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05.06.11

Links 6/5/2011: Linux-powered Android Phones Take Majority Share in the US

Posted in News Roundup at 5:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A 15 pound computer to inspire young programmers

    The result, a working computer running on a Linux operating system for very little, and a device that will, like the kit computers of the 1970s and 80s, encourage users to tinker around under the bonnet and learn a bit of programming. And it’s a yearning to return to those days that is driving Braben and the other enthusiasts who are working to turn this sketchy prototype into a product that could be handed to every child in Britain.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • FLOSS Weekly 164: Buildbot

      Buildbot is software that automatically configures and tests your software packages for you.

      Guest: Dustin J. Mitchell

  • Kernel Space

    • FHS Refresh

    • Graphics Stack

      • OpenWF Working Group Offers Hand To Wayland

        While not a huge item as no work has yet been rendered, the Khronos Working Group responsible for the OpenWF standard have offered their support to the Wayland Display Server project.

        OpenWF 1.0 launched in 2009 as an open, cross-platform API designed for composited windowing systems that is hardware independent. OpenWF is broken down into Composition and Display components with more technical details behind this hardware-independent API being available at Khronos.org. The Khronos Group is, of course, the entity also responsible for OpenGL, OpenVG, etc.

      • First steps with Wayland

        Wayland seems very interesting, specially from the perspective of having a clean codebase and architecture to work with unlike X.org. The main advantage is that the compositor acts as the display server, allowing it to be aware of the input events and avoiding round trips between processes.

        [...]

        To start my journey I had to read a bit about EGL and GL, coming from a high level/clutter/cairo/mostly 2D wonderland it was an interesting read and I’m starting to pick the basic concepts around it.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Let the user decide if in doubt

        If it comes to decisions there is always the aim to just do the right thing. In a lot of cases there is the one right thing. In quite a few cases there is no right thing but the consequences are small enough that it does not really matter which decision one takes. And then there are those use-cases where the only right thing to do is to ask the user because any other decision would just be guessing and lead to RAM and CPU wasting.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME marketing contract: final report

        My marketing contract with the GNOME Foundation finished last week. The final weeks of the contract gave me the opportunity to work on some more general marketing tasks that I didn’t have chance to in the run up to the release itself. So, in the final weeks of the contract, I…

  • Distributions

    • Ubuntu and Slackware, two of the most important distributions released new versions last month
    • Some of the faces behind the distros

      When I first migrated to Linux, I bought a nice set of stickers and one of them depicted many smiling penguins. As a heading, you could read “The friendly face of Linux”. Today, as I saw anticaptalista’s encouraging comment in Megatotoro’s blog, it suddenly struck me that there is an element that I have been enjoying since the moment of my migration, something subtle, but powerful. You see, as an ex-Windows user, although I could identify Bill Gates’ face (and even Ballmer’s), I never received any tangible support from Microsoft. Windows was merely a business.

      Linux, on the other hand, has represented an unmatched opportunity to learn and grow because of the intense human interaction of its vibrating communities. For example, as soon as I joined Mandriva’s community forum, I was received as a human being, not as a number. The same happened when I posted my first question in Mageia’s blog: the prompt reply giving me direction was refreshing. And I cannot describe the feeling I experienced yesterday when I opened my email to find a follow-up message from a Mageia developer taking care of the bug I reported.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat bashes Microsoft, VMware while pitching new cloud software

        Microsoft and VMware are the enemies of interoperability, and only open source software can prevent cloud lock-in.

        That, at least, is what Red Hat wants customers to believe, as the open source vendor unveiled private cloud software and a public cloud service while offering its usual screed against proprietary technology.

        At Wednesday’s Red Hat Summit in Boston, vice president of products and technologies Paul Cormier declared “We’ve changed the world,” and mocked VMware’s “Cloud Developer’s Bill of Rights” and its statement about preventing customers from being locked in to specific products.

      • Red Hat and University of Wisconsin Expand Technology Partnership and Cloud Leadership
      • Red Hat launches CloudForms IaaS, OpenShift PaaS platforms

        Red Hat introduced two new cloud products – CloudForms and OpenShift — at its annual summit Wednesday.

        CloudForms, which is based upon the company-sponsored DeltaCloud project that is now part of Apache– offer sophisticated resource management, application deployment services and Infrastructure-as a Service offerings that help IT adminstrators implement private and hybrid clouds.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • The Post Penguicon Unity Unification Story

          I still don’t really care for Unity, but I’ll admit the panel was very helpful in my attempt to deal with it. Here are some highlights. Please note the questions and responses are based on my recollection of the panel, so I’ve taken some liberties.

        • Ubuntu 11.04: Is Natty Narwhal the best Linux desktop ever?

          I have to say that I came to Ubuntu 11.04 not at all convinced that I’d like it. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Unix and Linux user. While I’m not so hide-bound that I consider the Bash shell to be the be-all and end-all of desktops, I do like getting to the engine of my operating system so I can tune it just the way I want it — and that’s not what Unity is all about.

          Somewhat to my surprise, I found that I liked it a lot. And, better still for what Canonical has planned for Ubuntu, I found that people who’d never used Linux before actually liked Ubuntu. Mind you, they couldn’t tell it was Linux under the hood, but I think that’s the point. This is Linux for non-Linux users, and as that, I think it’s a great success.

          Is it good enough to get Windows users to switch? I don’t know, but I do know, that as users switch more and more to tablets and smartphones, they’re certainly more open to new possibilities and that’s exactly what Unity is. It’s not just a new take on the desktop, it’s a new take on the interface for all devices. I fully expect to see Unity-based tablets sometime soon. And I think Ubuntu just might be the first Linux to gain a large number of ordinary users.

        • Ubuntu 11.04: Too Natty for Its Own Good?

          Do we love it? Well, many of us do, it seems. Then again, many of us aren’t so sure. The new Unity interface, in particular, has created more than a few furrowed brows.

        • 10 things to love about Ubuntu 11.04

          Today is a good day, as I dine on a dish of crow — served gladly by the ladies and gentlemen of Canonical. In Ubuntu 11.04: Small issues, big win, I explained how my opinions changed about Ubuntu 11.04 and the most recent release of the new default Ubuntu desktop, Unity. After installing the beta 1 release, I realized that my fears were pretty much misplaced. And now that I have the final release up and running — and despite its installation problems — I’m still convinced that there’s plenty to love about the latest Ubuntu release. Let’s take a look.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Ubuntu 11.04: The ultimate educational desktop?

            I’ve been using Ubuntu 11.04 since it was in Alpha testing and it’s my primary OS for the various netbooks I have floating around my house. Regular readers will know that I’ve used Ubuntu for quite a while, whether as a server or desktop OS. I spend a lot of time nowadays on my Mac, which is great, but I can’t help but feel that this latest version of Ubuntu just might be the ultimate educational desktop for a lot of reasons.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android phones account for half of U.S. market share; 4G is King.

          There has been an abundance of reports in the recent months noting that Android is the leading smartphone platform. Canalys echoed that main sentiment once again in its Q1 2011 analysis, but it discovered something pretty interesting: almost half of smartphones shipped in the United States last quarter were powered by Google Android.

        • Motorola Atrix With Android/Linux Available

          The world’s most powerful smartphone is available now for the price of a subscription to service. That will sell like hotcakes. It will be head-to-head competition for iPhone. In Canada, Atrix is slightly less expensive than the iPhone.

        • Archos 32 Android media player

          Archos is calling the 32 an Android tablet, but I have trouble convincing myself that anything with a 3.2in screen is really a tablet so it makes far more sense to review it as a touchscreen media player.

        • Most tablets doomed to fail says YouGov study

          UK market research agency YouGov believes most tablets launched this year are doomed to failure unless they can hit the magic price point for wider adoption: £250.

          Russell Feldman, Associate Director for Technology and Telecoms Consulting at YouGov, made the prediction as he commented on the pollster’s latest TabletTrack survey.

          “At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, earlier this year, over 80 tablets were announced for launch later in 2011,” said Feldman. “YouGov expects most of these tablets to fail to achieve widespread distribution. However, our analysis clearly demonstrates that if the pricing is right and the device is marketed at the correct audience, then there is significant latent demand.”

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why Teleplace went open source

    Earlier this week, Teleplace announced that it was releasing the current version of proprietary virtual world software to the open source community as OpenQwaq. The next generation of its software won’t be commercially available for three to six months.

    The Teleplace software normally runs for $50 per user per month for the hosted version and $100 per user per month for the on-premises software — and the company says it has hundreds of corporate clients with “thousands” of users.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome 11: The Best Browser?

        Was it only a few weeks ago, that we were looking at the latest crop of Web browsers? Why, yes, yes it was, but now Google has released yet another newer, faster, better, and more feature-full version of its Chrome Web browser: Chrome 11.

    • Mozilla

  • Databases

    • Former MySQL boss: Code ‘in better shape than ever’ under Oracle

      Despite concerns that Oracle would be unfriendly to open source projects acquired through the merger with Sun, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos says the MySQL code base is in fantastic condition.

      In an interview this week, Mickos said Oracle may not understand or care much about open source and the task of fostering community involvement, but Oracle seems committed to the products themselves and he has no complaints about Oracle’s technical expertise. Version 5.5 of the MySQL database “probably is the best MySQL version ever produced,” and the upcoming version 5.6 is looking strong as well, Mickos said.

    • MySQL successor, Drizzle, reaches maturity

      Brian ‘Krow’ Aker, MySQL’s former director of architecture, brings us up to speed on the first stable GA release from the Drizzle database project designed for web applications and cloud computing…

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Tech at Night: Net Neutrality, FCC, Patents, Copyrights, Sony, Anonymous

      No, the patent issue isn’t going away. the fight between Google and Oracle over the Java technology incorporated in Android. One does wonder, if Google really is as arrogant about copyright and patent as Oracle says, just how much litigation is ahead surrounding the growing Android platform. I’m not so sure Google is in the right with respect to Java, as I’ve previously in this space called their tricks pretty sneaky and perhaps too clever, but I won’t mind if the process spurs software patent reform.

    • Oracle has to toss 129 patent infringement claims in Google lawsuit

      Oracle filed the lawsuit against Google last year claiming that Google’s immensely popular Android operating system infringed Java patents that it acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems. Oracle submitted a total of 132 claims in seven patents and court documents reveal that Google identified “hundreds of prior art references”. But US District Judge William Alsup said, “This is too much.”

      Judge Alsup ordered a considerable narrowing of the claims to ensure “only a triable number of these items” will be placed before a jury in October. He cut Oracle’s initial 132 claims to just three and allowed only eight prior art submissions by Google. Oracle will have to surrender 129 of its patent infringement claims against Google and Judge Alsup shut the door against Oracle refiling those claims in subsequent legal action unless it is against new products. Basically Oracle will have to completely drop 129 claims of patent infringement against Google’s Android operating system.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Francis Maude outlines Public Data Corporation plans

        The government intends to have a data policy framework in place by autumn 2011 as part of its preparations for the Public Data Corporation (PDC), according to Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude.

        Maude was responding to a parliamentary question from Conservative MP Mark Pawsey about the government’s plans for the PDC, aimed at bringing together data from government bodies into one organisation. The government has said it wants to open opportunities for developers, businesses and members of the public to generate social and economic growth through the use of data.

    • Open Hardware

      • Massive launch of tablet PCs may result in excess inventory for players

        Non-Apple tablet PC players are at high risk of facing excess tablet PC inventory in the second half of 2011 as first-tier smartphone and notebook vendors as well as second-tier vendors are all ready to enter the tablet PC competition with their devices, according to market watchers.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • OASIS To Promote Interoperability of SOA Repositories with S-RAMP

      OASIS, the international open standards consortium has garnered support from leading SOA vendors and users to address a critical interoperability issue for SOA repositories. A new OASIS committee will work on a standard for sharing data across SOA repository products from multiple vendors for cloud and on-premise environments

Leftovers

  • OpenDNS offers IPv6 Internet DNS services

  • Security

    • Anonymous Faces Identity Dilemma Over Sony Hack
    • Anonymous: Sony is incompetent (and we don’t steal credit cards)

      Sony yesterday singled out Anonymous for its role in the PlayStation Network data breach, but Anonymous has its own view—namely, “Sony is incompetent.” As for the evidence against them, the group believes it is being targeted by a “false flag op.”

      Back on April 22, parts of the amorphous hacker collective Anonymous were already denying responsibility for taking down Sony’s PlayStation Network. “For Once We Didn’t Do It,” proclaimed their manifesto.

    • Security Expert: Sony Knew Its Software Was Obsolete Months Before PSN Breach

      In congressional testimony this morning, Dr. Gene Spafford of Purdue University said that Sony was using outdated software on its servers — and knew about it months in advance of the recent security breaches that allowed hackers to get private information from over 100 million user accounts.

      According to Spafford, security experts monitoring open Internet forums learned months ago that Sony was using outdated versions of the Apache Web server software, which “was unpatched and had no firewall installed.” The issue was “reported in an open forum monitored by Sony employees” two to three months prior to the recent security breaches, said Spafford.

  • Finance

    • The Global Economy’s Corporate Crime Wave

      The world is drowning in corporate fraud, and the problems are probably greatest in rich countries – those with supposedly “good governance.” Poor-country governments probably accept more bribes and commit more offenses, but it is rich countries that host the global companies that carry out the largest offenses. Money talks, and it is corrupting politics and markets all over the world.

      Hardly a day passes without a new story of malfeasance. Every Wall Street firm has paid significant fines during the past decade for phony accounting, insider trading, securities fraud, Ponzi schemes, or outright embezzlement by CEOs. A massive insider-trading ring is currently on trial in New York, and has implicated some leading financial-industry figures. And it follows a series of fines paid by America’s biggest investment banks to settle charges of various securities violations.

    • U.S. Joins Whistleblower Suit Against Education Management

      The U.S. Justice Department joined an employee whistleblower suit against Education Management Corp. (EDMC), intervening for the first time in the student recruitment practices at for-profit colleges.

      The suit alleges that Pittsburgh-based Education Management, 40 percent owned by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) funds, illegally paid recruiters based on the number of students they enrolled, the company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing today. The government, in most cases, forbids such incentive compensation for colleges accepting federal aid because of concern the practice will encourage companies to enroll unqualified students.

    • Goldman Sachs Has A Way With Words, and Deeds

      Below is Kaufman’s reply found in FP (Foreign Policy):

      Frederick Kaufman replies:

      Instead of working to undo the damage Goldman Sachs and other banks have done by transforming our daily bread into nothing but a financial product, and instead of elucidating the murky world of over-the-counter swaps and baroque derivatives, Lucas van Praag has chosen to offer up yet another example of the fact-twisting and blindness that have unfortunately become the 21st century banking industry’s norm.

      My article “How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis” did not accuse Goldman of introducing speculation to the commodity markets. To the contrary, the editors at Foreign Policy allowed a great deal of space for the history of American commodity markets, including an explanation of the traditional role of bona-fide hedgers and speculators. Of course, it is not traditional speculation that has sparked the historically unprecedented rise in the price of food, but the demand-shock Goldman and their industry followers introduced to the markets with their long-only Goldman Sachs Commodity Index fund — the two-decades-old food, energy, and precious metals derivative that has come to be widely imitated throughout the financial industry.

      Regarding the role of Gary Cohn, we need only review his testimony to Congress in September of 2008, in which Goldman’s president articulated the ideas and concepts that lay behind the birth of the GSCI: “There was no natural long in the market,” Cohn explained to the Senate. “The consumers are so fragmented that they don’t amalgamate to a big enough position. So we actually, as a firm, came up with the idea in the early 1990s to create a long only, static investor in the commodity markets.” In other words — and contrary to van Praag’s assertion — the traditional buy/sell or sell/buy activity of the commodities futures market did not satisfy Goldman, nor allow them nor their largest clients (in this case, multinational oil firms) the market position they desired, a position which had little to do with the long-standing price discovery function of the futures market. Long-only indexes subsequently hijacked this role from this market.

      Van Praag’s assertion that the index funds were created to help “pensioners, who seek to protect the value of their savings against inflation and rising food prices” is a classic case of Wall Street posing as Main Street. Spurred by the institutional sales force of Goldman and other banks, the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars of new money from hedge, pension, and sovereign wealth funds has pushed up the slope of the agricultural price curve. Meanwhile, the contango markets caused by the demand shock the long-only indexes themselves introduced have created a negative yield for investors — who lose money five times a year as commodity prices surge and the price-insensitive funds buy. The regular, 5-times-a-year “roll” of long futures has given commodity insiders the opportunity for immense profit at the expense of investors, and it is simply misleading for van Praag to compare the unnatural, subversive market behavior of the banks to a responsible property owner who regularly renews her home insurance policy.

      While the OECD study has turned a blind eye, both the United Nations and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs — in their investigation of the role of long-only index funds as a threat to interstate commerce — concluded that these funds must bear some of the blame for the rising cost of food. Of course, supply and demand matter, as do monetary policy, climate change, and nationalistic policies of protectionism. But despite all protestations of innocence, the long-only index funds have added regular doses of kerosene to the commodity conflagration that has come to mark the new millennium. No surprise, then, that both the U.S. Commodities Future Trading Commission and the G-20 agricultural ministers have put long-only index fund speculation near the top of their lists of the most egregious financial abuses.

    • How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis

      It took the brilliant minds of Goldman Sachs to realize the simple truth that nothing is more valuable than our daily bread. And where there’s value, there’s money to be made. In 1991, Goldman bankers, led by their prescient president Gary Cohn, came up with a new kind of investment product, a derivative that tracked 24 raw materials, from precious metals and energy to coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy, and wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known henceforth as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI).

    • How Wall Street Thieves, Led by Goldman Sachs, Took Down the Global Economy — Their Outsized Influence Must be Stopped

      If we don’t bust up Big Finance, there soon will be another financial crisis that will destroy what’s left of our middle-class way of life.

  • DRM

    • Is Defective by Design getting any traction at all?

      What if they gave a protest, and nobody came? The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is calling May 4 the “Day Against DRM,” but is it getting any traction? From the look of its 2011 wiki page, not very much.

      You’d think that an anti-DRM day would be a pretty easy sell. Digital Restrictions Management (the entertainment industry would call it “Digital Rights Management,” but I’ll side with the FSF here) is tolerated at best — and hated by many. I’ve never talked to anyone, no matter how computer literate or illiterate, who thought a scheme to lock their content to specific devices so it couldn’t be shared or transferred to different devices was a great idea.

    • It’s Time to Give Digital Rights Management the Boot

      Today may be “Star Wars” Day thanks to its lispy slogan, “May the 4th be with you,” but it’s also a day the Free Software Foundation has chosen to call attention to a tech-enabled problem. Specifically, by designating May 4 as its Day Against DRM, the organization hopes to draw attention to the high costs of digital rights management.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Generic drug firms cry foul as Israel returns to U.S. blacklist

      Israel is on Washington’s list of trading partners whose protections for intellectual property rights it considers inadequate largely because of Israel’s failure to comply with benchmarks it agreed to in February 2010.

    • Copyrights

      • Federal Court Ruling Shows Fair Dealing Fears Greatly Exaggerated

        While concern over Bill C-32′s digital lock rules has garnered the lion share of attention, the other major issue in the bill is the extension of fair dealing to cover education, parody, and satire. I have characterized those changes as a reasonable compromise – not the full “such as” flexibility that would have been preferable, but helpful extensions that attempt to strike a balance. Some writers groups have reacted angrily to the changes, claiming it will cost them millions in revenue and arguing that it amounts to an “expropriation of property.”

      • Court rules Internet IP addresses are not people

        “I am not an IP number, I am a free man!” OK, so that’s not exactly what actor Patrick McGoohan said in the classic TV show, The Prisoner, but Number 6 would have agreed that people aren’t numbers, and they certainly aren’t their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. And, now a U.S. District Court has ruled that an IP address is not the same thing as a person’s identification.

      • ACTA

        • Hollywood presses European Parliament to sign ACTA

          A letter that has all the hallmarks of the Motion Picture Association lobbying machine has been circulated to members of the European Parliament, calling on them to agree to sign ACTA without delay. It appears to be an attempt to stall the Parliament from seeking a legal opinion on ACTA.

          The letter follows a move by the Green group, initiating a move to ask the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for an Opinion on the compatibility of ACTA (Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement) with the EU Treaties. ACTA establishes an international IP enforcement regime and threatens to impose measures on Europe which may be either incompatible with the existing EU legal frameework or will impose new provisions, especially in relation to the Internet and online enforcement.

