/blog.
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The compact, Linux-powered Pogoplug device has just gained a $29 WiFi adapter companion, which enables it to work wirelessly. The new Pogoplug Wireless Adapter appears to be a standard USB 802.11 b/g/n WiFi adapter of undisclosed origin and chipset, and works with all current Pogoplugs.
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Phones
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Android
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The XT720 is the highly anticipated follow-up to Motorola’s Milestone, the first Android 2.0+ device the firm released. Although we were relatively impressed with many of its key features in our review back in issue 87, it was let down by its excessive weight and bulk, which was largely attributed to its otherwise effective slide-out Qwerty keyboard. Other problems included a rather short battery life and a 5MP camera that ticked all the boxes on paper, but often left shots either blurred or washed out.
Motorola wouldn’t be one of the largest mobile phone manufacturers on the planet without being able to take on board user feedback, so we’re not that surprised to see that the XT720 addresses almost all of these problems in one way or another.
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Just desserts? Motorola has posted a timeline for when users of its Android-running smartphones can expect an OS upgrade. While all eyes are on “Froyo,” or Android version 2.2, some users will have to be happy with 2.0 and 2.1 — also known as “Éclair.”
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Tablets
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Google Chrome OS powered tablet may hit the market as soon as late November, says the blog Downloadsquad.
HTC, one of the major users of Google’s Android OS, is developing this tablet. Accoridng to reports another of Google’s close partner Verizon Wireless will be the carrier for the tablet.
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Google has started inviting developers to prepare their apps for the Chrome Web Store. The web store is rumored to go live with the arrival of first Chrome OS running tablet.
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A CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW in Berlin will see Viewsonic show its whole range of wares, including an Android tablet.
Better known as a display manufacturer and not as a dabbler in any other consumer electronics hardware, Viewsonic is branching out to join the Android tablet brigade.
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ViewSonic says it will introduce two new tablet computers next week at a Berlin tradeshow. An unnamed ten-inch model will boot into either Android or Windows, while the seven-inch ViewPad 7 will offer Android, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS, plus front- and rear-facing cameras, the company says.
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One of the new tablets will almost certainly be the much-rumoured Archos 32 internet tablet.
“The company will showcase five brand new Internet Tablets ranging touch screen from 2.8 to 10 inches featuring computing, communications and apps with the power of Android plus Archos’ legendary video quality will be shown for the first time,” stated the company.
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Last week we reported about a rumor that Toshiba will unleash a 10-inch Android Tablet. Today photos leaked of the Toshiba Smartpad on NotebookItalia. Toshiba has apparently planned to unveil the new SmartPad at the IFA 2010 next week.
The Toshiba Smartpad looks pretty sleek with its black surface and metal frame with rounded edges. The Toshiba Tablet has four buttons on one side of the touchscreen and features a webcam. HDMI and USB ports are also available on the Smartpad. No new information is available on the specifications. The rumors talk about Tegra 2 chipset.
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Borders is now taking pre-orders for two seven-inch Android tablets, the $200 Cruz Reader and the $300 Cruz Tablet, and says the first of the devices will ship by the end of this month. Both tablets offer conventional backlit color touchscreens, but the Reader is resistive while the Tablet is capacitive, the reseller says.
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According to Fortune, Open Source is slowly gaining acceptance in the corporate world. More and more corporates are beginning to see the merits of Open Source and have started embracing it. But all these changes didn’t happened overnight. It was rather a painful journey. ‘Sharing’ was never a good thing for Corporates until recently. These changes were largely brought about by a string of Open Source success stories that happened over the years.
GNU/Linux
GNU/Linux is probably the biggest thing ever happened with Open Source. Richard Stallman, founder of Open Source movement, spearheaded a project to build a “complete Unix-compatible software system” based entirely of free software(free as in freedom).
Project was called GNU(GNU is Not Unix). During the same time Linus Torvalds built a Kernel(which is otherwise known as the heart of an opearting system) and made it Open Source. He named it Linux. The Linux kernel and GNU tools(libraries, compilers, text editors etc) combined to become GNU/Linux operating system(popularly known as ‘Linux’).
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Oracle
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However, the time between updates make increase by a large margin.
That’s what I take from the current problems that are causing fear and loathing in the open source camp. Many are afraid that Oracle is going to become as big a problem for OpenOffice as it has for OpenSolaris.
The difference is that OpenOffice has safety in numbers, being estimated at garnering a full 10% of the office productivity market. OpenSolaris is a miniscule part of the overall small operating systems market, usually categorized as “Other”.
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I do use alternatives of OpenOffice.org from time to time. KDE Office and some components of GNOME work (GNOME also depends on OpenOffice.org). I use LyX for some writing projects. KWord includes the database-merge capability so useful for writing students’ reports. Everything else in OpenOffice.org, I have good substitutes like GNUmeric, phpMyAdmin, Scribus, Inkscap, Dia, etc. but they are not so well integrated. Could we survive a catastrophe with OpenOffice.org? Yes, but it would be a major disruption. In order to minimize disruption it is important to explore options long before a crisis emerges. I have frequent opportunities in my teaching but others will have to make a determined effort to explore GNU/Linux for functionality outside of OpenOffice.org.
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How much of the Linux penetration was affected when Microsoft came out with ‘baseless’ accusations that Linux infringes on its patents (I did a long story back then for LINUX For You magazine). Microsoft never showed the numbers. All they got was to ‘force’ some Linux companies to sign cross licensing deal with them and extort some money from Linux.
[...]
Even if Oracle is technically right (which Google disagrees with), this move has damaged the Open Source community. Even if Oracle has emerged as a bad-boy for the Open Source community, Android will continue to thrive.
The FUD failed to work with Linux’ patent infringement accusation. After Linux, Microsoft accused Android of infringing on their patents – it did not work either. I don’t see this FUD to be working either.
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As many have seen, Oracle has elected to stop contributing to OpenSolaris. This decision is, to put it bluntly, stupid. Indeed, I would (and did) liken it to L. Paul Bremer‘s decision to disband the Iraqi military after the fall of Saddam Hussein: beyond merely a foolish decision borne out of a distorted worldview, it has created combatants unnecessarily. As with Bremer’s infamous decision, the bitter irony is that the new combatants were formerly the strongest potential allies — and in Oracle’s case, it is the community itself.
As it apparently needs to be said, one cannot close an open source project — one can only fork it. So contrary to some reports, Oracle has not decided to close OpenSolaris, they have actually decided to fork it. That is, they have (apparently) decided that it is more in their interest to compete with the community that to cooperate with it — that they can in fact out-innovate the community. This confidence is surprising (and ironic) given that it comes exactly at the moment that the historic monopoly on Solaris talent has been indisputably and irrevocably broken — as most recently demonstrated by the departure of my former colleague, Adam Leventhal.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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As the Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, we all know Eben Moglen as the legal voice of free software. He is that and more.
A professor of Law and legal history at the Columbia University, Moglen preaches what he practices — free software and the role it plays in improving education. As part of Bangalore’s Christ University’s conference on distributed education, Moglen delivered a (recorded) talk on how he uses Wikis to teach his Law courses.
[...]
This collaboration extends beyond the physical confines of the classroom. Moglen illustrates this with an example of how his students in New York collaborated with a student in Lodz, Poland, who was working on a 13th century jury question. Moglen’s American students located and scanned documents and made them available to the Polish student on the Wiki, who then with his fellow classmates, translated the documents from medieval Latin into English. “Without Wiki technology [this collaboration] would have taken months to arrange, and would in fact never come to be all”, he remarks.
Moglen finds a natural link between Wikis and his third course, on Law of the New Society Connected by the Internet. Students in this course use the Wiki as a kind of blog to exchange opinions and conduct academic disputation, by adding links and pointers to existing material, fill in additional examples, and references, and comment on the lectures and on their own work.
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Government
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What was interesting was a shift from the attitude at last years meeting of: “We can use open source software in the military?” to this years vibe of “How can we use, modify, sustain, and create more open source software around the military?” In the last year, since the update of DoD Open Source policy (see the 2009 DoD Open Source Memo), there has been an important shift in understanding that the benefits of being open vastly outweigh the hassles and foibles of closed and gated source code development–especially when the U.S. taxpayer is picking up the tab. Roadblock issues were brought up, such as:
- What are the best practices for how to run unclassified code communities for a classified client?
- How do we create, fund, and sustain development of open source?
- How do we generate more ideas on how to fix and deal with the government’s acquisition system?
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In the United States, the White House has led the march towards open source and free software by switching the http://www.whitehouse.gov/ website to the Drupal content management system. The government of the United Kingdom has decided to follow their lead. http://data.gov.uk/ acts as a central information repository for many of the UK’s government agencies. The government recently converted the site to a very clean and very polished Drupal website. The main effort of the site is to provide the British constituency with transparent access to data on the actions and statistics of various government bodies. For example, I visited the site and navigated to the Department of Energy section. There was a plentiful store of data on energy consumption, energy prices, C02 emissions, and energy trends. Overall, the site is very well done and it could be a model for information dissemination in smaller communities and other national governments.
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Openness/Sharing
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The open source way is going mainstream. If you have been involved in open source over the years, you have a very valuable skill set to offer your employer. You might need to use the word “co-creation” instead of “community” and talk about networked organizations, but this report shows that you have learned things that are greatly valued in the marketplace. Individuals who know how to create communities based on collaboration and meritocracy are in high demand.
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Almost all over the world, students are either back to school or preparing to do so. With this comes the headache of getting text books for the semester and its attendant costs. For a myriad of reasons, costs of school text books, especially those of higher learning have skyrocketed. If you are looking to cut costs (and who doesn’t anyway?), then the following 2 sites should come in handy.
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In a rare victory for Google and Yahoo Argentina, an appeals court has cleared the companies of defamation for including sex-related Web sites in their search results for an Argentine entertainer.
The appeals court overturned a lower-court ruling that had found the companies liable for defaming the entertainer, Virginia Da Cunha.
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Science
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A U.S. district court issued a preliminary injunction Monday stopping federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research in a slap to the Obama administration’s new guidelines on the sensitive issue.
The court ruled in favor of a suit filed in June by researchers who said human embryonic stem cell research involves the destruction of human embryos.
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It’s a mystery that presented itself unexpectedly: The radioactive decay of some elements sitting quietly in laboratories on Earth seemed to be influenced by activities inside the sun, 93 million miles away.
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Security/Aggression
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“It is an ongoing project that we started about 18 months ago,” Grugq told eWEEK. “Originally it started when Fyodor investigated some service offerings from Russian hacker forums for a specific project that I was working on. It turned out to be extremely interesting and amusing, so we discussed doing more long-term monitoring on the forums. It grew from there into what is now a continuous monitoring program.”
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The arrest warrant issued for Wikileaks’ editor-in-chief Julian Assange has been quashed by Stockholm Chief Prosecutor Eva Finné, who said in a press release “I am of the opinion that there is no reason to suspect that he has committed a rape.” The press officer of the Swedish Prosecution Authority says that he is still suspected of molestation, and that neither police nor prosecutors have yet been able to contact Assange. Assange had this morning said that he was going to hand himself in to police but also said that the accusations against him were false.
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Reliable sources tell us that the Election Commission of India had pressurized the Maharashtra police to press for Hari Prasad’s arrest on charges of stealing the EVM used for exposing the vulnerability of EVMs. The ECI’s intent becomes evident from the fact that they had instructed the police not to share a copy of the FIR with Hari Prasad to deny him an opportunity to move an anticipatory bail application. Hari Prasad did mange to get a copy of the FIR later but decided to court arrest if necessary rather than seek anticipatory bail.
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Finance
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Goldman’s first round of questioning began in the wake of the $85 billion federal bailout of the American International Group, the insurance giant, in 2008. Goldman owned insurance policies from A.I.G. on some of its mortgage investments. Analysts, journalists and federal authorities all raised questions about whether Goldman unfairly benefited from taxpayer funds used to bail out A.I.G.
Such questions were fueled by the résumé of a prime architect of the bailout, the Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., who had formerly led Goldman. (Mr. Paulson has said that he never took action to specifically benefit Goldman, seeking only to buttress the financial system as a whole.)
Like Toyota, Goldman has had internal debates about how forthcoming to be in confronting sharp questioning, with some insiders advocating a swift, unabashed disclosure of its dealings with A.I.G. to avoid inflaming public anger, according to people familiar with the deliberations who requested anonymity because the talks were confidential.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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ONLINE HUMAN RIGHTS GROUP the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has warned that a bill working its way through the California legislature will make it a crime to impersonate someone online in order to “harm” that person.
The law will make it illegal to create a Facebook or Twitter account with someone else’s name, and then use that account to embarrass that person.
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Unless a ring of terrorists is embedded entirely within some MNC, and is using its email and messaging system to plan terrorist attacks or other crimes using corporate BlackBerries, such a service cut would not be likely to prevent the planning or execution of any attacks. What it would do, however, is effectively cut off India from the global financial system. The ability of banks, insurance companies, law firms, consultancies and other professional service enterprises to operate around the globe depends entirely on the flow of confidential intra-firm communications. People cannot do business anywhere unless they can be sure that their firm’s business communications are not being overheard by competitors or other parties using breaches in communications networks. So every such enterprise relies upon mechanisms that ensure complete confidentiality on which the movement of trillions of crores every day in the world economy depend. BlackBerry provides one portion of that network to a large subset of that market. Any country which shuts off encrypted BlackBerry communications has shut down its place in the global economy.
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The facial recognition software that will put a name to every photograph in the internet
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Actel Corporation announced the addition of Red Hat Linux and Windows 7 support to its Libero IDE (integrated design environment) for FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays). The SmartFusion FPGAs are also being treated to a tiny “Unison” Linux, capable of running in as little as 1KB of RAM, the company says.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
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This Wednesday a security blog reported that several rogue sites are in operation which aim to pull in people who were aiming to reach The Pirate Bay, but accidentally entered the URL with typos. While this kind of activity is nothing new, there is a more interesting detail being overlooked. One of the companies behind the scheme is trying to register the Pirate Bay trademark in the United States.
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Intellectual property has become such a hot topic that it needs to be doused with some history. Strange as it may sound, this is an argument developed convincingly in Lewis Hyde’s “Common as Air,” an eloquent and erudite plea for protecting our cultural patrimony from appropriation by commercial interests.
[...]
The same attitude lay behind Jefferson’s description of knowledge as “common property.” It pervaded the entire Enlightenment, when men discussed experiments and ideas in correspondence networks and a chain of academies that extended from St. Petersburg to Philadelphia. Above all, they communicated their thoughts through print. Letters, learned societies and the printed word came together in the creation of a Republic of Letters, an egalitarian world of knowledge open to everyone — at least in principle, although in practice it was restricted to a literate elite.
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Copyrights
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As such, it often feels like copyright has become a crutch. Because content creators use it to earn some part of their living, they start relying on it for all of their earnings, and fail to flex their “creative business models” muscle and let those atrophy, as they increasingly rely on the gov’t granted monopoly privilege of copyright to act as a de facto business model.
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The Times solution is an amendment to the law which would make it possible after a good faith search and undertaking to pay should the performer surface.
Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide
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Send this to a friend
08.23.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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As she is 37 weeks pregnant and cannot move much, I found the box and checked it, but the camera driver was missing. For a split second, a flash of an ancient fear traveled through my body. My wife saw my face and calmly said to me: “Maybe I lost it…” I immediately understood my wife’s peace. SHE NEVER USES WINDOWS ANYWAY. If ALL the drivers are lost, what is the problem? No worry whatsoever. A Mandriva install gave her everything she needs to use her computer.
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2007 was a different world. Linux was taking a harsh beating on all sides. While its smartphone OS market share was growing, that growth was far from rapid. Symbian held a commanding lead and, while iOS was still comparatively tiny, the astounding success of the first iPhone had everyone anticipating Apple dominance in the near future.
In the realm of servers, a traditional Linux strongpoint, the open-source OS was starting to see a reversal of fortunes. Windows Server was ascendant, and over in the desktop market Linux barely even counted as a player. Open source failed in the world of big gray and black boxes, and for a time it seemed as if it might die out as a viable OS choice altogether. Articles fretting over the limited future of the open source movement feared that it was doomed to be marginalized at best.
Then along came Android.
Netbooks started to gain traction. Then they started to give way to something even more convenient (and sexy); the iPad.
Now Linux is ascendent, while pundits fret over the death of the desktop. Consumers want to be mobile now. Apple addicted the whole damn world with that first hit of iPhone, and now we’re jonesin’ for any sexy, slim piece of tech with a touchscreen and decent wireless connectivity.
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Desktop
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Remember 3ddesktop? Before Compiz was adopted as the messiah of the Linux desktop experience, 3ddesktop was the way cool kids spun their work environments and dazzled their Windows-using friends.
And it was pretty cool — it never was nearly the catalog of intricate bells and whistles that Compiz is, but it did a decent job in the eye candy department.
Of course, it did require a little video muscle to use. But considering its last update was in 2005, you could — and still can — get away with running it on a single-core machine with a ground-level video card that has a little acceleration to it. Even something as underpowered as this should do it.
