07.13.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Among the strawberries, nectarines, kettle corn and other fresh fruits and vegetables — and since when is kettle corn NOT a fresh vegetable? — the Felton Linux Users Group has set up a table offering Organic Software each Tuesday afternoon at the Felton Farmers Market; Linux, GNU/Linux and other Free/Open Source Software programs and information about FOSS, all with no artificial colors or preservatives, and software that’s healthy for the well-being of your computer.
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Yes, a properly looked after and protected windows computer is safe. As is a misconfigured Linux computer unsafe. What are the chances of coming across the former compared to the latter? What are the chances of being stung by a windows machine compared to a Linux one? You tell me in the comments. I already know what I think 
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One of the most common criticisms of Linux is that there are “too many versions”, and that makes it confusing. Here are a few thoughts and examples related to that.
- “Too many versions”? Yes, probably so, in the same way that there are too many different kinds of breakfast cereal, or laundry soap, or wrist watches. Here’s an example straight out of current markets. From what I have seen and heard, Toyota has been having some problems with quite a lot of their cars. How many of us would like to be in the position of having Toyota be the ONLY car? Continuing on this speculation… what if Toyota were now to fix the problem (or problems, if there turned out to be more than one), but once that fix was complete and they were producing cars that worked properly again, they announced that they were not going to give owners of their existing defective cars any consideration at all in the purchase of one of the new “fixed” models. Vehicle owners would not be happy, but there would be nothing they could do about it because Toyota was the only supplier! Not a situation that I think anyone would want with their car, so why should we want it with our computers?
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Server
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The new ERP system, which will run on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5-based HP ProLiant blade server, will use a common data repository to manage financial accounting, procurement, HR and payroll applications.
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Audiocasts
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Google
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Since late 2009, talk of how Google’s Chrome OS is being positioned to “take on” Microsoft Windows has been promoted by individuals who I believe have no idea what they’re talking about.
By Google’s own admission, Chrome OS is being designed for near exclusive use on netbook computers, due to its minimalist nature. And as we know, netbooks make up a small piece of the collective PC market. This clearly leaves out of desktops and laptops, which will remain dominated by the Windows OS (near term, at least).
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Kernel Space
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Last month saw the opening and subsequent closing of the 2.6.35 kernel’s merge window, the period of time during which all of the exciting new features that have been waiting in the wings (and in linux-next nightly kernels provided by Stephen Rothwell) are considered for merging into the official ‘mainline’ kernel source tree by Linus Torvalds. Recent releases have often added a new file system (or perhaps two), but 2.6.35 does not add any new file systems. It does add many other new features, including support for profiling virtual machines from the host machine using ‘kvm perf’, the KDB in-kernel debugger that has augmented the existing KGDB support for remote debugging, the memory compaction patches, and memory hotplug support in the SLAB memory allocator.
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Applications
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There are only two search engines in this world: there is Google and there is the rest. Google is almost now synonymous with the very word search and has all of us using it tens of times a day.
DuckDuckGo is the new kid on the block that is built on Open Source software. Ubuntu and FreeBSD as the OS, Nginix for server, Memcached for caching, PostgreSQL for database with the primary language being Perl.
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DuckDuckGo is a new search engine focused on relevant results and respecting user privacy. Actually a mash-up of several other sites like Wikipedia, About, Bing, and Yahoo, DuckDuckGo also uses it’s own web crawler: the DuckDuckBot. DuckDuckGo uses what it calls Zero-click search results to try to guess what you are looking for and give it to you directly in your search results. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a few weeks now, and I’m impressed.
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In my ongoing search for something with which to tinker, I’ve occasionally run across the Midori browser, a fully GTK+2 integrated, WebKit-based browser with a focus on being lightweight and simple.
It had been a while since I gave Midori a try, so I thought that since they had released a few updated versions since my last look, I’d install it and give it a new look, because it seemed to have some promise the last time.
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WinFF is available in Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese Traditional, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish and Turkish.
WinFF is open source and cross platform written in Free Pascal and Lazarus. WinFF is published under the GNU public license. WinFF is published without any warranty or suitability for any purpose.
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Virtualization Software for Linux: In computing, virtualization has been described in a variety of ways. But to simplify its meaning or to make it more casual I should say; virtualization is creating a virtual (not actual) form of a stuff to make it into something that is functional and efficient. For example, you create or virtualize an operating system to make it run as guest inside the host operating system without the need for additional hardware. Some other forms of virtualization:
Server virtualization – emulation of server resources that includes individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems
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Spotify
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According to an official blog post, the Linux version was built by developers at the company “during hack days and late nights”, and shares most of the same features as the Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications. That said, due to issues regarding decoding of local music on the Linux platform, Spotify hasn’t been able to include support for local files in this version.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Here are a few pictures I took while at Akademy this year.
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GNOME Desktop
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If you like mplayer, you will love SMPlayer and Gnome-Mplayer. Both SMplayer and Gnome-Mplayer are really good MPlayer front-ends and they do work great. SMplayer has long been my favorite multimedia player in Ubuntu and we have even featured SMplayer among the most wanted multimedia apps for Ubuntu.
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Xfce
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If you’ve read me long enough, you know I am a desktop junkie. Much to Jaqui’s chagrin, I do love my desktops. So much so I could have a different desktop every day and still not be completely happy. During my trials and tribulations with the Linux desktop I have, surprisingly, missed the whole Xfce train. Why? I have no idea. I’ve known of it, I’ve used it briefly, and never really thought much more about it. That is, until recently.
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Reviews
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Just one week after the first release candidate arrived, the Parted Magic developers have released version 5.0 of their open source, multi-platform partitioning tool. Parted Magic can be used to create, move, delete and resize drive partitions and will run on a machine with as little as 64MB of RAM. File systems supported include NTFS, FAT, ReiserFS, Reiser4 and HFS+. LVM and RAID are also supported.
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SystemRescueCD is a free, Linux-based CDROM image for system recovery that boots into a minimal graphical interface and provides a host of useful tools culled from many sources.
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Although SystemRescueCD offers a desktop, it can be complicated to use and requires a some basic computer knowledge. However, it doesn’t require much Linux specific knowledge to operate most of the tools, so I would be happy to recommend it to a Windows guru. Besides, people who don’t understand the basics shouldn’t be operating partition managers and file recovery utilities anyway.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Linux vendor Mandriva has announced the availability of its Spring 2010 release, an updated version of its desktop Linux distribution. Mandriva originally planned to ship the software at the beginning of June, but had put the launch on hold due to serious financial difficulties that jeopardized the company’s future. The Spring 2010 version was finally released last week after some new investors bailed out the company and made it possible for development efforts to continue.
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After spending some time with the latest version of Mandriva, I can see why it remains appealing to so many KDE users. It has a sense of simplicity, consistency, and conservatism that are unusual in the KDE world. Subjectively, it feels much better than Kubuntu but doesn’t quite rival openSUSE’s power and sophistication.
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I am sure you know, but in case you didn’t – one of the most exciting and long lived desktop Linux distros has rolled out a new release.
Yes, Mandriva 2010 Spring is out – and I love it.
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After a long and anxious month of delays, Mandriva finally released their 2010.1 Spring update with lots of goodies for all. In related news, PCLinuxos, a derivative of Mandriva, released what they’ve dubbed their Quarterly ISO updates in several flavors.
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Red Hat Family
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The world’s largest open source software maker, Red Hat Inc., expects to make further inroads into the Indian market through the government and telecom sectors.
“For Red Hat, India has been growing much faster than other geographies,” chief executive Jim Whitehurst said in an interview. “Increasingly, most of the large government IT (information technology) programmes, including e-governance-related ones, are being built on open source platforms.”
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We had been running CentOS 5.2 on dozens of our office-desktops. They were boringly stable though little obsolete. Finally I wanted to upgrade my system to the latest v.5.5 so as to use some of the updated packages including Firefox 3.5 and OpenOffice 3. Skipping as much as 2 versions to CentOS 5.5 was smooth as a trademark of the enterprise desktop. There were some minor glitches pertaining to drivers which is documented earlier (CentOS 5.5 Left Me Clueless and CentOS 5.5 USB Device Mounting Annoyance) plus a far critical (purely on the basis of desktop experience) bug that’s some way associated with nash and mkinitrd packages.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Last October I wrote about running Ubuntu 9.10 with older PC hardware, but over this past weekend I restored an even older Phoronix test system to see how it runs with the most recent Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release and the very latest Ubuntu 10.10 development snapshot in relation to the older Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS. This antiquated system has an Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB IDE hard drive, and an ATI Radeon 9200PRO AGP graphics card.
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I recently did a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 on my Dell netbook (because the upgrade process didn’t work smoothly) and in doing so I re did some of my Ubuntu tweaks I am used to. For my own sake (meaning so I don’t have to remember these again) and yours (in case you’re not familiar with these) here they are.
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Ross, who often blogs about Ubuntu at http://randall.executiv.es/, says Ubuntu represents a completely new approach to computing. “No longer does a person need to sit back and wait (or complain) that their computer isn’t doing what they want. With Ubuntu, they have direct and easy ways to get involved and improve the experience for themselves and everyone.” Says Ross, “Ubuntu includes one profoundly important component that no other operating system has: Community. The Ubuntu community is diverse, lively, and fun to be around. The Ubuntu community is real and local.”
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With the new release Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 2 the new software center comes with a new shape, as well the new release of software manager of Linux Mint 9 Isadora.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 201 for the week July 4th – July 10th, 2010.
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GamePark
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While we’re not sure just how we missed it, it seems GamePark was at E3 2010 in force, with a brand-new Linux gaming portable called the Caanoo. Though it’s got the same 533MHz ARM9 processor as its wizardly predecessor, GamePark’s doubled the memory to 128MB, and added a dedicated 3D GPU to power the larger 3.5-inch touchscreen.
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GamePark Holdings (GPH) is readying a new version of its GP2X handheld game console running open source Linux games. The “GP2X Caanoo” is equipped with a 533MHz ARM9 CPU and 3D-ready GPU, a 3.5-inch display, Wi-Fi, and an accelerometer with a vibration motor.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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To say you are “redefining the Linux desktop landscape” is a bold claim to make. It is even bolder when presenting a non-KDE project at the annual conference of KDE, one of the leading providers of desktop Linux software. However, that was exactly how Valtteri Halla, Director of Nokia MeeGo Software chose to title his keynote address.
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Android
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Arguably the most important development in the world of open source in the last year or two has been the rise and rise of Google’s Linux-based Android operating system. It’s true that the mobiles out there employing it are not 100% free, but they are considerably more free than the main alternatives. More importantly, they are turning Linux into a global, mass-market platform in a way never before seen.
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You can build just about any app you can imagine with App Inventor. Often people begin by building games like WhackAMole or games that let you draw funny pictures on your friend’s faces. You can even make use of the phone’s sensors to move a ball through a maze based on tilting the phone.
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Google has released tools that “make it easy for anyone to create programs for Android phones”.
Much like Lego, App Inventor lets people drag “blocks” of code around to create applications.
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We have known of MediaTek’s intentions to get their low-cost CPUs into more and more Android handsets for a while now, but today’s announcement that they have officially joined the Google-led Open Handset Alliance signals that they are committed more than ever to the idea. In the past, patent issues with Qualcomm prevented MediaTek from doing much business outside of mainland China, a but a cross-licensing agreement signed last November and their new involvement in the OHA could see the inclusion of their system-on-a-chip processors in low-cost Android phones around the world.
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Google has announced a new browser-based visual development tool called App Inventor that allows users to create Android applications without having to write any code. It appears to be aimed primarily at students.
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The aim of this project is to help you bridge the gap between when you are on your desktop and your phone. With it, you can send links directly from your Chrome browser to your phone, place calls directly from your phone by highlighting a phone number on your desktop and populating the Android clipboard by highlighting text on your desktop.
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Tablets
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Be that as it may, companies like Jumpbooks are making it possible for the old college bookstore to offer eTextbooks to students. While most students will look to Amazon and Barnes & Noble for their digital textbooks, Jumpbooks will make it possible for schools to inexpensively offer school specific textbooks (e.g., for a professor’s required readings).
Other companies, like CourseSmart, are already selling eTextbooks directly to students. And, perhaps the best news of all for students and their parents tired of the financial weight of textbooks, most eTextbooks are available at half the price of a new hardbound textbook.
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Open source has always been a favorite among scientists and universities where budgets are limited but where there is plenty of expertise around to fiddle with the code and customize it for a specific project or department. It never behaved like the costlier, commercially available products from big-name vendors, and it required lots of patience for dealing with quirks and knowledge of some arcane coding tricks.
That explains why using open source for production in mission-critical environments, particularly where security is essential, has been relatively rare. But that’s beginning to change. Since the Internet’s widespread adoption, open source has become a global effort, and over the past several years that collaboration has yielded significant advancements. Applications are more readily available, security has been beefed up and the underlying Linux operating system has been worked on extensively.
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In general I’m much less bothered about people who think I’m crazy than they usually think I should be because I know a lot about the life cycle of reform movements. I studied this topic rather carefully in early 1998, just after Netscape announced its intention to release the Mozilla sources, when I noticed that a burgeoning reform movement seemed to need me to lead it. I was particularly influenced in my thinking by the history of John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community.
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I don’t know if we’ve actually reached that point yet, but if and when we do it won’t bother me. I did not do what I did for anyone’s approval; I did it because it was right. And then I let go.
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That’s very similar to the Foursquare location layers that give you information relevant to your position. But the great thing about Google’s Open Spot is that I don’t need to check in to anything: Google Android tells the system where I am. Isn’t that the obvious way for it to work?
Indeed, why do we need to download a separate Android app? Perhaps Mozilla needs to accelerate its work in this area. If it doesn’t, then the danger is that we’ll get another Facebook: a client and company so dominant in its field that it will be hard for open source contenders to fight against it. The time for free software to square up to Foursquare is now, not a few years down the road….
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In my day job at New Kind, I spend quite a bit of my time working on brand-related assignments, particularly for organizations interested in community-based approaches to building their brands.
When marrying the art of community building to the art of brand building, it’s hard not to talk about building “brand communities.” It’s a convenient term, and brand experts love to trot out examples like Harley Davidson and Apple as examples of thriving communities built around brands.
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The Open Innovation Demo Cup – a contest open to all open source projects and solutions getting ready for commercial launch or already on the market – will be held at the next Open World Forum on the 1st of October.
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It’s hard to remember how hard things can be, especially when you’re surrounded by a community of people who are the ones who self-selected and made it past that hardness. By definition, if you’ve gotten into FOSS, the current participation mechanisms worked for you… so why fix them?
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Reading this prompted me to wonder if the United States had an equivalently highly-placed official with sufficient power to influence the US Government’s decision process regarding OSS solutions. The closest I could find was Howard A. Schmidt, our current US DHS “Cybersecurity Czar”. It didn’t take much digging to begin to understand where Schmidt’s priorities are likely to fall regarding OSS. From WhoRunsGov.com, we discover that Schmidt went to work for Microsoft in 1997 as their chief security officer. He remained in that position for 5 years, and in 1999 he donated $250 to the Microsoft Political Action Committee.
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Events
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Databases
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Databases can be dangerous, though, because of unintended consequences. Because of their power and size, one needs to be more careful with matters of security, backup, entry and retrieval of data. Fortunately in a small school like mine, the consequences of mistakes are not as large as happen in the outside world. I can limit the damage by keeping databases off the web and simple password authentication takes care of most of my issues of security.
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The tools I use all come from Debian GNU/Linux(except for Gallery image database). It takes only a few minutes to install MySQL database, PHP and Apache web server on a basic installation.
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Oracle
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Five Nice extensions for Openoffice.org
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Last week Marcus Lange announced the branch of the new code-line OOO330 for the next release of OpenOffice.org. It is based on developer snapshot DEV300m84. For such milestone I finalized the list of features/enhancements. I announced this list some weeks ago on the relevant OOo-mailing lists for QA and L10N and since then only some more entries came in. This list isn’t a ‘what’s new’-guide. It more technical orientated and is for L10N testing and for checking the new features by the QA and the L10N teams. If you are interested what is in the next release, please take a look.
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In an act of desperation, the OpenSolaris governing board (OGB) has issued an ultimatum to Oracle. The company must nominate a contact person able to take decisions regarding OpenSolaris by the 16th of August or the board will dissolve and relinquish control of OpenSolaris to Oracle.
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Business
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The news that Kenneth Bosung had joined OpenGeo as senior VP might have seemed like little more than a glorified press release to some. But there was an interesting twist there – Bosung had spent his entire career thus far with proprietary software companies.
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Government
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Public administrations are improving their opinion on open source, finds Vice-President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes. In a video speech addressing an open source software conference taking place later this month, she says: “We do not yet have a true level playing field, but thankfully attitudes are changing.”
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Openness/Sharing
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The following guest blog is from Open Context’s Project Lead Eric Kansa and Editor Sarah Whitcher Kansa, who are both members of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology.
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The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has released Millennials Will Make Online Sharing in Networks a Lifelong Habit.
Here’s an excerpt:
In a survey about the future impact of the internet, a solid majority of technology experts and stakeholders said the Millennial generation will lead society into a new world of personal disclosure and information-sharing using new media. These experts said the communications patterns “digital natives” have already embraced through their use of social networking technology and other social technology tools will carry forward even as Millennials age, form families, and move up the economic ladder.
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As Chris Anderson pointed out in a moment of non-hyperbole in his book Free, the phrase Information wants to be free was never meant to be the rallying cry it turned into.
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Already one of the richest collections of openly shared educational materials in the world, the MIT OpenCourseWare site has reached a significant milestone: With the publication of 10 new courses in the last two weeks, the site now shares core academic materials—including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams—from more than 2,000 MIT courses.
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Open Data
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The following guest post is from Ivan Begtin, who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data.
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Open Access/Content
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“Access to Information” a message from the Access to Information Unit, Jamacia
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Standards/Consortia
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A major milestone was reached for the OASIS ODF TC last week. The latest Committee Draft of ODF 1.2 (CD 05) was sent out for a 60-day public review.
As you may recall, ODF 1.2 is a single standard in three parts:
* Part 1 specifies the core schema, and was send out for public review in January.
* Part 2 is OpenFormula (spreadsheet formulas)
* Part 3 defines the packaging model of ODF, and went out for public review back in November
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* applicable (without restrictions): free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by any party or in any business model,
* existing (implementations): available in multiple complete implementations by competing vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.
* independent (of a single vendor): managed and further developed independently of any single vendor in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties
* open (specification): subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all parties
* untainted (with dependencies to closed standards): without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open Standard themselves
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Even Pittsburgh’s United Steel Workers Union is getting in on the (cooperative) action. The union is partnering with Mondragon to explore the possibility of steel worker cooperatives. With over 40,000 manufacturing facilities closed throughout the United States during the economic recession, exploring new business models probably isn’t a bad idea.
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But what about Apache? Surely the venerable web server remains the most popular platform for deploying web applications? Well, yes, it is. Here are Netcraft’s numbers for overall web server share.
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A report last month in the Economist tells us that “blogging is dying” as more and more bloggers abandon the form for its cousins: the tweet, the Facebook Wall, the Digg.
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That’s some houseguest. The Pope invited himself to visit England, and asked the British government to pay for it — that takes some gall right there — and is now revealing that the bill for his visit will be at least £20 million.
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A seemingly anonymous gift left on the front porch of a Houston home owned by an oil company executive has the city’s affluent population of oil profiteers on edge this weekend, after that package exploded and seriously injured a 62-year-old woman.
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An hour or so ago, Fring reported on their blog that we had blocked their access to Skype. I want to make one thing absolutely clear: this is untrue.
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There you go, the perfect operating system that should turn you into a hacker within days. Nothing like the fear of pain to make you perform at your best. That or hysteria. You may feel slight physical and mental discomfort at first, but it will definitely be worth it.
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Science
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NASA today significantly expanded its Centennial Challenges program to include $5 million worth of new competitions to develop robots, small satellites, and solar powered spacecraft.
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Probably because of the visibility of the GalaxyZoo project, I think several of my colleagues and I have been under the impression that astronomy is a somewhat more open field than chemistry or molecular biology. It was easy to rationalize such a position because patents are not an issue, as they clearly are in fields which rely more on invention than discovery. However, after reading “The Case for Pluto” by Alan Boyle, I am left with a much different impression.
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We just finished reading a paper describing the viability of using microwaves to fuse lunar soil (regoilith) into solid shapes, in the hopes of creating an effective way of building lunar structures for future astronauts and their bases.
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Security/Aggression
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New Labour never give up. Even out of government, they are still looking for groups of individuals who, they believe, are just salivating at the prospect of the chance to carry a shiny new ID card.
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Last month, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., introduced a bill that might — we’re not really sure — give the president the authority to shut down all or portions of the Internet in the event of an emergency. It’s not a new idea. Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, proposed the same thing last year, and some argue that the president can already do something like this. If this or a similar bill ever passes, the details will change considerably and repeatedly. So let’s talk about the idea of an Internet kill switch in general.
It’s a bad one.
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As reported in the Daily Telegraph this morning, the Government only has until the end of the month to decide whether to opt-in to the new European Investigation Order (EIO).
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This video shows a police officer at the G20 protests in Toronto threatening to arrest a protestor for blowing soap bubbles (“If one of those bubbles touches me, it’s assault”) and then leading the protestor away, presumably for the aforementioned “offense.”
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Two robots with surveillance, tracking, firing and voice recognition systems were integrated into a single unit, a defence ministry spokesman said.
The 400 million won (£220,000) unit was installed last month at a guard post in the central section of the Demilitarised Zone which bisects the peninsula, Yonhap news agency said.
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Environment
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The climate scientists at the centre of a media storm over leaked emails were yesterday cleared of accusations that they fudged their results and silenced critics, but a review found they had failed to be open enough about their work.
Sir Muir Russell, the senior civil servant who led a six-month inquiry into the affair, said the “rigour and honesty” of the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) were not in doubt. His investigation concluded they did not subvert the peer review process to censor criticism and that key data was freely available and could be used by any “competent” researcher.
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“Like it or not, this [demand for openness] indicates a transformation in the way science has to be conducted in this century.” That, say many, will be the lasting legacy of the independent review published last week into the controversial emails between climate scientists that were stolen from the University of East Anglia and posted online.
Scientists were cleared, as expected, of any fiddling of the figures to exaggerate the case for global warming. But the review heavily criticised them and the university for consistently blocking access to data and failing to recognise the risk such secrecy posed to the “credibility of UK climate science”.
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China set to consume 50% of global coal production this year
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Global crude oil supply fell in April, after a surprising revision upwards to the March totals, of approximately 200 kbpd. Volatility in the data is currently coming out of the North Sea. This will continue as Norway is expected to see production falls when the next few months of data is reported. Globally, oil production stood at 73.552 mbpd in April. On an annual basis, through the first 4 months of 2010, global crude oil production is averaging 73.458 mbpd. The current peak year for global crude oil production remains 2005, at 73.719 mbpd.
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An oil-like substance has been poured around one of the British Museum’s statues by activists urging it to end its sponsorship deal with BP.
The targeted relic, Hoa Hakananai’a, is a giant carving of a human head and torso and is about 1,000 years old.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was accused in a lawsuit by Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. of misleading investors in 2007 when it sold Fannie Mae preferred shares while betting against the U.S. mortgage market.
