04.09.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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As I mentioned before, the architecture of Linux follows closely the architecture of the Unix systems. A relatively small monolithic kernel with libraries and utilities that add functionality to it.
This alone adds security value, since it allows the end user to turn off a lot of services (both hosted and network services) that they do not need, and if left to run on the system would create more avenues and possibilities for attacks.
For example, the average desktop system acts as a client for services, not as a server. Turning off these services means that other people across the network cannot attach to them. In the early days of Linux a lot of distributions would be distributed with the services turned on when you installed and booted them the first time. This was under the mistaken impression that having the services running would make them easier to administer, but security people quickly pointed out that having the services running at installation time (before needed patches could be applied) also left the systems, however briefly, open to attack. Now most, if not all, distributions install with these services turned off and you are instructed to turn them on at the proper time, hopefully after you have applied needed patches.
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Graphics Stack
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While up to this point AMD has only cleared Evergreen shader documents for release to the general public, the developers at AMD responsible for working on the open-source support have been working on some code too for this Radeon HD 5000 series support. The Linux 2.6.34 kernel has kernel mode-setting (KMS) support for the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards, but it goes without any 2D/3D/X-Video acceleration support. There’s also DDX Evergreen support allowing these “R800″ class GPUs to work with user-space mode-setting. That’s really been the extent of the open-source support though for these graphics cards that are a few months old.
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While development efforts within the X.Org community are now ramping up for the release of X Server 1.9 that should arrive in August, there is an ongoing discussion concerning a planned long-term change for the X Server: pulling the drivers back in.
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Applications
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With Yoono, you can have updates to all your social media accounts arranged in a columnar form for easy viewing and organizing. You can also choose to have all your updates from all your social media accounts in one tab (my killer feature of the app). Post your updates to all your networks or just choose those you want, it’s up to you. Sharing stuff like links, pictures and videos with friends across all the networks is also a blinking act.
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Proprietary
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Overall, the SoftMaker Office applications appear to have similar functionality to their Microsoft counterparts in Office versions prior to 2007, and many of the functions are found in the same place and have similar options, so users should have no difficulty getting to grips with TextMaker, PlanMaker and SoftMaker Presentations.
Although I only had time for a brief evaluation of SoftMaker Office 2010, it looks impressive and is definitely worth trying out if you are a Linux user looking for a decent equivalent to Microsoft Office.
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Instructionals
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But what about RPM based distributions like CentOS? They don’t offer a setup tool like that – even due to their wide distribution. In my case I need a CentOS environment to do some tests. CentOS uses RPM, just as its mother distribution RedHat. But in our case, it’s not that simple as we cannot emerge it and be done.
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Whether you’re new to Linux or looking to become a more advanced user, there are a lot of free online books and tutorials that can give you guidance. For beginners good choices abound, and good titles are just a few clicks away. In this post, you’ll find our updated collection of many good Linux reference guides online–all available at no cost.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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KDE 4 right now is an awesome desktop and doesn’t need to retroactively justify the earlier releases.
Instead focus on a clear listing of the improvements and features, and maybe even engage in a little self-depreciation and poke a bit of fun at the 4.0 release along the way. Let people know what they are missing today if they decide not to give KDE another look.
Try to re-capture those that might have left KDE! Don’t burn calories calling them liars – they obviously at one point cared enough to give 4.0 a try, I bet they could be convinced to give 4.4 a try as well –hopefully with a different result!
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Ubuntu
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A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the second and final Beta release of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system, due for launch at the end of this month. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS development.
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As you may have heard, Mark Shuttleworth announced his vision for Ubuntu 10.10 a few days ago. Without prejudicing the more pressing release of Ubuntu 10.04 in a couple weeks, here are some thoughts on what Shuttleworth said, and what we can expect from Ubuntu 10.10 in October 2010.
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What’s the best new feature coming to Lucid? You could even call this one Lucid’s killer feature.
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Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 2 doesn’t come with drastic visual changes, but there are quite a few minor improvements and tweaks. In this post I’ll try to cover all the changes made since Beta 1 (see also: Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Beta 1 screenshots).
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Last week I finally dumped my Blackberry smartphone and got myself one of the Verizon Droid phones; specifically the Droid Eris. I was waiting for the Nexus One to come to Verizon Wireless for quite some time and when I read that it was to be offered through Google only (unlocked and without a contract deal) for $530, I said forget about it. I will go to the store instead and get one of the Droid phones (Motorola Droid & HTC Droid Eris).
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If the recent debate about open core licensing has proven one thing, it is that the issue of combining proprietary and open source code continues to be a controversial one.
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Oracle
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OK, OK! All of you who raised your hand and are hopping in your seats to get called upon for your suggestions, click here. If your hand is sort of wavering at shoulder height and you need a little more urging, read on for more info on “Better Defaults”, the new subproject of Project Renaissance which just began in the UX community.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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All what I’m going to write here, is likely to be considered happening in a world that, even not perfect, is a bit better of the real world we all live in together; a world where software patents don’t exist, as they bring out the worst part of legal troubles, and heavily step into the Freedom given by Free Software.
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Back in the days when the FSF was finding it’s feet Richard and others began this amazing process of taking functional proprietary tools and recreating these tools as free software, drop-in replacements. This process of “doing all the boring bits” really set the technical foundations and I think is why a lot of people were really amazed by the principled dedication and out of this grew respect.
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The open source movement grew out of the lack of compromise in the Free Software community, but it’s grown further from being just about inviting businesses into a friendly arena and into a more pragmatics’ hiding hole, there are no difficult questions to answer, and free as in beer software is how it’s all advertised with no further explanation about how it became free in the first place.
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Lawsuits
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The pharmaceutical industry is a huge mess, which has little, if anything, to do with making people healthy. The way the system is currently designed, if it’s more profitable for a pharmaceutical company to put you at greater risk, it will do so. And sometimes the US gov’t will help them brush it under the rug. Reader Bill Pickett points us to a recent investigative report concerning the big, high-publicity lawsuit the US gov’t filed against Pfizer, after the company blatantly went against FDA approvals and marketed a drug for all sorts of alternative uses, which the FDA had specifically noted could be dangerous and could put people at greater risk.
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Denise New’s 16 year old son filed charges against her last month and requested a no contact order after he claims she posted slanderous entries about him on the social networking site. New says she was just trying to monitor what he was posting.
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A Cuyahoga County judge sued The Plain Dealer and affiliated companies Wednesday, claiming that they breached a Web site privacy policy when stories linked an e-mail account used by the judge to a series of online comments related to some of the judge’s high-profile cases.
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Science
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While the nuclear accident of 1986 is what Chernobyl is known for, there were two other nuclear accidents of smaller magnitude that took place at this nuclear power plant before it was finally decommissioned in the year 2000. In 1982, there was a smaller accident within Chernobyl’s Reactor #1, but it was not nearly as significant and the reactor returned to an operational state within months. In 1991, there was a fire in Reactor #2 that caused severe damage and ultimately led to the shutdown of this nuclear reactor. Reactor #4 is home to the infamous Chernobyl accident. The other reactors were not permanently shutdown immediately as Ukraine was dependent upon Chernobyl for its electricity production and for the country it would not make economic sense to prematurely discontinue the use of the other reactors. Reactor #1 was permanently decommissioned in 1996 and Reactor #3 was finally retired from operation in 2000.
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Finance
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European Council President Herman Van Rompuy found MEPs in trenchant mood Wednesday when he reported back to them on the conclusions reached by European leaders at their summit last month. MEPs took a critical look at the summit’s solutions to the current euro-zone crisis, with many demanding a more ambitious European approach to current difficulties
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Austrian Socialist Hannes Swoboda disagreed, saying the summit was disappointing, especially on Greece. He said that leaving help in the hands of the IMF meant giving up a common economic policy in favour of a technocratic approach. “The Council is like the Titanic – they hit an iceberg and as a response they set up a task-force.”
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Of course, Goldman has become the proxy for all attacks on the role financial firms played in the crisis, so its boss does not enjoy the same latitude as Dimon. Nor are Blankfein’s words likely to silence his critics — short of closing the bank down, nothing will. His letter underscores the jam Goldman’s in. But it is, at least, a spirited defence.
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The New York-based firm received $10 billion of taxpayer aid in the credit crisis, which it repaid in June. That money led politicians and pundits to blame Goldman Sachs for profiting from taxpayers. Labor unions led protests calling for bonus payments to be canceled, and a Rolling Stone magazine writer last year labeled the firm a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” and criticized it for selling securities backed by subprime mortgages.
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Why should Goldman have to pay for mitigating the risk of its deal-partners when the SEC or the Fed can do Goldman’s work for it — on the taxpayer dime?
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Goldman Sachs Mortgage Co., the lender to the owners of Florida’s Sawgrass Marriott Resort, asked a bankruptcy court for permission to take over and sell the company’s assets.
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Crony Capitalism. Government influence buying. Insider information and trading schemes, derivatives and market manipulations, shadow banking.
Goldman Sachs is arguably the most powerful financial institution since the House of Morgan, during the Robber Barron days of capitalisms ‘Golden Age’ of the turn of the 19th century.
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We’re good guys, really!
Goldman Sachs, the publicly vilified former investment bank famously nicknamed a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi for the way its seemingly wraps its tentacles around every far flung money-making opportunity, issued a defense in its annual letter to shareholders this week. The company did not benefit by wagering that the mortgages behind the securities it originally issued and sold would default, it said. Goldman’s chief operating officer Gary Cohn wrote in the letter: “The firm did not generate enormous net revenues or profits by betting against residential mortgage-related products, as some have speculated.”
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The company, which received $10 billion in preferred stock investment from the U.S. Treasury through the Troubled Assets Relief Program in October 2008, downplayed the aid it received from the federal government in the midst of the crisis.
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Then there is AIG. In today’s letter Goldman continues to insist that its “direct economic exposure to AIG was minimal” and that Goldman limited “overall credit exposure to AIG through a combination of collateral and market hedges.” Goldman’s primary exposure to AIG was through some $10 billion of insurance Goldman purchased on super-senior CDO tranches. When AIG became insolvent, that insurance did not look too secure. But Goldman and other banks were made whole, collecting 100 cents on the dollar, by the U.S. government. First, AIG used bailout cash it received from the government to post collateral that Goldman was allowed to keep. Second, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York purchased the CDOs directly from Goldman and the other banks.
As for Goldman’s hedges–they remain unclear. Tim Geithner, who headed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the time of the bailout, has said he never inspected them. The Special Inspector General for TARP has said Goldman might have had difficulty collecting on the credit protection it had bought on AIG. Goldman believes that it would have been able to collect.
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Ali Hedayat, co-head in the Americas of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s largest internal hedge fund, has left the firm, the second senior departure from the unit in less than a month, said three people familiar with the matter.
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In what would mark the second high-profile departure in less than a month from Goldman Sachs’s Principal Strategies unit, Ali Hedayat, the co-head in the Americas of the bank’s largest internal hedge fund has left the firm, Bloomberg News reported, citing three people with knowledge of the matter.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Pro-euthanasia group Exit International is holding national hacking crash-courses in how to bypass the Federal Government’s planned ISP-level Internet content filter with help from the Australian Pirate Party.
The first of eight “Hacking Masterclasses” was held in Chatswood NSW on Thursday last week, and drew about 50 elderly people — some bearing laptops. Exit International director and controversial Australian physician, Philip Nitschke, created the class to help the elderly access euthanasia-assistance material online, following fears that the Internet filter will block access to the information.
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A proposal to let Internet service providers conceal the contact information for their business customers is drawing fire from a number of experts in the security community, who say the change will make it harder to mitigate the threat from spam and malicious software.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg on Tuesday subtly slammed the premise of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, stressing the United States was already the envy of other countries in broadband adoption.
Even though the FCC argues otherwise — chiefly presenting its broadband recommendations as a way to expand high-speed Internet services while returning the U.S. market to the top of the world rankings — Seidenberg said it was other nations that lagged behind.
“One. Not even close,” the CEO said of the U.S. market’s broadband standing during a discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg sat down for an on-the-record conversation yesterday at the Council for Foreign Relations, and he pulled no punches: the US is number one in the world when it comes to broadband. We’re so far ahead of everyone else, it’s “not even close.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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(“Newser”), and any agent or affiliate of Newser, immediately cease and desist using The Wrap as a source for Newser content. Newser is not following industry best practices, is intentionally misleading consumers/users at the expense of The Wrap and at the expense of other unnamed sources, and has effectually demonstrated no intention to allow consumers/users to logically and easily ascertain the source of Newser articles.”
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Copyrights
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The moral case, although easy to sympathise with, is a way of trying to have one’s cake and eat it. Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. From 1710 onwards, it has involved a deal in which the creator or publisher gives up any natural and perpetual claim in order to have the state protect an artificial and limited one. So it remains.
The question is how such a deal can be made equitably. At the moment, the terms of trade favour publishers too much. A return to the 28-year copyrights of the Statute of Anne would be in many ways arbitrary, but not unreasonable. If there is a case for longer terms, they should be on a renewal basis, so that content is not locked up automatically. The value society places on creativity means that fair use needs to be expanded and inadvertent infringement should be minimally penalised. None of this should get in the way of the enforcement of copyright, which remains a vital tool in the encouragement of learning. But tools are not ends in themselves.
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Much of his concern is how these costs will multiply in an age of ebooks, but it seems like a serious enough issue from the start. Just the fact that authors who are discussing and building on the works of others are being blocked due to copyright is hugely problematic. In this context, it hardly sounds like the new works would act as substitutes for the old works at all — but could actually drive more interest in those original works. It’s difficult to see why or how copyright policy makes sense in these cases.
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Another point that he found was that the movie makers recognized they needed to “compete” with unauthorized copies, and priced things accordingly — so that the price wasn’t all that different than the unauthorized VCDs. Now, that did mean that some of the movies produced in these countries were quite low budget — but, again, if you combine a higher quality movie with a real reason to buy (see in the theater/additional benefits for buying) there’s no reason why big Hollywood movies can’t take advantage of the same economics.
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We recently covered how a recently created outfit going by the name US Copyright Group, had launched tens of thousands of lawsuits (some of which appear to be quite questionable from a legal standpoint), as part of what appeared to be an attempt at copying the efforts of companies like DigiProtect and ACS:Law in Europe (where such practices have been widely condemned). The lawsuits appear to be a smokescreen to get contact information for people to whom this “company” can send “pre-settlement” letters, in which they’re told to pay up to avoid the lawsuit.
Considering that this pseudo-shakedown is apparently lucrative in Europe, perhaps others are preparing to do the same in the US as well. A reader who prefers to remain anonymous, but who works for a small ISP, passed along an email he recently received from what appears to be a newish operation called the Copyright Enforcement Group, whose website has a mock law enforcement shield on it.
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ACTA
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We were confused a few weeks ago when the USTR started promoting letters from lobbyists in support of ACTA. After all, of course the lobbyists want ACTA. They’re the ones who wrote much of it in the first place. In the meantime, thousands have been writing the USTR to express their concerns about ACTA… but the USTR doesn’t bother mentioning them at all. It’s as if the USTR is flat-out admitting that it’s controlled by the lobbyists.
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An ACTA Oversight Committee will undermine the European Parliament’s power in intellectual property rights enforcement, according to the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII). A recently leaked Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) document shows negotiating parties want to create an “Oversight Committee”, which is planned to supervise the implementation and consider the further development of ACTA. It may also address “disputes that may arise regarding the interpretation or application” of ACTA.
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Digital Economy Bill
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With the UK’s Digital Economy Bill rushed through with little real debate, it’s worth looking at the ignorance behind those who supported and pushed through the bill. The more you look, the more you realize they didn’t even understand the very basics of what they were talking about. As some have noted it was “a bill proposed by the unelected, debated by the ignorant and voted on by the absent.”
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TalkTalk’s refusal to cooperate with ‘draconian’ anti-piracy measures reflect growing resistance to the digital economy bill
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It looks like much of the Digital Economy Bill will make it through to get Royal Assent by the end of the week.
The Bill is now in much better shape than when first tabled by the Government last year – the ability of the Government to impose disconnection at will has been checked and the Henry VIII clause that literally allowed the Government to do anything else to reduce copyright infringement has been removed.
However, many draconian proposals remain such as the responsibility on customers to protect their home networks from hacking at a collective cost of hundreds of millions of pounds a year, the presumption that they are guilty unless they can prove themselves innocent and, as in China, the potential for legitimate search engines and websites to be blocked.
SourceCode Season 3 – Episode 3: Enemies of the Environment (2006)
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04.08.10
Posted in News Roundup at 3:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This is not even close to Fedora’s claims of its desktop installation user base of 24 million. The new Ubuntu marks a milestone with its LTS release. This release will be supported for the next three years.
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Sony
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Noted iPhone and PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz, or GeoHot, told the gaming community not to update their systems until he was able to release custom firmware allowing them to continue using their Linux partitions, and it looks as if he’s close to his goal. A new video posted today shows the hack, although a release date hasn’t been given for the rest of us to download his work.
“This can be installed without having to open up your PS3, just by restoring a custom generated PUP file, but only from 3.15 or previous,” he writes. “It’s possible this CFW will also work on the slim to actually *enable* OtherOS; I’ll know when my infectus gets here.”
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Sony-bating hacker GeoHot reckons he can restore the ability to run Linux on Sony’s flagship console, despite the fact that the company has removed the functionality.
A recent firmware upgrade to version 3.21 killed the ‘Install Other OS’ option in fat versions of the console’s operating system, angering academics and hackers alike.
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As no surprise to anyone, someone has figured out how to restore Linux support once again.
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Server
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You don’t want to throw your server hardware away, but using the AWS sounds cool to you? Maybe you want your own private cloud that is interface-compatible to the AWS. With Eucalyptus, an open source solution exists. Eucalyptus provides the EC2, S3 and EBS functionality and you can use the same open source tools for managing your private cloud that you already know from the AWS. The Eucalyptus team provides packages for CentOS, Ubuntu, openSUSE and Debian, as well as source packages. The easiest way to install Eucalyptus is the Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition because this distribution already contains Eucalyptus. Give the cloud a try.
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The implication is that Cray is in the running now for the next big upgrade at NCAR. And since NCAR is dabbling with Windows HPC Server as well as Linux in addition to its big production AIX supers, you can bet that NCAR would love to have a box that could run either Windows or Linux, which a super based on Xeon or Opteron processors can do. (IBM’s Power-based supers can run either AIX or Linux, except for the BlueGene machines, which are restricted to Linux.)
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The Linux partition runs Cognos 8 analytics and InfoSphere Warehouse; these are the special mainframe Linux editions of those programs. This partition is capable of doing the analytic work for between 5 and 10,000 users, depending on how many processors in the System z10 box you dedicate to it. The bundle includes some base DS8000 storage arrays as well, but does not include the Linux license, which you need to buy separately from Red Hat or Novell.
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Applications
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Creating patches is usually handwork; fixing one specific issue at a time. Once in a while though, there is janitorial work to be done or some infrastructure to change. Then, a larger number of issues have to be taken care of simultaneously, yet all of them are following the same basic pattern, e.g. a replacement. Such tasks are often addressed at the source-code level using scripts in sed, perl, and the like. This article examines the usage of Coccinelle, a tool targeted at exactly those kinds of repetitive patching jobs. Because Coccinelle understands C syntax, though, it can handle those jobs much more easily.
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Visualization is a critical tool for exploring and understanding large amounts of data. Thanks to the computer power of the 21st century it has become possible to visualize ever-expanding amounts of data. Because the open source development model is massively decentralized and network-centric, it is by its nature the perfect domain for graph-based visualizations. Connections or dependencies between projects, communities, and code commits can be explored and displayed in a lot of ways. These visualizations can give us a unique perspective on open source projects and communities, such as fundamental differences in their approach.
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One thing that’s taken me a while to find is a suite of programs to create video DVDs from scratch for home videos. From capturing, editing, authoring, and burning to a DVD. Finally, I’ve found a solution that is 100% done on Linux from start to finish, and it works better than the proprietary products I’ve used in the past that cost hundreds of dollars. Here’s what I have found to work very well:
Capturing – Kino. Kino is a great and lightweight program. It works flawlessly and can capture to AVI, DV, or Quicktime DV. It integrates perfectly to my video camera that is connected by firewire (Kino can preview and control the video camera right within its own interface). I can even do other tasks while it is capturing, which I could NOT do in Windows programs like Adobe Premier.
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Kleo Bare Metal Backup has finally made backing up a machine just about as simple as it can be. And the restoration is just as easy. If you are looking for a free, easy to use backup solution give Kleo a try…you might never turn back!
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Kleo comes in a handy live distribution. So what you need to do is download the ISO image, burn it onto CD (or you can put it onto USB with the help of Unetbootin), boot it up, and walk through the wizard.Now before you think Kleo is going to offer some clunky, kludgy ncurses-like interface, think again. When you boot up Kleo you will be surprised to find it boots into a typical GNOME desktop (see Figure 1). In fact, I am writing this article from the Kleo desktop!
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Proprietary
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German developer SoftMaker has announced the availability of SoftMaker Office 2010 for Linux, an application suite claimed to have superior compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats, yet low hardware requirements enabling it to run well even on netbooks and older PCs.
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The release candidate version of Flash Player 10.1 is available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux. Those for Android, Symbian, Palm and Windows Mobile WebOS are in preparation.
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Instructionals
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There’s a problem with the state of Linux audio, and it’s not that it doesn’t always work. The issue is that it’s overcomplicated. This soon becomes evident if you sit down with a piece of paper and try to draw the relationships between the technologies involved with taking audio from a music file to your speakers: the diagram soon turns into a plate of knotted spaghetti. This is a failure because there’s nothing intrinsically more complicated about audio than any other technology. It enters your Linux box at one point and leaves at another.
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While it’s hard to make the claim that there aren’t enough Linux distros out there, it’s also hard to escape the fact that no distribution is all things to all people. There are all kinds of reasons to consider rolling your own, but many people never make the attempt because it seems like such a huge undertaking. Fortunately, with modern software we can create new distros, remixes, and custom configurations in a matter of minutes instead of months. Here, we’ll showcase some of the current software tools that make this so easy.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva today announced that its board of directors has named Arnaud Laprévote on the 24th of March to serve as the company’s Chief Executive Officer.
Arnaud Laprévote succeeds Stanislas Bois. Arnaud will surround himself with Hervé Yahi, Chief Stategic Officer and Stanislas Bois, Chief Financial Officer at Mandriva.
Arnaud Laprévote will also hold the position of Chief Technical Officer and of Director of Research and Development.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Project, the team behind the free Debian operating system, is pleased to announce that the first Debian Mini Conference in Germany will take place on the 10th and 11th of June in Berlin as a subconference of this year’s LinuxTag. LinuxTag is one of the most important Open Source Events in Europe and takes place from June 9th to 12th on the Berlin Fairgrounds.
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Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 10.10 will be codenamed Maverick Meerkat, as Canonical pushes social-networking services to the forefront of the popular open-source distro.
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Unitrends, the leader in affordable, vertically integrated, disk-based all-in-one data protection appliances, today announced that all of its backup appliances have been certified for use with the Ubuntu operating environment through a partnership with Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu project. Unitrends now supports Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix, Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition, and Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition and is actively working to certify Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
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– Unitrends announced that all of its backup appliances have been certified for use with the Ubuntu operating environment through a partnership with Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu project. Unitrends now supports Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix, Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition, and Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition and is actively working to certify Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
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The new Ubuntu will have a much more stylish design which seems to have influences from both Microsoft and Apple. According to Ubuntu’s branding page, the overall design theme from 2004-2010 was “human”, while the new version uses “light” as its overall theme.
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The upcoming release of Ubuntu, i.e Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, is already showing signs that it boots fast – very very fast if you are using SSD. The Ubuntu developers will probably not be able to achieve the 10-second boot that they were aiming for in Ubuntu 10.04, but an Ubuntu Developer, Benjamin Drung, has managed to boot Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx in 3.6 seconds using SSD. On a normal spindle-based hard disk, such booting times, of course, cannot be achieved due to the mechanical parts that are involved.
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Providing an alternative to the Microsoft-dominated desktop, Canonical later this month will offer a version of its desktop Linux OS featuring a new look and feel, faster boot speed and accommodations for social networks.