          The lobbying letter appears to be trying to heavy the Parliament into signing ACTA without seeking further legal advice. It suggests that any attempt to seek an ECJ Opinion will substantially set back the
          final adoption and implementation of ACTA in Europe, and postulates the threat that such a delay would “weaken the position of the EU viv-a-vis its international trading partners”.

Clip of the Day

Exclusive working Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 Hands On


Credit: TinyOgg

05.05.11

Links 5/5/2011: Linux Back on PS3, New AntiX

Posted in News Roundup at 6:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Returns To PS3 Through Custom Firmware Update

    Homerbrew developers have released a custom firmware update for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video game console that reactivates the OtherOS functionality that was blocked the company more than a year ago.

    The OtherOS++ firmware, which installs the Linux operating system along side Sony’s PS operating system, is described as ‘one small step for devs, one giant kick in the nuts for Sony’.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • New Looks for Desktop Linux

        The GNOME Foundation, which has overseen the development of the default graphical environments for the Linux- and Unix-based operating systems from Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and others, has diverged from the consistent look and feel that marked its namesake desktop environment for years, with its new GNOME Shell interface.

      • GNOME Shell and Ubuntu Unity both offer new looks

        With the release of GNOME 3.0 and Ubuntu 11.04, the face of the Linux desktop environment is changing. This eWEEK review finds there’s a lot to like in both the GNOME Shell and Ubuntu Unity desktop environments, although both will take some getting used to.

        With GNOME 3.0, the GNOME Foundation has diverged from the consistent look and feel that marked its namesake desktop environment for years. The new GNOME Shell interface represents a new desktop approach intended to make applications easier to access, limit workspace distractions, and make more use of modern desktop and notebook hardware.

    • Xfce

      • In the Linux Garage, Xfce Is Your Tough, Reliable Jeep

        If the more popular Linux desktop environments out there are the cushy sport sedans of the open source world, think of Xfce as a rugged, reliable Jeep. It’s a feature-rich yet lightweight desktop environment that’s anything but underpowered. It’s a long-haul computing workhorse whose only noticeable shortcoming is a very forgivable lack of eye candy.

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat’s thin client revival

        If you’ve been in the IT industry for a couple of decades you might well remember when thin-client technology was big news. In particular you might remember when Oracle chief Larry Ellison sang the praises of thin-client technology. You might also remember when, in the late 1990s, Ellison again proclaimed the virtues of thin-client computing.

        Today thin-client computing is no longer sexy. Many companies use it successfully but there aren’t that many vendors that will trumpet thin-client systems as a way to sexy-up their sales material.

        [...]

        Now Red Hat is hoping to give Linux on the desktop a boost with its new virtual desktop infrastructure plans.

      • Welcome to KVM virtualization – Thorough introduction

        If you’ve been reading my Virtualization section, you know that my focus so far has been mostly on VMware and VirtualBox, with a tad bit of cloud stuff and image remastering. Well, time to branch out. Today, I’d like to formally begin a whole new era of tutorials with KVM. Later on, there will be Xen and other weird beasts, but for now, our topic is KVM.

      • Red Hat, Inc. And IBM Corporation Announces Partnership
      • Red Hat Revolutionizes the Private and Hybrid Cloud Market

        By incorporating comprehensive application lifecycle management, Red Hat CloudForms allows organizations to benefit from the elasticity and flexibility of cloud computing while retaining the ability to control and govern their application portfolio in the cloud.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 15 First impressions

          So, most of my recent use of Linux has been on Linux Mint, a distribution based on Ubuntu. I currently have a dual-boot set up, and installed the new Fedora 15 (beta) to give it a spin. I have not used Fedora very much. I am used to the GNOME 2 desktop but the upcoming Fedora – which will be released on May 24 – is using the brand new GNOME 3 with no ability to return to GNOME 2. This is something Windows users wouldn’t be expecting – the same “desktop” but implemented differently. In Ubuntu and Fedora, the main taskbar is at the top. In Mint, and some other distributions of Linux, it is at the bottom, as Windows users usually see it.

          [...]

          I was much more impressed with the new Fedora than I expected.

    • Debian Family

      • MEPIS based antiX M11 Screenshots

        I’ve taken some screenshots of the MEPIS-based antiX M11 release that came out yesterday. This is an extremely lightweight distribution designed to run on as little as 64MB of RAM. I found using the live cd, installing antiX and performing basic tasks to be a breeze. Here are some screenshots of antiX M11. You can download antiX here or buy Linux CDs in our cart.

      • Congratulations, antiX! Well Done!
      • antiX M11 is Still Quite Impressive

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Debunking FUD: “Ubuntu restricts you, Ubuntu spies on you”

          This is the latest line used by people some people in the free software community in Venezuela to talk down on Ubuntu. This is not just a casual comment.This comes from the people that organize a nation wide 12 city tour to talk about free software.

          I have already commented on how we have been excluded by censoring us, they require us to say ubuntu is propietary software just like mac and windows, they claim ubuntu users are as naive as those using the previous mention propietary systems.

        • Fighting with Ubuntu 11.04 (Unity)

          Ubuntu 11.04 is one of the most expected releases this year. Yes, there were lots of pre-release discussions, reviews, controversy and so on. Finally, it was released.
          As you may know, my laptop is quadro-boot. One of the systems I had there was Ubuntu 10.10, which was upgraded from 10.04.
          Of course, such an event like Ubuntu 11.04 release could not be bypassed by me. This time I decided to go through fresh install route and replace my Ubuntu 10.10 with Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity desktop. Before going for final installation, I ran it in Live mode from Live USB. First impression was positive, so decision was made to go on.

        • Ubuntu 11.04 review

          Ubuntu 11.04, code-named Natty Narwhal, is the latest version of the popular Linux distribution. Released on April 28, 2011, Natty Narwhal is the first Ubuntu release to ship with the Unity desktop interface, replacing the GNOME 2 desktop. This release also marks the end of a separate Ubuntu Netbook Edition (UNE). So if you are running Ubuntu 10.10 Netboot Edition, you will, like every other Ubuntu user, be using Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop.

        • Top 6 Quicklists for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty to Enhance Unity Launcher Functionality

          Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal has been a revelation of sorts in terms of UI improvements it brought to the table. One of the highlights of the new Unity UI is the launcher that sits on the left side of Ubuntu 11.04 Unity desktop. Now I can access my most favorite apps much more faster and my desktop will remain clean at the same time. But I didn’t noticed the limitations of Unity launcher until I implemented the following quicklists which further enhanced the Ubuntu Unity launcher functionality. I am pretty darn sure that you are also going to love these awesome Unity launcher improvements as I did.

        • UnityFox: Integrate Firefox With Ubuntu Unity Launcher (Extension)
        • Change Login Screen On Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”
        • [How to] Run KDE Plasma Widgets in Ubuntu Unity

          We all like a bit of desktop bling on our otherwise standard looking desktops, and despite the recently-revived Screenlets project boasting a noble, if belated, entry there is still no competitor to style and variety of KDE’s “Plasma widgets”.

        • Ubuntu Linux: A User-Friendly, Desktop Operating System

          Last week, Canonical — the open-source development firm — released a new version of its Ubuntu Linux operating system, seemingly aimed at offering casual Windows and Mac users a feature-rich alternative.

          Although it is certainly a bit of hyperbole to say that Ubuntu 11.04 will send Apple and Microsoft packing, ecommerce merchants may find that this new desktop operating system — which is free — is a viable alternative that may save money, improve security, and even provide a better environment for some kinds of web development and maintenance.

        • Install CompizConfig Settings Manager And Enable Desktop Effects Ubuntu Classic 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”
        • Canonical Introduces ‘Ubuntu Friendly’ Open Hardware Validation Program

          Victor Palau, Platform Services Manager at Canonical, announces a new open hardware validation program being developed at the upcoming UDS-O in Budapest called “Ubuntu Friendly”.

          “We are planning substantial change to our Self-testing hardware validation programme at UDS-O. Mainly, we are discontinuing the commercial Ubuntu Ready programme and replacing it with a community programme that has the working title “Ubuntu Friendly”,” writes Palau.

        • Manual disk partitioning guide for Ubuntu 11.04

          Advanced or manual disk partitioning is available for those that want to create a custom set of partitions for installing Ubuntu 11.04. For whatever reason or reasons you choose to use the advanced disk partitioning tool, this article gives a step by step guide, with detailed explanations, on how to do it.

        • How To Use Standard GNOME Notification Bubbles In Ubuntu
        • Speak to me!
        • [How To]: Enable Icons In Menus For Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal
        • 4 Terribly Easy Steps To Move Away From Unity In Ubuntu 11.04
        • Three Alternatives To Unity For Ubuntu 11.04

          A couple of days back, Ubuntu 11.04 was released. As expected it had the new Unity user interface. Unity has divided the Ubuntu users into two groups – those who like it and those who hate it.

        • Mark Shuttleworth talks Windicators, changes for Unity in Oneiric, and whole lot more…

          For one hour in the week following the release of the latest Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, the ‘founder’ of Ubuntu, holds a question and answer session as part of ‘Ubuntu Open Week’.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Welcome to the future.

          Welcome to the future. On the left is the first AndroidNoG phone that I’ve actually played with.

          [...]

          It’s exactly how Baidu expects to dominate search on Android in China and is reportedly the basis for the Facebook phone.

    • Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • OSR Group Thesis: Open Source Collaboration Codified (in English)

    Abstract: When using mailing lists as a collaboration tool, (open source) software developers are following various usage patterns. In order to improve the efficiency of open source collaboration, this thesis tries to identify these existing patterns by analyzing the mailing lists of popular open source projects, then proposes an annotation schema to codify these patterns. A mailing list archiver application is also implemented, which applies the codifications to handle email messages, provides tool supporting for the improvement.

  • Events

    • 20 Years of Linux at the ForumPA, 9 May 2011, Rome

      The Linux operating system is 20 years old, and the Open Source Focus Group for public administrations will run a dedicated event on May 9 at FORUM PA 2011, a workshop hosted by IBM to talk with experts and enthusiasts about Linux’s history and the state of the art.

    • The Linux Foundation Announces LinuxCon Japan Keynotes, Support for Tsunami Relief

      News Highlights

      • Linux creator Linus Torvalds tops LinuxCon Japan agenda, will share his thoughts on the 20th Anniversary of Linux

      • A dedicated day titled, “Open Forum: Power of Collaboration in Crisis,” will facilitate collaboration among open source project leaders working on technology to address crisis

      • The Linux Foundation to donate program funds to tsunami relief efforts

  • SaaS

    • The IT Reform Agenda: ‘Cloud-first’ and mainstreaming of open source

      I attended the latest briefing at the White House complex, where Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, Federal Chief Performance Officer Jeff Zients, and other Executive Branch officials reported on implementation of the Administration’s IT Reform Agenda.

    • Legal challenges could hold back cloud computing

      Want to store your digital songs, movies, TV shows, books and video games on a computer or mobile device? No problem. The real trick these days is pushing all that content onto the Internet so it can follow you from device to device, eliminating the need for storage altogether.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle Donates Open Source Hudson To Eclipse Foundation

      Oracle is donating the Hudson open source code that came with Sun Microsystems to the Eclipse Foundation Wednesday. Hudson stirred up controversy in late January when the project’s founder declared that it should be forked to create a branch free of Oracle’s control.

      The project’s founder, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, while at Sun created what’s called a continuous-integration tool in order to simplify agile Java development. A continuous integration tool automatically manages all the changes to a software system as it’s developed. Hudson became a Duke’s Choice award winner for top Java software at the 2008 JavaOne Conference, and was widely adopted by Java programmers. Kawaguchi still has a claim on some developers’ loyalty and they have followed him into his next project, Jenkins.

    • The Apache Software Foundation Subpoenaed to Produce Documents in Oracle America vs. Google

      The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has received a [United States District Court subpoena] requiring the production of documents related to the use of Apache Harmony code in the Android software platform, and the unsuccessful attempt by Apache to secure an acceptable license to the Java SE Technology Compatibility Kit.

    • Oracle, Google move to streamline Java lawsuit

      Google and Oracle each submitted proposals on Friday to reduce the number of claims in their Java patent infringement lawsuit, which could help bring the case to a speedier conclusion.

      Google and Oracle each submitted proposals on Friday to reduce the number of claims in their Java patent infringement lawsuit, which could help bring the case to a speedier conclusion.

      Oracle sued Google in August, claiming its Android mobile operating system infringes on seven of Oracle’s Java patents. Google has denied all wrongdoing.

    • Oracle Ordered to Reduce Claims Against Google From 132 to 3

      So, 132 Oracle claims down to 3, and the rest are deep-sixed forever, not to be seen again. That obviously will also cut back on any possible damages. Methinks this judge has a clue.

    • Governing Board Minutes: 2011/4/28

      The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 28 April 2011 at 15:00 UTC with the following agenda:

      1. Use of the Chatham House Rule
      2. Status update on Oracle legal work
      3. Cadence for approving and publishing meeting minutes
      4. Observers

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Selfless behaviour brings success for all

      One possibility to spur people on to save energy: people punish selfishness more when their group is in competition with others

      That which motivates a football team to committed teamwork could also benefit climate change. The members of a group act in a particularly selfless manner and for the benefit of the group, especially when their community is in competition with others. They are then more likely to accept disadvantages themselves in order to punish members of their group who behave selfishly. A research group headed by the economics researcher Lauri Sääksvuori at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena has gained this insight by conducting investigations involving game theory. This could result in a way of spurring people on to save energy.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Crippled class suits may put new watchdog to test

      It’s a joyful spring in corporate America thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court. It has ruled that companies can stop customers or employees from banding together to sue. But as directors celebrate, consumer advocates and trial lawyers are mobilizing to overturn the decision. One of their best hopes of an ally may be Elizabeth Warren’s new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.

      The decision came in a challenge to AT&T’s requirement that cellphone customers resolve claims one-by-one in private arbitration. Lower courts struck down the class-action ban, but the high court reversed, saying federal law favors arbitrations over litigation and class actions make them too costly and slow.

  • Censorship

    • Alarm over EU ‘Great Firewall’ proposal

      Anti-censorship campaigners compared the plan to China’s notorious system for controlling citizens’ access to blogs, news websites and social networking services.

      The proposal emerged an obscure meeting of the Council of the European Union’s Law Enforcement Work Party (LEWP), a forum for cooperation on issues such as counter terrorism, customs and fraud.

    • China Makes Internet Censorship More Efficient

      China formed a new State Internet Information Office on Wednesday, consolidating its disparate offices that oversee the Internet into a single agency.

      The office will “direct, coordinate and supervise online content management and handle administrative approval of businesses related to online news reporting,” the government said in a notice posted to the official government Web site.

      Leading the office will be officials from the State Council’s Information Office as well as two vice ministers, Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology Xi Guohua, and Vice Minister of Public Security Zhang Xinfeng.

  • Privacy

    • Jennifer Stoddart’s Shot Across the Privacy Bow

      By virtually every measure, 2010 was a remarkably successful year for Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart. Riding the wave of high profile investigations into the privacy practices of Internet giants Facebook and Google, Stoddart received accolades around the world, while garnering a three-year renewal of her term at home.

    • WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange: Facebook an ‘appalling spying machine’

      “Facebook, Google, Yahoo, all these major US organizations have built-in infaces for US intelligence,” he said. “It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena, they have an interface they have developed for US Intelligence to use. Now, is the case that Facebook is run by US Intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US Intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure to them. It’s costly for them to hand out individual records, one by one, so they have automated the process.”

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • What a Conservative majority means for tech & telecom

      Well, that certainly was an exciting election! Not many people expected a Conservative majority to emerge and even fewer saw the NDP forming the official opposition. I’ll save the general political punditry for the… er… political pundits, but I can add some thoughts on what this might mean for tech, science and telecom in Canada over the next four years.

    • Digital Agenda: Commission and European industry join forces to build the Internet of the Future
    • AT&T Caps Have Arrived

      Back in March we exclusively were the first to report that AT&T would be imposing usage caps and overages on their terrestrial broadband users. Those caps have officially arrived, with DSL users now facing a 150 GB monthly cap, and U-Verse users now facing a 250 GB monthly cap. Both DSL and U-Verse users must pay $10 per every 50GB above the cap they travel. As our original report noted, only users who exceed the new usage cap three times — across the life of your account, not per month — will be forced to pay these new per byte overages.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • The US Intellectual Property Watch List: The Canadian Perspective

      To the surprise of absolutely no one, the U.S. has again placed Canada on its Special 301 Priority Watch List, implausibly claiming that Canada’s intellectual property laws are seriously deficient and on par with countries such as China and Russia. The U.S. “analysis” is short and to the point:

      Canada remains on the Priority Watch List. The United States continues to urge Canada to implement its previous commitments to improve its legal framework for IPR protection and enforcement. Unfortunately, Canadian efforts in 2010 to enact long-awaited copyright legislation were unsuccessful. The United States encourages Canada to make the enactment of copyright legislation that addresses the challenges of piracy over the Internet, including by fully implementing the WIPO Internet Treaties, a priority for its new government. The United States encourages Canada to provide for deterrent-level sentences to be imposed for IPR violations, as well as to strengthen enforcement efforts, including at the border. Canada should provide its Customs officials with ex officio authority to effectively stop the transit of counterfeit and pirated products through its territory. U.S. stakeholders have also expressed strong concerns about Canada’s administrative process for reviewing the regulatory approval of pharmaceutical products, as well as limitations in Canada’s trademark regime. The United States appreciates the high level of cooperation between the Canadian and U.S. Governments, and looks forward to continuing engagement on these important issues.

    • Israel returned to the US Special IP Report Blacklist

      This development is not surprising. I don’t think the position adopted by the US is a more moral position or an objectively better balance between free market competition and patentee’s results, nor do I think the amendment is warranted. I see this as simply an example of US protectionist bullying.

    • Trademarks

      • Department of Commerce Releases Worthless Report on Trademark Bullying

        Given its apathetic nature, the report doesn’t make the logical jump that any intellectually curious person would instantly make: if the “duty to police” might be driving trademark owners to be (over)zealous in their enforcement efforts, maybe we should fix the duty to police. After all, this “duty” isn’t in the statute at all; it’s barely in the caselaw; and it could be easily remedied with a statutory clarification that might very well be welcomed by both trademark owners and secondary trademark users because it might eliminate ambiguity plaguing both communities. C’mon, guys–that conclusion isn’t exactly rocket science.

    • Copyrights

      • Moral Bankruptcy of the Copyright Industry

        As anyone who has followed the area for a while learns, the copyright industry has an extraordinary sense of entitlement. It seems to think that it has a right to demand that governments around the world preserve its outdated business models and existing profit margins – and that it should be granted any kind of extraordinary legal protections for its monopolies to ensure that, whatever the concomitant cost to society.

      • Judge Lets Latest Righthaven Lawsuit Move Forward

        Even though controversial copyright enforcer Righthaven has already lost two lawsuits on fair use grounds, not every defendant that chooses to fight back is going to get a quick win. A lawsuit against an Urdu-language web forum over its copy of the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s “Vdara death ray” illustration will move forward, following a judge’s ruling.

        Righthaven sued Azkar Choudhry back in December, saying that an image at his website, GupShup forums, was illegally copied from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a newspaper that sells its copyrights so that Righthaven can file lawsuits. Choudhry responded, arguing that his site’s use of the image—which was an “in-line link” automatically added via an RSS feed—is fair use.

      • CNET Accused of Copyright Infringement for Distributing LimeWire

        CBS Interactive, the owner of CNET, is being sued for facilitating “massive copyright infringement” for distributing the LimeWire software, a file sharing service a federal judge ruled illegal last year.

        A lawsuit brought by rappers and others accuses CBS of profiting from distributing 220 million copies of LimeWire on CNET’s download.com site since 2008, or 95 percent off all LimeWire downloads.

Clip of the Day

Les Paul Trio – “Over The Rainbow”


Credit: TinyOgg

05.04.11

Links 4/5/2011: KDE Publishes 2010 Report, Red Hat Eyes $1 Billion in Revenue

Posted in News Roundup at 5:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux skills: A hot commodity for job hunters

    While only a few years ago Linux skills were just one in a series of possible assets for job applicants looking to stand out, in today’s fast-paced, highly competitive workforce, it can actually be a make-or-break element. In fact, a quick search of job sites shows more than 8,000 technical jobs requiring Linux. Add to that recent reports showing demand for Linux skills has exceeded Unix for the first time ever and this is one trend IT professionals need to be aware of.

