The biggest thing Intel brought to the CES table this year was undeniably its Sandy Bridge processor, but the electronics manufacturer also introduced a new way to play with Legos. Using an Intel Core i7 processor and Gentoo Linux, Intel programmers are bringing the digital world of toys into the physical one.
InfoWorld has put together a Linux IQ test to see just how learned you are vis-à-vis the free-and-open-source operating system that makes the world go ’round. (You do know that Android is based on Linux, right?) Let’s see how well you do!
The new system runs a Linux-based matching engine, understood to be developed around Red Hat software. In November the exchange hired 81 additional open source staff to cope with the changes to the system, which operates in a C++ environment. It replaces a Microsoft .Net system, built by Accenture.
For Linux 2.6.38, the kernel developers have integrated the much-discussed patch which considerably improves the response time of Linux desktops in certain situations. The AMD developers have extended their open source graphics drivers to support various Radeon HD 6000 graphics chips. A discussion was sparked by the tricky situation surrounding the graphics drivers for Intel’s new processors.
Now that the kernel mode-setting page-flipping for the ATI Radeon DRM kernel module has been merged into the Linux 2.6.38 kernel and the respective bits have been set in the xf86-video-ati DDX, we’re in the process of running new open-source ATI graphics benchmarks under Linux. Our initial results (included in this article) show these latest improvements to cause some major performance boosts for the open-source ATI driver as it nears the level of performance of the proprietary Catalyst driver.
Brian Joseph, CEO at Zarafa, explains: “In 2010 we have experienced that many Scalix partners changed to Zarafa. And now we see many Scalix customers checking non-Linux-alternatives because they do not trust the Scalix roadmap promises anymore. We have decided to help these customers to continue to use Linux”.
There are many good reasons to support KDE with a regular financial contribution – it enables KDE e.V. to have a predictable and stable income. That can be used to plan support for contributors and events that help speed up development of KDE software, enhance our promotion efforts and help grow our community. However, our contributors and users are scattered throughout the world and have many different backgrounds and their reasons for contributing are likely to be just as diverse. We caught up with our 125th supporting member, Paul Eggleton to ask him why he Joined the Game.
You’ll find far less hand-holding on the Arch Forums than some of the other distro’s forums, and for good reason. Arch has one of the most informative, user-friendly wiki’s out there. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT ask a question in the forums or on IRC without searching the wiki and the forums first. If you can’t find a solution by searching, include all appropriate log files and as much information as possible in your request. Look at some of the current posts marked “Solved” in the Arch Forums for examples.
This version fixes some booting issues and Save Session for CD/DVD. There were a few bugs fixed in the new direct ISO booting feature. Super Grub Disk(1/2) has been updated to .9799 and 1.98s1. Some other minor issues…
13 Jan 2011. New release, new bugs I have discovered that the functionality implemented in pelican_config is not working on v2.3. For most people, this is no problem. For those of you who would like to user permanent storage, use the older method – there’s a prompt at boot time. For pelican_config users, mount your $PELHOME by hand.
Red Hat is out today with the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 (RHEL).
After the big launch of RHEL 6 last year though, there isn’t a whole lot to be excited about in the latest 5.x release. That said RHEL 5.x users that aren’t in a position to move to RHEL 6 will likely be very happy with the update.
Each incremental update of RHEL always brings with it additional driver and bug fixes, which make them important for users.
Android has surged past iOS in ad impressions on Millennial’s ad network for the first time, breaking a two-month tie that suggested a possible lull in the growth of Google’s mobile platform. Android now represents 46 percent of ad impressions in December, compared to 32 percent for iOS after the two OSes were tied at 38 percent in November. Millennial said Android has also widened its lead in ad revenue from applications with 55 percent compared to 39 percent for iOS.