Goldman Sachs misrepresented Fannie Mae’s health when it underwrote the offerings, in which the insurer invested $62.5 million, according to a complaint filed yesterday in federal court in Boston. The investment bank misstated the purpose of the sale by saying the offering was to raise surplus capital when it was actually needed to help Fannie Mae sustain its business, said Liberty Mutual, which accused Goldman Sachs of securities fraud.
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Corporate cash in the US is sitting at a record high of $1,700bn. James Mackintosh, investment editor, explains how both bulls and bears are taking this as a signal for the stock market’s next move.
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I’ve had a number of posts recently looking at the effect of reductions in the tax burden during Presidential administrations or during (or just following) recessions and how those affected subsequent growth. In each case, cutting the tax burden did not lead to faster growth. In fact, the data shows that, contrary to theory, real economic growth tends to be slower following cuts in the tax burden than following hikes in the tax burden.
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Sometimes it’s useful to step back slightly from the current fray and ask what we’ve really learned about macroeconomics over, say, the past year and a half. Here’s how I see it: in early 2009 there was a broad divide between two policy factions. One, of which I was part, declared that we were in a liquidity trap, which meant that some of the usual rules no longer applied: the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet wouldn’t be inflationary — in fact the danger was a slide toward deflation; the government’s borrowing would not lead to a spike in interest rates. The other side declared that we were in imminent danger of runaway inflation, and that federal borrowing would lead to very high interest rates.
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Democratic governors facing grim budget choices, lingering unemployment and angry voters are pointing a finger at their colleagues in Democratic-controlled Washington to explain this year’s toxic political climate.
Few will directly fault President Barack Obama for their party’s plight heading into the fall midterm elections, but the state chief executives gathered here for the National Governors Association meeting believe Congress and the White House have made an already difficult year worse.
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“There is a certain circularity in all this business. You have a crisis, followed by some kind of reform, for better or worse, and things go well for a while, and then you have another crisis . . . People are nervous about the long-term outlook, and they should be.”
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Inflation has been falling, but how close are we to deflation? I found myself wondering that after observing John Makin’s combusting coiffure, his prediction that we might see deflation this year.
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As he shepherded a far-reaching and ever-expanding bill to remake financial regulations through the Senate during the past year, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd uttered the same warning again and again: Nothing’s finished until everything is finished.
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Final passage of sweeping legislation to overhaul the nation’s financial regulatory system is now a question of when — not if — according to Senate Democrats. Yet, there still seem to be a lot of questions about when.
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The credit scores of millions more Americans are sinking to new lows.
Figures provided by FICO Inc. show that 25.5 percent of consumers – nearly 43.4 million people – now have a credit score of 599 or below, marking them as poor risks for lenders. It’s unlikely they will be able to get credit cards, auto loans or mortgages under the tighter lending standards banks now use.
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The sovereign debt crisis would seem to create worry enough for European banks, but there is another gathering threat that has not garnered as much notice: the trillions of dollars in short-term borrowing that institutions around the world must repay or roll over in the next two years.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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One is 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. (formerly SPC) Bradley Manning who allegedly leaked a secret video and classified military information to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, was arrested by the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command in May 2010 and is currently held in US military detention in Kuwait facing numerous charges.
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Chinese security forces last night cancelled a documentary screening by an HIV/AIDS education group, which Amnesty International is strongly criticising as part of the ongoing harassment of peaceful public health educators.
“Harassing and curtailing HIV/AIDS activism in China poses a real threat to effective HIV/AIDS prevention, with dire consequences for the right to health,” said Catherine Baber, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Deputy Director.
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Julian Assange, editor of whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, has criticised mainstream media for not making proper use of “primary resources” and claimed that the site has created “a real free press (…) for the first time in history”.
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The mainstream media ignored important additional research related to the video of a U.S. Apache helicopter shooting civilians in Iraq that was leaked to the Wikileaks Web site, according to its founder and editor, Julian Assange.
Assange spoke on Friday at the Center for Investigative Journalism at City University in London, marking one of his few public appearances since Wikileaks published the video, in which up to a dozen civilians were killed, including two Reuters news service employees. Assange said he is avoiding travel to the U.S. due to concerns that he could potentially be subject to a subpoena.
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Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation has told newspaper Der Freitag Wikileaks receives no money for personnel costs, only for hardware, travelling and bandwidth. Hendrik Fulda, the foundation’s second chairman, says around 30.000 euros have been handed out after receiving signed receipts. According to Fulda, most of the money has been mainly used to restore Wikileaks and keep the site up and running. The website had to be taken down last year as donations did not cover costs.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Fair use is the concept that copyright has limits on time and other restrictions. That is, for personal education, copies are allowed. For backup copies are allowed. When the copyright expires in time, the work is in the public domain and may be copied.
[...]
One of the ideas is that DRM prevents legal copying even after the copyright expires so it is unfair. That could apply to things like WGdisA, too. To the extent that DRM frustrates the provisions of copyright laws it is unfair.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Earlier this year we discussed an important upcoming Supreme Court case between Omega (the watch company) and Costco over whether or not it can be considered copyright infringement to resell legally purchased watches that were bought overseas. The concept sounds crazy, right? What does reselling foreign watches have to do with copyright? Well, the details are a bit complicated, but basically lots of companies hate the concept of first sale rights (the ability to resell something you’ve legally bought) and have tried all sorts of tricks to try and block those rights. In this case, Omega inscribed a tiny globe on the back of its watches (where no one will ever see it) solely for the purpose of copyrighting that design and using it to try to stop resale. Of course, once again, the first sale doctrine does allow for resale, but here’s where Omega got sneaky. It pointed out that the first sale doctrine technically only applies to copies that are “lawfully made under this title.” Omega’s argument is that because the copyrighted globe design was made outside of the US, the copy was not made under US law… and thus (voila!) there are no first sale rights on any copyrighted product made outside of the US.
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The French Supreme Court this afternoon ruled in Google’s favour in a series of groundbreaking trademark cases.
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Copyrights
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OpenBitTorrent is a non-commercial BitTorrent tracker that doesn’t host or link to torrent files. Despite this seemingly neutral setup, both Hollywood and the music industry have declared war against what they see as an illegal service. After Hollywood won its case against the former provider of OpenBitTorrent, IFPI is now going after its new host in Spain.
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“When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label’s parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry’s songs. I love Joe Henry, but the price was too high. I replaced him with Shakespeare, whose work (depending on which edition you use) is in the public domain. Mr. Henry’s record label may differ, but it’s not clear that his interests — or theirs — are being served here. Were they concerned that readers might have their thirst for Mr. Henry’s music sated by that single lyric? Isn’t it more likely that his lyric would have enticed customers who otherwise wouldn’t have heard of him?”
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And that explains why huge megastars like Lyle Lovett have pointed out that he sold 4.6 million records and never made a dime from album sales. It’s why the band 30 Seconds to Mars went platinum and sold 2 million records and never made a dime from album sales. You hear these stories quite often.
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The RIAA’s “business plan” is even worse than I’d guessed it was.
The RIAA paid Holmes Roberts & Owen $9,364,901 in 2008, Jenner & Block more than $7,000,000, and Cravath Swain & Moore $1.25 million, to pursue its “copyright infringement” claims, in order to recover a mere $391,000. [ps there were many other law firms feeding at the trough too; these were just the ones listed among the top 5 independent contractors.]
Embarrassing.
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You might usually expect a turnaround specialist to cut costs and lay off staff. But, in Bebo’s case, the cutting had already been done by AOL (NYSE: AOL)—the site now has only 25 to 30 staff, and now Criterion will need to re-invest, particularly on engineers, Levin tells paidContent:UK.
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Planned sessions will examine the options for change to UK copyright legislation to meet the rapidly changing and evolving digital era; how consumers could be better informed about exactly what they can and cannot do with their music, movies and photographs; and whether technical measures, such as throttling, may be used as an alternative to disconnection to deter file-sharers.
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As the U.S. struggles with the prospect that thousands of file-sharers will receive threatening letters in the now-famous Hurt Locker lawsuit case, over the pond in the UK there is a continuing escalation of the ‘turn piracy into profit’ bandwagon. A new firm of lawyers has entered the market and while their business model appears identical, they are attempting to sugar-coat their actions.
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Copyright is critical to the survival of the music industry and its creators, but lack of respect for copyright is not why artists are struggling to make ends meet, argued a recent panel of media lawyers and music industry experts. The blame for that lies squarely on the corporate-focus of the music industry, and how it has bent copyright law to serve companies rather than composers, said a panel at the University of Westminster.
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Last Friday, we quickly covered the news that Judge Nancy Gertner had declared the original jury award of $675,000 against Joel Tenenbaum for downloading and sharing some songs unconstitutionally excessive. Over the weekend, however, I had some more time to read the full ruling (posted by Eric Goldman) and get a sense of what Gertner’s full argument meant. You can read the ruling here, and I highly recommend taking the time to read the whole thing…
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It’s currently being reported by users that ACS:Law is sending out copyright infringement letters again. Now I would say that ACS:Law have not seen the publicity they received in the same light as TBI (in respect of alleged copyright infringement) , but then looking at the ACS: Law website, it appears that they do little else. (and please, someone correct me if I’m wrong)
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Copyright is critical to the survival of the music industry and its creators, but lack of respect for copyright is not why artists are struggling to make ends meet, argued a recent panel of media lawyers and music industry experts. The blame for that lies squarely on the corporate-focus of the music industry, and how it has bent copyright law to serve companies rather than composers, said a panel at the University of Westminster.
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Last month I briefly blogged about my love affair with old automated musical instruments such as the player piano, player reed organ, nickelodeon, wind-up phonographs and my long association with the Automatic Musical Instrument Collector’s Association (AMICA).
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The perceived political center of Canadian Society, was determined during the Canadian Copyright Consultation. The consensus was that ‘Digital Locks’ weren’t wanted or needed. This consultation was considered one of the most successful of all time. Curiously certain people didn’t like the results. Barry Sookman, who Michael Geist claims is working for the CRIA (I have asked Barry several times to indicate his allegiance – he has so far refused to do so to me, so I don’t know if Michael is right or not) didn’t like the results. Nor did James Gannon, nor did Richard Owens. Lawyers, and members of the Recording Industry Association of America, members of the Motion Picture Association of America, and a couple of other American industries. Lawyers, and American companies.
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Video host Vimeo on Tuesday is rolling out a new feature that will users apply Creative Commons (CC) licenses to their uploaded videos.
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The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has launched a campaign to raise money from its members to hire lobbyists to protect them against the dangers of “Copyleft.” Groups such as Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are “mobilizing,” ASCAP describes in a letter to its members, “to promote ‘Copyleft’ in order to undermine our ‘Copyright.’” “[O]ur opponents are influencing Congress against the interests of music creators,” ASCAP warns. Indeed, as the letter ominously predicts, this is ASCAP’s “biggest challenge ever.” (Historians of BMI might be a bit surprised about that claim in particular.)
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ACTA
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The European Union “will not swallow” U.S. hypocrisy when negotiating an anti-counterfeiting agreement, said the senior E.U. representative involved in the talks.
European Commissioner for Trade, Karel De Gucht, made the statement during a presentation to the European Parliament on Tuesday. He was updating members of the parliament (MEPs) on the state of play of negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). But despite his tough talking and apparent hardline stance, many MEPs were unconvinced that the revised ACTA agreement will safeguard civil rights.
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A renewed call from Green MEPs for ACTA transparency crosses with a reply from the Commission that maintains its old, discredited line that ACTA will remain within the EU acquis.
Last week, the Green group in the European Parliament issued a call for the European Commission to suspend all negotiation on the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) until there is a proper agreement in place for full transparency. By ‘transparency’ the Greens mean that the negotiating documents can be made public.
The Greens stress their concerns that ACTA will infringe citizens’ fundamental rights and freedoms and that it will impose some form of graduated response measures.
But is the Commission listening? Also last week, a written answer from the Trade Commissioner Karel de Grucht, crossed with the transparency call. The Commission’s answer arguably dodged
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The ACTA negotiators from the Commission came to the European Parliament today, to inform the Parliament about what happened in the last round of negotiations in Luzern.
However, the meeting where the information was to be given was declared ”in camera”, i.e.: closed to the public.
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While those involved in the ACTA negotiations have mocked the concerns raised about the ACTA draft, and said that those who are complaining are merely repeating “wild internet rumors.” Of course, we’ve seen that’s not the case at all. A recent filing about ACTA, put together by a bunch of industry groups, highlighted many of the very real problems with ACTA. Of course, ACTA defenders still dismissed this, because they claimed that the report came from those industries who benefited from weakened IP laws.
I wonder how they’ll try to belittle this one. The Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) recently sent its own letter to the US government complaining about the scope and specifics of ACTA (pdf). The Intellectual Property Owners Association is not exactly the sort of organization you can accuse of wanting weaker intellectual property. It’s also not an organization that I agree with very often (as you might imagine). But, in this letter, the group points out that ACTA appears to be way too broad and that, contrary to claims from ACTA negotiators, it seems clear that it would require changes to US law.
CLUG Talk – 11 Sep 2007 – Linux Name to Identifier Resolution (2007)
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07.11.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Gujarat government is all set to follow Kerala’s Marxist-led Left-Democratic Front (LDF) in IT education in schools. Following Kerala schools, it has decided to use only Linux operating system, the open-source free software, in the computers installed in 3,650 schools.
Linux will also be installed in another state-run 2,750 schools, where computers will be installed this year. Freely downloadable, Linux is internationally regarded as alternative to Microsoft Windows.
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According to the publication “Kommersant”, the state enterprise “Russian Technologies” has almost completed the acquisition of shares LLC Alt Linux. This Russian company is developing software based on Linux. Interestingly, at the same time the Russian investment fund NGI acquired stake in Mandriva, the initiative is approved by the adviser to the Russian president Leonid Reiman. According to Kommersant, the result of both of these projects could be the creation of an operating system focused on the Russian public sector.
In this case, the developers of each of these systems based on Linux can get the appropriate government funding, and this can be quite a good amount. So, every year the government allocates to the field of IT for government, government agencies and defense industry about 12 billion dollars. How did you find the publication, “Russian Technologies” will be adapted by “Alt Linux” for educational institutions and the future goals of the project “Electronic Government”.
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Picture this: you have just left Yongsan, having put down well over a million won for a new laptop: 15-inch screen, RAM out the wazoo and enough space on your hard drive to store every single K-Pop music video in existence. You turn it on, and despite the salesman’s assertions of “Yes, Englishee, yes!” Windows is not only in Korean, but suspiciously already activated and operating a “free” version of office. This is the “service” you get for your patronage of Kim’s Wide World of Computer Goodness in the back streets of Yongsan.
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This post only scratches the surface of what is required of Linux administrators responsible for systems which must adhere to the PCI DSS. The standard is detailed and requires good planning and a commitment to maintain the final achieved security posture.
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Ballnux
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Applications
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Microblogging
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Identi.ca is the open source equivalent to Twitter based on the StausNet (formerly Laconica) micro-blogging server.
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Like Turpial was when we first featured it, the application isn’t available in English. gTweety’s interface is 100% Czech but, as with Turpial, this doesn’t impact on usage as much as you might imagine – the UI is laid out in a logical fashion.
On the surface it may seem more than a smidge similar to other gnome-specific twitter clients. If offers separate views for Timeline, Replies & Direct Messages, quick access to updating and the usual notify-osd alerts.
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Proprietary
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Google SketchUp is one of my favorite applications. It’s a free 3D software that I use to create my fabulous 3D models. It works well and lets my imagination and fingers do their magic. It’s an excellent therapy for mind and soul. There’s only one problem, so to speak. It has been designed to work on Windows and Mac only, with no Linux version in the offing.
All in all, it’s not a tragedy, since I believe in using any software and/or operating system that meets the requirements. If you need to draw a bit, you power Windows and do what needs to be done. But some people may not have the privilege to make the cross-platform choice. For them, Google SketchUp is on the wish-list. Or is it?
[...]
There you go. If SketchUp was a showstopper keeping you from migrating to Linux, that roadblock has just been removed. Even if you’re more of a polygamist when it comes to operating systems, you now have an extra choice of enjoying a great program on yet another platform. Either way, it’s a win-win situation.
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Instructionals
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But there are certain advanced configurations that I want to illustrate that might not be as obvious to the new-to-Xfce user. This time around we’re talking about the Window Manager Tweaks tool.
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Games
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The Flying Penguin is a game where you try to fly the penguin as far as possible with limited fuel. While in the air, you have to collect floating fish to gain extra fuel. This is a native OpenGL game inspired by the flash game Hedgehog Launch.
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The next Sabayon Linux release will be 5.4 as usual it will have the usual skew of package updates and bug fixes. We are tracking the bugs earmarked for fixing before 5.4 using the Sabayon 5.4 Tracking Bug. This means that you can see which bugs will be fixed for 5.4 and the status of each issue individually; it also means you can report bugs and we can easily target those before each release. This is a new public approach for to nailing down issues before release and is due in part to structural changes within the Sabayon testers group.
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Red Hat Family
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A: We are involved in developing free software as well. I am often asked, how can a company make money selling free software? What’s important to recognize is that the recent Red Hats has been successful because we don’t actually sell software. The software itself is functionally free. The source code is available. But an enterprise is not just implementing features and functionality, they need to implement a solution which needs to last for years. When the New York stock exchange which runs on Red Hat enterprise Linux spent millions of dollars to develop their exchange, they want to make sure that it works for the next 5-10 years.
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Fedora
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Fedora project members, from pretty much every part of our project (especially Ambassadors), give presentations all over the world: from FUDcons (Fedora Users’ and Developers’ Conference) all over the world, to FOSS.in in India, to the Linux Symposium in Canada, LinuxTag in Germany, to FISL in Brazil, to SCALE in Calfornia – and many, many more.
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Debian Family
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Debian comes with a rebranded version of Firefox called Iceweasle. The reasons for this are that the Firefox logo was copyright, and everything in Debian must be strictly free software- thus free to modify- and Debian maintains its own Firefox/Iceweasle package after Mozilla itself has stopped providing security updates for them. (Debian Lenny comes with Iceweasle 3.0- perfectly stable- which is the aim of Debian stable releases by definition- but old.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu is based on Debian, so it uses a package manager called aptitude. This system allows users to easily add and remove software. Without a package manager, Ubuntu users would have to compile and install software from source code.
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Lately I have been watching a couple of threads related to Ubuntu packaging and publishing whichs makes me feel something is wrong.
With all respect, I believe Matt was probably dreaming when he came up with the “We’ve packaged all of the free software” title. There are plenty of applications not properly archive maintained or even packaged due to the lack of human resources.
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Flavours and Variants
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Kubuntu Netbook Remix is basically Kubuntu with the KDE Plasma Netbook interface instead of the KDE Plasma Desktop used in the desktop versions. Till Lucid Lynx, Kubuntu Desktop and Kubuntu Netbook Remix were available for download as separate ISOs.
However, from the next release of Kubuntu, i.e. Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, the Kubuntu Netbook Remix will not be released along with it. Rather, the Plasma Netbook package will be included in the Kubuntu Desktop ISO. At the time installation, using some screen resolution detection algorithm, it will be automatically decided if Plasma Desktop or Plasma Netbook is to be turned on by default. There will also be an option to change it manually in the System Settings.
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There is still three months left until Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” will be officially released along with the Ubuntu Netbook spin and the various other incarnations of this popular Linux distribution, but today we have some initial netbook tests of this next version of Ubuntu Linux. While Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook may boast a new user-interface now that it is using the Unity Desktop, the changes that have taken place “under the hood” have led to some performance differences compared to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Netbook.
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Android
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sensorMote for Android, is an Android application that allows you to control your media from your phone with simple hand gestures!!
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This really is amazing news, and a testament to just how popular Android has become. In September 2009, the Android Market had only 10,000 apps. Now, just 10 months later the Market has over 90,000 apps and is on track to surpass 100,000 before the month is over. If Android Market continues to grow at its current pace, we could very well see it catching up to the iTunes market within a year.
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For me, more than the over-used phrase of “open”, the promise of true multitasking, and the platform’s integration with Google Apps, was one word – “Choice”. Choice of handsets. Choice of carriers. Choice of manufacturers. Second behind the word choice has to be “Momentum”. I can see that Android has momentum in terms of improved quality, in terms of the number of devices sold and users, and yes, applications, which are growing in quantity, soon to be followed by quality. I really do believe that if Android does not already have a market share lead over Apple yet in this discussion, they soon will. It is inevitable. The growth in the number of handsets, carriers and users will drive more developers to the platform, and the holdouts who are not there will eventually make the move. And yes, third is “Cloud” – the idea that I don’t need to be tied to my desktop computer to manage data on the phone, but instead, the phone is built to tap into data stored on the Web. Fourth is “Capability”. The Android platform, as the Droid commercials offer, simply does more. The power of the mobile hotspot cannot be understated, and the iPhone is a zero there.
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Trend of computing show that we are looking for a lightweight device.
Future is all about a single device (a smartphone) which will do following task
* Office & Internet Computing
* Communication (audio, video)
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CEIVA Logic, Inc announced earlier this week that they have released an application to the Android Market that will allow users to send photos over-the-air from their mobile device to any CEIVA-connected photo frame. The application is called CEIVA Snap and since CEIVA invented connected digital photo frames, we’re sure this app will be a winner. Additional features allow users to view and store their photos on their devices all while on the go from anywhere.
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Marvin is a free ZX Spectrum emulator for phones running Android. Currently in v1.3, the package can be found in the market place and better still, its free! Marvin offers emulation of both the 48k and the 128k Spectrum, so lets look at how well it performs that task.
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Tablets
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Affordable Android-powered iPad-like Tablet Computers Galore: While browsing through dealextreme.com, a popular online shop for electronic products here in Asia, I was really surprised to see several iPad-like tablet computers that are sold for as low as $99 (US). Another surprising thing is that they are all powered by Android.
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Web Browsers
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I’ve been around a long time, and I can vividly remember when GNU Emacs was soundly criticized for being so large, using up so much memory. Well, those complaints went away a long time ago. Before we even had 1 GHz desktop computer systems, I found that GNU Emacs would load in just a few seconds on computers with as little as 200 MHz and 32 MB memory. It’s so much better today. The typical Web browser is four or five times larger just to download, and the amount of virtual memory they use can easily exceed a factor of ten beyond what an even loaded Emacs would consume.
Where does that leave the typical Web browser then? Two years ago, Web browsers were probably near their all time low in terms of efficiency and performance. Yes, they were offering more and more features, but the cost of those features were becoming prohibitive.
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Openness/Sharing
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Recent years have seen technological revolutions in informatics, communications, and the life sciences. Xconomy readers are deeply engaged with these trends, but may be unaware of the most important development of all, the transition (sometimes painful), to an Open Science system better suited for a global, networked, knowledge economy. Sadly, rapid technical progress has thus far not been matched by a revolution in the democratization of scientific problem solving. Instead, the practices and institutions that comprise our science and innovation paradigm are badly strained, and in some cases, arguably crumbling in the face of rapid technological and economic change.