  • Switch Off Windows, Tune Into Linux And Drop Out

    For me Linux/Ubuntu (the operating system I use) reminds me of America in the sixties. Linux is the free love movement, the hippies, the switch off, tune in and drop out people, flower power, smoking joints and dropping acid.

    While Microsoft/Apple are corporate America, drudgingly ploughing forth in their slow, monotonous way towards profits and percentage points, working your way up the corporate ladder, teams of lawyers to protect everything you make, say or do.

  • Linux as Social Justice Symbol – I Think Not

    Linux and Open Source is a meritocracy. To move up the food chain in Open Source development, you have to prove your coding prowess. Everyone has the opportunity to contribute, but only the gifted or those that work hard succeed. It does not mean that everyone born can contribute. Linux and Open Source under the various GPLs offers FREEDOM not free of cost.

    [...]

    Linux is about freedom – freedom to choose which components to use, freedom to alter the source code as desired, and the freedom to redistribute for profit or not.

  • Does Linux need third-party anti-virus?

    Tasmania’s Department of Education has gone to market for anti-virus software for its 40,000 desktop PCs and 1,000 servers, specifying solutions must be able to secure not only Microsoft Windows, but also Mac OS X and Linux, in a move that has once again raised the question of to what degree the alternative platforms require dedicated security software.

    In a request for tender document issued last week, the department said it required anti-virus/anti-malware protection software for its environment, for the “Microsoft Windows, Macintosh and Linux-based operating systems”.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • [Interview with Linux Torvalds]

      LinuxFR : You’ve been doing Linux for about 20 years now and it’s a hard job. Is it still fun ?

      Linus Torvalds : Oh, absolutely. It’s still fun. And partly exactly because I’ve been doing it for 20 years, I wouldn’t call it “hard”. It’s still challenging and interesting, but I think I’m good at it.

      LinuxFR : Why did you choose to switch the kernel from his original non-GPL copyright to the GPL licence ? Was it an ethical or a practical choice ?

      Linus Torvalds : Practical. I think my original license contained the ethical parts I cared about, but it turns out that it was too strict about that whole “no money” thing, and it also wasn’t well enough known. Moving to the GPL fixed the problems that people had with my original license, and had the advantage that it was a known entity and also a lot more likely to stand up in court than the short blurb I had written originally.

    • How Linux Was Announced to the World in 1991 [pic]
    • GL Announces Linux Drivers & APIs

      GL Communications Inc. announced today the release of Linux Driver Support for Universal T1 E1 and OC-3/12 STM-1/4 Cards. Speaking to newsmen, Mr. Vijay Kulkarni, CEO of the company said,” The Internet as we know it today would not exist without “open source software”, a model based on collaborative software development available free to anyone. Its roots are in academia, colleges, and universities where open and free exchange of ideas (and software) is a way of life. The Internet is powered by open source, like Linux, Apache, TCP/IP, DNS, PHP, the list is endless.”

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE e.V. Publishes Final Report for 2010

        The report summarizes KDE activities in the last three months on 2010, including sprints and trade shows attended by KDE contributors with the support of KDE e.V. It features the individual supporting membership campaign ‘Join the Game’, and how KDE benefits from it. There is a showcase for community artwork, including the report itself. New KDE e.V. members are presented, as is an overview of KDE e.V.’s finances.

  • Distributions

    • GParted Live: A Boot Disk ISO You Can’t Afford to Be Without

      If you ever need to partition or edit the partitions on your hard drives without an existing OS on the computer, then GParted Live should be in your PC toolbox. The free GParted Live is based on a live version of Linux, (i.e. one that will boot from a disc or USB drive), and the Gnome Partition Editor, a.k.a. GPartEd, or more commonly GParted. GParted Live boots quickly, and handles virtually any partition type, including nearly all Linux, OS X, and Windows types.

    • Reviews

      • #! CrunchBang 10 “Statler” Review

        When I see distributions like this one or Bodhi i always start with a positive feeling, others distro have used me to install everything and more and then i spend time to remove stuff that I did not had requested.
        In this case, CrunchBang install the minimum indispensable and discreetly asks if you want extra things, and then I have at my disposal the repository of Debian so I can really have fun and install anything.

    • New Releases

      • Tiny Core Linux 3.6 brings improved installer
      • antiX MEPIS 11 is Available for Download

        After one year of development, antiX MEPIS 11 has been released earlier today (May 3rd) on mirrors worldwide (see download link at the end of the article), available for 486 and 686 architectures).

        Dubbed Jayaben Desai, the antiX MEPIS 11 operating system is a light, fast and very complete/flexible desktop Linux LiveCD based on SimplyMEPIS and Debian Testing distributions. This version defaults to a completely customized icewm-Rox desktop environment.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat to hand off Enterprise Linux 6.1 RC1 at summit this week
      • Momentum Grows for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced momentum for the adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization by North American channel partners as part of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Accelerator Program. Launched in June 2010, the Program has driven the adoption of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio through training and support of virtualization-certified Red Hat channel partners.

      • Nimbula Partners With Red Hat to Support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Deltacloud

        Today at the Red Hat Summit, Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, announced that Nimbula Director will support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2, which provide a strong foundation for today’s cloud deployments. Nimbula will also work with the Deltacloud community to ensure support for Nimbula Director in the Deltacloud project.

      • Red Hat CEO predicts $1 billion revenues within the year

        Linux giant turns increasingly competitive to protect profits. Rory MacDonald investigates…

        Enterprise Linux champion Red Hat announced record fourth-quarter earnings this month following the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). As many companies closed up their financial year, the world’s most profitable open source company announced that its revenues for the financial year (FY) 2011 were up 22 percent at $909.3 million.

      • Red Hat Summit: Linux Meets Cloud and Virtualization

        At Red Hat Summit this week, CEO Jim Whitehurst will attempt to turn a rare triple play. Indeed, Whitehurst and the Red Hat team will strive to more clearly connect the dots between Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) and Cloud Foundations — a set of educational tools that can help channel partners get started with cloud computing. Here’s the update.

      • Fedora

        • FUDCon North America 2012 will be in Blacksburg, VA

          I am pleased to announce that the FUDCon conference in the North American region in 2012 will be held from January 13th through 15th, 2012 on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. We had two excellent bids for the North American FUDCon (Blacksburg, VA and Needham, MA) and both were excellent proposals. It was a
          difficult decision to make, and I’d like to personally thank all those who took the time to submit bids and to help in the decision-making process.

    • Debian Family

      • Five Debian Based Alternatives to Ubuntu 11.04

        I made a post last month outlining some of my thoughts on the Unity desktop Ubuntu rolled out with it’s latest 11.04 release. If you are one of the many that has mixed feelings about the Unity desktop then odds are you may be looking for alternatives to the latest Ubuntu release. The following is a round up of alternatives that won’t leave you feeling completely lost as they still use the apt-get package manager.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Natty Narwhal: the First Linux for Newbies?

          Whenever a new version of an operating system is released, it’s common to see a wave of reviews following on its heels, assessing how the software compares with what came before it and weighing its new pros and cons.

        • DO NOT Install GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty from GNOME3-Team PPA, For Now Atleast

          Do not try to install GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal from GNOME3-Team PPA, at least for now. I was trying to do just and ended up with a completely unusable Ubuntu now. Even PPA-Purge was not able to fully recover my Ubuntu 11.04. I should have really read this warning before trying to install GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.04.

        • Debugging with X11Vis

          Recently on the Xorg-Devel mailing list, Michael Stapelberg, who is the author of the i3 window manager posted a new tool, which presents a nice alternative to both xtrace and xscope called x11vis. This tool allows you to monitor every single X Request and have a report on what your program is doing, much like strace will tell you what’s going on with IO and valgrind will tell you what’s going on with memory. It’s especially important for window manager authors like myself since a lot of the bugs that we face are often complicated X11 related timing issues, race conditions, requests that don’t get processed or mysterious events that seemliness’s come out of nowhere.

        • Indicator-Sensors Displays CPU / Motherboard Temperature On The Panel Using An AppIndicator [Ubuntu]

          These days we’ve got a lot of comments requesting for a temperature monitor applet with Ubuntu AppIndicator support that displays the CPU / Motherboard temperature, Fan speed, etc. on the panel.

        • Natty Refreshed, Slackers Rejoice and More

          It is Linux distribution releases that make the Linux Planet go around. This past week was a big week for releases, with two very different distros releasing their latest and greatest offerings. It was also a big week for browser releases with new Firefox and Chrome browsers for Linux.

        • What Is The Target Audience For Natty Narwhal?

          Tired of learning all those difficult technical terms like “Applications” and “System” just to get to your favorite porn site or play another online game of Slash Your Neighbor?

          Well, relax. You can just install our new word-free desktop, Nasty Nonwhale, and you’ll never need words again. You’ll use pictures for everything, pictures that are as simple and limited in what they can do as the ones on your phone. In fact, we’ve reduced the functions you can access to the point that less than a dozen big, colorful icons will show you everything you’ll ever be able to do with your computer.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint XFCE Roller Coaster

            I have been trying to use Broadcom 4311 WiFi card on most Linux distro I have tried so far. This card is built into my Compaq C300 laptop. I think it became my idee fixe at some point. Especially when I was taking Debian-based systems for review.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux signage PC enables programmable waiting-room content

      Jayex announced a Linux-based digital signage computer aimed primarily at waiting-room applications. Available with multimedia and client call software, the “Web Media M4″ is built around a dual-core Intel Atom D510 clocked at 1.66GHz and offers 1GB of RAM, 250GB of storage, HDMI and VGA ports, as well as Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and USB connectivity, says the company.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Databases

    • PostgreSQL 9.1 Gets Synchronous

      The open source PostgreSQL database is gearing up for a major new release.

      PostgreSQL 9.1 is now available in beta, introducing a number of new features. Among the new features is support for synchronous replication for the database.

  • CMS

    • Putting Drupal to Work

      Last week, you installed Drupal and were left hanging at the point of basic configuration. This week, you’ll take the short path to Drupal setup. Of course, you’ll only see a fraction of Drupal’s capabilities in this tutorial but you’ll have enough information to discover the rest on your own. For those of you who don’t know, Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) that powers some of the Internet’s most high profile sites. Do a Google search to find out who but trust me, you’re in good company.

  • Business

    • Thinking open source: How startups destroy a culture of fear

      Software engineers of corporate America are wired in a way that promotes fear. It hurts creativity and growth. And open source is finally changing that.

      Let’s try the following exercise: Write down three things that come to mind when you see the following email subject from your company’s CEO in response to your new open source project announcement.

    • Don’t Sell Your Love Cheap: How To Successfully Earn a Living with FOSS, Part 3

      There’s also a third aspect. Perhaps the IT professionals have not even bothered to understand their true worth in the industry; or are just too lazy to seek a job that offers dignity and delight. In fact, some of the most exciting and demanding jobs in the industry today are based around FOSS, and all such jobs are offered by the top companies.

      So, if you feel you’re stuck, and being exploited in a low-paying job in the FOSS industry, here’s what I think you should do. Get to know your true worth by applying to another FOSS-based company, and then confront your employer with the written offer made to you. If your employer refuses to give you a fairer deal, you should quit. It’s about time FOSS companies that exploit freedom-loving employees get a wake-up call.

      If there are no FOSS companies that offer you a similar job description and/or package, then definitely apply in other companies. Yes, I mean in proprietary-software companies. You should know your true worth, and should know whether you really do have desirable and marketable skills. Once you become aware that you do, you’ll find it’s very difficult to let yourself continue to be exploited.

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD 4.9 adds support for NTFS file system

      Six months after version 4.8 arrived, the OpenBSD project development team has announced the release of OpenBSD 4.9, its free BSD UNIX-like operating system. According to developer Bob Beck, version 4.9 is the 29th release on CD (30th via FTP) and includes a number of new drivers, performance improvements and new features.

      The x86 and amd64 versions of OpenBSD 4.9 now feature read-only support for the NTFS file system and a vmt(4) driver for VMware tools support as a guest OS, both of these are now enabled by default. Other changes include the ability to boot on machines with up to 64 cores, support for AES-NI instructions found in the latest Intel CPUs, and further improvements to suspend and resume.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • BBC executives still paid too much, says Lord Patten

    Lord Patten, the new BBC chairman, has admitted that some of the BBC’s executives are still paid too highly and that not being able to pay top dollar for talent is something the corporation “has to live with” in return for not having to “flog advertising and subscriptions”.

    Speaking on Radio 4′s Today programme, Patten said that the corporation was working through a series of cuts that would scale back the number of senior executives by about a quarter. “In some circumstances, yes [pay is too high],” he said.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • After literature and MP3: Baidu’s encyclopedia accused of copyright infringement in China

        Baidu’s open online encyclopedia Baidu baike (“Baidupedia”) was accused of copyright infringement by unofficial members of Chinese Wikipedia recently.

        The infringement involves quoting and modifying Wikipedia’s content without specifying author or source, sharing not in accordance with Wikipedia’s CC-by-sa-3.0 license, and without permission from Wikipedia.

Clip of the Day

Sarah Vaughan: I Can’t Give You Anything But Love


Credit: TinyOgg

05.03.11

Links 4/5/2011: New PCLinuxOS Magazine, Firefox Fork, Linux Preinstalled on ARM

Posted in News Roundup at 8:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 10 Reasons Why the Linux Desktop is Still Flapping its Wings

    A few weeks ago, the Linux Foundation chief Jim Zemlin openly said that bashing Microsoft is ‘like kicking a puppy’, every Linux user saw some amount of truth to that. If some disagree, they can always look at Android, Amazon’s Kindle, and a bucket load of Linux-based gadgets that have sprung up in the market recently. Also, when it comes to servers, Linux has managed to beat Microsoft hands down. The conformation came straight from the horse’s mouth when Steve Ballmer admitted that Linux’s server share is 60% as opposed to Microsoft’s 40%. Having said all that, Linux desktop’s market share stands at a meager .71 % in the United States, which is even less than Apple iPad’s userbase. So, what are the reasons why the Linux desktop is still far behind its server counterpart? Why the Linux desktop still isn’t winning? Let’s take a deeper look at the problem.

  • PC, or Not PC, That Is the Question for Linux Users

    It may be true that “the clothes make the man,” as the old saying goes, but can anything similar be said of a user’s computing preference?

    Indeed it can, at least if a recent Hunch survey is anything to go by. Mac users are generally a much more interesting bunch, according to Hunch’s “Profile of a self-described Mac person vs. PC person,” which was published recently as an infographic.

    In fact, Mac users are younger, more liberal, more urban, more educated and more likely to eat Shawarma than PC users are, according to the report. Oddly, they’re also more likely to consider themselves “computer-savvy gearheads.”

  • Desktop

    • 10 Ubuntu 11.04 Pre Installed Laptops and Netbooks

      Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is released finally and it is getting some rave reviews from around the web(Recommended read: top things to do after installing Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal). Eager to buy a laptop or a netbook pre-installed with Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal? Here is a quick list of Ubuntu 11.04 pre-installed laptops and netbooks from prominent manufacturers.

    • Trim-Slice, compact Tegra2 Desktop, now released for $199

      Here’s a powerful super compact Nvidia Tegra2 ARM Cortex-A9 Dual-core 1Ghz based Desktop box, for now seems to run something like Ubuntu 11.4 (ARM netbook edition?), but the software support is a process that is a work-in-progress. Their pricing starts at $199 for the basic model, I will try to get a review unit, what do you think about this type of compact ARM Powered desktop?

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Splash screens and QML

        If you were to pass by Sebas’ house these last few days of Tokamak 5, you’d see a window full of post-its that contained tasks that we plan to do (can be seen on Kevin’s blog).

        [...]

        The theme is rather simple – black/white KDE logo with rotating gear that fades into the logo that can be seen in the screenshot. If you are wondering why the text says ‘Friday’, it is because we are recognizing the fantastic song made popular by our idol Rebecca.

        Tokamak 5 is approaching the end – only Marco and I still linger around (and Sebas, naturally) – and that is going to end tomorrow around noon.

      • KDE: Unity Setup

        How to-ish:
        Basically you add the Window Menu bar widget to a panel. Then you move the panel to the top. You add a second panel to the left with a task bar widget in it. Tweak the size and make it autohide. Also, notice that the Title Bar disappeared in the full screen window. Well you can do that with any window manually but with a little handy work, you can actually have kwin hide the title bar when you maximize the window. (This is one of the areas that would require work to reach unity’s level of functionality though as no window controls go into the panel.

      • The next step: Coisceim

        In the old KDE PIM Platform applications owned the data and provided a scriptable access interface to it over D-Bus. In the new platform however, applications only provide a user interface to the data, and the data interface is provided by Akonadi. That makes the applications themselves far smaller, making it easy to split them up and create more purpose-built applications to fit with what the user wants. Newspeak centerward make easy newapplications indeed.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • On pointer control

        GNOME 3 has been designed to ensure that it can be used by those who have a low level of pointer control, either because they are not well practised at using pointing devices or our software, because they might not have good control over the hand and fingers, or because they are using low quality hardware. This is one way in which GNOME 3 is easier to use than GNOME 2.

      • Adventures in Gnome 3 part 2: The Wifening

        My wife has a Dell laptop that normally runs Windows 7 on it. I don’t push or whine about that, it’s her machine and she can run whatever she wants. I very very rarely have to do tech support on it, which is a good thing because at this point all of my Windows skills are gone. However, a minor catastrophe recently caused her hard drive to go bad (she dropped it), and Windows would constantly warn her, then BSOD, then the machine wouldn’t even boot and the BIOS would say it couldn’t find the internal hard drive. In short: it was totally screwed.

      • GNOME Panel Dock

        When GNOME 3.0 was released some weeks ago, I finally switched to gnome-shell by default. Performance is quite good in my laptop, so the only problem was getting used to the new user experience.

  • Distributions

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • May 2011 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine released

        The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editors Andrew Strick and Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

      • Mageia 1 Beta 2 – Almost Ready for the Big Day

        A while ago we had a poll here and a review of Mageia came second just after Scientific Linux. Mageia is a new distribution and this is only the second beta, but it’s due for release in around 30 days so I thought we’ll take a sneak preview now. No doubt there will be more reviews coming all over the web once this is out.
        The old Mandrake Linux, before it became Mandriva which of course Mageia is a fork of, was the first Linux distribution that mostly worked for me. The first actually was Corel Linux 1.0 (the one and only), but it was slow on a 266MHz Pentium 2. So I’m approaching Mageia with a lot of good will and high hopes but realistic expectations.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Names its 2011 Certified Professional of the Year

        Red Hat has announced Director of Open Source Consulting at Emergent LLC Quint Van Deman as the 2011 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year.

        The award recognizes and honors the hard work, skills and creativity of those holding Red Hat certifications.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project News – May 2nd, 2011
      • Debian Women Offers Building Packages from Source Tutorial

        Are you enthusiastic about Debian and thinking about contributing? We want to guide you in the basics.

        We are convinced that there are a lot of people out there that want to get involved with Free Software but don’t know where to start. For Debian, the most common task you’ll do as a contributor is rebuilding a package.

      • Debian May Begin Rolling Release Branch

        A discussion has begun in the quiet corner of Debian testing about offering a rolling release branch in addition to its current line-up. Well, sort of. Lucas Nussbaum has posted details of the intriguing discussion on his blog.

        Nussbaum recognizes that rolling releases are quite popular and offers the numbers of those using Debian testing and the growing popularity of Arch Linux as evidence. Some others may remember PCLinuxOS as well. He states that many users find the software in stable Debian perhaps a bit too stale or old. So a rolling release could be possible with little extra effort based on the testing branch.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Hints on installation of Ubuntu 11.04

          Ubuntu 11.04 comes with a new theme namely Unity. It is a 3D theme that requires 3D display driver.

        • Ubuntu 11.04: Installation stumbling block and post-install impressions
        • 16 things we’d change about Ubuntu

          Ubuntu is a popular Linux-based distro but, like everything in life, it isn’t perfect.

          There’s plenty that could be improved, both in terms of software and the way it goes about doing things.

          Here’s what we think would improve it.

        • Ubuntu Unity – A New Direction No-One Expected. Also, Custom Launcher How-To

          Ubuntu Natty Narwhal is here, yep, 11.04 has landed. (Is it just me or is there less Internet fanfare than before?) Along with Natty came the much discussed, loved-hated, maligned-adored, yet universally greatly expected Unity Interface.

