Caller: “Yes, that! Is it some sort of computer mafia or something?”
Me: “Uh, no, it’s just a different operating system. Nothing to worry about.”
Caller: “But it’s illegal! It’s not Microsoft, not even Windows! They’re on a normal Microsoft computer, so they’re breaking the law! I think they stole my identity when I came in the building! I’m calling the FBI!” *hangs up*
The truth of the matter is Gandhi-Con4 has already started. Brazil, the 10th largest world economy and growing, dumped Microsoft in favor of Linux years ago in a desire for transparency and has been tickeled pink ever since. The French Army just quit Outlook in favor of the open source email client, Thunderbird. It does not stop there, remember, countries in every corner of the world have ordered One-Laptop-Per-Child netbooks that run Linux. Tax-payers of the world will see this trend and get sick and tired of seeing that Microsoft is on their corporate welfare dole.
Should we really have to call it GNU/Linux instead of just Linux?
The question lingers in my mind after a recent reader commented and corrected me that I should use the term “GNU/Linux” when referring to the entire operating system. I guess the naming controversy quietly lives on.
Your Linux costs don’t end with the Internet. I don’t think that the electricity that powers your computer is free. And the longer your days and nights spent in front of the computer the higher your light and heat bill. Furthermore, the more time you spend on Linux the more money you may end up spending on snacks, new eyeglasses, and taxis when you miss the bus to work because you just couldn’t tear yourself away from the computer in time. I think you get my drift. But we repeat. Linux, this website, and many of the references on the web are free. Should you outgrow Damn Small Linux the larger versions of Linux are free, or at least quite inexpensive when compared to ostensibly similar versions of Microsoft Windows.
Kernel versions 2.6.27.40, 2.6.27.41 and 2.6.31.7 offer minor improvements and correct several bugs – including one security hole. Torvalds has already incorporated more than 5,000 changes for Linux 2.6.33. Its merge window will probably be open for just over another week. Various developers are working on significant improvements to the open source Radeon graphics drivers.
Less than two weeks ago the first release candidate for the xf86-video-intel 2.10 driver was released, but now the second release candidate can be obtained from its Git repository. Not a whole lot of work has been committed to the Intel DDX driver since xf86-video-intel 2.9.99.901, but 2.9.99.902 is out there and testing is appreciated.
While the Gallium3D driver to provide 3D/OpenGL acceleration (along with OpenCL, OpenVG, OpenGL ES and other accelerated APIs through the state tracker interface) will not be released right away as this is where the bulk of the development is still taking place, the Nouveau driver already has many advantages over what it is replacing: xf86-video-nv. The xf86-video-nv driver is NVIDIA’s attempt at an open-source driver in the way of just providing very basic user mode-setting for their hardware and limited 2D acceleration. That’s about it for the features of this driver with no RandR 1.2 support or any other DDX features found in most other drivers.
Leading up to this though, Red Hat attributed Nouveau not entering the mainline tree sooner on the basis of some microcode/firmware concerns. Without sorting out the issue for this mysterious microcode, known as ctx_voodoo, they could not sign off on the code. As of right now, they haven’t even fully resolved this situation but they are just having ctx_voodoo be loaded through the kernel’s firmware loader interface. However, we have learned that ctx_voodoo is not even needed for all graphics cards and that Red Hat was just attempting to ignore this little fact.
For those not interested in the Nouveau driver, head on over to NVIDIA’s FTP server as a new 190.xx driver is available. Late last month NVIDIA released the 195.22 beta Linux driver as the first in this new driver series, and while there are new features and advancements going on there, NVIDIA is still maintaining the current 190.xx stable driver series. Released last night was the NVIDIA 190.53 pre-release driver.
This is the second time I try to get into Python scripting for GIMP. My script in the first show about scripting was simple, just saving some clicks. Now it is more complicated, variables, loops and floating points included. But no parrots!
Songbird is the new Polio cure, the Elvis of digital media, King Henry V, you name it. It’s truly spectacular. And it achieves all this by being simple, unobtrusive. The interface is smooth and polished and intuitive. I did not even suffer a moment of confusion or hesitation while I played with Songbird.
On top of that, you get lots of online services, decent and relatively cheap, tons of useful media info via mashTape, many worthy extensions, and a powerful, easy-to-use search. Everything is there, at the tip of your fingers. The colors are toned down, there are no useless visual tricks to steal your eye’s focus or distract you from pure pleasure.
You get everything you need and then some. Furthermore, it’s fast, responsive and stable and works great. Songbird is simply superb!
This should be and must be your music player. I give it a perfect ten! Enjoy!
Only two weeks after our previous beta release, all the folks from the Getting Things GNOME! project are very proud to announce you that the new 0.2 version is now out! So, get it while it’s hot! You can either download it on our Launchpad project page or, if you prefer, grab a package and install it from our PPA. And if you want to know what’s new in this release (and this is not only a few things!), just continue to read!
Now, it’s time to celebrate that 0.2 release and to spread GTG love everywhere (we are even on FR wikipedia). See you at FOSDEM 2010 or at GUADEC 2010?
Purely in the name of science, I dumped every torrent I could find on the front page of LinuxTracker into the 600m, and let it spin up. That’s 86 torrents, probably more than 60Gb of disk space, and generally speaking a considerable workload.
As I mentioned in a recent post, I have recently switched to a Linux distribution as my operating system of choice. Many other users may be put off from making a similar switch because they are concerned that they may not be able to use the applications that they know from the Windows environment. While some applications are not available on Linux, there are a number of alternatives that offer all the most important features and have the benefit of not costing a penny.
The default Ubuntu experience might be good but this makes it more accessible ; ) Adding and removing applications could be quite confusing for new Linux users, no matter what distro it is. Ubuntu Geek has a good blog entry with screenshots that show us how easy it is to install applications with Ailurus. I hope to read more stories about how universities have used Ailurus to their advantage. Especially on the caching aspect and the downloading from the fastest mirror bit.
Krita’s team have reached their target to raise Krita to the next level since they’ve raised €4,000.00 so far, which is €1,000.00 over their goal!. This donation will be used to hire Lukáš Tvrdý for three months to work for accelerating Krita’s performance, stability and usability.
Thanks to our latest donor, Silvio Grosso, we’re at four thousand euros now on Pledgie: Help raise Krita to the next level — which together with the donations people have made into my bank account directly, means that, even after Paypal has taken its cut, Lukas will be able to work on Krita for another month in the summer!
So I got to wondering how much overall our community has generously given the KDE project. I dont have all of /KDE checked out, only /koffice, which is worth a stonking $ 34,484,962.
For the fun time we’ve had working on KPilot or whining about the pity state of device synchronization on Linux in general (still today it seems that there’s not really a rock solid solution available). I’d also like to thank Robert and Doug for their contributions and of course the people who started KPilot in the first place like Dan Pilone and Rainhold Kainhofer. We’ll have to see what the future brings. But with all those new powerful devices, which are able to access various groupware solutions I doubt if anyone wants to really invest in a computer <-> phone/handheld solution. The curtain falls for KPilot, good bye old friend, fare well!
For the longest time the only worthwhile network manage (especially of the wireless kind) was the GNOME Network Manager. Once KDE hit release 4 their network manager KNetwork Manager was plagued with issues to the point where it was nearly unusable.
Despite Google’s move into the operating system (OS) space, the idea of a primarily cloud-centric OS is nothing revolutionary; the earliest examples date back to 1999. And although numerous other attempts at developing Web-centric OSesn none up to this point have truly broken into the mainstream. But some current offerings present welcome alternatives to mainstream operating systems, packing in useful features and making it easier to access your online content.
Mangaka Chu is unique enough that it doesn’t remotely resemble its parent distribution. It has many interesting software choices and seems dedicated to helping their target audience enjoy anime and manga on Linux.
Slitaz has already given me the proverbial “middle finger,” as some of my American friends say — being the only distro I know that I didn’t build myself that can run comfortably on less than 16Mb of memory. A day or two ago it did it again, popping up a graphical desktop with Xorg 7.4, which hasn’t worked for me ever.
More than one year after the release of version 1.9, the GNUstep developers have released their GNUstep LiveCD 2.0, which allows the platform-independent, object-oriented GNUstep OS to be tried without installing it. The system is available for 32 and 64-bit systems, as well as for PowerPCs and UltraSPARC. GNUstep 2.0 comes with Linux kernel version 2.6.31 and is based on the Debian distribution. The GUI is provided by the WindowMaker window manager, a design similar to that of NeXTstep.
The best, refined blend of GNU/Linux, coming with bleeding edge edges is eventually here! Say hello to Sabayon Five-point-Oneh, available in both GNOME and KDE editions!
Dedicated to those who like cutting edge stability, out of the box experience, outstanding Desktop performance, clean and beauty. Sabayon 5.1 will catch you, anything that could have been compiled, has been compiled, anything cool that could have been implemented or updated, it’s there: you will find outstanding amount of new applications and features, like XBMC 9.04.1 (formerly known as Xbox Media Center), KDE 4.3.4, GNOME 2.28, and so forth.
Open source software developer Red Hat announced this week that it will host an online forum on open source cloud computing forum on February 10, 2010.
Acrosser is shipping a fanless 1U network appliance that runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.x. The AR-R5100FL is a 19-inch rackmount system that incorporates an Intel EP80579 (“Tolapai”) SoC with Intel QuickAssist technology, along with six to ten gigabit Ethernet ports, and dual USB, serial, and SATA ports.
There’s also Bob Young from Red Hat Linux – a legendary figure and company hero-worshipped by many in the computer industry. From Young’s accounts over sessions that totalled 10 hours, Martin describes in The Opposable Mind the obstacles and contradictions the former had faced.
Young was realistic enough to accept that to be sustainable, a revenue stream must be created for Red Hat. He also realised that companies were willing to pay for goods and services, including software. However, they must be reassured the vendor company will be around in the years ahead.
Young’s competitors were formidable – Microsoft, which wanted to control the server operating system market, and the different Linux distributions. Through integrative thinking, Young focused on getting Red Hat to be seen as the market leader. He decided on a move which astonished everyone – he encouraged companies and users to download Red Hat for free! However, they would have to pay for future services; like in upgrading the software.
The free downloadings resulted in Red Hat being tabulated in industry statistics and records as the leader in server operating system. It brought prestige, credibility and trust among businesses, with many deciding to use Linux rather than Windows for their servers. Young’s unique decisions and solutions from the opposable factors propelled Red Hat into the big time, and he became a billionaire upon the company’s IPO.
To that end, while there is a place for trademark law in open source, it’s my opinion, that the value a brand, or project be it Fedora, Red Hat or any other is more about how they deal with their users and community, than how they deal with Trademark law (but it’s always good to have a lawyer on hand..just in case).
Coming up to this event, I’d been struggling a bit with some mental and spiritual exhaustion. This event helped me get Fedora back into perspective and reminded me what a beautiful thing it is to be surrounded by wonderful, smart people — and how much we can accomplish when we bring our ideas together and compare them constructively to find the best way forward. Thank you to every single one of you who participated either on-site or remotely, for the gift of renewal.
Although my experiences with Fedora over the years have been riddled with installation issues, humdrum looks, and a lack of tools and default software, I seem to be in the minority. What works really well for me, my work flow, and my hardware may not work that well for you – and vise versa. This is why a particular distro may receive a bad review from one writer and a glowing review from another. It all boils down to personal experience. I’m reminded of this every time I try to use Fedora.
I went ahead and just did a quick screenshot walk through of installing Ubuntu 9.10, and some possible points of interest for anyone that may need help understanding the steps.
Ubuntu 9.10 didn’t end up seeing integration of Plymouth as USplash and the new XSplash ended up being used. However, the Ubuntu development community and Canonical seemed to have changed their mind. Just uploaded to the Ubuntu Lucid repository for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is in fact Plymouth.
For those looking to play with Plymouth on Ubuntu right away, it’s as easy as sudo apt-get install plymouth when running on the Ubuntu 10.04 development branch. Yesterday we installed Plymouth on an Ubuntu Lucid box and recorded the video below.
I hope you are as excited about 10.04 as I am. I believe this could be the Ubuntu release that the public would have a hard time turning down as its desktop OS. Not only will it have a very solid foundation, the overlaying structure will be much more modern looking.
Timesys announced that its LinuxLink embedded Linux development framework supports NetLogic Microsystems’ MIPS32-based Alchemy Au1250 and Alchemy Au1300 system-on-chips (SoCs). The LinuxLink framework provides access to hundreds of open source Linux middleware packages, as well as automated development tools for processors used in mobile consumer electronics, says the company.
HardKernel is shipping a developer-focused handheld game device that runs Android and offers source code, schematics, and a debug board. The $350 Odroid is based on a Cortex-A8 Samsung S5PC100 clocked to 833Mhz, and offers 10GB of flash, a 3.5-inch touchscreen, 720p video via HDMI, plus WiFi, Bluetooth, and accelerometers.
Google has handed out a new mobile phone running its Android software to some employees, stirring another wave of speculation that the oft-rumored Google Phone is real.
So why did they call it JooJoo instead of CrunchPad? Recent disagreements between Arrington and the Fusion Garage team ended the CrunchPad project. Chandra Rathakrishnan, Fusion Garage CEO, later announced that the CrunchPad would be released by the company as the JooJoo to avoid lawsuits.
[...]
The JooJoo is basically just a web-browsing machine. It runs on a custom-made Linux operating system with a sole purpose of running a browser that’s based on Webkit. The home screen is your window to different web sites/applications. The “internet is the application” so you can’t save files like images and documents to your physical storage device.
Check the operating system. If you can find a netbook with linux, I recommend that one, since it’s cheaper, and then you can install whatever you want, without extra costs for windows.
Novell and other members of the Linux community have worked very hard with Intel to ensure compatible Linux drivers were available before netbooks went into production. The result: Solid Linux options for every manufacturer, with some offering pre-loads of Novell SUSE or Ubuntu Remix for netbooks. In addition, Intel has released its own Moblin (Mobile Linux) for the netbook. And the ever-hyped Google Chrome OS, for which open source code is now available, is aimed at netbooks. Google envisions it as a Web-centric complement to another PC.
Google’s new netbook-oriented operating system, Chrome OS, got more than its fair share of press when its source code was released (including a download from our very own Jorge Sierra.) But Google’s not the only major tech company developing a speedy, open-source operating system for netbooks – Intel’s been working on Moblin netbook OS since 2007.
Nobody wants to be feel helpless, to have increased stress, or have their freedom taken away. I care about free software because I value not just my own time and independence but that of my friends, family and customers. If you feel the same, try a 100% free software operating system, try a replacement for your billing software, or communicate with your proprietary software vendor about why they don’t publish their software under a free software license. You have a choice.
My use of the term “free software fanatic” really rubbed one of my readers the wrong way, and he responded with this, er, rather blunt reply…
[...]
Oops! I certainly never intended to insult anybody with my choice of words, so I apologized in the comments section. But, in a way, I’m very glad that this issue came up as I think it’s one worth exploring.
Taking Schaeffer’s three tactics as our lead, here is a FOSS perspective on these protection mechanisms:
Best practices implies community effort: discussing, sharing and collectively building understanding and techniques for managing systems and their software components. FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) communities develop, discuss and share these best practices in their project support and development forums. Debian’s package management system implements some of these best practices in the operating system itself thereby allowing users who do not participate in the development and support communities to realize the benefits of best practices without understanding or even knowing that they exist. This is one of the important benefits of policy- and package-based operating systems like Debian and Ubuntu.
There was a time years ago when open source software in the enterprise often had to be just ‘good enough.’ Over time, use and broader adoption, open source software has now reached the point that it must often be ‘as good or better’ than proprietary alternatives, now typically getting equal consideration from customers and users.
So settle in for the mid-term march to profitable $100 million open-source companies. At current growth rates, we should start to see IPO action as early as 2012, and perhaps sooner.
Making the Italian South Tyrol Free Software Centre (FSC) part of the Digital Technologies Area in the innovation centre in the Italian city of Bolzano, has given it the strength to support public authorities as well as companies in the region, says Patrick Ohnewein, head of the centre.
The FSC was made part of the Digital Technologies Area of the innovation park (TIS), a project from the trilingual province of Bolzano-Bozen, earlier this year. “It has given us a lot more resources. We are now much closer to the four strategic teams at the Digital Technologies Area, and that has raised our profile with all the organisations that contact the innovation centre.”
Add-ons product manager Justin Scott (reluctantly) announced the news this morning at an add-on-happy conference in Mozilla’s home town of Mountain View, California. “We’ll probably be doing a marketplace pilot in 2010,” he said.
Eben Moglen, the founder and executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), will assure European Regulators today, that the open source license under which MySQL is distributed can protect the program from any proprietary threats that could emerge from the merger of Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
As a whole, VirtualBox is a simple-looking application. On the main screen, as seen above, there’s a VM list to the left, and detailed information on the respective VM you’ve clicked on to the right. There’s nothing much complicated here, and if you were judging the application simply by this screen, you’d likely imagine it’s not too powerful, but what an understatement that would be.
The undersecretary of Poland’s Interior Ministry, Witold Drożdż on 2 December became the honorary patron of a project on ‘sound and transparent procurement tools’, an information campaign by the Polish Foundation on Open and Free Software (Fwioo).
So, the answer to the question is, no. Using open source software in government, in private business or at home actually puts you at less risk.
The Obama Administration is moving in the right direction, as are many other of the world’s governments, by transitioning away from proprietary software and using software that is cost-free and open source.
Maybe once the trend is set, private businesses will follow the example and adopt open source software for their use as well.