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Shipping initially with Linux, with a Windows CE version due later this year, the AM1x SoCs support applications ranging from smart metering and Point-of-Service (PoS) devices all the way up to home and industrial automation with the high-end AM1808. In addition, the processors offer pin-compatibility with the OMAP-L1x line of DSP-enabled SoCs, such as the OMAP-L138 model, which shipped last year with a TI TMS320C6748 DSP.
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Texas Instruments has spun a new IP camera system-on-chip (SoC) that enables 1080p video and analytics for the video surveillance market. The TMS320DMVA1 SoC combines an ARM9 core, a new Vision analytics co-processor, and a codec co-processor, and is offered in a Linux-ready DMVA1 IP camera reference design, says TI.
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Android
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Android, the mobile operating system from Google, is on a tear. Because it is free and open source, there are now 24 different Android devices available from 61 operators in 49 countries. Last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced that Android is selling 60,000 handsets every day. At that rate, and if Google continues to double sales every quarter, we can expect to see 25 million Android handsets this year. Most of this market share expansion is at the expense of Windows Mobile.
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Sub-notebooks
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Ubuntu Netbook Remix
Also known as Ubuntu Netbook Edition, this is one of the earliest and best known netbook-optimized OSes. UNR basically contains optimizations for Intel Atom processors which are used in most netbooks today, as well as a new application launcher and other tweaks that make it easier to use on small screens. However it’s still very recognizable as a full Linux OS and nothing is stripped out, as opposed to other oversimplified PDA-style interfaces with icons for programs and nothing deeper.
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In an interesting hook-up, IBM collaborated with Indian outfit Simmtronics to make a netbook which runs the new Ubuntu Netbook Remix operating system.
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Somewhat to my surprise, I’m equally as excited about the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) release for netbooks as I am by the iPad. The iPad is not yet a netbook-killer.
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The huge problem is that there is no multithreading technology. This means that your $600+ tablet computer can only run one application at a time just like your iPhone. For some who like multitasking while using a computer this is a big let down. Even the cheapest sub $300 netbooks running Linux can handle multiple applications at one time and that hardware is quite a bit less powerful than what the iPad has.
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So the Android operating system seems to be catching on with many folks these days in a myriad of devices, so why not adorn your little netbook with fonts from the Google Android OS instead? Developed by Ascender Corporation’s Steve Matteson, this custom family of fonts including Droid Sans, Droid Sans Mono, and Droid Serif are sure to spruce up your netbook whenever you type out a geeky document.
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Written completely from scratch, ReactOS will run all softwares that are supported by Windows XP. An initial pre-launch version (alpha) has been launched and the final version is expected in the next few months. Users such as Nirmalya Mukherjee, a programmer based in Kolkata, said using free software is better than downloading pirated version of the Windows software.
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The Think Tank is hosted by Olliance Group, the leading independent open source business and strategy consulting firm and DLA Piper, the leading global legal services practice providing services to the open source industry. This year’s event focuses on the next evolutionary phase of commercial open source and will address customer adoption trends, the impact of SaaS and cloud computing, the growing complexity of the ecosystem and industry consolidation.
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The security researcher who invented malware known as Blue Pill has come up with a secure open source operating system called Qubes OS that is available for alpha-testing downloads.
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Everywhere I go, I am constantly asked, “which open source cart is the BEST?” But that’s not fair; it’s like asking which child is my favorite.
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StatusNet, the open-source microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, announced the launch of the Shit My Dad Says website yesterday afternoon. The site will run on the service’s SatusNet Cloud Service, which also powers a community-driven microblog for the Mozille Foundation.
According to StatusNet CEO Evan Prodromou, the main point to move a service like SMDS to StatusNet is that the site owner can take control of advertising revenue, while still being able to send out content to other services.
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Liferay, provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class, open source portal, announced a new partnership with Aegif, a leading provider of solutions and services to the Japanese market. In partnering with Aegif, Liferay will leverage the Tokyo-based firm’s expertise in the Japanese enterprise market and gain a local provider of training, consulting and support.
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Washington County Public Library is the first known library in Kentucky to go live with Evergreen, the consortial, open-source library automation software. Equinox Software provided assistance with the migration and will continue to provide ongoing technical support.
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The recessionary period witnessed last year gave a big boost to the adoption of open source technologies. With customers looking to lower the total cost of ownership for their IT projects, players in the software services industry have been steadily adding open source components to their overall portfolio. A case in point is mid sized player, MphasiS, which has seen a gradual rise in the usage of open source technologies.
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This year’s Pizzigati Prize winner, Yaw Anokwa, will be accepting the award in Atlanta today at the NTEN 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference. He’ll be accepting on behalf of a team of University of Washington doctoral students who have crafted, in Open Data Kit, an open source application that unleashes the mobile phone’s social change potential.
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SaaS
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Though both GroundWork and Eucalyptus have open source versions of their products and the pair are now soliciting users to participate in a beta program, the cloud monitoring solution itself is not entirely open source.
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Oracle
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“We’re looking forward to outlining our plans for MySQL and providing the development community with deeper insight into the enhancements they can expect right now and moving forward,” Screven said in a statement released Thursday.
MySQL “is strategic to Oracle,” he added.
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Oracle released a list of pledges regarding MySQL in December, including promises to continue making the database available through the General Public License; to not require customers to buy support from Oracle in order to get a commercial MySQL license; and to boost spending on research and development.
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Funding
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But the good news is that open source vendors pulled ahead of the pack. Aslett writes that “OSS-related vendors fared better in terms of investment compared to software as a whole.” This takes into account 67 deals, with a dip of 25% year over year from 2008. The total investment bill came in at about $375 million.
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BSD
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This is one of the great things about FreeBSD: They make a release, and you know right then how long it will be supported by the security team.
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Education
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The second reason was that it was based on the principle of “open source”, meaning that the software is free to install and use. Open-source software is fundamentally different to the business model used by most 20th-century software companies, who still write software and then sell licences.
If you want to change the software to suit your needs, you pay the originator of the software to make the changes and the software remains the property of originator. Open-source software, on the other hand, is available to anyone to take, change and enhance as they need and then share their experiences.
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Transparency/Government
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Want to investigate — er, research — the Obama administration?
The White House announced “open government” plans today for all Cabinet agencies, calling them road maps “for making transparency, citizen participation and collaboration part of the way they work.”
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One of President Obama’s major campaign promises was to bring more transparency to government, and the administration has launched several Web sites–including the stimulus-tracking recovery.gov, and the IT Dashboard, which tracks government spending.
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The Tories also say they will encourage departments to use open source software, and work on the assumption that projects should not cost more than £100m. A Conservative government would also publish all Gateway reviews. In the past, the party has also pledged to scrap the child database Contactpoint and ID cards.
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Openness
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Open-source culture. What does this bring to mind? For some, it represents freedom: freedom to speak, freedom to share, and freedom to change. Yet, to others, the words sound a death-knell. To them, anything open-source is dangerous. Sherman Alexie, a novelist, was quoted in an interview: “With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership — of artistic ownership — goes away… it terrifies me.” I must respectfully disagree. Artistic ownership can not go away simply by sharing it freely with the world, by allowing others to contribute their own ideas and solutions. When you freely share your own creativity with the world, it is still your own property. Licenses similar to the GPL for software, or Creative Commons licenses preserve original thought, while still freely sharing your creations. Others may make their own changes, just so long as they attribute the original work to you. Of course, this is a decision to be made by the content creator; if you do not want others messing with it, you have that legal right.
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Makerbot, the affordable open-source 3D printer, has begun to experiment with the Open Prosthetics database, creating a prototype for the Trautman Hook, and posted the designs to the wiki.
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The Open Source Washing Machine Project (OSWASH), an innovative project developed several years ago by Jean-Noel Montagne, takes a different “spin” on washing machines for people in developing countries.
Montagne developed the concept during an Open Source Hardware workshop for artists in Paris in 2008. The project was created in order to help the billions of people across the globe that do not have access to clean water, electricity and other basic amenities.
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Open Source Music will also lead you to contemporary music that includes New Age, Ska, and Indie Rock. The team beind the Web site makes regular podcasts of music they enjoy. Be sure to also check out the with-permission rebroadcasts of the populr radio show “Selvin on the City,” that features interviews wtih big name entertainers like Steve Miller and Sammay Hagar.
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Recently, we have seen two projects come under considerable criticism for the development directions that they have taken. Clearly, the development space that a project chooses to explore says a lot about what its developers’ interests are and where they see their opportunities in the future. These decisions also have considerable impact on users. But, your editor would contend, it’s time to give these projects a break. There is both room and need for different approaches to free software development.
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Security/Aggression
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The_lives_of_others Although this story emerged over the weekend, there can be little doubt that it requires full exposure and investigation.
As reported by the Sunday Telegraph:
Brussels is funding research at Reading University aimed at detecting suspicious behaviour on board aircraft.
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The home secretary today accused the Tories of being “soft” on crime and threatened to throw the reforms out of the crime and security bill, should the Conservatives pursue their efforts to limit retention to three years.
He said he would pull all provisions from the amendment bill today if the Tories refuse to sign up to the government’s plans – including a six-year retention limit – in full. The bill is destined for this afternoon’s wash-up session to complete the government’s legislative programme ahead of the dissolution of parliament for the election.
Johnson told Sky News: “This is a basic example of how they [the Tories] talk tough on crime but act soft.”
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A feature documentary, Erasing David is the story of what happened when Filmmaker David Bond received a letter informing him that his daughter Ivy was among the 25 million children whose details were scandalously lost by HMRC in 2007.
David decided to find out just how much of our personal information is floating around in government and corporate databases by disappearing for a month and setting two of the world’s top private investigators the task of tracking him down, using only publicly available data.
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Customers are being asked to leave a thumbprint when trading in second-hand goods for cash in order to stop criminals making money out of stolen items.
A number of second-hand stores in Norwich have agreed to take part in the scheme, launched by local police.
A police spokeswoman said the prints would help detectives trace sellers if goods turned out to be stolen.
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Jason Hadlow, chairman of Yarm Town Council and owner of the Simply Dutch store in Leeming Bar, North Yorkshire, was left gobsmacked at the confiscation.
Now he faces an £80 fine to get his 4ft high masonry manhood back – something he has refused to do.
Mr Hadlow has instead ordered 150 more of the garden ornaments from Indonesia, 10 of which have already been sold.
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Identity theft is on the rise nationwide, yet in a report released Tuesday, federal investigators lament that the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) efforts to combat such crimes have to some degree “faded as priorities.”
According to the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General (IG), many of the suggestions pitched in 2006 by then-President George W. Bush’s task force on identity theft have yet to be implemented fully. As of March, the agency had not even appointed an official to oversee those efforts, according to the report.
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Environment
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On 11 June 1770, six weeks or so after becoming the first European to make landfall on the east coast of Australia, Lieutenant James Cook unexpectedly ran aground. His ship, the Endeavour, had struck a reef now known as the Endeavour Reef, within a manifestly far bigger reef system, nearly 25 miles from shore. Only the urgent jettisoning of 50 tonnes of stores and equipment (including all but four of the ship’s guns), a delicate operation known as fothering (in which an old sail was drawn under the hull, effectively plugging the hole), Cook’s expert seamanship and a great deal of hard pumping saved the vessel and her crew.
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Finance
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Almost every day, I read in the paper that the goverment is making money off of the bank bailout. Papers love good news, even if it is has little to do with reality. Today, the Financial Times reported that the U.S. made $10 billion off bank repayments on the bailout funds. $10 billion, hooray! We are in the black!
Unfortunately, our recent comprehensive bailout accounting puts taxpayers $2 trillion in the red. That is right, $2 trillion. While most of this money was in the form of loans, and American taxpayers might recoup those funds one day, it is foolish for the press to declare “Mission Accomplished” based on a thin study by the SNL Group. (Saturday Night Live strikes again?) Especially when taxpayers also lost $14 trillion in wages, retirement, college savings and housing wealth.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A classified CIA memo (pdf) obtained by Wikileaks.org outlines public relations strategies that could be used to shore up French and German support for continuing the war in Afghanistan. In February, the Dutch government effectively collapsed over a dispute about whether the Netherlands should continue to keep its 2,000 troops posted in Afghanistan.
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An egregious example of this occurred on February 12, 2010, when NATO’s joint international force issued a press release that bore the headline Joint Force Operating In Gardez Makes Gruesome Discovery. The release said that after “intelligence confirmed militant activity” in a compound near a village in Paktiya province, an international security force entered the compound and engaged “several insurgents” in a fire fight. Two “insurgents” were killed, the report said, and after the joint forces entered the compound, they “found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed.”
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While some Tea Party members accused Palin of “flip-flopping” on health care reform, Sean Hannity of FOX News disagreed: “Sarah Palin is not the extremist that much of the media likes to portray her and she supports bipartisan solutions when they make sense.” On the heels of last weekend’s campaign appearance for John McCain, Palin appears to be moving to expand her base in preparation for her expected presidential run in 2012.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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A criminal inquiry is under way in France to find the origin of internet rumours that President Sarkozy and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, his wife, were having affairs.
The investigation was made public because the President’s advisers suggested that the rumours might have been started in an attempt to destabilise Mr Sarkozy’s position at a time when he is seeking to regulate global capitalism.
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A computer failure at NHS Forth Valley led to the loss of records for all patients being treated at its audiology department, the BBC has learned.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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To see what’s wrong with this, imagine if we implement a “property rights” regime in which we clear out the entire electromagnetic spectrum and auction it off to a single owner. You could call that a “property rights” system, but most people would just call it a monopoly. And this monopoly would be subject to precisely the same knowledge problem as the FCC. Central planning is hard regardless of whether you’re a private company or a government agency.
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Democrats on the Federal Communications Commission say the federal court’s decision regarding Comcast has renewed their resolve to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service in order to enact net neutrality regulations.
“The only way the Commission can make lemonade out of this lemon of a decision is to do now what should have been done years ago: treat broadband as the telecommunications service that it is,” said Michael J. Copps, the senior Democratic member of the panel. “We should straighten this broadband classification mess out before the first day of summer.”
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It’s never nice to hear about the demise of a piece of simply brilliant software. when I discovered that get_iplayer was being pulled by its developer I was, to use a cliche, gutted. The potential loss of a piece of software that did just what it said on the tin is bad enough but it was impeccably free and open. What’s more, it was an example to the BBC about how things should be done. It was the work of one lone, unpaid developer, not the product of professional developers subsidised by the BBC licence. What happened exemplifies everything that is wrong with proprietary software.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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WiMP, which is already available to Telenor customers in Norway, allows subscribers to stream unlimited music to PCs, Macs, Linux and mobile handsets powered by the Android OS for 99 kroner a month.
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Facebook’s lawyers have been getting pretty nasty lately. We recently covered the company’s threats against the creator of a useful Greasemonkey script, and now a developer named Pete Warden has shared the sordid details of his legal run-in with Facebook — where they threatened to sue him for his activity aggregating publicly available data found on Facebook.
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Recent profiles of Murdoch have suggested he doesn’t use the web, so perhaps he doesn’t realize it, but there’s always somewhere else to go, and if News Corp. is so short-sighted to lock itself away from the open web, well that just opens up a much greater opportunity for his competitors to make sure they’re the place to go.
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All the big music sellers may have moved to non-DRM MP3 files long ago, but the watermarking of files with your personal information continues. Most users who buy music don’t know about the marking of files, or don’t care. Unless those files are uploaded to BitTorrent or other P2P networks, there isn’t much to worry about.
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The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) is heavily involved in the Special 301 process, filing submissions every year on behalf of its member organizations, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It’s only natural that these trade associations would be concerned with intellectual property laws and their enforcement around the globe, since copyright is where their members make their livings. It’s less understandable, though, when they seem to argue that their exclusive economic rights should have priority over others’ basic human rights.
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[A] really troubling aspect of all of this is that some newspaper industry lawyers have been pushing for massive changes to copyright law on the false belief that stricter copyright law for newspapers will somehow magically save them. One (but certainly not the only) aspect of this is an attempt to bring back the “hot news” doctrine, a concept that had been mostly considered dead. However, with some recent lawsuits, “hot news” is suddenly making a troubling comeback, much to the delight of some very short-sighted newspaper industry lawyers.
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Sadly, the “hot news” right is not as racy as it sounds. It does not offer legal protection for scantily clad celebrities. This is a legal right that extends far beyond copyright law to cover the facts of the news themselves; if I break the story, the hot news right allows me to stop competitors from repeating the facts – at least for as long as the story has immediate currency.
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Digital Economy Bill
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You would be hard pressed to find a better example of how broken our current political system is than the passage of the digital economy bill through parliament. A vast sprawling bill made to order on behalf of the so-called creative industries in the face of opposition from pretty much everyone else, it has all the hallmarks of legislation carved up between Sir Humphrey and a minister with an ego of monstrous proportions (only Lord Mandelson would consider Henry VIII-style powers as something to aspire to in the 21st century).
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Stallman’s blog reheats a number of long-argued controversies ranging from the curbing of ‘digital rights’, the extension of copyright, and the way legislation such as the DEB will in his view work to restrict access to content.
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And there you go. The entertainment industry gets its ridiculous anti-consumer copyright law with no real attempt at debate or amendment in the House of Commons. Concerns raised about how this bill could force the blocking of Wikileaks or the shutdown of internet access at small business? Ignored.
SourceCode Season3 – Episode 2: Eco Dissent/Not Terrorism (2006)
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In this special show we interview Philip Newborough aka. corenominal and his wife Becky about Crunchbang Linux and a lot of other pretty random stuff…
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Linux logos are often a expression of feelings. Often they express a sense of humor, or great feel for esthetics. One of the reasons people use linux is because it’s possible to make it a personal experience.
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Skills
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1. Linux has expanded at a high rate over the past few years, with recent expansion even within Government organizations and the military.
2. Linux is recognized as a cost saving device among larger corporations that are trying to cut back on hardware costs.
3. Linux administrator positions continue to be approximately 25% of the total Linux related job market.
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Sony
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Sony PlayStation 3 owners who held off on updating their systems in order to keep from losing the option to install alternate operating systems have a new glimmer of hope. Hacker George Hotz (a.k.a Geohot) has released a video of a new hack that promises to keep the alternate OS install feature, even with the 3.21 firmware update that was released last week.
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Opting to not download the update bars the user from accessing the Playstation Store, playing games online or playing any games or Blu-ray movies that require the 3.21 update to function.
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And now, as of April 1, you’ll have a hard time finding Linux running on one particular high performance computing (HPC) platform — Sony’s PlayStation3. Since its launch, the original version of the games console has had the ability to run another OS as well as the gaming platform on its processor (although the newer “slim” models couldn’t). A new version of Sony’s PS3 firmware released in late March removed the option to run Linux on the PS3 once and for all.
Why would anyone want to run Linux on a PS3? As it happens, the PS3 is a pretty powerful beast with an IBM Cell BE processor at its heart. It runs Linux like a bat out of hell. The consoles are dead cheap because Sony subsidizes them, hoping to make money on the sale of games and extras. More to the point, you can link large numbers of PS3s to build a low-cost supercomputer cluster. That’s why the U.S. military announced last November that it planned to increase the power of an existing 336 PS3 HPC cluster by buying a further 2,200 of the consoles, according to Ars Technica. Compared to buying IBM Cell blades there’s a ten-fold price/performance advantage in using PS3s, according to a “Justification Review Document” quoted in the piece.
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Desktop
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Windows vs. MacOSX vs. KDE vs. GNOME vs. BeOS wars are thing of the past. The future discussions and most exciting developments will happen on mobile devices. So watch out for iPhone OS vs. ChromeOS vs. MeeGo (and probably Microsoft if they get their act together with Windows Phone 7 and Slate). For Intel and AMD this development means that they should concentrate on server processors and very low power processors for the consumer devices, since this is the area with the most demand in the future.
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Kernel Space
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Almost simultaneously with the first series 1.8 X Server, the developers have also updated Mesa3D and various drivers. Four new stable kernels offer bug fixes and minor improvements.
The X Server isn’t the only component for which a new version has recently been released, as many other components that impact the graphics support in Linux distributions have also been updated in the past two weeks.
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Graphics Stack
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More than a year ago AMD rolled out the ATI FirePro V8700 workstation graphics card and months later then pushed out the FirePro V8750 as their new ultra high-end graphics card for those engaging in CAD, imaging, and other tasks. Now though AMD has unveiled the FirePro V8800 series that replaces the V8750 for the top spot.
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Applications
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It’s no longer a hard-copy world, and most writing tasks don’t require all the bells and whistles in heavyweight word processing programs. Text editors are a much more nimble choice. However, not all text editors are alike. You may not need a lot of features, but you definitely want the right ones. gEdit and Leafpad are two open source options that complement each other nicely.
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Virtualisation is a bit of a buzz word at the moment. Virtualisation can be used for all sorts of different computing tasks from server consolidation to cross-platform software development, to running that one “must-have” app in that “I – wish – I – didn’t – have – to – use – this – damned – OS” OS. This article is more at the latter end of that scale. It will tell you about some VM options for linux, and will run you through some tips and tricks for getting the more popular VM’s up and running.
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Instructionals
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Games
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The amount of software that is available for Linux is truly mind-boggling with tens of thousands of applications available to download, including an impressive arsenal of open source games.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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We could try to excuse the issue and say, “Well, KDE is huge now. 600+ developers contributing to the last release, even more translators, artists and others. That’s a lot of people to move about!” While this is true, I don’t think it is the whole picture.
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GNOME Desktop
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The evolution away from these origins has sometimes seemed slow. Often, in looking at a GNOME release, I have been disappointed in the apparent lack of progress. Yet looking back over the 2.0 series as a whole, I now suspect that part of that perception was impatience on my part.
[...]
That’s something to remember while we look forward to GNOME 3.0 six months from now. GNOME 3.0 marks a new chapter in the free desktop. It is going to be attracting increasing attention, both from those who enthuse over it and those who condemn it as misguided or new. Yet in the excitement of GNOME 3.0, I think it worth looking back at the GNOME 2.0, and congratulating all involved on an impressive work in progress.
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This is how some of the popular Linux distro websites looked like when they launched initially. Thanks to the archive.org for all the screenshots. Redhat website looked pretty decent for a 1996 website. Which one of these websites did you like?
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There are plenty of reasons for wanting a low-resource distro running on your computer. Maybe you have some ancient hardware that you need to breathe new life into. Perhaps you want something that will fit on a modestly sized memory stick. Or it might be that you want to run 200 virtual machines simultaneously on your desktop.
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I got an e-mail a day ago that reminded me about DexOS, which is another one-disk wonder. You’re probably still wondering what the point is, when floppies are so far out of date as to be completely irrelevant. Well …
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Last night while watching my usual list of recorded television programs, I saw a commercial for KGB, the company that begs you to text them with your questions. For a mere 99 cents, they’ll answer any question that you ask of them. I’m sure that they have their share of tricksters with questions such as, “What is life” and “What is the air speed of an unladen swallow.” But my mind dances to a different beat. And, with my wife’s permission, I posed the following question using her cell phone: “Which Linux distribution is the best for new users?”
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I am sure many will have other new user distributions to recommend and may argue against my choices. Debate over distributions is one thing that is not in short supply in the Linux community. However, I am going out on a limb to state that Mandriva Linux is easily at the top of the list of new user distributions. I am confident that this assertion will hold up under scrutiny once I make my case.
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Fedora
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For the time being, in my personal opinion the best Linux Distro for MacBook 2.1 is Fedora 12 i386.
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Debian Family
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I’ve tried several versions of the SimplyMEPIS but never really got hooked on the visual appearance leaving me wondering what beginners find so appealing in SimplyMEPIS. With the release of SimplyMEPIS 8.5.01 I decided this was the perfect time to give it a try and see what all the fuss is about.
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Before using SimplyMEPIS this time around, I wasn’t sure what was so exciting about this Debian-based distro. Now I know. Two reasons SimplyMEPIS 8.5.01 might make a great distro for newbies is it offers GUI configuration tools and also a huge package selection due to it’s Debian base. The visual appearance is getting there and I think that this most recent version is an improvement in the overall look and feel but still may have some catching up to do when compared to other top distros.