        • Will Ubuntu 11.04 Bring Unity?

          Last week, Canonical released the latest version of its desktop Linux operating system, Ubuntu. Affectionately nicknamed “Natty Narwhal,” Ubuntu 11.04 is notable not just for being the most recent step along the company’s six-month development cycle, but it could very well also be the one that catapults Ubuntu—and Linux itself—into the same pantheon of popularity as Windows and Mac OS X.

        • My Impressions of Ubuntu 11.04

          This was a big week for Ubuntu Linux with the release of new version 11.04, ‘Natty Narwhal’ of the popular GNU/Linux operating system. There’s been loads of discussion over the last few months leading up to this, primarily over the decision to use the new Unity desktop interface instead of Gnome Shell. Some people like it; some hate it. Well, I just had to see for myself what all the fuss was about. I tried out Ubuntu 11.04 Beta about a week ago and found it a little too simplistic and not easily configurable. The final release just came out a few days ago, so I decided to install it on my experimental HP Compaq computer. I believe the only way to really see how an operating system works is to install it and use it for a while. Here are my impressions of ‘Natty Narwhal’ after two days.

        • Ubuntu’s New Unity Interface Makes Linux Friendly For The Mainstream

          A few days ago Canonical Ltd. released the newest version of the company’s popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu 11.04. featuring a completely new user interface called “Unity.” The Unity interface is aimed at mainstream computer users, not just Linux geeks. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical founder, says that the Unity interface’s beautiful graphic design elements represent a new direction for Ubuntu and, hopefully, one other free software developers will follow. This Linux has long been one of the more aesthetically-pleasing distros, but Unity takes it up a notch. Is tempting mainstream users the only motivation, though?

        • Ubuntu 11.04 is a free operating system with a cool new interface

          This alternative to Windows has a strong identity of its own that is easy to use and makes good use of widescreen monitors

        • Ubuntu’s new face

          The newest version, 11.04, features a radically different interface called Unity that had its roots in the now-discontinued Netbook Edition. With 11.04, also known as Natty Narwhal, everybody uses the netbook interface by default.

        • Ubuntu Linux 11.04

          The latest edition of Canonical’s free operating system brings a new front-end to the popular Windows alternative

          A new edition of Ubuntu arrives every six months, bearing a new zoological codename. The latest is version 11.04 (reflecting its April 2011 release), known to its friends as the Natty Narwhal.

          You’ll notice one change before you even download the installer: the Netbook Edition has been retired, so there’s now only one ISO for all home computers. It’s a wise move; one standard installation makes life easier for beginners and developers alike.

        • Ubuntu gets a dock a decade late [Mac zealot warning]

          When Canonical last week issued the stable Ubuntu Linux 11.04, the build has brought out a bunch of new features and interface tweaks that’ve freshened up the overall aesthetics while improving usability. One of the most striking changes is the new Unity desktop environment (requires 3D acceleration) that puts a Dock-like application launcher to the left edge of the screen.

        • Can Ubuntu finally give Windows a run for its money?

          Microsoft isn’t exactly the most-loved company in the world, and part of that arguably has to do with its dominant position in the OS market. Its flagship product, Windows, has improved recently, but frustrations caused by its checkered past are, for some, hard to forget.

          For years, many computer industry professionals have hoped that strong Windows alternatives would emerge. Much of this hope was based on the idea that highly-polished GUIs for Linux-based operating systems could offer consumers Windows-like experiences and give Microsoft a run for its money.

        • no background wallpaper problem after upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 Natty

          Ubuntu 11.04 has come out for few days, if you choose to upgrade from a previous Ubuntu edition you may encounter no wallpaper displaying problem in Unity. There’s only a white background and wallpaper chosen in Appearance window won’t display any more.

        • My thoughts on Ubuntu Unity

          Over the weekend, I made the painful mistake of upgrading to Natty Narwhal 11.04, the newest release of Ubuntu Linux. I was previously running 10.04 and realized I was stuck with Qt 4.6 and I desperately needed a feature in 4.7. After starting the upgrade process, I realized I actually had missed the last upgrade 10.10, which was required before upgrading to 11.04. I installed that and realized it contained Qt 4.7. I could have stopped there and be content, but I didn’t.

        • Unity – Banshee Radio Stations

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Ubuntu 11.04, Natty Narwhal: Successes and Failures

            Few releases of any distribution have received as much attention as Ubuntu 11.04 (codenamed Natty Narwhal). Most of the buzz is about the switch to the new Unity desktop — and deservedly so, since it is radically different from the GNOME desktop it replaces. However, Natty also features some changes to widgets, the installer, and the Ubuntu Software Center, many of which — like Unity itself — reflect Ubuntu’s ongoing concerns about usability and design issues, while having mixed levels of success.

            This concern has always loomed large in Ubuntu. However, it became even stronger several years ago, when Shuttleworth decided that usability and design were areas where Ubuntu and its corporate arm Canonical could “make a significant contribution” to open source software. Since then, Ubuntu has introduced such innovations as the app indicators, the repositioning of title bar buttons, and a new color-coded default theme reminiscent of Apple’s.

          • Ubuntu Unity not all that unifying

            Ubuntu’s new Natty release is out but does the new Unity interface live up to its billing?

            Right now I am at a loss as what to think of Unity, Ubuntu’s new desktop interface.

            Like many long-time Ubuntu fans I was eagerly awaiting Ubuntu Natty, the latest release of Ubuntu. Most of all I wanted to try out Unity, the new interface that Mark Shuttleworth has been promoting as the next big step forward for Ubuntu Linux. I’d tried various versions of Unity during its development but was mostly disappointed, a fact I put down to it being early testing software. When Natty was released Unity would so much better, I rationalised.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Sandia’s mini supercomputer runs Linux on 196 Gumstix ARM modules

        Sandia National Laboratories is demonstrating its latest mini supercomputer at ESC Silicon Valley this week, incorporating 196 TI OMAP3530-based Overo Tide modules running Linux. Being used for botnet research as part of Sandia’s MegaTux project, the “StrongBox” product combines 28 Gumstix Stagecoach boards, each with seven Gumstix Overo Tide computer modules.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Mozilla

    • The Day I Nearly Dumped Firefox

      So, as the result of an extremely small, unforeseen glitch, I find myself a satisfied user of the Chromium browser. Despite my initial frustration, I still have Firefox on my machine, and it’s still my main browser, but the experience has made me wonder how many other people hit these apparently small obstacles, and are driven to download Chrome or Chromium, say – and like it so much that they do switch? Could that explain the current rise of Chrome, and the gentle decline of Firefox’s market share?

      Obviously, Mozilla can’t test every add-on when it upgrades Firefox. But perhaps there is something that can be done to the architecture so that this kind of thing simply doesn’t happen for such minor upgrades. Alternatively, maybe there should be a roll-back feature so that you can always undo such upgrades when you find they have problematic consequences.

    • 13 features that make each Web browser unique

      Many cynical users assume Web browsers do little more than dutifully render HTML. The content is the most important part, they say, so it makes little difference which browser you use.

      This may be true for basic tasks, but for all their similarities, browsers differ in subtle and significant ways, thanks to the hard work of vendors looking to establish any edge that might attract more users to their stack of code. There are even some features that make each browser unique, and in the technology world, unique functionality often points the way forward.

    • Firefox 4 Breaks the 10% Mark
    • First Firefox 5 Beta Build Posted

      Mozilla is trying to establish a new 6-week product cycle for its Firefox web browser and has just posted the first build of Firefox 5, not quite six weeks after the release of Firefox 4, which crossed the 10% market share mark over the weekend.

      It feels as if Firefox 4 was just released, at least if you did not crawl along the seemingly never ending beta process of the browser last year. The next version is already knocking on your door and due for a first beta release on May 17. The first build has made its way out of the Aurora channel and was promoted from version 5.0a2 to 5.0 beta (build1).

    • Firefox 4.0.1: Firefox is out (of memory) !

      I’ve been running various builds of Firefox 4 on Linux since the betas were beginning, months ago. They were very stable. And then 4.0.0 was released, and recently 4.0.1, and with both I’ve had a lot of crashes.

    • Early reaction to Firefox 4.0.x — I can feel the speed

      While Firefox 4.0 is no faster than the Google Chrome web browser, 4.0 is certainly faster than Firefox(es) 3.5 and 3.6, all of which I’ve run extensively on both the Linux and Windows platforms.

      And while there’s a lot to like about Chrome/Chromium (I run the one in Windows, the other in Linux — currently Debian Squeeze, if you want to know), I lean toward Firefox/Iceweasel because one of my key web-accessed applications not only prefers it but pretty much demands it. (It could be worse; the same app used to prefer Internet Explorer and begrudgingly work in Opera).

    • To Toggle, or not to Toggle: The End of Torbutton

      In a random bar about two years ago, a Google Chrome developer asked me why Torbutton didn’t just launch a new, clean Firefox profile/instance to deal with the tremendous number of state separation issues. Simply by virtue of him asking me this question, I realized how much better off Chrome was by implementing Incognito Mode this way and how much simpler it must have been for them overall (though they did not/do not deal with anywhere near as many issues as Torbutton does)…

      So I took a deep breath, and explained how the original use model of Torbutton and my initial ignorance at the size of the problem had lead me through a series of incremental improvements to address the state isolation issue one item at a time. Since the toggle model was present at the beginning of this vision quest, it was present at the end.

      I realized at that same instant that in hindsight, this decision was monumentally stupid, and that I had been working harder, not smarter. However, I thought then that since we had the toggle model built, we might as well keep it: it allowed people to use their standard issue Firefoxes easily and painlessly with Tor.

    • Firefox4: Change Minimum Tab Width [Quick Tip]

      In Firefox 3.x, there used to be an option in about:config called “browser.tabs.tabMinWidth” which you could change to specify the minimum tab width. And changing that to “0″ would allow you to have all the tabs visible at all time, without having to scroll through them.

    • 10 Reasons why I will not upgrade from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4!

      This trend was observed in stats revealed by StatCounter Global stat for Browser usage in April 2011. The graph shows that in April 2011, the usage share of Firefox 4 is less than half of Firefox 3.6; despite that Firefox has been around for more than a month!

    • A new and improved AwesomeBar for Firefox by Mozilla

      Mozilla is working on a number of improvements for Firefox that they are developing as extensions, some of which might actually make it into the Firefox code in the future. Some previous Mozilla add-ons to have received this treatment are Personas, Panorama and Sync.

      Firefox has maintained a distinction between the search bar and the location bar till now because of the privacy implications of having a combined bar, and Mozilla’s staunch pro-privacy stance. However the advantages of having a combined bar are quite clear.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Cory Doctorow: Techno-optimism

      Herein lies the difference between a ‘‘technology activist’’ and ‘‘an activist who uses technology’’ – the former prioritizes tools that are safe for their users; the latter prioritizes tools that accomplish some activist goal. The trick for technology activists is to help activists who use technology to appreciate the hidden risks and help them find or make better tools. That is, to be pessimists and optimists: without expert collaboration, activists might put themselves at risk with poor technology choices; with collaboration, activists can use technology to outmaneuver autocrats, totalitarians, and thugs.

    • British Telecom: please include freedom in your new music service

      British Telecom is a leader of telecommunication and digital content markets, and has a reputation for product innovation. Plans recently reported for a new not-for-profit music download service [1] for BT’s 5.5 million broadband customers have sparked much discussion, and once again placed BT at the fore of the future of digital content delivery in the UK.

      Amongst those speculating about the nature of the new service are the growing number of BT customers who use Free Software [2] web-browsers, operating systems, and multimedia players. Currently these and other Free Software users are unable to enjoy many popular content delivery systems such as Spotify, Steam, and iTunes, because they are not compatible with Free Software, or require the waiving of users’ rights and freedoms in order to use them [3] [4] [5]. The nature of BT’s new service, and the extent to which it respects the freedom of it’s users, are therefore of particular concern.

  • Project Releases

    • Speed dial, private browsing, user agents

      So Midori is going full speed ahead, we support the new libSoup cache now (WebKitGTK+ 1.3.11 or greater required) which supersedes the old extension, support for F6, F7 and Ctrl(+Shift)+Tab and Tab in completion and a faster speed dial, which is still in the middle of even greater improvements, so stay stuned for more goodness in the future.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • Electronic resurrection through open source

        Over at Make: Online last week, Phillip Torrone posted “If You’re Going to Kill It, Open Source It!”–his wish list of dead products that he’d like to see given to an open source community for new life. It’s a great suggestion–freeing the knowledge that went into a product gives it a little life after death and could give a unprofitable or seemingly useless project a better reason for existence.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

  • Security

    • Re: Botnets exploit Linux owners’ ignorance

      After Flaming retort, I have another rebuttal. Another piece of scaremongering, with overhyped drama and sensationalism, wrapped in tech lingo to make the crowds shudder with fear and reverence. While the general rule says: don’t feed the trolls, as in I’m merely bringing attention to an article that does not merit any, I think it’s important to show the other side of the spectrum.

      Today, I want to talk to you about a short article called Botnets exploit Linux owners’ ignorance, which presents a grim picture of botnets actively engaging in cyber warfare against Linux [sic] and its owners. Naturally, there’s always the not so subtle hint that the solution is in your pocket. Let’s digest the original report, see what it says and what it means, and how thing relates to the average computer user.

  • Cablegate

    • Another attempted attack on opposition radio station journalist

      Arnulfo Aguilar, the director of Radio Uno, an educational radio station based in San Pedro Sula, narrowly escaped an armed ambush outside his home on the outskirts of the city on the night of 27 April which he blames on the army. A station that supports the opposition National Front for Popular Resistance, Radio Uno has often been targeted by the security forces since the June 2009 coup d’état.

      Ten masked gunmen were waiting for Aguilar as he arrived home after leaving the station. After spotting them, he managed to elude them by taking a different route into his house. Some of the gunmen nonetheless got into the yard but fled after hearing him call his neighbours and the police for help. The police reportedly waited more than an hour before responding.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

  • DRM

    • Interview with Leo Babauta

      2) Since August 2009 you joined Identi.ca, the free microblogging platform. Social networks can be overwhelming due to their great amount of messages and friends. How do you manage to stay updated without burning up?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Berlin Wall artists sue city in copyright controversy

        The East Side Gallery is one of Berlin’s most popular tourist attractions, a 1.3km-long brightly painted stretch of the wall which divided east and west for almost 30 years.

        But now the outdoor exhibition space is embroiled in an expensive copyright controversy after Berlin council destroyed some artworks painted on the wall and reproduced others without the permission of the original artists.

        The city of Berlin, which owns the wall and the land around it, is being sued by 21 artists over the way the council handled recent renovation of the gallery.

Clip of the Day

Unity Interface – Craptastic Mac Wannabe – Ubuntu 11.04


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 3/5/2011: OpenBSD 4.9, Firefox 6 Prioritising GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 3:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Tassie education dept wants Mac, Linux anti-virus

    Tasmania’s Department of Education has gone to market for anti-virus software for its 40,000 desktop PCs and 1,000 servers, specifying solutions must be able to secure not only Microsoft Windows, but also Mac OS X and Linux, in a move that once again raises the question of whether the alternative platforms require dedicated security software.

  • Server

    • GNU/Linux Marches On

      Netcraft reports that, of the top 40 hosting providers, one used F5-big_IP, 6 use FreeBSD, 24 use GNU/Linux, 2 use 2003 and 2 use 2008. I believe the market has spoken. GNU/Linux provides great performance/price. The same advantages seen running applications on the server present themselves running applications on the personal computer: low price, reliability, ease of administration, less malware, etc. Use Debian GNU/Linux.

  • Google

    • Is Today’s Google Really Open?

      With the current raging controversy over the delayed release of the source code to Android Honeycomb by Google, many an analyst have questioned whether the Google of today is really as opened as they’d like us to believe. As a stauch Google fanboy, I set out to find out what the meaning of “open” is in the first place, and what better place to seek that answer than from Google itself.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Kernel Boot Statistics: 2.6.24 To 2.6.39

      A clean installation of Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS was done on two systems and the boot time of every Linux kernel release from 2.6.24 to present (2.6.39-rc4) was measured using Bootchart. The kernel was the only change made each time to the system.

  • Applications

    • 5 RSS Feed reader on linux

      If you follow news sites or blogs probably you are using some online service or a program to aggregate all the news into one more convenient point. This is doable thanks to RSS feed.

    • 9 of the Best Free Linux Data Mining Software

      This article focuses on selecting the best free software for performing data mining. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who needs to make strategic decisions when confronted with large amounts of information.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Gaming with Trine

        In conclusion, I think Trine is a great game. It’s flexible in that a person can spend just ten minutes bashing undead foes or get lost in an hour of solving puzzles or pass the time exploring. The controls are intuitive and the difficultly curve is gradual. The levels are varied and well laid out and I’ve encountered no serious problems with the game play. In short, Trine is a lot of fun.

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Distributions

    • GParted Live: A Boot Disk ISO You Can’t Afford to Be Without

      If you ever need to partition or edit the partitions on your hard drives without an existing OS on the computer, then GParted Live should be in your PC toolbox. The free GParted Live is based on a live version of Linux, (i.e. one that will boot from a disc or USB drive), and the Gnome Partition Editor, a.k.a. GPartEd, or more commonly GParted. GParted Live boots quickly, and handles virtually any partition type, including nearly all Linux, OS X, and Windows types.

    • Reviews

      • Is there a blue pill for Qubes OS?

        Those who regularly follow the Black Hat briefings probably remember Joanna Rutkowska who presented a novel attack against Windows Vista (and any Operating System running on an x86 architecture, in general). She was the first researcher to demonstrate a piece of malware (bluepill) that could run in root or host mode in a current x86 architecture and push the Operating System one layer (ring) below.

    • New Releases

      • 29/04/2011 — SMS version 1.6.0 Released!
      • [Tiny Core Linux] v3.6

        Much improved Tiny Core Installer, now offering a GUI for both USB and frugal hard drives. Updated critical system module, squashfs. Many updates to improve error handling, large files, and auditing / updating the extensions. Many user interface improvements and additional supported options in: ab, appbrowser, appsaudit, cpanel, flrun, fluff, mousetool, tc-install, tce-load, and wallpaper.

      • [OpenBSD 4.9]

        The current release is OpenBSD 4.9 which was released May 1, 2011.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Distro fatigue keeps me in the Squeeze of Debian

        I tried out the Fedora 15 Alpha. GNOME Shell wasn’t working on my hardware for some reason. I also tried Ubuntu 11.04, and Unity does work. OpenBSD 4.9′s release is imminent.

      • bits from the DPL: the start of the term

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • 5 things I like in Ubuntu 11.04 (Unity) and 10 things which I don’t

          Here we are! Long awaited and much discussed version of Ubuntu is here. It is Ubuntu 11.04.
          This version was long awaited because of one 2 main reasons:
          1) As of 11.04 Canonical stopped free distribution of CDs with Ubuntu via partner Shipit. It’s a pity, because that was a way how I got my first ever Ubuntu CD.

        • Ubuntu-running dual-core ARM desktop ‘Trim-Slice’ goes on sale
        • CPU Frequency Scaling applet in Unity
        • Nice themes for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal
        • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Release Schedule
        • Are You Afraid Of The Dark Ubuntu Unity?
        • Ubuntu 11.04

          Summary Table:
          Product: Ubuntu 11.04
          Web Site: http://www.ubuntu.com/
          Price: Free
          Pros: New Unity interface; user ratings and reviews in the Software Center; easy install routine that includes the ability to upgrade from the Live CD.
          Cons: Unity interface is a “love it or hate it” affair that will either bring people to Ubuntu or drive them away, the jury is still out on that and we won’t know for a while which way things will go.
          Suitable For: Beginner, intermediate and advanced Linux users.
          Rating: 4/5

        • Ubuntu Insistant Upgrades & Testing
        • Can Unity create first consumer-class Linux distro?

          Yesterday, I read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ discussion with Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth on the merits of Unity, and saw an interesting point that Vaughan-Nichols raised, but did not follow as far as I would have gone. Citing another blog lamenting GNOME 3.0, the “official” new GNOME shell that’s out and about, as “Defective by Design,” Vaughan-Nichols states:

          “GNOME 3.0, like too many Linux/Unix interfaces, was designed by software developers for software developers..”