In this version of the guide on MAKE I will link to the product page and if it’s sold in the Maker Shed there is an additional link to the Maker Shed if you’d like to support OSH and get a kit or project. For 2009, this guide became so large that it cannot fit in to one post on MAKE so it will be divided up in to sections, 18 of them:
* 3D printing – Open source hardware is now making things. Physical things you can print out, over the last few year 2-3 projects have really gained momentum and made some wonderful advances in low-cost desktop 3D printing. Projects include Fab@Home, MakerBot and RepRap. A new project was also added this year, s DIY open source construction set for experimental personal fabrication (view projects).
* Arduino – Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Perhaps one of the most successful open source hardware projects to date. Dozens of projects are included in the guide (view projects).
* Arduino shields – This is a new category mostly because there are so many open source hardware shields in 2009. These “shields” add music, internet, GPS and additional functions (view projects).
Methods: We performed a prospective experiment involving otolaryngology residents in Vancouver, Canada. The main outcome was the proportion of “heads” coin tosses achieved (out of 300 attempts) by each participant. Each of the participants attempted to flip the coin so as to achieve a heads result.
Results: All participants achieved more heads than tails results, with 7 of the 13 participants having significantly more heads results (p ? 0.05). The highest proportion of heads achieved was 0.68 (95% confidence interval 0.62-0.73, p < 0.001).
Interpretation: Certain people are able to successfully manipulate the toss of a coin. This throws into doubt thevalidity of using a coin toss to determine a chance result
Goldman originated or bought protection from AIG on about $33 billion of the $80 billion of U.S. mortgage assets that AIG insured during the housing boom. That is roughly twice as much as Société Générale and Merrill Lynch, the banks with the biggest exposure to AIG after Goldman, according an analysis of ratings-firm reports and an internal AIG document that details several financial firms’ roles in the transactions.
In Goldman’s biggest deal, it acted as a middleman between AIG and banks, taking on the risk of as much as $14 billion of mortgage-related investments. Then Goldman insured that risk with one trading partner—AIG, according to the Journal’s analysis and people familiar with the trades.
The trades yielded Goldman less than $50 million in profits, which were mostly booked from 2004 to 2006, according to a person familiar with the matter. But they piled risks onto AIG’s books, which later came to haunt the insurer and Goldman. The trades also gave Goldman a unique window into AIG’s exposure to losses on securities linked to mortgages.
Five months after it first announced coming privacy changes this past summer, Facebook is finally rolling out a new set of revamped privacy settings for its 350 million users. The social networking site has rightly been criticized for its confusing privacy settings, most notably in a must-read report by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner issued in July and most recently by a Norwegian consumer protection agency. We’re glad to see Facebook is attempting to respond to those privacy criticisms with these changes, which are going live this evening. Unfortunately, several of the claimed privacy “improvements” have created new and serious privacy problems for users of the popular social network service.
Members of the House of Lords recently voiced concerns over the UK government’s Digital Economy Bill, stating that the problems facing the entertainment industry are largely of their own creation. There was also criticism of companies who demand cash from file-sharers in the UK, and ideas were put forward to end their scheme.
While some do seem upset about the issue, others are actually figuring out ways to deal with it, including offering their own vastly cheaper ebook versions quickly (and with no DRM), or even working out deals with “pirate” sites to share some of the ad revenue. The one publisher that the article focuses on, Sergei Parchomenko, says that they’re not losing money from pirate sites, but the responsibility is on him to come up with a workable business model. It’s nice to see someone realizing that they need to react to the market, rather than freak out about things.
By and large, thinking of music as commerce, as strictly a means through which money is made, is what got the record industry into this mess in the first place. Long before the Internet and file-sharing became common scapegoats, the record industry’s growth was already based on the notion of a forever expanding market for music that never existed. Because music is such a definitive part of the human experience and passionately embraced the world over, it was supposed that quarter to quarter not only could record labels achieve exponential growth, but that from album to album an artist ought to be able to achieve the same results. But, as we now know, this mindset can only persist for so long, because music as commerce expands rather differently from music as culture.
Speaking as a Linux/FOSS user, none of this comes as any surprise to me at all. Since my move from Microsoft in the home (as a result of repeatedly being let-down, then blamed for failing software) I have experienced first hand the advantages of migrating to FOSS. This is not because the software is free (to me thats just an added bonus) but the days of me constantly fixing, correcting, scanning, cleaning up my system have come to an end.
One only has to look at any IT related forum to see users running many different FOSS projects. For some its on a Windows platform, for others they have, like me moved away completely.
It’s not just the big-time robber barons, but all the way down the foodchain. I just know that someone is going to comment “But businesses care only about maximizing profits, otherwise shareholders will sue them and bad stuff like that.” Please. Don’t bother because it’s garbage. It’s excusing unethical behavior. Businesses are run by people with plenty of values, though sometimes the wrong ones. It’s akin to saying that businesspeople must lie, cheat, and exploit because that is the only path to success. Hey everyone does it.
Rip off the artists, musicians and creators because they’re too stupid and weak to protect their own interests. Gouge the freelancers, abuse employees, rip off your own customers, buy yourself favorable legislation. I don’t call success that comes at the expense of damaging other people success. That is failure.
Check Dell’s page for home laptop buyers and there’s a menu (see image, left) offering Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and … drum roll, please … Ubuntu options. Thank you to a number of readers who pointed out Dell’s decision to highlight the Ubuntu option.
Not to sound like a Luddite, but sometimes the old ways are best. When it comes to Web browsers, that’s not very often, but knowing your way around a text-mode browser like w3m does come in handy from time to time. You probably won’t want to switch, but after taking a look at what you can do with w3m, you might want to add it to your toolbox.
Regarding the lack of support for open source products and protocols… that is an opportunity. If you aren’t happy with the fact that open source product X doesn’t have anyone offering commercial support or that the existing support offerings are poor, someone else (even you) can change that and start a new support service. What it takes is massive adoption of product X to make the opportunity into a lucrative no-brainer. IBM has shifted a certain portion of their business to become a support company for open source… and they are a big lumbering company that takes forever to change direction. Imagine what a flexible, well run, smaller company could do.
So what comes next? Fedora 13 is tentatively scheduled for release on May 11, 2010. The proposed feature list for this release is just beginning to come together, and some possible features (such as Btrfs-based rollbacks) do not yet appear there. Unsurprisingly, improvements to the Nouveau and Radeon graphics drivers are on the list. Better online telephony support is a possibility for F13 as well.
The Chumby is one of those strange little gadgets that defies easy categorisation. If we absolutely had absolutely to try to sum it up in half a dozen or so words, it would be: Wi-Fi internet radio alarm clock with widget support.
Though it’s only been available for a few weeks, Verizon Wireless already has released an update package for the Motorola Droid, an Android-based smartphone. A Verizon spokesperson said the update started Monday and will continue for about a week.
Sugar Labs has announced the availability of Sugar on a Stick version 2, a major update of its Linux-based operating system for education that was originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child project. The new version introduces an ebook reader and a number of other important features.
The lawsuit comes on the heels of news late last month that the alleged CrunchPad had allegedly died an alleged death at the hands of Fusion Garage – only to be revived by the Garage band as the JooJoo.
SaVi runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows (under Cygwin) to simulate satellite orbits in two and three dimensions. Unlike other satellite visualization software, this app focuses on helping users understand how satellites move together in a constellation formation to provide reliable global coverage without gaps in data transmission.
Personally, even if I only use Free Software and always write about it and recommend it as much as I can I don’t worry that much if few people already use it and above all I do not care at all if almost no Free Software user contributes to it in any way. I care much more, for example, that everybody demands as soon as possible that only open formats, even before Free Software, are used by Public Administrations and that public data of public interest are made available online with open licenses. I’ll regularly cover these topics here and recommend the same priorities to all FOSS advocates, without stopping promoting Free Software, of course!
Unix was a good choice in that it was compartmentalized and it was relatively straightforward to replace each Unix component with it’s GNU replacement. (For anyone who doesn’t know: GNU is a recursive acronym that means ‘GNU is Not Unix’). Bit by bit RMS worked and by the early 1990′s he had almost a complete system. Only one major part was missing and that was the kernel.
As we know Linus Torvalds wrote a kernel and then people started to use the GNU utilities to create a complete operating system. Of course there were many contributions from different places, but the two most important parts were the GNU utilities and the Linux kernel.
Nevertheless, the historical narratives of the digital spaces could benefit from a critical reflection and inspection, just think of the origins of free software as narrated e.g. by Grassmuck in Germany. According to the narrative in the beginning all software was freely shared and source code exchanged but then corporate greed took over, and Richard Stallman quit his MIT job. Of course you also find other narratives of the history of computing and the net or could make up your own.
The European Commission has released a report [.pdf] with the rather unpromising title “Trends in connectivity technologies and their socio-economic impacts”. Despite this, and a rather stodgy academic style, there are a number of interesting points made.
Ryan’s article is an extended argument for why MIT should continue to support OCW after its grant funding runs out in two years. I (and I expect most readers of this blog) agree with the importance he places on the project and the very important public good it has become. More importantly, MIT OCW is terribly important to the broader field of open education.
One of the heartening trends in openness recently has been the increasing, if belated, release of non-personal government data around the world. Even the UK is waking up to the fact that transparency is not just good democracy, but is good economics too, since it can stimulate all kinds of innovation based on mashups of the underlying data.
It’s significant that books about the commons are starting to appear more frequently now. Here’s one that came out six months ago:
Who Owns the World? The Rediscovery of the Commons, has now been published by oekom Verlag in Berlin. (The German title is Wem gehört die Welt – Zur Wiederentdeckung der Gemeingüter.) The book is an anthology of essays by a wide range of international authors, including Elinor Ostrom, Richard Stallman, Sunita Narain, Ulrich Steinvorth, Peter Barnes, Oliver Moldenhauer, Pat Mooney and David Bollier.
“If you take this stack of video stories about a region and you create a kind of syndication model – it’s probably a free syndication model – you actually create an enabling mechanism for people to access this video content and do something with it,” Ofcom’s content and standards partner Stewart Purvis told the regulator’s Have We Got News For You? conference in Cardiff on Friday.
So, can Eiffel come next after Java? Maybe. It is definitely not worse as a language, it is almost for sure better and at least is not just same Java again as C#. Also, Eiffel code is compiled into C and has no bytecode layer that separates Java from the “C world” so strongly. It may be an attractive alternative to try if your tasks require you to stay in this ‘C world’ and you just want to have a more convenient language rather than periodically switching into Perl, Python or something similar. And having C layer allows to create executables for ARM or even more exotic platforms; something that seems not working out of box with EiffelStudio but surely deserves investigation. This may allow to use Eiffel on Gumstix-like devices where currently Java is just *very* “ok”, C is still a king and Linux is that’s expected when you put your device out of box. Eiffel is not lots faster then Java neither it uses a lot less memory but it really seems a little faster and uses a little less memory – this still leaves a great impression as Eiffel provides more, not less programming comfort.
3D graphics became ordinary first in games, then in operating systems, and on Thursday, it took a significant step toward being built into Web browsers as well.
The Khronos Group, which oversees the OpenGL graphics interface, announced that its work with Mozilla to bring hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the Web has reached draft standard form. The standard, called WebGL, lets programmers who use the Web’s JavaScript language take advantage of the fact that video cards can handle 3D graphics with aplomb.
Agner Fog, a Danish expert in software optimization is making a plea for an open and standarized procedure for x86 instruction set extensions. Af first sight, this may seem a discussion that does not concern most of us. After all, the poor souls that have to program the insanely complex x86 compilers will take care of the complete chaos called “the x86 ISA”, right? Why should the average the developer, system administrator or hardware enthusiast care?
In short, the world is moving to the ePub standard, with Amazon as, apparently, the primary holdout. That means that it will be in everyone’s best interests to optimize every device (except the Kindle) to the ePub standards, and to convert every book to the ePub standard. Amazon, on the other hand, will need to support its hardware and format standard all by itself. Of course, not being a hardware or software company, it will need to rely on…oh yes…the Taiwanese to supply them with the sort of cutting edge technology to be able to beat….Hmmm. That may be a problem.
We’re not sure how many judges out there are avid Facebook users. But those that are might want to think twice before hitting the “confirm” button on all those friend requests from lawyers in your districts. At least, we should add, in Florida.
Department of Homeland Security has placed five transportation security employees on leave following the inadvertent leak of a sensitive manual detailing security procedures for screening passengers at airports.
On the desk in my office I have a sign that says: “Don’t steal — the government hates competition.” Indeed, any power a government arrogates to itself, it is loathe to give back to the people. Just as we have gone from a constitutionally-instituted national defense consisting of a limited army and navy bolstered by militias and letters of marque and reprisal, we have moved from a system of competing currencies to a government-instituted banking cartel that monopolizes the issuance of currency. In order to reintroduce a system of competing currencies, there are three steps that must be taken to produce a legal climate favorable to competition.
It sounds simple but let me deconstruct this. We need information to be informed and we need the ability to exercise our vote in a meaningful way to be a valid electorate. In the current set up we get neither and thus we cannot honestly call the UK a democracy.
Durham police last week put the final nail in the coffin of the Home Office mantra “nothing to hide, nothing to fear”, with a clear announcement that DNA and fingerprinting could harm an individual’s career prospects – even if they are otherwise totally innocent.
As we know, the UK government intends to force UK ISPs to store vast amounts of data about our online activities. The idea that this might be an undue burden is dismissed out of hand. But what do we now read about using intercept evidence in court?
United States law enforcement agents and partners reported “encounters” with suspected terrorists 55,000 times in the last year; a check against the terrorist watchlist found a match 19,000 times, according to testimony presented to the Senate on Wednesday.
The letter to Children’s Secretary Ed Balls, from the seven main representative organisations for school and college leaders, says they take very seriously their duty to protect youngsters but the newly introduced system is “disproportionate to risk”.
The standard answer to a question like this is that “we all suffer.” While that’s probably true, it misses the point — we may all suffer, but we don’t all suffer equally. Some nations will be hit harder by storms or droughts than others; some nations will have the resources and technologies to adapt better than others. And therein lies the potential for what may end up as a nasty tool of international competition.
There is, I believe, a non-zero chance that an extended period of climate instability could induce a state that believes itself to be better able to adapt to global warming to slow its efforts to decarbonize in order to gain a lead over its more vulnerable rivals.
Warmed, overfished and polluted, the small Mediterranean Sea is giving scientists a look at what the future may hold for the rest of Earth’s oceans — and it’s not pretty.
To mark the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, I’m trotting out some maps I made a while back. This one has states labelled with the names of countries that are their greenhouse gas equivalents.
Government-backed venture capital funds worth £776m have generated only £11m in net income so far, according to a damning report by the National Audit Office.
His first piece was a polemic against Goldman Sachs, which triggered a backlash against the venerated Wall Street firm due to its incestuous relationship with Washington. Afterwards, he took on health care reform. Now, he is taking on the Obama Administration and its status quo bias. I have an excerpt below and a link to the full article. But, first, let me say a few words.
As you probably know, I have been quite disappointed with this Administration’s leadership on financial reform. While I think they ‘get it,’ it is plain they lack either the courage or conviction to put forward a set of ideas that gets at the heart of what caused this crisis.
It’s not enough that they have brought the US and Europe to their financial knees. Now banks, under the guise of the WTO’s free trade treaty, want to expand the casino to the new big emerging powers with their trillion-greenback reserves. A derivatives crash in those markets could easily trigger a financial China Syndrome—a second meltdown from New York to Beijing to Brasília.
Last year, the American people overwhelmingly voted for a change in our national priorities and for a new direction on the economy. After eight long years of trickle-down economics that benefitted millionaires and billionaires while leaving the middle class behind, Americans demanded a change that would put the interests of ordinary people ahead of the greed of Wall Street and the wealthy few.
What the American people did not bargain for was another four years for one of the key architects of the Bush economy.
My friend, the wonderful sf writer Peter Watts was beaten without provocation and arrested by US border guards on Tuesday. I heard about it early Wednesday morning in London and called Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She worked her contacts to get in touch with civil rights lawyers in Michigan, and we mobilized with Caitlin Sweet (Peter’s partner) and David Nickle (Peter’s friend) and Peter was arraigned and bailed out later that day.
But now Peter faces a felony rap for “assaulting a federal officer” (Peter and the witness in the car say he didn’t do a thing, and I believe them). Defending this charge will cost a fortune, and an inadequate defense could cost Peter his home, his livelihood and his liberty.
But JWZ has the kicker, when he reminds us that Eric Schmidt’s Google blackballed CNet’s reporters after CNet published personal information about Schmidt’s private life: “”Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story…” “To underscore its point about how much personal information is available, the CNET report published some personal information about Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt — his salary; his neighborhood, some of his hobbies and political donations — all obtained through Google searches….”
Hey, Eric: if you don’t want us to know how much money you make, where you live, and what you do with your spare time, maybe you shouldn’t have a house, earn a salary, or have any hobbies, right?
Evony’s owners, who boast that the game has more than 11 million players worldwide, have accused Everiss – a 30-year veteran of the computer games industry – of damaging their reputation with a series of claims made on his blog. Among the allegations that Evony is objecting to are claims that the game is exploitative and has links to another company that is already being sued for fraud by Microsoft.
A crack squad of London cops — three cars and a riot van — converged on a famous architectural photographer who was taking a picture of Christopher Wren’s 300 year old Christ Church spire. Grant Smith, the photographer, refused to tell a Bank of America security guard what he was doing (he wasn’t on B of A property) and so the guard called in the police. When the police arrived, Smith was searched and questioned under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act.