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As a matter of fact, what IS the right market for Linux?
The mythical Average User? No way. The average user wants a computer that performs the tasks set for it. Those people are in the market for a computer, a real, physical machine, a tangible object with a keyboard (real or imaged), a mouse (or trackpad/trackball/touchscreen), and a display screen. The Average User scarcely notices, and certainly cares less, what sequence of binary commands course through the CPU to translate input into action.
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These guys easily have 35,000 square inches of LCD monitors running Ubuntu desktops, displaying in real time thousands of graphs, metrics, monitors, and statuses. Hundreds of multi-head desktops running 8.04 to 10.04, attached to 17″ to 42″ Samsung LCDs, Ubuntu logos everywhere I turned!
There is no doubt that across both Server and Desktop, Ubuntu is proving itself in enterprise environments. Linux is here, there, everywhere, and Ubuntu is a very important player, helping make that happen. I take great pride in what we’re achieving together!
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I chose Fedora 13 and I am extremely happy that I did. Not only has it breathed new life into these PCs which were at crawling speeds with XP, but everything is working much cleaner and now I can rest assured that they will be virus and spyware free for quite some time. I’m not going to forget that Linux does have viruses and spyware, but it’s so uncommon that there’s no sense in worrying around the clock about it.
In my cases, the various software that was required was already being used in Windows, with the exception of MS Office, which I have them using OpenOffice 3.2 as a replacement. There have been some minor formatting issues at first, with documents that were imported from MS Office. These will be corrected along the way as the documents are used. But other programs such as Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. are equivalent across multiple platforms, making the transition easier.
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Server
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Big Blue has wanted you to run Linux and AIX on your OS/400 and i platforms for the better part of a decade now, and maybe you have and maybe you haven’t. Maybe Linux is now commercial enough that you feel like ditching Windows for certainly infrastructure and application serving jobs. If you do, and you have some latent capacity sitting around in your Power6, Power6+, and selected Power7 machines, then IBM has a deal for you.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week on the show: OpenSolaris is dead, Oracle sues Google over Android, Canonical unveils multitouch for Ubuntu, an Android game review and much more…
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Kernel Space
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Another week, another -rc. I didn’t really ever get around to announcing -rc1 when I released it, and we had enough niggling small problems (like a memory corruptor in the HID layer that ended up
causing some random problems etc) there that I never got around to fixing that lack of announcement. And hopefully -rc2 is a good point to correct the lack of earlier commentary.
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It has been a while since my original announcement of systemd. Here’s a little status update, on what happened since then.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I still have a very big collection of DOS games that I keep dearly and safely stored and backed up in several locations, including the original game saves. See you around.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Klipper is the KDE 4.5 clipboard and it is not your average clipboard tool. Unlike most operating system clipboards, Klippy gives the user quick and easy access to not just the last object copied, but multiple objects copied. Klipper is so powerful a clipboard tool, you will wonder why other operating systems don’t mimic the features and functionality. Klipper is also so powerful that most users won’t take advantage of it’s full range of features.
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GNOME Desktop
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Linux: W7 Theme is a free script that skins your Linux desktop with a familiar Windows 7 look and feel.
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The Debian desktop is pretty much Gnome with some Debian wallpaper. The default Main Menu icon is the Gnome foot.
To replace the Gnome foot with the Debian Swirl, replace the start-here.svg or start-here.png image with an appropriate Debian Swirl image.
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As everyone who ever tried it knows that trying to count how many people use a particular Linux distribution is almost impossible. Now, Rick Lehrbaum, founder of LinuxDevices and a friend and former editor of mine, has tried a new and interesting way to count Linux users on his new site, LinuxTrends: look at Google search results for the various Linux distributions.
Some of the results aren’t surprising. Ubuntu has become far more popular than the other mainstream distributions of 2004/2005: SUSE Linux, Fedora, Debian and Mandrake/Mandriva.
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Reviews
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Obviously, this is not a distro that most people should use. It’s a curiosity created by an oppressive government, and it’s a travesty that the open nature of Linux was used in this rather perverse manner. It’s a good example of how even the best things in life can be taken and distorted.
I don’t recommend it to anyone, beyond simply being a curiosity. Distrohoppers might have a bit of fun installing it to play with, but it will also creep them out. It certainly creeped me out while writing this review. So perhaps it’s best if nobody else installs it.
One thing puzzles me though; the North Koreans are usually heavy on the propaganda stuff (see the Vice Guide to North Korea videos at the beginning of the review). And yet, they appear to have blown a major propaganda opportunity. They could have released this distro around the world in different languages, with lots of propaganda built into it for each language. Instead, they released it only in Korean. Odd.
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Day Five. If you are wondering, yes we have had other things going on this weekend. Among the things I did was try and get Dreamlinux 3.5 working for Elzje, and I spent my Friday evening with my friend Renier Meyer painting a wall in his new house and eating epic pizza.
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The Salix OS developers do meet their stated goals: making a distribution for “lazy Slackers” rather than one that is generally easy to use for everyone. Some other Slackware derivatives, such as VectorLinux and Zenwalk, have done more to make their distributions friendly to Linux newcomers at the cost of straying further away from their Slackware roots. Salix OS developers made a conscious choice to go in a different direction. In some ways Salix OS reminds me of VectorLinux four or five years ago: it definitely takes me more time to install, configure and tweak it to suit my needs than a typical Linux distro does but, much like VectorLinux back then, the end results are definitely worth the effort. How much effort depends very much on the hardware used, as the very different results with my two systems illustrate.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Some people will tell you fragmentation is one of the main things that is holding back Linux from desktop adoption. Not having a unified name, packaging system, or heck even desktop environment often confuses new users and puts them into overload – Too much choice can be a bad thing.
Android is currently the only real player in the Linux mobile market. Now don’t get me wrong, I am glad Android jumped in record time to right near the top of the smart phone market. I’m also glad that through this success it has put the power of Linux into the hands of millions of people (many of whom are none the wiser about their penguin powered device).
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Android
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Manufacturing upstart PocketBook is clearly still gung ho about e-readers, judging by the five new models it has announced will be released at IFA in September, which include a pair of entry-level ProBook 602 and 902 units, as well as the ProBook 603 and 903 premium units. The 60x designated models sport 6-inch screens, while the 90x models have a bigger 9.7-inch. All models will feature 2GB of internal storage, a Linux-based OS, and include WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity.
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Sub-notebooks
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In one of my previous articles I talked about the use of Linux as a free alternative to Windows. Now most people choose to use Windows on computers mainly because of compliance, as some software/games run only on Windows. We wouldn’t even argue that some software are better functionally than their Linux-based alternative. No contests for guessing the superior office suite between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.
Since the last two years, the inception of Netbooks has brought in a new wave of affordable computers that can be easily carried around anywhere. Netbooks were not designed to replace laptops and are meant to be used for basic tasks. Tasks such as browsing the net, working with office productivity suites, watching a movie or playing a few songs etc. You really don’t want to try and run 3D MAX or encode HD videos on it.
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Last week SimpleGeo and their partner Stamen Design jointly released a project they have been working on together called Polymaps. It’s absolutely beautiful and a stunning example of what you can do with the SimpleGeo API. They’ve released the Polymaps source code on GitHub so any developer can quickly see how the API is used, play around with real production code, and modify the base examples for their own use.
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What do you think? Are proprietary companies taking over the open source world? Are they, bit by bit, applying the divide and conquer strategy with a future outcome that open source as yet cannot see? Are open source defences crumbling because they only think about the here and now while proprietary companies look far beyond the horizon? So many questions and I have no answers.
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After more than a year of research and development, the Opencast project under the patronage of the University of California Berkeley has presented the Matterhorn 1.0 lecture recording system. The German (virtUOS) Centre for Information Management and Virtual Teaching at the University of Osnabrück was a major contributor to this undertaking.
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Events
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Seven open source experts will form the judging panel of the 2010 Open Source Awards, due to be held in Wellington on November 9th.
The panel includes two New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS) Presidents, current President Rachel Hamilton-Williams and past-President Don Christie; Foo Camp founder Nat Torkington; WebFund Chairman, Dave Moskovitz; Richard Wyles, Director of Flexible Learning Network/Mahara; and Telecom Mobile Engineer Amber Craig.
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The staff behind the Free Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) have just announced that the 2011 conference will take place on the 5th and 6th of February. This is the first weekend of February, which is right around the time that the other FOSDEMs have taken place. Like always, this event will be taking place in Brussels, Belgium.
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Oracle
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As it had previously threatened, the OpenSolaris Governance Board (OGB) has now resigned. The dissolution motion was proposed and passed unopposed in a fourteen minute long meeting of the OGB.
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BSD
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Gnash
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We just released an improved GNU Flash player, Gnash 0.8.8. Gnash plays SWF (Shockwave Flash) files compatible with the Adobe Flash player. Gnash is portable software released under the GNU GPLv3. It runs on GNU/Linux, embedded GNU + Linux systems, and BSD, including x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and 64-bit systems. It comes with a standalone player as well as a browser plugin compatible with Firefox, Chrome, Konqueror, and all Gecko-based browsers.
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So is it worth using Gnash over the proprietary Adobe Flash Player? I would say: not yet, but Gnash is taking huge steps forward and soon we should have a viable open source Flash Player alternative that can do everything Adobe’s Flash does, and with some actual Linux support, specially now that Adobe discontinued its Flash Player 10.1 64bit for Linux.
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Government
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The Guideline on public procurement of Open Source Software, was revised in June 2010. The latest version includes references to recent procurement policies developed by Spain and Malta and to this year’s approval by Italy’s constitutional court on the country’s Piedmont regional administration procurement law.
Both Spain and Malta this year adopted policies that specify that when their public organisations distribute open source applications, they will by default use the European Union Public Licence (EUPL).
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In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.
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Security/Aggression
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A few months back, a research report came out noting that e-voting machines in India were not secure. I had seen it at the time, but considering how many stories we’ve seen of e-voting machines with security problems, I let it pass and didn’t write it up. However, the story has just taken a distressing turn. One of the researchers, Hari Prasad, who had obtained the e-voting machine from an anonymous source in the first place, has been arrested and taken into custody because he will not reveal who gave him the machine…
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If mine were truly a free country, US police wouldn’t wield such immense power or employ such aggressive tactics against their own citizenry – a militarisation of our police forces that started with the war on drugs and intensified after 9/11.
Consider: can you invent a realistic scenario wherein you shoot a man dead; justify it with a story witnesses contradict; confiscate any surveillance video; claim a “glitch” makes it impossible to show the video to anyone else – all while enjoying the support of state legal apparatus?
Police in Las Vegas did that last month, after they shot Erik Scott seven times as he exited a Costco. Cops say Scott pointed a gun at them; witnesses say Scott’s licensed weapon was in a concealed holster, and five of those seven shots hit him in the back. The confiscated surveillance video might settle the question; too bad about that glitch.
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The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was himself the subject of a rapidly spreading online story when news cascaded across the internet for several hours at the weekend mistakenly saying he was being sought in Sweden on rape charges.
Before Stockholm’s chief prosecutor made clear on Saturday afternoon that Assange was in fact neither charged with rape nor due to be arrested, the story had spread, generating more than 1,200 articles, available through internet news search, that received more than 1m hits.
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Thirty minutes after the police became involved, they decided to let her collect her belongings and board her plane.
“I was shaking,” she says. “I was almost in tears.”
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This isn’t a book for armchair war junkies. It’s about what Wilfred Owen called “the pity of war”. The centre and the pity of Jim Frederick’s account is the murder of the Janabis, an Iraqi family, and the rape of their 14-year-old daughter by four US soldiers. The most chilling aspect of the crime was the casual manner in which it was carried out. It was almost a jape – something to break the boredom of endless hours at a checkpoint. The soldiers did it because they had the power to do it; they didn’t need a reason why – almost the invasion of Iraq in microcosm.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Speculation that government ministers are far more concerned about a future supply crunch than they have admitted has been fuelled by the revelation that they are canvassing views from industry and the scientific community about “peak oil”.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is also refusing to hand over policy documents about “peak oil” – the point at which oil production reaches its maximum and then declines – under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, despite releasing others in which it admits “secrecy around the topic is probably not good”.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Australia faces days of uncertainty and political horse-trading after prime minister Julia Gillard acknowledged that neither the ruling Labor party nor the opposition conservative coalition had won an outright majority in the weekend’s election.
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The coalition government is plunged into a major row today over its commitment to human rights amid claims that it will scrap the Foreign Office’s landmark annual assessment of abuses across the world.
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While everyone is concerned about privacy violations from Facebook Places, government agencies may be using powerful new technology to violate 4th-Ammendment protection against unreasonable searches.
Here’s what the 4th Amendment says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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We’re used to the logic of copyright. Movies, music, and pharmaceuticals all use some form of patent or copyright protection. The idea is simple: if people can’t profit from innovation, they won’t innovate. So to encourage the development of stuff we want, we give the innovators something very valuable—exclusive access to the profit from their innovations. We’ve so bought into the logic that we allow companies to patent human genes.
And companies love copyright. They love it so much they persuaded Congress to pass the Sonny Bono Act, which extended individual copyright protections to the life of the author, plus another 70 years; and corporate copyrights to 120 years from creation, or 95 years from publication, whichever is earlier. That’s an absurdly long time, and it belies the original point of patents: does anyone seriously believe that a 40-year-old with a money-making idea is going to hold back because someone can mimic it 20 years after he dies?
At a certain point, copyrights stop protecting innovation and begin protecting profits. They scare off future inventors who want to take a 60-year-old idea and use it as the foundation to build something new and interesting. That’s the difficulty of copyrights, patents, and other forms of intellectual protection. Too little, and the first innovation won’t happen. Too much, and the second innovation—the one relying on the first—will be stanched.
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ACTA
Sorting Algorithms
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Send this to a friend
08.22.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Michael Pope is a pragmatic person by nature – a developer who, before he sets out on a task, takes sufficient care to create a soft-landing in case it is needed.
Hence, when he was asked by his employer to convert a small accounting firm from Windows to Linux, it is not surprising that his methods embodied his whole approach to things in general, and computing in particular.
[...]
He is quick to point out that the cost savings of converting to Linux will be obvious after using it for a year. “The conversion itself will most likely cost money but in the end it will be more stable, faster and more efficient,” he adds.
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That is, most certainly, the question. It’s hard to draw any sort of conclusion on such a topic because it’s a very subjective issue. If you have not used any of the more recent releases of a Linux distribution you really have no business making a comparison. So…if you really want to draw a conclusion for yourself you need to break down and install a recently released distribution on a machine, use it for a week or so, and THEN compare it to what you normally use. Once you have done that, you can draw as many conclusions as you want. Until then, don’t try to say you know FOR SURE that Windows is more user friendly than Linux.
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With the removal of Other OS, everything changed. A feature was lost, and now it appears that Sony’s previously unhackable machine is defeated through unrelated means. I’m skeptical of OzModChips’ solution, which costs $170, until it’s verified by an independent source, but if it’s legitimate, why should Sony pretend that removing Other OS keeps the Playstation 3′s integrity intact?
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That feature was mostly used by Linux users to use the powerful machine as a regular PC as well as wired supercomputers. In the last couple of year while the feature was active there we no security breach or cracking reported on the console.
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Desktop
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These generous car dealers have asked to remain anonymous and I understand that. Often when I donate to things I believe in, I don’t particularly want any recognition. Just getting the job done is enough for us.
We will be doing some bulk ordering of laptop and desktop RAM if this works out for us. We will also use the money to purchase decent video cards and hard drives.
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Kernel Space
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After writing to the drive for an hour straight, the enclosure is warm but not hot, and after removing the drive from the enclosure, the drive itself is warm; this is compared to the Seagate 7200.12s in my RAID 5 array which could burn you at this point.
Many drives fail in enclosures because they overheat; I don’t think this will happen due to Vantec’s thick aluminum design in the NexStar series enclosures, and the fact that the HW203WI has low power usage.
After formatting with ext4, the file system uses 29GB out of 1.82TB total. Its kind of funny when I’ve owned drives smaller than the space consumed by an empty file system.
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Applications
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In this article I am going to take you to different level of system information.To know more about internals and methods . I will touch few thing which is essential to operate on such system.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Valve has taken a Left 4 Dead-style shotgun to rumours that it is working on a Linux compatible version of its Steam platform.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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So you’ve followed the latest series on KDE 4.5 (see Ghacks KDE 4.5 content) and you are now using the spectacular latest release from the KDE team. You want to use Compiz, but quickly realize that it is not necessary as KDE has it’s own built-in compositing effects. What you will find is that the built-in KDE compositing is not like Compiz – but it is comparable and much easier to use. And the fact that it is built-in, ensures you will have less issues with integration.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Recently it became clear that Mandriva was once again in serious financial trouble. Mandriva 2010.1 was even delayed because of that, although not much explanation was given. In the end the company was saved by a new investor, but how things will involve in the more long-term, remains unclear.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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The folks behind Kubuntu Linux have decided to drop the separate Netbook Edition once Ubuntu and Kubuntu 10.10 are released in a few months. Instead, netbook-friendly code will be baked into the main operating system and Kubuntu will automatically determine the best settings to use for your computer upon installation.