          Unity, on the other hand, was built with Canonical’s usability testing and performance goals in mind. Which is why, we have heard Canonical reps explain ad nauseum, Canonical chose to take a different path with Unity rather than stick with a pure GNOME 3.0 environment for Ubuntu.

        • Linux desktop interface evolves

          No, this is not going to be a post about Ubuntu 11.04′s specific implementation of the Unity desktop. I’ll be trying 11.04, but not for a little while. Rather, this is about the Linux desktop in general, and how it’s maturing.

        • Are You Afraid Of The Dark Ubuntu Unity?

          Ubuntu Natty 11.04 is officially released! Some of us have already upgraded either during the development stages of natty or now after the stable release. However there are still a few who would like to hang on to their dear old gnome 2.x.

          This could be either due to fear of the new Unity interface or a general tendency to stay in the comfort zone of Maverick Meerkat. However I hope this article would help change that.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Kubuntu lets me down again

            I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m not going to fight with Kubuntu or KDE to try to make it stable the way Gnome is. At this point it’s fairly obvious that the problem relates to the Nvidia proprietary drivers, but I’m using the same drivers with Gnome, and having no trouble. If the current Nvidia driver breaks Kubuntu, then Kubuntu’s not ready.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • How Free Software Brought Motorola Back From Graves

      Those who question the relevance of open source or Mukt (free) Software need to look at Motorola, a company which was broken down by the attack from corporate raider Carl Icahn.

      The company was forced to split its business. But is now back as one of the giants of the mobile world. The credit goes to only and only one element — Linux. It was Linux-based Android which saved the company.

      Motorola has reported its financial results registering net revenues of $3.0 billion, up 22 percent from first quarter 2010.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Google Talk Enables Video Chat On Android Smartphones

          Google recently launched Google Talk with video and voice chat for Android phones. With the service, users will be able to video or voice chat with their friends and family directly from an Android phone. Calls can be placed over 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi connections. According to Google, the new features will first roll out to the Nexus S phones over the next few weeks as part of the Android 2.3.4 over-the-air update. Google Talk with video and voice chat will launch on other Android 2.3 and higher devices in the future.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • Saturday at LinuxFest NorthWest

      First day of LFNW is going well. We gave away lots of CDs and DVDs. Lots of positive feedback on Gnome 3. Jesse, Adam, Tom and Robyn all stopped by to help. OLPCs were a hit. One of the cool thing about the OLPC was when a five year old complained about speak not pronouncing her brother’s name correctly, I noticed her mother was speaking a foreign language, so I set speak to use that language and it pronounced the brother’s name correctly! The mother got real interested in the OLPC and explored Scratch while her daughter moved on to mazes.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Review – SeaMonkey 2.0.14

        All in one solutions can be very appealing. Since I have multiple communication methods online and SeaMonkey is touted as an “all in one Internet solution”, I simply had to put it to the test against my browser of choice and the associated packages I use. With the release of 2.0.14 what better time?

        I’m sure SeaMonkey will be available for many in their respective repo’s, but since I wanted the latest version and wanted it now, I downloaded direct from the site. The comparison for this review will be with Chromium 11.0.696.25 (and I suppose X-Chat & Thunderbird too) which are currently installed on my system. Presently I am also running Compiz with the desktop cube effect, I have 4 available desktop spaces with each desktop space being given to Chromium, Thunderbird and X-Chat. The remaining workspace is left empty for anything else.

      • Firefox 6 For Linux To Be As Fast As Firefox Currently Is On Windows (And Less Sluggish)

        As linux users ourselves, we have been frequently fed up with the sluggish nature of the Firefox browser on Linux. Some time back,we told you about Opera 10 which was a bit less sluggish on Linux but then Google Chrome changed everything. However, for many Linux users Firefox is still the most preferred web browser and things are gonna change for sure for Firefox on Linux.

        Mozilla’s Mike Hommey has announced on his blog that his team at Mozilla has finally managed to get the Linux builds of Firefox to use GCC 4.5 with aggressive optimization and profile guided optimization enabled. All this simply means that we can now expect a faster and less sluggish Firefox browser on Linux (both 32 bit and 64 bit systems). The experience is going to be much closer to the Windows builds of Firefox.

      • The Best Firefox Security Add-Ons

        One of the biggest features and strength of the Firefox web browser is its extensions engine and the support it receives from the Firefox community. Users find thousands of different add-ons for virtually any purpose in the official extensions gallery over at Mozilla. Mozilla tries its best to promote popular and interesting add-ons, but the sheer amount makes that attempt more or less futile.

        The best Firefox security add-ons is a guide for Firefox users who want to improve their web browser’s security and protection from attacks on today’s Internet. That does not necessarily mean that you need to install all of the add-ons to protect your browser from malicious attacks, as some may only be useful if you visit specific websites or types of sites regularly.

        The list concentrates on security related add-ons, not privacy related. Only extensions that are compatible with at least Firefox 4 have been included in the list.

      • Why is Firefox slower on Linux than Windows?

        Have you tried Firefox 4 on Linux and then tried Firefox on a friend’s Windows 7 PC? The experience isn’t the same and that’s not good news for Linux users.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Programming

    • PHP Dependency Injection Creates More Maintainable Code

      Although not originally conceived as such, PHP has over the years evolved into a very capable object-oriented language, with countless enterprise projects and a number of powerful frameworks such as Symfony taking full advantage of these mature features. Of course, the advantages of object-orientation can only be fully exploited when implemented in conjunction with best practices such as encapsulation and inheritance. One such “implementational” best practice is dependency injection, a design pattern that facilitates the decoupling of otherwise dependent components.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • UK Government Open Standards Survey

      Government must be better connected to the people it serves and partners who can work with it – especially small businesses, voluntary and community organisations. Government ICT must play a fundamental role in making life easier and I want to ensure that it does.

      One of our first goals is to organise Government data and systems using an agreed set of standards that make our ICT more open, cheaper and better connected.

Leftovers

  • Federal govt goes shopping for new search service

    Requirements for the service including conforming to the OpenSearch protocol and support for compressed and uncompressed versions of non-HTML documents like PDF, RTF, CSV, Microsoft Office formats and Open Document formats.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Osama bin Fragged: a review of terrorist propaganda games

      It’s rare that the president addresses the country without giving any details about what will be discussed, but the topic of last night’s address became known well before President Obama spoke. The military forces of the United States had finally found Osama Bin Laden, we were able to put boots on the ground, and in a firefight that lasted 40 minutes, the world’s most wanted terrorist was killed. In an often ill-defined war on terror, this was a dramatic win.

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Peak Oil – April 2011 Update

      The US Energy Information Administration’s January oil production figures are out, and they show record oil production. Where are we headed from here?

  • Finance

    • Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World, By William D Cohan

      n the 1860s, when the clothing merchant Marcus Goldman offered cash, at a suitable discount, for bills yet to be paid by others, he used to stuff the accumulated IOUs under his top hat.

      Goldman’s clients could tell how busy Marcus was by the tilt of his headgear, a degree of transparency that would not always be displayed in the decades that followed.

  • Privacy

    • South Korea, Europe start iPhone location tracking investigations

      South Korea’s Korea Communications Commission is now asking Apple questions about the location data being stored on iPhones and iPads and backed up to users’ computers. South Korea joins the governments of France, Germany, and Italy, which late last week notified Apple that they also had questions about location data collection. These investigations follow stern letters from US Sentaor Al Franken (D-MN) and US Representative Ed Markey (D-MA), both of whom asked Apple to answer why the data is retained on users’ devices, how it is collected, and what Apple does to protect users’ privacy.

      Last week, a news firestorm started after the public revelation by researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden that iPhones and iPads keep a log of location data based on cell tower and WiFi base station triangulation in a file called consolidated.db. The news led many to believe that Apple was using or could use the information to track iPhone and iPad 3G users, and raised privacy concerns that the information could make it into the wrong hands.

    • Sony apologizes, says 10 million credit card accounts may have been exposed in network attack

      Sony has revealed that 10 million credit card accounts may have been exposed two weeks ago when a hacker broke into the company’s computers in San Diego and stole data from 77 million PlayStation Network accounts.

      During a news conference in Tokyo on Saturday, Kaz Hirai, Sony’s executive deputy president, offered the company’s first public apology by an executive and promised to compensate customers.

    • Privacy Lost: The Amazing Benefits of the Completely Examined Life

      Your iPhone’s tracking you. Your game network just surrendered all your personal data. And your mom is posting your potty-training videos on Facebook. Like many of us, you’re laboring under the delusion that privacy matters–that there’s such a thing as too much (public) information. It’s time to get over it! Soon we’ll all recognize the positives of exposing every aspect of our lives. What a relief it will be when we’ve finally revealed everything and have nothing left to hide. Herewith, the potential benefits of our upcoming, privacy-free utopia:

      • Better security, plus entertainment, 24/7: Tune into the airport security “Grope-cam” channel.

  • Civil Rights

    • Wisconsinites Get Revved up for Worker’s Rights

      Hundreds of Wisconsinites lined Madison’s Capitol Square Saturday to welcome bikers from all over the Midwest and to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attack on Wisconsin unions. Just when Walker thought he had memorized all the chants and signs, Wisconsinites revved it up a notch.

      Every kind of bike, from Harley-Davidsons to Huffys, descended onto the Square from Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd and South Hamilton Street. Eric Hartz, the organizer of the event, complemented the thunderous entrance with songs from the Raging Grannies, a social justice organization made up of older women. Other speakers included Sen. John Erpenbach, Sen. Mark Miller, Rep. Cory Mason, Rep. Peter Barca, Milwaukee Public School Teachers and the City of Middleton Fire Fighters.

    • May Day March Unites Workers

      May Day, or May 1st, became International Workers’ Day in 1886, when it was the beginning of a multi-day general strike in Chicago in which workers demanded an eight-hour work day. On May 4, 1886, the strike ended in what became known as the Haymarket Affair.

  • DRM

    • Day Against DRM – Two Days Away

      Clear your schedule for a worldwide day of action against DRM. On Wednesday, May 4th, we will be taking action to raise the stakes and increase awareness about the threats of Digital Restrictions Management — in a very significant way!

      Awareness is a key part of defeating DRM. Whether protesting outside Apple Stores in Hazmat suits as we have done in years past, handing out leaflets in front of public libraries, or sending direct complaints to senior executives at Sony, action gets attention, and creates space for change.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Judge Slams Copyright Troll Lawyer John Steele’s Latest ‘Fishing Expedition’

        The mass infringement lawsuit shakedown plan is looking shakier and shakier these days as more and more courts keep hitting back on these cases. More and more judges (with one notable exception) are recognizing that these lawyers are just using the court system to pressure people into paying up… and they don’t seem to like it very much. The latest involves Chicago divorce lawyer-turned-porn P2P shakedown lawyer, John Steele. Steele has already had some trouble with judges buying his arguments. Steele is also the guy trying to set these lawsuits up as reverse class actions — a strategy that failed miserably the first time around.

        However, despite that loss, Steele has tried again for another reverse class action. Earlier, the judge denied Steele’s motion for expedited discovery. Expedited discovery is a pretty standard thing that almost every court grants as a matter of course, but we’ve now seen a few courts in these mass infringement lawsuits refuse, after realizing the only purpose behind expedited discovery is to get the names/addresses of people in order to hit them up with settlement offers. In this case, the judge specifically ordered the court clerk not to issue subpoenas in the case, to stop Steele from getting the info he needed to pressure people into settling. Steele still pushed forward, trying to get the court to approve things so he could send out the subpoenas and get the names.

Clip of the Day

Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal uses Unity Desktop by Default! [UDS N Day 1]


Credit: TinyOgg

05.02.11

Links 2/5/2011: New Tablets Running Linux, More ACTA Backlash

Posted in News Roundup at 10:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A Fishy Tale

    Linux is like an ocean. Water keeps coming from the rivers, and there are a lot of rivers around. There is much to see if you want to, while doing all your regular swimming activities. You can travel the ocean far and wide and be wiser, or you can stick to your school and enjoy your locale. You take the call. You can migrate to a different part of the ocean in search of peace/adventure. You take the call. Typical of an ocean, you find big fish, small fish, medium fish, etc. You can be lost and ask for directions or befriend them and swim more of the ocean. You take the call. This is freedom. With so much freedom, comes so much power. With that much power, comes that much responsibility. You can use it according to the book and be safe, or take a few wrong steps and learn lessons the harder way. Of course, nowadays there are nicely laid out paths in the ocean for new fish to start out, cutting the intimidation. So, you can learn a few things about the ocean and, if you want a little more, the adventure is limited only by your imagination.

  • Desktop

    • Desirable OS

      It has been a long time if ever that Linux has been described as a desirable OS but it is happening now. A survey of smartphone-lovers finds that more intend to buy Android/Linux next rather than iOS or worst, Phoney 7. Underneath it is the same stuff that consumers have not been choosing for a decade but the change is understandable. While the forces of evil denigrated GNU/Linux as “communism” and “cancer” and their multitudes of “partners” repeated the chants until the media believed them and common wisdom in the retail trade was than no one would buy GNU/Linux, the makers of smart phones have been uncontaminated. You can see ads on television for smart phones with Android/Linux from the manufacturers, ISPs, banks, etc. and many millions of people are showing them to their friends. The “partners” have been bypassed. The monopoly is now irrelevant.

    • Building a PC
    • HeliOS Buillds Its Future

      With six guys, plus Skip and me, we got the sheet rock to the new HeliOS building and got it unloaded. We will probably start hanging it this evening or tomorrow, then the fun part starts…we get to find someone who knows how to tape, mud and float.

    • Exclusive Interview With System 76 CEO Carl Richell

      Muktware: What is System 76? Can you tell us something about how and when you conceptualized the company and what was the driving force behind it?
      Carl Richell: We started discussing System76 back in 2003 but not seriously until 2005. We felt that GNU/Linux had come a long way and deserved an OEM building high quality pc’s backed by dedicated support.

      There was also this newfangled distro called Ubuntu. It clearly had traction. There was already a great community and a unique and attractive business model behind it. Shortly thereafter, we shipped our first laptops and desktop with Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • New look for KDE Edu

        The KDE Edu Team is proud to present its new website at http://edu.kde.org as the central place to start to discover KDE Edu.

        With this new website, we are also officially presenting the new KDE Edu logo as the stamp for KDE in Education. The logo emphasizes the opportunity for people to grow their knowledge freely in various fields with KDE Edu programs. The concept was started in May 2010 by Alexandre Freitas and finalized by Asunción Sánchez Iglesias.

      • Put the World in Your Pocket with Marble

        Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have the whole world at your fingertips? How about cradling it in a single hand, putting it in your pocket and taking it with you wherever you go? With KDE’s Marble Virtual Globe on your mobile phone, you can do just that.

      • KDEnlive 0.8 Released – Best non-linear video editor for Linux

        For a long time I’ve been a big fan of kdenlive. I’ve written a two articles about it. One is a general overview of video editing on Linux and the other is more specific to kdenlive. For a number of years, video editing on linux – at least at a consumer level – has been patchy at best. This is somewhat ironic given the heavy use of linux in major Hollywood block film production. However, with the advent of kdenlive, things are looking pretty good and with the release of version 0.8, there have been some great features added for the more advanced users, while still retaining a simple and easy to use UI.

      • Things I want to see in KWin

        Now with the GSoC application timeline ended, I feel like blogging about some more ideas what I want to see in KWin in our next releases, but are not enough for a GSoC. Nevertheless most of it is in the scope that it can also be handled by new developers. But some parts have to be done by KWin/Plasma developers.

      • Show your Yahoo calendars in KOrganizer ? so easy…

        A few days ago, Jeremy explained how to add your Google calendars to Kontact, how about doing the same with your Yahoo calendars ?

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • A tale of two distros: Slackware 13.37 and Ubuntu 11.04 released

      After months of development, one of the most important Linux distributions was released today. Of course I’m talking about Slackware 13.37. Oh, and the Ubuntu Project released 11.04 today too — though by reading the press release you’d never know Ubuntu was actually a Linux distribution.

    • Supporting Slackware Linux Project

    • Reviews

      • Chakra GNU/Linux review

        Chakra is a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. It evolved from a hobby project to what is now, from my initial assessment, a very solid desktop distribution with features not yet available on established Linux distributions. The developers warn that, “This is alpha software, it could eat your hamsters.” It did not eat my hamster, but the time I spent installing and reinstalling it on multiple machines and in a virtual environment was very eventful.

        For this review, the first for Chakra on this website, I will let the screenshots do most of the “talking.” I like this approach better because, as they say, a picture is worth more than a thousand words. A screenshot with one or two paragraphs conveys more than a dozen paragraphs of colorful descriptions.

        The version of Chakra that is the subject of this review is Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.04, code-named Aida. It was released on April 27, 2011.

    • New Releases

      • RIPLinuX 12.1
      • [Ubuntu Rescue Remix] Version 11.04

        Version 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) of the very best Free-Libre Open-Source data recovery software toolkit based on Ubuntu is out.

        This version features and up-to-date infrastructure and several new packages including Dump, a backup and restore solution as well as Clamav, the best in free-libre Antivirus software.

        Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix features a full command-line environment with the newsest versions of the most powerful free/libre open-source data recovery software including GNU ddrescue, Photorec, The Sleuth Kit and Gnu-fdisk.

      • Ubuntu Rescue Remix 11.04 Is Available for Download

        Right after the announcement for Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), Andrew Zajac proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the Ubuntu Rescue Remix 11.04 operating system.

        Ubuntu Rescue Remix 11.04, the rescue and computer forensics Linux distro, is based on the most recent Ubuntu 11.04 release. It comes with lots of updated packages and an up-to-date infrastructure.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • A newcomer in Mageia: Maven

        The Java packaging in Mandriva 2010.1 (from which Mageia was forked) was just unusable. Many of the packages were obsolete and not really maintained. The task of updating packages had become very difficult as Maven, a now very common Java project build tool, was not properly integrated in the distribution. Many Java libraries installed using the old packages would not be usable by Maven. Moreover the version of Maven was obsolete and would not allow building recent software. This was a serious problem for maintaining the Java stack.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Fedora15 steps out

          Latest beta release from Red Hat-backed project makes the switch to Gnome3

          The big issues in the world of Linux right now are the Gnome3 desktop interface and Ubuntu’s pending Natty release which will use the Unity desktop interface by default. The tried and tested Gnome2 desktop is finally making way for a new generation of desktop effects and most users will find the change jarringly different.

        • Fedora 15 with GNOME 3 & some cool upgrades!

          The next version of Fedora, Version 15 is available for download as a beta version. The beta version was released and a reworked boot loading system will be featured by this OS. The major changes for the Linux distribution are hopefully taken care of and the complete release is scheduled for May 2011; it is to be noted that this period of release is approximately a month after the release of Ubuntu 11.04. New releases of Fedora can usually be expected about once every six months.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • 17 Top Rated Applications in Ubuntu Software Center You Should Have in Natty Narwhal

          Ubuntu Software Center in 11.04 has got a really nice ratings and reviews system in place that allows us to review our favorite applications and install top rated applications in one click. So here is a list of 17 highly rated applications not installed by default in Ubuntu 11.04.

        • Ubuntu One Music app adds support for playlists, OGG Vorbis, iTunes

          Canonical released Ubuntu 11.04 this week, giving the operating system a dramatically new user interface as well as some new features and performance tweaks. The company also recently launched an updated version of the Ubuntu One music app for Android.

          Ubuntu One allows Ubuntu Linux users to store music online and access it from a computer or mobile device. The service is free to use for 30 days, but you’ll have to sign up for a subscription after that.

        • My Dream Ubuntu One Feature
        • Ubuntu Linux 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) is out
        • Ubuntu 11.04 – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
        • Is Ubuntu 11.04 Beating Apple’s Mac OS X in User Experience?

          Canonical yesterday released the final version of Ubuntu Linux 11.04. For quite some time Ubuntu will get a new release twice per year – one in April and one in October. As usual with updated distributions, the release comes with updated software. In this case however, the software responsible for the appearance of the desktop was changed. While previous Ubuntu releases relied on Gnome as a desktop manager, with 11.04 Ubuntu makes the switch to the Unity desktop environment.

        • Thoughts On Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” After Using It For A Day

          As you should know, Ubuntu 11.04 was released yesterday. I have used the development builds of Ubuntu 11.04 on and off during the development cycle. However, it is not a very good idea to do to do a review during the development phase. So, as soon as the final release of Ubuntu 11.04 was available, I downloaded it and installed it on my laptop. (I actually used zsync to update the image of Ubuntu 11.04 beta that I had.) So, after using it for one whole day, here are my thoughts on Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”.