We were not especially impressed by their sending of seven officers in three cars and a riot van to deal with architectural photographer, Grant Smith, caught filming a church in the City of London. This was overkill, but alongside Kent’s arrest of a photographer for being too tall, as well as interference by various forces with assorted schoolboys, trainspotters and Austrian tourists, it was but small beer.
Leading security expert Bruce Schneier was in London this week on a whirlwind lecture tour. ZDNet UK caught up with the ex-NSA man, who is now BT’s chief security technology officer, at lectures in parliament and at University College London.
Schneier talked to ZDNet UK about his views on behavioural advertising, the efforts of various governments to tackle unlawful file-sharing, cyber-warfare and vendor lock-in.
Hidden away inside the Bill, there’s unlimited – and arbitrary – censorship of any site the Secretary of State takes against:
Surely something must limit this power you ask? It seems not. The Secretary of State may make an order if “he considers it appropriate” in view of:
(a) an assessment carried out or steps taken by OFCOM under section 124G; or (b) any other consideration.
Where “any other consideration” could be anything. To their credit the Tories do seem to have realised that this particular alternative is overly permissive. Lord Howard of Rising and Lord de Mauley have proposed (in the first tranche of amendments proposed that the “or” be replaced by an “and”.
What astonishes me is that there is no obligation for the Secretary of STate to even publish such an order, let alone subject it to the scrutiny of Parliament, yet he could fundamentally change the way the internet operates using it. Other orders made under other parts of the Bill will have to be made by statutory instrument and most will require Parliamentary approval. Not this one.
If this goes through, we are in deep trouble, people….
Three Republican lawmakers have asked the Department of Homeland Security what can be done to bar or criminally penalize whistleblower sites that reposted a sensitive airport-screening manual that was published on the internet by a government worker.
If Redbox is set to destroy the Hollywood with $1-per-night DVD rentals, what’ll happen if Big Box DVD kiosks start appearing around the country, charging just 6 cents an hour? We could find out if Big Box parent Mosquito Productions is able to expand its kiosk DVD rental business.
William Patry: Patry, the author of the book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars and the scholarly treatise Patry on Copyright, defines copyright as a social program that is a means to an end.
As devotees of our hit video series Five Minutes with Harold Feld (or as the cool kids call it “5MWHF”) will no doubt recall, on the eve of Thanksgiving MPAA dropped a lengthy filing into the Selectable Output Control (SOC) docket. Among other things, it called Harold a liar. Harold immediately took five minutes to tell MPAA to chillax, and yesterday we filed our official response with the FCC. Although I urge you to read our full reply (I promise it is much shorter than the MPAA’s), if you are in a rush here is the short version. Our response basically made three points.
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Public Knowledge does not know which of these groups should be satisfied. More importantly, neither does the FCC. The FCC’s job is not to choose winners and losers in the marketplace. Instead, the FCC’s job is to advance the public interest. MPAA produced plenty of information in its most recent filing, but none of it suggests that SOC is in the public interest.
Oh, and just in case you were wondering to yourself “who owns these millions of HDTVs that will be broken if the FCC allows SOC?” I can’t tell you everyone who owns one, but I do know that at least one of them is on the ground floor of the FCC.
The irony is that the Government has put libraries at the forefront of its campaign to push services online in order to improve efficiency and reach more people.
My Mum says that libraries are increasingly reliant on their provision of Internet access to attract visitors, and that if they were no longer able to provide such access, it’d be difficult to put together a case for their continued existence.
Claims by the MPAA that illegal downloads are killing the industry and causing billions in losses are once again being shredded. In 2009, the leading Hollywood studios made more films and generated more revenue than ever before, and for the first time in history the domestic box office grosses will surpass $10 billion.
The first rule of Usenet is, you don’t talk about Usenet. This rule kept Usenet providers and users out of sight from anti-piracy organizations for years. Ironically, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN are now the first ones trying to enforce this rule in court.
SoundExchange has at times in the past been a bit lax about finding artists owed part of the money it collects from webcasters and satellite radio stations. Integration with other databases is changing that, albeit slowly, to SoundExchange’s credit.
This purpose of this site is to provide information about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and its potential impacts in New Zealand.
ACTA is a ‘plurilateral’ treaty, currently being negotiated between the US, Canada, Japan, the European Union, South Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand.
The opposition movement that formed in response to the “three strikes” rule is ready to take action on ACTA, to make sure that New Zealand’s information policy is made democratically, and not through secret meetings in back rooms. They are organizing their response to the ACTA negotiations next April, and given their amazing mobilization against “three strikes” the last time around, I expect great things. If you’re from .nz or live there now, tell your friends and loved ones about this: your family’s ability to communicate, earn a living, get an education and participate in civil society could be jeapordized by the decisions the elite plan on making in your country.
And hey, Mexico! There’s an ACTA meeting headed your way in January. Got anything planned?
I’ve written several times about the trick that ACTA uses to blur the distinction between large-scale, criminal counterfeiting, and domestic, personal copyright infringement. Sadly, the EU seems to be following the same script…
The technology event season has come to a close, as the holidays approach and 2009 draws to its end.
This was a great year for events in the Linux community. Several regional Linux and open source shows filled the calendar around the world, so most Linux enthusiasts got a chance to visit at least one event near them. There were also the big shows, like OSCON, Open Source World, CeBIT, and, of course, LinuxCon, which came off as an unqualified success for the Linux Foundation.
Arxan Defense Systems Inc., a leading anti-tamper systems integrator for government and military programs, today announced the addition of natively compiled Java binaries and secure Linux support to its EnforcIT®-S anti-tamper platform.
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced that it had expanded its training partner program to include 44 nations–up from 33 a year ago. In addition the organization has increased the number of LPI-Approved Training Partners (LPI-ATP) and LPI-Approved Academic Partners (LPI-AAP) to a total of 242 partners — up 10% from this time last year.
Adding eye candy should never be about purely cosmetic changes. Instead, it should enhance the usability of the desktop and make the average session more productive and more streamlined. We’re going to show you how to do just this, and in the process we’ll help you turn your Linux desktop into the envy of your proprietary OS-loving friends.
I believe both have a role to play in helping an end user make the most of their system. I don’t however, believe a person’s inability to use the CLI actually makes them dumb. Neither do I believe that you’d be diminishing your status by using point and click to get things done for the sheer reason that you’re a CLI guru. If Linux is actually going to go anywhere in the future, the sometimes fundamental stance people take on the issue of CLI vrs GUI ought to be discouraged.
Dell announced new Ubuntu Linux-ready OptiPlex desktops, including a power-efficient model claimed to be the “world’s smallest fully-functional commercial desktop.” In addition to the 9.4 x 2.6 x 9.3-inch, Intel Core 2 Duo-ready OptiPlex 780 USFF desktop, Dell announced a 13-inch Vostro V13 laptop that also offers Ubuntu.
Looks like most reasons Linux is not being adopted in the workplace are based on false assumptions and incorrect perceptions. How can we promote Linux adoption in the workplace? Seems to me the answer lies in educating and informing the “powers that be” in IT departments. Talking to managers in terms they understand, emphasizing reduced costs and increased productivity. Reduced cost because of the license savings, increased productivity because less time is spent applying service packs and patches, and the chances of catching a virus drop to near zero.
Convincing managers to give Linux a try is easier said than done, I know, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Wow, the day has come, open-source fans with NVIDIA hardware that run Linux have quite the present this holiday season. Yesterday there was the first DRM pull request for the Linux 2.6.33 kernel that brought many changes to the ATI/AMD and Intel DRM along with other core DRM improvements (such as to the TTM memory manager). These changes were quite significant and we even called it a great present in the Linux 2.6.33 kernel.
These DRM changes were accepted, but Linus Torvalds went off on a bit of rant wanting Nouveau merged into the kernel. A discussion ensued and after blaming Nouveau’s lack of upstreaming on wanting the kernel/user-space API to potentially change in the future and then with Red Hat disclosing the Nouveau microcode problem that seemed to be pretty much that and we had not expected any immediate activity on the matter.
Linus Torvalds, lead developer of the Linux kernel community, has merged DRBD, an open source data replication solution, into Linux as a fully supported component. After exactly 10 years of ongoing development work – software developer Phil Reisner wrote the first line of code on December 8, 1999 – Torvalds’ acknowledgment means DRBD has become a fixture on the storage market.
We’ll need to start by downloading the software from www.tonido.com. The package is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, with the Linux version offered as a Deb file suitable for installation on Ubuntu or some other Debian-based distro. (SUSE and Fedora users have reported successful installations after using the Alien converter to create an RPM file.)
Now gamers can play the games they want, on whatever platform they want! With CrossOver Games, you can run many popular Windows games on your Intel, OSX Mac or Linux PC. Whatever your tastes, be they first-person shooters, fantasy, strategy, MMORPGs, or more, CrossOver Games provides the capability to run many popular games titles. CrossOver comes with an easy to use, single click interface, which makes installing your games simple and fast. Once installed, your game integrates seamlessly into your Desktop. Just click and run! Best of all, you do it all easily and affordably, without needing a Microsoft operating system license.
This means that all programs running under a window manager will follow that particular window managers display rules and have a consistent look and feel across the board. All buttons will have the same shape, all menus will look the same, all dialog boxes and the colour scheme will be the same for all programs. If you change the window manager or desktop environment then all programs will also reflect that change.
It is with great pleasure that we announce the making of our core Data Acquisition framework “Open Source”. The GDA project is an open-source framework for creating customized data acquisition
Gluster is joining a recent wave of emerging vendors adding enterprise storage management features to clustered network-attached storage (NAS) systems based on commodity hardware with this week’s release of the Gluster Storage Platform.
Yesterday Red Hat used what was arguably the worst-titled press release ever to announce that they are open sourcing their SPICE remote display protocol. SPICE was developed by Qumranet a few years ago and made a huge splash at BriForum in 2008 when they demoed the software-based SPICE protocol on a client with multiple monitors running high-def video, audio, and games. (Here are videos of their sponsored breakout session from BriForum 2008 and DEMO Lab product demo from BriForum 2009.)
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The bottom line is that I want to love SPICE and think that it’s going to be everywhere. But I think the reality now is that everyone who needs a remoting protocol has one. I’m guessing an open-source Xen-based SPICE is highly probable, along with SPICE getting better on KVM. But other than that, who knows?
Well, I am not allowed to take names, but we are definitely working with them. Red Hat allows multiple virtual guests in the boxes, which is beneficial to the managed service providers.
What’s new in Kubuntu 10.04 LTS Alpha 1? Well, this first Alpha version of the upcoming Kubuntu 10.04 LTS operating system is built on top of the KDE Software Compilation 4.4 Beta 1, which includes lots of new features and improvements over the previous KDE 4.3 releases.
It also offers features such as grouping windows into tabs, new widgets and effects, improved configuration and user interface.
Powered by a Linux OS, the network-attached device – which you connect to a router using an Ethernet cable – works with Linux computers, although the remote access is Windows-only for now. For those working in digital media markets who need fast and expansive storage, or for an office workgroup that needs a place for everyone’s files, the ShareSpace is an ideal product that’s easy to configure and use, with only a few minor issues.
The Timesys Linuxlink software-development framework provides Alchemy Au1250 and Au1300 processor users with an intuitive environment for developing Linux-based media and navigation products.
By providing access to hundreds of open-source middleware packages, Linuxlink allows customers to accelerate product development and makes it easy and convenient to create footprint-optimised Linux platforms with a rich set of APIs well matched to their end applications.
The Motorola Droid has been enjoying some great success in the States. Since its US launch in November, it’s been the subject of much praise and critical acclaim – with pundits suggesting it might be Android’s best outing yet. Now, on the same day of the Droid’s UK launch (as the Milestone) it’s been crowned best gadget of 2009 in TIME Magazine’s top ten of everything for 2009.
The Android OS (operating system) used on the new Droid phones offered by Verizon and powered by Google is the first significant threat to the domination of the computing world by the Windows operating system. Although this potential is still in the distant future, it should not be ignored.
The biggest difference – and perhaps Android’s strongest point – is that Google’s operating system is open source. That means anybody – from the weekend hacker to the biggest cell phone makers in the world – can tweak it as they see fit. As such, the Android phones didn’t look like clones – for better of for worse, the individual smart phone makers managed to make them their own.
The software will initially be available only on Nokia’s N900 handset, which uses the Linux-based Maemo operating system, and will be able to run 30 or so Firefox extensions.
This tiny form factor computer omitted the optical drive in favour of USB ports, and even ditched Windows, switching to Linux to keep costs down. It was a brave move on Asus’ part, but one that paid off.
I’ve done my fair share of software reviews on this site, but so far, all of them have been about the major commercial applications and “industry standards” like Adobe products and a couple of 3D suites. But there’s a new class of graphics applications built on open-source platforms that are going to leap further and further into our awareness in the coming months and years for a variety of reasons. Possibly most notably, they are free.
Tony Merenda, CTO and VP of International business at Opengear told CRN that under the contract, Tatts Group has purchased 12,000 Opengear SD4000 series device servers (pictured) for its subsidiary, MaxGaming.
“Long gone are the days when open source efforts were regarded as an obscure sideshow of geeks, open source software was viewed with suspicion by general public and corporate IT departments, and entrepreneurs struggled to commercialize open source efforts,” says Fakhri Karray, primary founder, president and CEO of Vestec. “Asterisk, of course, has in many ways led these changes in perception about open source telephony software and deserves to be acknowledged as a classic open source success story.”
For small and mid-sized businesses, there often is a question about whether to stick with tried and true software providers such as Microsoft for your servers, e-mail and business applications or consider adoption of open-source products such as Linux.
I’ve witnessed in this region some hesitation toward adoption of open-source products. I believe it’s important to be able to make a rational evaluation of the two paths so you can make the best decisions.
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Open-source products should probably always represent the first thing you consider for your business. In my experience open-source products tend to have larger communities, more support and often more options. It doesn’t hurt that they are free to use, and I have witnessed hundreds of thousands of dollars in saving as a result.
Open source development tools are used by 34 percent of the respondent base, while 38 percent use open source office applications. Interest in open source is also picking up gradually in open source security applications (15 percent) and storage (7 percent).
A new email client unveiled by Mozilla this week contains code from an unusual source — the French military, which decided the open source product was more secure than Microsoft’s rival Outlook.
Oracle remains confident that the European Union will cave in and abandon objections to its proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems.
The firm gave evidence in Brussels yesterday, including support from several customers who believe that MySQL is not a serious competitor to Oracle’s core database products.
Fluendo S.A. today expressed its concern that, if upheld, the European Commission’s objections regarding Oracle’s acquisition of Sun could set a precedent that will undermine the development of open source technology worldwide.
With debate brewing about whether database, application and middleware giant Oracle should be able to obtain commercial open source database vendor MySQL, concerns about the proposed acquisition have a part to play in a predicted decline of MySQL use, according to a report by market research firm The 451 Group.
The Oracle/European Union drama never stops. Now IBM’s stuck their collective necks into the fray and said that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun should go through if they make some positive open source gestures to all parties. Meaning what exactly, though?
The Amazon EC2 High Memory instances provide 34 GB and 68 GB of RAM to applications for short-term, high usage instances. Ruiz added that Gear6 will also support Amazon’s block-based storage as well, which could end up providing users with more utility for their memory utilization.
But it’s equally true of relatively new companies like Salesforce, Red Hat, and Google, which have eschewed gimmicky software and flimsy business strategies to give customers tangible, ongoing value. None of these companies sought an early exit through acquisition. None of them were content to build for the quick flip.
So, yes, technology may be a veritable boneyard of failed companies, and essential ingredients like open source may accelerate the demise of start-ups and incumbents alike. But those companies that use such ingredients to deliver above-average customer value are going to endure…and thrive.
If this sounds like a perfect storm for open-source Android, that’s because it is. But it’s also creating an exceptional opportunity for Funambol, and could well establish beachheads for a range of other open-source products that sit within the Android ecosystem.
I’m a college professor who is putting together an open-source textbook. I’m trying to decide between using the GNU Free Documentation License or the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. I don’t really understand the difference between these, though it seems with the Free Documentation License I need to include a copy of the license in my text. Which do you advise using?
The Salt Lake City-based vendor is not placing its source code on the open source market, Kipp Lassetter, M.D., chair and CEO emphasizes. “It’s not a first step toward moving to open source, but definitely defining the system as an open system.”
OMB also highlighted the a programming “code-a-thon” sponsored by HHS in August to bring together public and private open source developers to improve the agency’s “Connect” healthcare Internet gateway project and broaden its use. The software, developed by a group of federal agencies, enables organizations to exchange health data according to standards established for the nationwide health information network (NHIN).
Version 9 of Java development environment IntelliJ IDEA has now been released in two variants – a commercial version, dubbed Ultimate Edition, and an open source Community Edition. The Apache 2.0 licence, which is also used by other JetBrains open source projects, has been selected for the Community Edition.
Sun Microsystems has announced the official release of the Java EE 6 specification, along with Glassfish V3 (the Java EE 6 reference implementation), and NetBeans 6.8, which enables you to easily build Java EE 6 applications.
Is one type of standard better than another? Clearly not; they simply serve different goals. The art, as in so many things, is to find the right balance (even in the second type of standard) between ensuring usability, while enabling beneficial creativity.