Google will announce Android 2.4 “Ice Cream” in May, adding fuel to the theory that version 3.0 will fork Android, say reports. Meanwhile, Samsung is rumored to be prepping a “Vibrant 4G” phone for T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network featuring 21Mbps downloads, Samsung and IBM are teaming up on mobile R&D, and the Google Goggles app gets a marketing-focused upgrade, says eWEEK.
The vast majority of the tablets, however, use the Linux-based Android. At BetaNews, Joe Wilcox quotes a Caris & Co estimate at the start of the show stating that some 69 tablets were expected to be shown or announced. CNET, meanwhile, says the number was more like 75.
At CES last week, MIPS Technologies, demonstrated a number of MIPS-based Android mobile devices, including two smartphones and several tablets. MIPS also announced that Chinese semiconductor firm Ingenic — whose MIPS-based processors power Velocity’s Cruz Android tablets, has licensed the MIPS32 architecture to develop one of the new Android smartphones — while an Action Semiconductor MIPS SoC powers the other.
Samsung Electronics has shown off a Google TV-based Blu-ray player and companion box at CES, due to ship later this year. Meanwhile, Vizio unveiled two HDTVs running the Android- and Intel Atom-based Google TV stack, including a 56-inch model.
Verizon Wireless capped off a week of Android-based smartphone introductions with two new 4G LTE-ready, 4.3-inch models: HTC’s ThunderBolt and LG’s Revolution. The phones will compete on Verizon with Motorola’s similarly 4.3-inch Droid Bionic, announced earlier this week, which ups the ante with a dual-core, Nvidia Tegra-2 processor.
Around mid-2010, Jonnalagadda started HasGeek, a firm that works for the open source community, and helps support it. He explains: “We have a lot of good software developers in India. They may contribute to open source. But very few Indian projects are able to make it big and retain the lead.”
One almost starts to question whether open source has been so heavily influenced by its commercial cousins that the true open source maverick will be left struggling to find a voice. So is there still a place for the OSS ‘garage band’ software start up?
The Brisbane river was expected to peak today, and the post notes: “We should know the full extent of the floods around this time and will continually keep people updated via the web and social networking sites.”
A decision on whether to go ahead with the 12th Australian national Linux conference, which is scheduled to be held in Brisbane from January 24 to 29, will be made on Monday, January 17.
We’ve made the point many times that one open source browsers–with Firefox and Chrome leading the way–are setting the pace in browser innovation, but as open source browsers run neck-and-neck, and still compete with Internet Explorer, are we in danger of seeing fragmented standards? On The Chromium Blog this week, Google officials wrote that they are putting more muscle behind the VP8 open source video codec, and that future versions of Chrome will support the WebM Project and Ogg Theora codecs. The upshot: Google is moving steadily away from supporting H.264 video, and that may eventually have a big impact on web publishers and device manufacturers.
We built RedMonk Analytics to track developer behaviors, and what it is telling us at present is that Firefox and IE both are losing share amongst developer populations to Chrome. Chrome is highly performant, but also benefiting from significant marketing investment (e.g. billboards, site sponsorships) and related product development (e.g. Chrome Web Store). The conclusion from this data is that Chrome will eclipse Firefox from a marketshare standpoint (speaking specifically of developers, not the wider market where Firefox is sustainably ahead), likely within a quarter.
But having tested the 4.0 version of Firefox for several weeks, it’s clear that Mozilla’s browser is responding to the evolutionary threat. Firefox 4.0 is faster and less stale from a user interface perspective, but more importantly differentiated via features like Panorama.
The 4.0 release is unlikely to be sufficient in preventing Chrome from assuming the top spot among developer browser usage, but it is likely to arrest the free fall. Expect Chrome and Firefox to be heavily competitive in 2011.