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Ubuntu
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From time to time, Dell does a poor job articulating its Ubuntu Linux strategy. But sources close to Dell and Canonical continue to insist the relationship remains healthy and “stronger than ever.” Here’s an update on Dell’s Ubuntu strategy — which includes a dramatic Dell-Ubuntu PC push in China.
First, some background: Dell began shipping Ubuntu preloads in mid-2007 on selected U.S. desktops. Dell’s decision to offer Ubuntu came only a few months after Microsoft launched Windows Vista. That certainly caught my attention.
By July 2007, I jumped on the Dell Ubuntu bandwagon, and hoped to eventually launch an Ubuntu-centric web site that tracked Canonical’s business strategy.
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Ubuntu Linux is gearing up for the debut of its latest release with Ubuntu 10.04, codenamed “the Lucid Lynx” and scheduled for general availability at the end of the month. It’s a release that offers multiple new features on the desktop and a new look to Ubuntu Linux.
The Lucid release could also help to further accelerate adoption of Ubuntu, which has been growing over the last several years. In 2008, Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu, pegged the number of Ubuntu users at 8 million. It’s a figure that could have increased by as much as 50 percent or more since then, insiders say.
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Although Ubuntu Lucid Lynx has not yet been released, Canonical chief Mark Shuttleworth has already named its successor: Maverick Meerkat.
Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is due for release at the end of April while the newly named Maverick Meerkat is only scheduled for release in October. But, as is traditional, Shuttleworth used the remaining weeks of the Lucid development phase to lay down guidelines for the next phase.
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Some manufacturers are using Linux for their television sets, Sony for instance has a impressive list of tv’s which are running Linux.
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Sub-notebooks
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PaleXO is the Palestinian XO Laptop Community. We are working with the coordination and support of the Palestinian Educational Initiative (PEI) on implementing the XO laptop project In Palestine, and trying to create a success story out of it.
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This week’s featured site is The Freesound Project (TFP). While working on a personal Ardour project, I began looking for some sound clips to throw into a song in order to bring the track a bit more life. Namely I was looking for a drunken countdown, or something similar. I had bookedmarked TFP while researching an earlier article, so I figured I’d give it a go. What I found after a quick search using their integrated search tool was a well-recorded group countdown from roughly the number 12. They mumbled at the beginning, making it seem like it could very well be at a bar. What’s great is, as mentioned previously in my Open Music article, this meant that I had to attach credit to the song I was working on. Thus generating more traffic back to the page where I received the file, helping both the author of the file itself and The Freesound Project as a whole. It’s a great web that is quickly woven around art that otherwise would go unnoticed. The best part? It wouldn’t be possible at this level without open source.
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The O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) has posted sessions and keynotes for its annual conference. Scheduled for July 19-23, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OSCON features keynotes including Google’s Chris DiBona, Facebook’s David Recordon, Canonical’s Simon Wardley, and the GNOME Foundation’s Stormy Peters (pictured).
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AOL has closed the doors on its Open AIM program. Pidgin developer Mark Doliner outlines where to go from here to support AIM, but maybe it’s time to close the door on the protocol altogether.
AIM and Yahoo! were the predominant protocols for IM when I started using Linux, and for a very long time they were the only reliable ways to chat with most of my friends and family that used Windows or Macs. IRC was fine if I wanted to chat with other Linux folks, but most of my contacts didn’t use IRC and weren’t about to switch or pick up yet another client because I was the odd man out on the desktop.
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Education
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The answer is simple: the skills required to succeed in an open source software project are the exact same skills required to succeed in any large software project. The biggest difference is that, with just a bit of guidance, anyone can build their software skills in the open source world.
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The Free Software philosophy is founded in the ideals of freedom, openness, and sharing. Producing software based on these ideals has great pragmatic benefits. Free Software is developed in the interest of its users instead of the owner of the software. This method of producing software benefits the entire community, and the software is of much higher quality due to the huge number of volunteer and paid contributers.
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Mozilla
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With the massive amounts of data that we have at our disposal online, there are times when you just don’t know where to start from. Thanks to some really cool Firefox addons, you can get more out of the web in less time and sweat. The following 5 addons should be of interest to you if you want to enhance your web experience.
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Last night Boriss wrote a great post about the benefits of the contextual design process. Aspects of the contextual design process like the inquiry, work modeling and environment design are all incredibly important skills for a UX designer to have. However, I couldn’t disagree more with the premise that this process should have been applied by Lead Ubuntu designer Ivanka Majic in the design of the window manager.
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SaaS
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Larry: I agree with that. I think of the Cloud as the platform now. I think of porting to Amazon, Rackspace or Windows Azure. I don’t think of porting to Linux or porting to Microsoft Windows.
I think of the Cloud service provider as the platform. And the OS, just like the database, is a piece of the stack. The app server is a piece of the stack. Those are all pieces of the stack. The importance of the OS is declining and the importance of the Cloud service is increasing. And that to me is independent of Open Source or proprietary.
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From a higher perspective, I believe that the whole IT market is moving toward service-based approaches — SaaS paved the way — because it aligns customer value with vendor revenue. That’s why we — at Nuxeo — won’t use the open core model even if it could increase short term revenue. We’re here to stay and we believe that basing our revenue stream on the value we create for our customers is the best way to create sustainable growth.
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In fact, open source is now so fundamental to the software industry that it is part of every software company’s product and/or business strategy. The industry needs to start thinking of open source as being the software commons for the entire industry, not just one small group of companies. Therefore, it is my hope that in the next 12-18 month the term ‘open source company’ will quickly fade away.
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Oracle
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There’s good news for fans of MySQL: It won’t be left to wither and die any time soon. Oracle has made very public assurances that it will spend more on developing the database than Sun ever did, at least for the next three years. The Community Edition will continue to see improvements, which will be released under the GPL at no charge with all of the source code.
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Setting up the paywall for Solaris 10 simply refines the open core model the Solaris/OpenSolaris relation already had. It’s just that now the commercial Solaris 10 will not be free in any sense: neither as in beer or freedom.
Obviously, the restriction of these freedoms is not a good thing, but I have a feeling that this may be the way Oracle will reconcile its desire to maintain a strong OpenSolaris community versus its need to generate revenue.
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Business
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Roughly, the participants in the discussion can be split into three camps. On one side, there were those who went gaga over how open source is successfully making money and, on the other end, there were skeptics who were wondering why Open Source is not making big bucks like their proprietary counterparts. In between these two camps were the so called “moderates” who argued that open source need not make big money but they enable others, like Web 2.0 vendors and the current day cloud vendors, make big bucks. They even showed the example of how open source is single handedly keeping Wall Street running and, thereby, helping some people make really big bucks.
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The Lucene community has recently decided to merge the development of two of its sub-projects – Lucene->Java and Lucene->Solr. Both code bases now sit under the same trunk in svn and Solr actually runs straight off the latest Lucene code at all times. This is just a merge of development though. Release artifacts will remain separate: Lucene will remain a core search engine Java library and Solr will remain a search server built on top of Lucene. From a user perspective, things will be much the same as they were – just better.
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WANdisco, a leading provider of infrastructure software for replication, scalability and high availability, and a corporate sponsor of the Subversion open source project with core developers from the project on staff, today announced that it has made WANdisco certified Subversion binaries available for free download. WANdisco’s certified Subversion binaries provide a complete, quality assured version of Subversion based on the most recent stable, fully tested release.
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Orange, the key brand from Europe’s third-largest telecom, and OpenX, an open-source ad server, are teaming up to challenge Google’s DoubleClick in the European ad exchange market.
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BSD
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I’ve been running FreeBSD for more than a week now – first 8.0-release, now 7.3-release (with packages for some reason coming from 7-stable), and as the title of this post says, it’s going very well.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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We’ve got to worship principles, not people.
With this I mean that even if I agree with the idea behind FSF and the GNU Project, I don’t have to see either Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds as my personal God, nor I would have to accept the GNU project as the owner of all good software in this world. There is more to that. The same principles apply to other situations, even situations where GNU is laughed at, even situations where GNU’s code is laughed at but their license is used. Because what makes me dislike some of the GNU project’s applications and in general the FSF (America) approach, is not the license, otherwise I wouldn’t be using it extensively for my own projects, both personal and work-related.
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Releases
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Licensing
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Apple’s licenses are probably the easiest example of proprietary licensing terms that are well beyond reasonableness. Of course, Apple’s licenses do the usual things like forbidding users from copying, modifying, sharing, and reverse engineering the software. But even worse, Apple also forbid users from running Apple software on any hardware that is not produced by Apple.
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Recently we’ve seen some questions about whether Eclipse plug-ins can be released under the GPL. Answered briefly, this is possible if you can provide an additional permission with the license to allow combining your plug-in with the necessary EPL-covered libraries. The rest of this post examines why an additional permission is necessary, and has specific recommendations for interested developers.
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Openness
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Hmm. Jill Sobule raised over $80,000 in less than two months. That seems like more than gas money. Ellis Paul raised over $100,000. That seems like more than gas money. It’s not clear exactly how much Josh Freese was able to get from his experiment, but it was clearly over $30,000 from reports that were given. Marillion has been surviving on crowdfunding for over a decade.
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On the Harvard Business Review blog, John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, recently wrote a thought-provoking piece on the future of open innovation. They make many keen observations about the limitation companies currently face in making effective use of “Transactional Open Innovation” (TOI), defined below.
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Programming
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Right next to my desk in a bookshelf is my 1988 copy of Kernighan and Ritchie’s second edition of The C Programming Language. I’ve kept this book, the urtext of C programming, because C has always been the first language of Unix and Linux, and I like to be able to read source code. I know that, over the years, C had declined in use. What I didn’t know was that, old as it is, C has actually maintained more of its popularity than I had thought and that it’s now once more the number-one programming language in the world.
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Standards/Consortia
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In many ways, HTML5 is an attempt to bring order to many of the features and behaviors that have become the norm in recent years. This section highlights some of the more compelling additions.
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Science
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Even though the name ununseptium (symbol: Uus) is only temporary, Russian and U.S. scientists still have made an important discovery of a new chemical element, one with an atomic number of Z=117.
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Scientists have found the first multicellular animals that apparently live entirely without oxygen. The creatures reside deep in one of the harshest environments on earth: the Mediterranean Ocean’s L’Atalante basin, which contains salt brine so dense that it doesn’t mix with the oxygen-containing waters above.
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Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday are to report advances in the design of a new class of diminutive switches capable of replacing transistors as computer chips shrink closer to the atomic scale.
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Security/Aggression
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Romanian police have arrested 70 suspected cybercrooks, thought to be members of three gangs which allegedly used compromised eBay accounts to run scams.
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Cyber war is not some victimless, clean, new kind of war that we should embrace. Nor is it some kind of secret weapon that we need to keep hidden from the daylight and from the public. For it is the public, the civilian population of the United States and the privately owned corporations that own and run our key national systems, that are likely to suffer in a cyber war.
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The U.S. still reserves the right to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely without charge, try them via military tribunal, keep them imprisoned even if they are acquitted, and kill them in foreign countries with which America is not formally at war (including Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan). When Obama closed the secret CIA prisons known as “black sites,” he specifically allowed for temporary detention facilities where a suspect could be taken before being sent to a foreign or domestic prison, a practice known as “rendition.” And even where the Obama White House has made a show of how it has broken with the Bush administration, such as outlawing enhanced interrogation techniques, it has done so through executive order, which can be reversed at any time by the sitting president.
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A year after his groundbreaking pledge to move toward a “world without nuclear weapons,” President Obama on Tuesday will unveil a policy that constrains the weapons’ role but appears more cautious than what many supporters had hoped, with the president opting for a middle course in many key areas.
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Finance
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Cloud computing providers have often looked to the financial companies as potential customers. But what about potential competitors?
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The number of people using food stamps increased for the 14th consecutive month with the number of people receiving them at a record 39,430,000! That’s equal to 12.8% of our entire population! No pictures of people in soup lines that extend around the block? There they are.
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Ali Hedayat, a managing director in Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s largest internal hedge fund, has left the firm, the second senior departure from the unit in less than a month, according to three people familiar with the matter.
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It was “grateful” for the government assistance during the market turmoil, Goldman chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein and chief operating officer Gary Cohn said in the firm’s annual letter to shareholders.
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Nine months after being labelled “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”, Goldman Sachs has issued a wide-ranging justification of its conduct before, during and after the financial crisis.
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But increasingly that international influence has come at a cost to Goldman’s once gold-plated image – including the charge of putting its own interest above all else.
For example: allegedly helping the Greek government hide its ballooning debt – and then betting it would eventually default – contributing to a financial crisis so deep it has led to riots in the streets.
Goldman defended itself against similar accusations about its role in the housing crisis in a letter issued Wednesday, saying it didn’t “bet against our clients,” but rather was simply “managing our risk.”
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The Fed abused the taxpayers’ trust when it bailed out AIG’s trades for 100 cents on the dollar. The Fed claims its loan for purchases of the CDOs may be paid back, but that is only 40% of what taxpayers are owed. The loan was only for the 40 cents on the dollar that remained after Goldman (and others) already took billions out of AIG. The purchases should be reversed, and taxpayers should be paid 100 cents on the dollar–the original principal amount (less interim principal payments). [2] The proceeds can be used to pay down AIG’s public debt.
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Goldman Sachs defended its controversial employee bonuses and multi-billion dollar relationship with AIG in its annual report released Wednesday, while downplaying its short-selling in the mortgage market.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The 1987 civil rights documentary emerges from a long period of unavailability.
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Tomorrow a hearing “Protection of Personal Data in Transatlantic Securitz Cooperation, SWIFT, PNR, etc. The Public Hearing is hosted by MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht.
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Somehow — it will not say how — WikiLeaks found the necessary computer time to decrypt a graphic video, released Monday, of a United States Army assault in Baghdad in 2007 that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters. The video has been viewed more than two million times on YouTube, and has been replayed hundreds of times in television news reports.
The release of the Iraq video is drawing attention to the once-fringe Web site, which aims to bring to light hidden information about governments and multinational corporations — putting secrets in plain sight and protecting the identity of those who help do so. Accordingly, the site has become a thorn in the side of authorities in the United States and abroad. With the Iraq attack video, the clearinghouse for sensitive documents is edging closer toward a form of investigative journalism and to advocacy.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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If you haven’t been following the story, the Labour party took a photo of actor Philip Glenister as Gene Hunt from Ashes to Ashes, photoshopped in David Cameron’s face and put it on a poster with a tagline about going back to the 80s. The Conservatives took Labour’s image, and changed the words to something more positive, and put it on their own posters. The problem is that it appears neither of them bothered with the trivial matter of getting approval from the copyright holders.
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James Gannon is a lawyer who works with Barry Sookman at McCarthy Tétrault LLP. He also has a blog called ‘IP, Innovation and Culture’ which is hosted at WordPress.com, where he expounds on ‘Intellectual Property‘ issues.
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Let me see – Wal-Mart shut down their DRM servers in 2009, and his presentation was in 2010. Does anyone see the disconnect here? RealNetworks is has been struggling, Sony’s music sales aren’t work breaking out in their year end reports (at least I couldn’t find them), and Microsoft doesn’t break out music sales on their year end reports (probably too embarrassed to do so). As I stated above, the two giants of digital music sales don’t use TPM/DRM on their music. From that you can guess how essential it is to running a successful Digital Music Store.
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So which is it? Do you want Canada to adopt the WIPO Copyright Treaties? If so, why are you not criticizing those who are not in compliance, like the United States (with the DMCA) and the United Kingdom (with the Digital Economy Bill). For that matter, where is Doctor Mihaly Ficsor, the supposed copyright expert? Why isn’t he criticizing the United States and the United Kingdom for passing legislation which is not compliant with the WIPO Copyright Treaties?
Logic people. Use some logic.
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Last year we had a post, based on a post by Peter Friedman, suggesting a big reason why Girl Talk hadn’t been sued for creating entirely sample-based music was because there was a good chance that Girl Talk/Gregg Gillis would win that lawsuit, and establish a clear fair use right in sampling. Now, with the more recent discussion about the legality of the documentary Copyright Criminals, Friedman is making the same point again: suggesting that the filmmakers won’t get sued, because they would likely win, and redraw the boundaries of the law on music sampling and fair use:
But if McLeod is willing to fight a lawsuit — and I think he is — the recording industry won’t sue him. The existing precedents requiring licensing of every single recorded sample would be overturned, and the record industry would [have] lost the appearance created by these precedents, an appearance that makes the vast, vast majority of samplers pay license fees for their samples. It’s better business for the industry to let the occasional brave and creative soul feel as if he’s getting away with something than to have the industry’s precious — and ill-founded — legal precedents put at genuine risk.
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Just in case you were in any way confused (which it seems a whole lot of people are), copying is not stealing, as this charming little jingle illustrates.
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ACTA
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The lobbyists blackmail Luc Devigne by embracement on principles. It is great to have finally a more professional discussion.
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Anything one can consider as politically cool from an EU perspective, ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, the multilateral treaty to combat counterfeiting and piracy) negotiations have got it all: the internet, the USA, large potential for media exposure and a hitherto Nixonian element of secrecy balanced by a flow of thrilling documents leaked by generous deep-throats.
Thus it’s hardly a surprise that during the past few months, being horrified – sometimes on the basis of irrational arguments – about this secretly negotiated treaty has superseded SWIFT as the fashionable cross-party pastime in Brussels.
At the heart of all the ACTA anxiety is the hazard of policy laundering or legislation through the back door. Simply put: can we as Europeans envisage one morning “waking up” to our legal reality having been transformed via ACTA?
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What do I mean in the context of ACTA? It is the “maximalist attitude” which regards politics, legal technicalities, competences, balances, mandates as a simple restriction to be exhausted, pushed to its limits. I remember that was what fascinated me about ACTA from the very start of the process, the way in which the Commission brushed away all the technical difficulties.
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The truth about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is different depending on which side you are on.
At a hearing organised by the Liberal Party Group in the European Parliament in Brussels yesterday Canadian law professor and ACTA expert Michael Geist challenged the position of the European Commission and other negotiating parties to the agreement that ACTA would not lead to substantive law changes in the ACTA countries and also explained what possible long-term effects could result from the heavily debated treaty. Critics in Europe go one further in their rejection of ACTA which does undermine according to them democratic processes in the EU and EU member states.
The “truth about ACTA,” according to Geist, is first and foremost that it is not what it is said to be. “It is essential to recognise that ACTA is not the norm,” Geist said, countering the argument of negotiating parties who have pointed out tirelessly that trade agreements never were negotiated openly.
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Digital Economy Bill
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We’ve launched a new forum, over here. Please sign up and use it to help us plan the next steps in our campaign against the Digital Economy Bill.
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After months of warnings from photographers, and weeks of viral posters demonstrating the dangers of Clause 43 and misuse of photography, the Labour party have got in on the act by launching their election campaign with a poster using all the techniques warned of: only to see it blow up in their faces.
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This week marks the Tercentenary of the 1710 Statute of Anne – the world’s first Copyright law. It also marks the first discussion of the Digital Economy Bill in the Commons. And in 1865, the Locomotive act was being discussed in the Commons too. How do they compare?
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I won’t repeat myself about my objections to the DEB. Whilst my articles and opinions are strongly anti-piracy, I think that there is so much wrong with the implementation and current copyright laws, that there are issues on both sides.
What I want to look at is it is now reported that Clause 18 has been removed in the final throes of the DEB debate. Before I do that though, many sites report:
Copyright holders will be able to apply for a court order to gain access to the names and addresses of serious infringers and take legal action.
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Despite tens of thousands of people writing their MPs, and multiple MPs asking for approval of the Digital Economy Bill to be delayed, it looks like the Leader of the House of Commons, Harriet Harman, has decided that the bill will be rushed through via a “wash up,” no matter what. Glyn Moody points us to an image showing that a lot of MPs simply decided not to even show up for the discussion, which is a bit of a disgrace.
SourceCode Season 3 – Episode 1: Climate Change (2006)
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04.07.10
Posted in News Roundup at 1:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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If you are at all familiar with my brain sneezes (I could use another word here but this is a respectable blog 
then you know I am always rabbiting on about Linux. I am always Linux this and Linux that. This gets some people upset and they claim that it should be GNU/Linux or perhaps more accurately Linux/GNU. There is a word in the English language (which I hope I am using) called context. In other words, I use the word Linux in the context of a complete Linux based distribution and believe that my readers understand that context.
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The Egyptian Linux Users Group organizes an event every now and then in order to raise the awareness of the masses of Free Open Source Software (FOSS). They help distribute Linux CDs for free, help people in installing Linux on their machines, and give awareness sessions and brief introductions to FOSS-related software and technology.
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UNISSA (Universiti Islam Sultan Sharif Ali) and the Brunei Open Source Software Community (BOSSC) will be holding a networking event today from 2pm to 4.30pm at the basement of the UNISSA library.
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THE Brunei Open Source Software Community (BOSSC) kicked off a successful networking event highlighting examples of Open Source Software (OSS) as a major tool in national development.
At an event held at Universiti Islam Sultan Sharif Ali (Unissa) Library, the Brunei Open Source Software Community (BOSSC) held four presentations hosted by Unissa’s Centre for Promotion of Knowledge and Language Learning.
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Many computer users are not aware of the wealth of free software that is available to the public; one of the most prominent being browsers like Mozilla Firefox. “Raising awareness and evangelizing open source software and its benefits is part of the mission of our group,” adds Turland. “If someone is interested in using open source software and isn’t sure how to get started, we’re more than happy to help them out.”
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Today the BBC has reported about a study from South Korea’s Science and Technology Policy Institute, which warned that the Red Star software is designed to increase government control over its citizens and their access to technology and the Internet. What? In North Korea?
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According to researchers at South Korea’s Science and Technology Policy Institute (STEPI), North Korea’s Linux-based “RED Star” software is mainly designed to monitor the Web behavior of its citizens and control information made available to them.
However, the computer operating system does represent North Korean efforts to advance its computer technology, which lags as a result of the country’s isolation, relying on Linux and other open-source software, said Kim Jong-seon, a STEPI researcher.
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North Korea is expanding the use of its Linux-based operating system “Red Star” developed in 2002, into diverse areas and it is currently using its software to monitor citizens’ Web behaviour, said a researcher for the South Korea’s Science and Technology Policy Institute.
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Of course the operating system wouldn’t be complete without numerous programs that allow North Korean authorities to watch what users are doing and of keep outsiders from getting in.
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1. Live CD – Live CDs are bootable CD images that you burn to a CD or DVD, place in your CD/DVD drive, reboot your computer and enjoy a full Linux-based system without installing, partitioning or altering your current system. Everything runs from CD. Some things don’t work well, or at all, but you’ll have a first-hand Linux encounter that’s easy to use, acceptably fast and fully loaded.
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Open source isn’t just a license or a coding methodology, to many it’s a religion. And the central prayer of that religion is an ode to Linux. In the spirit of such love, Linux has begun to sprout up everywhere. Here’s a compilation of some of the more surprising places you’ll find this beloved operating system.
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Server
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Rank Company site OS Outage
hh:mm:ss Failed
Req% DNS Connect First
byte Total
1 www.memset.com Linux 0:00:00 0.012 0.586 0.129 0.260 0.260
2 DataPipe FreeBSD 0:00:00 0.016 0.065 0.027 0.056 0.083
3 iWeb Technologies Linux 0:00:00 0.016 0.134 0.083 0.165 0.165
4 ReliableServers.com FreeBSD 0:00:00 0.016 0.250 0.083 0.197 0.337
5 INetU unknown 0:00:00 0.021 0.702 0.073 0.158 0.301
6 Swishmail FreeBSD 0:00:00 0.021 0.159 0.086 0.173 0.438
7 www.singlehop.com Linux 0:00:00 0.021 0.258 0.104 0.429 0.962
8 Hosting 4 Less Linux 0:00:00 0.025 0.116 0.091 0.186 0.474
9 Kattare Internet Services Linux 0:00:00 0.029 0.153 0.093 0.187 0.443
10 www.dinahosting.com Linux 0:00:00 0.029 0.121 0.130 0.258 0.258
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IBM has announced a range of Power7 servers for the i and AIX user communities. (These machines support Linux, too, but that doesn’t define their markets.) Mainframes based on the z11 (which will share some components with the Power7 chips and which could end up with a different name) are expected to debut before long.