This need for balance is recognized in one of the core tenets of modern standard setting, applauded by competitors, antitrust authorities and economists alike. That tenet goes something like this: vendors should be encouraged to collaborate on the creation of the standards necessary to enable new goods and services to be offered, and then compete in the creation of additional value-added features that will distinguish their particular wares in the marketplace from each other. And, in fact, this is exactly what does happen all of the time.
News Corp, Time Warner Inc’s Time Inc and three other publishers detailed their long-expected plans to develop open standards for a new digital storefront and technology to help prepare their print titles for devices ranging from e-books to tablet computers.
Over the past couple of months, I have been working losing sleep over getting Flash to work in QGraphicsView on all platforms. The good news is that flash now works in QGV on all platforms.
I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
This, from 2006, is my response:
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.
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For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.
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This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And it’s our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.
Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
Renewal of two controversial Patriot Act provisions set to expire at the end of the year have been approved by House and Senate Committees over the past month, and appear headed for floor votes in both bodies. President Obama has endorsed extending the provisions.
The two provisions include the “records” rule and the “roving wiretaps” provision. The so-called “records” rule grants federal officials with a court order the power to force private parties such as businesses, hospitals, and libraries to hand over “any tangible thing” they believe has “relevance” to a terrorist investigation.
“Roving wiretaps” allow wiretapping multiple lines of communication without informing FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts which specific phone lines or communication media are being targeted.
The report assigned each database a status based on traffic lights. Only six of the 46 databases were assigned the ‘green’ status that indicated they worked properly and legally.
Goldman loves to tout the fact that they’ve paid back their $10 billion in TARP funds – and can now wash their hands of their responsibility to American taxpayers. There it is. Case closed. Except for that nagging fact that the $10 billion in TARP was just the tip of the bailout iceberg for Goldman Sachs. According to independent reports, Goldman received more than $60 billion in total taxpayer-funded bailouts – much more than the $10 billion that was paid back to TARP. (see page five of this PDF for more). In other words, they’re still using our money to get rich.
Since the government bailout that saved GS’s bacon, (and “about $85 billion worth of its bacon”) writes Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, “We now live in the United States of Goldman, Sachs.”
Sramek would rather focus on his long-term goal: getting rich. He’s already planning out his future in philanthropy; he told an interviewer he wants to focus on education, which would require him to amass a significant amount of wealth: “I would like to once be in a position where I can do something about it, and do it from a position of power,” he said, adding that wealth was necessary “to get the required leverage or to try and do things differently.”
Moving to quell the uproar over the return of big paydays on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs announced on Thursday that its top executives would forgo cash bonuses this year and that it would give shareholders a say in determining compensation.
Even worse, most Americans will be required to purchase private health insurance at high rates with bad coverage. How is this possibly a good deal for the millions of young people who organized and voted for change? It simply isn’t.
The head of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association lashed out at net neutrality supporters who say Internet non-discrimination is a First Amendment cause. The real issue, he says, is the First Amendment rights of ISPs.
What sort of jackass (I fumed) had concluded that the contents of American public laws were some kind of operational secret? But of course, once I got over my pique at this obnoxious excess of secrecy, I started thinking: Why, exactly were they worried about someone reading that? I had, perversely, just gained a bit of new information. Not the statutory definition—that was already sitting on my desk in yet another pile—but the fact that the investigative technique they’re taking pains to conceal (that’s what “b7e” means, it’s the code for the FOIA exemption they’re invoking) involved exploiting that part of the statute in some crucial way.
There’s a new study that’s making the rounds, noting that the average American consumes about 34 gigs worth of data/information each day. That number has been increasing at a pretty fast pace as well. This is, obviously, not just internet data. It includes TV, radio, mobile phones, newspapers, video games, etc. However, what struck me is that more and more of that is moving to the internet, and that seems like a trend that will continue. And, yet, we still hear stories of ISPs looking to put in place broadband caps that are as low as 5 gigs per month. Clearly, something has to give. Even Comcast’s relatively generous cap of 250 gigs per month could run into trouble at some point as well.
In a 71-page report (PDF) entitled, rather directly, “FCC Needs to Improve Oversight of Wireless Phone Service,” the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) spanks the FCC for its sloppy handling of customer complaints.
The result of the collaboration between Clinton and the musicians holding him up is still “one of the most frequently sampled compositions of the Funk era,” and the “Bow Wow refrain” is often licensed by itself. But in this case, it wasn’t licensed at all. Universal Music Group, which owns the (likely much less lucrative) rights to the work of Public Announcement, argued that the allegedly infringing elements — “the use of the word ‘dog’ in a low voice as ‘musical punctuation,’ the rhythmic panting, and the Bow Wow refrain” — were not copyrightable, but the jury disagreed. (Those of you who are always wanting to get out of jury duty should be reminded that there are cases out there like this one.) It awarded $89,000 in damages for the unlicensed woofing.
A worldwide coalition of Non-Governmental Organizations, consumers unions and online service providers associations publish an open letter to the European institutions regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) currently under negotiation. They call on the European Parliament and the EU negotiators to oppose any provision into the multilateral agreement that would undermine the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens in Europe and across the world.
By December 17th, 2009, European negotiators will submit their position regarding the proposal put forward by the U.S Trade Representative for the Internet chapter of the ACTA. It is now time for the European Union to firmly oppose the dangerous measures secretly being negotiated. They cover not only “three strikes” schemes, but also include Internet service providers liability that would result in Internet filtering, and dispositions undermining interoperability and usability of digitial music and films.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is generating growing concern (witness today’s release of a protest letter from civil liberties groups from around the world) as many people learn about the secret copyright treaty for the first time. I’ve posted video talks and interviews on ACTA, but some have asked for a visual timeline to trace its emergence. Posted below is an ACTA Timeline created using Dipity. I’ll update as events warrant.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, especially if you happen to live within a few miles of Alek Komarnitsky’s house and the massive Christmas display he puts on every year in the name of charity. While most neighborhoods have a Christmas overachiever, Komarnitsky is in a special league of his own: His display can be remote-controlled and is powered by open source.
You may have heard a lot of anti-Microsoft jokes before since you can read them everywhere. However, it’s pretty rare to find anti-UNIX/Linux jokes. So I would like to share with you some pretty old but still funny anti-UNIX one-liners. Enjoy!
Is Linux just too quiet to attract mainstream users who are used to the siren songs of bells and whistles? Or do Linux bells and whistles run on a frequency Windows users can’t hear? “One person’s ‘bells and whistles’ are another person’s ‘this is too different for me’ impediment,” suggested Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. For example, “the desktop cube just blows [Windows users] away.”
This morning the first DRM pull request went in for the Linux 2.6.33 kernel that brings many nice graphics changes for Intel, ATI/AMD, and VMware users. Anything for NVIDIA hardware through Novueau was not mentioned as there is no readied support, but as we stated in our article this morning, its unlikely to see Nouveau’s DRM in the mainline kernel before the Linux 2.6.34 kernel. This is even though Fedora has been shipping Nouveau support for a few releases now and even Canonical is pulling in Nouveau KMS support for Ubuntu 10.04.
Following a feature-packed DRM pull request this morning for the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, Linus Torvalds became frustrated that the Nouveau driver for supporting NVIDIA hardware was still not to be found in this most recent pull request. Linus wants Nouveau in the mainline kernel especially as Red Hat has already been shipping this free software driver in Fedora for two releases.
Unigine has the Linux version of Heaven completed (we have seen it and even benchmarked it, and it’s amazingly great), but they are waiting on AMD to publicly release a Catalyst Linux driver that can even handle this demo as right now the Linux drivers out there simply don’t work because this demo is absolutely gruesome on the driver stack and hardware.
I have been using GNU/Linux for two years so far, and I’m using Ubuntu (GNOME). Over this period, I have tested a lot of download manager applications; unfortunately, I can’t find the one that suits best for me, because what I have in mind was a program which more or less is simple, lightweight and practical. I don’t want a download manager which is crowded with features nor a primitive one and certainly I don’t want one that works via a command line/terminal!
Incremental releases for large projects are often grab bags of unrelated features. However, KDE SC 4.4 beta 1 (aka KDE 4.3.80) is a welcome exception to the rule.
True, the release includes new applications and improvements to existing applications on the KDE desktop. But it also features improvements to general desktop functionality and the evolution of several technologies and directions introduced earlier in the KDE 4 series of releases. In other words, it is ambitious, with far more innovations than than the average incremental release.
Red Hat has long been the poster child of Linux and open source, the distribution that has been there since the beginning, grew up right, got all the luck, usually made the right decisions, and fetched up on top of the pile.
Staying at the top of the pile may present a different set of problems. Free and open source software has made its presence felt, the operating system has become increasingly commoditised, free software is rising up the stack, cloud computing and virtualisation are transforming the market for operating systems, and open source (in some form or another) is being adopted or proclaimed by many different companies.
So, as I promised yesterday, here’s a quick wrap-up of my FUDCon experience. This was my first FUDCon, and it was definitely a lot of fun. My photos of the event are up here.
You have probably heard of Nepomuk, the semantic desktop technology we’ve been shipping for a while as part of the KDE Platform. However, so far, you may not have noticed it really doing very much useful for you. So what is this thing called Nepomuk, what can it do for us now and what will it bring us in the future? We asked two of the driving forces behind Nepomuk, Stéphane Laurière and Sebastian Trüg of Mandriva, to tell us about the real Nepomuk features that are already available in KDE software and those that have been introduced with Mandriva Linux 2010.
This tutorial shows how to set up a Mandriva 2010.0 Free (x86_64) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig 2 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box). This tutorial is written for the 64-bit version of Mandriva 2010.0.
The recommended download is called “One”, a 32bit only Live CD available in many languages with either the KDE or GNOME desktop environment. This edition includes closed source software such as proprietary kernel drivers and Adobe Flash.
Taking this version one step further is the “PowerPack”, which is not available free of charge. This edition includes even more proprietary software, as well as providing commercial support. The website lists the following software:
Flash
Fluendo DVD Reader
Fluendo Codecs
Acrobat Reader
Skype
Opera
Arkeia
VMWare
At the heart of every serious software development project is the use of some kind of version control code repository. For Ubuntu Linux, that version control system is its own Bazaar (bzr) system, which make it easier for the project to encourage and manage developer participation.
Lucid may not be getting a new GTK theme but it will still be getting an entirely new look.
Ubuntu’s Ayatana team (most famed for creating those awesome ‘new’ notification balloons that came in Jaunty) are currently testing a super-duper enhanced version of GTK+ that adds RGBA support (think Windows Aero) and client side window decoration.
Acer plans to launch as many as six new smartphones with Google’s Android mobile operating system in the first half of next year, a company executive said Thursday.
Set aside the particulars of the Crunchpad drama for a moment and talk to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. Software is already free. Chipmakers such as Intel have teams of hundreds of engineers building sophisticated software for consumer electronics around the Linux operating system, Zemlin says. Hardware, meanwhile, is only getting cheaper. The materials bill for a decent laptop is now as little as $150, he explains.
Open-source code is more prone to severe flaws than commercial software, but bugs get fixed more quickly, according to revealing new research from application security firm Veracode.
Now I have read that this company is trying to change its Open Source image (sigh) again. They are doing it by copying the image from another large company. This fruity company directly gained its current, dare I say it, popular software offering from Open Source software. I intend to take so much salt with this latest venture that I can feel my arteries harden just thinking about it.
As indicated in the previous posts, we have started to redesign a few really basic interactions in OpenOffice.org Impress in order to reduce the overall complexity of the UI. Currently, we focus on navigation through slides in various contexts, the visual appearance of different slide selection states and the handling of slide layouts. Today, I want to share some thoughts about a different way how to assign slide layouts.
I begin this tutorial a few weeks ago with Part I and received some very nice comments correcting my (fortunately) minor errors. This isn’t a tutorial about how to program in a specific language or even really about how to program. I wanted to show the common structure of interpreted programming languages in the hopes of revealing some common threads, rather than focusing on the ins and outs of one language. I’ve heard it said that if you learn one langauge, it makes learning the next one easier. My problem is I get lost in the nuances of the language in question and lose track of the basic structure of programming. I’ve created this tutorial series to try and correct that. This tutorial is for my education as much as anyone else’s so I welcome comments but, as I said before, be polite. This is about learning.
Web-based applications are at the core of Google’s strategy. As a result, it’s not surprising that Google has been embarking on a strategy to help both itself and the wider developer community build better Web applications.
Key to Google’s Web application development effort is its Google Web Tools (GWT) applications, which became open source in 2006. This week, Google debuted GWT 2.0, which provides new developer workflow improvements as well performance enhancements.
Sun appears to have timed the release of three updated versions of its Java enterprise software products to coincide with a closed-door hearing in Europe about Oracle’s planned takeover. Could be the company wants to send regulators a message that it’s still viable and still innovating. It’s also quite likely that Sun is seeking to reassure customers, who are no doubt becoming restless.
Is it possible to cram a whole Linux server into something the size of a plug? Apparently it is – Marvell has combined gigabit Ethernet, flash storage and an ARM CPU with a full install of Ubuntu to produce the tiniest Linux server we’ve seen for some time. Can you resist the power of your geek hardware lust? If not, don’t read on…
For a technology that’s all about being fast, 802.11n Wi-Fi sure took its sweet time to become a standard.
In fact, until September 2009, it wasn’t, officially, even a standard. But that didn’t stop vendors from implementing it for several years beforehand, causing confusion and upset when networking gear that used draft standards from different suppliers wouldn’t always work at the fastest possible speed when connected.
The only clue I find to where the world’s leading climate sceptics are meeting in Copenhagen is a large round sticker on a pavement outside a house down a side street. It depicts a happy-looking Eskimo standing on a clearly melting ice flow with a cheerful sun beaming down on him and his ice-cream under the words “Hurra global warming”.
Out of the Frying Pan, Dec. 10, 2009. We rolled our van out of the ferry boat at 8am and rumbled into the center of Copenhagen. Giant banners and billboards are everywhere trumpeting various points about global warming, such as “It’s Too Late to Limit CO2 – We Need Other Solutions.” Picking up a newspaper, I could see there is buzz about the “alternate” conference going on called “Klimaforum09.” Naomi Klein had just given a speech there– the first person I spoke to randomly on the street surprised me by volunteering that she was disappointed she had missed Naomi’s speech. (Here is a link to her blog from The Nation on President Obama and COP15 and on how more money is being spent on war than fighting climate change.)
The most vocal organizations around the University of East Anglia hacked email story (aka. “climategate”) have been involved in a decade-plus campaign to delay action on climate change.
The goal of this campaign, which began around the time of the first Kyoto Protocol negotiations, was to assemble a group of like-minded “free-market” think tanks and pseudo-experts that would bring into question the scientific realities of climate change, create doubt with the public and politicians and effectively delay the introduction of clean energy policy in the United States.
It’s no coincidence that the groups pushing this story the hardest have a long history of taking money from oil and coal companies to attack the conclusions made by climate scientists.
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan had called upon Congress to take a different course. “Don’t preempt state Attorneys General, there needs to be state level enforcement of state and federal consumer laws, particularly when the Feds fail to act,” said Madigan in a news conference.
Last week, Ben Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve, came before the Senate Banking Committee for a confirmation hearing. Bernanke was nominated by President Bush for a four year term beginning in 2006. President Obama chose to continue with Bernanke and re-nominated him this year for another four year term.
While a contrite Bernanke admitted to the committee that the Fed “should have done more” to prevent the 2009 financial meltdown and protect consumers, for some Senators, this was too little too late.
Following their $700 billion bailout, Wall Street is now enjoying a resurgence in profits and bonuses, but they are refusing to lend to small businesses. I am with Larry Summers, and 200 other economists. It’s time to put a damper on the casino and put Wall Street to work for Main Street.
Federal records show that a contract worth $5.97 million, part of the $787 billion stimulus Congress passed this year, helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global public-relations and communications firm headed by Penn.
Health insurance industry trade groups opposed to President Obama’s health care reform bill are paying Facebook users fake money — called “virtual currency” — to send letters to Congress protesting the bill.
Here’s how it’s happening:
Facebook users play a social game, like “FarmVille” or “Friends For Sale.” They get addicted to it. Eager to accelerate their progress inside the game, the gamers buy “virtual goods” such as a machine gun for “Mafia Wars.” But these gamers don’t buy these virtual goods with real money. They use virtual currency.
David Koch, an oil and gas billionaire who is the ninth-richest person in the United States, according to Forbes magazine, was simultaneously responsible for a $100 million refurbished opera house and a protest that featured signs comparing health reform to the Holocaust. The two sides to Koch’s activism aren’t unique – they harken to a long tradition of conservative tycoons who were great philanthropists with one hand and ruthless powerbrokers with the other. But Koch’s hidden presence in the health care debate illustrates the extent to which the Old Right is creating – and then hiding behind – the grassroots fervor of middle-class opponents of health reform.
Since President Bill Clinton’s health reform plan died 15 years ago, the health insurance industry has come to be dominated by a handful of insurance companies that answer to Wall Street investors, and they have changed that basic math. Today, insurers only pay about 81 cents of each premium dollar on actual medical care. The rest is consumed by rising profits, grotesque executive salaries, huge administrative expenses, the cost of weeding out people with pre-existing conditions and claims review designed to wear out patients with denials and disapprovals of the care they need the most.
The health care debate has so many moving parts that it’s hard for anybody to keep them straight. So we decided to put together an overview of where we’re at—both good and bad—and what we’re all going to need to keep fighting for.
Neither of these bills is close to perfect. But we’re entering the home stretch where we risk losing a lot of what’s good in these bills and where we have a huge opportunity to strengthen the parts that need work.