1. Virtual appliances become a stepping stone to the cloud: Software vendors eager to offer on-demand application services find a simple solution that doesn’t require the time and expense of re-architecting applications. Enter virtual appliances, which are already being used by software vendors like VMware, IBM and SAP. The need for simpler deployment and the demand for cloud-based options are driving major ISV interest in virtual appliances, which are optimized, pre-configured virtual workloads. In 2011, 25 major ISVs will use virtual appliances as a fast and painless way to meet the demand for cloud-based application delivery (SaaS), and Linux will be a key enabler of this approach.
PHP Fog has raised $1.8 million for its PaaS cloud targeting PHP developers. Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital and Founders Co-op are the named investors in this round. PHP Fog is the brainchild of veteran developer Lucas Carlson, who was the lead engineer for music-on-demand service Mog and wrote Ruby Cookbook for O’Reilly Media. A PHP PaaS offering certainly should attract users, even if PHP Fog isn’t the only one at that dance.
Because Joomla is offered under the General Public License (GPL) version 2.0, it requires no hardware investments and no initial spending on software. Ozimek said it also will work with a wide variety of SQL and even noSQL databases, including mySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle, so “it can be the glue for Web services.”
Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin has paved the way for organizations all over the world by initiating a cost cut. Putin has ordered his federal decision makers to phase out proprietary software-Windows-and adopt free solutions-Linux-by 2015.
But he was not prepared for the storm that erupted once this news was posted on Slashdot, referencing a post by an open source developer, Philip Paradis. A respondent to the post on Paradis’ blog pointed out some lines of code which were believed to be from the original mtr and which, could, therefore mean that Manac was violating the GPL.
This is a 66% growth in HTML5 video user support since December of 2009. With the expected release of Internet Explorer 9 in the near future, 2011 could see a major increase in websites adopting HTML5 video as their primary playback method.
Of browsers that support HTML5 video, Mozilla’s Firefox is the clear leader, with Google’s Chrome in second place. Much of the growth in HTML5 video support can be attributed to Chrome’s success in stealing market share from Internet Explore over the last year.
Government lawyers had argued there was no discrimination because those same services are provided in other formats, such as on the phone, in person or by mail.
In the Israel of 2011, it’s no longer legitimate to belong to the left. It’s illegitimate to campaign for human rights or to oppose the occupation or to investigate war crimes. Such actions earn Israelis a mark of shame. A land-stealing settler is a Zionist; a warmongering right-winger is a patriot; an inciting rabbi is a spiritual leader; a racist who expels foreigners is a loyal citizen. Only the leftist is a traitor.
During the Bush administration’s “war on terror”, it was important to dehumanise the men held at Guantánamo, to give life to the myth that the prison held “the worst of the worst” terrorists, picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan.
At least 11 people have died in new clashes with security forces in Tunisia after four weeks of unrest, it was reported today. The interior ministry said eight people were killed over the weekend in the western towns of Thala and Kasserine. Rioting against joblessness and other social ills has scarred many cities in the country since 17 December, when a 26-year-old graduate set himself on fire when police confiscated his fruits and vegetables for selling without a permit.Mobs have since attacked public buildings and the local office of the party of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
When Alina happened upon a group of men—too many to count—raping a girl in the squalid Port-au-Prince camp where she and other quake victims lived, she couldn’t just stand there. Maybe it was because she has three daughters of her own; maybe it was some altruistic instinct. And the 58-year-old was successful, in a way, in that when she tried to intervene, the men decided to rape her instead, hitting her ribs with a gun, threatening to shoot her, firing shots in the air to keep other people from getting ideas of making trouble as they kept her on the ground and forced themselves inside her until she felt something tear, as they saw that she was bleeding and decided to go on, and on, and on. When it was over, Alina lay on the ground hemorrhaging and aching, alone. The men were gone, but no one dared to help her for fear of being killed.
The American ambassador to Reykjavik has been summoned to explain why U.S. investigators are trying to access the private details of an Icelandic lawmaker’s online activity as they try to build a criminal case against WikiLeaks.