        • Unity Shadow Tweak
        • Unity Compiz Tweaks
        • Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal): How to remove chat and mail icons (indicators) from system tray
        • My first look at Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal
        • Ubuntu 11.04 Carrot Dangled in Front of Windows and Mac OS X Users

          Despite its runaway popularity when compared to other Linux distributions, Ubuntu still struggles to capture the attention of the general computing public. With recent releases, Canonical has clearly been looking at ways to make Ubuntu more appealing to the average Joe — and Natty Narwhal offers plenty of features that could make it an appealing alternative to Windows and Mac OS X.

        • Ubuntu 11.04 – Excellent, but still rough around the edges
        • On Ubuntu 11.04

          I did an in-place upgrade of the Ubuntu 10.10 running on my mother’s netbook to Ubuntu 11.04. I had it run overnight, and by morning, voila!, I had Natty Narwhal on the computer. The upgrade went by without a hitch; real sweet, considering this was a Wubi installation.

          I can’t say I’m too fond of the new Unity interface yet, though. I like the simplicity, but I’ve just gotten far too used to the old way of working. Unity just hides several icons so it was at first confusing to look up applications. That said, I’ll keep this on for a month or so and see how this works out for me.

        • Ubuntu 11.04 Unity – A Big Leap Forward For Linux

          It’s here. The newest version of Ubuntu sports an entirely new user interface: Unity. It also includes a much-improved Software Center, alongside the usual updates for the thousands of free programs Ubuntu offers. Download it now at Ubuntu.com.

        • Turning Wireless on Causes Laptop to Freeze on Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal? My Work Around
        • Install Google Earth and Fix ugly fonts problem in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty
        • How to get back launch bar and top bar after ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) upgrade
        • Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal): Use ‘normal’ GNOME instead of Unity
        • Ubuntu’s app management better than Apple’s
        • Ubuntu Can Innovate Faster Than Windows, MacOS

          Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, is a known frequent blogger. If Steve Jobs personally replies to the emails of users, which the company later denies as Jobs’ comments. Shuttleworth, the guy who has been to the space, shares his views in public and allows comments. Of course his blogs are not proprietary.

        • Ubuntu Books | The Top reference books for using Ubuntu
        • Installing Ubuntu 11.04

          Ubuntu 11.04, also known as the Natty Narwhal, arrived on April 28th, 2011 and is the 14th release of the Ubuntu operating system.

          Even if the Ubuntu 11.04 operating system includes a smarter installer, we’ve created the following tutorial to teach both Linux newcomers and existing Ubuntu users how to install the Ubuntu 11.04 operating system on their personal computer.

        • Linux Mint > Ubuntu 11.04

          I’ve been playing around with Ubuntu 11.04 on a couple of machines for almost a week now. Ubuntu 11.04 has an entirely new user interface to it making doing even the simple things very difficult. Even opening a shell is a major task. You have to click on an apps icon. Then carefully maneuver the mouse to a little triangle that will display all the apps and wait 5 seconds for the interface to respond. Then you must slowly and carefully scroll down. If your mouse deviates outside the area you must restart from scratch because the window will close. In another 5 seconds you’ll find the terminal app. Now if you want a second terminal, shell that is, you can’t get it. The menu only lets you open a single shell. The final kick in the nuts is the color scheme the shell uses. It’s very hard to read.

        • Steel Storm Episode II : Burning Retribution is Coming Soon to Ubuntu Software Center

          Fast paced, 3D top down shooter, Steel Storm : Burning Retribution a.k.a. Episode II will soon land into Ubuntu Software Center where users can easily buy this game in one click.

          Kot-in-Action, the game development studio behind Steel Storm has already successfully delivered Episode I which is featured in Top 100 indie games for the year 2010 by IndieDB. They are now coming up with Episode II which packs in more features, more action and more adrenaline rush. With 25 full missions and a multiplier mode that allows upto 16 players to play together, this is surely an action you would like to watch for this year.

        • Shuttleworth on Ubuntu 11.04 Linux & Unity

          Shuttleworth opened by saying that the main point of Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity was “to bring the joys and freedoms and innovation and performance and security that have always been part of the Linux platform, to a consumer audience.”

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Review: Edubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”

            Before I get on with the rest of this post, I need to apologize for not having posted anything this week. It turned out to be a good deal busier than I anticipated, and even otherwise, there wasn’t a whole lot to write about, at least at the beginning of the week. I did say in the latest “Featured Comments” article that I would review the latest release of Ubuntu — version 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”. That is still happening, but for reasons that will become clearer, I will not write reviews of Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu just yet, but will wait a day or maybe a little more.

          • Lubuntu 11.04 Released

            Right after the announcement for Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), Mario Behling proudly announced last night (April 28th) that Julien Lavergne has released the lightweight Lubuntu 11.04 operating system.

          • Kubuntu Returns to Glory with 11.04

            After years of giving Kubuntu releases unfavorable reviews, that time has finally come to an end. I’m proud to say that Kubuntu is back, and us KDE fans have a distribution to root for now. I hope that going forward, Kubuntu continues with this level of quality. I’m not sure if Kubuntu will remain my main distribution forever, because I prefer the rolling release style of Arch, but that’s just a personal preference. But I can say this, I know first hand how hard it is to get Linux to work with this laptop considering the current state of Intel’s drivers, so I applaud whatever the developers did to make the latest Kubuntu work so well. The distribution as a whole is amazing. Give it a try when it’s released on April 28th, you’ll be glad you did!

          • Xubuntu 11.04 Released With Xfce 4.8, Gmusicbrowser Default, New Artwork [Screenshots]

            Along with Ubuntu 11.04, Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Lubuntu were also release. In this post I’ll try to cover the changes in Xubuntu 11.04 – a very interesting Ubuntu flavor based on Xfce.

          • Peppermint One review

            Peppermint is another Ubuntu derivative distribution, in a similar vein to the likes of early CrunchBang and Mint.

            It has two unique selling points. The first is speed without feature compromise, as the entire system has been tuned for lightening-fast operation.

          • Linux Mint: Two Years, Going Steady

            Two years ago to the day was the first time I installed Linux on my computer. Sure, I had seen other people use it and had used it on other people’s computers (though not so frequently), but I had never before put an OS other than Microsoft Windows on my own computer until that day. I had talked to a friend of mine about it before because I was planning to do it for a while; I thought of installing Ubuntu, but he suggested Linux Mint, as it would be easier for me to get used to and work with. I took that advice, and on 2009 May 1, as I took a break from studying for AP exams and felt quite fed up with Microsoft Windows XP, I downloaded the Linux Mint 6 “Felicia” GNOME ISO file, got InfraRecorder for Microsoft Windows XP, burned the live CD, and went on my way.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Rugged, Atom-powered handheld runs Linux
    • Review of OpenPandora Handheld Gaming Device

      The buyer (me) acts as the investor for this project since their pre-order money will be used to fund the project. It was originally pre-ordered for $330, but after over a year of waiting for the production to take place I canceled it. Now in addition to pre-ordering, the Pandora can be bought and shipped in a week for a premium price of $500 which I took the opportunity, but is it worth the cost? Let’s find out..

    • Phones

    • Tablets

      • HP Flexes WebOS Muscles, Snubs Microsoft On Windows Tablets

        In one of his boldest pronouncements since joining HP last November, CEO Leo Apotheker told Fortune this week that HP doesn’t intend to release new Windows 7 tablets anytime soon. “HP smartphones and tablets will be running WebOS, only WebOS, at least that’s for the near future, that’s the plan,” Apotheker in an interview published Monday.

        While it’s premature to interpret HP’s decision to focus exclusively on WebOS tablets as a sign of strain in its Microsoft partnership, there’s no denying that mobile industry competition is a notoriously savage beast. At the very least, we could be witnessing a shift in how HP and Microsoft compete in the mobile space.

      • Nook Color 1.2 Review: Near-Perfect, but a Gap Remains

        The Nook Color is simultaneously disappointing and pleasing. Why? At $249, the Nook Color does a lot of things pretty well. Well enough, in fact, that you think “the Nook Color would be perfect if only…” — if only it had Bluetooth and supported an external keyboard, or if only it supported a wider range of apps, or if only Barnes & Noble were willing to let customers install any app, like the Amazon Kindle app.

        But for the price, the Nook does quite a bit. I would recommend it without hesitation to anyone that wants a eBook reader with a little bit extra. If you’re on a limited budget, the Nook Color is also a really good choice. For heavy readers who also want a tablet and a decent app selection, the Nook is not a good choice.

      • Toshiba’s Honeycomb Tablet Hits the FCC With Wi-Fi, Bluetooth

        Toshiba may finally be set to bring their tablet out as the FCC has given them the green light to sell it. This one only has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth inside of it, but we expected as much.

Free Software/Open Source

  • OpenGamma financial analytics platform now open sourced

    UK-based OpenGamma has been developing a unified platform for financial analytics which will allow financial services firms to combine their data management, calculation engines and analysis into a single framework. The platform, which is still in development, has now been released as a open source developer preview, dual-licensed under an Apache 2.0 licence or a commercial licence. The preview is described as a “beta-quality release” that has been through OpenGamma’s testing and QA processes.

  • Comparison of Open Source Application Servers

    The role of application servers has grown significantly in IT architecture over the past few years as the cloud becomes the new frontier for application development–a frontier that offers more opportunity and challenges than the Web ever did.

    That’s not to say that the Web space is over and done. We have come a long way from simple CGI requests, and Java-based application servers dominate the application server space on the Web, handling everything from interfaces and data access to availability and scale.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla patches Firefox and Thunderbird
      • Mozilla: Firefox 5 slated for a June 21 release

        According to an update at the Mozilla releases page, Firefox 5 looks like it’s headed for a release on June 21, less than two months away. We haven’t heard anything about what new features the next version of Firefox will have, but when Mozilla said that Firefox 4 would be the last time they waited months between major releases, they meant it.

      • Mozilla engineers visit Indonesia to ‘better cater to user needs

        Six engineers from San-Francisco-based tech group Mozilla, the developers of the Firefox browser, will meet Indonesian users at the Firefox 4 Launch Party, which will be held in six cities from April 29 to May 7.

        Viking Karwur, the manager of Mozilla Indonesia Community, said this delegation was twice as large as the delegation to the previous launch party.

      • Firefox 4 about:memory

        You blame Firefox 4 to be a memory hog? Check it out first by typing about:memory in the address bar. You’ll get a nice detailed report of your browsers memory usage. While it’s not guaranteed you’ll understand every statistic available in the report, you can at least peek at the overall memory use, and see how much it’s fragmented by comparing “memory mapped” and “memory in use” numbers.

      • A few more Firefox 4 tips

        Several weeks ago, we had an article that taught us how to restore sane browsing configurations in Firefox 4 after switching over from Firefox 3.6, including look and feel and addons compatibility. Now, we will talk about several more tricks and changes that should make your Firefox 4 experience even more pleasant.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle wins round one in bare-knuckle Android patent sui

      Oracle has won an early round in what is sure to be an epic battle against Google over Android’s use of Java.

      This week, Judge William Alsup issued a “claims construction” order in which he sided with Oracle on the definition of four out of five patent terms that will help determine outcome of the company’s lawsuit against Google and Android. On the fifth term, he sided with neither company, choosing to lay down his own definition. Oracle and Google have until May 6 to respond to the order.

    • Java SE 6 update 25 brings faster server startup

      Oracle has released Java SE 6 Update 25 (6u25); this update contains no security updates to the Java runtime, but does include wider platform support with Windows 7 and SP1, Windows 2008 R2 with SP1, Oracle Linux 6 and Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 added to the supported list. Also supported by the update are Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 4, Google Chrome 10 and VirtualBox 4.

    • Oracle and Google Try to Reduce Their Claims & Judge Issues Tentative Claims Construction Order

      The parties in Oracle v. Google have been asked by the judge to reduce the number of claims, so the case can actually be reasonably tried. So they have each filed their suggested cuts. Also the judge has issued a *tentative* claims construction order, asking for reaction from the parties and saying he may well make changes on his own initiative as more evidence is on the table.

  • CMS

    • An In-Depth Interview With Dries

      When we began this interview, Dries was on a Drupal tour in Australia, calling from a hotel room in Sidney. For Dries, trips like this are becoming more and more common, allowing him to meet an increasing number of the people all over the globe using and developing Drupal. He listens to success stories and challenges faced in adopting or migrating to Drupal. “It helps me as the project lead to talk to as many Drupal people as I can”, he explained. Later this year he’s planning an around-the-world tour, literally flying around the world visiting as many countries as he can to talk about Drupal.

  • Education

    • ‘Open source on the rise in UK schools’

      The United Kingdom’s institutions for higher and further education are increasing their use of free and open source software, concludes OSS Watch, a public service organisation, following a survey. Most needed are tools to accurately determine the total cost of ownership (TCO) for software, both proprietary and open source.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU gv 3.7.2 released

      I am pleased to announce that GNU gv 3.7.2 has just been released. It is available for download in the GNU ftp, ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gv

    • Help Keep the Pressure on Sony- FSF

      We asked you to email Sony CEO Howard Stringer during our last call to action
      and Sony responded by shutting off his email address. Many of you then sent
      emails to the next email address we posted, Nicole Seligman, Sony Executive VP and General Counsel. Your action was effective — it was an important part of the overall public pressure put on Sony to back off.

      And back off they did. Sony ended up settling its lawsuit against George Hotz (aka geohot). Hotz has agreed to not use Sony devices in an ambiguous “unauthorized” fashion — in fact, he’s boycotting Sony anyway — and the accusations brought up in the case by Sony remain unproven.

  • Government

    • FR: Research institute donates hardware to free software developers

      Free software developers in France can soon write and compile their solutions using computer hardware donated by a French national computer science research institution. The institute, which preferred not to be named, is donating a hundred computers to the French chapter of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

  • Programming

    • 5 Reasons Java Developers Should Learn and Use AspectJ

      Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm which focuses on modularizing system-level concerns (like logging, transaction management, security, performance monitoring, etc.) in the applications. In AOP language, these system-level concerns are called “crosscutting concerns” because they crosscut all the layers of the application.

      AspectJ, a compatible extension to the Java programming language, is one implementation of AOP. AspectJ is very widely used in a lot of Java frameworks (like Spring), but still most developers do not know AspectJ. Developers often think that AspectJ is difficult to learn or it makes your code complex, and they decide not to learn this very powerful and useful technology. In this article, I will write down five reasons why I think Java developer should learn and use AspectJ.

    • Case Statement

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Simple Java API for ODF Release Notes

      We released the Simple Java API for ODF version 0.5.5 today. In this version, we provide high level methods for image and text span. Now you can add images to text, spreadsheet and presentation documents. The position of the image can be specified by a rectangle, a paragraph or a cell. With text span, you can set a different style to a small unit of the text content. An interesting demo has been upload to website to demonstrate how to add a 2D barcode image to a presentation slide.

    • Links for the end of April

      # Events-wise the month of May will be busy. I will attend the OASIS Board of Directors’ meetingin Berlin and meet with the Bitkom. The week after that Ars Aperta will join a session on the political and legal issues pertaining to Free Software development during the Linux Solutions 2011 event in Paris. I will also give another talk during the same event as part of the Document Foundation and our experience with forks. Spoons shall come next year.

Leftovers

  • Say What? Top Five IT Quotes of the Week

    Amazon’s cloud failure, Oracle’s open source success and Instapaper decides that free doesn’t pay the bills.

  • European and national multi-modal journey planners
  • Yahoo Finds Delicious Buyer

    Yahoo is selling off its delicious social bookmarking site, after nearly five years of ownership.

    Technology startup AVOS, founded by YouTube founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, is acquiring delicious for an undisclosed sum from Yahoo. Hurley and Chen sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion in October of 2006.

  • Finance

    • Europe Probes Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Investment Banks Over Default Swaps

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and 14 other investment banks face the first-ever European Union antitrust probes into the swaps market, following investigations by U.S. regulators.

      The EU is examining whether 16 banks, including Citigroup Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG, colluded by giving market information to Markit Group Ltd., a data provider majority-owned by Wall Street’s largest banks. It will also check if nine of the firms struck unfair deals with Intercontinental Exchange Inc.’s European derivatives clearinghouse, shutting out rivals.

    • Did Lloyd Blankfein Misunderstand Goldman’s Mortgage Bets?

      Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and other top executives at the firm may not have understood the positions they were taking in the mortgage market, according to a report released today by the Senate Investigations subcommittee.

      The report—which runs to 635 pages—details how Goldman built up a massive short position in mortgage-related assets following the collapse of two subprime Bear Stearns hedge funds. This was referred to as “the big short” within Goldman.

    • Look For Shares Of Goldman Sachs Group To Potentially Rebound After Yesterday’S 1.48% Sell Off (GS)
    • Hazing at Goldman Sachs

      There is perhaps no more telling detail about what kind of person works at Goldman Sachs than the story of the Memorial Day weekend meeting William Cohan relates in his book “Money and Power.”

    • “Goldman Sachs Is Out-Of-Control Genius”

      “How did Goldman Sachs take over the world?” Jon Stewart asked William Cohan, the author who is spilling all of Goldman Sachs’s secrets in a new book.

      “Spoiler alert,” Stewart said last night, “Goldman did it by going short on the world. They bet against the world and they won.”

      “No matter what firm I worked for, they always wanted to be Goldman Sachs.”

    • How Goldman Sachs Beat the Bubble

      Contrary to the silly subtitle his publisher no doubt foisted on him, William D. Cohan does not argue that Goldman Sachs rules the world. A judicious author, Cohan avoids hyperbole in “Money and Power,” a definitive account of the most profitable and influential investment bank of the modern era.

    • How Goldman Sachs created the food crisis

      Frederick Kaufman’s piece for Foreign Policy examines how the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI) is responsible for the increase in food prices.

    • EU investigates activities of 16 investment banks

      Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and 14 other investment banks face a European Union antitrust probe into credit-default swaps for companies and sovereign debt, regulators said Friday.

      The European Commission said it opened two antitrust probes. It will check whether 16 bank dealers colluded by giving market information to Markit, a financial information provider.

    • Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Among Banks Probed by EU Over CDS
    • Big payday for Goldman Sachs team

      Six New Zealand-based Goldman Sachs partners are expected to cash in when Goldman Sachs US takes full ownership of its Australian and New Zealand operations, with senior partners expected to clear up to $40 million.

      According to the Australian Financial Review, local partners include Byron Pepper in the investment banking division, Duncan Rutherford in the securities division and Rebecca Cottrell in federation legal division.

      Local managing director Andrew Barclay is also a partner, and the Star-Times understands other local partners include executive director David Goatley and Bernard Doyle, a New Zealand-based strategist.

      Barclay, Cottrell and Rutherford are also listed as directors of the New Zealand business.

      The exact shareholdings of each partner is not known and Goldman Sachs was not prepared to comment.

    • The Volcker Rule and Goldman Sachs

      In my paper, Conflicted Gatekeepers: The Volcker Rule and Goldman Sachs, I consider the conflict of interest restrictions in the Volcker Rule provisions. These provisions, namely Sections 619 and 621 of the Dodd-Frank Act, purport to impose fiduciary-like standards on banks in their arm’s length relationships with sophisticated counterparties. Section 619 generally prohibits banks from engaging in proprietary trading and affiliating with certain private funds; it permits some activities as exceptions to this general prohibition, but subjects such activities to the requirement that they not give rise to material conflicts of interest, including conflicts between banks and their “counterparties.” Section 621 purports to ban material conflicts of interest between banks (in their capacity as underwriters) and investors in offerings of asset-backed securities.

    • [KR139] Keiser Report – Murderers & Martyrs!

  • Privacy

    • Leaked Emails From Google Show How Important Location Data Is To Android

      The San Jose Mercury News landed some leaked emails from Google CEO Larry Page, as well as other top Google executives, which show how important gathering location data is for its mobile plans.

      Last year, Motorola, one of Google’s biggest mobile partners, was planning on using Skyhook Wireless’s location data for its handsets over Google’s location data.

  • Civil Rights

    • Supreme Court denies right of farm workers to unionize

      The Supreme Court of Canada has abandoned Ontario’s farm workers and the charter of rights has failed them, UFCW Canada national president Wayne Hanley said Friday after the union lost a 16-year court battle to allow agricultural workers to unionize.

  • DRM

    • Did Richard Stallman Invent the eBook?