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PowerVM runs on Power5, Power5+, Power6, Power6+, and Power7 systems, and can be used to provide logical partitioning for OS/400 V5R3, i5/OS V5R4, and i 6.1; AIX 5.2, 5.3, and 6.1; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5; and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and 11. I went through the pricing for PowerVM when the new pricing was announced as part of the Power Systems convergence back in April 2008, and you can check that out here.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that CUBRID is its newest member.
CUBRID provides an open source database system that is optimized for web services to support mission-critical Internet applications. The company is joining the Linux Foundation to gain access to exclusive networking opportunities and face-to-face collaboration with members of the Linux community.
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The test system used for these experiments was a stock CentOS 5.3 distribution but with a 2.6.30 kernel and e2fsprogs was upgraded to 1.41.9. The tests were run on the following system:
* GigaByte MAA78GM-US2H motherboard
* An AMD Phenom II X4 920 CPU
* 8GB of memory
* Linux 2.6.30 kernel
* The OS and boot drive are on an IBM DTLA-307020 (20GB drive at Ulta ATA/100)
* /home is on a Seagate ST1360827AS
* There are two drives for testing. They are Seagate ST3500641AS-RK with 16 MB cache each. These are /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc.
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We’ve covered the Linux Foundation’s “We’re Linux” video contests before, and there’s another underway right now. This year’s prizes include a trip to LinuxCon in Boston later this year, a chance to win a fully-loaded Linux laptop, and bragging rights for submitting the best “We’re Linux” video from all the entries.
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Beloussov: Since Parallels was founded in 2000, we have been a strong contributor and supporter of Linux – in fact we did not support any other platforms until 2005.
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Applications
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So here we are, Songbird is no more supporting Linux platform, so we decided to create our own version, supporting Linux first, but also Windows and Mac OS X later…
We had a long debate for the name of our project, and it’s now chosen : Nightingale.
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The popular open-source XBMC media player has had VDPAU support for more than a year now to offload some of the video decoding work during the playback process onto the GPU (primarily NVIDIA GPUs) using this robust Linux/Unix graphics API. However, for graphics hardware / drivers that do not implement NVIDIA’s Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix, the XBMC mainline code-base now has working support for VA-API.
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I really like KeePassX and it fills my needs well. The only complaint I have is that I wish you could set a “master” database to replicate/sync to, because I still sometimes add or edit an account on my “travelling” copy. It’s never more than a minor inconvenience to patch things up, but I have to complain about something.
I’d also be interested in hearing if you have a password management solution that you think is preferable or comparable to KeePassX.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Linux’s acceptance as a viable desktop OS, is then reliant on the availability of key application for it, and companies won’t be willing to port their applications to Linux till until enough people adopt a Linux desktop. This is the reason why it is easier to find applications such as MATLAB, Pro/Engineer, and Maya for Linux, as they users of such software have a larger presence on Linux.
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GNOME Desktop
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When I was updating my system I realized there were a lot of gnome packages to be upgraded, my enthusiasm immediately rises, gnome 2.30 was out.
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Red Hat Family
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That’s pretty quick and in my view, one of the quickest turnarounds yet from Oracle with their version of RHEL. Oracle has been releasing its own version of Linux with OEL, based on RHEL since 2006 and they’ve been updating OEL as Red Hat updates RHEL.
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Red Hat urges governments to implement cloud computing founded on both open standards and open source as de facto. Open Source technology by its nature, provides a robust and interoperable foundation for many of today‘s cloud computing deployments. Moreover, it obviates the problem of vendor lock-in that has prevailed for decades.
Red Hat has the enabling open source technology that governments can already leverage today to implement robust, high performance clouds that are reliable, available and scalable.
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Fedora
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All of these features are marked as 100 percent ready and approved by the Fedora technical steering committee for the Fedora 13 release.
Anaconda StorageWorks Filtering – The last part of the Anaconda-publicized code of the storage configuration.
Automatic Print Driver Installation – Necessary packages will be installed on hardware that requires these packages when found by the system.
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Debian Family
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So, to sum up, Debian is one hell of a Linux distribution. Perhaps not as newbie-friendly as some others, but it’s still pretty easy to use. Whatever criticism I’ve heard so far is simply wrong, as I’ve met none of the problems described. I can see myself using Debian for the next few years to come, at least until I decide to fiddle with Gentoo…
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Linux distributions don’t simply appear on mirrors and BitTorrent networks fully formed. A great deal of work goes on behind the scenes before a release sees the light of day. Linux users who aren’t involved in the production of a Linux distribution may not fully appreciate all of that work. Take, for example, the work done by Debian’s ftpmasters team.
[...]
Debian is, as Jaspert alluded to, “not getting smaller” and managing the number of new packages is a “kind of Sisyphean task.” The Debian archive contains thousands of packages, and the NEW queue can have hundreds of packages awaiting approval. NEW packages are those entering Debian for the first time, which do not have source packages in the archive, or those adding new binary packages. New versions of existing packages are moved automatically into the pool.
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Ubuntu
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Take a good hard look at your screen and ask yourself if it is possible to accidentally close an application while reaching for the File menu. In most cases the answer is a clear no, but for users of Ubuntu, it has become a very real and dangerous use case.
All the fuss began in March when the decision was taken to refresh Ubuntu’s look and branding, which included a set of new default themes that moved the trio of minimise, maximise and close buttons from the PC standard right-hand side to the left side of the title bar. Suffice to say that despite the positives of the updated Ubuntu look, users overwhelmingly detested the movement of the window buttons — as shown by the over 630 comments, the vast majority of which are intensely negative, on this bug report.
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While still in Beta, Lucid Lynx is humming along quite nicely two weeks after I installed it on my Acer laptop. Sure, there are the little annoyances linked to using a Beta product from Ubuntu, for instance, the large daily updates of software and the occasional application crash. For the most part, though, Lucid Lynx is quite usable and I’m growing to like it.
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StarDot Welcomes CyberVision Inc. as Their New NVR Partner with full Support of StarDot’s New Line of Dual Codec H.264/MJPEG Cameras
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The Drobo FS includes Gigabit Ethernet, five hot-swappable hard drive bays, and dual core processor running a Linux kernel. It supports mixing hard drive sizes and types, can auto-restore data to replacement drives should one fail or be replaced, and offers Time Machine backup support, too.
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Phones
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SPB Software, a leading mobile applications and games developer announces the release of SPB TV for webOS. This is the very first application from SPB Software for this eye candy Linux-based mobile operating system.
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Nokia
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This handset come blessed with Linux-based Maemo platform and offer multiple ways to remain connected with the world via Internet. Users can remain online with friends and relatives residing in any corner of th earth.
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Nokia has since teamed up with Intel in an effort to build an industry-standard Linux platform called Meego that will work across a wide range of mobile form factors and support both the ARM and x86 architectures. MeeGo incorporates some of the best elements of Maemo and Intel’s Moblin netbook operating system. The path towards converging Maemo and Moblin is still at a relatively early stage, but a significant portion of the source code is already available.
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Set to hit this fall, Kumar offers little else in the way of details. However, he does allude to Nokia’s partnership with Intel and the company’s new MeeGo operating system that’s based off of Linux. Announced in mid-February, the OS is a mash-up of Nokia’s Maemo OS and Intel’s Moblin. Nokia and Intel have said the open source OS will run on both smartphones and netbooks, with support for ARM architecture and Intel’s line of Atom CPUs.
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Whereas Nokia’s high-end smartphone line is heading toward the Linux-based Maemo for its standard operating system, the new tablet could potentially run MeeGo, the new mobile operating system the company is developing with Intel.
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Plans for a tablet may be incidentally supported by Nokia’s alliance with Intel for MeeGo, a hybrid of Maemo and Moblin Linux
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If the company should enter the market, SlashGear predicts that any slate-format device would likely run the hybridised Maemo/Moblin Linux distribution MeeGo, based on work carried out between Nokia and Intel.
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In order to overclock the Nokia N900, one would have to reflash it with another kernel. The following kernels are available: 825MHz, 800MHz, 750MHz, 700MHz, and 600MHz.
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Running with Linux based Maemo 5 OS which will offer the experience as real desktop offers.
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Android
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What’s interesting about Motorola is the company has released Linux-based handsets in the past and is the distributor of more than a few mobile operating systems.
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TV
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The TVs will soon be using Linux-based Opera technology to able users to surf the web on their living room TVs and power widgets and interactive HbbTV services. HbbTV is a new standard that combines traditional TV viewing with interactive apps.
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Remember Android? Don’t worry. You’ll remember next week once this whole iPad thing blows over. Anyway, a Swedish company called, inexplicably, People of Lava has announced what they’re calling and Android-based TV. The TV, called the Scandinavia, comes in a 42-inch configuration that costs about $2,500.
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Android is not just for smartphones anymore — in fact, a Swedish company has just unveiled the first Android-based TV. “This highlights the continued use of Linux and open source for embedding software in all kinds of devices, from mobile phones — where Android is having traction and impact — to set-top boxes and, as we see here, in TVs and other electronics,” added Jay Lyman, an analyst with the 451 Group.
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Sub-notebooks
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Mobile Music Making just got a lot more popular this weekend with the debut of the Apple Ipad. But how does it stack up to the original Indamixx portable studio and touchscreen tablet?
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They’re likely to produce netbooks architecturally similar to Apple’s — ARM-based processor, Solid State memory, and a Unix-based O/S (Linux, Android, Chrome). Not Intel (INTC), Seagate (STX), and Microsoft.
We’ll spend more time detailing the “why” in the future, but the bottom line is simple: lower cost. ARM/Linux is a small fraction of the cost of WinTel. Solid State Storage is more expensive (for now), and manufacturers will have to make up for this cost increase somewhere.
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Tablets
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The other open source alternitive comes to us from Spain. It was developed at the University of Cordoba and runs a customized Linux OS optimized for the touch screen. Below is a YouTube (again no real audio, just music this time) that shows what it looks like and has.
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GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.
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OfficeSIP Communications makes its two enterprise VoIP SIP clients officially open-source. OfficeSIP Softphone and OfficeSIP Messenger are now publicly available, and their source code published under the GPL license. The two products complete with the source code are available for immediate download at the company’s Web site, officesip.org.
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So this week I had the opportunity of setting up a little lab to test both of these firewalls. Before this week I had no idea these firewalls even existed, and the only open source routing/firewall software I even knew of at the time was Vyatta; which is really only for routing purposes.
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Open Source solutions are becoming even more popular by the day. But that doesn’t mean they are any more easier to install and set up. BitNami offers a number of new virtual appliances though that should do the trick.
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The result could be misleading, Christie suggests. “I think we may have asked the question the wrong way.” His company, Catalyst IT, was part of the survey; “and we provide those services”, he says. But someone in the company clearly did not think so.
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Mozilla
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The open source community spends a lot of time kicking around the idea of an open Web and how best to develop open and non-proprietary specifications for Web technologies. Creating a plan is one thing, but communicating the importance of an open Web to non-technical computer users is another. Mozilla has taken the reins in an attempt to form an understandable explanation and wants your help.
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SaaS
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Dries Buytaert, founder of the popular Open Source CMS Drupal product, says that cloud computing has done an ‘end run’ around the Open Source community. His point is that while SaaS and Cloud computing is offering up a totally new delivery model, it is echoing the practices of traditional closed-source vendors.
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GroundWork Open Source and Eucalyptus Systems have paired up to offer integration between Eucalyptus’ open source private cloud offering and GroundWork’s monitoring software for cloud application management.
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Basically the two open source firms announced they have established a technical partnership. They are not producing products together, but they are ensuring their software will work together. Eucalyptus produces Eucalyptus 1.6.2, which provides the basics of establishing a self-provisioning cloud, one whose API functions, such as the directive, “run this workload,” are compatible with Amazon’s EC2.
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CMS
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Part of the reason for Sakai’s success at the 2,200-student college–which self-supports Sakai internally, in contrast to many smaller schools–was approval of the move to open source, according to Instructional Technology Consultant Mary Glackin. She was a member of the original Sakai implementation team and is on the college’s current Sakai management team.
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Business Intelligence
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The Community Edition of Pentaho Data Integration 4.0 is free. The Enterprise Edition of the software, which starts at USD 2,000 includes support services as well as additional security and development features.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GCC 4.5 has been running a bit behind schedule due to outstanding regressions, but last week the last of their highest severity regressions were addressed, which paved the way for a release candidate. Today the release candidate for version 4.5 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has arrived.
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Releases
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The Horde open source messaging and groupware project is gearing up for the first major release of its application suite and development environment in years with version 4, which is due to arrive in mid-2010.
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The LGPL licensed framework and plugins are available to download. An example plugin is also available.
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Government
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“A coordinated approach to ICT web services seems to be missing in New Zealand” says event director, Tim Knapp. “Many of the government departments I’ve spoken to are in dire need of an organisation that can provide independent advice on open source web technologies, particularly as there’s so many to choose from. Australia are far ahead of us on this front, where they’ve setup the Open Source Business Cluster to fill this need”.
Mr Knapp goes on to say “Plone is particularly suited to government as it is an enterprise-level content management system, exceeds the E-government standards for government websites, and therefore was officially sanctioned by the State Services Commission back in 2005″.
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Experts agree that electronic medical records can lower costs and improve care. Yet just 10 percent of U.S. hospitals keep any computerized records, according to a survey in the New England Journal of Medicine last year. The biggest reason is cost: depending on the size of the hospital, the price of a digitized record system can run from $20 million to $100 million.
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Licensing
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A while ago, we received a request to take a look at an open letter on the compatibility of the Eclipse Public License (EPL) and the GNU General Public License (GPL). This led to a number of conversations with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) on the topic. What we have learned and the conclusions that we have drawn are outlined below. You can also find the FSF’s summary and conclusions on their blog.
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Openness
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Osmosoft will be hosting the first meeting of OSHUG, the Open Source Hardware User Group on April 29th. OSHUG’s first meeting will include presentations by Professor David May and Alan Wood. May, currently CTO of XMOS Semicoductor, architect of the transputer and author of occam, the concurrent programming language, will be introducing the XCore XS1 microprocessor architecture. Wood will be discussing Amino, a “networked creator tool for hardware and software production” which his company, Folknology, are developing.
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Zuckerman story has been covered by various reporters. He relayed to me that the most common question he gets asked is, “Why would someone who is almost 40 do this without any compensation, what’s going on here?” His motivation, he admits, is multi-faceted. “It was driven by self-interest in the sense that I was bored and needed to be proud of something I created.” On the flipside, there is the “joy I get from helping people.” But the unexpected consequence of Zuckerman’s tool library is how his idea of sharing and kindness is spreading to affect the lives of dozens or maybe hundreds of other people he does not know or has never met.
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At the end of the process, estimated to take approximately two years, a collaboratively-edited electronic document will be released on the web. A more closely-edited print book composed of selections from this process — edited by Ken Goffman aka R.U. Sirius (that’s me!) with Morgan Russell — will be published. Finally, the video footage might be rolled into a Mondo 2000 film documentary.
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Programming
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With that vision in mind, we identified a number of high-value improvements which Subversion should gain in coming releases.
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Environment
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Environmentalists are often criticized by conservatives for embracing the science of climate change because it fits neatly with their ideological positions on conservation and sustainability. I think there is certainly some truth to that. But I’d argue that there is even more truth to the opposite position: Energy company executives and the politicians who carry their water reject science and oppose energy legislation because it conflicts with their ideological belief that anything that interferes with private profit-making is evil government intrustion.
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Finance
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Today, the Real Economy Project of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released an assessment of the total cost to taxpayers of the Wall Street bailout. CMD concludes that multiple federal agencies have disbursed $4.6 trillion dollars in supporting the financial sector since the meltdown in 2007-2008. Of that, $2 trillion is still outstanding.
CMD’s assessment demonstrates that the Federal Reserve has provided by far the bulk of the funding for the bailout in the form of loans amounting to $3.8 trillion. Little information has been disclosed about what collateral taxpayers have received in return for these loans. CMD also concludes that the bailout is far from over as the government has active programs authorized to cost up to $2.9 trillion and still has $2 trillion in outstanding investments and loans.
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“While we continue to pray for the speedy recovery of the President, permit me to emphasize the policy continuum of governance and to insist on the imperative of this team to roll up its sleeves, and to redouble efforts so as to meet the expectations of our people who are yearning for good governance,” Jonathan said today.
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Just when you thought you’d had enough of Goldman Sachs running things — and running them into the ground — along comes Meg Whitman. Most Californians know she’s using her fortune to run for governor. They probably don’t know that she was once on the board of Goldman Sachs, and most likely still would be if she hadn’t been cited for a practice one law firm describes as “essentially … an illegal bribe … to corporate leaders.” Then came the Congressional investigation, and the investor lawsuit, and … well, it was probably best to just leave the board.
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The Wall Street press can be pretty tough, but it’s nothing like the political press. Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, and now a candidate for governor of California, is finding that out now. Her opponents no doubt are only too happy to have her relationship with Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) aired in the media. The firm, by the way, has been embroiled in a controversy about whether it advised clients to short California muni bonds that it helped underwrite.
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As reported by Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs, with arguably the most vexing image issues, came in 56th out of 60. Citigroup (NYSE: C) came in 57th. Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) came in 52nd and JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) came in 53rd. American International Group (NYSE: AIG) came in at 59 and Fannie Mae at 58. Freddie Mac, now a ward of the government, came in dead last.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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John Whittingdale, the committee’s chairman, said that local media was facing “unprecedented challenges” from the recession and the internet. “This has led to the closure of a large number of newspapers, many commercial radio stations becoming loss-making and the possible end of regional news on commercial television,” Mr Whittingdale said. “This has serious implications for local democracy.”
The committee wants the Government to press ahead with changes to cross-media ownership recommended by Ofcom, the media regulator. These include relaxing the rule that no local newspaper publisher with more than 20 per cent of a market may also own a Channel 3 regional television licence.
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In case you have not seen it yet, Wikileaks has released a video of an American helicopter crew opening fire on a group of men in Iraq, and later firing on a van that was trying to retrieve the wounded. I have been debating with myself whether to embed the video here. It is seriously disturbing, and I am concerned about potentially tasteless juxtaposition between the seriousness of the subject matter and the light-hearted nature of this blog, but I have decided that this is important enough that it requires all of the promotion it can get.
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After being pressed to release its version of the WikiLeaks clip, U.S. CENTCOM says it can’t locate the footage
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Having recovered from inhaling an amount of tear gas, I accompanied Robert González – the executive secretary of the Oil Workers’ Federation (Federación Petrolera) – as he was being interviewed by TVS Maracay (a regional TV channel). While he spoke to the journalist, a group of more than 30 police surrounded us. As soon as the TV cameras switched off, they pounced on us and, pushing against us, bundled us into the van. Amidst the tussle, they seized and broke my anarchist banner, which read, “FOR LIBERTARIAN AUTONOMY AND AGAINST THE REPRESSION OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS”. Twelve people in total were packed into the police van, including two members of the Workers’ League for Socialism (LTS). They didn’t tell us what our charges were, or where we were headed.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Net Neutrality is the principle of keeping web content equally accessible regardless of its provider, origin or destination. According to the Free Press Action Fund’s Savetheinernet.com campaign, net neutrality is threatened by the major conglomerates in the telecommunications industry who wish to provide themselves with an advantage by slowing down sites that aren’t associated with their companies and don’t pay a fee for the faster service.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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So here’s my position: There is no future in a paywall. No salvation in digital razzle dazzle.
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Question Copyright’s first Minute Meme is a response to messages that have tried to convince people that copying information is the same as stealing property, when it’s an entirely different (and generally positive) thing. Until the air is cleared on that point, it’s hard to have any kind of useful conversation about copying, sharing, copyright, or licensing.
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1) Price your copies near the cost of pirated copies. Maybe 99 cents, like iTunes. Even decent pirated copies are not free; there is some cost to maintain integrity, authenticity, or accessibility to the work.
2) Milk the uncopyable experience of a theater for all that it is worth, using the ubiquitous cheap copies as advertising. In the west, where air-conditioning is not enough to bring people to the theater, Hollywood will turn to convincing 3D projection, state-of-the-art sound, and other immersive sensations as the reward for paying. Theaters become hi-tech showcases always trying to stay one step ahead of ambitious homeowners in offering ultimate viewing experiences, and in turn manufacturing films to be primarily viewed this way.
3) Films, even fine-art films, will migrate to channels were these films are viewed with advertisements and commercials. Like the infinite channels promised for cable TV, the internet is already delivering ad-supported free copies of films.
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Nintendo has issued a cease-and-desist notice to the creators of the open source Pokémon MMO Pokenet, requiring that they take down their website and surrender the pokedev.org domain name used for the game, claiming unauthorized use of Nintendo trademarks, according to Joystiq.com.
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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InternetNZ and the New Zealand Open Source Society have released their submissions to the Ministry of Economic Development’s consultation on this month’s ACTA negotiations, with the two organisations taking different, but equally critical tacks on the issue.
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Internet New Zealand has strongly opposed the signing of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) by New Zealand in a submission to the Ministry of Economic Development.
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In the Internet Community, we do not believe that it is even theoretically possible, short of instituting an entirely undesirable Orwellian police state, to effectively prevent music and films from being shared over the internet in non-commercial ways. We expect that any efforts by governments are any other party to stop this will fail, although they will surely be harmful side-effects, like for example the notice-and-takedown provisions of the DMCA in the USA are already being abused by enemies of the freedom of speech. (By contrast, the appropriate handling of copyrighted digital assets in commercial contexts is a solvable problem, as the international standard ISO/IEC 19770-1 on Software Asset Management proves. In my opinion, enforcement efforts should focus on that area where it is actually possible to achieve progress.)
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The New Zealand Open Source Society has made a submission on ACTA to the Ministry of Economic Development. The submission explores the relationship between legislation of the United States passed in 1998 called the DMCA with provisions in the Copyright Amendment Act 2008 and the leaked provisions in ACTA. The NZOSS does not wish to see a regime where citizens will be disconnected from the Internet based only on notices from rights holders, but rather maintain a position where proper judicial oversight and process will be maintained. Video here.
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Two photographs. Nearly a century apart. Of people watching a sports game without paying.
The question is, were they stealing? Would you call it stealing? I wouldn’t. But I know some people who would.
More Background Manipulation with the GIMP
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Send this to a friend
04.06.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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To begin with, there is nothing wrong with using the root account if it is your system or you’re the administrator. Secondly, using sudo instead of a root shell is not more insecure. That’s simply ludicrous. The only difference is that with one you require knowing root’s password, and with the other you need to know your own password. If you are in the habit of using poor passwords, yes, this could bite you — but if you are already in the habit of using poor passwords, what’s to say that the root password isn’t just as bad?
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Desktop
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Most often its not the case that you have only one application open at a particular time on your computer. With hardware becoming cheaper & faster, multi-tasking has become a norm. Its a common sight today to have a media-player, web browser, chat client & an image editor all running in realtime on one’s desktop. Though the computers can handle such multi-tasking the user’s productivity most often than not gets crippled. Blame it on to the cluttered desktop for the decrease in productivity. Half of the user’s time is wasted in finding the right application window. Grouping similar windows is handy but still not too much either. However, most of the user’s are unaware of the feature called ‘Workspaces’ in Linux Desktop Environments. Almost all desktop environment offer this feature enabled by default. It is set to 2 or 4 workspaces by default but can be altered to provide many more.
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Just a year ago — April 21, 2009 to be exact — I installed a Linux distribution. I installed it from a DVD of Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex, that came with an issue of Linux Pro magazine I bought from a news stand, and I put it on a hand-me-down eMachine with 384MB RAM (the other 128MB being dedicated graphics). It was the first time I had ever installed an operating system. In fact, it was the first time I had ever installed anything at all, anytime, anywhere. I had always just called for (and paid for) professional help from a neighbor who extended me rates more favorable than his enterprise customers paid. Raised at IBM, he had become a born-again Microsoft True Believer and wanted to keep us all happy Windows users.