Revelations that the U.S. Justice Department obtained a court order to examine data held by Twitter Inc. on Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian who sits on the country’s Foreign Affairs Committee, immediately caused consternation in the tiny North Atlantic nation.
He turned up with long hair, tattoos and an insatiable appetite for climbing trees. Few people suspected anything odd of the man who introduced himself as Mark Stone on a dairy farm turned spiritual sanctuary in North Yorkshire.
He had come alone on 12 August 2003, in the middle of a heatwave, for a gathering of environmental activists known as Earth First.
A police officer who for seven years lived deep undercover at the heart of the environmental protest movement, travelling to 22 countries gleaning information and playing a frontline role in some of the most high-profile confrontations, has quit the Met, telling his friends that what he did was wrong.
PC Mark Kennedy, a Metropolitan police officer, infiltrated dozens of protest groups including anti-racist campaigners and anarchists, a Guardian investigation reveals.
Six environmental activists who faced charges of trying to take over a power station called today for an inquiry into the role of an undercover police officer, who is accused of helping to plan and pay for the invasion.
The trial of the six, who denied conspiring to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, collapsed today, after details began to emerge about the role played by PC Mark Kennedy, an undercover police officer.
On Easter Monday 2009 over 400 police officers were involved in a raid at Iona school in Nottingham, which led to 114 arrests. I represented 113 of those arrested. The 114th we now know was PC Kennedy, an undercover police officer. Six of my clients were due to face a long trial starting today.
Along with many others, I was sickened when I discovered that the man I knew as a fellow activist, Mark Kennedy, was in fact an undercover police officer who had been spying on us since 2003. Yet my feelings were nothing compared with those who were close to him. The betrayal and loss they are feeling is a real grief – the equivalent of someone you love dying. I went through this myself a few years ago when one of my best friends, Martin Hogbin, was exposed as a BAE spy. I denied the facts for a long time simply because the truth was too difficult. I still miss my friend, miss the good times, miss him seeing my son grow up; I don’t think this feeling will ever go away.
The huge quantities of methane gas that bubbled out of BP’s broken well in the Gulf of Mexico were eaten up almost entirely by undersea microbes by the end of August, a new study reports today.
Other scientists cautioned that much oil remained on the ocean floor, where it has penetrated deep into the sediment, as well as in fragile marshlands. Oil is still turning up in tar balls on beaches and in fishermen’s nets.
The commission also concludes that the government’s efforts to prevent disasters like this were inadequate. “As this narrative suggests, the Macondo blowout was the product of several individual missteps and oversights by BP, Halliburton, and Transocean, which government regulators lacked the authority, the necessary resources, and the technical expertise to prevent,” it states.
Glaciers in the European Alps could shrink by 75% by the end of the century, according to new research into the expected impact of global warming.
The study, published in the journal Nature: Geoscience, concludes that, globally, mountain glaciers and ice caps are projected to lose 15-27% of their volume by 2100, although the extent of the damage varies widely. The analysis suggests glaciers in the Alps and New Zealand will shrink by more than 70% but shrinkage is predicted to reach about 10% in Greenland and high-mountain Asia.
By the time he left office, President George W. Bush wasn’t exactly known as a friend of endangered wildlife. Over eight years, his administration protected 62 species of domestic animals and plants under the Endangered Species Act. By contrast, Bill Clinton had declared 522 species endangered during his two terms. (See chart below.) On average, Bush added eight new species to the list annually, the slowest pace of any president since Richard Nixon signed the ESA into law in 1973.
The CRTC last week quietly proposed a significant change to the rules on false or misleading news broadcasts on radio or television. The law currently provides that a broadcast licensee “shall not broadcast any false or misleading news.” The CRTC is proposing to amend the law with respect to television and radio by lowering the standard to “any news that the licensee knows is false or misleading and that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.” In other words, it would perfectly permissible for a broadcaster to air false or misleading news, provided that it not endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.