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Are you a hacker? Artist? Programmer? Do you just like having tons and tons of tiny, easily mod-able computers lying around your house? If any of these things describe you, the Nanonote might be up your alley. Gearlog reports that this mini-computer boots Linux out-of-box and can be loaded via USB drive with the OS of your choice.
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The LogLogic solution is a hardware appliance that to date has used a Linux base — actually a custom derivative of the CentOS Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, Manley said.
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Developers now have the option for Linux-based embedded design when using SmartFusion intelligent mixed signal FPGAs. With continued broadening of its ecosystem, Actel continues to provide ease of adoption of SmartFusion devices for embedded designers.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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We had some great MeeGo activities and sessions at LinuxCon North America in Boston last week. Many people who are participating in the MeeGo community were at LinuxCon, and there were also plenty of other people who haven’t been involved, but were interested in learning more about MeeGo.
We had an Intel booth at the event that was focused entirely on MeeGo, and we had some really cool MeeGo shirts that we gave out to attendees. The MeeGo handset and netbook demos were very popular, and most people seemed pleasantly surprised by the responsiveness and the general feel of using MeeGo. Linux Magazine even got Derek on video demonstrating the handset and a video of me doing a netbook demo.
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Android
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But Yahoo isn’t exactly in bed with Google now. Yahoo still touts many of its efforts for Apple’s iOS platform, and appears to be investing in more apps for that system.
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Dell unveiled the Android-based Streak in May. Though it is being marketed as a tablet, it only boasts a five-inch screen and is capable of making phone calls, so it is really more like a large smartphone. The Streak also includes built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and available 3G, which will handle e-mail, texting, instant messages, and voice calls.
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Google’s Android mobile phone operating system (OS) is set to pip Research in Motion (RIM) to second place in the global market by the end of this year, more than 18 months earlier than expected.
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All models will feature 2GB of internal storage, a Linux-based OS, and include WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. However, the higher-end versions also gain 3G connectivity and a Wacom touchscreen.
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Tablets
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Tablets, tablets and more tablets – it seems like thats all we’ve been hearing about as of late. Of course, it’s not without reason because, as I’ve said in the past, Apple has proven that the consumer market is very interested in such devices with their iPad. Add Apple’s high sales numbers to the fact that around 14% of Americans plan to buy a tablet next year according to a recent survey which equals out to around 27 million people and you can see why the industry is abuzz over the hot new form factor.
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We announced our Open Source program three weeks ago. Yet our open sourcing process will take another one year. Why the delay, you may wonder. There are a number of reasons – code reorganization, resourcing, documentation, and the biggest one of them all , complying with the various open source and commercial licenses we are using in our codebase as we open source it.
Our good friends at Palamida scanned our entire code, and came up with a list of 75 instances where SonATA software was using external third party code – parts that warranted further investigation. It was a pleasure to have Jeff Luszcz from Palamida walk the software team through the entire list.
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Looking at all of these systems management tools, it can be difficult to parse any real advantage between these companies. Zenoss, perhaps the best known of this group, but their product offerings seem little different from those of, say, Hyperic’s. To add to the confusion, products in this space can even include each other: the GWOS and Hyperic offerings incorporate Nagios for event tracking, and both Zenoss’ and GWOS’ products make use of the Multi Router Traffic Grapher for resource graphing.
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Oracle
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From here on out, Illumos and Oracle Solaris diverge. The funny thing is, based on the calls I’ve had today, I could hardly be more optimistic about the future of illumos and the code base that was formerly called Solaris. Even more talent is getting behind this effort every day.
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OracleVM, which is based on open source Xen virtual machine software, can be packaged with templates from Oracle and deployed using Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder software that makes it easier to deploy Oracle applications on top of OracleVM that can run on multiple tiers of Intel or Sparc servers.
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Healthcare
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It’s a truism that open source software development (and perhaps all software development ) is best driven by the people who will ultimately use it. So we can understand why VistA meets certain essential needs — such as allowing an emergency room doctor enter an order within a few seconds — that are missed by most proprietary software in the health care field. But I find it surprising that the system could work so well when each piece was developed in isolation. Perhaps the software used can provide a clue.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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That’s how it works with software. We have a computer to “cook” for us, but we usually don’t write the “recipes” – the software. We get it from various sources, either for free or for cash — ranging from single digits for your cool mobile app and up to millions for high-quality corporate software.
Either way, we don’t know what the code looks like; we only see the output. That’s why it’s called closed software. We can’t learn from it; we hope it does what we want, but it might have bugs or do something differently than we expected. We’re largely stuck with what we got.
Free as in beer, free as in freedom
When software is given away for free, like those free apps, that’s fun — like free beer. However, the software is still closed, and you can’t understand how it does what it does or how to change it. But when you can see the code, and you’re allowed to change it and redistribute it — then it is called free software — free as in freedom.
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Today is a fine day, and while I have shared this elsewhere, I thought I would take the time to share this here. In many ways the struggle of the North American Indian remains to this day one to simply be recognized as and treated with common human dignity, and there remains I think an interesting and potentially important role for free software in this process, especially in overcoming some of the vast deprivations of both past and present faced by the communities in the captive nations. Given that I was asked several years ago to help speak for the people of the Lakota nation, it seemed appropriate to do so presently here once more.
Well before considering free software as an economic model, some of the captive nations in North America have tried many different things in the past to create self-sustaining economic development, including of course casinos and call centers. Some have tried meat packing for freedom. Yet, unemployment remains high, over 80% for some communities, such as on the Lakotah reservations in North America. Similarly, per capita income often remains below the poverty line. On the Lakotah reservations, per capita income in fact is less than $4,000 annually, and average life expectancy is now under 47 years. These are not statistics from communities in Haiti , but rather from within the United States itself. The exact story is of course different for each of the captive nations, but the overall results of even the best of these efforts have usually been rather bleak.
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Openness/Sharing
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The fact that I rely on openly accessible materials led Access Copyright supporter John Degen to describe my approach as a “shockingly arbitrary and irresponsible policy that will only place artificial (and highly political) limits on education.” Degen then implies that the choice is based on attempting to find cheap materials or ones that are consistent with my political leanings.
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At Peer 2 Peer University, we pride ourselves in being an open education community. I have a fairly good idea what it means for content or software to be open, but I find the complex human dynamics that make up open communities much more intriguing than the arguments over which license is the right one. And so, over the past year, I have enjoyed exploring what it means to be an open community, by helping shape the developments at P2PU. What are the structural differences between open communities and closed ones? What is good leadership in open communities? How can groups of volunteers make decisions efficiently and get stuff done? In a nutshell, how does open governance work? I want to better understand these questions and find answers that help P2PU remain the healthy, vibrant and wonderful community it is today, and enable the next phase of expected growth.
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Open Access/Content
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Pretty much everybody in government should read this fantastic New York Times article Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s. On one hand the article is a window into what has gone wrong with science – about how all to frequently a process that used to be competitive but open, and problem focused has become a competitive but closed and intellectual property driven (one need only look at scientific journals to see how slow and challenging the process has become).
But strip away the talk about the challenges and opportunities for science. At its core, this is an article is about something more basic and universal. This is an article about open data.
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Programming
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The new release, which features performance improvements as well as some fixes and new features, comes at a critical time for the Ruby ecosystem. For one thing, the popular Rails framework for Ruby (Ruby on Rails) is gearing up for its 3.0 release, making Ruby 1.9.2 not just a long-anticipated update, but one that’s been closely watched due to its implications for a wide array of related projects.
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Standards/Consortia
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Data standards are critical components of all enterprise architectures but they are absolutely central to e-Democracy and e-Legislation. Data standards are the primary vehicle through which seamless data interoperability, data interchange and transparency can be achieved whilst at the same time ensuring information longevity and vendor independence.
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A new extension has been added to the attachment viewer to support ODF thumbnails. As I learned from a colleague last week the ODF file format is really just an archive (ZIP to be exact) so the same Java API’s I used for the ZIP provider work equally as well in the ODF file provider.
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According to recent filings from the Republican Governors Association, News Corp., parent company of Fox News and the New York Post, donated $1 million to the RGA this June. Politico calls it “a new step toward an open identification between Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and the GOP.”
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C.Umashankar IAS, an honest and efficient officer joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1990. He started his journey as an assistant collector in 1992 in Mayiladuthurai, Nagapattinam district in Tamil Nadu. He questioned irregularities in cyclone relief work taking place in the area and was promptly transferred to Seiyar, Thiruvannamalai district. This is indeed is part of the vicissitudes in the professional life of an honest official.
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The headhunting firm was established in 1956 and is a privately held partnership with expertise in consumer goods that expanded into technology, communications, and media in 1982 and followed up with life sciences, financial services, legal firms and non-profits, among other industries. The company found Louis Gerstner his top job at cookie maker RJR Nabisco, and was one of the two firms picked to find a replacement for flailing IBM CEO and chairman, John Akers, when IBM went aground badly and nearly went bankrupt in the early 1990s.
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You may remember last year when model Liskula Cohen went to court to get Google to hand over the name of a blogger who was mean to her, calling her a skank. Of course, in doing so, it brought a lot more attention to the blog which almost no one had read before. In fact, it seems clear that a hell of a lot more people now associate “Liskula Cohen” with “skank” due to her legal actions, than the blog. Eventually a court said Google should unmask the anonymous blogger — which it did.
[...]
Either way, it looks like we’re getting something of a repeat — as another woman, this time a former model and actress, and now a consultant named Carla Franklin — has gone to court to get Google to hand over the names of some YouTube users who posted some videos of her, and referred to her as a “whore.”
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Franklin, a 2008 graduate of Columbia Business School who works as a consultant, was alerted to the slurs after her friends checked her out in a series of YouTube videos.
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Science
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“Researchers at the University of Manchester this week revealed a detailed face tracker that runs in real-time on the Nokia N900 mobile phone. Unlike existing mobile face trackers (video) that give an approximate position and scale of the face, Manchester’s embedded Active Appearance Model accurately tracks a number of landmarks on and around the face such as the eyes, nose, mouth and jawline. The extra level of detail that this provides potentially indicates who the user is, where they are looking and how they are feeling. The face tracker was developed as part of a face- and voice-verification system for controlling access to mobile internet applications such as e-mail, social networking and on-line banking.”
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IF YOU were forced to learn long division at school, you might have had cause to curse whoever invented arithmetic. A wearisome whirl of divisors and dividends, of bringing the next digit down and multiplying by the number you first thought of, it almost always went wrong somewhere. And all the while you were plagued by that subversive thought- provided you were at school when such things existed- that any sensible person would just use a calculator.
Well, here’s an even more subversive thought: are the rules of arithmetic, the basic logical premises underlying things like long division, unsound? Implausible, you might think. After all, human error aside, our number system delivers pretty reliable results. Yet the closer mathematicians peer beneath the hood of arithmetic, the more they are becoming convinced that something about numbers doesn’t quite add up. The motor might be still running, but some essential parts seem to be missing- and we’re not sure where to find the spares.
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Security/Aggression
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The Pentagon is walking back initial denials that it tried to contact WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, in recent days to discuss still-unreleased secret files from the Afghanistan war. And new details divulged by defense officials suggest their middleman for contacting the website was an obscure lawyer based in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
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This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN) 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks. “The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to WikiLeaks.org cannot be ruled out. It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses “trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers, the report recommends “The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the WikiLeaks.org Web site. [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective]. As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that “Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the WikiLeaks.org website. The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks—U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable U.S. violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.
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The case of the Afghanistan war logs and the hounding of Julian Assange prove that there’s never been greater need to speak truth to power than today.
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Julian Assange’s supporters are quick to point the finger at American intelligence agencies and say they were expecting slurs after he posted 77,000 Afghanistan war documents online
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According to Expressen, a Swedish newspaper, the 39-year-old Australian had been wanted in connection with two separate incidents. The first involved a woman from Stockholm who reportedly accused him of “molestation”. The second involved a woman from Enköping, about an hour’s drive west from Stockholm, who had apparently accused Assange of rape. The warrant was withdrawn yesterday afternoon.
Assange claimed he was the victim of a smear campaign. He denied the charges on WikiLeaks’s Twitter page, saying they were “without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing”.
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For unknown reasons the Thai Government has closed access to the Wikileaks website. This means that Thai internauts and webizens are not allowed to take part in the current netbased movement of freedom. This is not acceptable, anywhere in the world. Therefore we make all Thai-related content from the Wikileaks website available for direct download. We will continue doing this for every country that blocks essential internet infrastructure. The internet is an intricate system of tunnels, we will dig a hole in every national firewall.
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Yesterday, “Thailand is blocking domestic access to WikiLeaks under the country’s 2005 emergency powers”, said p2pnet, quoting the Bangkok Post.
At the end of the story, “It doesn’t say if the censorship means Thai authorities fear documents damaging to them may suddenly show up on WikiLeaks”, we added.
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While people in the US and elsewhere have been reacting to the release by WikiLeaks of classified US documents on the Afghan War, Chinese bloggers have been discussing the event in parallel with another in their own country. On July 21 in Beijing, four days before WikiLeaks published its documents, Chinese President Hu Jintao convened a high-level meeting to discuss ways to prevent leaks from the archives of the Communist Party of China.
Party archives in China exist at local, provincial, and central levels and have always been secret and extremely closely guarded. At local levels, some, in recent years, have been digitized, but at the highest levels the original paper is guarded physically, and rules of access are complex and extremely rigid.
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Pentagon lawyers believe that online whistleblower group WikiLeaks acted illegally in disclosing thousands of classified Afghanistan war reports and other material, and federal prosecutors are exploring possible criminal charges, officials familiar with the matter said.
A joint investigation by the Army and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is still in its early stages and it is unclear what course the Department of Justice will decide to take, according to a U.S. law-enforcement official.
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Fast forward to 2007, the first time Task Force 373 is mentioned in the Wikileaks documents. We don’t know whether its number means anything, but coincidentally or not, chapter 373 of the U.S. Code 10, the act of Congress that sets out what the U.S. military is legally allowed to do, permits the Secretary of Defense to empower any “civilian employee” of the military “to execute warrants and make arrests without a warrant” in criminal matters. Whether or not this is indeed the basis for that “373” remains a classified matter — as indeed, until the Wikileaks document dump occurred, was the very existence of the group.
Analysts say that Task Force 373 complements Task Force 121 by using “white forces” like the Rangers and the Green Berets, as opposed to the more secretive Delta Force. Task Force 373 is supposedly run out of three military bases — in Kabul, the Afghan capital; Kandahar, the country’s second largest city; and Khost City near the Pakistani tribal lands. It’s possible that some of its operations also come out of Camp Marmal, a German base in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Sources familiar with the program say that the task force has its own helicopters and aircraft, notably AC-130 Spectre gunships, dedicated only to its use.
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After the last release, the Pentagon very flamboyantly accused WikiLeaks of endangering the lives of innocent Afghans, even accusing them of having “blood on their hands” (despite the absence of a single claim that anyone was actually harmed from the release of those documents). If Pentagon officials are truly concerned about the well-being of Afghan sources identified in these documents — rather than exaggerating and exploiting that concern in order to harm WikiLeaks’ credibility — wouldn’t they be eager to help WikiLeaks redact these documents? That would be the behavior one would expect if these concerns were at all genuine.
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The pathologist who performed the autopsy on the government scientist David Kelly said today his death was a textbook case of suicide but he would have “dearly loved” to have found evidence of murder.
Nicholas Hunt, a Home Office pathologist, told the Sunday Times he had been horrified at the treatment of Kelly by the Labour government.
He spent eight hours examining the 59-year-old’s body for evidence of murder but found nothing to support that theory.
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Friends of the secretive founder of WikiLeaks, the website behind the biggest leak of United States military documents in history, claimed yesterday that he was the victim of a smear campaign after prosecutors withdrew a warrant for his arrest in connection with rape and molestation allegations.
On Saturday a spokeswoman for the Swedish prosecutors office in Stockholm confirmed that an arrest warrant for Julian Assange had been issued and urged him to “contact police so that he can be confronted with the suspicions”.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Maybe we should update the state slogan to say; “Welcome to the Land of 10,000 Lakes and 100 tornadoes.”
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OME experiments are hard to conduct. Fisheries biologists are, for example, reasonably confident that creating protected areas in the sea, in which fishing is forbidden, encourages the recovery of those species that stay put in the area. This has worked in several places in the tropics, notably the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, where fish populations in protected zones have doubled in five years. They are less confident, however, that it applies to places where the fish of interest are migratory, as is often the case in temperate-zone fisheries like those of the North Atlantic and its adjacent seas.
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Energy giant BP has been accused of hiding key data needed to investigate the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.
Transocean, the company that owned the oil rig, alleged that BP is refusing to hand over information it needs about the explosion.