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Open Access/Content
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In short: maybe we shouldn’t just be releasing content created in a closed process as Open Educational Resources (OERs); rather, we should be producing them in public using an open source production model?
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Programming
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Way back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, many Perl fans could rattle off a list of big projects using Perl: Slashdot, Amazon.com, IMDB. Eyebrows popped up (maybe at one point), as if the fact that billions of dollars of online sales went through Perl were validation of a language.
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Standards/Consortia
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UOF is not in same structure of ODF, some features(such as Media Object and Conditional format of Spreadsheet ) can not transform well only with XSLT, so we need to develop a set of extensions to transform them into a friendly structure first. For UOF API we must bind a bundle of interfaces and services on OpenOffice.org in order to OpenOffice.org can be integrated into office system with UOF API. The mission of this project is improving the interoperability of UOF.We’re going in for transforming the format between UOF and ODF with XSLT.There’s an UOF filter including an extension to solve some very important problems with Calc and OLE.
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Science
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The 3D-Bioplotter takes computer aided designs from a PC and build biomaterials. Anxious geeks building girlfriends in AutoCAD as we speak.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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In October Scotland’s new Sexual Offences Act will come into force. Unlike the 2003 Act that was written for England and Wales, the Scottish act contains a clause outlawing “indecent communication”. It will soon be illegal to communicate with someone sexually – either in writing or in speech – without obtaining their consent, or without the ‘reasonable belief’ that they do consent to it. Quite simply they have taken the standard traditionally applied to rape – to the actual penetration of another person’s body – and applied it to what people say.
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A Chinese government-backed think tank has accused the U.S. and other Western governments of using social-networking sites such as Facebook to spur political unrest and called for stepped-up scrutiny of the wildly popular sites.
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Copyrights
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A UN treaty called the WIPO Copyright Treaty requires countries to pass laws protecting “software locks” (also called DRM or TPM). Countries around the world have adopted the treaty in different ways: in the US, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits all circumvention of software locks, even when they don’t protect copyright (for example, it would be illegal to for me to break the DRM on a Kindle to access my own novels, were they sold with Kindle DRM).
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It should also be noted that if Bill C-32 passes as is, the right to collect from commercial radio stations for “reproduction” activities – i.e. copying and storing music on servers so that it can be archived, stored and broadcast efficiently – will be gone, provided that broadcasters can live with the limited exception provided for such reproduction which would last a maximum of thirty days. If the broadcasters can work with this proposed regime, they could save annual payments of $11 million to CSI, $10 million to AVLA/SOPROQ and $200,000 to ArtistI.
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Another break happened today in the RIAA’s case against Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum, as the $675k fine was reduced by 90%. The judge in the case criticised the RIAA and held that the jury’s damages were unconstitutional. Even the reduced fine is described as “severe, even harsh” by the District Judge.
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Two ISPs have won their court battle against an anti-piracy group which had demanded that they block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay. Yesterday a judge at the Antwerp Commercial Court rejected the blocking demands and labeled them “disproportionate”. The Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation has reacted angrily, accusing the ISPs of siding with The Pirate Bay.
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Digital Economy Bill
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Lord Mandelson has been accused of “running the worst general campaign in Labour’s history”, as he reignited the feud between Blairites and allies of Gordon Brown ahead of the publication of his memoirs.
In an interview to promote the book, entitled The Third Man, Mandelson said Brown had been served badly by his aides, who had “unbridled contempt” for Tony Blair.
CLUG Talk – 20 Oct 2007 – Darcs (2007)
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07.10.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Apparently, if you consider only that other OS you can make a proposal look good. Against MacOS and GNU/Linux the costs are staggering. TDSB has 60K PCs and 256 support people, 240 machines per support person. RedHat and others can set up systems where one support person can deal with thousands of machines. Could it be that the IT people did not believe CMS’ advice and lay themselves off upon migrating to Vista? Chuckle… The truth is only M$ and its partners benefit when a school board migrates to a product from M$. On top of that students are harmed by the exposure, instilling dependency on that other OS.
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We use Linux.
Now, Diane is well aware of the problems that Windows Users face. She’s been one of them for as long as she’s been using a computer but once she sat in proximity to a Linux computer and someone who knew how to use it, that all changed.
Diane is retired from the Airline Industry. She spent years in the Accounting and Purchasing Divisions of several airlines and companies so she’s no stranger to spreadsheets and databases. In the last part of her career she also used many on line applications to do her work.
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Server
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Linux provides the basis for much virtualization technology — Xen, VMware, KVM and OpenVZ, for example. Cloud vendors that use Linux exclusively, such as Amazon.com, attest to the fact that Linux provides the perfect virtualization backdrop for their services.
[...]
Linux is no longer viewed as just an anomaly among “real” data center OSes. Its developers and converts have made it a respectable and competitive choice for businesses that seek to lower their IT overhead and regain some profit. Converting to Linux isn’t difficult, even for those who find themselves drowning in a sea of proprietary software and hardware. It’s a real choice for developers, cloud vendors, database vendors, virtualization companies, hosting companies and you, the business owner. Linux is here to stay. Linux is a real commercial offering. Linux has proven itself as a real data center OS. And, the developers keep it real for everyone.
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Google
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In a matter of weeks, Google’s very first operating system aimed squarely at computers will be upon us: Chrome OS. As Dana Blankenhorn notes, Google has a FUD engine going surrounding the operating system that rivals the very best FUD campaigns from Microsoft’s past. Google is spoon feeding us 100 Chrome experiments, and appears to be wooing powerful hardware makers such as Dell. Like the iPad, the pent-up love for all things Google will probably make Chrome OS a short-term success, but where does it really fit in?
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Applications
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Now a Linux version is available. TeamViewer offers a bit more than just remote desktop sharing. It comes bundled with a host of other features such as the ability to manage share lists, record sessions and have voice conversations using VoIP.
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rekonq has a clean minimalistic interface – the type of interface most web browsers prefer nowadays. It has a Chrome type wrench icon from where you get the various browser options. There is also the bookmark next to it. Like Google Chrome, it has an integrated URL bar from where you can search the web, your history or simply enter the URL. It also serves as an indicator when a page is being loaded.
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Multimedia
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Free Linux music packages Ardour, Hydrogen and Jack will help you fall in love with a whole new world of creative possibilities
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A few things I’d like to see implemented include some of the more helpful items that were in Amarok 1.4 such as being able to add a “play count” column in the queue display list, and some of the playlist builder functions (“random 50″ and “random 100″ were two that I used a lot in Amarok 1.4).
That said, I’m extremely happy with what it can do as it currently stands, and those wants are pretty minor compared to what they’ve already done with it. I’m really kind of amazed that there isn’t much buzz surrounding this great application. So here’s to hoping that this quiet little project gets the attention it deserves!
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When I was still using Windows, I remembered playing or should I say scratching with the popular audio/video mixing software made by Atomix Productions called VirtualDJ. Though I didn’t really enjoyed DJing that much, I missed those days when I finally get to somehow experience what it’s like to be a DJ. So I started looking for DJ software program that I could install on my Linux box. Unfortunately, I only found a few and most of them are really old or are poor in quality if compared to VirtualDJ. But there is one Linux-compatible, free and open source DJ software program that is quiet promising, and its name is Mixxx.
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Instructionals
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Xfce
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As we continue on with our travels down the Xfce path, I thought it would be smart to highlight the Xfce calendaring application Orage. This tool is not an “all in one” tool like Evolution, nor does it have all of the bells and whistles of the Mozilla Sunbird calendar. But what it does, it does well and does so without taking up tons of your resources or your desktop real estate.
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Reviews
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Puppy will run upon pretty much anything out there.
It gives you a blisteringly fast machine with a sensible selection of pre-installed applications.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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The open source KVM virtualization technology is being promoted by many different vendors, often as a mechanism to help enable cloud deployments. Among the biggest backers of KVM are Linux vendors Red Hat and Ubuntu, though in at least one use case the solutions they’re marketing aren’t necessarily the solutions that cloud deployments are using.
Hosting provider The Planet recently launched a new cloud service offering built on KVM technology without the benefit of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) or Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). Instead The Planet has chosen to take its own path, leveraging the freely available Ubuntu Lucid LTS release and without engaging in a commercial contract with Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Stemming from Canonical’s relatively modest customer base, especially outside of cloud deployments, the vendor behind Ubuntu doesn’t have to worry about existing customers doing a similar price comparison between the pay-per-usage cloud approach and traditional support subscriptions. This is definitely an advantage for Canonical over Red Hat.
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Lucid, 10.04, was released nearly 3 months ago and still to this date the Ubuntu Chicago LoCo Team has not received our shipment. Not only has our shipment not been received but nobody seems to be answering my emails. Getting a bit tired of telling everyone, nope you can’t have any CDs because I don’t have any CDs, and not being able to have a decent gathering to promote Ubuntu because we have zero materials. Maybe this blog post will make its way to someone’s desk that can help or who possibly cares.
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Ubuntu 10.10 (codename Maverick Meerkat) is well into the development cycle, with the planned celebrity release date of 10 October 2010 (10/10/10). The development time frame of Ubuntu is quite condensed, and this is managed with a number of stages. These stages tend to symbolise milestones of the schedule, and usually refer to a restriction on what activity can happen during this time.
We have long passed the Alpha 1 CD image stage and I anticipate the release of Alpha 2 by the time you read this. You will no doubt be eager to test Alpha 3, which is currently scheduled for 5 August. Alpha 3 will be the last CD image created before the development of Maverick starts entering the second half of the ‘freeze’ stages.
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The fragmentation of Linux has become a hot topic in recent weeks as industry leaders debate how the community can collaborate to compete against single, vertical operating systems without creating an ecosystem that pulls the community in too many directions at once to be truly effective. As FOSS developers work at a fever pitch to create Linux-based OSes, handheld devices, enterprise-level servers, and mobile phones, the point at which they join forces can make the difference between getting a leg up on other operating systems and lagging behind.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Tests run by independent benching site Carrypad confirmed that Google’s open source OS took a licking. The benchmark was the Sunspider Javascript test. This is a processer intensive test that measures how quickly applications get displayed in a web browser.
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As I begin a series of tests on the Aava prototype phone today, the first thing I wanted to get out of the way was a Sunspider javascript test. It’s CPU-intensive and forms an important part of the chain of events that take place to get a web application displayed on your browser. Yes, it’s one of many variables but it’s a good indicator of CPU performance.
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Android
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iOS game developer OpenFeint has announced that the company will be bringing its open-source gaming platform to Google’s Android OS.
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Apple ranked number two with 24.4 percent share and Microsoft third with 13.2 percent, while Palm rounded out the top five with 4.8 percent.
Android’s growth should come as no surprise to mobile enthusiasts. More than 20 Android phones are available in the U.S. currently. Handset makers such as LG and Samsung that have been slower than rivals Motorola and HTC in adopting Android are now planning to launch new Android devices.
Earlier this week, LG said it will have two Android smartphones and an Android-based tablet available by the end of the year. Samsung has already announced that its first 4G Android phone on Sprint will be available this summer.
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OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE HOUSE Google has updated its Android software development kit (SDK) to match the latest version of Android 2.2.
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MindTree is using open source software to build the applications. This was the choice of the authorities in charge of the project. But Lahiri says open source such as Linux is scalable and mature enough for a project like this. Mindshare will use some vendor applications.
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One of the better blogs you might like to read up on in follow up to this event comes from Scott Wilson who talked about open innovation, development and collaboration. Wilson said that his focus was on barriers to community as he discussed areas such as, “Governance, diversity and personal barriers to engaging in an Open Source development community and how as a member of such a community you can make a contribution.”
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Five years on, Simon Brock catches up with those original open source projects he covered in this very column
It’s now five years since this column changed its title to Open Source, before which it had been restricted to Unix server software. We changed it because so much of the open-source Unix software we covered was also available for Windows and the Mac, and a broader remit seemed more sensible.
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“Does this mean that [moving forward] all newsrooms will publish using Scribus or will tone all photos using Gimp? No, but if an operation — part Journal Register or an outside company — wanted to, they could,” the press release read. “The tools we discovered, trained on and used as part of the Ben Franklin Project could allow a news organization to throw away their old methods and start anew.”
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The person making these comments is a professional writer who I follow, with several books published. So the opinion about the software not being feature rich is a valid issue and being too complicated is something that I too find with writing software in general. But that the author feels it is less feature rich because it is Open Source, or more correctly, because it is free is something that bothers me.
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Symbian
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Product Development Kit (PDK) 3.0, released today by the Symbian Foundation, is targeted at device developers. The kit includes all the source and binary files required to generate the new S^3 operating system and run it in the supplied emulator.
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Web Browsers
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Both Opera and Google are obsessed with the speed of their browser. With each release, each claim to be the fastest browser. Google has even gone on to make a game to demonstrate the speed of its browser Chrome. With today’s release of Opera 10.60, Opera is now claiming that it is the fastest browser on earth. So, we decided to see if it is indeed the fastest browser or if it is Google Chrome. We also decided to throw in the latest dev build of Chromium and Firefox 4.0 beta to the test.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is perhaps best known today for its Firefox web browser. Underlying that browser however is the open source license that enables its development community to thrive. The Mozilla Public License (MPL) has remained nearly untouched since 1999 and now at long last is undergoing a process of evolution.
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SaaS
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If you’re slightly bewildered by all the buzz over this new technology with the funny-sounding moniker, you’re not alone. The official story is that Hadoop was the name of the inventor’s kid’s stuffed elephant. However, for most IT professionals, it could easily be an acronym for “Heck, Another Darn Obscure Open-source Project.” The fact that Hadoop, managed by Apache, includes subprojects with similarly opaque names–such as Pig, Hive, Chukwa, and ZooKeeper—contributes to the queasy feeling that this is an untamed menagerie of squealing beasties.
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Open source technology is going to seriously impact the cloud computing world, and there are two main reasons why: Open source software is essentially free, and it is not generally encumbered by the software license models of proprietary software. Many proprietary software vendors, such as Microsoft and Oracle, are trying to maintain old and expensive license models, even though they impede the flexibility gained by virtualization and cloud computing.
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Databases
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Since Ingres was re-created in 2006 we have tripled our revenues and established ourselves as the second-largest open source company after Red Hat.
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CMS
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Business
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While Consona has aquired a number of software companies based on this model, that doesn’t seem to be the strategy behind the Compiere deal. Compiere brings only 130 customers to Consona and I doubt Compiere’s open-source business model was generating big profits. Instead of buying customers and profits, Consona seems to be thinking ahead about how they can lead the market in the next generation of technology. The acquisition is more about growing organically – selling more Compiere systems – than it is about harvesting customer support contracts.
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BSD
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The PC-BSD project brings a user-friendly pre-configured KDE desktop to the FreeBSD community. Which is all well and good, but what if you’re more of a GNOME person? Well, it turns out there is a project in the works for you too. The GhostBSD project is in its early stages, but it’s paving the way for users who enjoy running GNOME on a FreeBSD base without any configuring or installing extra software. I had a chance to exchange emails with Eric Turgeon, the project’s founder and lead developer.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Have you ever heard someone saying “Intellectual Property is a dumb term, please do not use it” in the parliament? Well it happened in the German Bundestag: Prof. Dr. Thomas Hoeren said it during the internet enquote this week. Afterwards one of the other experts, Prof. Rainer Kuhlen supported him and added that collecting societies abuse this term “so they can get goods with licensing agreements and circumvent copyright law”. (I already wrote about that in German blog entry.)
[...]
A bit later in 2004, Richard Stallman also wrote about that topic, in his article “Did You Say ‘Intellectual Property’? It’s a Seductive Mirage”:
It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws—plus a dozen other laws into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not become common by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely.
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Government
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John Ferlito, president of Linux Australia, has revealed that he and several associates are developing a way for open-source users to interface with the government’s Standard Business Reporting (SBR) system.
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National Linux advocacy body Linux Australia has added its support for the federal government’s Standard Business Reporting initiative by planning an open source SBR integration project, meanwhile work begins at the ATO on AUSkey for Linux.
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It wouldn’t be anything really new, either, for the U.K. government to look toward open source. In 2003, the government signed a five-year agreement with Sun to look at using some of its open source systems in government.
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Openness/Sharing
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Sara Coffin likes to think of Schreibstuck as the dance equivalent of open-source software that allows members of the public to modify and redistribute the original code to suit their own needs.
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Open Data
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AOL’s MapQuest has announced an interesting partnership open-source online mapping outfit OpenStreetMap. Through the partnership, MapQuest will begin using data provided by OpenStreetMap to power a version of its product. This new product, available for now in the UK at open.mapquest.co.uk, will reside separately from the main site and will not use any commercial mapping data.
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Open Hardware
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OSCON this year will be a delight for anybody interested in working with hardware. A full open source hardware track offers a range of talks to get you started with hardware hacking, and gives a great insight into the current options for prototyping.
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Programming
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The open source Python language is at a crossroads with two major versions available to developers. The end of the road for the Python 2.x branch is now a little closer, with the release of Python 2.7 this week.
Python 2.7 is intended to be the last major Python 2.x release as the open source project aims to help developers migrate to the newer Python 3.x release codebase. Python 3.x first hit general availability in December of 2008. Though the Python 2.x branch is now at the end of the line in terms of new releases, Python 2.x still has a lot of life left in it.
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Standards/Consortia
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There are already a number of Flash alternatives available to users, including the promising open source Lightspark and Gnash players.
The most interesting alternative, however, is not a replacement Flash player but a separate technology that converts existing Flash content into HTML5 and Javascript, on the fly.
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Stuart sends over a column from a Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Terry Savage, that I could have sworn was satire until someone convinced me that it’s not. Savage is apparently a “financial” columnist, who apparently is a bit confused about her basic economics. Over the long weekend, she decided to celebrate the American way by berating and lecturing some children who set up a lemonade stand because they wanted to give away the lemonade for free. According to Savage, these kids represent all that is wrong with America. I’m not joking.
[...]
Wait, what? You know what the Declaration of Independence also didn’t include? Anything about how much “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” costs. You know why? Because it has nothing to do with whether or not something costs money or is free. So that’s not “something to think about” because it makes no sense.
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Given the massive backlash against Best Buy for this move, it appears the company is backtracking quickly. Best Buy’s CEO did a blog post saying the company had “completed its investigation” and Brian was being offered his job back. The CEO also points out — as people did in the comments, that some of the original concern wasn’t so much about the famed iPhone/Evo video (which doesn’t mention Best Buy), but other videos he had done that had mentioned the company (which have since been taken down).
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Security/Aggression
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Roger Thompson chief research officer at AVG revealed a Javascript injection attack that lures users by providing a link to a video, which it claims “99% of people can’t watch”. The link forwards users to another page that asks them to paste Javascript code into their browser’s address bar.
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The US National Security Agency (NSA) is embarking on a secret domestic surveillance project dubbed “Perfect Citizen”, intended to monitor and protect important national infrastructure such as power grids and transport systems.
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The National Security Agency plans to launch a program aimed at assessing vulnerabilities and developing capabilities to help secure critical infrastructure like power plants, air traffic control systems and the electrical grid.
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The results of a Cyber-Ark global survey show that 35 percent of respondents believe their company’s highly-sensitive information has been handed over to competitors. Thirty-seven percent of the IT professionals surveyed cited ex-employees as the most likely source of this abuse of trust.
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Finance
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At a minimum, once U.S. firms will be required to detail their payments to foreign governments, the citizens of these countries will know how much their governments are receiving and from whom, giving them a fighting chance to hold their government accountable for investing those funds in critical needs such as food, health and education.
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The fate of the Wall Street reform bill is up in the air after the death of Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. The bill is a single confirmed vote short of the 60 votes needed to get past a threatened filibuster by Senate Republicans. From day one, the Bankster team has supported the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and that is still one of the strongest pieces of the bill. It is a great time to send off the last emails to Senators telling them to put a new cop on the block in the form of a CFPB.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In addition to recommending a professional PR campaign to try and coax tourists back to Arizona in the wake of the state’s tough new immigration law, the task force appointed by Governor Jan Brewer suggested that Arizona try to “change the tone of the dialogue” by talking about the effects that tourism boycotts have on vulnerable employees within the state.
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It’s a move that outraged observers have decried as an attack on First Amendment rights. And CNN’s Anderson Cooper describes the new rules as making it “very easy to hide incompetence or failure.”
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For the first time, thanks to an ongoing “open records” investigation by the Food Rights Network, the public and the press have easy online access to dozens of internal SFPUC files, documenting the strange tale of Chez Sludge, or how the sewage industry bedded Alice Waters.
[...]
San Francisco’s SFPUC is in the forefront of the latest maneuver in this toxic scam, “composting” its toxic sludge and marketing it as “organic Biosolids compost,” thus co-opting a venerable terms used in Organic agriculture. This greenwashing scam slipped rather unnoticed by the public from 2007 until the fall of 2009. That is when the San Francisco Chronicle reported on an effort by two public interest groups who petitioned the [SFPUC to halt the program. In December 2009, the The Atlantic reported that the city had rejected the petition and that the SFPUC was preparing to increase its toxic sludge to gardens giveaway ten-fold in 2010.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The wireless industry urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) not to mandate that cell phone companies make their billing practices clearer, a possibility the agency is considering in its effort to mitigate “bill shock.”
The commission started a proceeding in May seeking comment on whether it should make regulations to prevent consumers from receiving higher-than-expected cell phone bills.
[...]
An FCC survey released in May picked up national attention for reporting that nearly one in five American consumers have been subject to sudden and unexpected rises in their monthly cellular phone bills.
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Copyrights
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This interesting abuse or misuse of copyright law again shows an old fox obeying the law but getting what he wanted, including great publicity in a campaign where it is not all that easy to get news coverage.
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Sharron Angle has resorted to an unusual maneuver to counter Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s attacks on her past quotes and positions, the Reid campaign has announced: A cease-and-desist letter, demanding that Reid no longer republish Angle’s previous campaign website.
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CMR International, a firm that tracks that performance of the pharmaceuticals sector, released a rather depressing report on research and development productivity last week. The report will set you back $10,000, but highlights have been made public:
[...]
- Pharma is having a tough time selling its new drugs: New drugs launched within the last five years accounted for less than 7 percent of industry sales in 2009, down from 8 percent in 2008, highlighting the big problems that companies are having in trying to reinvigorate their portfolios.
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There are so many reasons to love Woot, including their recent awesome letter and video about their acquisition. But, even better may be that in today’s Woot offering, they mock the Associated Press for its coverage of the Woot acquisition, because the AP just happens to have also copied text from the awesome Woot letter. Now, that’s all well and good for most publications, but this is the AP that we’re talking about. The same AP that threatens bloggers for copying headlines and snippets. The same AP that insists it needs “hot news” to protect others from “free riding” on its work. And, most importantly, the same AP that has a famously ridiculous pricelist for quoting five words or more from an AP article.
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It’s no secret that the Associated Press is hot for the “hot news” doctrine (even as they seem blind to how it will come back to bite them). However, most of the lawsuits involving “hot news” to date have strayed away from really testing the legal limits of, say, blogs writing about newspaper stories and quoting parts of the story in the process. That may be changing. Dean Singleton is the chair of the Associated Press, as well as the CEO of MediaNews, one of the big newspaper chains out there. Apparently he’s decided to test the waters on threatening bloggers over “hot news.”