Here’s where we are….
The Pirate Party’s Christian Engstrom is already making waves in the European Parliament. After his hard work on the Telecoms Package amendment he’s now working to set up an Internet Bill of Rights, attempting to codify some of the core beliefs of the Pirate Party. To achieve this he wants your help.
More important, perhaps, Gertner wrote that Tenenbaum’s team didn’t provide evidence or precedents to back up its position. In other words, it was all show, no dough. Hence her decision to grant the labels’ motion to throw out Tenenbaum’s defense before the case reached the jury.
There are those fans who were really excited about “New Moon,” buying Robert Pattinson-emblazoned pillows and making elaborate scrapbooks for the stars, and then there are those fans who may have gone overboard in their excitement. Samantha Tumpach was busted in a Chicago movie theater for allegedly taping three minutes of the “Twilight” saga sequel inside a theater in late November and could face up to a three-year prison term for her actions; Tumpach has said she was essentially filming a home movie had no intention of distributing the footage.
Now Chris Weitz, the director of “New Moon,” has come to Tumpach’s defense, saying that the prospect of such a harsh sentence is unjust.
“Needless to say, the case seems to me terribly unfair and I would like to do what I can to address this,” Weitz wrote in an e-mail to the Chicago Sun-Times.
About a year ago, we wrote about the massive success of musician Corey Smith, creating not just a sustainable living as an independent musician, but a multi-million dollar operation — built on a combination of closely connecting with his fans, using free music, touring relentlessly, working hard to gain new fans (including reserving some cheap tickets to shows) and (the important part) really great music. What caught everyone’s attention was that this totally independent musician, with no record label, no radio play, no massive publicity campaign had grossed about $4 million in 2008. Now, of course, tour grosses (which made up the lion’s share of that amount) are a bit misleading, as the venues take a cut of that, and there are certainly other expenses to be paid, but as a starting number it’s still really impressive. Luckily, Corey is now sharing some more details about his path to success.
Just copying something doesn’t give anyone a reason to buy from you — and depending on the product, copying them will take time, combined with the additional time to even let people know you’ve got a product in the market. By that time, the real innovator may be much further ahead.
I believe Free Software in general including the Linux ecosystem, cannot realistically be treated as a New OS, but a whole new market of operating systems and applications which operates on somewhat different, more consumer friendly, assumptions and expectations. The markets function best when there is competition and when their actors act fully in their own self interest without coercing the others to act on it. Thus the insistence on integration and unification is harmful. Competition is a form of cooperation as well. The difference is that people cooperate on their own terms and for their own individual benefit rather than for a share benefit over which there may or may not be agreement. I’d say competition is actually the best form of cooperation there is.
The holiday season is approaching fast, but there is still time to buy a nice gift for the Linux geek in your life. Not sure what to give? Here are a couple of gift ideas.
Becta and the OGC must be shaking their heads, just how can schools get value for money from ICT procurement? Ironically, it seems, being (potentially) ripped off was seen as the safer option to trying something inherently less risky namely free, open source solutions.
Why less risky? Because the product does not ‘belong’ to the seller of the services. You can shop around and replace your ICT service providers if they fail to satisfy whilst keeping your systems and software.
Once schools and LAs were prepared to suffer the lock in of proprietary service and software providers in return for the latest shiny things, few questioned the superior wisdom and efficiency of the private sector. They might do soon.
Lane — who blogs for Linux Journal on open source issues — told the ARRL that the same day he posted “Open Source Ham — Is That Like Free Range Chicken?”on his blog, he was chatting on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) with Linux Journal publisher Carlie Fairchild: “She said they were thinking of doing an Amateur Radio-focused issue — what did I think? I said something to the effect of ‘Did you see my post this morning?’”
This week: Lenovo ThinkPad X301 review, Black Screen of Death, Firefox dethrones IE in Germany, Palm target of GPL-infringement suit, lots of Google news and more…
In this episode: The Linux version of Google’s Chrome browser is now officially in beta and Linux netbook share appears to be growing. Nokia releases Qt 4.6 and we ask whether Linux documentation could be improved and is Google’s Chrome operating system a good thing?
I took a trip down memory lane today, thinking back on all the changes that have happened this year and I’d like to review them with you. 2010 started off with a bang with every company waiting to release news that had brewed for the fourth quarter 2009. Cloud-computing still reigns as the big winner for newsworthy fodder for industry bloggers, insiders and sideliners. Larry King announced back in June that the recession had ended as quickly as it arrived and that hiring and growth were on the way. Mergers and rumors of mergers filled the air at every technical conference and trade show throughout the year, including the two big announcements at VMworld in San Francisco.
Unlike phishing, malware is a Windows-only thing. What to do about it? How can you defend yourself, your computer, and your accounts? Opinions vary, but more than a few techies suggest not doing any online banking from a Windows computer.
I first argued this is August (Consider Linux for Secure Online Banking) and then again in October (Windows and Online Banking: A Dangerous Mix). Brian Krebs (author of the Security Fix articles) came to the same conclusion in October:
“An investigative series I’ve been writing about organized cyber crime gangs stealing millions of dollars from small to mid-sized businesses has generated more than a few responses from business owners who were concerned about how best to protect themselves from this type of fraud. The simplest, most cost-effective answer I know of? Don’t use Microsoft Windows when accessing your bank account online. ”
D-Link unveiled its soon-to-be-released “Boxee Box” at Boxee’s preview of Boxee Beta in New York last night. Few details have been disclosed other than that it runs Boxee on Linux,
D-Link is readying a Linux-based IP set-top box (STB) based on the open source Boxee home entertainment stack. The singularly styled “Boxee Box DM-380″ incorporates WiFi, Ethernet, USB, and HDMI out, as well as analog and digital audio outputs, says the company.
Cisco is a top vendor in the networking arena and are fairly ubiquitous in enterprise environments. With the acquisition of Linksys, Cisco was able to enter into the consumer market to provide routing and switching for home networks with a proven brand.
“As the popularity of Linux-based computing clustering grows, so does the need for simplified and highly performing file management software that is able to function across many hardware platforms,” said VP of Deep Computing at IBM, David Turek.
ParAccel – one of the many upstarts that is chasing the data warehousing and analytics dollars these days – has tweaked its ParAccel Analytic Database 2.0 software and its underlying homegrown Linux operating system so that the x64 nodes on which it runs can be equipped with flash-based drives. And that, the company says, will boost query performance.
As we reported earlier, a Twitter user Hexxeh has brewed a version of Chromium that boots a Windows, Linux or Mac computer from a USB drive. The latest build requires an empty USB flash drive (installing Chromium will wipe it) with a capacity of as little as 1GB.
VMware is preparing to propose that its “vmwgfx” DRM kernel driver be pushed into the mainline DRM tree and in turn will then be pulled into the mainline Linux kernel — as soon as the Linux 2.6.33 kernel. VMware’s Jakob Bornecrantz (formerly of Tungsten Graphics) is calling for comments on the two patches that introduce the vmwgfx C header file and then the Direct Rendering Manager code itself. This code will initially be put into the kernel’s staging tree and then in a release or two should be found within the main DRM directory.
While NVIDIA and ATI/AMD have OpenCL support within their binary drivers, the open-source Mesa / Gallium3D stack is still lacking open-source support for the Open Computing Language on Linux. But the discussion surrounding OpenCL in Gallium3D has been renewed on the mailing list today.
David Airlie has just called upon Linus Torvalds to pull in the latest DRM patches for inclusion into the Linux 2.6.33 kernel. The Direct Rendering Manager improvements in this next kernel release will be particularly interesting and are perhaps as significant as earlier kernels that had introduced kernel mode-setting support for Intel and ATI/AMD hardware along with in-kernel memory management. The changes that the Linux 2.6.33 kernel will bring are aplenty and will impact almost all of those using an open-source graphics driver stack.
It took decades of writing, but I’ve come to a realisation: word processors do way more than what I need. Programs like Microsoft Office and Open Office are intended for laying out content visually to be printed on sheets of paper. You can use them to format text in your desired font, to add tables and even graphics.
[...]
For my day to day writing needs I use PyRoom. This isn’t to say I’m not impressed with WriteRoom’s feature set – it’s just that PyRoom is GTK based and I’m a Gnome user. The fact that there’s a solid option for both major desktops is great, though–that sort of choice is no small part of why I’m a Linux user in the first place.
I like TreeLine for having a polished interface and a structured feel to it, but neither it nor beeswax (or Agenda, to be honest) is likely to dethrone hnb for me any time soon. TreeLine is clever and attractive, but seems unnecessarily mouse-driven, or overcomplicated for things like checklists. And like I said, beeswax doesn’t really feel like it’s finished.
So hnb by comparison is just too fast and easy. Right arrow makes a new branch. Start typing and a new item is added. You can embed checklists in standard hierarchies. Copy and paste throughout the tree. Export into several different formats, including HTML.
I’ve long considered Handbrake on of the best DVD ripping applications available, and after a year long wait, it’s finally been upgraded to version 0.9.4, complete with over a whopping thousand changes.
After many months of development, and massive amounts of input from the public, we are proud to present you with the new release of Blood Frontier, v0.85 (Beta 2). This new version totally redefines and improves the game in many ways, creating a whole new style that makes it almost nothing like its predecessor.
Following shortly after the release of KDE SC 4.3.4 for Linux and similar platforms, the KDE Windows team is pleased to announce the release of the latest KDE software for the Windows platform.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that, in an effort to openly collaborate with partners to drive the future of virtualization, it has open sourced its SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environment) hosted virtual desktop protocol.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it will present the second online Open Source Cloud Computing Forum on Wednesday, February 10, 2010, hosted by Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens.
The time has come to bite the bullet and move Fedora’s package source control on from CVS. CVS has done is well, and although it is a decaying source control, it handled our needs rather well for many years. However nothing is a constant, and over time more and more cracks have shown up in our source control. The time to move on is now, and I feel pretty confident in the plan we are exploring.
Overall it was a great event. I almost felt like I was at what I’ve imagined a Red Hat Summit to be. The service they used worked well and was easy to navigate and explore around… like you’d do at a real conference. If you missed it (or not), I recommend you login to the system and “replay” any content you are interested in.
We’ve already taken the time to do an Ubuntu 9.10 review as well as Kubuntu and Xubuntu but these were all the desktop editions. Today, we decided to try something different and take a look at Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition and see how easy it would be to setup and configure a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) server.
Linux Mint 8 OS is a great OS for those who want to enjoy near flawless out-of-box experience. It has all the necessary apps built from DVD burning app to Internet browser to office suit, it has it all.
Devon IT announced a thin-client notebook computer based on Dell’s Latitude E5400. The SafeBook E5400X includes a 2.2GHz Intel Celeron CPU, a 14.1-inch display, 1GB of RAM, and will “soon” be offered with its Linux-based DeTOS operating system, says the company.
This is kind of exciting — in a geeky sort of way. The open source Pandora handheld is just about ready to launch judging by the latest demo videos posted on the project’s blog. I always knew the Pandora guys were basing the gaming device on Linux and using emulation software, but I had no idea that they were going to also provide a full desktop environment as well. You could say… it’s more of a pocketsize netbook now (about the size of a Nintendo DS). Expected MSRP is $330.
Verizon’s Motorola Droid is a brand-new phone today. Like many smartphones before it, the Droid has been rooted so that owners of the Android 2.0-based smartphone can install multitouch support (including pinch-to-zoom gestures), enhanced themes and other previously forbidden goodies.
I can say that Linux on netbook is gaining momentum right now contrary to what others believe. Just take a look at the growing number of Linux distributions that are optimized for netbooks so that you will know what I mean.
My third major consideration was System76, which also deals solely in Linux machines. Its netbook option, the Starling, can be configured with 2 gigabytes of memory, a 6-cell battery and a webcam for $359. Unfortunately, an SSD drive is not an option, which is a major disappointment. Nonetheless, the price is not bad for a Linux-oriented vendor that will likely offer better support to Ubuntu users than Dell.
The idea behind ChromeOS is really that consumers should have a full laptop or desktop as their main computers and purchase a ChromeOS device as a companion to use when on the road. This is close to the idea of the original EEPC 701. The problem is that in places where mobile bandwidth is still selling at premium prices and access points are rare ChromeOS devices may end up being either very expensive to keep connected or very useless as soon as the user’s leave the range of their home’s wifi network. Add to that the fact that a lot of online video content (like Hulu) is only available in the US and the usefulness of the machine as a source of multimedia is very compromised when you consider the international market. ChromeOS is a good idea in places where you have the network infrastructure and online media content to support the model. Unfortunately this is not the case in most countries beside the US.
My first impression was how incredibly easy it is to obtain and install on your memory stick. Fedora has released a flash installation tool that handles downloading and imaging the flash drive on Windows systems. (There are installation instructions for other operating systems as well.) Not only is this tool available for use to install Sugar on a Stick, but you can also test drive other Fedora Linux distributions. The tool also allows you to partition off some space to save your documents to when in the Linux environment. Keep in mind that when you run this utility you will wipe anything on the memory stick.
Sugar Labs has revised the LiveUSB version of its education-focused “Sugar” Linux distribution. “Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry” offers simpler navigation, improved wireless networking, streamlined activities updating, better Gnash support for Adobe Flash, and activities designed for reading electronic books (ebooks), says the non-profit organization.
It is a difficult problem but I will not give up. I will continue to pass out copies of The OpenDisc to Windows users without ever knowing if people will throw the disks in the trash. There is a possibility that people think I am trying to give them a virus because I do not use professionally pressed media. That is under consideration although it would be time consuming and expensive. I am als considering switching to DVD-RW as well, that way the new owner of the OpenDisc may choose to keep it since it has a little more value. Ideally, I would like to find a bunch of other folks who will also help distribute the OpenDisc upon professionaly pressed media.
Thunderbird 3.0 comes packed with fantastic new features, including a new tabbed interface à la Firefox and other web browsers, a beautiful and powerful new search and filtering tool that lets you pinpoint any email, and a totally streamlined email setup tool that’ll get your Gmail or other accounts up and running with Thunderbird in a jiffy.
One feature that isn’t included is the calendaring add-on, Lightning. Originally, Mozilla had planned to bake the extension into the program, but decided back in February 2009 to change course and leave it up to users to download. Although Thunderbird natively comes with Microsoft Exchange support, there’s no calendar and therefore no meeting support in the default Thunderbird installation. Along with Lightning, there’s an essential Google Calendar add-on for Lightning that gives Google users calendar support in Lightning.
Mozilla has announced the availability of version 3 of its popular open source Thunderbird email and news client for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The long-awaited major release is based on the Gecko 1.9.1.5 platform, including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, web compatibility, and code simplification and sustainability.
Mozilla Messaging has announced the official release of Thunderbird 3. Ars takes a hands-on look at the improvements in the new version—including tabbed messaging and enhanced search—and finds a lot to be excited about.
Analyst report points to growing interest in open source alternatives to traditional business intelligence tools
The impact of the financial crisis has been to force companies to cut costs while also increasing competition for fewer customers. Against this backdrop, analyst Gartner has reported that interest in open source alternatives to traditional proprietary business intelligence (BI) tools has been steadily growing.
Richard Stallman’s free software organization seeks to assemble a loose and open group of supporters on a voluntary basis to distribute information on the Web and promote free software.
Focus of the new version are the extensions of the reporting and analysis functions in the CRM module and improved calendar functions. Moreover, many users are likely to be positively assessed, that Tine 2.0 now can operate as an OpenId Provider. In total the Changelog lists over 150 new features and improvements.
With this notice, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) within the Executive Office of the President, requests input from the community regarding enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from research funded by Federal science and technology agencies. This RFI will be active from December 10, 2009 to January 7, 2010. Respondents are invited to respond online via the Public Access Policy Forum at http://www.whitehouse.gov/open, or may submit responses via electronic mail. Responses will be re-posted on the online forum. Instructions and a timetable for daily blog topics during this period are described at http://www.whitehouse.gov/open.
Tasktop Technologies and ThoughtWorks Studios have announced availability of the ThoughtWorks Studios Mingle Mylyn Connector. The connector integrates development activities performed in the Eclipse IDE with project management in Mingle 3.0.
All this wouldn’t be possible without that little scripting language created some fifteen years ago to spike up web pages. Yes, that’s Javascript. Some people hate it, some people love it, but the world definitely needs it. Google, with Google Chrome OS, is betting a lot on it. Visual Environments like Lily are starting to pop up — and you can bet there will be more and more.
We live in an online world, and Javascript is the new world’s engine. It’s open, it’s free, it’s powerful, and it’s managed to reshape the computer world.
Whoever bet on it was definitely in the right place at the right time. Would you have ever imagined?
I have a feature on asset forfeiture coming in the February 2010 issue of Reason. Forfeiture critics I interviewed for the article say there’s good reason to think laws that send forfeiture proceeds back to prosecutor offices may be unconstitutional. Whereas police only make the initial seizure, prosecutors actually make the policy decision of determining which cases to take. Dicta in prior U.S. Supreme Court cases indicates the Court may find due process problems with those same offices then materially benefiting from those decisions.
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Taking property from poor people without due process of law in order to enrich local police departments. Seems like the sort of thing Barack Obama might have fought to change in his days as a community organizer.
THE WORLD’S FIRST museum gallery showcasing the technology of the Internet opened recently at The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) and the interactive exhibit tells the story of the pioneering British boffins without whom the World Wide Web could have been a very different place.