The claim is made in a letter from one of Transocean’s lawyers sent to members of President Barack Obama’s cabinet.
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Finance
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But in America we do have a choice. The markets aren’t demanding we give up on job creation. On the contrary, they seem worried about the lack of action on the fact that, as Bill Gross of the giant bond fund Pimco put it earlier this week, we’re “approaching a cul-de-sac of stimulus” which he warns “will slow to a snail’s pace, incapable of providing sufficient job growth going forward”.
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If you’re curious to know what’s giving more than 6 million viewers on YouTube a thrill, you should go to the site and enter the key words “bum fight”, which will produce in excess of 5,000 videos showing homeless individuals in the US, mostly older men, being plied with lethal alcohol and goaded into performing ridiculous acts such as punching walls with their bare hands, diving from heights into dumpsters, fighting each other and generally being humiliated, mostly by younger men who have a home.
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Under the program, which is already live, anyone who provides a tip that leads to a successful Securities and Exchange Commission action will be able to collect between 10% and 30% of the amount recovered — as long as the total amount exceeds $1 million. This means the minimum payout is $100,000. The whistle-blower could be a company insider or a private investor, if they’re able to offer information or analysis that leads to an action. And with potential payoffs netting millions — or even tens of millions — of dollars, experts are bracing for a surge in tipoffs.
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The contentious Tribune Co. bankruptcy case lurched into a new state of uncertainty Friday as a settlement at the heart of the company’s proposed reorganization plan fell apart and big creditors said they would attempt to negotiate a deal without Tribune’s participation.
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“Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the economy has yet to hit bottom, a sharply higher percentage than the 53% who felt that way in January,” according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll.
A growing and vocal minority of economists believes that there will be a double-dip recession primarily because of the intransigence of high unemployment and the rapidly faltering housing market. The notion of a “jobless recovery” has been around since the recessions of the 1950s and 1960s. It is a concept built on a relatively simple idea: employment lags during a recession but it is always part of a recovery cycle. Production rises as businesses see the end of a downturn and anticipate improving sales. They are reluctant to hire new workers until the recovery is confirmed, but once it has been, hiring picks up.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Now two Israeli groups seeking to gain the upper hand in the online debate have launched a course in “Zionist editing” for Wikipedia, the online reference site.
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Tuesday, Reps. Peter King (R-NY) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) called Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf — best known for his work with multicultural Cordoba Initiative to build a mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan — a “radical” and criticized the Obama Administration for including him on a Middle East speaking tour. That tour, which includes stops in Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, is designed by the public diplomacy office to explain to Muslims abroad what it’s like to be a Muslim in America.
Outside of how getting constantly called a radical by American politicians busy flacking the proposed “Ground Zero mosque” for political purposes might affect Rauf’s view of what it’s like to be a Muslim in America, there’s one other big problem with King’s and Ros-Lehtinen’s accusation: Rauf already represented America in this way, under the Bush Administration.
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Much has been reported about how Texan oil companies Valero and Tesoro have been fighting to repeal the landmark clean energy climate change law, AB 32. The Wonk Room recently obtained a PowerPoint from Tesoro showing that the company made a pitch to oil companies, including BP, to join their effort known as Proposition 23.
But there is another powerful out-of-state fossil fuel interest trying to eviscerate California’s pioneering climate change law: Koch Industries. The Wonk Room has learned that Koch Industries is funding the lead “grassroots” group organizing support for Proposition 23, and is also funding the Pacific Research Institute, the main think-tank producing junk studies smearing AB 32.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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A lawsuit in federal court alleges that several companies like Warner Bros. Records, Disney, Ustream and others “hacked the computers” of millions of consumers “to covertly, without consent, and in an unauthorized, deceptive, invasive, and fraudulent manner” implanted “rogue” Flash tracking cookies. The group referred to collectively as “Clearspring Flash Cookie Affiliates” are accused of spying on users, including kids, by intercepting online transmissions with tracking code, that even if the user deleted, would be used to “re-spawn” Flash cookies.
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The production of the RFID chips, an integral element of the new generation of German identity cards, has started after the government gave a 10 year contract to the chipmaker NXP in the Netherlands. Citizens will receive the mandatory new ID cards from the first of November.
German RFID identity card
Various German authorities will be able to identify persons fast and reliable by scanning the RFID citizen card. These will be the police, customs and tax authorities and of course the local registration and passport granting authorities.
The new ID card will contain all personal data on the security chip that can be accessed over a wireless connection.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Demon has unveiled a new broadband package that prioritises the traffic of gamers.
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The opposition in the Lower House of Congress yesterday said the government’s decision on Thursday that Internet provider Fibertel, owned by Grupo Clarín, must cease operations in 90 days is part of a “systematic” Kirchnerite plan “to restrict individual freedoms” and a threat to “democracy and the rule of law.”
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Two groups supporting strong network neutrality rules protested a new round of compromise talks involving technology and telecommunications companies by saying the talks don’t include organizations representing consumers.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Mkrtchyan claims the “Alice” chairs are a dead ringer for his design … in fact, he claims he has a chair for every suit in the deck — including spades, clubs and diamonds.
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The BBC’s legacy Radio and Television programme collections have resided at the Windmill Road Archive in Brentford, West London, for 42 years. There are almost five million items held on a wide variety formats including film, dating back to 1936, videotape, first introduced into the BBC in the late sixties and numerous audio tape and disc including a small collection of wax cylinders which date back to the early 1900s.
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Little Caesar’s is claiming that a Royal Oak restaurant is infringing on the copyright of the slogan “Pizza -Pizza.”
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Copyrights
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Adult entertainment and piracy go hand in hand, so to speak. While some players in the industry use legal tools to bring piracy to a halt, others are not bothered about unauthorized sharing. In a recent video interview the CEO of one of the largest porn distributors said that the more people pirate his company’s work, the better.
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Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country’s industrial might.
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As Righthaven continues to file lawsuits, it seems that various lawyers who are concerned about copyright, free speech and chilling effects online have been rushing to help defend some of those sued. I can’t recall a situation (even with US Copyright Group) where lawyers have been so eager to take on a company filing copyright infringement claims. Of course, the really interesting part is how some of the lawyers are testing out a variety of defenses to the lawsuits, some which seem to have a much better chance of passing judicial muster than others.
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A group of 13 trade organizations representing all corners of the music industry is calling on Google to incorporate mechanisms for cracking down on piracy as it attempts to broker a deal on net neutrality.
“The music community we represent believes it is vital that any Internet policy initiative permit and encourage ISPs and other intermediaries to take measures to deter unlawful activity such as copyright infringement and child pornography,” the groups wrote in a letter to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt.
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ACTA
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At the lunch meeting the U.S. negotiators explained the reason for this — they said it was obvious that regardless of what the ACTA provisions say, the U.S. can ignore the provisions in cases where there are statutory exceptions. “It is not necessary to say that in the ACTA text” I was told. “It’s obvious.”
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Yes, it appears we’re negotiating an agreement where the US isn’t too concerned with the fact that it goes against key points in US law because we’ll just ignore the parts we don’t like. But, you can bet that we’ll put massive pressure on any other country that tries to do the same. And, when there’s any discussion of improving US law, we’ll be told we can’t, because of our “international obligations” under ACTA.
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A long-running battle over the right to use European place names, like Parma or Roquefort, for some of the world’s most popular foods and beverages looks to be the toughest remaining issue in international trade talks aimed at reducing copyright and trademark theft.
The 27-nations of the European Union want the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to cover “geographical indicators”, which are names for food and alcoholic products drawn from a particular location, such Champagne or Cognac, both in France.
Richard M. Stallman Speech Patents Calgary Canada 2005
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Send this to a friend
08.21.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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How about application GUIs that learn, and get more streamlined over time because they remember your previous operations? Instead of having to wade through the same baby steps every time you use the program. Or configurable GUIs so we can streamline them ourselves. I think this all by itself would be a “killer feature”. It does not seem that efficiency is very important in GUI design. The command line still reigns supreme for efficiency because it has multiple tools for customization, doing things faster, and automating repetitive tasks.
OK, well, that’s pretty much it for my Linux usability wish list. For the most part working in Linux is pleasant and satisfying, much more so than Mac and Windows, and I can’t find too much to get exercised about. What are your usability wishes?
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Audiocasts/Shows
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IBM
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Recently, some colleagues were talking about the upcoming LinuxCon 2010 in Boston – “The Linux Foundation’s annual technical conference that provides and unmatched collaboration and education space for all matters Linux.” Hearing about this conference brought me back to 1999, when we started a number of studies that culminated in the announcement of the new IBM Linux initiative in January of 2000.
By the summer of 1999, Linux was picking up steam in the marketplace, especially in areas where IBM was very involved, including Internet infrastructure and supercomputing. At the time, a number of research institutions and leading edge companies were already using clusters of Intel processors running Linux as a way of building relatively inexpensive, and increasingly powerful supercomputers, as well as highly scalable web servers, distributed file and print servers, network firewalls, and other Internet infrastructure applications.
We commissioned a couple of studies, one focused on the use of Linux in supercomputing, and the other on Linux as a high-volume platform for Internet applications. Both studies strongly recommended that IBM embrace Linux across its product lines, that IBM should work closely with the open Linux community as a partner in its development, and that we should establish an organization to coordinate Linux activities across the company.
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Kernel Space
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Kernel mode-setting (KMS) is useful for faster VT/X switching, VTs being always at the panel’s native resolution, the ability to thwart some security bugs in the X.Org Server (as shown earlier this week), presenting a cleaner and more flexible architecture, and allowing new and interesting projects to emerge (such as Plymouth and Wayland), but the benefits do not end there. When kernel mode-setting is combined with KDB, a Linux kernel debugger shell, you now have one powerful combination.
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Graphics Stack
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Welcome to X server version 1.9.0.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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So, one of the first distros that contacted me related to branded Stripes was openSuse. So, this is one of the versions.
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GNOME Desktop
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We introduced to you guys probably the best combination of gtk theme and icon set for Ubuntu/Gnome[Equinox gtk theme + Faenza icon theme]. Now take a look at Awoken icon theme. I won’t say it is better than Faenza icon theme, but it is almost as good.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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So, who’s up for making Maverick Movies? It would be great to have a “10 best features in 10.10″ video collection for release. Unity’s awesome and then there are things to show off in OO.o, Gnome, Firefox…. giving credit where it’s due.
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Something I need to make clear up front is that the KDE client does not connect to the Ubuntu One servers itself. This will probably sound odd to you, so let me explain just how both the KDE and GNOME clients generally work. There is a helper application for authentication (in up to 10.04 called ubuntuone-auth, in 10.10 and above ubuntu-sso-client) that handles authentication to Ubuntu One. Secondly there is a synchronization component called SyncDaemon, as one can assume it handles synchronization of data and is essentially the gateway to the the servers. Thirdly there are clients that talk to the SyncDaemon. Such a client could be a tray icon that informs you whether your SyncDaemon is actually connected or not. But it could just as well be an application to manage your shares. I implemented 2 of those using KDE or Qt technologies, namely the client structures and the authentication helper. I did not reimplement the SyncDaemon!
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Phones
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Android
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Motorola set the standard for Android-based QWERTY sliders when it launched the original Droid last year. An aggressive advertising campaign, excellent specs, and an appealing form factor propelled the Droid to the top of the charts and made it one of the best-selling Android smartphones. Motorola is sticking to its winning formula for the product’s sequel, the Droid 2, which recently launched on Verizon’s network.
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“Public Software? The so-called Public Software is a political project which aims to remove the Free Software main feature: the Freedom. It tries to put the people in the role of mere “viewing public”. The Free Software Social Movement historically called the participation of the entire society for the transformation of the surrounding reality, it aimed to create PRODUCERS of free culture, free software, free computer networks and free hardware in order to achieve a freer society .
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It is common for market laggards to go open source. It is less common for market leaders to do so.
Thus we need to celebrate the Affero GPL 3.0 version of Urbi, software that powers (among others) the Segway RMP and Lego Mindstorm.
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When Amanda Brock joined Canonical two and a half years ago, she discovered something rather surprising about open source.
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Within the Drupal project, we don’t have a paid staff to advance the software. However, many of the developers who contribute to critical parts of the Drupal code base make their living by building complex Drupal websites. Some Drupal developers are paid by customers to contribute their expertise to the Drupal project or are employed by companies “sponsoring” Drupal development.
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I’ve been working as a freelancer for almost a year now, and I cannot help noticing how free software helps making this possible. Working in an international setting, most of the work is done from my home office. This requires techniques to get the work done. Small motivational “rewards” (or really fun customer assignments so that one forgets lunch…) The other half is the communication with the customers itself. This is where free software enters the picture.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Today, Mitchell Baker was announced as the recipient of Frost & Sullivan’s 2010 Growth, Innovation and Leadership Award. Mitchell will be honored for her achievements at the annual GIL 2010 event in Silicon Valley on September 13, 2010.
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Oracle
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By now you’ve read that Oracle has sued Google for patent and copyright infringement related to the Android platform. Google has responded that the claims are baseless and counter to the open source community movement. In all the hullabaloo, the press, pundits, Oracle, and Google seem to have ignored the impact on enterprise Java.
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Healthcare
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Long before open source entered the lexicon, the Veterans Administration (VA) was known to techies for VistA, an electronic medical record (EMR) program written in MUMPS that was developed in an open way and published as a public record, freely available.
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Do parents have the right to know which of their kids’ teachers are the most and least effective? That’s the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times’s Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The newspaper’s announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city’s elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers’ union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Indeed, for Transitionists who dream of moving quadrillions of BTU demand, currently supplied by oil in global transport, over to a new electrified grid it behooves us to think harder about resources such as Copper. Like Kedrosky, and surely some of my readers, I have marveled over the possibilities of material upgrading and other technological wonders of resource substitution–the kinds of methods that often appear in presentations from places like MIT’s Solar Group. That said, we need to confront the fact that in conjunction with new lows in global copper ore grades, the price of copper–just like oil–has entered a new regime. Expecting a miracle of substitution in copper, or a price reversal downward away from the current regime, is certainly not realistic if we are on the threshold of hitting hard global copper resources to electrify world transport. Simon-Ehrlich recasted is another important step, therefore, towards the realism we need to actually solve the challenge of energy-transition.
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Finance
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If you’re expecting the new financial reform law to cut into Goldman Sachs’ profits, think again, says Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone. The Los Angeles Times recently reported that Goldman executives are privately — and with conviction — assuring analysts that they won’t make any less money than they did before. Goldman appears to be “seriously preparing for some major changes,” since the new rules bar banks from engaging in proprietary trading, or investing the firm’s own money. The idea is to prevent federally-insured depository institutions from “engaging in high-risk speculation,” but apparently there are enough “loopholes” in the new law to “allow the bank to continue gambling as before.”
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What to make of their latest research note? It is something of a glass half-full, glass half-empty story. Here are excerpts from the report, by Ed McKelvey, issued Thursday. Make your own call on whether to view this take on the U.S. economic outlook as fundamentally optimistic or pessimistic.
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A New York judge has combined two shareholder lawsuits against executives and directors of Goldman Sachs Group Inc and put the case on hold pending progress on resolving it and 16 related federal lawsuits.
All of the lawsuits concern Abacus, a transaction that led to Goldman’s agreement in July to pay $550 million to resolve a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission civil fraud lawsuit.
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That’s not the way Goldman handled its image, though. With few exceptions, Goldman dismissed the verdicts of its critics. That just created more of them, culminating in an ignominious Securities and Exchange Commission fraud charge and settlement. It all tarnished the firm’s stated goal of unparalleled client focus.
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Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Bill Gross urged government officials today to allow all borrowers who haven’t missed payments on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans to get lower-cost mortgages. Dachille, who oversees about $8 billion of fixed-income investments, supported the idea yesterday in a telephone interview, saying such financing should be offered without consideration of homeowners’ incomes or house values.
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John Paulson, the hedge-fund manager who became a billionaire by betting against U.S. mortgage markets, bought 1.1 million shares of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in the second quarter.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Spiegel reports that German photographer and IT consultant Jens Best wants to personally take snapshots of all those (German) buildings which people asked Google Street View to remove. He then wants to add those photos to Picasa, including GPS coordinates, and in turn re-connect them with Google Maps. Jens believes that for the internet “we must apply the same rules as we do in the real world. Our right to take panoramic snapshots, for instance, or to take photographs in public spaces, both base laws which determine that one may photograph those things that are visible from public streets and places.”
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“I do not consider there to be any reason to suspect that he has committed rape,” chief prosecutor Eva Finné said in a statement explaining her decision.
The statement was issued at 4.30pm on Saturday to confirm that Assange was no longer a suspect and is thus no longer required to contact the police.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Plenty of people are worried that the Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal has too many exceptions. The recording industry is worried that it doesn’t have enough.
In a letter sent today to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the RIAA and other music trade groups expressed their concern that the riddled-with-gaping-loopholes policy framework nevertheless might put a damper on ISP attempts to find and filter piratical material flowing through the Internet’s tubes. Failure to allow for this sort of behavior would lead to an Internet of “chaos.”