[...]
You see, Mr. Ulanoff was apparently intent on generating FUD in support of his publication’s proprietary-system advertisers like Microsoft and Apple. He described his experience at installing Ubuntu 8.10 as if it were the most computer-threatening, nerve-wracking, brain-challenging experience of his life. Zapped computer. Several required reinstalls of Windows XP Pro (which he made sure to say he tossed off quickly with his indominatble expertise). Finally, with a lot of help from experts both in his office and online, he heroically managed to get it up and running. There was no account of what he actually DID with it.
And here’s a thing for all Linux fans to take into account: the working (read “paid”) reviewers derive their income from corporations that advertise in the publications for which they write. How likely is it for them to heap praise on a system that offers a viable, inexpensive, and sometimes superior product to the ones which are the ultimate source of their pay?
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Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs a full-fleshed Linux Ubuntu operating system on your Windows like any other Windows application. Version 3 of this brand runs Ubuntu 9.10 on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Download the latest package that takes about 559MB of your hard disk space (3.81GB when extracted). You can run it directly from your thumb-drive – its so portable.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Ricoh Company Ltd., is its newest member. Ricoh is a global leader in digital office solutions and will participate in the Linux Foundation’s events and OpenPrinting.org workgroup.
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Ricoh will also be participating in the OpenPrinting.org workgroup, one of the most active Linux Foundation workgroups aimed at standardising printing functionality on Linux.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Parallels is its newest member. Parallels, a leading provider of virtualization and automation software for the enterprise, cloud service providers and consumers, will participate in the Linux Foundation’s workgroups and events.
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Last year, the inaugural We’re Linux video contest kicked off a storm of creativity and captured the spirit of Linux and the diversity of its community. The winning video “What Does it Mean to Be Free” was an inspirational piece that communicated the ideals of the open source operating system.
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I hope I have clarified the whole independent desktops per monitor concept. I believe that it would be much more simple in practice than it was to explain and has the potential to be more self discoverable.
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Applications
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Zeitgeist can give Gnome/KDE/Maemo all of this right now. Think of a desktop that learns how you do things from the way you do things, the time you do things at and in which program you use them in. Zeitgeist is not just a logger it is your desktop/phone/netbook/smartbook/server but smarter.
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I must say I am very excited about the new developments happening in the Zeitgeist World… I have no idea where to start but here goes nothing.
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When you launch the Kleo wizard, you are asked if you want to back up or restore data. If you choose the former, you are able to pick the partitions on your computer that you want to back up. The great thing about backing up the whole system using such a Live edition of Linux is that you can restore your system without the need for any other software. All you need is the Live disc, access to your backups, and a functional computer to restore to. The flexibility of being able to take snapshots of selected partitions is great, especially in a case where you are short of storage space for your backups. This way you can take a snapshot of your important partitions.
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Always feared that controlling Compiz with the power of thought alone was something only available for Jedi’s and Sylar from Heroes? Think again. (Bad pun. BAD pun.)
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Miro is one of the finest softwares I have ever used. Its a video aggreator cum Internet TV. It has been handling all of my audio/video feeds since the very first time I used it. Miro easily allows you to subscribe to torrent feeds, lets you search and dowload youtube videos in HD and a whole lot more. And the new Miro 3.0 comes with even more new features to make your life easier and further improving Miro, the best Internet Video application.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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Clutter is no good on a desktop. It takes too long to find anything. There is a reason the old designs are popular. They work. The new designs work for their designers but not anyone over 50, or under 10. That’s about half of humanity. Do what you want with the desktop but leave me XFCE4 and such that boot like lightning and can move as fast as I can. My son likes the new stuff. His hand is just a blur as he clicks on stuff at 1680. I have to squint four inches from the monitor to see any details.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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It has been brought to my attention that recently, I have not blogging enough about cool new features in future versions (as in, not the upcoming version, but a later one) of Amarok.
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I’m proud to announce the initial release of AuroraeDesigner, a small application to design Aurorae themes. At the current state of development it is possible to open an existing theme and get an interactive preview of the theme and change all configuration details. The changed configuration can be saved, but I’d recommend to backup the original file before starting to play with the designer 
Packages are available for openSUSE through the openSUSE build service. As it depends on 4.4, I was unable to build packages for other distributions.
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GNOME Desktop
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Now I will warn you that I am a fan of GNOME. I understand that KDE did the same thing when they re-invented their take on the desktop. The difference is – the innovation from KDE seemed more like a “retooling with added features”. GNOME 3 will be a milestone for the desktop. I have head some people say it is too much like the “iPhone interface”. To those I have to say “use it first”. But no matter where you stand, GNOME 3 is going to be different, and this article will show you how to install it and give you a first glance.
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GNOME 2.30 was originally intended to coincide with GNOME 3.0 — a massive cleanup and rethinking of the popular desktop. However, GNOME 3.0 is delayed for at least another release, which leaves GNOME 2.30 as most likely the last version in a series stretching back almost a decade.
[...]
On the other hand, 2.30 will probably be the final version of the 2.0 series. For those who were around for GNOME 2.0 back in 2000, the 2.30 release stands as evidence of how far GNOME in general and the free desktop in particular have come in the last decade in usability and design. If you do a search for images of early GNOME releases and compare the results with 2.30, you can have no doubt that, although GNOME sometimes tends to over-simplify, its improvements over the last decade remain unmistakable.
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Deciding on the best Linux distribution for your enterprise requires research. Your environment and computing needs are unique, and there are many factors to take into account. However, the reward can be dramatic cost savings coupled with high reliability and flexibility in your computing environment. There are third party support options –- including OpenLogic -– that not only help with support and services, but also can help with initial consultation and evaluation.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Last fall I took Mandriva’s desktop system, Mandriva 2010, for a test drive and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The Mandriva developers make one of the most user-friendly, stable and elegant systems in the Linux ecosystem. Having played with their Enterprise Server, I find it to be in the same class of excellence. The Enterprise Server is fast, stable, easy to configure and wonderfully intuitive to use. One of the things I enjoyed most about using MES is it does a great job of balancing giving information to the user while staying out of the way. There aren’t any annoying pop-ups and neither is the user left alone in an empty sea of UNIX. The Control Center continues to be one of the best all-in-one configuration tools on the market and I like the work the developers have put into installing services as building blocks. Having played with MES for a week, setting up services, running and restoring backups and managing accounts, I’ve encountered no problems. The system feels polished and well tested, suitable for a business environment and the price tag makes Mandriva’s Enterprise Server a good option for small and medium organisations who are looking for an inexpensive solution.
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The rest of the package I would rate as average. Nothing really screams wow, nothing else is really lacking. With this you get a solid XFCE distro, albeit a bit fragile that is not as robust as others. If you are a fan of PCLinuxOS, the support is there, the community that is second to none and the packages are customized towards what those users are wanting to see. I love that the links are there in Firefox and I love the line “The distro-hopper-stopper” as I have always felt PCLinuxOS was one that would stick with the user a bit more than others.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux already enjoys strong momentum on Wall Street. But now, The VAR Guy hears, Red Hat is preparing to make a private cloud pitch to Wall Street customers and partners on April 19. Here are the detail, and the implications for Red Hat partners.
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Ubuntu
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Now, Canonical hopes to begin the discussion with Wall Street firms as well. True believers include Equitec, a financial services firm that moved its proprietary trading software from 100 Windows-based servers to 30 Ubuntu-based servers, according to Canonical. (Side note: I’m having difficulty getting an update from Equitec regarding the Ubuntu deployment as well as the company’s business status.) Somewhat similarly, Linux Box — a solutions provider in Ann Arbor, Michigan — has started promoting Ubuntu to financial services firms.
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I’ve used Puppy, DSL, and a few other lightweights to bring some old junkers back from the dead but never had the pleasure of using TinyMe, until now. The Unity-based TinyMe 2010 is of course a minimalist distro and it uses the Openbox session and window manager. The 2010 RC1 download I used is only 200MB and runs as a live CD. You can get a stable version from the TinyMe download page.
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Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced today that its Ubuntu One cloud service will soon gain support for mobile contact synchronization. The feature will be available to users who are paying for the higher tier of Ubuntu One service.
Canonical officially launched the Ubuntu One service last year alongside the release of Ubuntu 9.10. The service allows users to keep files and some application data synchronized between multiple computers. The company is planning to roll out several significant new Ubuntu One features when Ubuntu 10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx, is released later this month. The new Ubuntu One music store, which is integrated into the Rhythmbox audio player, will use Ubuntu One to deploy purchased music to all of the user’s computers. Much like the music store, the new mobile synchronization features are opening up for testing, but will officially launch alongside Ubuntu 10.04.
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I’m already using the beta of the forthcoming version of Ubuntu 10.04 and I like it a lot. I decided to ask the good people at Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, what they thought about the new Ubuntu, scheduled to arrive on April 29th, and this is what Gerry Carr, head of platform marketing had do say.
One thing I noticed in looking at the beta of Ubuntu 10.04 was that Ubuntu, more than ever, is becoming the Linux desktop distribution for new users. I was right. Carr said, “We want new users.” Ubuntu has never been the distribution for Linux purists or experts. “We’ve always felt that one of the most important things that we can bring, hopefully, to open source is popularity as a desktop OS.”
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Variants
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This is a great release from the Mint team. It’s fast, built on the rock solid Linux Mint core and pleasing to the eye. There are more than enough applications available to suit anyone and customization options are easy to use and plentiful.
Pro’s:
* Very fast thanks to LXDE and Openbox for the desktop.
* Excellent selection of software.
* Visually attractive with plenty of customization options.
* Easy to use for a new user.
Con’s:
* We would have preferred to see AbiWord instead of OpenOffice installed by default.
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Based on Ubuntu and Debian Live, puredyne is a Linux live distribution dedicated to live audiovisual processing and streaming, and focuses largely on the Pure Data audio synthesis system, although it also includes SuperCollider, Csound as well as live video-processing systems such as Packet Forth and Fluxus. Another aspect of pure:dyne is that it is maintained by media artists for media artists. The system provides particular optimizations at the kernel and compilation level to take the most out of i686 machines for real-time audio and video. As a consequence, this operating system is well suited for live performances and art installations. The modular aspect makes it easy for artists to customize and deploy it quickly to their own project needs.
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Puredyne is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution aimed at creative people. It provides a number of creative applications, alongside a solid set of graphic, audio and video tools in a fast, minimal package. It includes software for everything an artist might need – from sound art to innovative film-making. Puredyne is optimised for use in real-time audio and video processing and it distinguishes itself by offering a low latency kernel and high responsiveness needed by artists working in this field.
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With all the hype about the iPad, and indeed, the hype about smaller and smaller mobile computing devices, I thought I would remind you all that there was at one point a Linux-powered wristwatch! This marvelous curiosity was discussed back in 2001, when it ran kernel version 2.2.1, had 8 megabytes of flash memory, and had IrDA (remember that?!).
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Last year about this time we reviewed the VIA ARTiGO A2000 and found it to be a great hardware complement to the FreeNAS distribution. This time around we take a look at the latest incarnation of the small server box from VIA named the M’Serv S2100. We had to look pretty close to see the differences in the two from the outside. On the front panel they’re virtually identical with the exception of one LED. On the back panel the two audio ports have been replaced with a second Ethernet port.
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The WiLink 6.0 design, which debuted in January in TI’s own eBook Development Platform for Linux and Android, was the first of the company’s WiLink chips to offer 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth, and FM on a single chip.
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Android
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If you’re anything like me then all this talk about Android development, source code, root, version, etc., is all completely over your head. If you don’t know who Cyanogen is, it’s okay. Well, for now. So, what’s the real deal about Android phones? So far, only the geekiest have them, right? I mean, who else is going to sit at a computer all day fiddling with source code to come up with some new doohickey thingamabob that changes a single light on a phone? Well, my husband, the biggest geek I’ve ever met, and thousands more.
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Sub-notebooks
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Most businesses would be very happy with 33% year over year growth in units shipped. The panic/hype that the iPad will somehow damage netbooks is silly. Lower the price and there will be new surge in sales… Oh. You will have to dump that other OS to lower the price. Use GNU/Linux. It works better and costs less. Let the folks with too much cash buy the iPad. The rest of us will be able to afford two netbooks running GNU/Linux instead of one iPad. We can use one and give the other to a friend.
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The Ben has OpenWrt-based Linux with an ash console, BusyBox and the opkg package manager. Connecting the mini-USB cable provides USB network connectivity. The dmesg kernel ring buffer command that it registers as highspeed USB device with the cdc_ether (communications device class, or CDC) kernel module. The kernel version is 2.6.32 and the images are often newly built, which the NanoNotes changelog explains. The last version (image 2010-03-26) added Python, PHP 5, make, OpenVPN and tcpdump. The new image can be updated via software or hardware or USB boot. The latter is great for tinkerers, but more than tedious for end-users. For us, a couple of circuit board connections shorted out while removing the battery.
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Tablets
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Some people are shocked — shocked I tell you — to find that the iPad isn’t open source and so are encouraging people to avoid it. Hello? What part of the iPad being an Apple product did you not get? Apple, even more so than Microsoft, is the un-open company. If you want an open-source based iPad clone, congratulations: Linux-powered iPod-like devices are already on their way.
At the same time, Apple is supporting open standards. Sure, if you want to develop applications for the iPad, you have to jump through Apple’s hoops — but if you want to develop iPad-friendly Web pages, you’ll do it by embracing HTML5 and avoiding proprietary formats like Flash.
If you really want to open up an iPad’s software and void the warranty, the iPad’s already been jailbroken. In two weeks’ time, someone will doubtlessly have Linux running on it.
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High-tech companies want research and development help from outsiders, but granting them authority is another matter — and the tighter their control, the harder it is to attract outside participation. One of the best high-tech open-source role models is Eclipse, formed through IBM’s 2001 donation of its Java development software.
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Invoicing is one of the necessary evils for freelancers and small business owners. It’s a pain in the neck to bother with but, on the other hand, it’s always nice to get paid. Here are four open source invoicing applications that make the job a little easier.
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NASA may be cutting back, but don’t let that stop you from celestial crusading. In the multi-player space combat game Conquest, players on four teams – Federation, Orion, Romulan, and Klingon – fly around in a ship, conquer planets, and fight other players.
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OpenTTD is an open source clone of the Microprose game “Transport Tycoon Deluxe”, a business simulation games, in which the player is in control of a transport company, and can compete against rival companies to make as much profit as possible by transporting passengers and various goods by road, rail, sea or by air.
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It has games, an e-mail system known as Pigeon and a Mozilla’s Firefox internet browser – which has the North Korean government website as a home page.
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The open source Apache Maven project has been helping software developers for over six years with their project build and reporting management needs. For most of that time, the project has been offering incremental updates to the Apache Maven 2.x product line, but in the next few months, Maven 3 is set to emerge.
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Mozilla
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The importance of Mozilla and its Firefox browser went up a notch last week. For it was then that it became clear that Microsoft has little intention of following a very particular standard – its own OOXML, pushed through the ISO at great cost to that institution’s authority. Contrast that with Microsoft’s increasingly positive signals about Web standards, which it is adopting with notable fervency – largely thanks to Firefox.
Microsoft is complaisant because Firefox’s market share is getting close to the critical level where it becomes the dominant browser in the market. According to the first Mozilla Metrics Report, Mozilla’s global market share is around 30%. That figure is confirmed by the latest figure from W3Counter, which gives Internet Explorer 48% globally, and 32% to Firefox.
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Databases/Oracle
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OpenOffice.org (OOo for short) is a great office suite for Linux and pretty much any other operating system, but can always use improvement. This is especially true for templates and clip art. Fortunately, the open source community provides many add-ons or extensions. Here’s a look at eight different ones:
English Templates by OxygenOffice
One of the biggest features you might miss from Microsoft Office is their templates. This might especially be the case now that they have integrated the online user-submitted templates, giving you even more choices. In OOo, all you get is two presentation templates, an assortment of presentation templates, and a few wizards to help make letters, faxes, and agendas–the bare minimum. Then on a different menu (File > New), you’ll find shortcuts to work with labels and business cards.
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CMS
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Research shows that if your web pages take longer than 5 seconds to load, you lose 50% of your viewers and sales. You can speed up your wordpress blog by using a CDN to display content to users faster and more efficiently. You can distributes common files or content such as css, javascript, uploaded images, videos and much more through a CDN, which serves the content from the closest cdn edge server to the end-user. In this tutorial, I will explains how to configure WordPress, Apache/Lighttpd webserver, Bind dns server to use a CDN to distribute your common files such as css, js, user uploaded files and lighten load on your web server.
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BSD
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Kris Moore recently announced some of the new features that will be available in 8.1. He is looking for testers for the latest snapshot.
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An impressive, mature and polished Linux distribution, that doesn’t quite beat Ubuntu for sheer ease of use, but is nonetheless a worthy alternative.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Emacs is not so much a text editor, more a way of life – an “extensible, customisable self-documenting real time display editor” with thousands of ready made extensions that take you way beyond its original remit as a text editor, some of which can be found at the Emacs wiki or on the Emacs Lisp list.
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I quite enjoyed seeing how RMS tempered prophetic statements with unfortunate real-world experience. Consider this insight from RMS into why it would be unlikely for a commercial entity to produce something like Emacs:
I don’t think that anything like EMACS could have been developed commercially. Businesses have the wrong attitudes. The primary axiom of the commercial world toward users is that they are incompetent, and that if they have any control over their system they will mess it up. The primary goal is to give them nothing specific to complain about, not to give them a means of helping themselves.
Some 23 years later, on the commerically amazing debut of the iPad, it’s striking how accurate this assessment is!
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Standards/Consortia
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Radio Free Deutschland: For Document Freedom Day, March 31 2010, a couple of European radio stations were granted awards for using open standards.
The radio stations Deutschlandradio and Radio Orange received the awards from the Free Software Foundation Europe and Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure because they transmitted over the Internet in the Ogg Vorbis media container format. The free Radio Orange 94.0 in Vienna and dradio.de (Deutschlandfunk in Cologne and Deutschlandradio Kultur in Berlin) were honored with the awards (and a cake) the afternoon of March 31 under the slogan “rOGG on!” (see Gallery).
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Consumerist.com’s fifth annual “Worst Company in America” tournament is on, with cable provider Comcast as one of the top seeds among competitors like Best Buy, Apple, and HP.
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Security/Aggression
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The Association of Teachers and Lecturers said cash for the vetting and barring scheme – which could cost up to £1 billion – would be better spent on more social workers.
Activists warned that the overwhelming majority of abuse was committed in the home or by relatives – meaning a database targeted at teachers, doctors, health workers and volunteers would be useless.
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The government’s new vetting and barring scheme could put theatre companies off casting children, according to local troupes.
Peter Hunt, a director for the Lindley Players in Whitstable, said: “It will add a layer of complexity for those of us trying to put on amateur productions and involve children, which we all want to do.
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Britain is at a crossroads in privacy and liberty. In recent years, public opposition has seen the government defeated on 90 days detention, forced to make ID cards non-compulsory and a series of concessions made on large-scale state databases from the NHS Spine to ContactPoint. But these only scrape the surface of the widespread erosion in personal freedom that has occurred in the past decade.
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Surveillance technology may be the most corrupting and also the most intoxicating media proliferating in these rapidly changing times. Its use is a slippery slope sliding further into the surveillance society.
For example, a school district in Philadelphia has recently been caught spying on its students via cameras installed on laptops. The school board was able to do this through several thousand Apple Mac Books with spyware installed that they distributed to students. School administrators could access and activate the laptop camera whenever they wished.
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And then there’s Alexandria Commonwealth Attorney Randolph Sengel, who fired off an indignant letter to the editor in response to Pope’s article. Calling Pope’s well-reported piece a “rant” that was “thinly disguised as a news story,” Sengel wrote that “Law enforcement investigations and prosecutions are not carried out for the primary purpose of providing fodder for his paper.” Mocking the media’s role as a watchdog for government officials, Sengel added, “The sacred ‘right of the public to know’ is still (barely) governed by standards of reasonableness and civility,” as if those two adjectives were incompatible with a journalist inquiring about the details of a govenrment agent’s fatal shooting of an unarmed man. Sengel’s concluding graph is worth excerpting at length to give a better feel for a certain type of official contempt for disclosure…
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According to these Western pundits who are, incidentally, often promoting their cybersecurity services, computers and connectivity in Africa either pave the way for terrorists to unleash cyber-attacks or for botnet operators to gather millions of unprotected machines into their control. Although we’ve spent considerable time debunking the hysteria around cyberwar, this new version of the meme is even more unfounded.
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Finance
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The bailed out insurer is “now on a path” to repaying the loans included in its $182.3 billion rescue package, Benmosche said in an interview yesterday. The company will first pay off the $25.3 billion it owes the Federal Reserve before deciding how to raise the cash it needs to end its separate arrangement with the U.S. Treasury that includes a draw on a second credit line of more than $40 billion.
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It is official. In their annual report via Business Week Goldman Sachs (GS) says their employees are innocent as lambs. (The implicitly government guaranteed company, Goldman Sachs, is full of lambs doing ‘God’s work’ with seven figure bonuses!) GS says that it did nothing wrong in its credit default swap bets with American International Group (AIG). There is a funny thing about the too big to fail (TBTF) problem. The dummy at the poker table isn’t even in the casino. AIG and Goldman Sachs (and most of the other major investment banks) were playing with the money of U.S. taxpayers.
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A recent Bloomberg story about one of the CDOs insured by AIG, Davis Square Funding III, is a stark reminder of one of the bedrock principles of real estate lending: Timing is everything. Davis Square III, originally underwritten by Goldman Sachs, was comprised of pieces of mortgage bonds issued in 2004, two years before the home prices peaked.
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“The IMF will not have a restricted role” in the recently decided support plan for Greece, because “it wants to insure the control of valuable Greek infrastructures”, alleges economic analyst Max Keiser on international television networks such as the BBC, Al Jazeera and Russia Today.
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When it comes to working on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs is the holy grail. Those who make it through the notoriously arduous interview process relinquish much of their personal lives, their identities, and their hair in service of the firm. Drinking in the combination of Old Spice, everything bagel, and money that emanates off of CEO Lloyd Blankfein during his visits to the trading floor is considered not just a workaday experience but a privilege. Which is why it is nothing less than shocking that casting director Scott Salyers told Bloomberg today that a number of God’s bankers have shown up at recent castings for The Apprentice.
New York auditions usually include “a lot of Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, that kind of stuff,” Salyers said.
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Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) will introduce a new scorecard system for its senior management in Australia, linking their part of their bonuses to their success in encouraging diversification in the workplace. Goldman Sachs’s senior U.S. managers already have their performance measured by the metrics.
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Despite being stabbed in the back by Goldman Sachs, California keeps giving Goldman Sachs billions of dollars in business — seven percent of Goldman’s revenues in 2008. Despite the billions of dollars in profit, Goldman Sachs refuses to support reinvestment for low-income communities in California.
While CEO of eBay, Whitman reportedly hired Goldman Sachs to handle the company’s initial public stock offering — and for a second stock offering too — and to help it acquire PayPal. She was also a private banking client of theirs at the same time. Goldman Sachs received $8 million in fees from eBay while Whitman was CEO, while she made $1.78 million from those ‘spinning’ deals.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Can posting a link to someone else’s website constitute defamation?
The Supreme Court of Canada has agreed to hear the case of a former Green Party campaign manager who says it does.
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The rulers had sued for defamation 16 years ago, saying a Herald Tribune Op-Ed column had implied that they got their jobs through nepotism. The paper wound up paying $678,000 and promising not to do it again. But in February, it named Lee Kuan Yew, the founding prime minister, and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, the prime minister now, in an Op-Ed article about Asian political dynasties.
After the Lees objected, the paper said its language “may have been understood by readers to infer that the younger Mr. Lee did not achieve his position through merit. We wish to state clearly that this inference was not intended.” The Herald Tribune, wholly owned by The New York Times Company, apologized for “any distress or embarrassment” suffered by the Lees. The statement was published in the paper and on the Web site it shares with The Times.