The gallery was opened on December 4th in the presence of the world’s press and as lively a gang of OAPs as your ever likely to encounter, many of whom were former employees of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), one of the UK’s leading science and research centres, and the birthplace of packet switching, the technology that underpins just about every element of the Internet.
Attempts have been made to break into the offices of one of Canada’s leading climate scientists, it was revealed yesterday. The victim was Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and a key contributor to the work of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In one incident, an old computer was stolen and papers were disturbed.
Gordon Brown raises the bar for climate change negotiations, urging world leaders to give their promises at Copenhagen the full weight of international law within six months.
To avert potential and catastrophic effects on both humans and ecosystems, we must prevent global temperatures from rising by more than 2º Celsius above pre-industrial levels.(1)
The IPCC indicates that temperatures have increased 0.74ºC in the last 100 years. (2) Therefore, we must not allow more than another 1.26ºC rise in the average global temperature.
This is the opinion piece that I promised on Goldman Sachs research and product sales. I want it to be clear that I have absolutely nothing against Goldman Sachs, and if I worked there I would want $19 billion of bonuses too, despite the fact that I just got bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of over $50 billion and still have middle class taxpayer funded government subsidies intact. The fact of the matter is that I don’t work for Goldman Sachs, and the reverence that they receive is illogical and borderline sickening, not to mention having nothing to do with the reality of the situation.
The National Aviation and Transport Services (NATS) is threatening legal action against Wikileaks because the website has published a recording of the crashing of BA flight 038, call sign Speedbird 38, which came down just short of the Heathrow runway in 2008.
davebarnes alerts us to a story of just such a situation involving an anonymous blogger in Oregon, who had heard about some “embarrassing” videos involving some local TV anchors. In looking for the videos, the blogger discovered the YouTube account in question had been closed, and sent out a Twitter message asking if anyone had seen the videos before the account was closed. In response, the blogger received a legal threat from the news director of the TV station demanding the removal of the Twitter message (which simply asked if anyone had seen the video and linked to a shuttered YouTube account).
His first impulse was to dismiss the ominous email as a prank, says a young Iranian-American named Koosha. It warned the 29-year-old engineering student that his relatives in Tehran would be harmed if he didn’t stop criticizing Iran on Facebook.
Two days later, his mom called. Security agents had arrested his father in his home in Tehran and threatened him by saying his son could no longer safely return to Iran.
“When they arrested my father, I realized the email was no joke,” said Koosha, who asked that his full name not be used.
Sega’s Aliens vs. Predator reboot is too gory for Australia’s ratings board, which has denied it classification, effectively blocking its release in the region.
Mini music label Blue Destiny Records has sued both Google and Microsoft for allegedly “facilitating and enabling” the illegal distribution of copyrighted songs.
Its being reported today that Microsoft and Google are both being sued by Blue Destiny Records over facilitating and enabling copyright material on their service. In my previous coverage of file sharing, I made the point that if TPB and other tracker sites were being faced with takedown notices, shouldn’t at the very least the same be applied to search engines and their respective results since there appear to be (in some cases) a relationship between some of the sites and search engines. (IMO)
From the rest of the article, it sounds like he wants a do over. He says that he wants to have a new trial where he’ll make a brand new argument: that Tenenbaum’s use was fair use because when he did the file sharing, there was no legal way to purchase that music digitally. As far as I can tell, that’s a misreading of what Gertner said might possibly work as a limited fair use claim, but there’s no indication that this is actually true in Tenenbaum’s case, and none of that addresses the basic procedural mistakes that Nesson made.
Tenenbaum was only the second person in the nation to be sued by the RIAA for file sharing and to take the case all the way to jury trial, making it a closely watched case. It’s not surprising he lost, given that he admitted to sharing 30 songs on Kazaa and Limewire. But a few commentators have decided that Tenenbaum’s lawyer, Harvard’s Charles Nesson, is to blame for failing to offer the nuanced “fair use” defense invited by the judge.
All in all, it really helped solidify the idea that the claim that “artists just need to be artists” and shouldn’t be concerned about business models or talking to fans is really just a line used by record labels to try to gain more control over artists, at their own expense. That doesn’t mean that artists shouldn’t try to find that “5th Beatle,” to help them when it becomes necessary, but that they should make sure that whoever that 5th Beatle is, he or she is really aligned with their thinking in where they want to go with their career.
We’ve seen the ridiculous pressure that lobbyists and diplomats have been putting on Canada to put in place significantly more draconian copyright law, without any evidence that it’s needed and even though it’s opposed by the vast majority of Canadian citizens.
Indie rockers Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte are pioneers in the new VideoSong movement, soon to hit a computer near you. The Stanford University graduates formed the band Pomplamoose in the summer of 2008, recording high-energy video covers of popular tunes like Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” (which was just nominated for a Song of the Year Grammy Award) and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” Filmed and recorded out of Conte’s childhood bedroom (his old blankets double as sound dampeners on the wall), the videos make use of clever editing and split screens to show off Dawn on vocals and Conte playing one of the two-dozen instruments lying around the room.
The best part about being a grownup is you can be your own favorite Linux/FOSS geek and buy yourself nice things. Here are some cool gift ideas for this holiday season. Or any time of year, because excellent adult toys know no seasons.
Now…for the important stuff. Lynn Bender of geekaustin.com has announced that he is beginning preparations for LInux Against Poverty 2010. I was pleasantly surprised to find that 25 people volunteered for the event within an hour of the announcement.
The use of computational grids, also known as ‘grid computing’, facilitates people’s lives by combining computer resources from various domains for a common task. An EU-funded team of researchers has developed and launched its second Linux-based grid operating system. Under the motto ‘Making Grid Computing Easier’, the XtreemOS project has released the second version of its Linux-based Grid operating system. XtreemOS, which is scheduled to end in May 2010, has received over EUR 14 million in financial support.
IBM on Tuesday debuted new hardware, software and services packages for enterprise customers that want to consolidate and virtualize Linux-based data loads on their System z mainframes.
If I said Google’s been getting a lot of press lately, that wouldn’t mean much. Google always seems to get a lot of press. It could be my imagination, of course, but it really feels like there’s been an uptick of chatter about Google these days. Motorola’s Droid was released, running Google’s Android OS. Google unleashed a new programming language called “Go” on the world. Then there was also the excitement over the Chrome OS that’s in development. I’m pretty sure it isn’t my imagination. In the midst of all this Robert Strohmeyer suggested that the future of Linux is Google. Hmmm…maybe, but I’m not so sure.
The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that for every new individual member who joins the organization between today and January 31, 2009, the Linux Foundation will give a free membership to a student for one year.
Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computer technology for the design of objects whether 2D or 3D, real or virtual. It is heavily utilized in many applications, including animation, automotive, shipbuilding, aerospace industries, industrial and architectural design, prosthetics, and many others. Because of its enormous economic importance, CAD has been a major driving force for research in computational geometry, computer graphics (both hardware and software), and discrete differential geometry.
Empathy is a IM/voice /video client that uses Gossips’s UI and Nokia’s MissionControl
The main goal of empathy is is libempathy and libempathy-gtk libraries which permits desktop integration. The widgets made in libempathy-gtk can be used to embed into any GNOME application
I haven’t used Rhythmbox for the longest time because Listen met my needs. Well, it was Listen, Sound Juicer and Ex Falso. I am not sure when was the last time I used Rhythmbox but I sure remember using something else to rip the files. There was Sound Juicer back then and that was it. I almost had no choice but to use it. So yeah, right now, Rhythmbox looks better.
In a session at the FUDcon Fedora Linux user and developer conference this week, contributors showed off some preliminary work for GNOME 3, the next major evolution of the GNOME platform.
For now I’m gonna stop this as there is plenty more but I guess ya’ll get the drift – plenty of cool KDE related blogs and people who care about what we do. I consider them part of our community. Not hardcore developers for sure, but part of KDE.
SliTaz has potential and the active community required to take things to the next step. SliTaz isn’t fancy but it provides a wonderful environment to log in and accomplish most tasks. SliTaz (Simle Light Incredible Temporary Autonomous Zone) is definitely the distro I will think about next time I need something for older hardware or a small rescue utility. SliTaz simply does not have what it takes, though, to be my new desktop Linux of choice. Ubuntu and Slackware will continue to own that title. Fortunately, none of what I see as necessary improvements impact the usability of the distro. Keeping track of SliTaz (http://forum.slitaz.org) is easy and I really look forward to hearing more as time goes on.
The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the December 2009 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Andrew Strick, Assistant Editor. The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
From spending a good week and a half with Fedora 12, I couldn’t find anything broken or out of place. The entire experience feels polished and well thought out. As I’ve mentioned before in past articles it seems to me that every even-numbered Fedora release is exceptional, and given the quality of this latest release, I’ll have to say that the tradition still holds strong.
If someone wants to switch from Fedora to something else, by all means, go for it… have fun… but for me I’m sticking with Fedora… on my personal desktops anyway. I’ll just be quiet about servers for now.
Lucid alpha 1 is due this Thursday, so the soft freeze is now in effect for main. Please be considerate with your uploads, and watch for any release blocker bugs.
Thoughts? How can we get people using Ubuntu and calling it Ubuntu (not Linux, because that brand is burnt/toxic) or if your dealing with some other distro how can we communicate that distro without marketing deals and educational packs for each of these companies?
Can a Windows server do that? A version upgrade, in place, without taking down the server, and with minimal offline time? I don’t think so. I never really appreciated the convenience of being able to continue to use a Linux system during an upgrade until I needed to upgrade a working server. It’s nice.
Data Ltd Incorporated (DLI) has announced an Ubuntu Linux-ready tablet PC designed to allow retailers to accept payments anywhere in a store. The DLI 8800 includes a 7-inch touchscreen display and magstripe reader, survives four-foot drops, and is available with a barcode scanner and RFID reader, the company says.
Ottawa, Canada-based Crank Software is shipping a Linux-ready, cross-platform GUI development suite for embedded R&D designers. The Eclipse-based Crank Storyboard Suite includes an embedded GUI design and prototyping application called Crank Storyboard Designer and a runtime component called Crank Storyboard Embedded Engine, says the company.
The Crank Storyboard Suite is built on C, but its Eclipse-based GUI programming environment enables UI designers “with no programming experience to drag-and-drop their UI designs” into a working storyboard, says Crank.
Open-source gaming fans will certainly be glad to hear that project lead Michael Weston and his team have uploaded the first pictures of a manufacturing test unit of the Pandora handheld built using mass production parts.
The Optima-made device doesn’t have the sliding keyboard that the N900 has and the former boasts to the the first device to run Maemo Linux outside of Nokia.
Sugar Labs, the organisation behind the One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop software, has released Sugar on a Stick version 2.0 – a.k.a. Blueberry. Sugar on a Stick is a version of the free open source Sugar Learning Platform that can be installed on a bootable USB flash drive to run on a conventional desktop, notebook or netbook computer. Blueberry, the latest release of the child-friendly operating system, is based on Fedora 12 and includes a number of new features.
Asked how Microsoft could claim that 93 percent of netbooks had its operating systems on them, Orr said the figures they were drawing on were only for the United States.
And he added that Microsoft did not include Dell in its figures as the company was selling directly to the public.
He said it was not possible to extrapolate figures for one region based on those of another as the usage patterns were totally different.
The Netbook World Summit (NWS) is coming to town. That is, if you live in Paris, France. December 8th 2009 will mark the 2nd year of the annual Netbook Summit. It’s an international conference designed to chat, engage and examine the emerging netbook market. This year, it’ll be at the swanky Parisian “Cyclone – Le Studio.” But is there really a need for a big event about a tiny computer? We sure think so.
For open source software, the most important thing is having good code. Every project needs more users and more developers, but without the proper technical foundation to absorb them, an open source project could easily hit a wall. (I actually wrote about this almost exactly two years ago under “The Limits of Open Source.”) A successful open source projects must be extensible, stable, and technically interesting — otherwise, who would want to work with your code base?
The wonderful wonderful manual about Ardour is done! It was produced in a Book Sprint / Workshop held at moddr_ in Rotterdam and lead by Derek Holzer. Its a super good manual and designed to help the newbies get to grips with Ardour.
On 1st December Olswang held their third and final Open Source Summit in London. For one reason or another I’d been unable to attend the 2007 and 2008 events and was glad to last week be finally able to make it along. Olswang are a law firm and so as you would expect the summit focused on open source legal matters. We were treated to a keynote from Bruce Perens and the overall quality of the event was very high. Numerous topics were covered over the course of the morning and a few notes follow.
Using open source software offers schools a unique opportunity to advance the information society that is fair and free, says Cenatic, Spain’s resource centre on open source and open standards.
Cenatic on Friday published a brochure ‘Ten reasons for using open source in education’, meant to show the country’s autonomous regions the benefits of open source software, and to ensure they consider the use of this type of software when schools modernise their programs.
The brochure will be sent to all of Spain’s secondary schools.
In favour of free and open source software are objective arguments, technical, social and cultural, explains Miguel Jaque, Cenatic’s director in a statement. “Open source is a model in itself, free, democratic, sustainable and technologically competitive. It helps to educate people to be free, independent and critical and shows them that they are able make their own technological choices.”
Open source caching startup Gear6 has entered the cloud fray by releasing an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of its memcached distribution server, dubbed Gear6 Web Cache Server.
Open source file system vendor Gluster released its Storage Platform, integrating a file system, an operating system and a management UI to create a cluster that can store petabytes of information and provide failover for virtual machines.
Barack Obama has chosen it for the White House web site. The London Stock Exchange replaced its previous trading system with it. And Germany has just awarded its most prestigious decoration to Matthias Ettrich for producing it.
So what makes people opt for open-source software?
For many, it’s the price. For others, it’s the freedom that open-source licences offer: the freedom to inspect the code, modify it and distribute it, and the freedom from potential vendor intransigence, incompetence and deliberate lock-in.
Looking forward to what the next 10 to 20 years hold in store, it’s clear to me that open source will be the default mechanism for software development.
Consider this, jQuery just beat out some serious competition. In the category for open source web applications the entrants, jQuery was competing with Firefox and WordPress.
Tell them the software is free. Many open source advocates are sure that the way to any boss’ heart is through her budget. While developers and other techies may love open source because of such things as its strong community or the philosophy of open source, they also acknowledge that the best way to appeal to the boss may be the bottom line. This attitude may be cynical — “They are always trying to save because they know that whatever is left in their account at the end of the period will go to their pockets,” wrote a guy named Al — but I dare say there’s plenty of justification in some firms. As a developer named Jason wrote, “I simply insisted that I will make and save them more money. And I did!… It didn’t take much to persuade my boss at all.”
Google has released Speed Tracer , an open source Chrome extension which visualises data gathered from within a browser to find performance bottlenecks. It can analyse and visualise JavaScript parsing times, layout and CSS recalculations, DOM event handling, resource loading, timers and XMLHttpRequests, displaying all the information in an easy to read timeline.
Mozilla Messaging, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla dedicated to developing products that encourage choice, innovation, and opportunity in messaging on the Internet, today announced Thunderbird 3, the latest version of its free and open source email application.
The outfit’s free alternative to Microsoft’s Outlook was made available as a download for Windows, Mac and Linux users on Tuesday. It comes less than a week after Mozilla pushed out a second release candidate version of the email client, in a move to fix a memory-hogging bug in Thunderbird 3.
Mozilla is wrapping up work on its first version of Firefox for mobile phones, an important step in bringing the second most popular PC browser to an area where a rival project holds more influence.
Mozilla is celebrating the fifth anniversary of Firefox 1.0, released 9 November, 2004. The project began as a fresh start intended to be leaner and faster.
I was researching the product suite offered by Talend at the request of a client. It seems to be a very rich and robust solution and is based on open source which makes it that much more interesting.
Separately, Zenoss recently announced Zenoss Enterprise 2.5, which the vendor says provides features to support scalability, reliability and security demands typical in enterprise IT environments. For instance, the software includes an agent-less distributed collector architecture and support for “distributed collector non-root installs” that the vendor says keeps customer environments compliant with corporate security policies while installing Zenoss Enterprise. This version also includes Amazon EC2 monitoring and VMware Ready support.
I think we also need to send Richard Stallman to meet with new Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, to discuss our government’s obligation to use free software. Stallman told me, himself, that he would like an opportunity to meet with Mr. Kundra. So, if any of you have any connections or contacts in that realm, let’s help RMS go to Washington.
We deserve a voice in Washington because we know there are those in the opposing camps with lobbyists and representatives to promote their side of the story. We need ours.
Barnes and Noble’s new nook ebook reader is now shipping to people. Mine[1] is due to turn up tomorrow, but the instruction manual is available for download already.
Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, and FreeSoft PLC, Hungary’s leading service provider in the software development sector, have won the Hungarian government’s open source software tender that has a four-year, $22.3 million budget.
I’ve been thinking the last few weeks about the evolution of the GPL violation. After ten years of being involved with GPL enforcement, it seems like a good time to think about how things have changed.
Roughly, the typical GPL violation tracks almost directly the adoption and spread of Free Software. When I started finding GPL violations, it was in a day when Big Iron Unix was still king (although it was only a few years away from collapse), and the GNU tools were just becoming state of the art. Indeed, as a sysadmin, I typically took a proprietary Unix system, and built a /usr/local/ filled with the GNU tools, because I hated POSIX tools that didn’t have all the GNU extensions.
This column mainly talks about open source software, for the simple reason that code dominates the world of openness. But open source hardware does exist, albeit in a very early, rudimentary form. Last Friday, I went along to NESTA for what was billed as an “Open Hardware Camp”. Fortunately, I didn’t see any tents, since that’s not really my kind of thing; what I did see was a huge amount of enthusiasm, and some interesting hints of things to come.