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THE composers of the legendary 1980s international pop smash hit Down Under have been ordered to pay five per cent of earnings from the song after it was found to have breached copyright law.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of academics and public policy groups are urging a federal judge to dismiss a criminal indictment that could give websites extraordinary power to dictate what behavior becomes a computer crime.
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Neil Hull had bought a Performing Rights Society (PRS) licence… however, the relatively unknown Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL) took him to court because, unbeknown to Neil, he needed a licence from IT, too
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Late last year, Summit sued to shut down an unofficial Twilight fan magazine, in part for using stock publicity photos that Summit had distributed to the news media. The production company had licensed the use of the photos for “journalistic purposes,” and it argued that Beckett Media, the magazine’s publisher, violated the license because its use of the pictures wasn’t journalistic enough.
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The MPAA is at it again, going after movie pirates. This time, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is helping out the movie industry, and they’ve seized nine different domains: Movies-links.TV, nowmovies.com, thepiratecity.org, filespump.com, planetmoviez.com, zml.org, tvshack.net, ninjavideo.net and thisninja.net. These were mostly ad-supported movie streaming sites that showed pirated versions of current theatrical releases.
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According to the Wall Street Journal, federal authorities seized 9 domain names of sites that were offering pirated movies.
The nine domain names were registered using U.S.-based registrars, allowing authorities to take control of their site addresses.
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The Federal Court of Appeal issued is decision today [not online yet] on whether Internet providers can be considered broadcasters within the context of the Broadcasting Act. The case is the result of last year’s CRTC New Media decision in which many cultural groups called on the Commission to establish an ISP levy to fund Canadian content. The ISPs argued that such a levy was illegal since they fell under the Telecommunications Act, not the Broadcasting Act. The cultural groups argued that ISPs should be considered broadcasters in the case of the transmission of video programs. The CRTC punted the issue to the Federal Court of Appeal.
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Digital Economy
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News that TalkTalk and BT are challenging the Digital Economy Act in court is extremely welcome. It is a vindication of our view that the legislation should not have been rammed through parliament in the dying days of the last government.
CLUG Talk – 09 Oct 2007 – Gentoo Portage (2007)
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux is easy to learn, highly capable of fulfilling a typical computer user’s needs, and 100 percent free. So why is it that Linux still has such a miniscule share of the overall desktop market? Maybe its gratis nature has been keeping it down. It seems that when consumers don’t know enough about a product, they judge it by its cost — and “free,” at least on a subconscious level, translates to “not as good.”
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Many security professionals who find themselves needing to analyze a specific piece of malware end up in a difficult situation. The classic approach to analyzing malware is to set up a virtual machine on a PC specifically designed for that purpose and then let the malware loose and see what it does. But that usually only shows you part of the picture; much of the malware’s behavior can remain hidden without the ability to do some deeper analysis.
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Google
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Is a command line really what Google needs now? Opinions were mixed at the debut of GoogleCL, the search giant’s new and daringly named command line tool. Reactions ranged from “I’ve had to write bits and pieces of it myself. Thanks!” all the way over to “The APIs were already out there. Of course, the best APIs can already be used from the command line with curl, so I care even less about this.”
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Ballnux
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Rumors of a June 8 launch of Telus’ HTC Triumph — a rebranded version of the Desire, seemingly — came and went without a trace, but now, we’ve got another reason to think that the model’s launch might be just around the corner.
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Sprint announced a Samsung handset running Android 2.1 that sells for $100 with a two-year contract. The Samsung Intercept is equipped with a 3.2-inch touchscreen display, a 3.2-megapixel camera, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and an optical joystick, says the company.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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One of the common misconceptions about GNU/Linux is that it “doesn’t have any applications”. Every time I hear this, I immediately respond with “how far did you look?”. Truth is, Linux has thousands upon thousands of applications. Some are installed by default in Linux distributions, and some are purposely not installed, but available and can be installed with a couple of clicks. Depending on which distribution you use, and how you install it, your list of installed applications when you are finished installing the operating system itself will vary.
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If you are a movie junkie like me, chances are you have quite a number of movies on your computer that would be nice watching on your DVD player or home theater system, mobile phone or portable multimedia device.
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Instructionals
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Let’s say you are doing research on your desktop browser and you need to leave your computer to run some errand. Wouldn’t it be great if you can sync what you are reading to your mobile phone so that you can continue your research on the move? If you are using an Android phone (running Froyo) and Google Chrome/Firefox, you just got yourself a great deal.
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Lifehacker offers a straightforward solution. Once your removable media has served its purpose, simply format them on a PC booted up with a Live CD. Live CDs are self-contained boot discs (usually running a variant of Linux) that let you use a computer without accessing—or installing—anything on your hard disk.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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At LinuxTag 2010, the KDE community announced the “Join the Game” campaign to support KDE e.V.’s Supporting Membership Program. The first new member was Georg Greve, founder of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). We caught up with him for a ‘short’ interview that turned into a two hour conversation about life, the universe and everything. The pertinent bits are excerpted below.
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The Gnome project creates the desktop environment used in Ubuntu, Red Hat, and many other operating systems. Each distribution tweaks Gnome a bit by adding or removing applications, but most of it is the same between the different systems. For all practical purposes, to the non-techie, non-geek, Gnome is the operating system, because it’s what they see and interact with. In Ubuntu, the default Gnome browser, Epiphany is removed and replaced with Firefox. The Gnome office suite is not used, favoring the more popular OpenOffice.org suite instead. Each distribution picks what it feels are the best parts available from the open source community.
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New Releases
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Salix LXDE edition 13.1 has been released! Based on Slackware 13.1, it features the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, “an extremely fast-performing and energy-saving desktop environment”, with a clean look and feel. The main applications that complete the LXDE experience are the lightweight and fast PCManFM file manager and the popular Openbox window manager.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS developers have released the quarterly ISO updates for the GNOME, KDE and LXDE editions of their Linux distribution. The 2010.07 releases include a number of desktop and package updates, but don’t add any new features to the operating system.
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There was a time in which Mandriva was considered a somewhat “intermediate” Linux distribution. In 2009, when I started using it, I found it slightly “difficult”. However, with the 2010 release, I have noticed how the distro has been oriented to the ease of use. I’m not saying that it is easy, as no OS is, but I must confess that I perceive less entanglement now. So, today I can confidently recommend beginners to install it as their debut distro in the fascinating world of Linux.
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Reprieved from its financial troubles with fresh investments, Mandriva released the final version of Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring. The latest stable release is touted for offering faster boot times, enhanced “Smart Desktop” file-organization technology, easier printer and wireless configuration, new scientific apps, plus updates including GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.3, and the new Go-OO branch of OpenOffice.
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“Mandriva possesses in its DNA all the requisites of an Open Source world leader. A community of 3.5 million users, a leading position in the BRIC zone, and prestigious clients in both the public sector and major business,” stressed Jean-Noël de Galzain, President of IF Research. “We are going to focus on the company management and promoting a new, dynamic commercial activity based on innovative products offered on a new distribution network.”
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Today, July 7th, Canonical proudly announced that it will support the Ubuntu Free Culture showcase, which will offer photographers, artists and musicians from all over the world and with any background, the opportunity to see their work in the next release of the Ubuntu operating system, Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), due for release in October 10th, 2010.
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NetLogic Microsystems announced a Linux-based hardware/software development kit it says is the first fully deterministic networking solution that concurrently processes Layers 2-7 at 40Gbps wire-speed. The NLX321103A solution combines the MIPS-based XLP832 eight-core, 32-threaded system-on-chip with the NL11k and NETL7 Layer 7 “knowledge-based” processors, the company says.
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Until now Brit chip shop ARM’s processor designs have been restricted to smart phones and other embedded devices, but new developments in a partnership between ARM and Canonical, the company which develops Ubuntu Linux, could see a new push into the traditional computing market.
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Phones
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Movial has announced enablement and certification services for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 on both systems-on-chip and mobile platforms for MeeGo and Android.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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MeeGo will be used on everything from advanced smartphones to netbooks, connected TVs, and tablet computers, the two companies say. Nokia still hasn’t announced its first MeeGo-based product, but it will be delivered this year, says Vanjoki.
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Android
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Russian Rover Computers has revealed five new tablets, ranging from 5- to 7-inch models. The processors are also varied and include Samsung ARM chips, while the range-topping RoverPad TegA W70 gets NVIDIA’s Tegra CPU. All five are likely rebadged OEM offerings, with the TegA W70 based on the Compal Tegra tablet.
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With the market moving so quickly, things are bound to change. The survey was conducted before Apple’s latest iPhone 4 was released in June. Also, look for Google to exceed Microsoft’s share in the next period since it is trailing by a minuscule .2 percent.
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The Android 2.2 SDK that was released at Google I/O contained a preview of the Froyo system image and today, we are releasing an update to bring it into sync with the system image pushed to Nexus One devices.
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And we have yet another cell phone maker joining the Android bandwagon. Various Japanese media, for example Sankei Digital [JP], are reporting that Fujitsu is currently working on an Android-based smartphone.
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One of the most popular sides of Google’s Android operating system is the openness to hacks and modifications it enables. We’ve already had the chance to take a look at a wide range of custom made Android ROMs for handsets that would not taste the platform otherwise, but today’s news bring something new into the equation. An Android 2.2 Froyo port available for users of a HTC Hero on Sprint’s airwaves in the US has just emerged accompanied by a video of Nexus One running under Ubuntu, complemented by detailed instructions on how this can be done.
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Android’s share of the smartphone OS market went up between February and May of this year while everyone else took a hit, according to the latest data from comScore. The analytics firm released its three-month MobiLens report Thursday, observing that Android’s share of smartphone subscribers had gone up a full four percentage points in the US, though it still remains fourth on the list after RIM, Apple, and Microsoft.
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Motorola
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Motorola announced a low-end Android 2.1 phone for T-Mobile equipped with a new version of its MotoBlur UI layer. The Motorola Charm is equipped with a 2.8-inch, 320 x 240 touchscreen, 802.11b/g/n, a three-megapixel camera, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and a “Backtrack” touchpanel on the back of the device.
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eWEEK has run two favorable reviews of the Motorola Droid X, praising the phone’s multimedia performance, call quality, battery life, and camera, but criticizing its Wi-Fi performance and MotoBlur interface. A Wired review, meanwhile, calls the Droid X “one of the finest Android devices available” — if one can handle the size.
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Sub-notebooks
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This update carries over 100 bug-fixes, including the upgrading of the Linux kernel against the 2.6.33.5 kernel, improved 3D performance via DRM and Mesa updates, web browser enhancements, improvements to visuals and the window manager, full support for the GNOME Proxy, and many other changes.
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The pre-selection of project management programs started by focusing on some of the most famous web-based ones, excluding the following (for the following reasons):
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Katonda has published a list of top 9 bugs and blunders of the last few weeks. In that list Apple and Microsoft seems to lead the world of bugs by delivering some of the most lethal bugs.
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Mozilla
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Firefox has been taking heat from Google Chrome over speed for some time, but the world’s most popular open source browser is getting ready for a comeback. Can Firefox 4.0 woo back some of the early adopters who’ve embraced Chrome? It looks like it will have a very good shot.
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Business
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Commercial open source software is a newer trend than open source software itself. Over time, it is likely that the distance, in terms of feature sets, between proprietary software packages and open source ones will be closed by contributions from commercial interests. At least that’s true for many important packages. It goes to show that even though many people in the open source community frown on commercial interests, companies that back open source projects can have a profoundly positive effect on them.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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By working together for free software in a focused movement, we can do much more than the sum of our individual or project efforts.
That’s where this campaign is headed–to strengthen the entire movement by promoting the underlying message that all free software projects work for a unified ideal: an end goal of software freedom. It represents a new theme in the Free Software Foundation’s work and a shift in focus that recognizes we are ready to engage a much wider audience. The approach for “Working together for free software” is to find new common ground to facilitate an effective public campaign for software freedom that will benefit everyone.
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The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) project occupies a unique niche in the free software community. As Richard Stallman is fond of reminding us, much of what we run on our systems comes from the GNU project; much of that code, in turn, is owned by the Free Software Foundation. But most of the GNU code is relatively static; your editor wisely allowed himself to be talked out of the notion of adding an LWN weekly page dedicated to the ongoing development of GNU cat. GCC, though, is FSF-owned, is crucial infrastructure, and is under heavy ongoing development. As a result, it will show pressures that are only seen in a few places. This article will look at a couple of recent episodes, related to licensing and online identity, from the GCC community.
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Project Releases
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The WordPress developers have announced the release of version 1.3 of their WordPress for Android app. Using the mobile application, users can easily post to and edit their WordPress blogs from an Android mobile device.
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RDPDesk, one of the leading companies in the field of security connection solution development would like to announce the launching of version 3.0 of RD Connection manager, a free open source remote desktop management solution which is licensed under the GNU General Public License
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Government
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When I started working on GNU C++ in 1987, I could almost feel the course of history changing with every line of code I wrote. When I started Cygnus Support in 1989, I was convinced that it was only a matter of time before companies began to realize that proprietary software restrictions did nothing to help their competitive advantage and everything to harm it. And though early funding for my work came from government agencies (US DARPA in 1987 and French INRIA in 1988), I never quite expected to be visiting and promoting open source in Malaysia [short version] [longer version]. Yet such is the reach of open source software! Now the Government of Malaysia proudly reports an astonishing 97% adoption rate for open source software in this new report:
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Science
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A black hole only slightly heavier than our Sun is emitting the most powerful jets of energy ever seen, rivaling that of quasars a million times larger, and creating a bubble of hot gas and fast-moving particles 1000 light-years across.
When black holes devour matter, they release massive amounts of energy. Physicists had thought this energy mostly took the form of radiation, primarily X-rays. However, as this newly discovered black hole so dramatically illustrates, at least as much energy, if not a great deal more, is released as jets of fast moving particles. These streams of particles smash headlong into the interstellar gas nearby, which heats up the gas and causing rapid expansion. The resulting bubble is a mix of the hot gas and the particles from the black hole.
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Security/Aggression
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Security weaknesses in the hugely popular file-sharing Web site thepiratebay.org have exposed the user names, e-mail and Internet addresses of more than 4 million Pirate Bay users, according to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity.com.
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Finance
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They’re decrying the fact I might fault them for having anything whatsoever to do with the rise of the price of global wheat. Harper’s will publish the letter, of course, with my response . . .
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Trying to get out in front of what they call a censorship arms race, a team of researchers has come up with technology that lets users exchange messages through heavily censored networks in countries such as China and North Korea in hidden channels via user-generated content sites such as Twitter or Flickr.
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Google Australia breached the Privacy Act when it inadvertently collected data from private wireless networks using its Street View cars, Australian Privacy Commissioner Karen Curtis said today.
In response, the search and advertising giant was forced to publicly apologise.
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The Australian government is conducting an independent review of websites due to be blocked by its controversial internet filter.
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Copyrights
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The basic recording contract upon which most of the popular music business has been based for the past 50 years is fundamentally broken.
This is not the sentiment of one of the countless critics who throw stones at the music industry from afar, usually for vague philosophical reasons, but rather the pragmatic opinion of a true insider: Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records, which sold millions of records by hip-hop artists including Club Nouveau, Coolio, De La Soul, Digital Underground, Everlast, House of Pain and Naughty By Nature.
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Brazil recently unveiled its much anticipated copyright reform proposal and it provides a statutory example of applying this principle. Article 107 includes an interesting balance to legal protection for digital locks.
Not only does the proposal permit circumvention for fair dealing and public domain purposes, but it establishes equivalent penalties for hindering or preventing the users from exercising their fair dealing rights. In other words, the Brazilian proposals recognizes what the Supreme Court of Canada stated several years ago – over-protection is just as harmful as under-protection.
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ACTA
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As our mission here at the Free Software Foundation is to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all free software users, we also have to defend against ill-conceived and misguided laws. Many of you may already be aware of an international trade agreement being negotiated by the G8 nations called ACTA, but another law known as the Digital Economy Act is of concern, specifically to citizens of the UK.
We have already published a petition condemning ACTA on a number of specific grounds which we urge you to sign if you haven’t already. If you would like to know more, please read the rationale for this declaration. Right now, you can take action!
CLUG Talk 28 October 2008 – GPU Computing (2008)
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Send this to a friend
07.09.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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By splitting the rendering framework into composite and opengl plugins, Compiz can be used as the known compositing window manager or as a backend for other 3D desktop programs such XRender or Clutter. Another significant change, decoration reparenting, will allow Compiz to run with decorations as non-compositing when used with the revamped GNOME or KDE Window Decorators. Integration with QT main loop and the creation of a KApplication provides better integration with KDE. A new DBus plugin will now use the screen number to identify the Compiz instance. A major redraw bug that caused ripping or skips in rendering was also fixed.
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Linux is growing in popularity for many reasons, and as an operating system it is many things to many people. While we all have our own reasons for liking Linux and open source, here are my top five (and a half!) reasons why, as a power user, I prefer to use Linux. You’ll notice that these reasons are quite a bit different from why I think Ubuntu makes a great operating system for Mom, which just goes to show how versatile Linux can be.
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Linux and the GNU project’s software was developed to offer an alternative to proprietary software. It is a system of open source and distributed under the GPL, i.e. anybody can get it, make changes and redistribute it. Although there are paid versions of Linux, but the vast majority of distributions is completely free. You can download the ISO images at no cost. Additionally, you can make changes to adapt it to suit your needs. Above all, you have the freedom to pass a free Linux distribution to your friends without committing software piracy.
Windows is a closed source and proprietary software. The price for the acquisition of Windows operating system is already something that one could consider prohibitively expensive and complicated for a personal computer user.
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Audiocasts
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In this episode: The first Mozilla 4 beta is here while Nokia is moving rapidly forward with MeeGo for mobiles. We report back on our You Dare Us challenge and hear Paul tackle Python.
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AskoziaPBX is a complete telephone system. It can speak to nearly any telephony technology in the world and is configured via a highly intuitive WebGUI. Designed to run on low-resource systems.
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On this episode of Linux Outlaws: A big announcement (kind of), ASCAP declares war on Creative Commons, Bilski comes down, new Fedora project leader, Microsoft kills Kin and Apple drops the ball on the iPhone 4.
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Instructionals/Technical
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You won’t need to tile windows location by yourself any more, with this simple applet you can simply Tile windows in many ways to get best view for active windows. I usually use tile mode to easily compare between to windows and included content inside both, also you can use it to simply drag and drop element from window to another.
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Games
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All of these games are cross-platform, so you can enjoy them on other operating system as well. Theres’ variety to be had, too. Single player, multiplayer, at home or online, role playing, classic strategy, puzzle solving. I have not intended to have balance in this list, but the games kind of naturally filled the right spots.
I recommend you start with demos and trials and see what gives. I believe you will have found a new collection of great items to play and explore. Along with the freeware collection, you have the rest of 2010 to get convinced in my choices. You won’t be disappointed.
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While I was on sabbatical, Protektor sent in a whole mess of Linux games we’ve yet to mention:
* Summoning Wars, a dungeon hack game
* Super Tux Kart, an enhanced version of Tux Kart
* Dragon History – a Czech adventure game that runs under ScummVM
* Shotgun Debugger – a 2D top-down shooter
[...]
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Indonesians are known to have spirit to share, and eager to help each other. Hence, BlankOn Developers believe, that it is their part of identity, to be more active and involved in Free/Open Source Software activities.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Nonprofit organization One Laptop Per Child on Thursday said it is adding a multitouch screen to the upcoming XO-1.75 laptop and is modifying software to take advantage of the new hardware.
The XO-1.75 with a touch-sensitive 8.9-inch screen will start shipping next year. The laptop will run on an Arm processor and is the successor to the current XO-1.5 laptop, which runs on a Via x86 processor. OLPC will also add a multitouch screen on the next-generation XO-3 tablet, which is due to ship in 2012.
Customers could be interested in buying XO-1.75 laptops as low-power replacements to existing XO-1 machines, which don’t have touch capabilities, said Chris Ball, lead software engineer for OLPC, in an e-mail.
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I saw an announcement the other day about a development OS release (os16) for the OLPC XO-1 laptop that basically brings it into parity with the release on the XO-1.5. I downloaded it, got a developer key, unlocked an OLPC, and figured out how to install it. Once you become familiar with the process, it is actually easy and straight forward. I even played with the FORTH-based firmware for the first time.
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Jack Wallen itemizes the improvements that have made him a Fedora fan again.
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Debian Family
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What I expected to happen some time ago, is finally becoming reality: Debian is now my favourite distribution for desktop systems.
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The most exciting thing is seeing the traction Ubuntu has as a mainstream choice for consumers. The alignment between Ubuntu, the community, developers and the hardware ecosystem is really coming into its own at this point. In my new role I am involved in more strategic discussions with our partners and customers, and the road ahead is looking very exciting.
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In parallel with the rapid development of mobile computing, various Linux-based OS pop up one after another—from Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu to webOS.
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Huge inventories of netbooks resulted because people wanted cheaper netbooks. Those inventories are now cleared but OEMs are taking a wait-and-see attitude before offering for sale the latest Wintel systems. Even the $11 price increase for the latest Atom is seen as too much. Wouldn’t a $50 reduction for using GNU/Linux look good about now? Wouldn’t a $50 reduction for using ARM look good about now?
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Kirk Wylie, CEO of London based startup OpenGamma, has announced the company has come out of stealth mode and in the coming months, will be presenting its financial analytics platform to the world. The company is developing a common infrastructure and applications for financial services firms. The platform unifies batch and live calculations to create more consistency in risk and analytics calculations and is designed to be the core technology in batch risk analysis, commercial trading systems, bespoke trading systems and event driven alerting systems.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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You’ve no doubt heard about or even seen Firefox 4′s new Chrome-like interface. More important are the many new features generally lumped together under the catchall standard HTML5, a specification that’s still a draft but has become more of a rallying cry for AJAX, JavaScript, endless tags, and life beyond plug-ins.
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Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now available and ready for testing. This first version is filled with dozens of new features and improvements. Here are more in depth explanations of some of the Firefox 4 Beta 1 features from the Firefox team…
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I want, I really want Firefox to become a top-of-the-line Web browser again. It was Firefox, after all, that broke IE’s (Internet Explorer) strangle-hold on Web browsers. Even Microsoft owes Firefox some gratitude. If Firefox hadn’t pushed Microsoft into making IE into a decent Web browser, many of us might still be stuck with crapware like IE 6. Unfortunately, I’m not sure Firefox 4 is going to get Firefox back into competition with IE 8, much less, what I see as today’s leading Web browser, Google’s Chrome 5.
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Education
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IT directors across the country are implementing open source software in their K-12 districts–a decision often prompted by the improving quality of open source options, as well as cost savings.
Selection of OSS is sometimes a value-added option when the commercial version would never be financially feasible. In other cases, IT directors are replacing existing solutions with OSS, instigated by license agreements that are ending, the need to refurbish old computers, or the purchase of netbooks.
While there are no recent surveys to measure use of open source software (OSS), anecdotal evidence reflects growing interest in–and use of–alternatives to proprietary software.