      One thing that hasn’t changed — things that I’ve always read on my computer — are GNU manuals. GNU manuals are written in an ingenious format called TeXinfo which enables the author to produce appropriate output for several different ways of reading: PDF, HTML and the online info format, most easily read in Emacs. If you’re running GNU/Linux, you will find tons of manuals in this format by typing “info” into a terminal. Within Emacs, type “F1 h” (that’s press and release F1, then press and release ‘h’). Either way you should get a menu of topics, each covered by its own info manual.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Wikileaks on New Zealand Copyright: US Funds IP Enforcement, Offers to Draft Legislation

        This week I published multiple posts Wikileaks cables revelations on the U.S. lobbying pressure on Canadian copyright including attempts to embarrass Canada, joint efforts with lobby groups such as CRIA, and secret information disclosures from PCO to U.S. embassy personnel (posts here, here, here, here, here, and here). Wikileaks has also just posted hundreds of cables from U.S. personnel in New Zealand that reveal much the same story including regular government lobbying, offers to draft New Zealand three-strikes and you’re out legislation, and a recommendation to spend over NZ$500,000 to fund a recording industry-backed IP enforcement initiative. Interestingly, the cables regularly recommend against including New Zealand on the Special 301 list, despite the similarities to Canadian copyright law that always garner vocal criticism.

      • Wikileaks: America will foot the bill for record company enforcement in NZ if NZ will let America write its laws

        Michael Geist sez, “Wikileaks has just posted hundreds of cables from U.S. personnel in New Zealand that reveal regular government lobbying on copyright, offers to draft New Zealand three-strikes and you’re out legislation, and a recommendation to spend over NZ$500,000 to fund a recording industry-backed IP enforcement initiative. For example, an April 2005 cable reveals the U.S. willingness to pay over NZ$500,000 (US$386,000) to fund a recording industry enforcement initiative. The project was backed by the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ) and the Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (AMCOS). Performance metrics include:”

      • ACTA

        • There is indeed no EU acquis on criminal measures
        • The EU Commission lacks basic reading skills

          In January 2011, prominent European academics issued an “Opinion of European Academics on Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA). The academics invite the European institutions, in particular the European Parliament, and the national legislators and governments to withhold consent of ACTA, “…as long as significant deviations from the EU acquis or serious concerns on fundamental rights, data protection, and a fair balance of interests are not properly addressed”.

          In April 2011, the European Commission’s services put on-line comments to the European Academics’ Opinion on ACTA. The Commission denies ACTA is incompatible with EU law.

Clip of the Day

Obama’s Speech: Osama Bin Laden dead HD CTV NEWS


Credit: TinyOgg

04.30.11

Links 30/4/2011: Systemd and a Lot of Ubuntu Coverage

Posted in News Roundup at 9:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The naming of parts: Time for “Linux Inside”?

    Names matter in free software. Just think of the number of electrons that have been spilt arguing over whether it’s “Linux” or “GNU/Linux”.

  • Linux, a slice of heaven for programmers.

    I have just read among one of the pc news articles which I browse every day, that gartner has finally, officially, stated that Linux is one of the fastest growing operating systems available today. Faster than microsoft even. According to gartner, Linux is rising while windows is falling.

    What this means is that more and more programmers will be attracted to the Linux platform as another revenue stream for their programs. When they do decide to stick their toe into Linux waters they will be very pleasantly surprised.

  • 4 Great Sources of Information About Linux and Open Source

    If you’re new to Linux and free/Open Source software, or even if you’re a more seasoned user, then you’re often looking for more information. Not just documentation, but also useful tips and tricks.

    The team here at Make Tech Easier works hard to provide as much quality information as we can. But we can’t write about everything (though we’re trying!).

  • Linux on a Fingernail

    This issue of Linux Journal is all about how to get Linux in your pocket. In this article, I go one better and tell you how to get Linux on your fingernail. Now, before you get too excited, I won’t be discussing some new nano-computer being used by James Bond, unfortunately. Instead, I discuss how to put Linux on a micro-SD card (or any other USB drive, for that matter). Using this, you can run Linux on any machine that can boot off a USB device.

  • Desktop

    • Linux Needs To Change! So They Tell Me

      Everyone’s heard of the year of the desktop, right? At least every new year a 100 or more people write about it too, no? Know why? Because someone did once and every other person has copied them since. It’s like a catch-phrase, it takes one person to say it so one person can hear it. Next thing you know the whole world is saying the same thing. It’s no different for all the people who think we need to do this or that to get people from other operating systems over to using a Linux Kernel based one. Someone wrote that once and everyone has run around saying the same thing since. You can see it in almost every comment area, forums, mailing list. People in the media within our community love it when they don’t have something else to talk about, it’s a good source for page hits. You can even see it from developers, even ones from well known professional projects. I look on in awe.

    • Life in a Linux-less World

      Linux has been with us for two decades now, but what would the technology world be like if Linus Torvalds had never gone about creating it? It’s impossible to know for sure, but lots of scenarios do come to mind: Microsoft may actually have been weaker, Apple may have ruled the smartphone world unopposed, and the enterprise would likely look very, very different.

    • What If Prince William And Kate Middleton Were Linux Fans

      Today is great day in the UK. Day of another Royal Wedding.
      Not only because this is just another Bank Holiday in this country. But also because this day continues monarchy. Hopefully Prince William and Kate Middleton will have baby soon, who can inherit British throne.
      I actually don’t know if William and Kate are Linux fans or not. Maybe they even have not heard about this great operation system.

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • The 2.6.35.13 longterm Linux kernel is released
    • Response to “Why systemd?”

      So I read Lennart’s blog post entitled Why systemd?. In it, he makes a number of comparisons between systemd and the two other Linux init systems that are still in widespread use (this being the third init system some distributions have adopted within the last few years). Overall, he makes a good argument that systemd has many nice and exciting features, and I’m sure they are of interest to various people who want their init system to be SYSV on steroids. Here are some of them…

    • Graphics Stack

      • Open-Source AMD Fusion Graphics Still Mixed

        While AMD was very fast to provide open-source Fusion graphics driver support under Linux (along with official support in their proprietary Catalyst driver), the support has not ended up working out too well for us. It has regressed since the November push. As mentioned in March, the E-350 Fusion Linux support took a dive in terms of its graphics support with some outstanding bugs. Since then, the support has improved and is now largely usable, but there are still some big issues.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • A new Linux desktop appeal

      With Gnome and Ubuntu shaking up the Linux desktop market it might be time to look at an alternative desktop interface

      With the Gnome project radically overhauling its desktop environment with Gnome3 and Ubuntu switching to the Unity environment, many Linux desktop users could be looking for alternatives this month. Here, then, are a few viable alternatives it you’re not sold on Gnome3 or Unity.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Fire Up Your Electrons!

        The scripting system is still powered by QtScript, but is now handled in such a way that it is able to control many more aspects of the game engine, and generally much more consistent.

      • tokamak 5 begins
      • Tokamak 5, Day 2

        Yesterday, in defiance of the weather reports, the day was sunny and reasonably warm and set the stage for a very productive day 2 here at Tokamak in the Netherlands. We held four design sessions in the morning: 2 on libplasma2 (specifically the dual topics of isolating QGraphicsView from the core code and using Qt Components), one on plasma-desktop defaults (a button to show the activities, an auto-hiding pager when virtual desktops drop to one, some default launchers that track the default file manager and web browser, and much more) and one on a new first-boot screen designed with OEM style installs in mind.

      • a typical day at Tokamak 5

        We just finished our daily progress meeting here at Tokamak 5 where we take turns moving our (self-)assigned sticky notes on the kanban window into the “Done” category. We each share what we’ve done the previous day, what we’re working on now and what (if any) blockers we’ve encountered.

      • KDE Commit Digest for 24 April 2011

    • GNOME Desktop

      • The Board 0.1.3

        Time for a new development snapshot release of The Board! I’ve just uploaded the 0.1.3 tarball. Get it while it’s hot! So, what are user-visible changes?

        The main feature of this release is the webcam support in photo elements with Cheese. It’s fun, it’s magic! A couple of useful key shortcuts were added: Ctrl+N to add a new page and Delete key to remove selected elements. An important crasher fix—caused by an update in gobject-introspection—is also included.

      • The crazy Zeitgeist week…

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Dual-core panel PC’s for hospital patients

      Advantech announced an “infotainment terminal” for hospital patients that includes a 15.6-inch touchscreen and a single- or dual-core Intel Atom processor. The PIT-1502W offers a resistive touchscreen with 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, a two megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, RFID, and a smart card reader, according to the company.

    • Rugged, Atom-powered handheld runs Linux

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • Nokia Kills MeeGo and Symbian- Finally

          Nokia has finally nailed the coffin for Symbian and MeeGo by announcing it will cut R&D staff dedicated to those two platforms, with some being transferred to Accenture, obviously to get them out of sight till Symbian dies a slow death.

        • LG working on MeeGo Linux tablets, phones, and more?

          LG is holding a session at the MeeGo Conference next month where the company will show off devices running MeeGo, including tablets, phones, and in-vehicle entertainment systems. It’s not clear at the moment if this means that LG will definitely be bringing these devices to market, but it at least shows that the company is putting some of its research dollars into MeeGo.

      • Android

        • Why Midrange Android Phones Aren’t Worth the Sacrifice

          While these phone’s list prices blow the competition out of the water (as they range from $100 to free with a new contract), you can still find high-end phones on Amazon for just as cheap. Instead of grabbing a $100 phone, for example, you might be better off snatching up the slightly-old-but-still-awesome Droid Incredible, for example, a mere $80 on Amazon or the slightly less old HTC G2 for $100.—and it’s probably a better phone than even the $100 midrange phones. These deals aren’t permanent, but every few months Amazon seems to have a slew of steep discounts on high-end phones that make buying midrange phones unnecessary.

          If you don’t want to be beholden to when Amazon or other outlets have deals on certain phones, or you want to get a phone for free, the lower-end phones are probably a fine buy, as Tested notes. But with a bit of patience and hunting around, you can almost certainly get just as good a deal on a higher-end phone—thus avoiding the sacrifice of a slow processor or the latest version of Android. Hit the link to Tested’s article on midrange phones, and share your thoughts on the subject in the comments.

        • Manage Your Photo Gallery from Android Using ReGalAndroid
        • Xoom sales still flag as developers rethink Android tablets

          Verizon says it is happy with Motorola Xoom tablet sales, despite a Global Equities estimate that only 25,000 to 120,000 units — a small fraction of the 500,000 to 800,000 units said to have been manufactured — have actually sold. Meanwhile, increasing frustration with Android fragmentation, as well as a rough-edged Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) release, has tipped mobile developer interest back toward the Apple iPad, claims an Appcelerator/IDC survey.

        • MIPS Honeycomb port in progress

          MIPS Technologies says it’s working on a port of Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) to the MIPS architecture, and also announced a 15 percent year-to-year increase in revenues for its fiscal third quarter. Meanwhile, MIPS and new licensee Ali Corp. of Taiwan announced Ali’s Linux-compatible, MIPS32-based “M3701G” chipset, designed for triple-play set-top boxes.

        • Dear Google: Here’s your roadmap out of Android Honeycomb hell

Free Software/Open Source

  • Dropbox snuffs open code that bypassed file-sharing controls

    Dropbox – the San Francisco startup that offers a free service for sharing files over the net – has suppressed a fledgling open source project that lets anyone use the service outside of its control, saying the project exposed Dropbox’s proprietary protocol and could be used for piracy.

    The open source project is called Dropship, and it provides a means of sharing files via Dropbox using only their hashes. It saves hashes of a file in JSON format, and anyone can then use the hashes to load the file into their Dropbox account. This could be used to share, yes, copyrighted content, which is officially barred by the company. “Dropship is a tool that attempts to access the Dropbox servers in an unauthorized manner,” a Dropbox spokesman tells The Register.

  • [VIDEO] Free and Open Source Software in Developing Countries
  • Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

    Yesterday morning I woke up much earlier than I wanted. Instead of lying in bed, wishing I was asleep, I decided to get up and check out Hacker News. Better to waste my time reading industry news than lying around. One headline in particular caught my attention: “Dropship — successor to torrents?“. The name was an obvious reference to Dropbox and the suggestion it could replace torrents was enticing. Data storage and distribution has been a long time interest of mine and I can’t resist reading about the industry. I had no idea that by the end of the day I’d have received a fake DMCA takedown notice, correspondence with Dropbox’s CTO, and witness the near killing of an open source project.

  • 2600hz Launches First-Ever Distributed, Open-Source Communications Software

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Benchmark The Browsers! Which One Is The Best?

      Every article presented here about browsers always generates some controversy about which browser is the best? With the arrival of new browsers market leaders, a series of 14 tests held to know the most comprehensive and impartial browser as possible.

    • Chrome

      • Chrome 11: Google’s web browser learns to listen

        Google has released the stable version of Chrome 11. After the update, users will have version 11.0.696.57 of Google’s web browser. As previously reported, Chrome 11 features the addition of a new logo that drops the previous 3D bubble look for a flatter and more simple look.

      • Latest Google Chrome Build Now Supports Speech Input

        The latest stable release of Google’s Chrome browser features speech input through HTML. What this simply means is that you can now translate your voice input into other languages using Google Translate right in the browser.

      • Google Chrome Patches Net Bug Hunters $16,500

        Google paid out a record $16,500 to developers for plugging 27 Chrome Web browser vulnerabilities, paving the way for the launch of the Chrome 11.

    • Mozilla

      • 10 Must-Have Free Firefox 4 Add-Ons

        As appealing as Firefox 4 is, it could be better at searching, keeping information secure, and performing other important tasks. Each of these freebies adds to the browser’s functionality and ease of use.

      • Mozilla Fixes Vulnerabilities in Firefox 4
      • Firefox 4.0.1 fixes several security issues
      • Firefox gets faster on Linux

        Linux users have always been a big part of Firefox‘s vocal fan base, and today a group of Mozilla developers has repaid their devotion with some good news. Mozilla’s Mike Hommey reported this morning that his team of coders finally managed to get both 32 and 64-bit Firefox builds for Linux to compile with GCC 4.5. The updated compiler has been available since April 2010, but Hommey’s team tried twice last year without success to make the switch. Now that they’ve been able to pull it off, Firefox on Linux should perform every bit as well as it does on Windows — with the possible exception of hardware acceleration, where Firefox’s utilization of Direct2D still gives Windows Vista and 7 a performance edge.

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • What’s New in Upcoming CUBRID Manager 8.4.0

      CUBRID 8.4.0 is coming out very soon, so is the CUBRID Manager. In this article I would like to explain briefly how we gathered the user requests for the CM 8.4.0 and which of them have been implemented.

    • Database Sharding with CUBRID

      Our development team has just released the User Specs for the Sharding feature which we are going to implement this year in CUBRID. In this blog I will explain the overall plan and how the database sharding will work in CUBRID.

    • Will the 2011 MySQL Conference Be the Last One?: A Q&A

      This year marked my fifth year at the MySQL Conference. With some distance between the Oracle acquisition, this year’s show provided an interesting glimpse into the status of MySQL, both the project and the ecosystem. Let’s get to the questions.

      Q: Before we begin, do you have anything to disclose?
      A: Yes. Prior to its acquisition by Oracle, Sun was a RedMonk client. And prior to its acquisition by Sun, MySQL was a RedMonk client. In addition, multiple entities that compete directly or indirectly with MySQL are RedMonk clients, including Akiban, Basho, IBM, Lucid Imagination, Membase, and Microsoft.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice development on track after Oracle move

      The Document Foundation on Friday announced a second beta for LibreOffice 3.4, the offshoot of the OpenOffice.org codebase, one week after Oracle said it would no longer sell a commercial version of the productivity suite.

      “Please be aware that LibreOffice 3.4 Beta2 is not yet ready for production use,” the Document Foundation said on its website. “You should continue to use LibreOffice 3.3.2 for that.” Release 3.4.0 is currently scheduled for delivery on May 31, according to the site.

    • Another LibreOffice Developmental Release Emerges

      The Document Foundation today announced another developmental release on the way to LibreOffice 3.4. Release candidates will be delivered throughout May with the final expected May 31.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Guile 2.0.1 released

      We are pleased to announce GNU Guile 2.0.1, the first and overdue maintenance release of the brand new 2.0.x stable series.

    • GNU Chess 6 released

      Version 6 is a major change of GNU Chess, because it is based on Fruit v2.1, a completely different chess engine. Fruit was written by Fabien Letouzey, thus he is the primary author of GNU Chess v6.

    • Volunteers needed to convert pages from a proprietary wiki to MoinMoin

      We are looking for volunteers to help write code to convert a free software project’s documentation wiki pages and associated history from a proprietary format to MoinMoin, a free software wiki written in Python.

  • Licensing

    • Free Art License 1.3

      The Free Art License grants the right to freely copy, distribute, and transform creative works without infringing the author’s rights.

      The Free Art License recognizes and protects these rights. Their implementation has been reformulated in order to allow everyone to use creations of the human mind in a creative manner, regardless of their types and ways of expression.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • ARM processor shipments — and profits — are booming

        Buoyed by sales of smartphones and tablets, ARM Holdings reported a 35 percent increase in year-over-year profits. The company added that shipments of processors based on its designs were up 33 percent, while 39 different licensees signed up during the first quarter of its financial year.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Why We Need An Open Wireless Movement

    If you sometimes find yourself needing an open wireless network in order to check your email from a car, a street corner, or a park, you may have noticed that they’re getting harder to find.

    Stories like the one over the weekend about a bunch of police breaking down an innocent man’s door because he happened to leave his network open, as well as general fears about slow networks and online privacy, are convincing many people to password-lock their WiFi routers.

  • The Possibilian

    When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof.

  • Ian Hislop attacks Andrew Marr over super injunction

    Private Eye editor Ian Hislop has accused the BBC’s Andrew Marr of hypocrisy after he admitted taking out a controversial super-injunction while working as a journalist.

  • Buying computers in multiple languages

    Very interesting petition from a French citizen. What strikes me is that the petitioner asked for regulatory changes while the Commission in its answer restricts itself to positive law, positive competition law.

  • Hardware

  • Security

    • Discrete Geometry Viewer – Quantum fun!

      Discrete Geometry Viewer may not be useful to everyone, but it will surely delight geeks and geek artists, who have gained a powerful new tool for image manipulation. Apart from its immediate scientific value, DGV also has educational aspects and can be used for stunning visualization effects that are otherwise virtually impossible to achieve.

      Personally, I think DGV is a great project. Whether it’s ever going to hatch from its infant phase depends mainly on the interest of the author, who could be pursuing other ideas once he completes his PhD. One thing is sure, this can be a smart ice breaker for all those terrified physics students, expecting years of boredom at the university. Lure them in, make them feel safe and comfy, thinking they are going to enjoy themselves. Well, they might actually get amused pasting pictures of Stalin and Mark together, even if they fail at the solid state physics exams.

  • Finance

    • Microsoft Stuck as Near-Record Discount Fails to Win Investors

      Yet the stock is stuck, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its May 2 edition. It closed at $26.38 yesterday versus its average of about $27 since the start of 2001. The shares, which first surpassed $26 in 1998, have lost about 7.1 percent including dividends in the past decade while the S&P 500 returned 30 percent.

    • Former SAC Manager Pleads Guilty to Insider Trading

      As the jury continued to deliberate in the trial of Raj Rajaratnam, the government notched another guilty plea in its investigation of insider trading at hedge funds.

      Donald Longueuil, a former portfolio manager at SAC Capital Advisors, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and securities fraud before Judge Jed S. Rakoff in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

    • The Post Is on Another Planet: Job Growth in the First Quarter Was Not Strong

      The calls for the bankruptcy of the Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street) are getting louder. The post told readers that:

      “The job market was a bright spot in the first quarter … with the unemployment rate falling and job growth coming in strong.”

    • EU targets 16 major banks in swaps market probes

      The European Union’s competition watchdog is investigating the practices of some of the world’s largest banks, as well as a clearing house and a financial data firm, in the market for credit default swaps.

      The two probes home in on a market that has come under fire for lacking transparency and allegedly worsening market turmoil during the financial crisis.

    • Profit Jumps at Exxon and Shell

      Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell reported huge increases in their first-quarter profit on Thursday, helped by higher oil prices and earnings from refining.

      Exxon Mobil, the largest American oil company, said net income rose 69 percent to $10.7 billion, or $2.14 a share, in the first three months of this year, from $6.3 billion, or $1.33 a share, in the same period last year.