European researchers have created the architecture, hardware and software that will enable super-agile distributed corporations capable of reconfiguring themselves on the fly. It promises to make ‘made-to-order’ a reality for consumers.
People Power plans to distribute OSHAN (Open Source Home Area Network)—its free, open source wireless software —and SuRF (Sensor Ultra Radio Frequency)—its low-cost hardware and software development kit —to engineers early next year.
The open source software company debuted its new hardware device at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Monday. The new device, essentially a TV set-top box, will augment the current beta software that’s available so far only to invited testers. Boxee officials expect to have the first consumer TV boxes on sale for around US$200 during the second quarter of 2010.
On Tuesday morning, the Obama administration formally unveiled its Open Government directive, an effort aimed at weaving the philosophies of openness, transparency and participation into the DNA of the federal government and its agencies.
The White House on Tuesday instructed every federal agency to publish before the end of January at least three collections of “high value” government data on the Internet that never have been previously disclosed, an ambitious order to make the administration as transparent as President Barack Obama had promised it would be.
Reading maps is pretty easy, creating them is not. MapBox is an online open source toolkit and database of custom tile sets that let you build great-looking maps in Amazon’s cloud.
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Data is plugged into the maps via OpenStreetMap, a free and editable map of the world, or TIGER US Census Data. TIGER provides a tremendous amount of geographical data, including states, counties, subdivisions, districts, and more.
There have been various murmurings from the UK government about openness without much substance – except for the recent announcement that Ordnance Survey data would finally be released. Now we have the “Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government” plan that includes further moves in this area as part of a larger government transformation.
In the news coverage over the President’s Open Government Directive, two stories being overlooked are the release of an “Open Government Progress Report to the American People” and the announcement (in a press release) that every Cabinet department will launch new open-government projects, details of which will be made available tomorrow.
The Australian government is emerging as one of the leaders in the sphere of open government. It has now published a draft report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, entitled “Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0″ (hmm, not quite sure about that phraseology).
Will it be another 15 years before the remaining 10,000 universities and research institutions (or at least the top 1000) wield the mighty pen to unleash the even mightier keystrokes (as 68 Institutions and Departments, and 42 Funders have already done)? Or will we keep dithering about Gold OA, publishing reform, peer review reform, re-use rights, author addenda, preservation and the other 38 factors causing Zeno’s Paralysis) for another decade and a half?
The Prime Minister said that “there are many hundreds more datasets that can be opened up – not only from central government but also from local councils, the NHS, police and education authorities.”; and the Secretary of State for Communities said “we plan to give local people far better access to information held by local public organisations so they can challenge, compare or scrutinise their local services in order to drive up standards in their area.”
Now the Dundee-born actor Brian Cox is to take on a role rather closer to home, playing fellow Scot Michael Martin, the former Speaker of the House of Commons, in a forthcoming BBC satirical drama about the MPs’ expenses affair.
The pilot phase of P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University) ended in October, after having run for six weeks with seven courses and approximately 90 participants. Last month, the pilot phase volunteers, including the course organizers, met in person for the first time at the first ever P2PU Workshop in Berlin.
Roche, the manufacturer of Tamiflu, has made it impossible for scientists to assess how well the anti-flu drug stockpiled around the globe works by withholding the evidence the company has gained from trials, doctors alleged today.
From the Lancashire Evening Post we learn that police in Preston have been closing down popular pubs and clubs on account of them having ‘inadequate security camera coverage’.
A new generation of average speed cameras that will police 20mph zones in residential areas are to come into force in the New Year after they were approved by the government.
At a Downing Street news conference earlier this year, Gordon Brown found himself flummoxed by a question from a foreign journalist. He was asked what impression the rest of the world was getting of civil liberties in Britain now that tourists could be arrested for taking a photograph of a building. Mr Brown responded: “I don’t accept that is the true picture of Britain at all.” He then moved on, having dismissed the question as beneath contempt.
After I read Norman Baker’s book on The Strange Death of David Kelly I was convinced that he was probably killed – and not by his own hand. Baker’s own theory of who did it struck me as implausable and the book is uneven and frustrating and includes unworthy inuendoes. But the defining and scandalous fact is this: there was no coronor’s inquest into what was a highly significant death. We know that Blair took us to war and misled the country to justify his decision. We don’t know why and how Kelly, the UK’s foremost active weapons inspector in Iraq who hated Saddam and also hated the way the evidence to justify invasion was being tampered with, died.
Therefore as a result of MPs now finding themselves liable under the libel law I conclude that libel reform is set to become a top priority on the legislative agenda. You read it here first!
Schneier believes a step change is coming. We live in a unique time: cameras are everywhere AND we can see them; identity checks happen all the time AND we know they’re happening. However technology is a great distrupter of equilibriums and Moore’s law is a friend of intrusive tools. Soon face-recognition software will obviate the need to carry ID – when you walk into your workplace they’ll already know who you are and whether you’re supposed to be there.
The government’s plans to limit DNA retention from those arrested but not charged or convicted may not go far enough, according to the body that ensures human rights rulings are obeyed.
But have things now changed? Are people in general less happy now with identifying themselves and cooperating with the police? Is there any research on this?
This play was unsupervised by mum or dad and children were free to go on adventures far from home. Sadly this world of independent child’s play has today largely vanished. One of the important reasons for this decline is the inexorable rise of stranger danger and child abduction in modern Britain.
A study published Monday in The Journal Of Child Psychology And Psychiatry has concluded that an estimated 98 percent of children under the age of 10 are remorseless sociopaths with little regard for anything other than their own egocentric interests and pleasures.
Since 1990, greenhouse gas emissions from global shipping have increased by 85 percent, or approximately 50 percent if the base year of 1997 is adopted. Either way, greenhouse gas emissions from the maritime sector are rising steeply and are likely to go far, far higher.
I have no expertise in environmental science, and have never made an intensive study. I realise that what I write here is so simple as to be taught to a six year old. But there is a reason I write it.
I am however trained as a historian. That mankind has changed the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is indubitable from a moment’s consideration of the evidence.
Other scientists point out that we are still not clear on how many sulfates are being emitted, particularly in the rapidly industrializing developing world. It is clear that sulfates (particulates) provide a cooling effect, even while carbon dioxide levels keep growing. In another post, the scientists discuss why NASA results show higher global temperature than the Hadley results from the UK. One conclusion is that the Hadley data does not have as many Arctic data points. Warming in the Arctic is 2-3 times faster than the global average.
Conservationists have condemned Norway’s decision to increase the number of minke whales it can kill by 45 per cent, describing the move as unjustified and “political posturing”.
Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN’s negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol
Christmas is a waste of money because people who give presents overestimate how much recipients will enjoy their offerings, economist Joel Waldfogel said.
As the battle for health care reform rages on in the Senate, the powerful insurance consortium Blue Cross Blue Shield appears to have embraced some rather unorthodox methods for achieving its goals.
After months of fierce insurance industry opposition to the bill, Blue Cross is working secretively with conservative front group American Legislative Exchange Council to use the issue of states’ rights as a pretext to declaring health reform unconstitutional.
[...]
Former insurance executive Wendell Porter, who now favors reform, declared that private insurers have become “consumed by rising profits, grotesque executive salaries, huge administrative expenses, the cost of weeding out people with pre-existing conditions and claims review designed to wear out patients with denials and disapprovals of the care they need the most.”
Consumers will be at the core of the European Union’s ‘i2015′ action plan for the future of the digital economy, which the EU institutions are beginning to shape and plan to deliver by spring 2010.
The FTC said Tuesday that it has filed suit against three firms for allegedly making “hundreds of thousands or even millions” of robocalls to consumers in violation of the Do Not Call rule and other laws. The three groups targeted allegedly called consumers in a bid to sell “worthless credit-card interest-rate reduction programs for hefty up-front fees of as much as $1,495,” the agency said in a statement. The groups have been ordered to stop making the calls pending trial.
We were just talking about how SOCAN, the Canadian copyright collection society, was going after gymnastics clubs for kids using music in their practice routines. Now they’re getting some well-deserved attention for other antics. Michael Geist explains how SOCAN tried to keep its submission to the government copyright consultation secret. The organization apparently requested that its submission not be posted online, even though that was part of the consultation process. The government made it available anyways, but only by email upon request. Of course, it’s now available online elsewhere [PDF].
If you want to use Iger’s logic, you could just as easily claim that copyright laws allow them to charge monopoly rents on products, thus depriving many other industries of money and jobs. Thus — again, using Iger’s own logic — copyright contributes to unemployment and the harming of our economy. Not sure he really wants to go there.
All too often, the public policy world focuses on subtle legislative distinctions and on regulatory details. But once in a while, an issue comes along that strikes to the heart of the big principles. Such an issue erupted last week in the UK – an issue that incorporates two of the most important subjects on these pages: privacy and innovation.
MIT business professor Renee Richardson Gosline has conducted research suggesting that people who buy counterfeit bags are highly likely to purchase non-counterfeit versions of their treasures at a later date (even though the two bags can’t be distinguished from one another by casual observers). Gresham’s Law repealed for status goods?
1999: The Recording Industry Association of America sues Napster, the online, peer-to-peer file sharing service that’s allowing millions of computer users to score free, copyright music. The rules are about to change.
Peter Mandelson, in his infinite stupidity, goes for lunch on a yacht in Corfu with the entertainment industry lobby and the next thing we know he has declared war on every single person in the UK who uses the Internet – whether they be guilty of undesirable behaviour or not.
The Liberal Democrats are to oppose a clause in the Digital Economy Bill that would let the business secretary amend copyright law without parliamentary debate.
The Conservatives have accused Business Secretary Lord Mandelson of “empire building”, calling for his department to have a cabinet minister in the Commons.
I met with Detica last Friday, at their suggestion, to discuss what their system actually did (they’ve read some of my work on Phorm’s system, so meeting me was probably not entirely random).
I have noticed recently while playing around on YouTube and Google Video seeking exam question fodder that many fans of popular movies and TV shows who make mash-up videos of material from the shows post a notice at the beginning or end of their video saying “no copyright infringement intended”. It strikes me that this is actually a really good example of the disjoin between what the law says and what people think the law says. If copyright is basically a strict liability statute, then the intention to infringe is irrelevant. However, the everyday potential infringer doesn’t know this.
This isn’t to downplay the importance of music, or say that the quality of music doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. But the music is not the scarcity, and you don’t make money off of selling something that’s abundant. You use the abundance to figure out what other scarce goods it makes more valuable and you sell those. So, people can complain and shout all they want, but it doesn’t change the basic fact that until you recognize that selling music directly just isn’t a very good business model, you’re limiting your market tremendously.
Summary:
· Announced Distro: Ubuntu Christian Edition 6.0 Beta Brings Server Edition
· Announced Distro: Calculate Linux 10.0 Is Now Available for Download
· Announced Distro: SystemRescueCd 1.3.3 Has Linux Kernel 2.6.31.6
· Other News: VirtualBox 3.1.0, KDE 4.3.4 and Linux Kernel 2.6.32
· Video Clip of the Week: KDE SC 4.4 Preview
Dell has introduced a new low-cost ultrathin notebook, the Vostro V13. The system closely resembles Dell’s recently released flagship Adamo, except it’s lighter and a grand cheaper. The Vostro V13 is about 0.65in thin, weighs 3.5lbs and starts at $449 with Ubuntu 9.04 or $599 with Windows 7 Home Premium.
Here’s another thought. If you were to put a Linux-based operating system on the 800,000 or so workstations now in the NHS and some FOSS productivity software such as OpenOffice, which incidentally will interface with more professional database server systems than many proprietary packages, how much would that cost (other than the man-hours for the installs)? Zilch. Zippo. FA. What if the NHS were to donate 1 GBP for each machine to the Linux distribution developers of their chosen O/S, and 1 GBP towards each OpenOffice installation? That would cost £1,600,000 or less than a third of one percent of the existing discounted Microsoft licensing. That relatively small donation would also ensure some future development of features needed by NHS staff in their chosen software.
Adding Linux Expertise, Traction with Global Leading Clients
With over 15 years of software engineering expertise, Cubical delivers service excellence to global industry giants including Fujitsu Services, Nokia Siemens Networks, and EADS. The acquisition of Cubical adds significant expertise for Symbio in Linux and open source product development, leveraging operating environments like Red Hat, SuSE, Maemo, Wind River Linux and OpenEmbedded Linux. This agreement further extends Symbio’s deep domain expertise across mobile, Web, enterprise and embedded technologies, underscoring its commitment to delivering tomorrow’s technology today for world leading innovators.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the call for papers is now open for the sixth annual Red Hat Summit and JBoss World. These premier open source events will take place June 22-25, 2010 in Boston at the Seaport World Trade Center.
I understand the the Linux Ubuntu Cloud is quite nice and uses the tried and tested Eucalyptus technology. Also PostgresSQL seems to work as well as Oracle. It’s all free,open source software.
The Chrome web browser – which has been available on PCs since September 2008 – is now available for computers running Apple’s operating system, Mac OS X, and for the open-source platform, Linux.
To many, the Linux development community appears to be highly open, with access to developers only an email away. To much of the user community, though, the situation looks different, with core developers seemingly as distant and inaccessible as they would be if they were doing proprietary code. Bridging the gap between users and developers is one of the tasks the Linux Foundation has set for itself; the annual End User Summit is intended to help toward that goal.
xPUD 0.9.2 features a new App Store, allowing users to easily install additional applications. Vergrößern The xPUD developers have released version 0.9.2 their fast, lightweight, Ubuntu-based Linux distribution with a simple web-based user interface. The latest development release of this “Browser OS” includes several improvements and new features.
Announced on December 7th by Warren Woodford and the hard working MEPIS developers, the first Beta release of the upcoming SimplyMEPIS 8.5 operating system is now available for download, for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. SimplyMEPIS 8.5 is still based on the Debian Lenny Linux distribution, but it is now powered by the recently released Linux kernel 2.6.32 and it is built on top of the KDE 4.3.2 desktop environment.
Freescale Semiconductor announced two Linux-ready system-on-chips based on its PowerPC-driven QorIQ platform. The QorIQ P1012 and dual-core P1021 SoCs are similar to Freescale’s QorIQ P1013 and P1022 processors, respectively, but add the company’s microcode programming QUICC engine, which supports customers using legacy multi-protocol interfaces, says the company.
Renesas Technology has announced the availability of the Renesas Multimedia Solution Linux platform, supporting development of systems incorporating the SH772x series application processor for multimedia applications such as audio and video for portable and industrial devices.
The Timesys LinuxLink software development framework gives Au1250 and Au1300 processor users access to a competitively priced, intuitive environment for developing a wide range of Linux-based media and navigation products.
The Nokia N900 is Nokia’s first smartphone possessing a Desktop operating system. It is using the Maemo 5 Linux based operating system. With the Nokia N900’s powerful features such as ARM Cortex-A8 processor, up to 1GB of application memory and OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration, it allows you to deal with multiple application windows at the same while being able to get maximum utility from its touch screen, cellular features and QWERTY keyboard.
Éclair – also known as Android 2.0 – was released to application developers at the end of October, and this month updated to 2.0.1 thanks to the addition of some minor tweaks. But what should you – the user – expect from Google’s latest handset tech?
Google announced Google Googles yesterday, an application that uses the camera in your Android-powered phone to take a picture, conduct a visual search, then return results. Google admits that it’s very early, but this is extremely intriguing technology and it has the potential to take visual search to a whole new level by combining it with virtual reality to give you results when you have no information whatsoever.
Wind River isn’t listing prices for its version of Android; that will be volume-dependent, but the company has a history of selling embedded Linux so knows what devices manufacturers will pay for. Wind River will be offering their own widget pack and user-interface layers, along with optimisation for TI’s OMAP processors.
The T-Mobile myTouch 3G is the latest Android phone available on T-Mobile. It uses the popular open-source Android operating system, which now offers more than 10,000 applications.
The netbook promises convenience and capability in a small, lightweight, and generally inexpensive package, and the concept of a smartbook goes even further: a handy-dandy combination of smartphone and notebook. Alas, most netbook offerings come burdened with a full-blown Windows operating system, which runs slowly on performance-limited netbook hardware and saps battery life. And Windows is not exactly smartphone-oriented.
Sugar OS is the custom Linux user interface designed for the OLPC XO Laptop. Sugar on a Stick is a project that lets you run Sugar from a USB flash drive, no XO laptop required. I first checked out Sugar on a Stick earlier this year, when it was still a bit rough around the edges. But at the Netbook World Summit in Paris today, Sugar Labs CEO Walter Bender introduces Sugar on a Stick version 2.0.
In addition to cloud computing and open-source software, other technologies that will be hot in the U.S. government through 2014 include virtualization, service-oriented architecture and geospatial technologies, said Input, an analysis and consulting firm focused on government contracting.
Open source software (OSS) is most commonly known as “free” software. However, this does not mean “no cost” but rather “freedom of speech.” OSS is software with a special license that allows users to shape and change it as needed.
OSS grants users the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the program by way of four essential freedoms. These include the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study how the program works and change it as needed through access to the source code, to redistribute copies to benefit others, and finally the freedom to improve the program and release the modified versions to the public.
John Palmisano of the Society of Robots writes with news of the Axon II microcontroller, and a matching software library designed specifically for robotics. The board is about 2.5 inches square (even though it looks 12 stories tall in the animated 3D tour above!)
[...]