The deadline for interventions into the forthcoming CRTC hearing on the Bell – CTV merger passed earlier this week with hundreds of submissions from across the country. Many cultural groups focused solely on the proposed benefits package associated with the transaction (e.g. Directors Guild of Canada, Alberta Motion Pictures Industry Association, the Documentary Organization of Canada) but there are many others rallying to support the deal.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has a lot on his plate: He’s mayor of America’s largest city, owner of one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing news organizations and patron of a $1.75 billion charitable foundation. Critics have repeatedly accused him of blurring the lines between those roles. Is he doing it again with Bloomberg View, his new opinion operation?
David Shipley and Jamie Rubin, the co-executive editors of the new service, will technically be employees of Bloomberg LP, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be necessarily be working in the financial-news-and-data giant’s offices on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. At least part of the time, they’ll be based in the Upper East Side offices of the Bloomberg Family Foundation, located on Madison Avenue and 78th Street
New legislation currently under consideration by the Hungarian Parliament is the latest government initiative that poses a threat to press freedom, according to Freedom House. Among other things, the measure would impose fines on private media organizations for “unbalanced” news coverage.
Amid the mock-gothic gilt and stained glass of Hungary’s elaborate parliament on the banks of the Danube, Viktor Orbán oozed charm, humour, and resolve. “I won. We won,” he bragged. “We democrats won our battle.”
But a lack of evil and stupidity does not eliminate short-sightedness,
foolishness, and priorities run dangerously amok.
The path to Internet-enabled perdition, like the spiritual path to
another well-known rhetorical locale very much to be avoided, can be
paved with seemingly good intentions nonetheless.
If they were not the hypocrites they appeared, but honourable men, who wanted to help all minorities and not only Muslims, they must now accept that Salmaan Taseer was butchered for protecting Pakistan’s religious minorities from its own blasphemy law.
Perhaps it is not the American Muslim community that harbors growing numbers of people threatening the core principles of our country. Perhaps such threats can more readily be found in certain dark corners of the hearing rooms of the House of Representatives. If we take constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties (that is the Bill of Rights) to be among the core pillars of the American way of life, then how should we judge Peter King’s intent and actions? Are they radical or not? And if they are, then we should all join with those American Muslims who are raising their voices against King and his machinations.
Yesterday I tweeted a request for folks to help me compile a list of all the things that are geoblocked in Canada. within minutes, #BlockedUpNorth became a Trending Topic- one of the top ten Twitter conversation topics in Canada. I was genuinely shocked by how aware Canadians are about geoblocking- and how angry!
A US professor of computer science is prodding electronics giant Sony with the stupid stick by hosting a copy of the PS3′s private key on his univeristy’s web servers.
Professor David S Touretzky, who specialises in robotics and has been known to try to replicate the spacial awareness of rats in his spare time, has poked his head above the parapet as Sony’s lumbering legal team grinds into action in an attempt to stop people spilling its secrets.
Later this year, the court will hear at least one case that examines the scope of the Copyright Act’s fair dealing provision. At issue is whether “research” within fair dealing can be extended to song previews that are made available on sites like iTunes where a consumer can freely listen to roughly 30 seconds of a song.
The Copyright Board of Canada ruled in 2007 that a broad and liberal interpretation of fair dealing meant that it could be included since the preview was effectively consumer research on whether to purchase the song. The Federal Court of Appeal affirmed the Copyright Board’s interpretation last May, opening the door to many other consumer research possibilities under the current fair dealing provision.
Back in August we debunked the administration’s Korea FTA stats, but the Obama administration has continued to tout these bogus figures. Regarding the alleged $11 billion rise in exports, the crux of the issue is that the factsheet is quoting the wrong section of the USITC report (the administration is citing Table 2.2 on page 2-8 of the report). The USITC study predicts that U.S. exports will increase by only about $4.8-5.3 billion, as Table 2.3 on page 2-14 of the report indicates. In addition, the study predicts that U.S. imports will increase by $5.1-5.7 billion due to the Korea FTA. This large increase in imports completely wipes out the benefits of the increase in exports and turns the predicted effect into a net negative.