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Posting on the userbase.be forums, the ISP was kind enough to share data on its top 20 subscribers (with their permission). In the top spot was a user who managed to transfer 2.7TB of data in a single month. 2nd to 5th spots counted 1.9TB, 1.4TB, 1.3TB, and 1TB of data transferred. After that the numbers fall quickly.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Round ten of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations in Washington concluded on Friday with countries confirming progress on all fronts and hopes to reach agreement on all remaining substantive issues at the next round in negotiations in Japan in late September. While the joint statement is not yet online, Reuters reports that the U.S. believes the remaining issues – including the U.S. – E.U. divide over geographical indications – could be resolved at the next meeting. The statement repeats earlier assurances about the impact on fundamental rights, cross-border transit of generic medicines, and iPod searching border guards.
Ps3 hack by Modchip with Jailbreak [ps3club]
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Ubuntu 10.10 is going to add gesture support and 11.04 is going to be called the Natty Narwhal. Debian 6.0 has been feature frozen while Oracle sets its sights on Google. Discover how we fared with our Nethack challenge and how we filled the Open Ballot section without an Open Ballot.
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IBM
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Remember ten years ago, IBM made a $1 billion bet on Linux, and in so doing, helped create the momentum for Linux in the enterprise data center that we all enjoy today. Back then, IBM concentrated on three areas:
- Making Linux better – providing contributions to help improve Linux with respect to reliability, availability and serviceability
- Enabling IBM products – both across major server lines and throughout the IBM middleware portfolio
- Extending Linux into new opportunity areas – Helping to expanding the total addressable market for Linux (e.g. Real-Time, HPC, SoNAS)
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Kernel Space
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The Linux 2.6.36-rc1 kernel was released earlier in the week and while it will still be a couple months until the Linux 2.6.36 kernel will be officially released, the developers behind the open-source DisplayLink graphics driver are already looking forward to the Linux 2.6.37 kernel. This next kernel release that will make it out in early 2011 will bring new features and fixes to this driver that supports many graphics products over USB.
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Graphics Stack
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Since our last R600g status report, some of the changes to this driver that will eventually replace the R600 classic Mesa driver include support for new TGSI opcode instructions, segmentation fault fixes, OpenGL occlusion query support, fixed pitch alignment, user-clip plane support, an improved texture format checker, point/sprite rendering support, and various other technical changes. Some of the new instructions supported include POW, COS, SIN, SSG, SEQ, SGT, SNE, FRC, FLR, DDX, DDY, SGE, SLE, TXB, and many more. You get the point.
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Nearly two hours ago we shared the news that there’s finally open-source 2D/3D/video acceleration for ATI’s Radeon HD 5000 “Evergreen” family of graphics processors, which is currently the newest and best consumer-grade GPUs from AMD’s GPG unit. At the time though only the xf86-video-ati DDX driver code was publicly pushed into a branch of the driver, but now the 3D portion of the code has publicly landed.
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LWN readers will have seen our reporting from the Linux Storage and Filesystem Summit (day 1, day 2), held on August 8 and 9 in Boston. Your editor was unable to attend the storage-specific sessions, though, so they were not covered in those articles. Fortunately, James Bottomley took detailed notes, which he has now made available to us. Many thanks to James for all of what follows.
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A file integrity scanner is something you need to have. Imagine a hacker placing a backdoor on your web site, or changing your order form to email him a copy of everyone’s credit card while leaving it appear to be functionally normally.
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Applications
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Lotus Symphony is an interesting project. Although somewhat archaic and seemingly outdated, it is a very useful office suite, with many new, modern features on top of an older design.
The 32-bit only version and the Hardy stamp for the Ubuntu version give an impression that IBM does not place too much focus on this program. And yet, lots of cool and modern options are available in the software, making it quite useful and relevant. It’s a confusing mix of old and new, wrapped in unique.
Overall, Lotus Symphony performed well. If you don’t mind spending some time getting used to new looks and some non-standard features, the office suite will serve you rather well. It has that deep, corporate tinge that only giants can offer. Well, it’s free, so you’re welcome to try and see for yourself.
Version 3 is coming soon and it will be based on OpenOffice 3, so you should expect a very decent, very modern office suite, with lots of IBM-specific additions. I believe Lotus Symphony 3 will be a very useful software. But only time will tell.
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After waiting two years for the service, most Linux users that want video chat capabilities are probably already using Skype or something similar by now. The next few weeks will tell for sure, but this service may not be of much interest to Linux users anymore anyway.
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Drop down terminals were originally inspired by in game consoles like ones found in first person shooters like Counterstrike and Quake. Yes, Guake is just Quake starting with a ‘g’ instead of an ‘q’. Drop down terminals run in the background and can generally be toggled on and off by pressing one of the function keys (F12 by default in Guake). This simplifies life for people that make regular or sporadic use of the command line. Instead of starting a new terminal window or navigating to a currently open one, you can toggle the terminal on, execute the necessary commands, and have it out of your way again by just hitting one key. It really simplifies tasks like compiling code while working on a project and routine administration tasks.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.3.1 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Support for drag & drop between X11 and OLE.
– New ipconfig.exe builtin tool.
– Support for favorites in builtin Internet Explorer.
– Beginnings of a shell Explorer control.
– A number of DirectDraw code cleanups.
– Improvements to the calendar control.
– Various bug fixes.
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Desktop Environments
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Xfce
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GNOME and KDE may be the first desktops that come to mind when you think of the Linux desktop, but they’re not the only ones. From the overly minimalistic Rat Poison window manager to the eye candy of the Enlightenment E17 desktop, Linux has just about every type of desktop you can imagine. Want a desktop that’s lean and resource friendly without giving up features? It’s time to take a look at Xfce.
For many users, the major desktops feel a little bloated. Fast hardware is cheaper than ever, but performance is still king on the Linux desktop. The ideal desktop is somewhere in the middle ground, between overly minimalistic and overly bloated. Xfce is right at the center of the Venn Diagram of features vs. speed. It’s lightning fast and still offers most of the features users have grown accustomed to. The problem? Most new users, and even some experienced Linux users, aren’t familiar with Xfce.
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Next, we take a look at the popularity trends of PCLinuxOS, Puppy, Sabayon, and Linux Mint, with CentOS as a reference. Note how Linux Mint rises up above this group — apparently following in the footsteps of Ubuntu, on which it is based.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) develops and provides open source software and services, including the Red Hat Linux operating system.
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Debian Family
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More than 1000 developers from all over the globe are part of the Debian community, their often-noisy debates and insistence on the values of free software often causing ructions far beyond their own mailing lists – which are open to the public.
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Debian and Ubuntu have a set of official membership roles that can be granted to regular contributors. Those roles come with rights that enable the contributors to do their work and to participate in the project governance (elections and other official decision-making processes). It’s also a way for the distributions to acknowledge the work done: most contributors are proud of the status they reached.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Last summer we reviewed the ASRock NetTop ION 330, which was the first Atom-powered NetTop computer that had come out of this vendor known for their affordable motherboards. The NetTop ION 330 combined an Intel Atom 330 CPU with NVIDIA’s ION platform to provide a low-power PC while offering modest computing and graphics capabilities.
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This is why I get so frustrated when people quickly dismiss Linux. I don’t have a problem with them preferring Windows, or even passing up the idea of giving Linux a try. But I do find it quite depressing that there’s no appreciation of what’s going on under the surface. I’m not talking about a sudo command, or lines of code. I’m talking about an ethos that standards are there to help consumers, to provide a level playing field for us all.
Instead, it seems the legwork is being done, and then greedy manufacturers are rubbing their hands with glee as they mess around with said standard in a bid to line their own pockets. It can and should be stopped. But sadly, I fear that not enough people – aside from a quick grumble in a pub – really care that much. For what it’s worth? I do.
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ChipWrights announced a Linux application development kit (ADK) for its CW5631 SoC, aimed at low-cost IPTV STBs and IP cameras. Like ChipWrights’ Linux-based CW5631 SDK announced earlier this year, the H264-ready ADK supports the CW5631, which combines a 400MHz ARM9 core, a DSP, and a RISC core.
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A Linux-ready evaluation kit called the MPC830x-KIT is available, containing a single MPC830x carrier card. There are also system-on-modules available for each of the MPC830x devices, and Freescale also offers an MPC8308-RDB reference design board.
All the evaluation boards and modules are provided with a Linux 2.6 board support package (BSP) that includes optimized drivers to support peripherals, says the company. The BSP is also said to include a quick-start guide and a six-month evaluation license for CodeWarrior development tools.
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Phones
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Android
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Christmas came early at Engadget HQ this year, as evidenced by the picture above — you’re looking at two Dell Thunder prototype smartphones, each with some surprising quirks, and hints that they might include global HSPA, AWS for the likes of T-Mobile, and maybe even a dash of CDMA support. We’ll warn you ahead of time that these are labeled EVT1 for “engineering verification test” and date back to the April leak, so they’re about as early as you can get — don’t expect the final handset to arrive without some significant differences. Good? Then peek the gallery below, hit the break, and let’s get on with the show.
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These shots of a real, live G2 confirm what we’d already suspected from renders: this is basically an Americanized version of the upcoming HTC Vision.
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Android 2.2, or Froyo, is just now rolling out to smartphones including the Droid 2 and HTC Evo 4G, but the blog TechRadar today is citing “multiple sources” as confirming that the next version of Android will be called Honeycomb, following the dessert-themed monikers of the mobile OS. Prior versions of Android were codenamed Cupcake, Donut, Eclair and Froyo.
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What we’re looking at here is allegedly the leaked over-the-air update to Froyo that Verizon plans on deploying to Droid X customers in the next few weeks, which means two critical things for customers: it should generally be faster all the way around, and — of course — you’ve got support for Flash, which was a big topic of interest at Motorola’s launch event for the phone a couple months back.
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It was merely a week back when Coralic, through his blog enlightened how to develop a chroot environment for ARM architecture based processors and run Ubuntu Linux OS.
A week back Armin Coralic, posted on his blog details on how to create chroot environment for ARM architecture based processors and run Ubuntu Linux OS. However this Ubuntu Linux version is a stripped down form of the same. Later, Coralic posted a step-by-step method of porting Ubuntu on Galaxy S.
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System Administrators are always in need of applications to remotely monitor their networks, administer the servers, and get stats. The Android smart phone comes to the rescue with an enormous number of such remote apps to help the administrator remotely access his system. Seven of the best android apps for system administrators follow.
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If true, the move will fulfill Google’s announcement earlier this year that it would launch Chrome OS tablets in time for the holiday season.
However, it’s not yet clear how Chrome OS tablets will coexist with those running the Android operating system, which is also offered by Google. Will they be targeted at different markets?
Also, could Oracle’s (Nasdaq: ORCL) lawsuit against Google hamper sales of Chrome tablets?
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Adobe has confirmed that it will deliver its cross-platform Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) environment for Google’s open source Android mobile operating system by the end of this year.
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Tablets
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While most smartphones and tablets have touch capabilities, the feature has been slow to reach netbooks and laptops. A few laptops, like Dell’s Latitude XT2, have touch capabilities.
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Urbi is an advanced robotics operating system, already available for a large number of robots like Aldebaran® Nao, Segway® RMP or Lego® Mindstorm, among 15 other different robots. One of its main innovations lies in a new orchestration script language called urbiscript, which natively integrates parallelism and event-based programming. Next to Urbi, Gostai also offers the Gostai Studio graphical programming tools, and compatibility with various simulators, making the Urbi framework one of the most advanced and complete solution for robot and complex system programming available today.
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Urbi source code is licensed under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3).
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The number of servers (both physical and virtual) is becoming uncountable. Automation of system administration is a must to handle the deluge; else swarms of sysadmins would be needed to handle all these systems.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Google on Thursday patched 10 vulnerabilities in Chrome, but it didn’t award any of the researchers who reported bugs its new top-dollar reward of $3,133.
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Mozilla
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Healthcare
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Project Releases
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Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 is derived from OpenSolaris Build 134, which is roughly what was supposed to be released as OpenSolaris 2010.02, then OpenSolaris 2010.03, and lastly prior to its slow death was just referred to as OpenSolaris 2010.1H. Nexenta CP 3.0 is also carrying various back-ports and other fixes onto the b134 stack.
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Inspired by frameworks such as Ruby’s Event Machine or Python’s Twisted, Node.js avoids thread based networking and moves to an event driven model, where one thread executes all the code as demanded by events, such as the opening of network connections, or the completion of I / O operations. This has the advantage of being memory efficient and avoiding dead-lock issues, as there are no locks. Within Node.js code, HTTP is a first class protocol, with a library designed to allow for the handing of streamed data through the framework.
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The Clojure developers have released version 1.2 of their dynamic programming language. Clojure is one of the youngest programming languages executable on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and has recently been competing for public attention with the increasingly popular Scala language. The Lisp dialect is dynamically “typed” and was developed specifically for the JVM. A general-purpose language, it aims at combining the advantages of script languages with those of multi-threaded programs.
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Licensing
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The GNU GPL might seem the obvious answer. After all, the GPL was drawn up specifically to make collaboration work and to create a community based on sharing code. But the experience of the last ten years of open source business has shown that, ironically, the GNU GPL actually allows companies that adopt it to act more, not less, like a traditional closed-source company.
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Openness/Sharing
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Wired states that the first instance of open-sourcing occurred in 1839, which is much earlier that most people might think. This progenitive incident also has some basic principles in common with more recent events in the computer field of somewhat dubious distinctions. I will leave those particulars out, but it shouldn’t be hard to figure out which companies I’m talking about in the events to follow.
Try to guess which modern examples follow the example set by Louis Daguerre if you want.
Before Daguerre came along, a permanent photo would take about eight hours to make. At the time, photographers could only make a negative image on a pewter plate. Daguerre worked out a chemical process that reduced this time to mere minutes, and etched out a positive image. Without that process, a significant step in the history of photography might never have happened. So what tips can we glean from Daguerre’s example
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Sometime this month, the 5 billionth device will plug into the Internet. And in 10 years, that number will grow by more than a factor of four, according to IMS Research, which tracks the installed base of equipment that can access the Internet.
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Security/Aggression
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On Friday Pete was informed that he needed to fill in a form for permission to sell his car – and would need to renew it after four weeks.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Spain has become the latest country to launch an investigation into the collection of sensitive wi-fi data by Google.
Google has admitted that its Street View cars had “accidentally” collected data from unsecured wi-fi networks in more than 30 countries.
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Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange responds to a BBC question about why it provides encrypted files for download.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Last week a crowd of about 100 people marched to Google’s headquarters in California to present boxes that they said contained 300,000 signatures upholding the values of net neutrality, a founding principle of the net that states that all web data is treated equally no matter where it comes from.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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On Aug. 5, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced S.3728: the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act. He’s got 10 co-sponsors — including three Republicans — and a big idea: to extend copyright protections to the fashion industry, where none currently exist. That’s right: none. I — well, not I, but someone who can sew — can copy Vera Wang’s (extremely expensive) dress and sell it to you right now (for much less), and Wang can’t do a thing about it.
We’re used to the logic of copyright. Movies, music and pharmaceuticals all use some form of patent or copyright protection. The idea is simple: If people can’t profit from innovation, they won’t innovate. So to encourage the development of stuff we want, we give the innovators something very valuable — exclusive access to the profit from their innovations. We’ve so bought into the logic that we allow companies to patent human genes.
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In my posts 11 Techy Things for Teachers to Try This Year and How To Do 11 Techy Things In the New School Year I mentioned podcasting and video creation. When creating podcasts and videos adding music and other sounds can enhance your students’ presentations. Here are seven tools that your students can use find and or create sounds for their multimedia presentations.
Richard M. Stallman Speech DebconfII Indonesia
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08.20.10
Posted in News Roundup at 11:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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A recent survey of IT decision-makers leads to the inescapable conclusion that FLOSS on the server will soon take many mission-critical roles that it has not already taken. Competitive forces will do the rest. Business is about making money and if your cost/performance is better with GNU/Linux you have the potential to compete well against others who cling to the old ways. About the only thing soon left to the monopoly will be managing its own clients. FLOSS can do everything else much better. Eventually the last barrier will fall, acceptance of that other OS on the client as the standard.
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Sony’s PlayStation 3 was long popular with the homebrew and tech-savvy gamer crowd, in part because Sony initially supported running Linux on the console. However, Sony removed Linux capability in a firmware update earlier this year, allegedly to staunch game and content piracy, and since then PlayStation 3 security has been garnering more than a little attention from enthusiasts and console modders eager to get back inside the console.
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Hopefully Playstation 3 users won’t lose more functionalities (like Linux) because of this.
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According to PSX Scene a bunch of open source hardware hackers have released a dongle called PS Jailbreak that will turn the PS3 back into a Linux machine.
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The remaining 7.7 percent answered ‘Linux system’.
“I’ve been using Linux for too long. I can see no good reason to switch to Windows,” commented octal.