The WebbotLib software library is written in C and licensed under the GNU GPL.
Open-source software pioneer Brian Behlendorf, who sports a ponytail and organized an online music site called SFRaves, is the unlikely architect of a new technology being embraced by the U.S. Defense Dept.
The DOD has started using technology from CollabNet, a Brisbane, Calif., company that Behlendorf co-founded with Bill Portelli, another open-source veteran, to provide an online meeting place in the Internet “cloud” for U.S. military agencies to build software through “crowdsourcing”.
Open source software has been gaining traction as a means to provide cost-effective, flexible, scalable, adaptable and obsolescence-resistant solutions based on code accessible to developers. Lately open source has been enjoined by open platforms and service-oriented architecture aimed at achieving similar results in particular for demanding contact center applications.
Opengear (www.opengear.com) today announced that the Tatts Group, a global provider of highly secure technical systems and networks for electronic gaming machines, has acquired more than 12,000 Opengear SD4000 series device servers.
Boxee has been a favorite among tech tinkerers, who liked using the free open-source software to turn a computer into a powerful set-top box for the TV.
First in regards to Open Cloud Services, basically the concept goes like this; as we move away from the traditional client/server based models of the past to more web centric / service oriented opportunities of the future, we will see open source shift from application centric (source code) toward free open services and information. Cloud providers will essentially give away access in return for greater adopt of their platforms / services, increased customer acquisition and to accelerated creation of data and information. Basically the same reasons companies open source their applications today, just applied in a cloud context.
DPCI, an interactive technology agency which delivers integrated content management solutions, has agreed to assist eDoorways in converting the company’s Internet platform to Drupal, an Open Source Content Management System written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License.
It’s amazing that this type of misunderstanding of the world of open-source software still exists, but obviously it still does. The flawed logic seems to be that low cost must mean low quality, and since open-source software solutions are often low cost, the conclusion is they can’t be any good. One obvious way forward is for open-source software makers to simply up the prices of their subscriptions: Their software and the entire open-source development process would presumably then become mysteriously “better.”
I will now share with you a small section of the Monty Program AB’s submission to the EU Commission, including its suggestion to replace the GPL with a more proprietary-friendly license, specifically the Apache license.
Even analysis of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is not the hard part. My actual experience with that license has been that the kinds of issues that have engaged (and entertained) lawyers (such as myself) through innumerable hours of legal discourse represent a small fraction of actual cases. In the main volume of GPL-related activity, attention is on the basics–like actually making the GPL-licensed source code available and otherwise getting the details right.
A month of the Hurd: initial work on network device drivers in user space, GRUB 2.
This month Zheng Da, our former Google Summer of Code student working on network virtualization and some related topics, published the code for the pcnet32 device driver that he had modified to run as a user-space process instead of inside the kernel, and posted some preliminary performance benchmark results.
The FSF is putting together a “Community Team” of supporters to spread the free software philosophy in blogs, online press, and through social networking sites.
Within the last decade, more than 60 countries and international organizations have developed nearly 275 policy documents related with the use of Open Source in public sector. The rationale behind most of these policy initiatives is the improvement of governance through transparent and effective use of information technology budgets in public sector, as well as economic/engineering benefits of reusable open source software. A majority of these open source initiatives (~70%) have been accepted and final actions have been taken by mid 2008. Suitable business models have been developed to implement these policies and successful public sector solutions based on open source software have emerged.
While many U.S. agencies have been using open-source software for years, the new emphasis on tightening budgets will make open-source packages more popular, Peterson predicted. In addition, many agencies will look for increased ways to customize their software using open-source packages, and some agencies will use open-source software to create private, or hybrid, clouds using open source, she said.
Riversimple’s design will be open source, with information shared through the website of the 40 Fires Foundation, so that they can continually improve the vehicle and encourage uptake of the technology.
I was alerted to this forthcoming news with an invite to a teleconference, which will encompass not only Java EE 6, but also GlassFish v3 and NetBeans 6.8. GlassFish Enterprise Server is Sun’s open source application server “project”, which has an accompanying commercial version known as Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server. Whether Thursday’s announcement will centre of the commercial end remains to be seen.
Who needs anonymous sources when the government is perfectly capable of leaking its own secrets?
Government workers preparing the release of a Transportation Security Administration manual that details airport screening procedures badly bungled their redaction of the .pdf file. Result: The full text of a document considered “sensitive security information” was inadvertently leaked.
The UK Border Agency is paying out £295,000 in bonuses to senior staff despite its ongoing struggle with a backlog of thousands of mystery cases.
The Home Affairs Committee’s latest report into the UKBA found that although it has worked through about half of its 450,000 backlog, it still does not expect to finish until summer 2011.
A Chinese woman arrested in Japan had surgery on her fingers to fool biometric border checks when entering the country.
The 27-year old woman, Lin Ring, who was deported from Japan in 2007, paid for surgery to remove and switch the fingerprints from her left to right hands, and presumably vice versa. Japan uses fingerprint scanners to check travellers entering the country.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is going after a single mother with two kids who makes $10 an hour at Supercuts. When she asked why she was being audited, the IRS told her: “You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle.”
And if so, does this constitute a national security risk? I am just asking because even in private sector operations often passionate citizens approach us with concerns when we use Google Analytics. I am curious if the European Data Protection Supervisor website also uses Google Analytics…
I wonder how a public authority can make a company use the traffic information of its visitors for commercial analysis purposes. So in other words, a European Union body allows a company from a third nation to record traffic data, to spy on the use of its government websites and hand it out to third nation authorities.
If you’re concerned about Google retaining your personal data, then you must be doing something you shouldn’t be doing. At least that’s the word from Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?
That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.
A couple of days ago Frog Eyes frontman/Swan Lake member Carey Mercer sent us a link to an article in the Edmonton Journal that discussed a clause in the contracts signed by performers at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics that barred them from speaking negatively about the Games or the Olympic organizing committee.
Along the way, the court rejected public policy arguments in support of the plaintiffs’ claims for ECPA protection. It rejected as well the contention that the ECPA applied because the electronic communications disclosed by Yahoo! China “may” have traveled through Yahoo!’s domestic network. Prior cases under the Wiretap Act, Stowe v. Devoy, 588 F.2d 336 (2d Cir. 1978), for example, have ruled that cross-border phone calls intercepted in Canada were not subject to the Wiretap Act.
Normally, I would just call Godwin’s Law, and move on, but this is just beyond bizarre. Automatically assuming that all new high tech is a straight line from the Holocaust is just sickening and delusional beyond pretty much any level of standard luddism.
They’re now sending out these letters at a massive rate, and while they’re not actually filing lawsuits, it appears that at least one of the firms involved, DigiProtect, is getting a collections agency involved in some cases. That seems pretty nasty. There’s no actual debt here, because the person has not agreed to pay up, but by handing it over to a collections agency, the person will now get hounded with demands for payment. It’s difficult to see how this is even close to legal.
In some cases, those rights are still held by independent music publishers — and there was a fair amount of confusion over who owned what. It was a perfect example of how ridiculous copyright law is today that even in setting up a big music operation from a major company with the major record labels, no one was exactly sure if all the proper rights were secured.
Music industry group IFPI has today submitted a request to the Stockholm District Court to force an ISP to hand over the personal details of an alleged file-sharer. The action marks the first time a request has been made by the organization under the IPRED legislation introduced in April.
Between $50 million and $6 billion may be owed to musicians and artists in Canada, but not from your run-of-the-mill file sharers. The Canadian recording industry itself is being accused of massive copyright infringement, and the list of miffed artists just keeps getting longer.
A federal judge has made it official: P2P file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum is on the hook for $675,000. The real tragedy here, though, is what might have been, as the judge admits she was receptive to all kinds of limited fair use claims and again slams the record industry’s lawsuit campaign.
The biggest, most powerful atom smasher the world has ever seen, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), with its 17-mile underground loop and TeVs (Teraelectronvolts) of proton beams, is finally up and running, with Linux in control.
After some LHC engineering problems were fixed, CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)’s LHC is now back to work exploring if the standard theories of both how matter and energy holds up and how the universe was created. The LHC will do this by smashing together a pair of particle beams that are shot around the circle in opposite directions at just shy of the speed of light. The resulting collision will produce showers of new particles, including, scientists hope, the elusive Higgs Boson particle.
Mavis Beacon without a doubt, is the most popular typing package in the world. However, a less known but better alternative to Mavis Beacon is Tux Typing. This cross platform open source typing application is designed to be intuitive, fun and educative with a special emphasis on children. It features the ever funny Tux-the official mascot of Linux- as the tutor.
Both my kids use Ubuntu at home; they are 5 & 9. They skip easily between Ubuntu & the Windows machines they use at school and with their friends. They also switch without difficulty between applications too. When necessary James does his homework in OpenOffice.org and takes a USB stick to school with the files saved in a nasty proprietary format.
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new hardware, software and services packages to help clients consolidate and virtualize enterprise workloads on IBM System z. Included are two new enterprise Linux servers that provide attractive, off-the-shelf pricing and configurations for large-scale data center consolidation on Linux.
IBM also announced two new offerings in its System z Solution Edition series that makes System z attractive to new workloads – such as data warehousing, electronic payments and disaster recovery – so clients can run a wider range of their business activities with the powerful reliability, transaction-processing capabilities, and management capabilities and efficiencies of IBM System z.
Piwik is a PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own web server. At the end of the five minute installation process you will be given a JavaScript tag. Simply copy and paste this tag on websites you wish to track. Piwik provides detailed web statistics such as the keywords used by your visitors to find your website, analytics report as beautiful graphs that provide visual cues, and much more.
MedCon is a conversion utility intended for reconstructed nuclear medical images.
In addition, the program allows to read unsupported files without compression, to print pixel values or to extract/reorder/reslice study images. It is possible to export images as PNG or annimated GIF for desktop applications. Its library can be used as a framework. With the help of GNU’s autoconf tool, make utility & C compiler, the project has been build successfully on a variety of architectures.
KDE SC 4.4 Beta 1 has been released, and of course I couldn’t stay still. Thanks to the friendly openSUSE Build Service, there were packages available, so I just pointed my zypper sources to KDE:KDE4:UNSTABLE:Desktop repository, adjusted a few other things (mainly other third-party repositories) and updated.
Pentoo linux is a Gentoo-based live CD with a selection of apps and tools designed to perform penetration testing. They recently released their 2009.0 version and we thought we’d take it for a spin and share our findings.
So basically, if you can install Gentoo, with or without the handbook, you can install Exherbo. Granted at the moment I’m installing in a VM but that shouldn’t make much difference. It’s just easier for me to start over. Though I haven’t so far. On the same hand though I don’t recommend starting with the pre-made VM on the Exherbo website. The one for VirtualBox at least was so outdated I couldn’t get paludis to work properly to save my life. No matter what I did it just kept bombing because packages had invalid tags on the end of the names. Apparently paludis 0.3x.x.x doesn’t like having “beta1″ or “rc” on the end of your package ID.
For the daring folks who follow Rawhide: life is about to get interesting for a while. Fedora developers have announced that Rawhide will be moving to upstart 0.60 and to RPM 4.8.0. Both postings should be considered required reading for people with Rawhide systems.
With over 20 million installations, Fedora is among the most world’s popular Linux distributions. While that kind of success has been due to a rapid base of supporters, the distro originally launched by Red Hat as a community Linux project is having to bridge the divide between targeting a mass audience and keeping hardcore enthusiasts in the fold.
Just in time for the Alpha 1 release of Ubuntu 10.04, X.Org 7.5 with X Server 1.7 has been pulled into the Lucid Lynx package repository. With this push of new X.Org 7.5 packages comes a number of other upstream X package updates along with rebuilds of the other non-updated drivers so that they will work against this latest stable X Server.
Right off the bat, Ubuntu earned my respect. Installing the entire OS, after deleting and creating new partitions, on my less-than-average HP dv5z took less than 20 minutes. (Side note- the HP dv5z disappoints me greatly. I do not recommend this slow, unstable, and easily-overheating laptop to anyone. I hope the new laptops in this series fare better than this.) I thought it would take a painful hour or more, so finishing the installation in this amount of time pleased me. After downloading all the necessary updates for the system, which went by pretty quickly, I restarted my computer (Ubuntu booted up in about 20 seconds), took a deep breath, and dove in.
The full technical specifications won’t be announced until CES, but the BoxeeBoxeeBoxee did announce some basic details about the Boxee Box at tonight’s event. The big news is that the box is being made by D-link, is WiFi enabled and has an SD slot.
With the growing popularity of netbooks, it is no surprise that many Linux distributions and software developers have created customized versions of their software to run on them. Some of the popular choices include Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix and Intel’s Moblin. Not to be counted out, KDE now has a version of their desktop environment designed for netbooks. While it is still under heavy development, I thought now would be a good time to get a little preview of what is to come. For the purposes of this preview, I installed Kubuntu Netbook Edition, but you can conceivably use any distribution that will support your netbook.
OLPC is not by any means going quietly into the night in the face of stiff competition. The company just completed the distribution of the XO-1 to 415,000 elementary schools in Uruguay. In addition, OLPC recently inked deals with Rwanda for 120,000 computers and Peru for 294,000 computers. In just three short years, OLPC has managed to sell over a million computers to some 31 countries. Kane proudly notes, “Indeed if a company would build a netbook that would have our qualities of low power and ruggedness, we would love to be out of the hardware business. We would love to have someone providing that machine at the right price point.” Yet it remains clear to Kane and his company that the XO-1 is still the only product suitable for meeting the needs of early childhood education in poorer countries.
In this regard, what we witnessed in Orvieto was important. For the first time we recorded about a dozen regions, states and any sort of upper administrative layers in many countries (Italy, Germany, South America, India, etc.) that migrated to OpenOffice.org and is effectively using it. In some countries, some of them earth giants and some others lesser giants, we witnessed purely and simply a national uptake. Brazil is a very telling example of this. It started by Brazilian states and the migration went up to the federal state. After that it reached large central administrations, central banks, large companies, and is now spreading to small businesses. We estimate today between 7 and 30 Million professional desktops that have been migrated to OpenOffice.org in Brazil. It is always possible that Brazilian citizens themselves are craving for MS Office and therefore lined up in IT stores to purchase licenses from Microsoft but local observers seemed skeptical of that. Brazil, some might think, might be the exception in all this (even if it were, what are you doing of their market share?) but we got very clear reports that such phenomena are witnessed elsewhere; albeit on a reduced scale. OpenOffice.org is gaining users in almost every public sector in the world, and gaining many more in the private sector (both small and large companies) while it’s quickly becoming the well known free (as in beer) alternative to Microsoft Office at home.
De Raadt says that by the time one release takes place, the developers are already six weeks into the next development cycle. “The release is a branch off the main development
tree. In many other projects, it is a live branch, as in a separate team cuts it off and then keeps making minor tweaks to it to make sure it is a good release (why? that is because the mainline is crap).
“In OpenBSD, the release branch is a dead branch. The day it split from the trunk it was determined to be good enough for making a real release. Without any changes. That is because the trunk is good stuff.”
For one, there is a higher degree of reliability. Running on a full computer system makes it infinitely upgradeable. It can be extended to do more than just shuffle packets back and forth. You can turn a simple firewall into a full intrusion detection system. You can analyze and track bandwidth usage. It can be a VPN end point, a Web proxy, DHCP and DNS server, load balancer, handle automatic failover, and provide great diagnostic tools.
pfSense, a firewall system based on the FreeBSD kernel, can handle all of this and more.
The Obama administration still has a very mixed record on transparency and openness. Despite promising to be a lot more transparent and open, the federal government has been extremely selective in where it actually is open.
SECRET police files on people protesting against Victoria’s $3.5 billion desalination project are being made available to the private consortium building the plant.
Under a deal struck by the State Government in a bid to ensure the project is finished before Melbourne runs out of water, Victoria Police has agreed to hand over photos, video recordings and other police records to the international consortium AquaSure to help it ”manage” protests and potential security threats.
A leaked email details how the party has begun offering wealthy backers the chance to attend ‘private presentations’ in Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) with key figures including director of communications Andy Coulson and director of strategy Steve Hilton.
We already know that Goldman Sachs is still engaging in many of the same behaviors that crashed our economy. But here’s what we don’t know – and what Goldman isn’t telling: how deep does it go?
Numerous Public Citizen activists turned out, holding high our protest signs demanding “Put people before Wall Street profits” and “Don’t let the banks drive us off another cliff.”
I said that it was untrue that IPR negotiations are normally secret, mentioning as examples that drafts of the other IPR texts, including the proposed WIPO treaty for disabilities and the climate change agreement language on IPR, as well as several drafts of the FTAA text and the 1996 WIPO copyright treaties had been public. Kirk said that ACTA “was different” and the topics being negotiated in ACTA were “more complex.”
I brought up to Kirk that the USTR had shown ACTA text to dozens of corporate lobbyists and all of its trading partners in the ACTA negotiation, and the text was only secret from the public. Kirk did say USTR was discussing this issue with the White House and its trading partners, but that was about all he could say at that moment.
Chet Baker was a leading jazz musician in the 1950s, playing trumpet and providing vocals. Baker died in 1988, yet he is about to add a new claim to fame as the lead plaintiff in possibly the largest copyright infringement case in Canadian history. His estate, which still owns the copyright in more than 50 of his works, is part of a massive class-action lawsuit that has been underway for the past year.
The infringer has effectively already admitted owing at least $50 million and the full claim could exceed $6 billion. If the dollars don’t shock, the target of the lawsuit undoubtedly will: The defendants in the case are Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association.
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