A few years ago, an OSS talk at the National Educational computing Conference (NECC; now ISTE) would draw about five attendees, and there would be just a “smattering of people” in the open source lab. Now the rooms are full, said Alex Inman, director of technology for Whitfield School in St. Louis, MO.
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Business
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There is renewed and meaningful discussion going about open core with several good insights and arguments: Simon Phipps, Mark Radcliffe, Stephen O’Grady and our own Matt Aslett to name a few.
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BSD
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FreeBSD 8.1 is slated to be released this month as the first significant update to FreeBSD since the rollout of the 8.0 release last November. With the second release candidate of FreeBSD 8.1 having just been made available a few days back, we have conducted a set of tests comparing the performance of FreeBSD 8.1 RC2 versus FreeBSD 8.0 and an Ubuntu 10.10 development snapshot.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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A couple of days ago, I was writing about how Richard Stallman’s GNU GPL uses copyright as a way of ensuring that licensees share code that they distribute – because if they don’t, they are breaching the GPL, and therefore lose their protection against claims of copyright infringement.
That’s all very well, but as many people have pointed out, this does result in the paradoxical situation that the GNU GPL actually *depends* on copyright, an intellectual monopoly, in order to spread intellectual freedom. Moreover, it seems to doom free software into a kind of symbiosis with copyright, forcing it to remain a supporter of that monopoly, since without it, the approach used to make the GPL so powerful would not work.
This is obviously a slightly troubling prospect, so a little while ago I thought I’d raise the point with RMS himself, since he was bound to be aware of the issue, and presumably had a solution (I hoped). This issue has come up a few times in recent months, so I thought it might be worth publishing his answers to my questions to shed some light on this important topic.
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Project Releases
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The Samba team isn’t expecting to release Samba 4 until the first half of 2011 (optimistically) but work on support for Microsoft’s SMB2 — and older SMB/CIFS — has moved ahead quite nicely.
Samba leader Jeremy Allison said support for SMB2 — which was introduced in the Windows Vista client — is finished and will be made available for testing in the next significant Samba release.
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Unfortunately a rather bad bug sneaked into GIMP 2.6.9, so here’s another release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series to fix this issue.
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GNU Dico is an extensible modular dictionary server with a set of database modules, a command line client utility and a web interface.
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Government
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U.K. government staff suggested replacing Microsoft Corp. operating systems on computers with free alternatives in response to a call for ideas for Prime Minister David Cameron’s cost-cutting drive.
Cameron asked the 600,000 government workers last month to make suggestions on saving money as his administration seeks to cut Britain’s record budget deficit. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne today published a sample of the 56,000 submitted ideas, which including abandoning Microsoft, switching office lights off and centralizing stationery procurement.
“In terms of spending less, what about migrating the whole of government (the NHS, education etc.) from Microsoft products to Linux and open-source software like Openoffice,” read one of the suggestions displayed on the Treasury website. Two of the 31 listed proposals, whose authors were not named, suggested dropping Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft.
Open-source software such as Linux and Openoffice offers free or very cheap alternatives to Microsoft’s Windows and Office, the world’s most popular operating system and productivity software. Osborne said before the Conservatives won power in the May 6 election that he favored the idea.
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Imagine a country that has one of the best Internet infrastructures in the world, and yet its government effectively forbids the use of GNU/Linux through a requirement that everyone employ a decade-old Windows-only technology for many key online transactions. That country is South Korea, where 1 Gbits/second Internet connections are planned for 2012; and that Windows-only technology is ActiveX.
[...]
Either way, it’s great news for the long-suffering South Koreans, who finally get to choose which technology they use in their daily lives – after more than a decade of enforced Internet Explorer and Windows use. It’s also great news for open source, which gets a chance to compete on a level playing field – something that Microsoft keeps calling for whenever the EU proposes favouring open source, and yet somehow never mentions when that field is already steeply tilted in its own favour, as has been the case in South Korea.
That new opportunity is important, because of South Korea’s advanced Internet infrastructure. It means that the open source community there can now work on creating advanced applications that explore the possibilities of that kind of bandwidth, and that can be used by South Korean businesses and citizens in their everyday lives – something that hitherto has been impossible. It would be nice to think this may lead to a sudden outpouring of free software creativity, but the reality is probably that it will take a good many years to recover from what was probably the worst Microsoft monoculture on the planet.
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Licensing
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Open Data
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This could get very messy, very quickly. Multiple reports have emerged overnight that the UK government is to consult the public over how to cut public spending via a dedicated Facebook page.
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I had been reading about the Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) — a project to provide a really good detailed overview of government finances (more information in this previous post).
I was therefore expecting to see the local council assets and accruals data of the sort that is recorded in the L-packs as well as central government spending captured annually in the C-packs. But it wasn’t there.
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The new fund will support projects in specific communities—it over the next year to help expand and enhance the geographic data available to developers, designers and other users as part of AOL’s commitment to open-source technology.
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Open Access/Content
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I do not think that CC licences, or any licence to that effect, requires a court decision in order to be valid. There are thousands and thousands of commercial End-User Licence Agreements that are never tested in court, yet they manage to have legal effects and are usually followed to the letter by its users without producing a conflict. True, many licences contain clauses that when analysed by legal practitioners and scholars may seem doubtful. But even then a court case is required to declare the clauses invalid. One could say that a licence is valid until proven otherwise.
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Programming
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The Haskell 2010 report was published in July 2010, and is the current definition of the Haskell language. It is freely available online, in the following formats:
* read it online: The Haskell 2010 Report
* PDF [1368K]
* HTML (tar + gzip) [336K]
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Standards/Consortia
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To OASIS members, Public Announce Lists:
The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC has recently approved the following specification as a Committee Draft and approved the package for public review:
Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.2
This standard specifies the characteristics of an XML-based application-independent and platform-independent digital document file format, as well as the characteristics of software applications which read, write and process such documents. This standard is applicable to document authoring, editing, viewing, exchange and archiving, including text documents, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, drawings, charts and similar documents commonly used by personal productivity software applications.
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THEY may not have the name recognition of a Google or a Yahoo!, but they can claim to belong in the same league. The websites of Digital Sky Technologies (DST) account for more than 70% of page-views on the Russian-language internet. Naspers is Africa’s biggest media group, both offline and online. And Tencent is China’s largest internet company by market capitalisation—and the third-largest in the world.
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Science
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An experimental solar-powered plane landed safely Thursday after completing its first 24-hour test flight, proving that the aircraft can collect enough energy from the sun during the day to stay aloft all night.
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Security/Aggression
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More than 21,000 fines of between £60 and £120 were issued for motoring offences such as stopping to drop off family and friends.
Neil Bennett, 60, from Blandfield Road in Balham, was caught twice in the same night in Grant Road behind Clapham Junction when he went to collect someone.
He said: “For a total of 40 seconds outside the station, the fine was £240. I didn’t realise I wasn’t allowed to do it, there wasn’t adequate signage.
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Developer Sean O’Neill, famous in cryptographic circles for designing the EnRUPT hash algorithm, has released an open source Skype library that emulates the modified version of the RC4 encryption algorithm used by Skype. Skype chose to modify key generation for the stream cipher to make its product incompatible with other IM clients and ensure that it remained a closed system. However, initial analysis suggests that O’Neill’s publication does not mean that Skype’s encryption can be considered ‘cracked’. Further study will be needed to determine whether key expansion and initialisation vector generation are secure.
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Environment
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More than one-in-four of all flowering plants are under threat of extinction according to the latest report to confirm the ongoing destruction of much of the natural world by human activity.
As a result, many of nature’s most colourful specimens could be lost to the world before scientists even discover them, claims the research, published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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My imagination was ignited a few weeks ago when I came across a post on BLDGBLOG about crypto-forests: forgotten patches of urban land where nature has taken its course. What we call weeds are actually demonstrations of the irrepressible force of nature–plants overtaking urban areas designed to keep nature at bay.
BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh describes crypto-forests quite lyrically: “Weed patches in which the earliest emergent traces of a thicket can be found; clusters of trees growing semi-feral on the edges of railroad yards; forgotten courtyards sprouting with random saplings unplanted by any hand.” It’s reminiscent of the scenario David Byrne vividly predicted in the Talking Heads song “Nothing But Flowers,” but smaller in scope and without the apocalypse.
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Heat waves like the one now roasting the Eastern Seaboard are likely to become commonplace over the next 30 years, say scientists at Stanford University – even if global temperatures rise by only one degree Celcius.
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Researchers have discovered two previously unknown species of bottom-dwelling fish in the Gulf of Mexico, living right in the area affected by the BP oil spill.
Researchers identified new species of pancake batfishes, a flat fish rarely seen because of the dark depths they favor. They are named for the clumsy way they “walk” along the sea bottom, like a bat crawling.
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Finance
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A civil lawsuit brought by federal regulators against a financial adviser suspected of stealing millions of dollars from celebrity clients was temporarily halted on Thursday by a federal judge in Manhattan who said a criminal case against the adviser should be dispensed with first.
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More than 450,000 people filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week, as joblessness continued to hamper the U.S. economy and other new economic indicators reflected mixed signs about the recovery.
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First-time requests for jobless aid dropped by 21,000 to a seasonally adjusted 454,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. The decline takes claims to their lowest level since early May, erasing the increases of the last two months.
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The catastrophic economic downturn that began two years ago was supposed to shake up the global economy, ending an era in which Americans consumed too much and saved and exported too little.
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The International Monetary Fund is calling for the United States to make a stronger effort to curb its budget deficits.
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“The commission had some real questions of credibility about whether an institution as sophisticated as Goldman can’t tell whether it’s making money or losing money on the derivatives business,” said Angelides. “They have 1.2 million derivatives contracts and it just seems logical that they should be able to produce the management information to show us the scale of its business.”
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There’s no indication, at this point, that any sort of quid pro quo took place, nor is Issa mentioned directly in the suit. But a three million dollar windfall for a congressman does seem like the sort of scandal in which Issa would usually take a keen interest.
In addition, CityBeat goes on to detail Issa’s extensive investments in Goldman Sachs’ High Yield Fund and a potential conflict of interest that may have occurred when he launched an investigation against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the timing of their fraud lawsuit against Goldman.
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Meg Whitman, gubernatorial candidate in California, has been tainted for her associations with the company. But a commentary in the New York Times notes rightly: “Despite the political haymaking, the truth is that Goldman Sachs did nothing differently in the years leading up to the crisis than did other firms of its stature. Nothing has come to light in any of the very public recent assaults on the firm that also could not be discovered by looking through millions of documents at every other Wall Street firm with large trading and capital-markets businesses.”
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Goldman was among the most aggressive players on Wall Street in marking down the value of mortgage bonds as the financial crisis brewed, and ultimately benefited in protecting itself from the housing downfall. A.I.G., on the other hand, had a large positive bet on housing through the billions of dollars of mortgage securities that it insured for Goldman and other banks.
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The bank lobbyists, it turns out, missed one. They and their congressional allies were able to gut the Volcker Rule, the Lincoln Amendment, and almost everything else that could have had a meaningful effect on the industry.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The case, in which the Internet Technologies Association argues that the restrictions illegally discriminate against millions of users, is the latest front in an ongoing dispute that raises questions about free speech in a country attempting to join the EU.
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Communications Minister Stephen Conroy this morning announced a number of wide-ranging modifications to the Government’s controversial mandatory internet filtering policy, including a delay of at least a year to the project while the state and Federal governments review the Refused Classification category of content which the filter would block.
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• Film shows airstrike that killed 12 and crew laughter
• Analyst accused of trying to bring discredit on forces
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France and the Netherlands called Thursday for international guidelines to prevent private firms from exporting high-tech equipment that could be used for Internet censorship.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A review of the Kenyan constitution has been undergoing for a long time, and only now has a final draft proposal for a new constitution been released. But, despite the stated aims of freedom, democracy, participation and the free exchange of ideas (pdf), the released draft seems far from that ideal: Kenya is taking the Euro-American route to heavier information restrictions, including more copyright, more patents and more private knowledge monopolies, instead of keeping their legal environment open to creativity, participation and sharing.
[...]
Intellectual property law is still based in the nation state, but is very much shaped globally. A reform in one part of the world does not go without consequences in other parts, but, contrary to what some may imagine, the effects are rarely beneficial to either party.
An approval of the intellectual property rights provisions in the Kenyan constitution could come to be an example of that.
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While India’s Right To Information laws have received widespread acclaim in the media for ousting bureaucrats in what appears to be a revolution in local government accountability, less conspicuous reforms such as the low costs associated with processing requests in Mexico deserve equal attention. In the day-to-day implementation of an effective access to information regime, it’s often the small things that make a difference.
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July 10, 2010 marks EFF’s 20th anniversary! To thank you for your support over these two decades, please enjoy this new animation created especially for us by celebrated cartoonist and free culture activist Nina Paley. This short cartoon highlights some of the reasons why EFF is here.
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Copyrights
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If you follow the entertainment business at all, you’re probably well aware of “Hollywood accounting,” whereby very, very, very few entertainment products are technically “profitable,” even as they earn studios millions of dollars. A couple months ago, the Planet Money folks did a great episode explaining how this works in very simple terms. The really, really, really simplified version is that Hollywood sets up a separate corporation for each movie with the intent that this corporation will take on losses. The studio then charges the “film corporation” a huge fee (which creates a large part of the “expense” that leads to the loss). The end result is that the studio still rakes in the cash, but for accounting purposes the film is a money “loser” — which matters quite a bit for anyone who is supposed to get a cut of any profits.
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I still think that if something is available for sale legitimately, you should pay for it (books, music, photos, movies, sheet music). A lot of the Bach, Scriabin and Rachmaninoff in Mr. Hawley’s collection is certainly available, and handing it to friends on a flash drive is absolutely depriving the publishers of their revenue. True, the composers are long dead, but editing and publishing sheet music is still worth something.
It’s those obscure, out-of-print, not-available-anywhere items in his collection that make a tougher case. How many hours are you obligated to research and dig just to find out if something is available for sale? In this case, the barriers to a legitimate purchase are ridiculously high. Isn’t digital piracy justified in that case?
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ACTA
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The Greens/ EFA group yesterday adopted an urgent appeal for transparency in the negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). With this action, the Greens/EFA protest against the decision by ACTA negotiators to keep a new version of the draft treaty secret after the 9th negotiation round concluded in Switzerland on 1 July. This decision clearly ignores the European Parliament’s Resolution adopted by a grand majority in March 2010. The Resolution clearly carried an expectation of a continuous policy of transparency. But instead, there was a one-time release of a draft text in April designed as a piecemeal appeasement of the parliament, and then again after a complete lack of transparency. The Commission’s flagrant disregard for the demands of the Parliament is completely unacceptable.
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Digital Economy Bill
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The great and the good of the internet world turned out in force last night at the London Marriott, DJed and evening gowned, to learn who had won prizes at the ISPA annual awards dinner. What a difference a year makes: last year the talk was all around safety, particularly for children. Last night the focus had shifted, with digital economy and the right way to fund creativity on the net very much to the fore.
CLUG Talk – 30 October 2009 – Netbooks (2009)
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Send this to a friend
07.08.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Dell is working with Canonical to help customers float Ubuntu-powered open-source clouds while also cozying up to developers.
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Desktop
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A new poll into Operating System popularity by a British computer magazine has revealed that an incredible 37 percent of respondents are still using Windows XP. That’s more than Windows 7 which managed to woo 30 percent of the folk taking part, and Vista could only garner a pretty poor 16 percent of support. This being a PC magazine it should come as no great surprise to see Linux being used by 8 percent of respondents and Mac OS by 7 percent.
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After a successful first year, the Needham High School Linux Club delivered its first batch of computers to residents of the Needham Housing Authority. Penny Kirk, Residents Service Coordinator, will distribute them to families who have requested them.
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The Australian Tax Office (ATO) has remained defiant in forcing Australian taxpayers to electronically submit their tax returns through Windows-only software.
A help topic posted on the ATO website attributes the lack of Mac or Linux-based e-tax software to priority focuses on compatibility with tax legislation.
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A help topic put up on ATO’s website attributes the absence of Linux and Mac-supported software for the e-tax to priorities on compatibility with tax law making.
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A couple of months ago the nice ZaReason people sent me their Teo Ubuntu netbook to review. I was favorably impressed and gave it a positive review. Then they let me take it on my vacation, so little Teo traveled 2500 miles with us. This was the ultimate portability, performance, and battery test. How did Teo do? Splendidly.
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All in all, it’s clear that the market for virtualization solutions targeted at desktop Linux users is rich and flourishing. While the traditional staples, VMware and VirtualBox, remain the most intuitive options, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Ubuntu endorse an “official” desktop virtualization infrastructure based on KVM or Xen a year or two in the future.
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IBM
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MAINFRAME VENDOR IBM has released a Linux development kit for the Open Computing Language OpenCL.
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Ballnux
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Samsung
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Considering that Apple’s iPhone 3GS sold a little over 800,000 units in roughly 8 months, this is big news for Samsung.
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If you don’t need a full Windows environment, HyperSpace Instant-on takes you online in seconds, if you don’t want to wait for Windows 7 to boot. This is a Linux set-up which may not suit all users but is certainly quick.
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The Samsung H1 runs off the Linux-based LiMO operating system, using the Vodafone 360 skin, and features an 8-megapixel camera and one of Samsung’s fab Super AMOLED screens, as seen in the Samsung Galaxy S.
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Kernel Space
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Power management features for Radeon graphics chips, the first groundwork for supporting 3D with Evergreen GPUs, H264 decoding in Intel’s Ironlake driver and the support of Intel’s next generation of desktop and notebook chips, are some of the major graphics driver advancements of Linux 2.6.35.
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Applications
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The developer of Minitube, the desktop YouTube player for Linux, has revealed a new music player called Minitunes. There are innumerable music players players available for Linux; many of them no different from the other.
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Flavio Tordini, an Italian software developer and creator of Minitube, has announced the release of the first version of his new cross-platform Minitunes music player. According to Tordini, who considers his application to be “just another music player, only better”, Minitunes is designed to provide a “clean and innovative interface”.
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Using two note-taking applications in tandem — Basket Note Pads and QToDo — leaves the user wanting for few, if any, additional features. Basket’s extensive use of tags is a real plus, and its always-on nature makes quick access a breeze. Meanwhile, QToDo shines in task-tracking. Perhaps merging both sets of functions into one app would create the ideal note-taking environment.
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For some reason, text editors are something that us Unix geeks get very passionate about. Whether it’s an argument over which editor is better, or just professing our love for our favourite keyboard shortcuts, it’s an emotive issue.
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When browsing and culling a folder of RAW files (in my case Nikon NEF) Irfanview is exceptionally fast as it reads the embedded JPEG preview rather than interpreting the RAW data. The preview file is a full resolution file, but compressed with “basic” JPEG quality. When you shoot RAW files and review the images on the camera’s LCD, it’s the preview files you’re looking at.
Irfanview is also fast and intuitive for batch functions such as resizing images and IPTC captioning.
For the first time since switching mostly to Linux almost two years ago, I can do all my image editing in Linux without compromise, even for the most complex professional jobs.
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If Evolution is overkill for your needs than a simple Gmail notification application is ideal.
There are plenty of solutions available – in fact we’ve reviewed two such applications previously.
Say hello to another, then, as we peek at GMailWatcher – a simple Messaging Menu application for alerting you to new mails in your inbox right on your desktop.
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Instructionals
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This section would cover how to install PHP, MYSQL and Apache and then hook them together to build an interactive site. The goal would be to install WordPress and maybe Joomla as examples of the LAMP server. The actual process to make this all come together is straightforward but there are a lot of little things that can trip you up. One goal here would be to teach you how to create, use and backup your MySQL databases.
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Have you been looking for open-source storage management tools that are easy to use and provide a graphical representation of your storage. Alas, there are no comprehensive tools but there are graphical tools that you can pair with command-line wizardry, particularly LVM.
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Games
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Most of the Linux sites that list games tend to highlight the same bunch; however, there are a few hidden gems that you may have missed but are still worth playing. In no particular order, here are four you might want to try.
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July is when the summer doldrums start to threaten. If you feel your hammock calling, resist the temptation, and turn instead to Chromium B.S.U., an adrenaline-pumping 2-D vertical shooter.
The game has been around for about 10 years. Creator Mark B. Allan came up with it after trying out a Linux port of a DOS shooter called Raptor. “I began to wonder how hard it would be to write a similar type of game using OpenGL. I had been wanting to experiment with SDL and OpenAL for a while, and this seemed like a good opportunity.”
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There are several “unknown” game companies which are very friendly towards GNU/Linux, yet because of the poor publicity none heard about them.
One of those GNU/Linux friendly gaming companies is Sake Visual.
They released 3 games so far and all of them have a native GNU/Linux client, 2 of the games where released as freeware.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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It looks like I’ll be at least making the migration from GNOME to KDE, even if I don’t leave the *buntu family of distros, so I needed to make a list of what apps I use regularly and see if they work under KDE (without needing to install libraries) and if not what apps may do the job. Apps I now use are listed in BOLD text if I absolutely need to use it regardless of what distro I use, although if I can keep the same features in a different program that will be acceptable.
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Not everyone can make it to Akademy, although given the record number of people captured in the group photo, it probably seems like everyone did.
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Today, KDE delivers the second release candidate of the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.5. The final version will be available in August 2010 and this RC is intended for testers and early adopters who can help by finding and reporting bugs. It will also interest those who want an early look at what is coming to their desktops and netbooks this summer.
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I started using KDE when version 4.0 was out. I had had a taste of KDE 3.5, which I didn’t like, but release 4.0 looked like a big step forward, so I was tempted to give it a go. Just like so many others, I found KDE 4.0 disappointingly slow, unstable and unintuitive. However, I did see lots of potential in it and kept using it release after release.
Up until recently, I was mostly a GNOME user. I considered it faster, leaner, more intuitive… and certainly not as ugly as some say! No matter how hard I tried to like KDE, it would always feel a bit alien and I would always end up going back to GNOME. The tide has shifted lately, though, and I have found myself leaning towards KDE desktops more and more. I believe that is mostly a result of the incredible work the developers are putting in place to improve and polish the product, but also down to the fact that I have been learning more about its “secrets”.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome is the most popular Linux desktop environment and one of it’s key features that makes it so wonderful is the “gnome panel”. For those unfamiliar the “gnome panel” is the bar that is typically located at the bottom (and top sometimes) of the screen where your menu, task-bar, and icon tray are located. If you have never done it, try right clicking on some blank space and click “add to panel”. You will be presented with a list of applets you can add to the panel. While there are a good number to choose from by default, there are piles of other applets you can find online to install. The following is a list of my four favorites I use on my various Linux systems around my house.
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With the upcoming release of GNOME 3.0, software development interests will focus increasingly on improved user experience, accessibility and application use. While the GUADEC 2010 conference aims to prmote all of these ideals through the work of the GNOME Foundation, the GNOME Open Desktop Day will place important attention on the desktop in government and education.
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Xfce
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In this piece of the puzzle we are going to take a look at Xfce’s “control panel”, the Xfce 4 Settings Manager. From this tool you can configure nearly all of the preferences for the Xfce 4′s desktop. It’s a very handy tool to have installed and will keep you from having to poke around the menu system to find the various setting tools.