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Desktop
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but it took in only $2.9 billion for consumer PCs. Imagine if those PCs had shipped with GNU/Linux and they had been able to pocket another $50-$100 per PC. That would have been another $100-$200 million revenue. Compare that to a $21 million loss.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Google
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Google‘s new Chrome OS cloud-based operating system is about to make its first appearance, not on netbooks, as was first thought, but on tablet devices instead.
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Kernel Space
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The summit was widely seen as a successful event, and the participation of the memory management community was welcomed. So there will be a joint summit again for storage, filesystem, and memory management developers next year. It could happen as soon as early 2011; the participants would like to move the event back to the (northern) spring, and waiting for 18 months for the next gathering seemed like too long.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD continues to abide by their commitment to provide open-source support for their graphics cards and as proof of that this afternoon they have released their initial hardware acceleration code that supports the ATI Radeon HD 5000 “Evergreen” family of consumer grade graphics processors. While this Evergreen support isn’t yet finished and for the time being is targeted towards Linux developers and enthusiasts, you can now play around with your ATI Radeon HD 5000 graphics processor on an open-source driver while having 2D EXA, X-Video, and OpenGL acceleration.
The ATI Radeon HD 5000 series family launched back in September of last year with the Radeon HD 5850 and Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards, which was followed by the launch of other GPUs like the Radeon HD 5750, Radeon HD 5770, and Radeon HD 5970. Following those product milestones, in December there was the release of some Evergreen shader documentation and by this February, there was finally Evergreen KMS support for utilizing kernel mode-setting and other basic functionality with your new ATI Radeon hardware. This initial KMS support was merged into the Linux 2.6.34 kernel, but it went without any X-Video or 2D EXA acceleration support. In April there was another AMD code drop for Evergreen and it implemented the command processor, interrupts, and graphics initialization support along with providing new microcode for these ASICs.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Despite the fact that open source has specialty label-and-business-card programs like gLabels and capable desktop publishing apps like Scribus, most general office users are going to continue to create their documents in the word processor of the office suite they feel the most comfortable in, like OpenOffice.org Writer. It is certainly a good choice, too; it provides design wizards that simplify creating print-ready documents for standard label templates, and OpenOffice’s mail merge backend is quite powerful.
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If you’ve been itching to try Linux but are intimidated by all the command line work, free download CLIcompanion will ease your fears, providing a customizable list of popular commands and what they do.
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Wine
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Tomorrow will be the last day of our huge 50% off sale of Bordeaux for Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, PCBSD and OpenSolaris.
Bordeaux for Linux and BSD has been marked down to only $10.00 and Bordeaux for Mac and OpenSolaris will cost you only $12.50 during this sale.
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Games
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Wildfire Games announced the release of 0 A.D. this morning. “This release comes with aggressive units that attack enemies on sight, lifelike animals that escape danger, two new maps, in-game multi-player chat and much more.” This open-source 3D game is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems.
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3.
There are many more factors than 7 that could have been tested. Updates, local services, games, etc. all may affect choices. Installing and trying things out from several distros is an option users of that other OS lack. Installing using a package manager is cool. It’s fast and you use the same tool to install the OS as the applications. Be sure to visit Distrowatch.com to help choose your distro.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is pursuing a certification for its Linux OS and virtualization, paving the way for government agencies to use the technology to create secure, virtualized IT environments and private clouds.
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Cloud Linux Inc., a software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, today announced that GARM Technologies, a hosting provider, will add CloudLinux to its shared hosting infrastructure. The company says that GARM Technologies specialize in shared and VPS hosting and selected CloudLinux for its new Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE) technology that will deliver substantial performance improvements to its hosting customers.
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Red Hat has added an additional 3 years to support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) via its new “Extended Life Cycle Support” (ELS). Available as a paid subscription, the added package prolongs the support of the Linux distribution for corporate customers from seven to ten years; this of particular interest to customers who are currently still using RHEL3, which was released in October 2003, as the regular support for this distribution will expire at the end of October.
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Oppenheimer is out with a research report this morning, where it reiterates its Outperform rating on Red Hat (NYSE: RHT); it has a $40.00 price target on the stock.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Proposed welcome screen looks pretty, readable and non-intimidating. Thats more like it. As a long time Ubuntu user, I really know how far these changes can help a newbie trying his luck in the new found Ubuntu world.
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A few months back we reported that the IA64 and SPARC versions of Ubuntu were in trouble and would be decommissioned if no individual(s) were to step-up and maintain these ports of Ubuntu Linux for these architectures that are much less popular and common than x86 and x86_64 hardware. Well, there still is no one backing the Intel IA64 and Sun SPARC versions of Ubuntu Linux so they are being dropped completely.
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No user-specific data is sent, Phoronix notes; rather, the package reportedly transmits only the operating system version, the machine product name and a counter.
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The release schedule for Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system has been published on the Ubuntu wiki. The distribution will be released at the end of April 2011.
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It’s hard to say why features are left the same or barely upgraded, but it is most likely done to familiarize the general public with Microsoft Windows itself. Interestingly enough, it comes in many forms and with different features, and the price seems to always be somewhere in the clouds, large price to pay for something so stale.
Perhaps one of the worst features of Microsoft Windows are the fact that users are extremely bound by computing law, even if they haven’t noticed it because of customizable features. For example, Microsoft Windows cannot match the customizing abilities of Mac and Ubuntu, and it never will.
One should find it hard to believe that developers would even consider working with Microsoft Windows to create new applications and games if it wasn’t for its popularity. The operating system itself is extremely unstable, one rouge application could crash the whole system or at least freeze the screen.
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Ubuntu 10.10, code-named Maverick Meerkat, will not be ported to the Itanium and SPARC platforms. The Ubuntu developers were already dissatisfied with the quality of the two ports in the recent 10.04 LTS release, because the two processor platforms have been without a dedicated maintainer for some time.
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Actel Corporation (Nasdaq: ACTL) and RoweBots today announced the immediate availability of Unison, an ultra tiny Linux® compatible OS for SmartFusion™ devices. Developers now have the option for Linux-based embedded design when using SmartFusion intelligent mixed signal FPGAs. With continued broadening of its ecosystem, Actel continues to provide ease of adoption of SmartFusion devices for embedded designers.
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ChipWrights, Inc.’part of AD Group’New Linux Application Development Kit for the CW5631 System-on-Chip provides the components to develop low-cost IPTV set-top boxes and IP cameras and significantly improve time to market. The Kit’based on the OpenEmbedded build system’leverages thousands of open source packages.
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Phones
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Other open source mobile platforms are available, including Maemo on the Nokia N900 and the LiMo platform. Palm’s WebOS is also worth keeping an eye on, which is Linux based even if closed source. That said, none of these make programming quite so easy as Google have just done for Android.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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…the last N-Series device from the Finnish company to offer Symbian OS, with future devices running the Linux-based MeeGo operating system.
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The Nokia N9 is a slider device with what looks like a full aluminium body, sliding device and amazing QWERTY keyboard. This Linux based device could well be perceived as a Nokia Booklet 3G Mini as it certainly looks as though it could be a full-bloodied portable computer.
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The first unofficial pictures of the Nokia N9 have appeared. This device is apparently going to be the replacement for the N900, and the first phone based on MeeGo, an operating system still in development by Intel and Nokia.
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Android
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“The software giant will have a difficult time maintaining its market share above 5 [per cent] as the launching of its new Windows Phone 7 OS has been delayed to the fourth quarter and sales of Windows Mobile smartphones [are] still showing no signs of rebound.”
We have hand it to Digitimes for showing such diplomacy. A more frank version would be that the Vole is sinking without a trace, Windows Phone 7 will be late and nobody wants its current crop of phones, but then again not everyone displays our lack of tact and sensitivity.
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Unlike the rigidly controlled Apple App Store, the Android Marketplace is a bit freewheeling. It can be hard to tell the gold from the dross. To help you find the gems, here’s a list of 75 of the best apps the Android Marketplace has to offer.
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When Google first briefed the media last November on its plans to help spawn a new generation of Chrome OS-powered netbooks, the company said the first set of devices would be released this fall.
Despite some analyst’s skepticism that the effort is on track, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), as recently as last week, said it expects Chrome OS netbooks to be available later this year.
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Acer’s ARM/Android-based tablet PC is expected to be delayed to the first quarter of 2011, from the fourth quarter of 2010, as the company plans to wait until Google launches Android 3.0, which will feature support for larger display resolutions, according to sources from notebook players.
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Tablets
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HTC is building a Chrome OS tablet for Google, set for a Verizon launch on Nov. 26, an industry report claims. Meanwhile, Pandigital released its second seven-inch Android-based e-reader tablet, with more memory than before plus a smaller, lighter design.
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Google Android was always going to be the heart of many Linux-based iPad like devices. That’s not news. What is news is that Google and Verizon appear to be working together to create a Chrome operating system-based tablet.
According to a report from the Download Squad, HTC is building the Chrome OS tablet. The device will be sold in partnership with Verizon starting on November 26th. That date is already engraved in every retailer’s heart as Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and usually the biggest shopping day of the year.
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Some proprietary software businesses assume that FLOSS projects/businesses will die from lack of income. They expect they can buy up the projects and convert them to proprietary products or kill them. They don’t get FLOSS. It’s the licences that keep FLOSS free, not the price. FLOSS can be forked and escapes the trap. The current suit by Oracle to capitalize on Java or to kill it will fail both because there is no legal basis for the suit and because even if Java is killed, FLOSS can work around the problem. If Oracle wishes to become a patent troll, its days are numbered as everyone will know it is risky to do business with them. They cannot sue the world as SCOG found out.
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OpenHatch is a place for developers who want to be involved in open source but don’t know where to start. You can go to the site and search for a way to contribute based on a language you know or a project you like. You can even search for “bite-size bugs,” the bugs that have been tagged by a project as being specifically good for new contributors.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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A bug in the Firefox browser that can be used to bypass an alert for obfuscated URLs is unlikely to trick users, according to Mozilla.
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Mozilla hopes to release its fourth beta of Firefox 4 on Monday, adding hardware-accelerated graphics for some Windows users but leaving it turned off by default.
Also coming is a major user interface change called tab sets, formerly known as tab candy.
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Databases
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The test confirmed that TPS levels of CUBRID and MySQL database systems increase on SSD equipped machines. During the I/O Bound workload CUBRID had 4.2 times increase in TPS, while MySQL had 2.8 fold improvement.
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Oracle
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The next to fall victim was the PostgreSQL database. Although not owned by Oracle, the open source database software is a competitor to MySQL, now owned by Oracle. Sun Microsystems was contributing servers for the development of PostgreSQL, but at the end of July Oracle shut these down, leaving PostgreSQL work in limbo, and raising further questions about Oracle’s commitment to open source.
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I begin to wonder if Oracle is beginning to build its own stack. What brings this to mind is the announcement by Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, that Oracle wants to give companies access to a world where data centers have become “service centers.”
Oracle has long had many of the parts: an operating system, Unbreakable Linux, and now Solaris; a DBMS, of course; and with the acquisition of Sun, Java and all the middleware you could ever want.
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I have written many articles in the past about how much I love OpenOffice.org. In fact OpenOffice is one of the applications that first gave me the confidence to switch to GNU/Linux six years ago. Today I downloaded and installed the latest stable version of OpenOffice, version 3.2.1. This is the best version of OpenOffice that I have ever used from a technical standpoint. However, there were a few things that I noticed that gave me great reason for concern. Based on what I saw, I have serious doubts as to whether OpenOffice.org will continue to be free software/open source in the distant future. Oracle seems to be allowing forces that could be seen as hostile influence, or at least interact with, the OpenOffice community. Perhaps more disturbingly, they appear to be trying to distance OpenOffice from the free software license under which it has propagated for so many years.
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I can think of all kinds of reasons why Oracle is suing Google over its use of its Java IP (intellectual property) in Android. Making money from its Java patents strikes me and most experts as the most likely reason. But, I’ve also heard suggested, time after time, that the real reason is that Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO is buddies with Steve Jobs, aka Mr. Apple and he wanted to help Apple fight Android.
Could that be the case? Here’s the logic that supporters of this theory use. First, Google and Apple are competiting head-to-head in the smartphone space. The iPhone certainly has more users, but the Android phone family is quickly catching up.
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Healthcare
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The Veterans Affairs Department sees advantages in using open-source software to modernize its Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) system, but it anticipates several problems if it takes that step.
The VA issued a request for information Aug. 11 asking for industry to deal with anticipated concerns related to open-source development for VistA.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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* Free Software has come from being ignored and ridiculed to being required by everyone. The world of IT now depends on Free Software.
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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Mike wrote a guide for programming MSP430 microcontrollers using the TI Launchpad under Linux. It makes use of the open source compiler MSPGCC rather than using a code-limited proprietary IDE.
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Standards/Consortia
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A version of Flash is being built using Java, two years after Adobe Systems opened the player’s closed formats to external inspection.
Programmer Joa Ebert has demonstrated a Java build of Flash executing SWF. The player is apparently called JITB, and it was recently unveiled at an event in San Francisco.
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The leading Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional printed the word “censored” across a white space on its front page today.
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Almost none. This weekend, the Indianapolis Star ran a front-page article looking at where all the forfeiture money is going. I’d like to link to it, but in an apparent effort to keep the paper as irrelevant as possible, the Star has lately adopted a policy of not putting its most important pieces online. But as it turns out, Indiana attorney Paul Ogden actually beat the paper to the story by several weeks. Last month, Ogden put up a post on his blog that came to many of the same conclusions the Star published this weekend. Here’s what Ogden found:
* Of Indiana’s 92 counties, just five have paid any forfeiture money into the school fund over the last two years. Three of those made just one payment. One county made a single payment of $84.50. Only one county could arguably be seen as complying with the law: Wayne County made 18 payments totalling $38,835.56.
* The total amount of forfeiture money paid into the account from all 92 Indiana counties over the two-year period was just $95,509.72.
* To put that figure into perspective, Ogden notes that attorney Christopher Gambill—the private attorney who, as I noted in my article, handles civil forfeiture cases for three Indiana counties and argued the case for Putnam County to keep Anthony Smelley’s money—made $113,145.67 in contingency fees off just a single forfeiture case.
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Earlier this year, we wrote about the odd decision of Warner Bros. studio to personally sue Marc Toberoff, the lawyer who successfully represented the heirs of the creators of Superman to win back some of their copyright, by using copyright’s termination rules. Toberoff is making a career of this, and has been helping numerous other content creators start the process of reclaiming rights using the termination process — which makes him somewhat… disliked in the entertainment industry. Still, to sue him personally seemed quite extreme. As we noted at the time, the lawsuit seemed to be based on the idea that Toberoff is a jerk and a savvy business person. As we noted at the time, that doesn’t appear to be illegal.
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I was horrified to read, “The days of DIY system administration are rapidly coming to a close.” All those lovely GNU tools about to be replaced by automatons. Sigh. Change is a given in IT. Fortunately my system is small enough my home-made configuration works well and it will take some effort to implement puppet or one of the other automatic systems.
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From a cultural perspective, though, this whole story again shows how culture is changing in very interesting and powerful ways. When we talk about things like “remixing” and “mashups,” we tend to hear from a chorus of folks who brush off such things as mere copying and not worthy of being considered art in itself. But there’s a lot more to it than that. What makes culture culture is the shared experiences around that work. This song is not only musically interesting, but also calls attention to a horrible incident that happened as well. And, again, some will brush it off as being meaningless, but the power with which it has interested so many people is not something that should be ignored.
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Security/Aggression
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Medway Council’s CCTV spy car has once again been captured parked on double yellow lines.
The all-seeing camera car, one of two operated by the council, was parked in a cul-de-sac outside Blockbuster’s Chatham town centre store, off Best Street, on Saturday, July 31.
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Derek Evans started tending the cemetery where his mother is buried after noticing the grass needed cutting.
The Army pensioner bought a £300 lawnmower and within a year was helping spruce up the gravesides for more than 70 grateful owners.
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Gutsy students from Medway have been snatching shoppers’ cigarettes, in an effort to persuade them to kick the habit.
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Federal prosecutors will not file charges against a school district or its employees over the use of software to remotely monitor students.
U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger says investigators have found no evidence of criminal intent by Lower Merion School District employees who activated tracking software that took thousands of webcam and screenshot images on school-provided laptops.
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Sources say that the final section of combat troops in Iraq, the United States Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade, based at Fort Lewis, Washington, have made their way across the border between Iraq and Kuwait, formally ending combat operations within Iraq.
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Biometrics R&D firm Global Rainmakers Inc. (GRI) announced today that it is rolling out its iris scanning technology to create what it calls “the most secure city in the world.” In a partnership with Leon — one of the largest cities in Mexico, with a population of more than a million — GRI will fill the city with eye-scanners. That will help law enforcement revolutionize the way we live — not to mention marketers.