    • Gas prices jump to $3.91 a gallon, heading to $4

      The average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. is now within a dime of $4.

      Drivers in 22 states are paying more than the national average of $3.91 per gallon. In Alaska, California and Connecticut they’re paying $4.20 or more.

      With one day left in April, gas prices are up 30 cents for the month. On average, the increase has been slightly more than a penny per day. At that rate, the national average for gas would reach $4 on Sunday, May 8. In 2008, when gas hit a record of $4.11 per gallon in July, it didn’t cost $4 until June 8.

  • Wisconsin/PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Madison’s Battle of the Brats

      The “World’s Largest Brat Fest,” which will take place over Memorial Day weekend at Willow Island at the Alliant Energy Center, will serve brats donated by Johnsonville Sausage of Sheboygan Falls, WI. Johnsonville owners (the Stayer and Stayer-Maloney families) and other principals of Johnsonville Sausage contributed a total of $48,450 to Scott Walker’s gubernatorial and other 2010 Republican state campaigns, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign’s Campaign Finance Database.This prompted Madison activists such as Sam Hokin to call for a boycott of Johnsonville and other corporations that contributed to Scott Walker. Tim Metcalfe, president and co-owner of Metcalfe’s Market and organizer of the “World’s Largest Brat Fest,” issued a statement on March 20th that “Brat Fest has, and continues to be, truly apolitical… My hope is that these traditions and civil accord can continue.”

    • Could Michigan-style “Martial Law” Be On Its Way to Wisconsin?

      Rumors have been circulating about a little-known initiative to subject Wisconsin local governments to “stress tests” and other new constraints. Many believe the proposal resembles the “martial law” bill that was recently passed in Michigan, which allows the state government to dissolve local governments in a “fiscal emergency,” and worry that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker or his friends in the legislature could be cooking up a similar plan.

    • Governor Walker’s Self-Managed Medicaid Mishaps

      Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s op-ed in the New York Times last week advocated for a Medicaid that promotes innovative, self-managed and flexible care that would allow individuals to stay in their own homes. Despite these statements, Governor Walker is eliminating a Wisconsin Medicaid innovation that worked toward these stated principles, a newly-created and relatively inexpensive statewide registry that helps vulnerable people with disabilities stay out of assisted living facilities and control their home healthcare.

  • Privacy

    • Sony’s security breach raises questions around data protection

      The Sony security breach is serious. Obviously it is hugely distressing if you are one of the huge number of people affected but it also raises questions on when should we, the public, be told about a serious security breach? Also what constitutes a security breach?

      In most US states, companies are required to report data breaches as soon as they happen. Let me be clear, I have no doubt whatsoever that Sony would have acted as quickly as possible once the full extent of the security breach was known, but the fact that it appears that a whole week went by before a public announcement was made has raised a few eyebrows. We do know that the EU is already looking in detail at a Data Protection Directive which will potentially introduce a mandatory reporting process for all organ

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Embryo patent row could dash Europe’s stem cell future

      Europe’s highest court has been urged to declare stem cell patents immoral and therefore illegal. Researchers warn this will destroy prospects for stem cell treatments in Europe, driving potential investors to patent-friendly China, Japan and the US. New Scientist explores what is at stake.

    • This is self-explanatory

      We find it extraordinary that Hong is apparently unaware of the IEEE publication. Although Hong does cite Phillips’s paper, we find that he does so in a somewhat misleading way and makes only cursory references to Bose. In particular, he does not refer to the crucial papers of Bose cited above.

      We hope you find these observations useful. We believe that they not only serve to debunk the claims of Marconi’s priority, but also to provide another illustration of the fact that inventions do occur without the protection of intellectual property.

    • Copyrights

      • Righthaven Suffers Blow in Copyright Crusade

        A federal judge blasted Righthaven’s copyright-collection business model in a ruling that says an Oregon nonprofit was justified through fair use to post an article by the Las Vegas Review Journal.

        “[Righthaven's] litigation strategy has a chilling effect on potential fair uses of Righthaven-owned articles, diminishes public access to the facts contained therein, and does nothing to advance the Copyright Act’s purpose of promoting artistic creation,” U.S. District Judge James Mahan ruled Friday.

      • IPR FILESHARING APPEAL: RIGHTS-HOLDERS LOST A
      • CERTAIN CANADIAN INDUSTRIES’ INPUT ON POSSIBLE WTO

      • ACTA

      • Digital Economy (UK)/HADOPI

        • BT and TalkTalk lose challenge to Digital Economy Act

          As no doubt you have heard by now, four out of the five judicial review claims on the Digital Economy Act brought to court by BT and TalkTalk have been dismissed. BT and TalkTalk argued that the Digital Economy Act was illegal under privacy and e-commerce laws, that the impact on business was disproportionate, and that the UK failed to notify the EU of the impending implementation of the law. Mr Justice Parker ruled today that all of these issues were not feasible reasons to deem the Digital Economy Act illegal except for the cost order which mandates that ISPs pay 25% of the charges incurred in implementation. A review of this cost order will now take place.

          We at Big Brother Watch are disappointed in this ruling. Our very own Dan Hamilton said today,

        • Judgment in the Digital Economy Act Judicial Review

          After only three weeks, Mr Justice Kenneth Parker has handed down his judgment in the Judicial Review of the Digital Economy Act. In summarising thousands of pages of evidence and submissions and the four-day hearing, the judge rejected nearly all of the grounds for the review, only allowing the challenge to part of the allocation of costs. The full text of the judgment can be found here and summaries of the hearings here.

          The first point to note is the number of parties. While the case was between BT, TalkTalk and the government, there were thirteen interested parties involved, including six notorious pro-copyright lobby groups and four unions. This gives an indication of the intense lobbying pressure behind the Digital Economy Act, and why the previous government felt compelled to act the way they did.

Clip of the Day

How Apple Genius Bar Works – South Park


Credit: TinyOgg

04.29.11

Links 29/4/2011: Linux 2.6.39 RC 5, Slackware 13.37

Posted in News Roundup at 3:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Ten places Linux and open source can thrive

    Some people might be surprised at the numbers of organisations that are now employing open source, says Jack Wallen. But which areas of activity could most benefit from its greater adoption?

    Some industries with few outward signs of open source are already taking advantage of it, while in others it has no presence whatsoever. What is certain is that they could all benefit — in ways ranging from cost-effectiveness to reliability.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 2.6.39-rc5
    • Why systemd?

      systemd is still a young project, but it is not a baby anymore. The initial announcement I posted precisely a year ago. Since then most of the big distributions have decided to adopt it in one way or another, many smaller distributions have already switched. The first big distribution with systemd by default will be Fedora 15, due end of May. It is expected that the others will follow the lead a bit later (with one exception). Many embedded developers have already adopted it too, and there’s even a company specializing on engineering and consulting services for systemd. In short: within one year systemd became a really successful project.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • New Kdenlive Released, Gets Rotoscope

        The Kdenlive Team has announced the release of version 0.8. The latest version of the popular film-editing software has some cool features which include: Multi track editing; Realtime effects and transitions; Image, color, titles, video and audio clips; customizable layout and ability to export to various formats.

      • User experience, one pixel at a time

        A couple of weeks ago, I’ve been attending 2011 user experience Sprint, in Berlin. That was interesting and nice and productive and everything, and above all it was my first live encounter with other KDE people, including Nuno.

        There’s been (notably) quite some discussions about how information and functionality should be presented to users, organized and formulated, in order to be complete but not overwhelming, sexy, gratifying, and elegant.

        [...]

        Things one notices:

        * more visible pressed tool buttons at the top
        * new slider at the bottom
        * and new folder icons (quite unrelated with this post actually), on which Nuno has been working lately (and I’m sure he would blog better than I about it).

        Things one does not notice (but with which we are happy):

        * improved holes for the scrollbars, progressbars, and main view (note notably how the main view bottom corners are better rounded)
        * improved (well, bug fixed) rendering of the capacity bar at the bottom.

        To give proper credit to whom it belongs, some of the improvements above have been primarily instigated by Peter Penz, Dolphin dev.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tablets

      • Convert Your NOOk Color Into An Android Tablet

        Barnes & Nobel announced that NOOK Color’s update to Android OS 2.2/Froyo offers system improvements, enhanced browser performance and a more complete Web experience giving customers access to enjoy even more video, interactive and animated content.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Modo Labs Launches Open-Source Mobile Development Framework

    Modo Labs, a provider of open-source content-delivery solutions for mobile, has debuted its Kurogo Mobile Framework for developers.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Releases Chrome 11 Stable for Linux

        The Google Chrome developers at Google proudly announced last evening (April 27th) the stable release and immediate availability for download of the Google Chrome 11.0.696.57 web browser for Linux, Windows, Macintosh and Chrome Frame platforms.

    • Mozilla

      • Iceweasel/Firefox 4 in Debian Squeeze – I make the leap

        I contend that it’s not necessary nor even desirable to upgrade an entire Linux distribution or BSD installation just to get some shiny newness like Firefox 4.

      • New Flamerobin snapshot revision 2100 in #debian

        The main change is that now it requires firebird2.5-dev instead of firebird3.0 headers and decided that is better to have a flamerobin 0.9.3 in the distros released for the next 1-2 years with a stable firebird 2.5.x and add firebird 3.0 requirement when is ready and stable ~1-2 years

      • Firefox AwesomeBar HD, Nothing That I Want

        Different teams and individuals are working on the Firefox web browser. Some are improving the web browser’s core, others are working on the interface or experimental extensions that may one day be added to the web browser’s core.

        One of those experimental spin-offs is the AwesomeBar HD which is now available as a beta release for Firefox 4 and newer versions of the web browser. As the name suggests, it has something to do with Firefox’s address bar.

      • Mozilla overhauling Firefox graphics, JavaScript

        In the quest for better browser speed, Mozilla has begun work on new Firefox engines for running JavaScript programs and displaying graphics.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle May Cease Support of Popular Linux Distributives Too.

      In a bid to further consolidate its server business in general and mission-critical server in particular, Oracle may in future cease support of popular Red Hat and SUSE Linux operating systems, according to an analyst. This currently seems to be a problem for a lot of customers using Intel Corp.’s Itanium-based systems from HP, who are unsure about the future of Itanium in general and HP-UX in particular.

  • BSD

    • Did You Know You Can Try BSD With VirtualBSD?

      A while ago back in January I came across this announcement on OSNews.com and made a mental note that this was something I had to try.
      VirtualBSD 8.1 was released on or around 4/01/2011 and it basically gives you a pre-defined FreeBSD 8.1 installation with Xfce 4.6 and a range of applications in a virtual machine. It is a desktop ready FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE in the form of a VMware appliance but can also in a few steps be made to run with VirtualBox. Read the instructions for that here.
      As I already had VMware Player installed I went for using it as intended. Most of what I’m going to write you can also read on the VirtualBSD site so feel free to skip over.

Leftovers

  • US Supremes deal death blow to class action lawsuits

    The US Supreme Court has granted a whopping victory to AT&T, the US Chamber of Commerce, and supportive corporations, by reversing previous court decisions that had prevented corporations from requiring individual arbitration of customers’ complaint.

    By issuing its 5-4 decision on Wednesday, the Court has essentially stripped away individuals’ rights to band together in class-action lawsuits should a corporation choose to include an arbitration requirement in its contracts or licensing agreements.

  • Finance

    • How Wall Street Thieves, Led by Goldman Sachs, Took Down the Global Economy — Their Outsized Influence Must be Stopped

      The Senate report calls for tighter regulations so that banks can’t play these games ever again. It calls for more effective regulatory agencies and rules, and it wants major reforms on the way the rating agencies work — much of this already contained in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. But in addition, the subcommittee obviously wants more federal prosecution of Goldman Sachs and others as it asks that “Federal regulators…. identify any violations of law…” (p 638).

    • As Wall St. Firms Grow, Their Reputations Are Dying

      Reputation is dead on Wall Street.

      This is not to say that financiers and financial institutions still do not commit foolish misdeeds. Rather, so long as the authorities do not find law-breaking, the penalties are few.

      The list of examples is long.

    • Don’t Let Goldman off the Hook

      With crises mounting daily—wars, deficits, debt limits, natural disasters—it’s tempting to forget the cataclysms of the past. In particular, America seems to have amnesia about the Wall Street-induced catastrophe that destroyed so much of our economy. We still haven’t learned its lessons, and if we don’t pay attention, we’re soon going to pay again for its perpetrators’ callous disregard for the public interest.

    • Taking on Wall Street

      Lorin Reisner ’83 and Kenneth Lench ’84 were about to take on perhaps the most important lawsuit in the history of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

      It was April 2010, and Reisner, the deputy director of the SEC’s enforcement division in Washington, D.C., and Lench, head of a key unit in the division, were preparing a civil fraud suit against Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs.

      The Brandeis graduates had helped successfully convince the SEC’s five commissioners to vote for the suit, arguing that 
Goldman misled investors about complex securities at the heart of the mortgage meltdown. But opposition within the agency was so fierce that it led to a nonunanimous vote to pursue the suit.

    • A.I.G. to Sue 2 Firms to Recover Some Losses

      The American International Group, the giant insurer rescued by the federal government during the financial crisis, on Thursday will file the first of what could be a series of lawsuits against Wall Street firms, contending that it was the victim of fraud.

    • Report: Republicans’ Hidden $34 Trillion Tax On Seniors

      A new report by economists at the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research looks at House Republicans’ plan for privatizing Medicare from a new angle, and finds that it could increase Health Care costs for beneficiaries by a staggering $34 Trillion over 75 years.

    • U.S. Economic Growth Slows to 1.8% Rate in Quarter

      Total output grew at an annual pace of 1.8 percent from January through March, the Commerce Department said Thursday, after having expanded at an annual rate of 3.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010.

      When the year first began, economists had been expecting a much more robust growth rate of about 4 percent, only to be barraged by bad report after bad report as the days wore on. Turmoil in the Middle East set off a jump in oil prices. Winter blizzards shuttered businesses and delayed construction, causing investments in nonresidential structures like office buildings to fall by 21.7 percent compared with an increase of 7.6 percent at the end of 2010. Imports, which are subtracted from output, surged, and military spending sank.

    • ExxonMobil earnings up 69 percent
    • More people applied for unemployment benefits

      More people sought unemployment benefits last week, the second rise in three weeks, a sign of the slow and uneven jobs recovery.

      Applications for unemployment benefits jumped 25,000 to a seasonally adjusted 429,000 for the week ending April 23, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s the highest total since late January.

    • Sokol Is Accused of Misleading Buffett on Trades

      Berkshire Hathaway directors have accused David L. Sokol, once considered a possible successor to Warren E. Buffett, of misleading the company about his personal stake in a specialty chemicals manufacturer that Berkshire recently agreed to acquire.

      Mr. Sokol, who resigned in March, never told Mr. Buffett that he had bought his stake in Lubrizol after Citigroup bankers had pitched the company as a potential takeover target, according to a report by the audit committee of the Berkshire board that was released on Wednesday.

    • Wonkbook: The Fed chooses a side

      Ben Bernanke’s first press conference wasn’t much for pomp and circumstance. Bernanke sat, he didn’t stand. The few cameras in the room didn’t hunt for the dramatic angles or work to heighten the tension between the chairman and his interrogators. Very few jokes were cracked, and Bernanke made no major missteps. It looked like what it was: an economist talking to econowonks about the economy. But tucked inside the talk of “anchoring inflation expectations” and “the economy’s central tendency” was perhaps the most important economic policy statement that Americans will hear this year: the Fed, Bernanke admitted, has chosen a side.

    • The FDIC’s Resolution Problem

      Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation (Title II of that Act), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is granted expanded powers to intervene and manage the closure of any failing bank or other financial institution. There are two strongly-held views of this legal authority: it substantially solves the problem of how to handle failing megabanks and therefore serves as an effective constraint on their future behavior; or it is largely irrelevant.

      Both views are expressed by well-informed people at the top of regulatory structures on both sides of the Atlantic (at least in private conversations). Which is right? In terms of legal process, the resolution authority could make a difference. But as a matter of practical politics and actual business practices, it means very little for our biggest financial institutions.

    • Economy slowed by high gas prices, bad weather

      The economy slowed sharply in the first three months of the year. High gas prices cut into consumer spending, bad weather delayed construction projects and the federal government slashed defense spending by the most in six years.

      The 1.8 percent annual growth rate in the January-March quarter was weaker than the 3.1 percent growth in the previous quarter, the Commerce Department reported. And it was the worst showing since last spring when the European debt crisis slowed growth to a 1.7 percent pace.

    • Profit Jumps at Exxon and Shell

      Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell reported hefty increases in their first-quarter profit on Thursday, helped by higher oil prices and earnings from refining.

      Exxon Mobil, the largest American oil company, said net income rose 69 percent to $10.7 billion, or $2.14 a share, in the first three months of this year, from $6.3 billion, or $1.33 a share, in the same period last year.

      The earnings beat some analysts’ expectations, and marked the fifth quarter in a row that Exxon reported an earnings increase.

  • Privacy

    • Jobs Says Apple Made Mistakes With iPhone Data

      Hoping to put to rest a growing controversy over privacy, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, took the unusual step of personally explaining that while Apple had made mistakes in how it handled location data on its mobile devices, it had not used the iPhone and iPad to keep tabs on the whereabouts of its customers.

  • DRM

    • Sony, Security, and Bovine Waste

      You see, another really annoying feature of the PS3 is Sony’s removal of the Other OS option, which made it possible for people who bought a PS3 to install Linux if they were so inclined. The removal of this option was something that happend basically as soon as I got my PS3. Shame on your Sony for telling people they could use your device for a specific purpose then taking that feature away from your paying customers. To make matters worse on this front, Sony thinks it’s okay to harras, sue, and otherwise make their customers’ lives a living hell for trying to return the functionality customers paid for. Ask George Hotz how reasonable Sony is when their legal thugs come knocking. In case you haven’t been following this, George Hotz, aka geohotz, figured out a way to jailbreak the PS3 and got sued for doing so.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Steve Jobs’ Android jabs may cost him App Store trademark

        Quick: When you hear the phrase “app store,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

        That’s the question a couple of tech’s biggest players — Apple and Amazon — are fighting over right now. Apple says “app store” is synonymous with its iOS App Store alone; Amazon says the term is generic and can be used by anyone.

        You’ve heard about this battle, right? Apple is suing Amazon for using the term “app store” (or, more specifically, “Appstore”) in the name of its new Android application store. Apple claims it owns the trademark and has exclusive rights to the term.

      • Apple’s App Store lawsuit gets a response from Amazon

        Apple had filed a lawsuit in March against Amazon’s use of “App Store” in their newly launched Amazon AppStore. Apple had informed Amazon that using the term “App Store” was unlawful because they owned the rights to the term itself. In the lawsuit Amazon indicates that the term “App Store” is too generic for Apple to lay claim to the name itself.

    • Copyrights

      • Wikileaks Cable Confirms Public Pressure Forced Delay of Canadian Copyright Bill in 2008

        A new Wikileaks cable confirms that the Conservative government delayed introducing copyright legislation in early 2008 due to public opposition. The delay – which followed the decision in December 2007 to hold off introducing a bill after it was placed on the order paper (and the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group took off) – lasted until June 2008. The U.S. cable notes confirmation came directly from then-Industry Minister Jim Prentice, who told U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins that cabinet colleagues and Conservative MPs were worried about the electoral implications of copyright reform…

      • The Massive Treasure Trove Of Historic Jazz Recordings That Almost No One Has Heard… Thanks To Copyright

        The museum is rushing to digitize the collection (much of which has deteriorated or was destroyed), but the only way to hear it is to make an appointment at the museum. They insist they’re going to try to tackle the copyright issues to release the music, but it’s clear that’s going to be an incredibly difficult task. What’s really unfortunate is how all of these works should be in the public domain, if we just went by what the law said when they were made. Yet, thanks to copyright maximalism, the world and our culture suffers completely unnecessarily.

      • ACTA

        • When DHS Questioned ACTA
        • Homeland Security’s 2008 letter to USTR: ACTA is a threat to national security

          On August 7, 2008, Stewart Baker, the Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, sent a one page letter and a three page “Policy Position on Border Measures of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.”

          Stewart Baker was the General Counsel of the National Security Agency from 1992 to 1994, and was appointed the first Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by George W Bush.

Clip of the Day

HTC Desire Z running Gingerbread/Cyanogenmod 7 (And debian linux with lxde)


Credit: TinyOgg

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