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Reviews
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This release of Sabayon is proving to be easy, fast, and stable. It is available in x86 or 64-bit KDE or GNOME versions as well as a CoreCD consisting just of the basics. With the included XBMC, Sabayon can easily become a home theater center as well. It is also the only known live distribution to offer musical accompaniment during boot. All the technical aspects aside, the best thing about Sabayon is – it’s just plain fun and easy to use.
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Following the release of the first beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 back in April we delivered our first RHEL 6.0 benchmarks while putting it up against CentOS 5.4 and Fedora 12. Now that the second beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 was released last week, we took the workstation build and have benchmarked it against the latest releases of Ubuntu, CentOS, and openSUSE.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The Spring version of the popular Mandriva Linux distribution is now available for download on mirrors worldwide. With the release of Mandriva Linux 2010.1 “Spring,” we definitely know that Mandriva is alive and kicking. The final release comes in three editions: One Edition, Free Edition and Powerpack Edition. Mandriva Linux 2010.1 is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, with GNOME and KDE4 LiveCDs.
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Red Hat Family
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Linux giant Red Hat has announced that Linux System Dynamics (LSD), an open source consulting firm, has been appointed a Red Hat Premier Business Partner for the Southern Africa region.
Red Hat Premier Business Partners are top-tier Red Hat partners, who have demonstrated expertise in the Red Hat product portfolio and have met the stringent technical, sales and training requirements specified by Red Hat, in order to deliver the benefits of Red Hat services and products to customers.
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Debian Family
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When it comes to Linux distributions, Sidux is an interesting character. While many distro’s “piggyback” on well known distributions (especially Ubuntu) and release their own “flavor” after the parent distribution is released, Sidux does things a bit differently. Sidux is still built on top of a parent distro (Debian) but is made to be a rolling release distribution by taking the packages that are in Debian Unstable, though adding customizations to make it stable.
I tried out Sidux very briefly a few months back, and was turned off by the number of updates that were available initially and the fact that they broke my system. The problem was that so much time had passed since their last spin (the previous version was released in April of 2009), that there have been so many changes that the updates just completely broke my system. (Linux changes faster than any other operating system, bar none, so having updated spins is a very important thing).
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Sidux is a really good distribution, though it’s not perfect. It’s clearly not for beginners, though there is a nice manual included so it may not be all that bad. As a power user, I had absolutely no problem using it and getting it up and running. I can see that excessive updates may be a problem to a beginning user, as package update overload can sometimes break things, but for me it’s been stable. As a matter of fact, if I wasn’t using Arch, Sidux would probably be my next best choice as I don’t think I could use anything but a rolling distro. Sidux is definitely well worth checking out, though I do recommend you try it in a Virtual Machine first to get the hang of it before installing it on a production machine.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The framework for supporting paid applications in the Ubuntu Software Centre will almost certainly be in place for Ubuntu 10.10 – but what could users expect to see on sale?
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Fonts
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When Canonical unveiled Ubuntu’s branding overhaul and new desktop theme earlier this year, the company also revealed that it had commissioned well-known type foundry Dalton Maag to design a new font specifically for Ubuntu. The font will likely be used by default in Ubuntu 10.10, which is scheduled for release in October.
Today Canonical launched a closed beta for the new font, making it available to testers and Ubuntu contributors. I tested it on my desktop computer, running Ubuntu 10.04. After installing the package, I enabled it in the GNOME appearance preference dialog. It matches the new Ubuntu logo font, but it’s designed for optimal screen readability. It looks very smooth on my LCD monitors and is very easy on the eyes. I think it’s a big improvement over Bitstream Vera Sans, the font that currently ships by default in Ubuntu.
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Canonical Design has introduced new Ubuntu fonts which will be used in the next release, Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. The new fonts will not be available to everyone, though, as it has been released as a private beta. Only Ubuntu Members are allowed access to the new font through a private PPA. The fonts will be released as a public beta on 8th August. So if you are not an Ubuntu Member, you have to wait till then.
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This “closed fonts beta” thing was a big PR mistake.
It’s not enough for you to push a proprietary font into Ubuntu in the default install. No, you can’t even release it publicly. You just had to release it as a closed-doors, “members-only” beta.
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Having read some of the comments and bugs I thought it might be useful to add some clarification on a couple of terms.
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You should be able to find the Liberation fonts on most distributions, though they may not be installed by default. Search for Liberation in your favorite package tool, and you should find a package with all three or separate packages for each. On Ubuntu 10.04, for instance, you’ll have the ttf-liberation package. Actually, if you do a search for ttf, you’ll see a number of fonts you can grab from the Ubuntu archives.
But the open font movement, if can be called such, has progressed beyond Red Hat’s triple header of Freedom. Check out the Free Font Manifesto, for example. It links to a number of fonts that have licenses that allow redistribution and modification, as well as a manifesto about free fonts. Check out the blog as well if the free font issue is important to you.
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Flavours and Variants
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Last evening while reading the SA forums, I encountered a thread about Linux and what was required to bring it to the general public. One of the goons mentioned a post that indicated ten reasons why Ubuntu wasn’t ready for the desktop in India. I kid you not – the most ridiculous reason was because users couldn’t perform the important ritual of right click/Refreshing on the desktop five or more times before getting down to work.
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In an earlier blog I wrote about the TI eZ430-Chronos. This is a $50 development kit with a twist. Instead of a generic target board, you get a wristwatch. Its more of a “Casio-style sports watch” than a Rolex, but inside is a fairly powerful MSP430 CPU and I/O including a 3-axis accelerometer, a temperature sensor, a pressure sensor, and a wireless connection back to a PC. You also get a USB programmer, and the USB receiver for the watch. Use coupon code HALFMSPTOOL (don’t know when that expires) and the price drops to under $25.
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The platform is currently a prototype, based on Sirrix’ Turaya Security Kernel, which handles encryption, VPN and a trusted user interface; and the OKL4 Microvisor, which can host the Sirrix trusted desktop alongside a variety of guest OS, including Android and other Linux variants, in OKL4 secure cells. The platform will initially run on Nokia’s N900 product, which runs Linux-based Maemo.
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FemtoLinux is a new Linux flavor optimized for real-time embedded systems. Our design goal is a low system call and interrupt-to-application latency and overhead. We achieve this by allowing to run critical Linux applications in kernel mode.
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Intel/Nokia/MeeGo
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The video above shows the MeeGo VT320 video terminal start up. It takes 17 seconds from pressing the power button to a login prompt on the video terminal. That includes 11 seconds for the BIOS, 1 second for bootloader and a further 5 seconds for MeeGo to get its act together.
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For one thing, it runs on the Linux-based Maemo 5 operating system. This is one very niche device aimed specifically at those passionate guys that reside within the wider Debian and Ubuntu communities – the ones who love to tinker with things.
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Meanwhile, Google’s Chrome OS netbooks will dispense with the operating system completely when they become available in late fall in favor of apps from the Chrome Web App store.
Of course, Linux and Windows netbooks like the ones Intel is targeting with the AppUp Store can run whatever software you want them to run — just like laptops and desktops. Their rebranding as things that run apps is, if anything, a step backwards.
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Steve Paine, who edits the Carrypad and UMPC portal got his hands on a prototype smartphone running Intel’s chips and MeeGo, a Linux-based operating system developed by Intel and Nokia.
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Android
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It used to be that folks would be busy trying to get Linux running on various electronic devices, such as an iPod, but the latest trend is to get Google’s Android OS running on phones that don’t officially support it.
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Google’s Android Market offers the largest share of free apps at 57 percent, while the Windows Mobile Marketplace offers the smallest share at 22 percent, says a report on mobile app stores released last week by Distimo.
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The Android operating system is a free Linux-based open-source platform for mobile devices. It managed to appeal a lot to users around the world, mainly due to the fact that it can take great advantage of the hardware resources packed inside mobile phones. Already adopted by a wide range of manufacturers and carriers around the world, Android has all chances to lead the smartphone market in the near future.
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Considering how hackable the Nexus One is already, we can only imagine a whole new host of interesting things thanks to Ubuntu running on the device. [Max Lee] set his heart out on getting not just Ubuntu on the Nexus One, but also Debian, and he wrote a perfect install guide to help out those wanting to give it a shot.
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Froyo was unveiled at at the Google I/O developer conference in May during a keynote presentation by Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra. Stabilizing the platform for an official Nexus One release took Google a little bit longer than expected, but the software is now being made available to users through an over-the-air update. We took it for a test drive to see how it compares to the previous version.
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Motorola
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Thankfully, Blake tells us that the Droid X is awesome. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know what to make of the 4.3-inch screen, 1GHz processor, 8-megapixel camera, 720p video…
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OK, we admit it. Despite our public loathing of Motoblur, the Motorola Charm (just announced for T-Mobile) has piqued our interest a bit, given that it’ll be the first front-facing QWERTY Android phone. Motorola’s done up a cute little video showing off its latest. And while we’re not exactly convinced it’s going to be the Android messenger we’ve been dreaming of, we’re definitely looking forward to giving it a shot.
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OLPC
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Manipur has been added to the global project One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a mission to empower the children learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child with the commencement of distribution of the laptop to four schools today.
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IBM, in collaboration with the European Union, industry and academia, is launching a research consortium which aims to help businesses more easily take advantage of Internet-based services – or “e-services” – to create collaborative business operations and achieve shared business goals.
The unique effort focuses on the development of a new computer science model that will enable organizations to greatly accelerate the typically time-intensive process around the coordination of e-services and increase the automation and efficiency around deploying new e-service blends. The research will enable even small to mid-sized businesses to create or join into flexible e-service blends, without investing in expensive IT expertise. The initiative will create open-source software to enable many organizations around the world take advantage of the technology.
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In general I have found that, in terms of quality, number of bugs and ease of usage, there is no real difference between OSS and proprietary software. I know that many people will disagree. I also know that they disagree because they have a biased point of view. As these people are used to a particular piece of software, for example msoffice or photoshop, then the OSS equivalents, open office and gimp, seem to be inferior.
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Events
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The conference landscape evolves constantly. Old events pass away, new ones arrive and it’s good to get pointers to know what’s worthwhile. I can recommend this year’s Open World Forum, happening in Paris on September 30 and October 1.It’s a volunteer-run conference for the open source and free software community and covers multiple tracks and events both for business and community interests.
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Slides and videos of the presentations at Red Hat’s annual convention provide a host of information about the features and capabilities of current and forthcoming Red Hat products. The presenters offered a particularly wide range of details on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, scheduled for release in the coming months, and on the various virtualisation products in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation family.
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Mozilla
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Absolute Linux 13.1.2 has been released bringing several updates and fixes as well as the switch to Google Chrome as the default browser, replacing Mozilla Firefox. Chrome was found to have several advantages over Firefox and the developers believed it to be the better choice for the light-weight distro. Firefox is still available on the second CD.
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Firefox has successfully grabbed a quarter of the browser market, but Google Chrome is growing very rapidly, and the fact remains that the world is moving to a new, need-driven browser model. For many people, it makes sense to run more than one browser. I’ll definitely adopt Firefox 4, primarily because I use a lot of the best Firefox extensions, but I’ll run Chrome as well.
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Buzzbird is a Firefox based twitter client for Linux. And like Firefox, Buzzbird too, just works. Buzzbird is fast, have all the basic functionalities and it almost never crashes.
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Databases
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CSQL is a very powerful command line interpreter. You are recommended to read our online Wiki CSQL Interpreter Tutorial. You will learn about reading, saving, and appending SQL statement, Shell command execution/registration, transaction processing, outputting schema information/syntax rules and examples, parameter setting, etc, which are beyond those provided by CUBRID Manager or other simple query editor tools.
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CMS
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MIT OpenCourseWare ( http://ocw.mit.edu/ ) is a web-based publication of virtually all course content from the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology (MIT). It is a resource that is used by students, teachers and average people around the world via the web, giving average citizens access to a wealth of information previously only available to students who could attend one of the world’s most recognized and respected universities.
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Education
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1. Don’t buy any software. No, seriously, just stop buying software licences. If you’d like to carry on using your Windows machines, check out the Open Education Disc, with a comprehensive suite of absolutely free applications providing tools for (almost) every area of learning within and beyond the curriculum, including OpenOffice.org, Inkscape and the GIMP, to replace Office, Illustrator and Photoshop for starters.
Furthermore, you’re allowed, indeed encouraged, to duplicate this so your pupils have access to the same software, legally and for free, at home too. Better still, put the temptation to buy more software firmly out of your grasp by switching to Linux desktops, such as the undeniably excellent Ubuntu. This comes as standard with a great suite of applications, with at the last count 30,046 packages (such as Tablix, a genetic algorithm based timetabler), that you can install (for free) over the net as and when you need them: think app store for a desktop, but all free and (generally) of very good quality.
If you’re worried that your pupils won’t cope with an unfamiliar interface, don’t be, they’ll quickly adjust and will be far more discerning users of computers as a result; if you’re worried that this won’t prepare them for the world of Windows, don’t be, just have a glance at Ofsted’s comments about alternative operating systems.
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BSD
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AccProbe uses IAccessible2 platform services to assist developers in discovering and correcting code problems in their Windows applications. It was developed in Eclipse by IBM and donated to The Linux Foundation’s Open Accessibility Workgroup.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Software conferences held in Berga during the last weekend, where eyeOS participated with a conference and a workshop, ended with a very special moment: The official inauguration of the first “Free Software” street in the world.
Richard Stallman, founder of GNU Project and Free Software Foundation, was invited and after speaking, officially inaugurated the street.
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Project Releases
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Core
* Mult-screen feature: support of many opened editors and viewers (#1490)
* Reorganization of menu and configuration dialogs. More options are available in UI (#320)
* Mark of text in input fields is available now, DEL removes selected/unchanged text (#2161, #2228)
* Now copy/move dialog shows the full path with file name in the field “to:” (#1907)
* Removed hardcoded shortcuts in dialog.c (#212)
* Added new actions for panels: PanelMarkFileUp and PanelMarkFileDown (#2021)
* Added new capability to create relative symlinks: menu item and “C-x v” default shortcut (#2042)
* Now we can use external utility to copy/paste text to X clipboard (#30)
* Cursor is hidden in menu and listboxes (#1771)
* All hotkeys in MC (in menu, checkboxes, etc) in the middle of a word are in the lowercase now (#2168)
* Use system realpath(3) function if available (#1911)
* GLib deprecated functions are not used (#2085, #2249)
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CMS-Maestro is a new PHP-based content management system (CMS) released by South African Web development company Valente Online.
Easy to install and use, CMS-Maestro offers the basics such as page and article management and adds to that the ability to add additional widgets, and manage menus and a range of media formats. In a release the company says that “CMS-Maestro is built with extensibility in mind and is designed in a modular fashion, therefore additional features and functionality can be added easily to the Maestro”.
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Licensing
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One key element of open source compliance is to know your obligations. There is a lot of confusion about what open source means exactly and some people believe that open source means you can do whatever you want. While open source grants users many freedoms, open source code comes under specific license terms which often include obligations that have to be followed by companies distributing open source software.
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Open Data
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Last week I participated in the third (and sadly final!) conference of Communia project, a European thematic network on the digital public domain. The theme of this conference was University and Cyberspace and several of the talks articulated a vision in which universities, academics, and students play a key role in creating, curating and promoting the digital commons.
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Programming
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Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, said the Helios release introduces important innovations in areas such as Git support, Linux development and JavaScript support.
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Science
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The European Parliament reiterated its opposition to meat and milk produced from cloned animals yesterday (7 July), piling pressure on the European Commission to ban food produced in this way.
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Security/Aggression
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Every politician understands what is in his or her short-term interest. They know what the party leadership wants, what their campaign contributors want, and what lobbyists want. At what point does the long-term interest of the nation as a whole come into play? Who represents the interests of future generations? Today, our future is determined by cowardly politicians who can only think as far as the next election. Our economy is guided by short-sighted corporations that only care about hitting their quarterly numbers, lest their stock nosedives and they get taken over by a rival corporation.
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Prosecutors in a New Jersey ticket scalping case are pushing the envelope on the federal computer hacking law, setting a precedent that could make it a felony to violate a website’s terms of service and fool a CAPTCHA, according to electronic civil rights groups intervening in the case.
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Imagine that right after briefing Adam about which fruit was allowed and which forbidden, God had installed a closed-circuit television camera in the garden of Eden, trained on the tree of knowledge. Think how this might have changed things for the better. The serpent sidles up to Eve and urges her to try the forbidden fruit. Eve reaches her hand out – in paradise the fruit is always conveniently within reach – but at the last second she notices the CCTV and thinks better of it. Result: no sin, no Fall, no expulsion from paradise. We don’t have to toil among thorns and thistles for the rest of our lives, earning our bread by the sweat of our brows; childbirth is painless; and we feel no need to wear clothes.
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Mr Shim said a French company was already offering simulated kidnapping packages, in which people can pay to be abducted without warning, bound, gagged and imprisoned for between four and ten hours.
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The police’s use of controversial counterterrorism stop and search powers against individuals is to be scrapped immediately, the home secretary announced today.
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As we’ve seen so often before (indeed, we’ve got a whole category devoted to it) – law enforcement throws funds at this technology which then can’t be spent elsewhere, policing becomes dependent on that technology, and it promptly fails.
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Environment
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Want to slow global warming? Save a sea otter. So says Chris Wilmers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose team has calculated that the animals remove at least 0.18 kilograms of carbon from the atmosphere for every square metre of occupied coastal waters.
That means that if sea otters were restored to healthy populations along the coasts of North America they could collectively lock up a mammoth 1010 kg of carbon – currently worth more than $700 million on the European carbon-trading market. Wilmers explained this at the annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology in Edmonton, Canada, this month.
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From China to New York, the more we cool ourselves, the hotter we’re going to get
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MEPs voted to approve a political inter-institutional agreement on a new regulation that sets obligations on operators that place timber or related products on the EU market.
The new legislation issues a ban on illegally-harvested timber. Covering the whole timber supply chain from logging sites to European consumers, the law aims to guarantee legally-sourced products access to EU markets while halting deforestation in third countries.
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The slow-moving airship will be arriving at the Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport in Mississippi after more than a month of travel from Yuma, Arizona where it’s based. The blimp will ultimately operate from a mooring three miles southeast of the Mobile Bay shoreline in Alabama.
The primary purpose of 178-feet long MZ-3A airship will be to spot and monitor for oil contamination along the Gulf Coast.
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But, does that mean oil in ocean water can’t possibly become involved in the hydrologic cycle? Nope. There is some evidence, according to the Christian Science Monitor, that floating oil can evaporate under the right conditions. In that case, though, you wouldn’t get oil droplets falling from on high. The more likely result would be normal-looking rain tainted with chemical compounds from the oil. According to Popular Mechanics, the only way you’d really get black “rain” is if a hurricane picked up polluted water and dumped it—sans evaporation—onto a coastal area.
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Finance
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The financial overhaul bill awaiting final action in the Senate includes a new regulator whose aim is to make sure mortgages, credit cards and other products from big banks don’t abuse or confuse you.
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What to do about the size of too-big-to-fail banks? Order a study. How to hold stockbrokers accountable for their dealings with clients? Another study. How to ensure the reliability of credit rating agencies? Study that, too.
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In what could be a first step toward restoring confidence in the health of European banks, a panel coordinating stress tests of major institutions has confirmed that they will be much broader than initially planned, covering most of the market. It also set a date of July 23 for releasing the results.
The Committee of European Banking Supervisors, made up of national regulators from across the European Union, said it will release results of the anxiously awaited tests for 91 banks. Those banks account for 65 percent of the E.U. banking market and at least 50 percent of the market in the respective countries, it said in a statement late Wednesday.
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A standard refrain from U.S. banking industry lobbyists is “you cannot put us at a disadvantage relative to our overseas competitors.” The Obama administration has largely bought into this line and cites it in public and private as one reason for opposing size caps on our largest banks and preventing Congress from raising capital requirements.
The US Treasury puts its faith instead in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision process, a somewhat murky convocation of bank regulators from various countries that has a weak track record in terms of setting sufficient prudential standards (also the assessment of Dan Tarullo, now an influential Federal Reserve governor; disclosure, I have a part-time position at the Peterson Institute, which published his book). But, the official US reasoning goes, the crisis of 2007-08 was so traumatic, our European counterparts will now want to be more careful.
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Wells Fargo said Wednesday that it would no longer make subprime mortgages and as a result would close a 100-year-old finance division that specialized in those loans.
The bank has a reputation as a conservative lender, but it has been battling heavy losses amid the financial crisis on its own subprime mortgages as well as on the loan portfolios it acquired when it bought the Wachovia Corporation.
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Target-date mutual funds — investment vehicles that automatically change your mix of assets as you near retirement — are thought by many investors to be a safer investment choice that’s relatively insulated from market gyrations as the funds get closer to the target date.
But lately, people on the verge of retirement have been surprised to see how much these funds have been affected by recent turbulence on Wall Street. In some cases, the funds have performed far less well than had been anticipated.
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Federal Reserve officials, increasingly concerned over signs the economic recovery is faltering, are considering new steps to bolster growth.
With Congress tied in political knots over whether to take further action to boost the economy, Fed leaders are weighing modest steps that could offer more support for economic activity at a time when their target for short-term interest rates is already near zero. They are still resistant to calls to pull out their big guns — massive infusions of cash, such as those undertaken during the depths of the financial crisis — but would reconsider if conditions worsen.
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It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 percent, maize by 90 percent, and rice by 320 percent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn’t afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in over 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, called it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made actions.”
[...]
For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer and the global price is high, he’ll lose some cash, but if there’s a lousy summer or the price collapses, he’ll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked well.
Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into ‘derivatives’ that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in “food speculation” was born.
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The U.S.’s Financial Reform bill is over 2,000 pages. It includes exemptions and lots of opportunities to create loopholes. Behavior that caused our ongoing global financial crisis is guaranteed to continue, if we don’t have swift and effective deterrents.
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When the nation’s most prestigious investment banks found themselves on the verge of total annihilation in the fall of 2008, the most radical and effective government response was not the infamous $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The wildest salvation scheme for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the securities system at large was a plan from the Federal Reserve to give these speculative institutions access to cheap loans from the central bank. It worked. With access to unlimited cheap funding from the Fed, the Wall Street titans survived. Hurrah.
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A well-coifed, dulcet-toned Harvard Scot named Niall Ferguson says that’s a bad idea and bond market vigilantes will show up in the dark of night and pummel U.S. bonds to applesauce, twist Uncle Sam’s arm around his back, and force him pay through his bleeding nose to borrow.
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Poised as we are for the most comprehensive financial reform in this country since the Great Depression, it is time to fess up to the fact that it likely would not have occurred without a concerted effort by the Obama administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress to demonize Goldman Sachs.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Army intelligence specialist Bradley Manning was charged yesterday for allegedly leaking video and documents to secret-sharing website Wikileaks. He faces up to 52 years in prison. Now, nerds are waging fierce campaigns to discredit both Manning’s informant and Wikileaks itself.
Bradley Manning was arrested last month after his confidant, ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, turned him in. Lamo won Manning’s trust by portraying himself as a minister and a journalist, and likely traded on a shared queer identity to convince the 22 year-old, deeply troubled soldier to confess his illegal activities over instant message. Lamo immediately notified Army investigators and spilled the story to his long-time unofficial mouthpiece, Wired’s Kevin Poulsen.