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Facebook’s login system continues to spill information that can be helpful to phishers, social engineers and other miscreants attempting to scam the more than 500 million active users of the social networking site.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Last week, a federal district court judge in northern California issued an injunction against planting biotech sugar beets next year. Why? He accepted the activist argument that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) must issue a full environmental impact statement (EIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act before permitting the improved sugar beets to be grown. An EIS is required when a federal government agency engages in actions that might be “significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.”
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Rising temperatures in the past decade have reduced the ability of the world’s plants to soak up carbon from the atmosphere, scientists said today.
Large-scale droughts have wiped out plants that would have otherwise absorbed an amount of carbon equivalent to Britain’s annual man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
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In early March, just days after the Kingdom of Morocco announced plans for a landmark environmental charter called “the first commitment of its kind in Africa and the Arab world”, Mohamed Attaoui was sentenced to two years in prison in the Atlas mountains. His crime? Speaking out against illegal logging of shrinking cedar forests and corruption among the ranks of the forest service and local government officials.
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Hundreds of climate activists have occupied land at the Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters in protest at its multi-billion pound loans to the oil and mining industries, including firms involved in exploiting Canadian tar sands.
The protesters cut through a perimeter fence on Wednesday night, erecting scores of tents and marquees on landscaped meadows a few hundred metres from the headquarters building.
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A 22-mile plume of droplets from BP’s Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico undermines claim that oil has degraded
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Finance
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Barclays – which is settling criminal charges of breaking US sanctions by effecting wire transfers with Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma – was accused of stripping out identifying data in the transfers, it has emerged. The bank is awaiting court approval for the $298 million (£190 million) settlement.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Independent testing commissioned by the Food Rights Network found toxic contaminants in San Francisco’s sewage sludge “compost.” In the sludge product given away free to gardeners from 2007 to March 4, 2010, are contaminants with endocrine-disruptive properties including PBDE flame retardants, nonylphenol detergent breakdown products, and the antibacterial agent triclosan. The independent tests were conducted for the Food Rights Network by Dr. Robert C. Hale of the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences.
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USA Today’s article emphasizes the decentralized nature of the Tea Party movement, reinforcing the idea that it is solely a grassroots movement. That has been far from the case. USA Today doesn’t mention that, unlike other “grassroots movements,” the Tea Party benefits from major media sponsorship by Fox News, and receives financial backing from corporate lobbyists. The article also fails to describe the many factions of the movement and their origins, which are confusing to many: the Tea Party Patriots (arguably the least well funded and most “grassroots” faction of the movement); the for-profit Tea Party Nation (a domestic for-profit business entity that sells baubles like bejeweled tea bags for $89.95 apiece) and the Tea Party Express, which is basically a professional PR campaign sponsored by FreedomWorks, which is headed by former Republican Majority Leader-turned-lobbyist Dick Armey.
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Documentary movies about the American food industry, like “Food Inc.,” “Fast Food Nation”, “King Corn” and “Supersize Me” for the first time gave millions of people a hard look at modern food production practices, including distasteful realities like factory farming. As a result, more people have become skeptical of modern farming practices and mindful about where their food comes from. But big farmers are starting to fight back.
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Last month, it was revealed that Target contributed 150,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of conservative, anti-gay candidate Tom Emmer. Agit-pop activists have something to say about that: “Target ain’t people so why should they be, allowed to play around with our democracy!” Watch:
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Google Inc.’s plans to launch its “Street View” mapping service in 20 German cities by year’s end has ignited a debate in Germany over how to reconcile the country’s cherished privacy laws with the realities of the digital age.
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9) wi-fi – if you’ve got wi-fi at home, give it a good password (see above). Otherwise it allows intruders in with few barriers to overcome.
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The award is judged by a group of retired senior US military and intelligence personnel, and past winners. This year the award to Julian Assange was unanimous.
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Filmmaker Michael Moore is praising an Army private suspected of releasing classified war records to WikiLeaks and said he would contribute to his defense.
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South Korea has blocked access to the official North Korea Twitter account, a matter of days after the secretive state started posting messages.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Earlier this month, Creative Commons asked for comment on the new Public Domain Mark (PDM), “a tool that would make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain.”
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Robert writes that he received an exciting e-mail from his Internet provider, Comcast. They were giving him a better connection! Faster downloads! Then Comcast followed up a few days later to say, approximately, “hey, remember that e-mail we sent saying that your Internet connection is faster now? Yeah, it’s not actually true.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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It should be no surprise that various malicious typo squatters have targeted The Pirate Bay with fake sites that try to install malware, however Torrentfreak looked a bit deeper and found that one of the typo squatters, a company called BladeBook, appears to be trying to trademark the actual name, as well. Apparently, BladeBook’s Craig Pratka first filed for the trademark the same day that it was announced that The Pirate Bay had been sold to GGF, a deal that eventually fell apart (as did the initial trademark application).
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Copyrights
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In my classes in IP law and copyright, I sometimes have difficulty conveying to students the “cost” side of the copyright regime. That is, though we often make reference to implementing the right copyright “balance” in our law, I think students (and others, for that matter) are often uncertain as to exactly what is being balanced against what. The benefits of a copyright regime are pretty obvious — if you give people a property interest in their creations, they’ll be able to work out market arrangements to receive compensation for them; knowing that in advance, they’ll create more works of art than they otherwise would absent that protection, and we’re all better off as a result. That’s easy enough to see. What’s harder to see is why that principle should ever be limited — if protection yields more creative works, why won’t more protection yield more creative works (to the benefit of all)? Why not make copyright perpetual, and copyright rights as broad and as deep as possible — won’t that get us even more creative works to enjoy? [That’s a viewpoint that many in Congress apparently share, as copyright protection has indeed gotten longer and longer and deeper and broader over the past 50 years or so — helped along, I suppose, by those stacked bundles of unmarked hundred dollar bills left in Congressional anterooms by representatives of the “copyright industries” — hey, don’t sue me, that’s just a joke).
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Here is one of the nation’s most prominent television critics at the time effectively admitting that a single copyright suit prevented countless of creative comedic works from being produced at the time – a shameful fact that is surely ignored in most law school and history classes today.
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After several months of battling App Store reviewers, the on-demand music service finally released its official iOS app last week. The reason for the app’s removal? According to the Grooveshark blog, Apple received a takedown notice from Universal Music Group UK.
In February, UMG filed a lawsuit against Grooveshark over the service’s use of IP. Grooveshark has also battled — and settled — with the music label EMI.
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We’ve seen all sorts of really bizarre and downright dangerous plans to change copyright law to favor newspapers, but a new one, posted at Henry Blodget’s Business Insider may be the most ridiculous of all. It starts off with a bunch of really bad assumptions, and then suggests special copyright protections for publications against aggregators, including that no one could repost (even fair use reposting) any content from a daily publication for 24-hours or a week for weekly publications:
A first suggestion would be to provide newspaper and other journalistic content special protection, so that no part of any story from any daily periodical could be reposted in an online aggregator, or used online for any use other than commentary on the article, for 24 hours; similarly, no part of any story from any weekly publication could be reposted in an online aggregator or for any use purpose other than commentary, for one week.
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Amusingly, the article also has the Righthaven folks admitting some “kinks” that need “to be worked out,” such as the time it sued the very source for an article (apparently, this has happened more than once). In the one case that we wrote about, after that came to light, Righthaven dropped the lawsuit. I’m guessing that after some more lawyers start fighting back against Righthaven, it’s going to discover quite a few more “kinks” in its system.
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Rocker John Mellencamp said on Tuesday that the Internet was the most dangerous invention since the atomic bomb, although new technology could paradoxically delay the inevitable demise of rock ‘n’ roll.
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This is a key point that often gets lost in business model discussions. When we talk about different offerings, it’s amazing how much people discount the importance of authenticity as a scarcity. We see it all the time with companies who want to sponsor something, and then have tremendous level of control — losing all of the authenticity and, with it, much of the value (and, eventually, audience). It’s nice to see a situation where a company (in this case, Microsoft) properly recognized when not to get too involved.
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“Federal law provides severe civil and criminal penalties for unauthorized reproduction, distribution or exhibition of copyrighted motion pictures.”
What’s with the many movies we watch at home launching with this threat? You can’t even fast-forward past it! And what’s with day-care centers being threatened for decorating with Mickey Mouse images? And club proprietors who must caution open-mike artists against strumming published songs? Are rockers who fold in a few seconds from some popular work, and visual artists who quote commercial imagery, really thieves?
It wasn’t always that way. Such cultural expression was, for centuries past, sharing, not theft. We’ve moved radically far in a long process of intellectual enclosure, privatizing and shutting down a vigorous cultural commons.
Lewis Hyde, MacArthur Fellow and professor at Kenyon and Harvard, offers a brilliant and absorbing account of the development of restrictive and enduring private ownership of shared experience. “Common as Air” develops, in Hyde’s own words, “a model and defense of our ‘cultural commons,’ that vast store of unowned ideas, inventions and works of art that we have inherited from the past and that we continue to create.”
Microsoft The Embarrasing moments
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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After the release of the Ubuntu Multi-Touch stack called UTouch and the X.Org Gesture Extension, the rising question would be the support of everyday applications, as only a few applications in Ubuntu 10.10 will properly support UTouch. Standard applications which are non-multi-touch-aware only recognize events which come from the keyboard and the mouse like key-presses and mouse clicks.
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Desktop
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LLVMpipe is an especially interesting Gallium3D driver since it allows accelerating the state trackers atop any modern CPU, but for any close to decent level of performance when using OpenGL you need a hefty multi-core CPU (here’s some LLVMpipe benchmarks just from last week) that supports the latest SSE4 instructions as well. While some OpenGL games will run with LLVMpipe and the performance of this driver that leverages the Low-Level Virtual Machine is much faster and better than Mesa’s old software rasterizer or the Gallium3D Softpipe driver, Compiz nor the GNOME Shell (and most other compositing window managers) yet work with this driver.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this special episode we interview blind Linux user Jonathan Nadeau about his company Frostbite Systems that sells blind-optimised computers, his podcast network Frostbite Media and much more…
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Karen and Bradley discuss the enforcement activities of the Software Freedom Conservancy, recent conferences and medical devices.
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Interview with longtime Gentoo user Mona, third place finisher in the recent 2010 Gentoo screenshot contest. If you would prefer to read the interview, Mona provided a transcript below.
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In this episode: Ubuntu 10.10 is going to add gesture support and 11.04 is going to be called the Natty Narwhal. Debian 6.0 has been feature frozen while Oracle sets its sights on Google. Discover how we fared with our Nethack challenge and how we filled the Open Ballot section without an Open Ballot.
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Google
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Google now supporting voice and video chat on Linux
Google has finally updated their web based talk service to support voice and video chat on Linux.
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Further details about the release can be found in the release notes. Version 1.3.6 of the Google App Engine SDK is available to download from Google Code.
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Gaming portal 1Up.com has detailed a presentation given by Google developer advocates Mark DeLoura and Michael Mahemoff at GDC Europe that contains new details about the Chrome Web Store — a feature first announced at Google I/O that will allow users to purchase web applications from their Chrome web browsers. During their talk, the Google employees revealed that the Web Store is going to (probably) launch in October, and they gave more details on how the web store’s payments would work.
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Android developers can distribute their software for free in 46 countries, but they can only sell apps in 13 countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States.
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Kernel Space
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In the context of the IRMOS European Project (Interactive Real-Time Applications on Service-Oriented Infrastructures), a new realtime scheduler for Linux has been developed by the Real-Time Systems Laboratory of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. The purpose of this article is to provide a general overview of this new scheduler, describe its features and how it can be practically used, provide a few details about the implemented algorithms, and gathering feedback by the community about possible improvements.
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Graphics Stack
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With the imminent release of X.Org Server 1.9, last week we delivered benchmarks of Intel’s 2D driver performance with X.Org Server 1.9. In those tests we found Intel’s UXA (UMA Acceleration Architecture) performance only changed a bit — for either better or worse — with the updated X Server, but today we are looking at the 2D EXA performance using ATI Radeon hardware using this soon-to-be-released X Server.
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Applications
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The ClamAV developers have released version 0.96.2 of their open source virus scanner toolkit. The latest version of the free cross-platform, anti-virus application addresses a number of bugs found in the previous version, including memory and error path leaks in the libclamav library. Other changes include memory management improvements, better database loading time and various scanning enhancements.
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The world of open source software has ample choices for editing and manipulating audio and video media files. But when you just want put your feet up and relax, fewer really ideal options are available. One solid choice is the Gxine is a media player (See my review here). But an even better pick is the VLC Media Player.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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When new users are presented with a new operating system, their experience can be tragic or it can be magic. Which path it takes depends upon a number of issues. First among those issues is how easy the transition is. If users are faced with hurdle after hurdle, you know they are going to either be coming back to you or giving up. It doesn’t have to be that way.
In this article, I am going to show you 10 steps to take a default Ubuntu 10.04 installation and make it as newbie-proof as possible. After this walk-through, you can also re-create the “complete distribution” so you always have that newbie-proof Linux distro at the ready. Let’s take a look at these steps.
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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By the standards of previous releases in the KDE 4 series, KDE 4.5 is tame. It has few new applications, and introduces no new technologies. Yet with its combination of small innovations and interface improvements, KDE 4.5 still manages to be a release worth installing. Although it does not try to expand the concept of the desktop, it does make KDE easier to use in dozens of small and satisfying ways.
Released August 10, KDE 4.5 is already packaged for many major distributions, including Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, and Ubuntu, although in some cases you will have to look in the developmental repositories rather than the main ones. Source code is also available from the project. Those who want to try it before installing can download the latest CD from openSUSE’s KDE Four Live site.
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My last article I spoke about the new KDE Activities features Search and Launch Containment Activity (see my article “Using the KDE 4.5 Search and Launch Containment Activity“). This is the first visible sign of KDE’s use of the Nepomuk Semantic Desktop. Nepomuk is a system that uses metadata throughout the desktop to aid in file search and peer to peer collaboration. So far the project has yet to reach its full potential (as it is quite new to the desktop).
Strigi, on the other hand, is the desktop search daemon that runs on the KDE desktop. It is these two components that help to create the KDE 4.5 Semantic Desktop (a desktop who’s data is easily shared between components). In this article I will introduce you to these two components and how you interact with them to make your KDE desktop as fluid as possible.
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On the website of an Austrian (no kangaroos!) newspaper, I read an interview with Canonical’s Jono Bacon. In this interview, Jono talks about the process of developing central components of the desktop inside Canonical. The process is basically that Canonical’s design department, Ayatana develops components. When they are finished, they’re offered for inclusion into GNOME, which was not a successful in all cases yet. According to Jono this is “working upstream”, explaining that in this context Ayatana is the upstream. GNOME is seen as a provider of components, building blocks for Ubuntu’s user experience.
The definition Jono handles of upstream development is quite different from how it works for me. I can speak of personal and professional experience in this context, as I have been working quite a lot on central components of the Plasma Desktop (and Netbook as well). I have done this work both, as a voluntary contributor in my Free time (pun intended), and continue to do so in my working hours for open-slx. open-slx happens to sell and support Linux deskop operating systems.
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Over the past couple of months I had the great opportunity of taking part in this year’s Google Summer of Code. I moved out to bring Ubuntu One to the KDE desktop and I think I was rather successful with it, now all I need to do is find someone who is willing to maintain it … 
Now that Google Summer of Code is over I will continue focusing my efforts on Kubuntu and general distribution development which is the reason I would very much like to find someone who is willing to maintain it.
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For other Linux distributions, FreeBSD, and other operating systems, you should check the official websites, wikis, announcement sections of forums, and mailing lists to see if KDE 4.5 will be included in their repositories and/or future releases.
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This week on a very steamy episode of KDEMU we have Lydia Pintscher, GSoC and Season of KDE cat herder.
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GNOME Desktop
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The first beta of the upcoming GNOME 2.32 has landed to give early adopters, distro builders, developers and generally curious people a taste of things to come.
GNOME 2.32 Beta 1, technically GNOME 2.31.90, is somewhat of a new development since the next release of the popular desktop environment was supposed to be the all-powerful GNOME 3.0.
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The GNOME developers have announced their first public release (v0.1) of SeedKit, consisting of both the GNOME SeedKit Viewer and the SeedKit library. GNOME’s SeedKit is designed to blend web technologies (namely HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript) into the GNOME desktop by allowing native user-interfaces to be written in these web technologies. SeedKit leverages GTK+, WebKit, and Seed to lower the barrier to creating new user-interfaces for the GNOME desktop. SeedKit was inspired by Palm’s WebOS SDK and Mozilla’s JetPack.
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Reviews
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Day Two. Our weapon of choice: Linux Mint 9 LXDE.
On the face of it Linux Mint LXDE is just a tweaked Lubuntu, but there is more to it than that.
It features (many) more software packages on install, codecs pre-installed, and some “heavier” packages like Thunderbird.
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Arch Linux is a lightweight, flexible and simple Linux Distribution which is targeted at competent GNU/Linux users. Its Development focuses on a balance of minimalism, elegance, code correctness and modernity. It provides a minimal environment upon installation, (no GUI), already compiled and optimized for i686/x86-64 architectures. We already discussed about a lot of Linux Distros and also How to create your own Linux Distribution.