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Each week, more blog posts are redacted, more videos deleted, and more web pages removed from Internet search results based on private claims of copyright infringement. Under the safe harbors of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Internet service providers are encouraged to respond to copyright complaints with content takedowns, assuring their immunity from liability while diminishing the rights of their subscribers and users. Paradoxically, the law’s shield for service providers becomes a sword against the public who depend upon these providers as platforms for speech.
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Anonymous online commenting has always been rowdy and raucous, especially when public figures are the targets.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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A federal court threw the future of Internet regulations and U.S. broadband expansion plans into doubt Tuesday with a far-reaching decision that went against the Federal Communications Commission.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks. That was a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company, which had challenged the FCC’s authority to impose such “Net neutrality” obligations on broadband providers.
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Since its creation in the 1930s, the Federal Culinary Commission has tightly regulated the pizza marketplace. Entrepreneurs wishing to open pizzerias have been required to apply to the FCC, specifying the location of their proposed pizzeria, detailing the kinds of pizza that would be offered, and explaining how the creation of a new pizzeria benefitted the public interest. If the FCC determined that a new pizzeria was needed, it would issue a new pizzaright, subject, of course, to periodic renewal to ensure that the pizzaright was being used in the public interest.
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It is important for free-market types to attack “unlicensed” spectrum proposals that actually come with a lot of strings attached. This, I think, is the flaw of the “white spaces” proposal: there’s actually nothing unlicensed about it. While the white spaces rules don’t restrict who may use the spectrum, it does impose detailed rules about the protocols these devices may use. But the fact that a particular “unlicensed” spectrum program worked out poorly isn’t an argument against deregulation in general. And by painting all unlicensed spectrum rules with the same broad brush, free-marketeers malign some of the most successful (and libertarian!) FCC initiatives of the last few decades for no good reason.
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The Commerce Department voiced support Thursday for legislation that would require AM and FM radio stations to pay performers a fee when they air their songs.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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He goes on to quote a publishing exec who disagrees, insisting that any unauthorized download is “stealing” and warns Cohen: “to condone this is to condone theft.” But, of course, that’s ridiculous. It is not theft at all. Nothing is missing. No one has lost out on anything. The publisher already got its money from this guy.
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Clay Shirky’s latest broadside, “The Collapse of Complex Business Models,” is as incandescent as ever. It’s a thoughtful and provocative piece on the way that “high quality” products (which are also complex and expensive) reach diminishing returns, where they are being made ever-more complex without any rise in value, because the institutions that made them don’t know how to be less complex. It’s a great commentary on walled gardens, paywalls, and the reflexive entertainment industry sneer that YouTube is made out of nothing but priceless pirated media and worthless videos of cats.
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While the Spanish Government tries to ram through legislation that will enable the authorities to shut down file-sharing sites more rapidly, employees of the ministry responsible have been exposed as pirates. Fresh data shows that at nearly all ministries, staff have been downloading copyrighted material.
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Now, this is the IFPI we’re talking about, and if ever there were an organization that knows something about studies that are “pure speculation,” it would be the IFPI. Every year the IFPI comes out with one of the more laughable reports on the “impact” of file sharing. The 2010 report is particularly full of baseless speculation, such as claiming that file sharing “harmed” some of the best selling music and movies in the last couple of years.
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It appears that a similar story is playing itself out across the pond in the UK, where the popular retailer Boots apparently refused to print one woman’s photos because they were seen as “too good” for her to have taken, and therefore must be infringing on someone’s copyrights (thanks to Dave Michels for sending this in). The woman even got a signed letter, and when that didn’t work, came back with the (pregnant) woman who was in the photos to let the staff know that these photos were, indeed, legit and not covered by someone else’s copyright. The store still said no.
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The Sword of Justice has just published an article titled ‘Terence Tsang undercutting his friends?” which asks some interesting questions about the operations of Davenport Lyons, ACS Law, and Tilly Bailey & Irvine. All three firms have sent ‘infringement letters’ to people that they claim have downloaded copies of movies and games. While Sword’s questions about the ties between the three firms are interesting, the point that really strikes me comes from Torrentfreak, apparently the monitoring software that the firms used cost them under $750.00!
OK, so we are in a down economy, and software engineers like everyone else are having a hard time finding work. But only $750.00? Assuming a charge rate of $100.00 per hour, that’s only one day’s worth of work. Now admittedly it appears that what they did was modify an existing bit torrent client, so a lot of the coding was already done. But on a lot of projects that I’ve been involved with, even the simplest ones, the planning stage takes a lot longer than that.
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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The drafting of the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) isn’t going so well. The agreement, which at least hints at three strikes provisions and third-party criminal liability for IP infringement, was finally leaked in its entirety last week. Now it seems that the drafters are a little nervous that authoritarian regimes might use ACTA to suppress speech. Wow, ya think? But we do not need to look to our enemies to find atavistic Internet policies. In the last few weeks, two of our staunchest supporters (South Korea and Australia) have been added to the illustrious Enemies of the Internet list. If even our well-intentioned, democratic allies offend Internet freedom by way of the rule of law, can there be any doubt that repressive regimes will do the same?
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If the government were to stop slavishly obeying the record companies as it formerly obeyed George Bush, and turn its attention to the real issue – how to support the arts in the digital age without impeding sharing – there is no shortage of methods it could try. My 1992 proposal for a special tax to be distributed to artists, with the money partly shifted from the most popular ones towards those not quite so successful, is still applicable. Meanwhile, many artists support themselves already with voluntary payments by their fans. If we make it easier to send these payments, with a send-one-dollar or send-one-pound button on every player, this method would work even better. And without disconnecting anyone!
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If you care about the future of books, you need to understand the Google Book Settlement. It’s a complicated legal document, but we’ve talked to some of its architects, detractors, and defenders – and break it all down for you.
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I am impressed by how responsive Google has been to the concerns of the publishing community. I believe they are going to make it possible for more consumers to discover great new content that they would have otherwise missed. Rather than being something we should fear, Google Book Search is something we should embrace. If we do, I think we will find that our content is suddenly more relevant than ever.
SourceCode Season 2 – Episode 10: Election Fraud (2005)
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Send this to a friend
04.05.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Ed sold MiTS and started medical school less than three years after introducing the Altair 8800. In one sense this could be seen as a logical transition from a dodgy electronic kit company that had almost gone under many times.
[...]
Linux might have called him back but by the time it was available Ed wasn’t.
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I’ve been offline for more than a day, and haven’t had time to blog, but yesterday I saw my old friend Dean Esmay. Among other things, he was installing, tweaking, and playing with the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, and burned an extra CD for me.
[...]
I am very, very impressed, and I highly recommend Ubuntu Linux.
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In the case of the PS3, however, the benefits of Linux on the CellBE-processor device were immediate. In 2007, the researchers at NorthCarolina State University clustered eight PS3 machines that ran Fedora Core 5 Linux (ppc64). That same year a University of Massachusetts team found that putting together an eight-node PS3 cluster together (for a cost of about US$4000) would perform with the same processing power as a 200-processor supercomputer.
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Kernel Space
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Netfilter maintainer Patrick McHardy recently announced a first alpha-release of nftables, slated to eventually replace iptables as the standard Linux packet filtering engine. Nftables aims to simplify the kernel ABI, reduce code duplication, improve error reporting, and provide more efficient execution, storage and updates of filtering rules. Patrick began with a high level overview of the three pieces that comprise the firewall, “the kernel provides a netlink configuration interface, as well as runtime ruleset evaluation using a small classification language interpreter. libnl contains the low-level functions for communicating with the kernel, the nftables frontend is what the user interacts with.” An insightful overview can be found on lwn.net.
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The patches, first posted in May of 2007, provide a mechanism for moving GFP_MOVABLE pages into a smaller number of pageblocks, reducing externally fragmented memory.
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Applications
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It’s early days for the fork so the team are actively looking for contributers. Head on over to #lyrebird on irc.mozilla.org to see how you can get involved.
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The results were interesting, due to circumstance I had to use a graphical browser to take care of work related stuff, however, everything else worked great. It is worth noting that in the past I have used all of the utilities mentioned here for a period of time for one reason or another (for instance I used to secure shell into a mail server and use mutt to read mail locally) so it isn’t like this is new so much as a trip back in time. In fact it has worked out so well, I continue to use all of the utilities because for me personally I work faster via a keyboard with less mouse rather than the other way around.
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Proprietary
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Opera 10.5x for Linux doesn’t seem to be evolving at the rate that I had originally expected as I interpreted from several Desktop Team blog posts, but it does seem to be inching its way forward on the stability end of things.
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CodeWeavers and Wine-Reviews have put together a special dealcode just for gamers and especially Transgamers. So if your a current or ex Transgaming Cedega customer and you would like to take the leap and switch over to CrossOver Games now is the perfect time to do so. With this special dealcode “ComeToTheLight” you will receive a instant 25% discount off the normal retail price of CrossOver Games or CrossOver Professional.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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From February 20th to the 21st, Linux enthusiasts from the greater Los Angeles area converged at the Westin Hotel near Los Angeles Airport to celebrate Linux and Free Software at the annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE8X). KDE was there once again showing attendees the work of the KDE community.
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Here, along with a description by the authors, are the competing Plasmoids in alphabetical order…
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME 3 is different. Very different. Gone is the start button, to be replaced by the Activities button. No more are you fumbling around in menus to find what you need. What you will have is a very streamlined, sleek, and sexy desktop that is sure to make your computing life easier. Oh of course there will be those that say “If it isn’t broke…” Well, I am one of those who will first claim that it is, in fact, “broke”. The current desktop that most everyone uses is klunky, kludgy, and ugly. It’s a task bar, and menus, and icons, and blah blah blah…there’s no “Apple factor”. What do I mean by “Apple factor”? Simple – there is very little energy given to aesthetics. And believe me in the current incarnation of the modern, capitalist society – it is all about form over function. You have to look good before you can be good.
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In GNOME 3, the System Status Area is a place where System Status Indicators represent the status of the system to the user. This is not an area that is variously called the Notification Area or System Tray and should not be used by applications (foreground or background) to indicate their status. This distinction is necessary to ensure the entire top of the screen is designed properly, system owned and coherent, able to be modified or extended, scale well to smaller form-factors, and not become a dumping ground or high-profile branding opportunity.
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A couple weeks ago, I wrote some posts on GNOME Shell which included a number of criticisms of the desktop environment that will likely become Ubuntu’S default at some point in the future. Jon McCann, lead designer for GNOME Shell, recently got in touch to offer his responses to the problems I found with the new interface. Here’s what he had to say.
In general, Jon’s message was that many of the criticisms I made of GNOME (not Gnome, I’ve realized…) Shell were unfair, given that its targeted release date remains six months in the future. For example, Jon assured me that my experience with a laggy interface was likely due to known bugs involving certain Intel GPUs, which the GNOME developers are working on fixing.
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One of the fascinating things about open source software is the way in which it can be adapted to suit many different, previously unexplored tasks. Linux, with its flexibility, can be used in many different niches. Take, for example, Asturix. The Asturix project is an attempt to make a better operating system both for the world in general, and Spanish speakers in particular. The project recognizes that Linux users often need to interact with applications and networks that aren’t always open-source friendly and have tailored their offering to make those situations as easy as possible. To achieve their goals, the Asturix team has created three editions of their distribution:
* Business – for use in offices
* Desktop – for people at home
* Lite – designed with older computers in mind
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New Releases
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We are proud to release GhostBSD 1.0 64amd.
Base on FreeBSD-8-64amd-stable
Run on Gnome 2.28.2.
We update Firefox to 3.6.
We remove gnome-games and Epyphany. We add some use full apps like Thunderbird, Abiword, Gnumeric, Geany, Planner and Gimp.
Some user of GhostBSD ask for it.
You can use sudo and su In terminal with out password.
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We are pleased to announce the delivery of PC/OS OpenWorkstation 10.1.1 PC/OS GNOME 10.1.1 as well as PC/OS WebStations 10.1.1. With this release we bring many bug fixes and enhancements to the platform. This release is a bug fix and precursor to the release of PC/OS 11. Some of the highlights of this release include.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The second bugfix release of KDE 4.4 was released this week and again thanks to neoclust we have packages for Mandriva 2010 since today, this time for both i586 and x86_64 platforms at the same time !!. With 4.4.1, packages for x86_64 weren’t built but I didn’t care much as I wasn’t using that plaform, but last night I reinstalled my system with 2010 x86_64 and it was a really great surprise to find this morning both platforms available to install. If you are upgrading from a previous KDE 4.4.x upgrade then don’t forget to disable or delete the old KDE 4.4.x repository before starting this upgrade, just in case.
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The first beta release of Mandriva 2010.1 has been made available for testing. Being fans of the 2010 release (it was, in our opinion, Mandriva’s best to date) we were eager to see what kind of progress is being made on their next stable release.
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Debian Family
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Ubuntu
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The development codename of an Ubuntu release takes the form “Adjective Animal”. Initially these weren’t in alphabetic order – until Dapper DRAKE (6.06) that is.
Let’s take a look (in pictures) at all Ubuntu mascots – from the warty Warthog to the latest maverick Meerkat…
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I believe part of the problem here is that reviewing patches is just too hard. At the Ubuntu Global Jam on Friday I was talking this through with a few people and I started drilling on the idea of a desktop tool that improves viability on patch contributions and automates much of the work involved. I believe this tool could greatly open up the world of patch review to more people.
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It’s an interesting relationship, but I think we all understand where each of us is coming from. The FSF seeks to be a defining entity that stands for a very precise ideal and raising awareness of that ideal through appealing to people’s politics. Ubuntu seeks to increase awareness and use of Free Software by providing products that work. So long as we in Ubuntu never forget to mention the ideals, philosophies and principles of the Free and Open Source ethos that gives us the great fortune of being able to make computers work better, then I think we have no real conflict.
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Ubuntu does not include “Non-Free” desktop software in a default installation: When installing Ubuntu, there is no desktop software that can be considered “Non Free” and that’s the main premise of Ubuntu today. Ubuntu provides the best free software to millions of people using it daily. Ubuntu never promotes proprietary applications over Free Software. However, it allows people who want to use non-free software, such as Skype. This is something that is true for Debian, Fedora, OpenSuse, ArchLinux, and even in the considered free distributions like gNewSense. The user chooses. Ubuntu does not force the user to use “non-free” software.
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A recent message on the Ubuntu One mailing list announces that Canonical has teamed up with Funambol, an established software stack that synchronizes thousands of mobile phones and other devices who have built a community around different client plugins, virtually supporting the majority of the existing software on all platforms that have contacts (Thunderbird, Outlook, Mac OS X Mail, etc).
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #187 for the week March 28th – April 3rd, 2010. In this issue we cover: Mark Shuttleworth: Shooting for the Perfect 10.10 with Maverick Meerkat, Ubuntu 10.04 beta 2 freeze now in effect, Ubuntu 8.10 reaches End-Of-Life April, 30, 2010, Call for Session Leaders for Ubuntu Open Week, Ubuntu Manual Team call for help, LoCo Directory: Team Events app Rocks, Ubuntu Ireland Global Jam Review, Help Translate the main LoCo Council page, Ubuntu One contacts, now with merging, Kubuntu Netbook Edition ScreenKast, At Home With Jono Bacon Podcast, Better sounding music with Rhythmbox, Ubuntu-UK Podcasts, and much, much more!
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Dutch “digital security” company Gemalto announced a lighter, more mobile version of its Linux-based Magic3 family of point-of-sale (PoS) terminals. The Magic3 W-1 runs the company’s “Open&Sec” PoS security stack on top of Linux, and offers a USB port, an Ethernet port, and WiFi dongle support, says the company.
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While it may not look like a computer, this armored baby is actually a high performing embedded Linux System…
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While more and more computer peripherals and gadgets these days are running Linux internally, not many vendors are matching their internal Linux support with external Linux customer support. For the Pogoplug though, which is made by CloudEngines, this is not the case. The Pogoplug is a network attached storage device that is far more than a basic NAS like the Icy Box NAS4220, but the Pogoplug can integrate with social networks like Twitter along with providing a rich web 2.0 interface for accessing the device from anywhere in the world. The Pogoplug device runs Linux and is built upon popular open-source packages, but Pogoplug does not hide this fact and they actually encourage community developers to work on the Pogoplug with complete support for SSH-ing into these devices and making modifications. CloudEngines also offers a 32-bit/64-bit Linux program for interacting with the Pogoplug.
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Phones
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There is no doubt that Linux will be the dominant player in the mobile market by the end of 2010. This is namely thanks to Google’s Android OS, which has been appearing on more handsets than I can count the past few months. Android however is not the only mobile Linux operating system (however it is easily the most popular) that exists. I have done more than a few posts about my Nokia N900, which is another mobile device that runs a variation of Linux known as Maemo.
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Nokia
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The Meego Community blog explains in more detail “The MeeGo architecture is based on a common core across the different usage models, such as netbooks, handheld, in-vehicle, and connected TV. The MeeGo common core includes the various key subsystems including the core operating system libraries, the comms and telephony services, internet and social networking services, visual services, media services, data management, device services, and personal services.”
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Android
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Now, Digg has launched its Android App.
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Firefox’s little cousin is now on Android, showing what an alternative browser can do for Google’s platform.
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Android is on the rise, despite the fact that Google insists on fragmenting its fledgling market. Meanwhile, BlackBerry is up to 43 per cent, and mobile Windows – following the introduction of Windows Phone 7 – has leapt from 13 per cent to 39 per cent.
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Yesterday, we summarized on the happenings of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Android device heading to Rogers.
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According to the results, 30% of those polled are considering Android as opposed to 29% for the iPhone. While the number is very close and not indicative of all potential buyers, it’s still worth noting. Even more telling for Android’s growth is that it jumped 9% from December.
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The Devour comes with the typical Android array of Google applications — Gmail, Google Talk, YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps and Google Maps Navigation. Additional applications can be downloaded from the Android Market, which has between 20,000 and 30,000 apps.
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Android is growing like crazy on smartphones — and stagnating everywhere else. That’s because Google is keeping its app store off all Android devices that aren’t smartphones. Such an approach is understandable only in the sense that it gives the company more control over the Android experience, but it will ultimately serve to send consumers in search of devices that offer them more freedom.
Take the ARCHOS Internet Tablet that debuted in September of last year. The 5-inch slate device offers a mobile web experience powered by the Android platform, yet doesn’t offer access to the Android Market — preventing its owners from making use of even the most basic Google apps, like Gmail.
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Tablets
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If you don’t recall, the JooJoo tablet is an Atom-based 12-inch tablet that primarily is meant to give people a big touch browsing experience. It’s got Flash and about a 10 second boot time.
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The iPad is the latest embodiement of Huxley’s Soma. It’s a seductive, closed device designed for passive consumption of pre-approved objects. That’s why the old ‘content’ industries are slavering over it. They see it as the way to undo all the damage wrought by the openness of the Web and its TCP/IP underpinnings, a way of rounding up all those escaped couch-potatoes and getting them back into the pen. And of being able to charge them for everything they use — and collect the money via Apple’s toll-gate.
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Neofonie WePad
A bit bigger than the iPad with an 11.6″, 1366×768 display, the WePad runs the Android OS. You can get apps from the Android Market or the WePad App Store. It also has a 1.3 megapixel webcam, which the iPad infamously did not include. What about the other iPad holes most often complained about? Flash? Yes. Multitasking? Yes. And the USB ports, modem, and 6-hour battery life won’t hear many complaints either.
Touch Book
Touch Book is sort of a netbook, sort of a tablet. It’s made by a company called Always Innovating, and it has a feature that really appeals to me–a detachable keyboard dock. Their website shows its many with-or-without-dock configurations with titles like “Yoga: Downward dog,” “Separation under way,” and my favorite, “Fridge magnet.” The hardware and software are fully open source–ready for you to do with what you like. It comes with a custom operating system, but you can install any mobile OS you like. Take a look at it at Gizmodo.
[...]
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At the El Sawy Culture Wheel in Zamalek, Al-Masry Al-Youm sponsored the “Free Open Source” festival on Saturday, also known as “Install Fest” or “GNU Linux” day. Volunteers held sessions on a range of topics, with a focus on the Open Source concept, explaining how even common applications could enhance user security.
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Open Source Software guarantees quality closed source software
It is very ironic but true. Without enormous pressure from mostly freely available and quality OSS, most closed source software would have just been junk. For instance, without pressure and competition from Linux, Windows 7 would not have been such a polished and nice software. OSS keeps closed source software developers on their toes in the knowledge that there is always some alternative available to users should they get it wrong.
Open Source Software reduces cost
Imagine your company in need of a particular software that is not available in the form it wants but there are others out there it can tweak to suit its needs. In this case, your company has two options, either build from scratch (which can be very expensive and time consuming) or grab the source code of an existing software and tweak it to their taste. Which would you prefer if you were the CFO?
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I found Few pictures which shows the status of software wars which has been going for years…Actually these are maps depicting the epic struggle of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) against the Empire of Microsoft.
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As of December 2010, Open-Xchange has about 150 active channel partners, up from about 80 active partners in December 2009, according to The VAR Guy’s second annual Open Source 50 survey (complete survey results will be announced May 2010). And all of Open-Xchange’s annual revenues come from channel partners, the company adds.
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Many computer users have an insatiable appetite to deepen their understanding of computer operating systems and computer software. Linux users are no different in that respect. At the same time as developing a huge range of open source software, the Linux community fortunately has also written a vast range of documentation in the form of books, guides, tutorials, HOWTOs, man pages, and other help to aid the learning process. Some of this documentation is intended specifically for a newcomer to Linux, or those that are seeking to move away from a proprietary world and embrace freedom.
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Mozilla
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Gnu Icecat is a project to create a fully free and remixable version of Firefox. So Why do I love it so much and why do I use it over firefox? Well First I feel it is important to have a browser that is fully remixable and is not under any licensing restrictions. Second as a Free Software activist I want to only be running free software plugins and Icecat makes it a snap!
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Schools
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One Laptop Per Child Australia today has expanded its deployment plans and now intends to roll out 15,000 XO educational laptops to remote schools across Australia over the next 12 months.
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I submitted a proposal for a talk to OSCON titled “The Secret Lives of Faculty.” The Twitterable blurb went like this:
This presentation will introduce open source practitioners to the secret lives of computing faculty in higher education. We will introduce the kinds of students we teach, the curricula we teach to, and the metrics by which we are evaluated.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The developers of Ubuntu, the popular flavor of Linux that is installed on the computers in the Science Center, showed questionable judgment by picking a name that is a pretentious reference to an African philosophy. But to make matters worse, Ubuntu developers mucked up their clever release dating system with a completely ludicrous set of nicknames. Each release of Ubuntu is dated by the year and the month—9.10, for instance, came out last October—but the numbers are also paired with an alliterative combination of an obscure adjective and a rare animal, yielding such gems as Edgy Eft, Intrepid Ibex, and Jaunty Jackalope. It makes pompous names like Mac OS X Snow Leopard seem almost reasonable by comparison.
In the pantheon of bad programmer names, recursive acronyms must sit near the top. It’s a perverse concept popular with MIT alums in which one of the letters in the acronym stands for the acronym itself. A relatively benign example is the web scripting language PHP, which stands for PHP: Hyptertext Preprocessor. Older, stranger examples are the free operating system GNU (GNU’s not Unix) and related spinoffs: Cygnus (Cygnus—Your GNU Support), a now-defunct company which provided support for free software, and Wine (Wine is Not an Emulator), software which helps run windows applications on Unix.
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I’ve been keeping this journal the way it was in 2000 for historical archival reasons. If you are interested in current information, here are some up to date links.
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Version 2.1 includes a new hardware evaluation platform based on Altera’s Cyclone III FPGA with rapid software development and debugging facilitated through the Eclipse integrated development environment and GNU GCC 4.4.0 toolchain, which now features native support for the eSi-RISC architectural features.
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Releases
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An update to VirtualBox fixes a diverse list of bugs in the virtualisation software.
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VDI images of pre-installed “Open Source” Operating System distros. Pre-installed virtualbox images ready for you to explore and play with.