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A German data protection official said Wednesday he launched legal proceedings against Facebook, which he accused of illegally accessing and saving personal data of people who don’t use the social networking site.
Johannes Caspar said his Hamburg data protection office had initiated legal steps that could result in Facebook being fined tens of thousands of euros for saving private information of individuals who don’t use the site and haven’t granted it access to their details.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Separately, some governments are now kicking off investigations into Monsanto’s advertising statements about the very same Roundup Ready soybeans. Combine all of that and Monsanto also reported dreadful earnings, with a 45% profit drop.
Once again, we’re seeing what happens when you live off of artificial monopolies. They can make you rich in the short term, but they’re no trick to building sustainable businesses. What the government gives in the form of monopoly rights, it can also take away.
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The piece was written by Christina Mulligan, who recently got plenty of attention for her thoughtful piece on the mixed messages on copyright found in the TV show Glee. It’s great that a paper like the Washington Post is giving her a platform to write about these concerns. Hopefully it will finally reach some of our more stubborn and misguided DC-based politicians that intellectual property is being widely abused in troubling ways.
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Copyrights
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Today, the BPI announced that 2009 was the best year for single sales ever.
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BT and TalkTalk are seeking a judicial review of the controversial Digital Economy Act, BBC News has learned.
The two internet service providers want the High Court to clarify the legality of the act before it is implemented.
CLUG Talk 25 November 2008 – AGM: New Features in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (2008)
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Send this to a friend
07.07.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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When I adopted GNU/Linux the impetus to change was the persistent failure of that other OS to run through a single 45 minute period of class time without fail. Perhaps the latest vulnerability in that other OS will be the impetus for many more to migrate. This one is not a bug but a feature of that other OS to permit working with foreign character-sets. That other OS welcomes executable files to manipulate foreign characters and in the process allows the system to be owned by aliens. Malware is out in the wild exploiting this feature of that other OS.
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Desktop
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As a sidenote on Linux lack of success in China on the desktop, I have to mention a discussion end of last year with CS2C that has been doing OEM (original equipment manufacturer) deals for quite some time, which was just a way to avoid the Microsoft tax for some PC makers. For the first time in the company’s history, people are actually keeping the preinstalled Linux system and using it, “forcing” CS2C to start a customer support line.
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Fedora is second most popular Linux Distro next to Ubuntu. Even the Linux God Linus Torvalds uses it (an old claim, not verified). The latest Fedora 13 (Goddard) as usual has lots of goodies like OpenOffice, KDE, and much more. A versatile operating system for home and office users.
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In Windows, the process goes like this:
1. Temporarily Disable System Restore.
2. Reboot computer in Safe Mode.
3. Locate nice.exe virus files and uninstall nice.exe files program. Follow the screen step-by-step screen instructions to complete uninstallation of nice.exe.
4. Open the registry editor.
5. Delete/Modify any values added to the registry related with nice.exe.
6. Exit registry editor and restart the computer.
7. Clean/delete all nice.exe infected files :nice.exe and related,or rename nice.exe virus files
8. Delete all your IE temp files with nice.exe manually.
9. Run a whole scan with antivirus program.
10. Run the antivirus program in your USB drive.
Very easy, right? The process can take more than an hour (that is, if you know where to start!)
In Mandriva Linux, you say good-bye to Mr. Nice by doing this:
1. Select nice.exe from your USB drive.
2. Delete it. If you get a message saying you cannot do it,
3. Change the permissions of the file and delete it.
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Graphics Stack
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Qualcomm has found itself unwittingly annoying the open-source community by posting the source code for OpenGL ES 2D/3D Linux kernel driver for its Snapdragon chipset, as found in the Nexus One, Dell Streak and many other devices. However, while the kernel driver is open-source, Qualcomm’s user-space driver remains closed; that prompted David Airlie, who maintains the DRM for the Linux kernel at Red Hat, to tell Qualcomm – and anyone else considering doing the same half-hearted thing – “If you aren’t going to create an open userspace driver (either MIT or LGPL) then don’t waste time submitting a kernel driver to me.”
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Applications
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A new GIMP Plugin Registry version was released today in Debian – 3.5, which failed to build under Ubuntu (because of a Python bug in Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid). After exchanging lots of emails with Bernd Zeimetz, the Debian maintainer of the GIMP Plugin Registry, he was able to locate the issue and fix it so Ubuntu users can enjoy these new plugins already. That’s why he released yet another version today – 3.5.1. And as always, the latest version is now available in the WebUpd8 PPA.
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The Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard (VMPK) is a MIDI event generator – a program that converts mouse actions and keystrokes in your computer into MIDI events, which can be sent to other programs or devices that understand MIDI and produce sound. It also receives MIDI events from other programs or external devices, displaying note events as highlighted piano keys, indicating control change events by moving the knobs in the toolbars, and so on.
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The Linux Foundation’s Open A11y (Accessibility) Workgroup has announced the release of IAccessible2 for Windows version 1.2 under a BSD licence.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Winter Wolves which I posted about earlier, is a very friendly company towards GNU/Linux users and released many games for our beloved platform (and many are yet to come).
They are now working on a Japanese style Sci-Fi RPG game which resembles the old (2d) Final Fantasy games a little (at least in turn based battle mode gameplay).
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GNOME Desktop
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In the following Q&A, OSCON speaker and GNOME foundation executive director Stormy Peters discusses the risks of cloud computing, the continued importance of desktop computing, and the interesting relationship between new mobile form factors and free software adoption.
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I can’t think of a better way to learn something new by playing. Since the “spin era” has begun with Sabayon Linux by using molecule, it’s something new to learn. Joost has posted a quick run down of how to do a basic spin. I’ve been messing around with this molecule thing and have found that adding and subtracting packages is simple enough to do. I do find that specific customizations of the user and root accounts a bit more complicated. I’m still trying to figure that one out yet. Scripting isn’t my strong point at all. I understand what it needs to do, but assembling a script of commands and paths is like writing hieroglyphics. I’m not sure where the script should be placed at in my spec file nor when the script should be invoked.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva is one of the cornerstones of Open Source, a technological pioneer offering the sole independent Linux distribution on the European market. Nevertheless the company has been faced with a mounting financial challenge for several years due in part to its size and lack of a clear publishing strategy.
Mandriva also plays a strategic role in the Paris Saclay innovative ecosystem centred on the Pole System@tic Paris Region and Cap Digital. The company is involved in a dozen R&D projects in partnership with some 60 research and industrial laboratories working on themes such as the semantic desktop, Linux Real Time distribution, shared infrastructures or cloud computing.
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Red Hat Family
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Just Dial currently has more than 200 servers with its mission-critical Intranet and extranet applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
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Debian Family
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At keyring-maint, we got a request by our DPL, querying for the evolution of the number of keys per keyring – This can be almost-mapped to the number of Debian Developers, Debian Maintainers, retired and deleted accounts over time since the keyrings are maintained over version control.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I’ve been using Ubuntu as my distribution of choice for VM’s and server instances, and on a lark I took a swag at installing Ubuntu desktop onto a VM yesterday. I’ve got to say, it’s a pretty usable setup.
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Fixing poor descriptions of Software Centre applications is listed as a papercut milestone for Ubuntu 10.10 because, as one tester during Canonicals’ user testing day put it: “Software centre descriptions are geeky.”
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Robotics and artificial intelligence enthusiast Francisco Paz has launched a new open source robot called Qbo. Paz’s five-year-long personal project is an attempt to realise the recently stated goal of Tomomasa Sato, director of the Japanese Robotics Association, to develop “an open source Model-T robot in which all global standards may be applied to achieve a result as revolutionary as Ford’s Model-T was for the car industry.”
As with other projects in the growing open source hardware space, Qbo will be made, as far as possible, from off-the-shelf components, and all design plans, firmware and control software will be distributed under an open source licence.
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An estimated 20 billion ARM processors are installed worldwide, around four per person and up to four or five per device.
For Sophie Wilson (pictured at left), who wrote the original instruction set back in 1983 for what was conceived as a co-processor for Acorn’s BBC Micro computer, they are still a “little bit awe-inspiring.”
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Almost everything that ARM could be doing it is except for widespread use in PCs.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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The MeeGo open source project merging Intel’s Moblin project and Nokia’s Maemo into a single Linux distribution has just initiated what it is calling “Day 1″ of its MeeGo Handset User Experience Project.
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Android
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Android is now activated on 160,000 phones daily, that’s almost 5m every month, demonstrating a significant take-up of the operating system and Android app Marketplace. Google has also just announced plans to expand into emerging markets in a bid for a further slice of the mobile market.
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“Adoption of Android-powered devices is growing globally by leaps and bounds. We want our users to have the enhanced experience that the Galaxy S Android 2.1 offers, whether for browsing the Web or tracking important tasks on your phone,” said Cathy Santamaria, Globe brand head.
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Apple wins the battle with Android for hosting the most paid applications, which are also on the whole more expensive than its open source rival’s.
According to a report by Distimo, the iPad store boasts the largest percentage of paid-for apps, at 80%, with the iPhone commanding 73% of costly applications, in contrast to Google’s Android store where the majority of apps are free.
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Ever since Google officially launched their open source mobile operating system entitled Android, handset manufacturers like HTC and Motorola have seemingly been scrambling to get as many smartphones onto the market, powered by platform, as humanly possible.
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Adobe
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Adobe says it works directly making contributions to projects including the SQLite embedded relational database management system and the Eclipse software development environment, which is primarily rooted in Java but extensible to a variety of other languages via plug-ins.
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A new open source project dubbed frash will allow iPad users to experience Flash in the Web browser as Adobe begins demonstrating its own efforts to port Flash 10.1 to the newly released Android 2.2 “Froyo”.
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The Open Source Initiative has worked hard to show that open source software, which are products primarily known for offering access to software source code, can provide economic value and strategic advantages to business practices around the world.
Twelve years ago, open source was implemented by software developers, and the importance of this non-proprietary software has only been compounded as open source developers and users have tailored their codes to truly evolve and grow as needed by individual companies and users.
[...]
According to the Open Source Initiative Web site, “the prehistory of the Open Source Initiative includes the entire history of Unix, Internet free software, and the hacker culture.” While the hacker culture may have been the birthing place of open source, different companies, users and communities have come to heavily rely on open source for several reasons.
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This may seem obvious to some, but there are lots of commercial open source companies that don’t grok the importance of the “support first” mantra. Many commercial open source companies spend a lot of time detailing the feature-specific advantages their products have instead of detailing support options. It’s a cart-before-horse issue. Like Red Hat, Cloudera, Acquia and other commercial open source startups increasingly understand all of this. Their understanding will definitely make a difference over time.
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Originally, it was called the Fedora Directory Server, introduced in 2005, but it was later renamed to 389 Directory Server. It can interface with Microsoft’s Active Directory, and since it is LDAP based it is extremely fast and powerful, and can be interfaced with from other devices that support LDAP authentication. Even client authentication is possible (in Linux, configuring PAM to use it as an authentication service). It also offers a full featured console for easy remote administration.
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Mozilla
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Last week the Mozilla community had quite a few releases, and the MPL team, not wanting to be left out, is excited to announce the first Alpha draft of the next version of the Mozilla Public License.
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SaaS
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Recently Adobe released Puppet recipes that they are using to automate Hadoop/HBase deployments to the community. InfoQ spoke with Luke Kanies, founder of PuppetLabs, to learn more about what this means.
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Oracle
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Through the deal, Oracle acquired the Java software language that underpins its Fusion middleware, as well as the Solaris open source operating system and open source database technology MySQL. The deal also saw Oracle acquire Sun’s hardware business including servers, storage and desktop workstations.
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CMS
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The Guardian has released a free tool that allows owners of WordPress blogs to publish articles from its archive onto their sites.
The free plugin, called The Guardian News Feed, allows users to browse the archive of Guardian content and then either post articles directly to their blog or store them in the drafts folder for later publication.
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Barebones CMS is an open source product. It is dual-licensed under both the MIT and LGPL licenses and is therefore free for both personal and commercial use. Financial donations to the project go toward future development.
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Healthcare
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Business
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By contrast, Schott notes, open source may cost time (i.e. money) to set up and evaluate, but you save that on the back-end, on lower subscription costs and no initial license cost. You have to sell yourself, in other words, but you save big.
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Semi-Open Source
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Don’t mention “open core” to Larry Augustin. Trust me, not a good idea.
He gets a small twitch in his face and enough clouds build that, even though I’ve got a few inches, a lot more pounds, and some martial arts training on him, I felt it prudent to take half a step back when I stupidly lumped SugarCRM in with open core products in a barroom conversation with him last month.
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Project Releases
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Following five release candidates, IPFire Project Leader & developer Michael Tremer has announced the release of version 2.7 of the IPFire open source firewall. IPFire is a Linux distribution that can be booted from a CD or USB drive, or installed to a computer’s hard disk drive.
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Foresight been using stable release of Gimp until 2.7.1 released. 2.7.0 was too unstable to update to.
Now users can easily use the “Single-Window mode” of gimp, it will make all windows in Gimp to be one. Looks more like photoshop.
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The Yorba developers have released version 0.6.1 of their open source Shotwell photo manager for the GNOME desktop. According to the developers, the latest update to their free digital photo manager includes a number of bug fixes, language support improvements and several new features compared to the previous 0.5 release from mid-March.
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Government
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But this can be taken one step further. By applying the principles of shared services to the exchange of best practice and technical knowledge, web teams from across the country can benefit from each other’s innovation and experience. And this is where open-source software is critical, particularly for applications such as web content management.
The question for local authority leaders is whether the enthusiasm for efficiency savings will be enough to overcome traditional barriers to open-source uptake. These have been well documented and include shortage of vendor support, lack of control and worries over cost transparency. Potential users can also be put off by uncertainties about product road maps and, with so many parties involved, over where responsibility lies when things go wrong.
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Jeremy Allison of Google and Terri Molini of Initmarketing, both presenting on behalf of Open Source for America (OSFA), joined us for the first Open Your World Forum. OSFA is organized to advocate for open source technology use in the US Federal government, and represents well over a thousand members, including tech industry leaders, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academic research institutions.
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Licensing
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As readers of this blog will doubtless know, Richard Stallman’s great stroke of genius at the founding of the GNU project was to use copyright when crafting the GNU GPL licence but in such a way that it undermined the restrictive monopoly copyright usually imposes on users, and required people to share instead.
That so-called copyleft approach has allowed a vast and thriving ecosystem to arise, but one that depends critically on the validity of the GNU GPL. If the GPL were shown to be unenforceable, then its terms would be void, and free software would have some problems. For that reason, every time somebody is threatened with legal action for allegedly violating the GPL, lawyers’ hearts beat a little faster at the prospect of a definitive ruling on whether it is valid or not.
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Openness/Sharing
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Google-owned video sharing service YouTube is creating a movie titled Life in a Day with director Kevin Macdonald and producer Ridley Scott, besides roping in hundreds of its online open-source contributors, reports said.
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This got me thinking that this social largesse was not unlike the open source movement. When left to their own devices people will help for free for the sake of helping and the social web helps drive this desire.
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Open Data
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As these examples show, the license under which data is originally released can have significant consequences on its downstream use and commercialisation. The open source software community has know this for years, of course, which is why organisations like GNU have two different licenses – GPL, which keeps software open by tainting other software that includes GPL libraries, and LGPL, which allows libraries to be used in closed/proprietary code. There is a good argument that by combining data from different open sources in a particular way valuable results may be created, but it should also be recognised that work may be expended doing this and a financial return may need to be generated (so maybe companies shouldn’t have to open up their aggregated datasets?) Just how we balance commercial exploitation with ongoing openness and access to raw public data is yet to be seen.
(The academic research area – which also has it’s own open data movement (e.g. Panton Principles) – also suggests a different sort of tension arising from the “potential value” of a data set or aggregated data set. For example, research groups analysing data in one particular way may be loathe to release to others because they want to analyse it in another, value creating way at a later date.)
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Open Access/Content
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The survey attempted to gather information from a broad spectrum of research institutions in developing and transition countries in order to get a better understanding of the current state of the implementation of open content licenses. Open content licenses or some explicit statement attached to the article when it is published in an open access journal or deposited in an open access repository help to refer to a specific type of libre open access.
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Open Hardware
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“That’s one of the beauties of open source,” said Bre Pettis, one of the founders of MakerBot Industries, a company in Brooklyn, NY. What are Makerbots? Inventor Bre Pettis talks about how a Makerbot is like Ikea furniture, here are the reasons why it may be the next personal computer.
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European Digital Rights has prepared a “frequently asked questions” document to explain the changes between the SWIFT agreement previously rejected by the European Parliament and the current text under discussion.
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Science
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Another study in 2007 showed that men who took two-hour walks in a forest over two days had a 50-percent spike in levels of natural killer cells, and a third study found an increase in white blood cells that lasted for a week in women exposed to phytoncides in forest air.
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Doctors have made their views about homeopathy clear, but their position on whether placebos should be knowingly prescribed is distinctly vague
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Business Models
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The role of the disruptor is not to make life easy for the disrupted. Swisher and these execs seem to be confusing the role of certain folks in the legacy industry with the overall entertainment industry itself. As noted, the entertainment industry is thriving. More movies, music and books are being created. More money is being spent. It’s just that it’s going to different players. There’s no reason to “figure out a way to keep talent from being dragged into the future.” The opportunities and wide open path are there. The problem isn’t that tech leaders haven’t made it easy for them. They have. It’s that these guys are so myopically focused on the way they used to make money they don’t realize that the new opportunities are already there and have been embraced widely by others.
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Longer hours, more pressure, decreasing quality and less enjoyable work. Old media is a dark, dark place for journalism – at least that’s the mood of many of the journalists who were interviewed for the annual Oriella digital journalism study.
There are some reasons to be cheerful, which include journalists not being quite as pessimistic as the previous year. Are things really that bad?
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Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. Time.com didn’t go behind a paywall this week and there aren’t plans for that to happen. Technically, Time magazine didn’t put one up for its online content either—that is, you can’t pay to read the contents of current issues of Time (NYSE: TWX) online. What the Time Inc. flagship did was slip on the magazine equivalent of a condom, a barrier between online readers and the full content of the magazine.
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Security/Aggression
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Britain’s fight against terrorism has been a disaster, because its “flawed, neo-conservative” direction alienated Muslims and increased the chances of terrorist attacks, a former leading counter-terrorism officer has told the Guardian.
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There’s a power struggle going on in the U.S. government right now.
It’s about who is in charge of cyber security, and how much control the government will exert over civilian networks. And by beating the drums of war, the military is coming out on top.
“The United States is fighting a cyberwar today, and we are losing,” said former NSA director — and current cyberwar contractor — Mike McConnell. “Cyber 9/11 has happened over the last ten years, but it happened slowly so we don’t see it,” said former National Cyber Security Division director Amit Yoran. Richard Clarke, whom Yoran replaced, wrote an entire book hyping the threat of cyberwar.
General Keith Alexander, the current commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, hypes it every chance he gets. This isn’t just rhetoric of a few over-eager government officials and headline writers; the entire national debate on cyberwar is plagued with exaggerations and hyperbole.
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What’s far, far more serious is the suggestion that the government be allowed to set up a National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. This sounds good. The plan is to create an Internet-based identity ecosystem, “where individuals, organizations, services, and devices can trust each other because authoritative sources establish and authenticate their digital identities.”
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Last month, we discussed a bill nicknamed “Katie’s Law” that would give states financial incentives to collect DNA samples from individuals arrested for certain crimes. At the moment, less than half of the states currently collect DNA samples from these arrestees. If Katie’s Law were enacted, the remainder of the states would likely expand the scope of their DNA collection practices, greatly increasing the number of samples collected.
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Environment
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As temperatures rise, smart-assed tweets about Al Gore from Republican senators appear to fall
Living in Berkeley, Calif., it can be difficult getting excited about the weather back East. Every blogger on the East coast in my RSS feed has been moaning and bitching about the record-breaking heat wave, but in Berkeley, I was wearing a sweater in the mid-afternoon and the thermometer hadn’t broken 60. And guess what, the exact same conditions prevailed during the great Snowpocalypse-ageddon earlier this year. So while Washington and New York convulse in cataclysms of sweltering heat and pounding blizzards, in the Bay Area we just hope the fog lifts, eventually.
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The launch of environmental disclosure rules was hailed as a turning point for eco-protection in China’s business world. But two years on, they have all but been forgotten, says Huo Weiya.
When chinadialogue organised a talk last May to mark the first year since publication of China’s environmental transparency regulations, “Measures for the Disclosure of Environmental Information” (or “Measures” for short) Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), said the biggest problem had been “the almost total lack of action from business”.
China’s firms may be unwilling to reveal environmental data, but when it comes to green marketing, there is no shortage of enthusiasm. In public, top executives never doubt the importance of environmental protection, nor do they deny their social responsibilities.
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Finance
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If you want to see what’s wrong with Africa, take a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The size of Western Europe, with almost no paved roads, Congo is the sucking vortex where Africa’s heart should be. Independent Congo gave the world Mobutu Sese Seko, who for 32 years impoverished his people while traveling the world in a chartered Concorde. His death in 1997 ushered in a civil war that killed 5.4 million people and unleashed a hurricane of rape on tens of thousands more. Today AIDS and malaria are epidemics. Congo, then, is not a place you’d normally associate with a yuppie.
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China tried Wednesday to allay concern about the political impact of its $2.5 trillion foreign reserves, saying they are not a “nuclear weapon” to control other nations and its vast holdings of U.S. Treasury debt “should not be politicized.”
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Agricultural Bank of China’s $22 billion initial public offering is making headlines as potentially the world’s biggest. It is also underlining the cash squeeze Chinese banks are facing after a massive lending binge.
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Financial shares pulled the stock market higher Wednesday after State Street Corp.’s second-quarter profit forecast topped analysts’ expectations.
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Unemployment in rich countries may have peaked – but there are still 17 million more people out of work than at the start of the crisis, the OECD said Wednesday.
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In one of the darkest tallies of the nation’s still-sputtering recession, experts say financial desperation has played a significant role in increased calls to suicide-prevention hot lines — and likely has led to increased suicide rates.
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The European Union’s executive says Greece is “broadly on track” with budget cuts and economic reforms linked to euro110 billion ($138 billion) in bailout loans from EU nations and the International Monetary Fund.
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In the study’s white paper, “When Executives Rake in Millions: Meanness in Organizations,” professors from Harvard, Rice and the University of Utah argue that rising income inequality between executives and ordinary workers results in “power asymmetries in the workplace such that top executives come to view lower level workers as dispensable objects not worthy of human dignity.”
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Some Wall Street firms aren’t waiting until the Volcker rule kicks in to shake up the trading desks that wager the banks’ own money.
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Goldman Sachs reported an increase in the number of signs of slowing U.S. economic growth and China. Specialists Goldman Sachs warned of worsening situation in the U.S. housing market. Regarding China, the experts reported that the intensity of the recovery of the Chinese economy is now the most important factor to which regulators should pay special attention.
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Apparently there’s massive growth ahead for nappies, but we’re not sure if Goldman’s Ontex will target young children or European debt traders.