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Today we give Sabayon Five-Oh a run. Three of the four distros we reviewed this week have been using LXDE as its desktop environment.
Sabayon is the first distro we are having a look at that have not been Ubuntu based or a variant of Ubuntu.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva S.A. Mandriva is an online retailer of Linux software products. The company is engaged in the development and distribution operations of Mandriva Linux products, software applications, storage devices and drives, USB speakers, support and training applications and goodies. Mandrivas main products are Mandriva directory server, Linbox rescue server, corporate server 4, Pulse 2 and corporate desktop. The company also
provides online download of its software products. The company caters to corporate enterprises, government organizations, and educational and technical institutions. The company has operations across 140 countries, and offices across France, Brazil and the U.S.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is pursuing a certification for its Linux OS and virtualization, paving the way for government agencies to use the technology to create secure, virtualized IT environments and private clouds.
The Linux vendor has entered into an agreement with Atsec information security to certify Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 under Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4, according to a Red Hat blog post.
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Red Hat shares have crossed above the 50-day moving average on lighter than usual volume. The crossing of the stock price above the moving average may signal the beginning of a bullish trend. Today, shares of RHT rose $0.86(+2.77%) to $31.88. RHT traded between the range of $31.20 – $32.08. Today’s trading activities for Red Hat stock may be a sign that the shares will continue to head higher in the foreseeable future assuming the moving average has upward slope.
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Today, the Red Hat team is excited to launch Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is an optional subscription offering that provides support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for longer than its standard seven-year life cycle.
With Extended Life Cycle Support customers can receive limited software maintenance and technical support services for an additional three years, extending the life cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to a full ten years. The seven-year life cycle of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release generally applies to major versions, so, for example, the standard life cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 runs from October 2003, when it was released, to October 2010. For customers who purchase ELS, which is sold as an add-on to an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, the support life cycle can be extended to October 2013.
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Fedora
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I’d heard really good things about the new generation Android phones, especially their playing nice with Linux hosts. So I decided it was high time I tried something new rather than simply queuing up for a new and spiffier prison cell (iPhone). Based on the reviews of service in Consumer Reports, Verizon was far and away the leader in customer satisfaction. I decided to concentrate on their offerings, and was thrilled to find the new Droid X (info: Flash site) was now shipping, albeit with a few weeks’ wait.
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So a while back I talked a bit about the fedoracommunity.org website project that the Fedora Websites team has been working on, including the vision behind it and the work that had been done on it up to that point.
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As John posted last night, Fedora 14 Alpha was declared ready for release next week. Although there was a one-week slip to handle the fact that our blocker list wasn’t clear, Fedora developers and testers in the community have worked hard together both to resolve the remaining issues and make sure that our Alpha would pass the release criteria. There were a number of developers who hopped in to fix things quickly to yield package builds that would clear the runway, so thanks to all of you guys.
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Debian Family
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In a study not likely to cause controversy, Christian Perrier has published the results of his analysis of the number of Debian developers per country. He ran the analysis last year for the first time, so one can see the progress or recession in the last year. No matter where you call home, the numbers are quite interesting.
The land that gave the world Linus Torvald also gives the world the most Debian developers per million population. Ranked number one last year as well, Finland is home to 3.92 active developers per one million souls. In second place is Switzerland with 2.83 per million. New Zealand holds a very respectable third place with 2.51 per million. The United Kingdom beats out the United States with their 1.03 developers per million to .53. In last place is the Ukraine, China, and India. Making their first showing this year is Ecuador with one new developer or .07 developers per million people. Sweden, who ranked third last year, fell to sixth this year. Ireland has gained three new developers bringing their total to nine which allows them to hold ninth place, up from 13.
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Welcome to this year’s ninth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* The Debian project Release Team announces an official Freeze
* Annual Debian Developer Conference 2010 ended
* A free (as in speech) Debian book in the making
* Second alpha version for “Squeeze”-based Debian Live images
* Net-installation CD images with firmware available
* Debian Edu/Skolelinux 6.0.0 alpha0 test release
* ZFS support in unstable on kFreeBSD ports
* Debian-Accessibility is using Blends web sentinel
* Debian GIS project will release Blends metapackages in “Squeeze”
* DebiChem project will release Blends metapackages in “Squeeze”
* DebConf11 logo contest
* When should services started by init.d scripts be operational?
* Different statistics about Debian
* Building all files from source
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For another thing, while some distributions are more concerned than others about ease of use, today what increasingly determines that factor is not distributions themselves so much as the desktop that is in use. Using GNOME or KDE on Debian is not so different than using GNOME or KDE on Ubuntu, despite Ubuntu’s recent usability efforts.
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This is a list of people who are in ubuntu-dev or ubuntu-core-dev AND have their key in the Debian keyring, it’s not an indicator of how active that person may or may not be. Here are the scripts they used if you’re interested in working on this sort of thing.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In This Issue
* Ubuntu Global Jam: We Need Your Events!
* Feature Freeze in place for Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)
* Making Ubuntu More Accessible
* Talking about Ubuntu Studio with Scott Lavender, Project Lead for Ubuntu Studio
* Another Heated Discussion In the Ubuntu Community
* Ubuntu Stats
* LoCo News
* Launchpad News
* This week In Design – 13 August 2010
* Finding The Ubuntu Font Design
* How are your users feeling? Example from Rhythmbox
* An Update to the Ubuntu Light Themes
* Awesome Work Others Have Done
* Hugs For Bugs!
* Can We Count Users Without Uniquely Identifying Them?
* Revving up the Ubuntu Manual Project for Maverick
* Behind MOTU Relaunches As Behind The Circle
* In The Press
* In The Blogosphere
* Linux Foundation Makes Enterprise Open Source Boring
* KDE’s New Releases Make a Splash
* LinuxCon Grapples With Challenges, From Mobile To Multicore
* Fotoxx — the Greatest Little Linux Photo Editor You’ve Never Heard Of
* Zenoss Releases 2010 Open Source Systems Management Survey Report
* Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
* Upcoming Meetings and Events
* Updates and Security
* UWN Sneak Peek
* And Much Much More!
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I predict that Ubuntu 11.10 will be named “Ostentatious Ocelot”.
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Flavours and Variants
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Does Peppermint Ice, the new cloud-oriented desktop distro, have what it takes to do for desktops what Jolicloud and Google Chrome OS are doing for netbooks?
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Some communities put a great deal of emphasis on the developers/testers group with limited time for users while others engage the users at a higher rate than developers/testers and also increase time on champions. I believe in solution B as an engaged user community significantly increases the feedback for developers and allows the project to expand into a significant force in the industry. I also believe that champions come from the user group and the more champions a community has the more successful it is.
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Intelligence analysts will soon have a new idea- and decision-management tool. Called Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, the software is an open-source version of a proprietary program developed for the intelligence community.
ACH allows analysts to start with a great deal of data and find those data points that support or undermine various hypotheses, but it is a single-user system. Matthew Burton, a Web strategy consultant and former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, has tried for three years to develop a collaborative version so that multiple analysts could study the same hypotheses simultaneously, but he has been stymied by incompatibility with proprietary software specifications and licensing issues.
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The first part of this article explained the purpose and scope of Contributor Agreements in open source projects. This article presents an overview of some Contributor Agreements that are used in the community.
Contributor Agreements come in all shape and forms, ranging from full-fledged Contributor License Agreements (CLA) that have to be signed to informal consent to some set of rules. This article will take a look at a number of different agreements in order to show that community norms can vary widely.
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Let’s say you want to start a FLOSS project.
How many people did that up to now? Many.
But there is a problem, or better, a conflict of goals.
In one hand, you have the need of making your code fast enough. Which task is even more complex if you are using an interpreted language (for reasons out of the scope of this blog post). On the other hand (:D) there is the very important requirement of keeping your code human readable.
Languages, in general, have several “syntax levels” basing on developer’s skills. Newbies tend to stick to what is the standard way of writing, say, a for loop, while more skilled people are able to exploit all the potential of the language by using very exotic “code constructs”. Again, I don’t want to get into any particular language here, I just want to explain the trade-off that a developer, especially a FLOSS one has to accept when writing software
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Now, I know there are tons of you out there who are ready for interaction design help and are definitely willing to work with designers, because I hear from you all the time! There’s not enough interaction designers in the FLOSS community, and I believe programs like Matt’s that engage up-and-coming designers in the FLOSS community early on will help build up our interaction designer population. They provide a wonderful mutual benefit – the design students get to work on real-life projects, not just throw-away designs that are abandoned forever at the end of the semester – and the developers involved get the design help they desire but have such a hard time finding because of the dearth of designers. Help provide these students a great experience in interacting with our community, and maybe they’ll stick around!
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That non-technical user is the future of FOSS. If we don’t reach out to that person and get them using FOSS, it’s only a matter of time before Linux on the desktop is synonymous with OS/2. Yes, I acknowledge that Linux powers the Internet, and most of the search traffic and the most e-commerce and most supercomputers, etc . . . but that’s not enough. People have to know they are using Linux and FOSS and that means it has to power their desktop. In the absence of an awesome Linux desktop marketing machine (Canonical is good, but they’ve got a ways to go before they can match the awesome marketing of Microsoft, or that up and comer, Apple, it’s up to us. The community. We’ve got to speak with something resembling a unified voice, delivering a consistent, inclusive message.
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In early 2009, as the stories of many websites begin, a few college friends were considering what kind of project they might start together. In this particular case, the result was OpenHatch.
OpenHatch is a place for developers who want to be involved in open source but don’t know where to start. You can go to the site and search for a way to contribute based on a language you know or a project you like. You can even search for “bite-size bugs,” the bugs that have been tagged by a project as being specifically good for new contributors.
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Events
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This year the Ubuntu Maryland Local Community Team will again be holding a day of talks and discussions about Free and Open Source Software at the Miller Branch of our co-sponsors the Howard County Library! We are currently planning to have the event from 10am until 2pm.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Blizzard also notes that the next major version of Firefox, 4.0, will be “a generation ahead” in terms of Javascript speed, but does it really matter if it’s so much faster than Chrome. Every iteration of benchmark tests between the two seems to show them neck-and-neck. As Blizzard notes many people are doing, I’m going to stick with both open source browsers, which, at this point, are defining browser innovation.
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Although the growth of Firefox has stagnated a bit lately due to the increasing competition from rival browsers, it’s still one of the biggest success stories in the history of the Internet and has the second-largest user base of any web browser.
Firefox has a widespread global user base, but we wanted to find out where it is most common, or another way of looking at it: how are the Firefox users distributed?
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Oracle
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An open source project is generally conceived and implemented by a single person or small group. This conceiver and controller of the open source project has the most knowledge of the project. It is their vision which determines the direction of the project and they have the ultimate say in what contributions are accepted. When an open source project is sold out it is generally with their blessing and they continue working on the project under the mantle of the new owner.
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Called Open The Door, the book is not so much a manual for the office suite as it is a guide to making the most of OpenOffice.org. So while it includes advice on installing and using OpenOffice.org on Windows and Mac OS X machines, it is also focused on helping users make effective use of OpenOffice.
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According to Garret D’Amore, Illumos project leader, the recently launched derivative is beginning to diverge from OpenSolaris. D’Amore has noted in his blog that he believes the last commit to Oracle’s public repository for ON, the core of OpenSolaris, has been made. According to a leaked memo revealed earlier this week, Oracle are ceasing open development of Solaris and will discontinue OpenSolaris, migrating users to Solaris Express 11.
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Last week we found out that Oracle is killing off OpenSolaris and that there will no be OpenSolaris 2010.xx release as we’ve been waiting on for months, their Solaris code-base will be developed behind closed-doors, and only after the enterprise Solaris release will there be a “Solaris Express” release intended as the replacement to OpenSolaris. Though derived from the OpenSolaris code-base there has been a few community derivative operating systems such as Nexenta, StormOS (based off of Nexenta Core Platform but shipping as a desktop OS), and BeleniX. While OpenSolaris may now be dead, Nexenta at least is still living and today they’re out with their Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 release.
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Leventhal said, in a blog posting, that at Sun he had found himself “surrounded by superlative engineers” and that he felt lucky to have worked with Cantrill and Shapiro on DTrace. Most recently, Leventhal had been working on Fishworks, Sun’s Solaris based storage system technology. Leventhal does not say what he will be doing next, only that he is “off to look for my next remarkable place and time beyond the walls of Oracle”. It is possible he could follow in Cantrill’s footsteps; within days of leaving, it was announced he had become Vice President of Engineering at Joyent, one of the companies involved in the OpenSolaris derivative Illumos which was launched at the beginning of August.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Eben Moglen’s keynote address at LinuxCon last week, “Doing What it Takes: Current Legal Issues in Defending FOSS,” called for a strategic shift in the free software movement. Moglen, the founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and one of the principal drafters of the GPLv3, said the economy of sharing and the economy of ownership are not mutually hostile, but mutually reinforcing, then outlined three steps for ensuring the continued coexistence between the free software and business communities. For those who missed Moglen’s speech, here is a summary of his ideas on what it will take to ensure the health of the FOSS ecosystem.
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Government
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I’ve never seen it in action, but DHS’s Virtual USA project sounds remarkable. On top of using open source software to build it, the objective of the project is to break another government taboo: sharing information with other agencies and levels of government. Having been an intelligence analyst who relied a lot on mapping tools and was constantly frustrated by the inability to share geographic data even within your own building, it’s apparent that if Virtual USA delivers, it’s going to dramatically change how first responders work.
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Programming
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More than two years since the 7.2 release, Vim creator Bram Moolenaar has announced the arrival of version 7.3 of his open source text editor. Vim, an acronym for “Vi iMproved”, was originally created for the Amiga computer as an extended version of the vi editor, with several additional features aimed at editing source code.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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As Muscovites suffer record high temperatures this summer, a Russian political scientist has claimed the United States may be using climate-change weapons to alter the temperatures and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries.
In a recent article, Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, wrote, “At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries.”
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Earlier this month, government scientists reported that about 75% of the oil had been captured, burned off, evaporated or broken down in the Gulf.
But University of South Florida scientists, returning from a 10-day research voyage, said they found oil on the ocean floor in the DeSoto canyon, a prime spawning ground for fish far to the east of BP’s rogue oil well. Preliminary results suggested that oil was getting into the phytoplankton, the microscopic plants at the bottom of the Gulf food chain.
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Finance
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At a time when Congressional hearings are set to call testimony from some Goldman Sachs employees, it is vital to understand how widespread that institution’s ties are to the Obama administration. This diary shows the pervasive influence of Goldman Sachs and Goldman created institutions (like the Hamilton Project embedded in the Brookings Institution), employees and influence peddlers in the Obama administration.
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In what is due to be among the biggest stock offerings in history, GM has announced its initial public offering after being bailed out by the federal government. You’ll be hearing a lot about this as the administration tries to sell its record this fall. Meanwhile, a little-noticed provision in FinReg will allow the federal regulators to limit executive pay if they so choose; the bulk of private-sector job losses are coming from small businesses; a handy interactive graphic allows you to see how different approaches to the expiring Bush tax cuts would affect you; a handy paper will help you figure out the Fannie and Freddie debate; and a handy cover of some 90s alt-rock will start your morning right.
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The Obama administration wants for-profit career colleges to better prepare students for gainful employment and to improve debt-repayment rates. The government is threatening to pull access to federal student aid for colleges that fail to show progress.
Under the administration’s proposed rules, if a program graduated a large share of students with excessive debt compared with potential earnings in their chosen fields, it would be required to disclose this information to current and prospective students.
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The pay decisions made by regulators will apply not only to banks but also to brokerages, credit unions, investment advisers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and other financial firms with $1 billion or more in assets.
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The SEC has considered permitting so-called proxy access since 2003, only to back away in the face of opposition from companies. Public pension funds, including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers), say the change is needed to make directors more accountable to investors rather than rubber stamps for management.
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A judge has attacked the US government for striking a “sweetheart deal” with Barclays to settle criminal charges that the British bank flouted international sanctions by doing clandestine business with Iran, Cuba, Libya, Sudan and Burma.
At a court hearing in Washington yesterday, judge Emmet Sullivan refused to rubber-stamp an agreement under which Barclays consented to pay $298m to settle charges that its staff deliberately concealed transactions with financial institutions in regimes frozen out by US foreign policy.
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Barclays Barclays told a US court that the bank has tightened its procedures and improved staff training. Photograph Andy Rain/EPA
A US judge reluctantly accepted a $298m (£191m) fine from Barclays today to settle criminal charges of flouting international sanctions, despite criticising federal prosecutors for using “kid gloves” by failing to throw the book at specific executives within the British bank.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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My personal take on Net Neutrality is that ISPs should treat all packets equally. I do not like the idea of being forced to host all my videos on YouTube or another huge site that can afford to make special deals with broadband providers such as Brighthouse, my local cable TV monopoly, instead of on my friend Joe’s Globaltap hosting service.
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KDE Plasma Mobile Tablet edition
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