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Openness
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But what if increased business opportunities were only the beginning? What if 3D printing actually changed lives not just for entrepreneurs but for consumers, for citizens? Adrian Bowyer is a senior lecturer at the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Bath. Since 2005 he has been working on the Reprap, a project with a clear aim: to make a 3D printer that can reproduce itself.
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Open Access/Content
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The Internet Archive is pleased to announce an important manuscript, Homiliary on Gospels from Easter to first Sunday of Advent, as the 2,000,000th free digital text. Internet Archive has been scanning books and making them available for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public for free on archive.org since 2005.
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Programming
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Last Wednesday, at the kind invitation of the folks from Eclipse, I had the opportunity to sit with more august company – Justin Erenkrantz (Apache), Mårten Mickos (Eucalyptus), and Jason van Zyl (Maven/Sonatype) – on a panel charged with debating the future of open source. Among the questions posed to us was this: is the future of open source going to be based on communities such as Apache and Eclipse or will it be based on companies that sell open source?
My reply? Neither. It’s Github.
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Standards/Consortia
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OpenOffice’s default format is ODF only.
Its Writer saves as “odt – open document text“.
Its Spreadsheet saves as “ods – open document spreadsheet“
Its Impress saves as “odp – open document presentation“
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HOSEF conducts a monthly ‘Open Source Pizza’ so that people can learn more about what is happening with Free and Open Source Software. Thіѕ presentation is about the adoption of the Open Document Format by the University of Hawaii’s College of Education.
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Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said there is a 70 percent chance Apple will roll out a mobile search engine tailored for its iPhone within the next five years. As the search provider for the iPhone, Google sees what iPhone users are searching for, which can help it tailor software and services for its own mobile smartphones. This competitive advantage has not gone unnoticed by Apple. Building its own iPhone-centric search engine would help Apple shield Google from its App Store data, Munster said in a March 30 research note.
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COMPUTER MAKER ACER has changed horses and is backing AMD with the announcement that its 6000 series servers will be powered by Magny-Cours based Opteron processors.
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Bob Gilbert has resigned as chairman of Nominet, the non-profit company in charge of the .uk domain registry, it was announced today.
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A grand jury in San Francisco has indicted a former executive of a Taiwan-based color display tube (CDT) manufacturing firm for his alleged participation in a global conspiracy to fix prices of the tubes used in computer monitors and other devices.
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In 2008, I published an article in the Guardian questioning whether chiropractors should be treating various childhood conditions. I was then sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association, which helped ignite the debate over libel reform, and whether the courts are stifling scientific debate.
For the last two years, my legal position seemed pretty grim, largely owing to the state of our libel laws. Yesterday, however, the court of appeal ruled in my favour by agreeing that my article is about recklessness, not dishonesty, and that I could use the more flexible defence of fair comment. Suddenly it seems I can mount a successful defence. Does this mean that libel reform is no longer necessary?
Unfortunately, the English libel system is still notoriously hostile to journalists, and the case for reform remains as strong as ever. Indeed, my case alone demonstrates many of the problems.
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As things stand, nothing happens in isolation online. But Wayne Crookes (right), ex-Green Party of Canada organizer and financial backer, wants to change that.
He says linking to an article is the same as publishing it and that linking to an allegedly libellous article can, therefore, be the same as defamation.
He says that’s what happened to him and so he wants to freeze the net solid, turning it into a sterile, featureless, colourless landscape.
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Science
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April 2010 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. To honor the vast accomplishments of this telescopic pioneer in space-based astronomy, NASA and Abrams Books have collaborated with the illustrated book “Hubble: A Journey Through Space and Time.”
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A Russian spacecraft blasted off from a facility in Kazakhstan Friday on a mission to the International Space Station.
The launch of the Soyuz TMA-18 comes three days before the launch of NASA’s space shuttle Discovery, which is also bound for the space station.
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By disrupting brain activity in a particular region, neuroscientists can sway people’s views of moral situations.
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Security/Aggression
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POLICE chiefs are facing the threat of a High Court privacy action over a nationwide network of cameras that is being used to take up to 14m photographs of motorists every day.
The images are being stored daily on a huge “Big Brother” database linked to automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) technology to track vehicles’ movements.
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Some of these accidents were disclosed for the first time only in this report. The DOD explained that these nuclear accidents “may or may not [have been] divulged at the time depending upon the possibility of public hazard or alarm.” Trust me, if I had lived at any of the above locations, I would have preferred that the government “divulge” the fact that a nuclear accident had occurred.
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Environment
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China is ramping up preparations for typhoons, dust storms and other extreme weather disasters as part of a 10-year plan to predict and prevent the worst impacts of climate change.
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A Greenpeace report questions the degree to which the Apple iPad and mobile devices that similarly rely on cloud computing are contributing to global warming. It also calls on IT leaders such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft to take the lead in pursuing critical climate-change goals.
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Greenpeace is calling on technology giants like Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook to power their data centres with renewable energy sources.
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Except when you actually look up the numbers. Computing accounts for a bit less than 3% of U.S. energy usage, according to Lawrence Livermore Labs. The global IT industry as a whole generates about 2% of global CO2 emissions.
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Greenpeace has lambasted Dell’s decision to “backtrack” on its commitments to remove hazardous chemicals from all of its products.
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Prosecutors today indicted an anti-whaling activist from New Zealand on charges that could lead to a lengthy prison term after he boarded a Japanese harpoon boat to protest at the ship’s whale-hunting expedition in Antarctic seas.
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What if you could light your entire building using no electricity, or artificial lights – but just the natural light from the sun? Conventional sky-lights do this well in certain types of single-story spaces, but are not very adaptable, powerful, and often have problems with excessive solar heat gain and heat loss. Enter the Sundolier, a powerful sunlight transport system that’s like putting a solar robot on your roof to pump sunlight indoors! The manufacturer claims a single Sundolier unit can provide enough light to illuminate a 1000-2500 sq. ft. area without any other sources.
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Finance
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Today, the Real Economy Project of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released an assessment of the total cost to taxpayers of the Wall Street bailout. CMD concludes that multiple federal agencies have disbursed $4.6 trillion dollars in supporting the financial sector since the meltdown in 2007-2008. Of that, $2 trillion is still outstanding. Our tally shows that the Federal Reserve is the real source of the bailout funds.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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What has this got to do with Alice Waters and Chez Panisse? Francesca Vietor, the Executive Director of the Chez Panisse Foundation, whose mission is to promote Edible Schoolyard organic gardens, is also the Vice President of the Public Utilities Commission. The PUC is refusing to permanently end their sludge give-away, nor agreeing to clean up the gardens already contaminated with the sewage sludge, as the Organic Consumers Association and the Center for Food Safety have asked.
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As we suspected, the vast majority of bailout funding came directly from the Fed with no Congressional vote or oversight. TARP represents only about 10% of the total amount disbursed by the government. While much of this funding is in the form of loans, as we have reported in the past, little information has been revealed about what the Fed has accepted for collateral for these loans. This makes it very hard for the public, policymakers and the press to make independent assessments of our chances of being paid back. The study was picked up by CNN and other news outlets.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The latest Pew Research Center Internet & American Life Project report is out: “The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future” surveys 895 tech experts on the way that technology will change institutions (government, business, nonprofits, schools) in the next ten years.
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When Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion school district installed remote control anti-theft software on student laptops, it had no intention of dragging Congress into a national debate about wiretapping laws and webcams—but that’s exactly what it got (in addition to some unwanted FBI attention and a major lawsuit). The key question: should the school’s alleged actions be made illegal under US wiretap law?
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If the messages in EFF’s inbox today are anything to go by, a lot of people are upset and angry — with good reason — over Sony’s announcement that it is going to disable a feature that allows people to run GNU/Linux and other operating systems on their PlayStation 3 consoles.
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President Gerald Ford secretly authorized the use of warrantless domestic wiretaps for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes soon after coming into office, according to a declassified document.
The Dec. 19, 1974 White House memorandum, marked Top Secret/Exclusively Eyes Only and signed by Ford, gave then-Attorney General William B. Saxbe and his successors in office authorization “to approve, without prior judicial warrants, specific electronic surveillance within the United States which may be requested by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Orchestras are moving into these areas largely out of necessity. The commercial classical recording industry, as it was configured in its late-20th-century heyday, is vastly diminished, and there is little money to be made in the business. The New York Philharmonic, for instance, a giant of the recording industry in the Leonard Bernstein years, has not had a long-term contract with a commercial label for a decade.
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On February 26, 2010, the National People’s Congress passed the second amendment to the Copyright Law. Only two articles of the Copyright Law have been amended, and the changes will take effect on April 1, 2010.
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Yes, there are legal aggregation sites – such as Google news – which contain short snippets of news stories. If newspapers want their content removed from these sites they can do so easily by simply changing the data contained in something called the robots.txt file. Google or Yahoo will no longer index their pages.
But the newspapers do not want to do this, because legal aggregators drive a great deal of traffic to them. And in any event, they do not need a new right to stop the practice. There are also sites that do illegally copy the entire contents, or the entire article. Their behaviour is already illegal under copyright law. (And in any event has a small effect on revenues. Do you read the FT stories at some shady site or at the FT?)
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There cannot be a free culture license because a license is an intrinsic impediment to cultural freedom (being a submission to copyright, let alone fraught with incompatibility and re-licensing issues), so it would be counter-productive and, despite the best of intentions, hypocritical to promote licenses as a means of achieving cultural emancipation.
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We’re happy to announce that we’re launching the public comment and discussion period for our new patent tools: the Research Non-Assertion Pledge and the Public Patent License. We invite you to join the discussion at our public wiki. There you can read about these tools, catch up on hot topics of interest to the community, or join our public discussion list to contribute your thoughts and suggestions.
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As mass file-sharing litigation lawsuits go inter-continental, not everyone is proud to be associated with this type of work. Lawyers Tilly Bailey & Irvine in the UK have been hard at work this month, editing large chunks of their own Wikipedia page in an attempt to hide their involvement and also earning themselves a copyright infringement warning.
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Lord Mandelson today accused the bankers of being the “unacceptable face of capitalism”. Isn’t this somewhat hypocritical, given that he wants the Internet industry to spend £500 million on an electronic fence to protect the rich in the music industry (ie, the Digital Economy Bill)? Is this acceptable when the country is virtually bankrupt?
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As the practice of hunting down alleged file-sharers and then issuing legal threats in order to force money out of them gathers pace, questions are continually raised over the quality of the technical systems used to gather the evidence. According to information on a rent-a-coder site, such a system was bought in 2008 for between $250 and $750.
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1. Does the Labour Party have a Licence to Use this image for this purpose? This is a publicity (PR) picture – a PR Licence does not normally permit use for party political advertising. We won’t know unless and until someone produces a Licence to Use, and whether that Licence includes advertising. If not, they are in breach of copyright.
2. If they do have such a Licence, from whom did they obtain it? Monastic Productions, Kudos Film & Television or BBC Worldwide?
3. Why was it granted? On the evidence of this picture, the BBC almost certainly holds rights in all publicity images from the series. The BBC is prohibited by its charter from engaging in partisan political activity.
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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The government has published a new draft of a controversial clause in the Digital Economy bill, in an effort to ease its progress through parliament.
The Liberal Democrats said they will oppose any plans to rush the Digital Economy bill into law.
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And note this in your diary, too: the PublicACTA conference, being held in Wellington on 10 April, just days before the (secret) ACTA talks open in Wellington.
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Music House — HQ for a number of the UK music industry’s trade groups — was in a lock-down situation this lunchtime as an Open Rights Group Flash Mob descended, protesting against the Digital Economy Bill.
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No specification of what form a notice requesting blocking should take (a la DMCA) so an ISP can at least find the right site (or part of a site) and know the request comes from genuine rightsholders, with genuine grievances, and not A N Other. No need to notify a site if it is blocked without court order. And no provision for a site to go to court and demand it be unblocked or at least demand to know why it has been blocked (“stay up” a la DMCA “put back” . A model for these already existed. Why has it been pointedly ignored in favour of a profusion of “mays” and “likely”s?
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On Thursday, our ‘Police’ visited the offices of the BPI, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties, and UK Music, and presented them with notice that the Digital Economy Bill is disconnected, from democracy, human rights, public opinion and sound business sense.
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Imagine there was a little tinpot dictatorship somewhere. Let’s call it a Banana Ice-Cream Republic.
[...]
Which is why the change in the law made so many of the townspeople very angry. They didn’t believe that banana ice cream stealing was going on at the levels that are claimed. They didn’t believe that the banana ice cream industry was losing as much revenue to stealing as the industry claimed. They didn’t believe that ice cream vans had much of a future, they thought that there are better ways to make and deliver ice cream. Some of them didn’t think that ice cream distribution was all that important anyway.
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Cruikshank introduced the Fred Figglehorn character in videos on the JKL Productions channel he started on YouTube with his cousins, Jon and Katie Smet. He set up the Fred channel in October 2005. By April 2009, the channel had over 1,000,000 subscribers, making it the first YouTube channel to hit one million subscribers and the most subscribed channel at the time.
Over a million subscribers. And creator Lucas Cruikshank is 16 years old. He calls his channel “programming for kids by kids”. By kids. Let’s remember that.
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If you feel really passionate about something, take the time to step back and look at things from the opposite perspective.
Now the Digital Economy Bill is something I feel passionate about, which is why, as we approach Tuesday 6th April 2010, I’ve been writing a post a day on the subject for the past few days.
Video: Staying in touch with nature by sharing.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.03.10
Posted in News Roundup at 9:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I do think that the time of proprietary operating systems are coming to a close. There are too many free and open source solutions available and the most important part of any computing system, the data, can be easily transferred between them. So while windows keeps trying to entice the public with eye candy, MacOS keeps its hardware to itself and AmigaOS keeps with the unfortunate business decisions, the average Joe Blo and SOHOs will look around for alternatives. Enterprise businesses are like large religions. Stubborn and take several thousand years to make a minor change.
So the day comes and Linux has toppled windows off of its pedestal. Linus Torvalds is as revered as Bill Gates was and Richard Stallman is throwing chairs when he hears about the new, up and coming operating system. Linux is pre-installed on just about every single computer sold and the whole computing industry is geared around providing service and support for Linux. I just wonder if we, as Linux supporters, will be treating the advocates of the new prodigy operating system the same way windows supporters treat us today.
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Audiocasts
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This week on the show: Sony disables Linux on the PS3 for good, SCO on the brink of death, Google’s plans for Froyo, Paul Frields to step down as FPL, new Gnome icons and a huge pale on Fab’s fart.
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Doug Smith joins the FLOSS crew to talk about the ACM/IEEE Super Computing Challenge in New Orleans.
Guest: Doug Smith.
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Desktop
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Well, I finally heard back from System76, and they told me something that changed the whole landscape. They had ONE Darter Ultra left!!!
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Ken Starks
As founder and Lead Director of The HeliOS Project, Ken Starks spearheads the effort to gather decommissioned or broken computers and refurbishes them. These computers are then given to Austin-area children who normally would not be able to afford one. To date, The HeliOS Project has placed more than 1000 computers.
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Appearance
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of four separate stable kernels: 2.6.27.46, 2.6.31.13, 2.6.32.11, and 2.6.33.2.
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Applications
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Google Docs is maybe the king among Web-based collaborative editing and document sharing applications, but the productivity suite from the all-mighty giant is not the only fish in the sea. An open source Web-based solution, co-ment provides an efficient document collaboration environment which offers everything you need to edit, annotate, and share documents. co-ment is not just a mere Web-based word processor, though. While you can use co-ment as a no-frills Web-based word processor, it’s designed for easy and efficient document annotation.
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Light and Fast Download Accelerator for Linux: Some of you may have used a download accelerator through a browser add-on but are not contented with the download speed gain. Perhaps you should try a light and fast standalone and desktop-based download manager that could help give considerable increase in download speed.
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Ardour
Released under the GPL, Ardour is a hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation application that runs on Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OSX. The application aims to provide a digital audio workstation suitable for professional use with features such as recording, mixing, editing and mastering. Ardour relies heavily on plugins ot get some features to work.
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Compatibility Layer
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Some Linux users insist that anything you can do on Windows, you can do better on Linux. While there’s some truth to that, many of us have Windows applications that make completely leaving Windows close to impossible. Thats where CodeWeavers latest version of CrossOver Linux comes in.
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The Wine development release 1.1.42 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
* Support for shared 32/64-bit setups.
* Dwarf debug info support for better backtraces.
* More standard actions supported in MSI.
* Support for TIFF image format in WinCodecs.
* A number of Direct3D improvements.
* Shell fixes for better Internet Explorer support.
* Various bug fixes.
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Instructionals
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If you or your in-need friends or relatives can’t boot into your Windows desktop, or you can’t actually do anything once you’re into it, booting up a live Ubuntu system from a USB thumb drive, or off a burned CD, can save your system, recover files, and pull off other miracles.
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So last night I figured it was time to give Arch a spin on the Meso. Next to Slackware I have a real soft spot for Arch. It’s a great distrobution with fantastic documentation and a wonderful community.
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Red Hat Family
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Options traders demonstrated confidence in Qualcomm Inc., Micron Technology Inc. and Red Hat Inc., selling “put” options in all three technology companies in hopes the stocks stay strong in coming weeks.
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Debian Family
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Today marks the release of version 8.5 of SimplyMepis, the popular Debian based distribution that focuses on the K desktop environment. We decided to take it for a run and see if there have been any significant changes since the previous release.
[...]
Overall Impressions:
Pro’s:
* Based on Debian which means the package selection is quite good.
* Plenty of configuration utilities for those uncomfortable with the console.
* System feels stable.
* Pre-installed browser plugins for Firefox save users some time tracking them all down.
Con’s:
* Visually unappealing.
* Welcome screen doesn’t start at first bootup which negates any value it might add.
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Ubuntu
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Kubuntu was my favorite distribution for a time, back during the KDE 3.5 series. I was a KDE user all the way back to 2.0. Before Kubuntu I used mainly Debian unstable on the desktop, and Debian stable on servers. Way before that, Red Hat and Slackware. Red Hat 5 was my first Linux, on actual 3.5″ diskettes. Somewheres in there I used Libranet, which was a super-nice Debian derivative, but sadly it died with the passing of its founder.
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Ubuntu just released the beta 1 version of their new LTS (Long Term Support) Distribution, Lucid 10.04. The theme is based on “light” and it looks great. Here’s what to expect and what not to expect when you first install this new flavor of Ubuntu:
The first thing you notice when you launch the live CD is Ubuntu’s new logo. Don’t worry, they still have the basic logo but they added some new typography and use the logo like a registration mark. They went with the black desktop theme for their default which is fine, but they moved something around. The window manager buttons went from the right side to the left, which is difficult at first if you are not used to it.
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Ubuntu’s Lucid Lynx (10.04) isn’t out yet but Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, and his team look toward the October 2010 (10.10) release they’re calling Maverick Meerkat. On his personal blog this morning, Mark wrote, “It’s time to put our heads together to envision ‘the perfect 10′.” Mark, himself, has a new vision for the upcoming release already knowing that 10.04 is almost “in the can.” His new vision is one of lightness-lightness in footprint, in deployment and in support requirements. A grand vision but can he do it?
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Phones
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Windows Mobile devices are very versatile. They can (sort of) run Android, Ubuntu, plus other flavors of Linux. In this video, it appears that someone has figured out how to run Maemo on an HTC HD2, or it’s very possible that they are simply using a VNC client to access an Nokia N900 (which is a Maemo device) through the HD2. What do you think?
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Android is looking good, no doubt about it. What has started as a Linux-based OS for handsets (i.e., mobile phones) has now rapidly spread to different devices. There are small tablet computers like Archos’ Internet tablets and Enso’s zenPad, e-book readers like Barnes & Noble’s nook and Spring Designs Alex, and even a netbook – Acer’s Aspire One D250 (actually dual boots with Windows 7).
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Sub-notebooks
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The lightweight computers run on Ubuntu and come pre-loaded with IBM’s office productivity suites built on OpenOffice.org code.
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Tablets
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The arrival of JooJoo seemed kind of fishy because 1) it was April Fool’s Day, 2) there was so much buzz on the blogosphere about this weekend’s release of the iPad that it just had to be a joke and 3) Engadget said it was so overwhelmed with iPad coverage that it wouldn’t have its own review out until next week – and readers should not expect a side-by-side comparison to the iPad right away.
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Linux developers should be able to build applications for this platform without too much trouble, since the OpenTablet’s “Flash applications may invoke class modules that are written in C/C++” and its “application hosting framework controls the loading/unloading of applications.” I can also see the OpenTablet doing well in businesses since “The system is fully managed with a device management system client that allows the server to monitor the device, provision the device, and send notifications (e.g., firmware updates or domain-specific messages such as peak pricing notifications for energy).” That means that, unlike the iPad, it should be easy to manage OpenTablet in a corporate network.
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MyPaint is a lightweight, easy-to-use open source painting application that you might not have heard of before. Unlike some of the more mature open source raster-graphics applications (such as Krita or Gimp), MyPaint doesn’t try to do everything: it’s not a photo editor, it doesn’t bother with paths, geometric shapes, text manipulation, or fancy masking options. Instead, it focuses on one and only one use: painting.
MyPaint is built around use with pressure-sensitive graphics tablets, and puts natural-media-simulation first. There is only one “tool” per se, the paintbrush with which you draw directly onto the image. However, you can choose from dozens of different profiles with which to use that brush, simulating everything from charcoal to pencil, to ink to watercolor. Each has a different behavior, including the way it responds to pressure, speed, changes in direction, and interacting with pixels already on the canvas.
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The Romanian Ministry of Education and Research has launched the “The Teacher – Educational Software Developer” strategic project that is to be implemented between September 2009 – September 2011 (24 months). The target of the project is three million pupils around the country.
In the project, eighty experts will train 1,500 pre-university teachers from all over the country to develop the competences that they need in order to create their own educational software applications and to improve their ability to use teaching-learning interactive methods.
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Mozilla
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To cut this post short, I would like to introduce you to my “new” favorite and best Firefox Add-On of the month called Cool Previews!
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Business
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It’s April 2nd, so the Apache Software Foundation’s 2010 April Fools’ joke is over. Here is why I liked it a lot. It represents a hypothetical: What if the ASF and its projects could be bought? Or, if not bought, then put under control or strong influence of corporate interests like in traditional open source consortia? It would put the very software infrastructure we take for granted under partisan control and there is no guarantee that those partisan or corporate interests would be in the interest of the public good.
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BSD
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this clip show some of the games/apps/etc that come pre installed with pc-bsd
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FSF/FSFE/GNU
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The SFLC’s founding director, Eben Moglen, said in his talk that the movement has reached “a point of inflection.” The challenge it will face in “Free Software: Phase Two” is to explain the relationship between privacy, the integrity of human personality, and free software. The movement will have to figure out how to convince people they need a solution to a problem they don’t know exists, he said. “It’s not about we’re done. The war is over. It’s about, what’s next.”
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Licensing
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GPL enforcement is successful in Europe. In several court decisions and out of court settlements the license conditions of the GPL have been successfully enforced. In particular, embedded systems are the main focus of such compliance activities. The article describes the practice of enforcement activities and the legal prerequisites under the application of German law.
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Programming
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Ruby Summer of Code has announced it raised $100,000 in three days, allowing it to sponsor up to twenty interns. The Ruby Summer of Code is modelled on Google’s Summer of Code, but focusses on the Ruby community.
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Standards/Consortia
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This week the German and the Austrian team >published a press release about our DFD activity (at the moment only in German)). The news that we and FFII will give our this years DFD price to Deutschlandradio (Germany) and Radio Orange 94.0 for their use of Ogg-Vorbis already got good media coverage on Gulli, Golem, Heise, Netzpolitik, OSZine, and Pro-Linux.
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Just say no to Word, Excel attachments say free and open software campaigners
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Microsoft and Apple formats are against freedom, says FSF
Documents, spreadsheets and presentations sent in Microsoft Word or Excel native formats, or documents created in Apple’s iWorks, are proprietary and incompatible with freedom and an accessible web, the group says.
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Prosecutors said that excluding Pfizer would most likely lead to Pfizer’s collapse, with collateral consequences: disrupting the flow of Pfizer products to Medicare and Medicaid recipients, causing the loss of jobs including those of Pfizer employees who were not involved in the fraud, and causing significant losses for Pfizer shareholders.