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TPG Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s (GS) private equity business are close to buying Ontex NV, Europe’s biggest private-label nappy manufacturer, for more than EUR1.2 billion. The deal to purchase Ontex from Candover nearly collapsed when Goldman Sach’s original equity partner pulled out, but the late addition of TPG has kept the deal alive, and the belief is the deal could be completed as soon as this week.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Google Inc (GOOG.O), which runs the world’s largest search engine, is in a pickle as it could lose its licence to operate a China-based search page, while trying to hold onto its anti-censorship stance.
In a bid to appease Beijing and keep its China license, Google said this week it will stop automatically redirecting China users to its uncensored Hong Kong site.
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Australians may not be censored online after all.
Under new leadership, the Oz government’s commitment to instituting what’s euphemistically called a net ‘filter’ is starting to look a little shaky.
Mandatory ISP filtering legislation will be “out by November”, Aarnet has the scheme’s frontman, Stephen Conroy, stating. And “Sooner rather than later.”
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Labour overstepped the mark on civil liberty issues, leadership candidate Ed Miliband has admitted.
The shadow energy and climate change secretary made the comment in an interview with Liberal Conspiracy in which he came close to endorsing gay marriage and branded himself a feminst.
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Army Specialist Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst who leaked the “Collateral Murder” video of US pilots shooting down Iraqi civilians (including two Reuters photographers) in cold blood, is finally being charged. For revealing to the American people the truth about what’s going on in Iraq, Manning faces horrendous legal consequences – nearly sixty years in prison if convicted on all counts. One of the charges, incredibly, is espionage. He was a “spy,” according to the US government – for letting Americans in on the “secret” that we are committing war crimes in Iraq, and around the world.
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Copyrights
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The major digital issue, with the still to be resolved Google Book Settlement, is Orphan Works. These are works that are still in copyright but where the rights owner can’t be traced, or fully determined and many believe is a goldmine of works that can’t be legally digitised today. Different countries have different rules over length of copyright and the criteria under which they get impacted. Some claim the number of titles impacted is relatively small and that there is little value in them, other would suggest the opposite. Now a review involving responses from 22 cultural institutions and published by the European Commission claims, that not only books are affected but that there is a significant high percentage of orphan works among photographs and audiovisual collections and the numbers are high.
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We’ve pointed out many times just how ridiculously complex various licensing collection agencies are in the music space, especially when multiple collection societies cover the same music. The whole system seems designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to actually play music legally. Take, for example, this situation in the UK, pointed out by reader mike allen, involving a hairdresser who had paid for a license from PRS For Music just to be allowed to turn on a radio in his shop… only to discover that he failed to pay the other UK collection society, PPL (home of the infamous CEO who insists that “for free” is a bogus concept). So even though this guy thought he was legit, he still ended up with a fine for £1,569.
CLUG Talk 29 September 2009 – Virtualbox (2009)
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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According to the figures, 87% of computer using patients in Mental hospitals used linux as their main operating system. According to the mental health professionals, the mental collapse is caused by the overwhelming strain of installing and using Linux. This OS forces a person’s brain to short circuit. The deeper they go with the OS, the more they become catatonic. They first begin to exhibit signs of helplessness, suffer depression symptoms as the operating system pushes them to the limit, and every step of the way they find themselves unable to grasp the terminology used and this undermines their self esteem and importance as a person.
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After wiping the hard drive and reinstalling Windows XP countless times, the computer refused to get to the Windows loading screen. So I decided to take the plunge and borrowed a buddy’s Mandriva Linux disc — and things actually worked.
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Ballnux
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LG announced an LG Optimus Series of mobile devices, including two Android 2.2 smartphones — the Optimus One and Optumus Chic — and promised an Android-based Optimus tablet. Meanwhile, a rumor about an Android 3.0 “Gingerbread” platform split-up has been squelched, and a photo of the Android-based “HTC Vision” emerged as the device’s manufacturer announced robust 2Q financials.
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Applications
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We have all read stories about people who have experimented living without spending any money whatsoever. By growing their own food, washing in the river, using a solar panel to provide electricity, and bartering for certain goods and services, these adventures have met with limited success. However, for us mere mortals the simple fact is that we need money. Money to buy food, to purchase clothes, to pay our bills, as well as indulging in our other infinite wants and desires.
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VIPS is an image processing system designed with efficiency in mind. It is good with large images (images larger than the amount of RAM in your machine), and for working with colour. It can perform many image manipulation tasks much faster than other packages such as ImageMagick and the GIMP and includes some special features such as creating single “mosaic” images from multiple parts.
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Qmmp is a simple, fast and versatile Winamp or XMMS like music player for Linux. It is written primarily with the help of Qt library. Qmmp supports almost all kinds of music formats out there and it is down to earth simple to use and configure.
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Many Linux enthusiasts associate desktop Linux with their repetitive daily routine. Same old, same old.
Looking to mix things up a little, I thought it’d be fun to take a more entertaining look at what we can do with our Linux boxes. I’m listing ten noteworthy Linux applications that I find very fun to use.
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It seems like I have a lot to talk about these days when it comes to digital media, and this article is no exception. As I discussed in a previous article, I feel that physical media (CD’s, Blu-Ray, DVD) is going away and in the future digital media will rule all. While this is a blessing since less shelf space would be taken up by stacks of media, it is also a curse since companies will likely push DRM. However, what if you wanted to adopt digital media on your own terms, using free software? Well, Handbrake is here to take care of digitizing your DVD collection.
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The description of Rekonq is simple: the Konqueror browser using the WebKit engine. But it’s not quite that simple. Rekonq will be the new default browser for Kubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). This is a new project that will, hopefully, overcome some ofthe shortcomings of the current Konqueror browser. And in this article we will take a look at this new browser so all the Ghacks readers will be prepared when it lands on the new KDE desktop.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals
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Two popular Linux distributions recently released new developmental versions on the road to their finals. One is early in its cycle and the other is about to cross the finish line.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Today, virtually all of the free software available can be found in packaged form in distributions like Debian and Ubuntu. Users of these distributions have access to a library of thousands of applications, ranging from trivial to highly sophisticated software systems. Developers can find a vast array of programming languages, tools and libraries for constructing new applications.
This is possible because we have a mature system for turning free software components into standardized modules (packages). Some software is more difficult to package and maintain, and I’m occasionally surprised to find something very useful which isn’t packaged yet, but in general, the software I want is packaged and ready before I realize I need it. Even the “long tail” of niche software is generally packaged very effectively.
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In this video, Jerone Young, Partner Engineer at Canonical explains the status of software optimizations and development to make ARM Powered Laptops and Desktops a reality. He tells about some of the fascinating challenges where Canonical is working together with the their partners at the Linaro group of companies (ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST Ericsson, Texas Instruments…) to realize a full desktop experience on ARM Powered devices, including full and fast web browsing and full access to most of the most useful Ubuntu applications.
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That Linux is a significant player in the enterprise comes as no surprise: Enterprise customers are a lot easier from which to generate revenue. It makes economic sense: if you have a business product to sell, it’s far easier to sell 1,000 products to one or two big companies than to do all the footwork to sell 2,000 products to 2,000 companies. Or even among 100 companies.
For some time, the big commercial Linux vendors have been happily wandering orchard of low-hanging enterprise fruit, almost completely eschewing markets such as consumers or small- to medium-sized businesses.
That single-minded focus may not serve them well against a relative newcomer to the enterprise Linux market: a newcomer that has quickly obtained a large percentage of the desktop Linux market and–more importantly–the hearts and minds of Linux developers.
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Android
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In April, we learned HTC expected to ship 4.5 million handsets worldwide which would be responsible for raking in a hefty $1.6 billion in pure revenue. Today, it’s been revealed that they surpassed their own estimation by posting an astounding $1.88 billion in revenue in the second quarter of the year (April, May, and June).
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Imagine you are there on the day of Open Your World forum and listening to all the talks that day, seven hours so far with a few fifteen minute breaks. You are learning, things are clearer, but all the ways of applying the open source way outside of software may have you feeling a bit lost in a sea of new ideas.
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LinkedIn
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That, in its turn, has allowed all kinds of new businesses to be created that hitherto would not be economically viable. Alongside Google, there is Facebook and Twitter, both of whom have been vocal in their support of the software they depend on. But I hadn’t realised that LinkedIn was also part of this growing club until I read the following…
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At LinkedIn, we love open source. We’re committed to contributing to Hadoop and Pig and giving back to the open source community through projects like Azkaban and Voldemort. We are determined to provide the open source community with the complete and painless data cycle that we enjoy – to enable even casual hadoop users to analyze data from their application at scale, to mine it for value and store it easily and reliably so that it can drive use and close the data loop. Look for new open source tools and projects from LinkedIn Analytics in the coming months that will help make this possible!
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now ready to download and test! This first version gives an early look at what’s planned for Firefox 4. Stay tuned, because there is more to come and we plan to release new beta versions every two to three weeks. Your feedback is essential to help shape the product which is why we’re launching now to hear from you early in our development process.
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Mozilla released the first beta for Firefox 4 on Tuesday, introducing a new interface design to a wider Windows audience, support for multiple technologies that aim to be essential to Web browsing in the future, and a plan for updates far more aggressive than those of the past.
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Ads and banners are a staple of the Internet. We know this, and many just try to ignore them as they surf along. And while ad revenue helps out the providers of the site you are visiting, they don’t necessarily help you — often they will hinder you because waiting for those ads to load tends to slow down the entire page. AdBlock Plus is a great add-on to get rid of them. When you first install it you will get to choose a subscription list to use, which is a list of filters to block. The “EasyList (English)” list, if you do your browsing in English, is a very good list of filters that auto-updates and should cover the majority of your needs.
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SaaS
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There is no doubt that the cloud is relevant for some businesses and some applications, but this is a market that is still evolving. A suppler who can offer a hybrid can give the best advice and make sure you only pay for what you need without being locked in.
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A survey finds “54% of those surveyed either currently use or plan to use cloud computing within the next 12 months for their applicatons”. (TFA comes from Google’s cache because the original site seems broken now…)
[...]
It’s a chicken and egg thing. Will GNU/Linux take major share because consumers lap it up in stores or will GNU/Linux take major share because businesses adopt it widely? IT shifts can spread either way from the consumer space to business or the other way round. It seems to me that many businesses running XP are clinging to XP because they can keep it working but are exhausted from the effort and want nothing more to do with M$’s high cost of maintenance.
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Databases
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I am happy to see that SkySQL, a new home for MySQL talents, is being formed.
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With the impending release of version 9.0 of the open-source Postgres database, due in mid-August, the developers behind the project are hoping that the new features will attract more interest from enterprises.
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CMS
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I really only want two things for my website: (1) I want the software that runs my website to be high-quality and (2) I want my website’s content to be high-quality. It sounds easy and straight-forward but I assure you it isn’t.
I want the software that runs my website to be stable, efficient at handling my website’s traffic, and flexible. Good content management systems meet these requirements, but it took years to get where we are today, and we still have a really long way to go. Fortunately, all my websites run Drupal, so the first part of my requirements presents no problem. If you want, you can have a Drupal site too — it’s free!
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Government
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This news is also great for the open source world: if I understand correctly, the French government is aiming to boost quality of service while reducing costs. And to succeed, I don’t see many other alternatives than relying on open source solutions! I cannot imagine a government – which is planning to cut costs – deciding to select expensive and inflexible systems offered by proprietary vendors.
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Openness/Sharing
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Free software may stem from a research mind-set, where shared results lead to a greater good. Free software has built this around various licenses such as GPL and BSD. The ideals behind free software have spread beyond software and can also be seen in other areas: documentation, game mods, illustrations, music – all types of content creation can be licensed in an open and free way.
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Open Data
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My blog post on Friday about the local spending information, the open data that isn’t, and the agreements that some councils seem to have struck with Spikes Cavell raised a flurry of tweets, emails, and a reassuringly fast response from the government’s Transparency Board.
It also, I’m told, generated a huge number of emails among the main protagonists – local and central government bureaucrats and private companies, who spent much of Friday and the weekend shoring up their position and planning counter attacks against those working for open data, and thus threatening the status quo.
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The new Government will be working with local government not only to put online information on spending, tenders and contracts over £500, but also to publish job vacancies online, in an open and standardised format, for anyone to use, re-publish and ‘mash up’ without charge. There will be no public sector monopoly – the jobs data can be used by anyone, from commercial recruitment, newspapers to pressure groups.
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The following guest post is from Hjalmar Gislason, an open data activist, member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on EU Open Data, and founder of structured data start-up, DataMarket.
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Secretary of State for Communities & Local Government Eric Pickles followed this up with a letter to councils saying, “I don’t expect everyone to do it right first time, but I do expect everyone to do it.” Great. Raw Data Now, in the words of Tim-Berners Lee.
Now, however, with barely the ink dry, the reality is looking not just a bit messy, a bit of a first attempt (which would be fine and understandable given the timescale), but Not Open At All.
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Open Hardware
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For electronics hobbyists, the open source chipset BeagleBoard that packs as much punch as a smartphone processor might seem like the key to paradise.
Yet it is the relatively underpowered 8-bit microcontroller Arduino that has captured the attention of DIYers.
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Science
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Last week, the hilarity was that Rand Paul refused to say how old he thought the earth was. The new chew toys are creationist apologists for ignorance trying to justify it, while also refusing to state how old they think the earth is. The amusement lies in the way these guys puff themselves up into a state of moral superiority while claiming that scientists are dogmatists…because, you know, they know stuff.
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The discovery in Gabon of more than 250 fossils in an excellent state of conservation has provided proof, for the first time, of the existence of multicellular organisms 2.1 billion years ago. This finding represents a major breakthrough: until now, the first complex life forms (made up of several cells) dated from around 600 million years ago.
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Security/Aggression
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141 arrested from 30,000 – or 0.47% of those stopped – is a disgraceful return. Just like Section 44, the overwhelming feeling we get is that thousands of people have had their journeys interrupted because the police needed to hit a target – we are little more than a statistic.
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A pub boss has hit out after being cleared of an offence under the Licensing Act.
Police claimed Tony Griffiths, managing director of Wylam Leisure, failed to hand over CCTV footage to Northumbria Police after an incident at city centre bar The Glass Spider.
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Workers’ Protests
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Police in Bangladesh using bamboo staves, teargas and water cannon fought with textile workers demanding back pay and an immediate rise in monthly wages on the streets of Dhaka today.
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Zhang Liwen found out that she was about to go on strike over a breakfast of steamed buns and congee rice porridge at her factory dormitory. Fifteen minutes later, she was taking part in industrial action for the first time in her life.
“I was worried, but everyone was excited and determined,” recalls the 21-year-old migrant worker at the Denso car parts plant in China’s southern province of Guangdong. “We started our shift at the normal time, but instead of working we just walked around and around the workshop for eight hours. The managers asked us to return to our jobs, but nobody did.”
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Environment
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Greenpeace has filed a Freedom of Information request with Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office asking for records of his communications with climate change ‘skeptics’ and ‘conservative’ organizations such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Cato Institute. Greenpeace is seeking to expose some of the inner workings of the network of denialists who are attempting to discredit the work of certain climate scientists and stop EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, SolveClimate reports.
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PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has found no errors that would undermine the main conclusions in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on possible future regional impacts of climate change. However, in some instances the foundations for the summary statements should have been made more transparent. The PBL believes that the IPCC should invest more in quality control in order to prevent mistakes and shortcomings, to the extent possible.
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Barack Obama’s hopes of leveraging public anger at the Gulf oil spill into political support for his clean energy agenda fell flat today after he failed to rally a group of Democratic and Republican senators around broad energy and climate change law.
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Climate scientists in the US say police inaction has left them defenceless in the face of a torrent of death threats and hate mail, leaving them fearing for their lives and one to contemplate arming himself with a handgun.
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The White House Thursday enacted stronger rules to prevent the media from showing what’s happening with the oil spill in the Gulf Coast.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported that evening, “The Coast Guard today announced new rules keeping photographers and reporters and anyone else from coming within 65 feet of any response vessel or booms out on the water or on beaches — 65 feet.”
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Earle, explorer in residence at National Geographic, believes it may have been the largest such congregation ever observed by scientists in the northern Gulf of Mexico. “It was an ocean full of whale sharks. I can’t even begin to count the fins,” she said. “We almost had them bumping up against the boat.”
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Friends of the Earth said it was astonished that BP was not planning to completely change all aspects of its business. “This [the BP statement] is sticking two fingers up to those who care about climate change and believe we should invest in low carbon technologies,” said Mike Childs, head of climate change. “It is saying its ‘business as usual’ and the share price falls may continue also.”
BP faced intense criticism over the tar sands from Greenpeace and socially responsible investors including the Coop with 620,000 votes cast at the oil group’s annual general meeting to review these operations.
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Here’s a consequence of climate change you probably haven’t thought of. Space buffs know that Earth orbit is littered with junk, including defunct satellites, spent rocket boosters, and other random debris–about 11,500 objects bigger than 4 inches across, according to NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office (it’s their graphic you’re looking at). It’s a worry: every one of these speeding bits of hardware could potentially damage, or even smash up a working satellite. The latter could create a lot more debris, potentially triggering something called the Kessler Syndrome, in which fragments of a smashed satellite go on to smash more satellites, creating fragments that go on to smash more…and so on.
What does this have to do with climate change? Maybe a lot.
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It’s very important, incentives to keep the forest rather than cutting it. Right now there are laws all over the tropics that say once you cut your forest you own it. Logging is encouraged by the governments. We have to reverse that somehow. We need laws and compensation for preserving forests and biodiversity.
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A revolutionary scheme backed by the World Bank to pay poor countries billions of dollars a year to stop felling trees is the best way to stop logging and save the planet from climate change, according to wealthy countries and conservationists, yet documents seen by the Observer show the plan is actually leading to corruption and possibly more logging.
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Well this becomes more entertaining by the moment. Those who staked so much on the “Amazongate” story, only to see it turn round and bite them, are now digging a hole so deep that they will soon be able to witness a possible climate change scenario at first hand, as they emerge, shovels in hand, in the middle of the Great Victoria Desert.
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Finance
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Two-thirds of U.S. counties became economically healthier in May, thanks to more manufacturing jobs in the Midwest and fewer home foreclosures in the Sun Belt, according to The Associated Press’ monthly analysis of conditions around the country.
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My starting point: a BBC report on Who owns the UK’s debt?
From there, I ended up finding loosely related data at:
National Statistics – UK Accounts
UK Debt Management Office Quarterly Review
Bank for International Settlements
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This looks like just another attempt at creating positive PR. The moratorium is just until the financial reform laws are passed. So, if financial reform happens tomorrow, then the moratorium is lifted. However, this new report by Charlie G. is worth watching. He does make some very good comments and observations. Watch and post your comments.
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Today, during the FCIC’s second day of hearings, Goldman CFO David Viniar was forced to provide additional data about the firm’s AIG CDS trades. Luckily the firm kept a record of all entry and exit points, and thus will be able to confirm just what the P&L of the associated trades is (and if not, we are happy to teach Goldman’s risk department how to use the Bloomberg CDSD function in conjunction with RMGR run scraping to build a real time CDS portfolio tracker)… Which is ironic, because when asked by Brooksley Born why the firm has not yet provided a break down of its derivative revenue Mr. Viniar by all accounts perjured himself. As Bloomberg reported: “We don’t have a separate derivatives business,” Viniar told the panel. “It’s integrated into the rest of our business.”
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The recovery has hit a wall. In June, the U.S. economy lost jobs for the first time this year. Existing home sales plunged 30 percent in May. Time to pump money into the economy!
But wait. The national debt is projected to jump to 62 percent of the economy by the end of this year. That’s the highest level since just after World War II. Time to cut back!
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With the financial reform bill likely to hit President Barack Obama’s desk in coming weeks, Wall Street’s top political players are warning Democrats to brace themselves for the next phase of the fight: the fundraising blowback.
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Debt-hobbled Greece may see a slightly milder than expected recession this year and aims to issue bonds again on international markets in 2011, the finance minister said Monday.
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Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club chain is teaming up with a lender to offer loans of up to $25,000 to its small business members.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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When the anger of a prominent young thinktanker causes one of the world’s largest web-hosting companies to shut down a site that monitors lobbying and transparency, it is time to start asking questions about online free speech and censorship.
Last week, as Hugh Muir reported in the Guardian diary, the website SpinProfiles was taken down by the domain name registrar, 1 & 1 Internet, following a complaint from Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, son of journalist Christopher.
SpinProfiles, run by sister organisation Spinwatch, aims to stitch together publicly available information to provide a detailed picture of who’s who in the shadowy world of lobbying. It features close to ten thousand profiles of think tanks, lobbying organisations and those associated with them.
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A quick analysis of the present charges against Bradley Manning. I’m not a lawyer, but I can read statutes. Mentions here of WikiLeaks and the identification of the video as “Collateral Murder” are my own interpolations.
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The American Civil Liberties Union plans to sue the U.S. government Wednesday on behalf of 10 citizens or legal permanent residents who have been placed on a no-fly list and, in some cases, stranded abroad.
In the suit, the ACLU accuses the government of violating the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Oh those jokesters over at the AP — the fun never ends! Last night, we wrote a post noting that Woot was (humorously) calling out the AP for not following their own ridiculous rules when quoting from content. By Woot’s calculation, using the AP tool, the AP owes them $17.50 (but Woot was nice enough to offer them the chance to buy some headphones off of Woot instead). The AP didn’t like that story — neither our’s or Woot’s.
This morning, Paul Colford, the Director of Media Relations for the AP sent emails to both me and Woot CEO Matt Rutledge.
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Copyrights
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Loreena McKennitt published an op-ed supporting copyright reform in the Winnipeg Free Press over the weekend that focuses on the harm of infringement and the need for C-32. The piece raises at least a couple of issues. First, there is the claim that “even popcorn sellers are struggling to stay alive” in light the current state of Canadian copyright law. This claim arises from some declining interest in big music tours, which is taken as evidence that performances are not a viable alternative for many musicians. What copyright reform has to do with concert venues, performers or popcorn sellers is anyone’s guess – promoters of struggling music tours say it has everything to do with a tough economy, competition for the entertainment dollar, and high ticket prices rather than music downloads or IP enforcement. Copyright reform won’t change the financial dynamics of the touring industry, which will presumably still leave those same popcorn vendors struggling to stay alive.
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French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the man who shepherded the French version of ACTA’s Three Strikes element (HADOPI) into law on behalf of Hollywood and the Big 4 Record labels, has been accused of receiving 150,000 euros (C$199,081) in illegal party financing.
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NDP MP Charlie Angus has issued a lengthy letter to Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement that challenges them on the digital lock provisions in Bill C-32. In a release on the letter, Angus states “the digital lock provisions will subject Canadians to arbitrary limitations on their legal rights of access. The government is trying to create the impression that this unbalanced approach to digital locks is necessary in order to bring Canada into compliance with WIPO and the Berne Convention. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
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ItsHidden is a VPN service that was set up with torrent users in mind, allowing them to hide their identities from ‘third parties’ who choose to snoop on their activities. The service launched less than a year ago, but with the increased demand for anonymous BitTorrent it has already amassed 300,000 members.
CLUG Talk – 13 May 2008 – The Conary Package Manager (2008)
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