“We have to ask whether by excluding the company [from Medicare and Medicaid], are we harming our patients,” said Lewis Morris of the Department of Health and Human Services.
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Our review of The Settlers 7 concluded that fans of city building, micromanagement RTS games could do worse than check it out, with particular reference to the robust community features of online multiplayer.
Sounds great! I’m sure we’re all going to love it! There’s just one problem – most of us can’t, thanks to ongoing issues with Ubisoft’s controversial new “always online” DRM.
SourceCode Season 2 – Episode 4: Greed/Water (2005)
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced that its affiliate organization, LPI-Nigeria, has successfully completed a program of free Linux training for youth in an effort to promote workplace development of skilled Open Source professionals. Lifeforte International High School (Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria), the LPI-Nigeria affiliate, has undertaken a two year program of training, Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) exam lab events, and other special initiatives with the country’s National Youth Service Corps and government agencies to promote this goal.
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With GNU/Linux, you only need one copy of an app running per terminal server to serve N users simultaneously, greatly increasing how many processes and users one server can accommodate. With VDI and that other OS, each user needs several times as much RAM to get the job done and you have a licence fee or more per user. GNU/Linux thin clients are the way to go. You can use bare X on secure network or NX or X over SSH on a normal network.
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At the time of publishing, an official X Server 1.8 release announcement has yet to appear, but you can find this new release tagged in Git.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Loomer have released Sequent in a wealth of standalone and plug-in formats: Windows EXE, VST, and RTAS; Mac OS X Audio Unit, VST, RTAS, and App; and Linux VST and executable. Sequent is a modular multi-effects unit that loomer says is the ideal tool for mangling audio on stage or in the studio. Here’s some details directly from Loomer…
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The new Chrome 5 is available in beta now for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, not that most Chrome users will ever have to know the version number if Google has anything to do with it.
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Pagestream is a very powerful DTP tool. Although this was just a cursory glance, you should easily see how powerful this tool is. We will revisit this tool and dive deeper into how it is used and some cool tips and tricks with its usage on a later date. Until then, enjoy Pagestream!
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Instructionals
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Games
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Previously, we held a contest here of GamingBits.com for a closed beta key giveaway on the game Heroes of Newerth (PC, Mac, Linux). Although we ran out of beta keys a long time ago, the good news is that S2Games has just announced Heroes of Newerth will be entering open beta on March 31st and plans to release quite a few new updates as well. This means that beginning tomorrow, March 31st at 4PM PST, anyone can sign up to play the wildly addicting Heroes of Newerth game.
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OpenTTD 1.0 has just been released! And do you know what this means? A whole new era of gaming fun.
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BrainParty is extremely popular on the App Store at $0.99, packing 36 fun puzzle games into a single download and charting just how much gray matter you’re packing. To share the fun with an even bigger audience, its developer has decided to release the source code under the GPLv3 license.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Time has came for first beta release for 2010 Spring version of Mandriva Linux. It’s now available through 32 and 64 DVD isos, as well as live-CD isos for GNOME and KDE on public mirrors
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Debian Family
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SimplyMEPIS 8.5 is ready for the spotlight with all the bugs and rough edges remaining in the final release candidate being ironed out. No new features have been introduced since RC3, but SimplyMEPIS 8.5 has plenty to offer users who want a great Linux experience right out of the box. SimplyMEPIS 8.5 is based on Debian Lenny, the latest stable release, but also comes with newer packages when the developers believed they were stable enough or offered enough improvements to justify their inclusion. The new release also marks the transition from the KDE 3.5 desktop environment to the newer KDE 4 software compilation.
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“As Ubuntu Server continues its growth in enterprise environments, GroundWork’s Ubuntu-powered virtual appliance is a great solution for those looking to measure, monitor, and manage their mission critical Ubuntu infrastructure,” said John Pugh, Software Partner Manager, at Canonical. “And the virtual appliance form factor has added benefits for those considering cloud computing.”
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Variants
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Linux Mint developers are proud to announce the release of the Xfce version of Linux Mint 8. This latest release features the lightweight Xfce desktop environment and has most of the nautilus features in built.
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Vyatta, an open source networking software and hardware specialist, has announced the release of version 6.0 of its Linux-based router and firewall software. The latest release of the networking distribution features a number of changes, including IPv6 and firewall enhancements, Netflow logging and analysis, and quality of service (QoS) improvements.
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Linksys
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Going back to its core business of flogging network equipment, the firm launched a bunch of Linksys branded wireless routers. All the units support 802.11N but the most interesting of the bunch is the E2100L which has a Linux OS underpinning it. Linksys equipment became popular with hardware enthusiasts once the WRT54 firmware was hacked and spawned many router distributions, all based on Linux.
The firm realises that not everyone who purchases its kit will know, or particularly care, whether it is running Linux or not.
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For Linux users, Linksys will offer the E2100L router ($119) with a USB port for added storage, enabling Linux to build apps and hacks on top.
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While it’s not yet clear how Linux is implemented in the E2100L, Linksys routers have long been popular with homebrew router firmware developers, so it’s likely that the E2100L will cater to a do-it-yourself crowd.
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Phones
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The Motorola VE66 is a slider phone with a difference, offering as it does a wide array of useful functionality whilst also offering a Linux-based operating system. The handset measures 103 mm x 49 mm wide and is 15 mm thick, whilst weighing 121 g in weight.
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Nokia
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When it was first announced last summer, the Nokia N900 was Nokia’s answer to a smartphone market that seemed to be progressing rapidly without it. Not only was it highly specced – with a TI OMAP 3430 SoC – but it was the first smartphone to run the Maemo Linux-based operating system developed by Nokia.
So without further ado, let’s have a look at it.
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The MeeGo society, created by Intel and Nokia, on Thursday released the MeeGo allotment infrastructure and working arrangement base to developers. Imageries which were released include Intel Atom-based netbooks; ARM-based Nokia N900; and Intel Atom-based phones operating on the Moorestown chip.
Imad Sousou, Co-chair of the MeeGo Technical Steering Group, said that the images that had been downloaded were presently boot into workstation because user understandings for them have not yet been released. In the upcoming days, the imageries will boot from a USB stick or be straight sparked on the gadgets from developers’ Linux Computers.
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Android
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Appcelerator, maker of the open-source Titanium cross-platform mobile, desktop and Web development platform, has released a new survey of its developer base that indicates that, while still hot, developer interest in Apple’s iPad is slightly on the wane from earlier this year, while interest in the Google Android platform continues to grow.
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MIPS Technologies, the microprocessor core licensor, has identified penetration of the cellular handset market as its top corporate priority.
“It’s at the top of my agenda,” Sandeep Vij, who took over as CEO of MIPS last January, tells Electronics Weekly, “two customers are building chips for Android handsets based on MIPS – one in China and one in EMEA.”
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Librarians and strategists at Simon Fraser University (SFU) have collaborated with a team of middle-sized libraries to expand the open-source CUFTS Researcher suite of tools to include an Electronic Resources Management (ERM) system. This paper focuses on: the development and implementation of the CUFTS ERM; interoperability between CUFTS ERM and integrated library systems (Millennium); impact of the ERM on acquisitions, serials, and collections workflows and staffing at SFU Library and the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) Library.
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Registration opened last week for the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON,) the premier free and open source software confence in Columbia, South Carolina. It’s a great way to both educate and involve yourself, or your organization, in free and open software and technology.
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Sitting in a restaurant, the designer and organizer of an upcoming Open Source conference saw tweets flashing on his screen. Within five minutes, the hashtag #pdxboom emerged. And so, Beels waded in, creating a Google map for people to mark where they were when they heard the bomb and how it sounded.
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With the official start of the 2010 Major League Baseball season just days away, I thought it would be a great time to talk about two baseball related open source projects that I have on GitHub. These projects are Gameday API, and Baseball Tracker. Gameday API is a Ruby API that makes it easy for you to get live MLB statistics direct from the MLB servers that power their own Gameday application.
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BusinessWeek Special Report
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We just published a collection of articles on the state of play within open source design and innovation. It’s an interesting bunch of pieces, with op eds from the likes of Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst, who makes the case that Toyota should open source its cars’ software systems, and San José State innovation and entrepreneurship professor Joel West, who explains precisely why many big companies find collaboration and sharing control so challenging.
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While most people have heard of Linux, an open-source community founded by individual programmers, increasingly companies are sponsoring their own communities and supplying development resources, infrastructure, and initial technology in the hope of attracting individuals and other businesses to help them create products and services for potential users. Sponsors also set rules for developing and using cooperatively developed software, to align the community to corporate objectives and avoid time-consuming negotiations inherent in shared governance.
But the tighter their control, the harder it is to attract outside participation. Sharing seems particularly challenging for large companies that are used to having their own way and running their own ecosystems. In the past five years, three big companies have created new open-source projects and communities to adapt Linux for use in mobile communication devices. None would be mistaken for a grassroots democracy.
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Organizations that embrace “open” will innovate better, cheaper, and faster. Here are three things to think about when implementing open-design principles
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Mozilla
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Software developers have dominated the open source community, leading to the creation of a tremendous volume of free code used to build the foundations of Web sites and browsers. Less attention has been paid to how they look and how easy they are to use. Design often gets short shrift in open source.
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The keystrokes are based on Emacs, a somewhat complicated but powerful text editor for Unix-based systems such as Linux. Some commands allow for rapidly skipping around a Web page or among open tabs, while others offer mode-sensitive editing features that work only while in a text entry area, for example.
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Mozilla estimates that Firefox now handles almost 30 per cent of worldwide web access.
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Unlike Google, Mozilla says it’s not committed to the idea of integrating Adobe Flash with its web browser.
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SaaS
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IELO, Mandriva, and Nexedi this week joined forces and formed the Free Cloud Alliance, which will work to push open source products for cloud computing.
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At this morning’s Bunker Session, the central question of the relationship between cloud computing and open-source software was answered early and often. The one thing everybody agreed upon is that most clouds of any appreciable scale are built on open-source software and, in fact, might not even exist without it. As to whether there’s any money to be made with open source, however, there was enough contention to go around.
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Databases
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Pharmaceutical distributor has found the Ingres database better value and more forward moving since its ‘commercial open source’ makeover
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Ingres Corporation and OpTech have entered into a strategic reseller agreement to bring open source solutions to government agencies across North America.
As part of the agreement OpTech, a systems integrator (SI), will promote Ingres Database and encourage migrations to Ingres Database from Oracle and Sybase IQ. The Ingres partner program offers ISVs and SIs the opportunity to innovate and profit, while building a loyal and satisfied customer base.
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3. Open source. Open source solutions are popular and cutting-edge. For example, Hadoop, an open source solution for scalable and distributed data storage and data processing, is growing in popularity as it has shown the ability to handle massive data while using cheap commodity hardware (computers) similar to cloud environments. R, an open source analytic solution, is widely considered one of the most robust analytic tools available. Given that both solutions are open source, both communities work happily together to integrate. Other open source solutions that may help with additional tasks include the data integration toolkit Jitterbit and traditional open-source databases such as MySQL.
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Oracle
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While there is no reason for Oracle to upset the Java community at this point, I highly doubt the company will continue with certain projects that are either direct open-source competition, or that require too much additional effort to be worth it for Oracle to continue.
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CMS
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By March 15, just a month before DrupalCon San Francisco, Robert Douglass of Acquia (news, site) reports that there were over 1700 registered attendees, which exceeds the sum total of all previous DrupalCons. The conference program was also announced for the San Francisco Drupalcon.
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Business
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Alfresco Software, the leader in open source ECM today announced the closing of its 2009 fiscal year ending February 28th with 61 percent year-over-year revenue growth.
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Alfresco reported both record fourth quarter earnings and record revenues for 2009. Growth is up 61% compared to last year. We look at these results with a grain of salt but in Alfresco’s case it increased its staff 29 percent and also added 300 customer, including companies such as Cisco, Merck and the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development.
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Most people think of Pentaho as an open-source business intelligence vendor. In fact, the company’s most popular product is ETL software. Pentaho now hopes to trade on that popularity with an integrated development environment (IDE) that blends data integration and business intelligence.
The idea behind Pentaho Data Integration 4.0, announced this week, is speeding development of BI applications by combining ETL, data modeling and data visualization into a single IDE. Pentaho’s Kettle project has long provided the ETL part of that equation, and it has been notable success.
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Releases
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Tiger Shore Management Ltd, the operating company behind the OpenRate open source mediation and rating engine for use in telecommunications, utilities and logistics environments, today announced the release of the long awaited Version 1.1 of their flagship product. The OpenRate V1.1 “Convergent” release consolidates the improvements made during 2009 and the early part of 2010 in the real time processing framework, meaning that OpenRate now offers a true “configure once, use anywhere” high performance charging engine.
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OpenRate is a fully open source product, professionally supported with a dual licensing strategy that makes it accessible to both end user organizations and service providers or resellers.
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Some people love ‘em and others hate ‘em. Now you can play with streamgraphs (seen here and here) yourself, whatever side you might be on. Lee Byron has made the code available on Github, under a BSD license.
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Government
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Now it appears some of that transparency may be taking root. A California-based nonprofit is creating a suite of open source election software that lets users view and modify the underlying computer code. Proponents of the approach say exposing the code used by e-voting machines allows a worldwide community of experts to evaluate the security of the code and make beneficial modifications.
In October 2009, the nonprofit Open Source Digital Voting (OSDV) Foundation made the computer code for its election system available on the Web. The foundation also plans to make other open-source election tools available this year through its Trust the Vote initiative.
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Now, open source advocates are teaming with tech industry giants and some electronic voting systems manufacturers to usher in a fundamental change to the way Americans cast their ballots. But it won’t to be easy. There are still many reasons voters conjure to be skeptical of electronic voting. And the electronic voting systems market is populated by a small, and powerful group of manufacturers who still deploy proprietary technology to keep a competitive edge.
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Once President Obama arrived at the White House, it was clear that the new administration had greater demands for connecting with constituents and using rich media. “We couldn’t keep up with what the new media team wanted,” Klause said.
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National
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Redington Value, the value-added distribution division of Redington Gulf, along with its Kuwait partner, KuwaitNet, discussed the importance of open source solutions to boost performance, reliability, security and cost- effectiveness among regional businesses, at the recently concluded conference ‘An Opportunity to re-invent IT with open source during the current economical challenges’. The event revolved around how open source solutions is an option that IT decision makers should consider as part of their IT strategy, and how it can unlock the potential of existing IT infrastructure. This was presented in context of Red Hat, a leading open source vendor.
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Redington Value along with its Kuwait partner, KuwaitNet, discussed the importance of open source solutions to boost performance, reliability, security and cost- effectiveness among regional businesses, at the recently concluded conference ‘An Opportunity to re-invent IT with open source during the current economical challenges’.
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Open Source software (OSS) is standards based software that is free to acquire and free to modify. OSS runs the mission critical servers for global organisations like Google and IBM and is generally acknowledged to be less error-strewn and more secure than conventional proprietary software. Traditionally OSS occupied the uber-geek territories of operating system (Linux) and infrastructure (Apache Web server) but is increasingly available for line-of-business applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
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Licensing
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This is the 4th article in a series giving a practical overview of intellectual property rights, targeted towards normal people like you. This one talks about the GPL (The GNU General Public License) and other such”open source” software licenses, and what does a regular business need to be careful about with regard to such licenses.
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Openness
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Many of those involved in steampunk do take a political stance by championing open source software, transparency and the use of licences that let anyone rip mix and burn what they have done.
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I found out about www.openprosthetics.org in March, and immediately fell in love. NPR described the creator, Jonathan Kuniholm’s mission, as an “open-source collaboration that makes its innovations available to anyone.”
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The free software community, along with the commercial ecosystem which surrounds it, is widely seen as having pointed the way toward successful, collaborative development of common resources. We have seen a number of attempts to port the free software model to other areas of endeavor. Open content, headlined by sites like Wikipedia, has adopted this model with considerable success. Other areas, such as open hardware, are still trying to find their way. Your editor recently read an interesting book (Rob Carlson’s Biology is Technology), which raises an interesting question: is there a place for an ecosystem based around free “software” running on biological processors?
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Programming
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Google has announced that the deadline for student applications for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event is Friday, the 9th of April at 19:00 GMT.
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Standards/Consortia
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A trio of Google engineers have ported id Software’s gib-filled first-person shooter Quake II to browsers— you know, for kicks—as a way to show just what HTML5 compatible web browsers are capable of.
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In my opinion, Brightcove, like most of the others that are announcing support for HTML5, is not acting as a friend to the Open Source movement by going with H.264 encoding and not adding support for Theora.
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Sandy Rossouw says she was among 366 people evicted from the Spes Bona Hostel in the district of Athlone three months ago because a stadium there is to be used for training by some of football’s biggest stars. She is now one of five family members who squeeze into one bed in her shack at Blikkiesdorp.
“We were forced out of our hostel because of the World Cup,” Rossouw said. “The hostel is on the main road to the stadium, only about 200 yards away. We didn’t want to move because we’re used to it and it’s close to everything. But they said if we didn’t get out, they would move us out with law enforcement.
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An elaborate scheme to get the husband of a co-worker he was obsessed with locked up in jail, backfired on Ilkka Karttunen, a 48-year from Essex.
His plan was to get the husband arrested so that he could have a go at a relationship with the woman, and to do this he broke into the couple’s home while they were sleeping, used their family computer to download child pornography and then removed the hard drive and mailed it anonymously to the police, along with a note that identified the owner.
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Security/Aggression
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Yep, the United States spent a staggering $607bn (£402 bn) on defence in 2008. Currently engaged in what will likely be the longest ground war in US history in Afghanistan. Harbourer of thousands of nuclear weapons. 1.5m soldiers. Fleets of aircrafts, bombs and seemingly endless amounts of military technology.
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Alan Johnson got his way on mephedrone, but good drug policy depends on looking beyond the media-driven demand for action
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Finance
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More than £1tn may have flowed out of Africa illegally over the last four decades, most of it to western financial institutions, according to a new report.
Even using conservative estimates, the continent lost about $1.8tn (£1.18tn) – meaning Africans living at the end of 2008 had each been deprived of an average of $989 (£649) since 1970, according to the US-based research body Global Financial Integrity (GFI).
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JPMorgan Chase’s crisis lead appears to have vanished. Its investment bank was crowned king of the downturn. Last year, it sat atop the rankings for debt and equity underwriting, and was No. 2 in merger work, behind Goldman Sachs. But it looks as if the edge is proving hard to keep.
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…JP Morgan was prepared to pay whatever it took to buy off officials in Jefferson County. In 2002, during a conversation recorded in Nixonian fashion by JP Morgan itself, LeCroy bragged that he had agreed to funnel payoff money to a pair of local companies to secure the votes of two county commissioners. “Look,” the commissioners told him, “if we support the synthetic refunding, you guys have to take care of our two firms.” LeCroy didn’t blink. “Whatever you want,” he told them. “If that’s what you need, that’s what you get. Just tell us how much.”
Just tell us how much. That sums up the approach that JP Morgan took a few months later, when Langford announced that his good buddy Bill Blount would henceforth be involved with every financing transaction for Jefferson County. From JP Morgan’s point of view, the decision to pay off Blount was a no-brainer. But the bank had one small problem: Goldman Sachs had already crawled up Blount’s trouser leg, and the broker was advising Langford to pick them as Jefferson County’s investment bank.
[...]
That such a blatant violation of anti-trust laws took place and neither JP Morgan nor Goldman have been prosecuted for it is yet another mystery of the current financial crisis. “This is an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior,” says Taylor, the former regulator.
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If I know my Masters of the Universe– and I think I do!– the message is this: “blow us.” Or variants thereof. Prove me wrong.
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For the past year, as its name was sullied, Goldman maintained a bunker strategy, largely fending off media inquiries. (The one major exception proved to be a disaster. After Blankfein sat for an interview with the London Times in November 2009, he famously quipped, when he thought he was off the record, that he was just a banker “doing God’s work.”) That fleeting attempt at humor created a weeks-long media storm, after which Goldman stopped trying to defend itself.
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“Goldman is trying to pretend it didn’t know any better, while also trying to say they are great risk managers,” says Tavakoli, the president of Chicago advisory firm Tavakoli Structured Finance. “Goldman cannot have it both ways.”
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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As part of a broad coalition of privacy groups, think tanks, technology companies, and academics, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today issued recommendations for strengthening the federal privacy law that regulates government access to private phone and Internet communications and records, including cell phone location data.
The “Digital Due Process” coalition includes major Internet and telecommunications companies like Google, Microsoft, and AT&T as well as advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). The coalition has joined together to preserve traditional privacy rights and clarify legal protections in the face of a rapidly changing technological landscape.
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TOURISM Australia is investigating legal action against an internet “brandjacker” who is lampooning its new $150 million advertising campaign.
The site is targeting Tourism Australia’s new campaign, There’s nothing like Australia.
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Late one Saturday night in February 2007, a stand-up comic named Joe Rogan decided to take the law into his own hands. Rogan, a well-known comedian, was on stage at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles, one of the nation’s most important comedy clubs. For weeks, Rogan had been furious over reports from fellow comedians that an even more famous stand-up, Carlos Mencia, had stolen a joke from one of Rogan’s friends, a relatively obscure comedian named Ari Schaffer. Rogan spotted Mencia in the audience, and he blew up. Slamming Mencia as “Carlos Menstealia,” Rogan accused his rival of joke thievery. Mencia rushed the stage to defend himself, and there began a long, loud, and profane confrontation.
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A company should not have read e-mails a former employee wrote to her lawyer from a private, password-protected web account, even though she sent them from her employer’s computer, according to a state Supreme Court ruling today that attorneys said could influence workplace privacy rules across the country.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Now, of course, it’s preposterous to blame YouTube for this, but how much do people want to bet that’s exactly what’s going to happen? The article notes that this may be “the next big headache for YouTube,” and it seems likely that sooner or later some software will try to pin the blame for such videos on YouTube, rather than the creators/uploaders of the videos.
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I recently co-produced a documentary titled Copyright Criminals, which examines the messy three-way collision between digital technology, musical collage, and intellectual property law. It aired on PBS’s Emmy Award-winning series Independent Lens, played at the Toronto International Film Festival, and got a DVD release. My filmmaking partner Benjamin Franzen and I should be celebrating, but we’re actually kind of terrified.
While we raised the money to license about two-dozen songs and some footage, our film nevertheless contains over 400 brief-but-unlicensed uses of copyrighted material. When I can’t sleep at night, I sometimes count how much we’d be liable for: up to $150,000 in statutory damages, per infringement. 400 x $150,000 = $60,000,000. Sixty. Million. Dollars.
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Reader cram points us to a paidContent post by John Yemma, the editor of The Christian Science Monitor, in which he makes a lot of great points about digital strategies for news publishing.
A year ago, we ceased publishing the daily, 100-year-old Christian Science Monitor newspaper and launched a weekly magazine to complement our website, on which we doubled down by reorienting our newsroom to be web-first. Our web traffic climbed from 6 million page views last April to 13 million in February. Our print circulation rose from 43,000 to 77,000 in the same period.
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Except… Canada already does have copyright/counterfeiting laws in place, and they seem to work pretty well.
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Watching that $14 Elements demo for the iPad reminded me again of the throwaway line that geeks of a certain age make of the iPad — that it all seems a bit CD-ROM.
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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In my interview in this episode, I focused on digital liberty issues, which I believe to be hugely important and becoming more so every day. If you’re ready to find out more about the issues I discussed, here’s a quick guide along with hints on taking action. I mentioned writing to your MP and MEP – there’s an encouraging guide to read if the idea makes you nervous.
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You’ll have heard of the Digital Economy Bill: it introduces powers to cut your Internet connection if you’re caught illegally downloading films, music or software. It does more than that. It takes your photographs from you, too.
Until now, if someone found one of your photographs and wanted to use it commercially, they couldn’t without first asking you. Clause 43 changes all that by allowing the use of “Orphan Works” – photographs, illustrations and other artworks whose owners cannot be found.
SourceCode Season 2- Episode 1: Work/Organize (2005)
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