The $10-11 billion figure that the administration is citing is merely the change in the U.S. bilateral exports to Korea itself, which tells only part of the story. As the USITC study acknowledges, bilateral tariff reductions induce significant “trade diversion” effects, which means that implementation of the Korea FTA will “rob” from the volume of U.S. exports that currently go to third countries and shift those exports to Korea, leading to little net increase in U.S. exports. The diversion occurs because many exporters of U.S. goods will stop exporting their goods to other countries like Germany and instead start exporting to Korea, just because the tariff that they face for exporting to Korea is lower than the tariff that they face when trying to export elsewhere. The shift in the destination of exports alone does not increase U.S. economic output or employment. Only net export gains matter for American workers.
With the biggest “partner” of Wintel criticizing the developments of the mother-ship, how long can the Wintel monopoly last? Intel will find that GNU/Linux runs well on Intel as on ARM and Intel will find it profitable to be partner of GNU/Linux. It’s all good.
The Spanish Ministry of the Interior has expressed its regret that an international crackdown on IT masterminds inside the violent Basque separatist group ETA was dubbed “Operation Linux”.
Apparently, penguin-loving outfits are complaining that the antiterrorist operation sullies their good name.
Dubbed the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), it will be available from Dell this week as the Dell Canonical UEC Solution. We hope that it does not mean that the servers will be all wet.
Mark Shuttleworth, the ever gracious founder of Ubuntu, stopped by Dell this morning to talk to various folks about various subjects. I was able to grab some time with him between meetings and get his thoughts on a few topics.
Shuttleworth said that he is encouraged to see standardization taking place in the cloud computing space, and clearly remains positive about both OpenStack and Eucalyptus. Clearly, Shuttleworth also likes the idea of open cloud standards.
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit (Server version is supported, desktop version will also work but not supported by Zimbra.) This tutorial uses Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop System.
In this episode: Firefox overtakes Internet Explorer in Europe while Android overtakes iPhone in the US, and TransGaming transforms Cedega into the GameTree Developer Program. Discover our new section and hear your own opinions in our Open Ballot.
Some “older” Linux distributions don’t even recognize it. And it’s not that new, I understand. In both OpenBSD and FreeBSD I have to “conjure” it to life by setting the media type. Otherwise it stays dark.
In the face of all sorts of rumours and interpretations about the future of the project there is a call for clarification regarding development of GIMP.
Currently GIMP team is working on finalizing the new stable v2.8 with many improvements such as layer groups, improved brush dynamics, a new unique transformation tool, optional single-window mode and more. There are two big obstacles in our way right now: missing specification on the last change in user interface and broken graphic tablets support in GTK+.
We have already invested a lot of time into UI changes and brush dynamics, we treasure your continuous support for the project and thus we are determined to release v2.8 only when it’s working out of box as expected for everybody.
One key area of frustration for newcomers to the Linux OS is using document scanners. Most hardware makers do not provide Linux drivers on discs that accompany their scanner models. So Linux users have to struggle to find solutions on distro-specific help forums.
Linux does not support the TWAIN-compatible drivers popular in the Windows world. So the trick in obtaining scanning success is to use a scanner device that is compatible with Xsane, a scanner interface that uses the Scanner Access Now Easy driver.
Few weeks ago we did show you apt-fast, a little shellscript that increases the speed of apt-get by many times. Thanks to sourceslist Team , apt-fast got an interface named 1blink-updater to simply install apt-fast, to integrate it with Synaptic and to perform updates.
Bordeaux entered the Wine services market in early 2008 and gained a foothold through its strength in marketing, branding and the technology expertise of a limited partnership with Wine-Reviews Inc.
Hexen: Edge of Chaos is a new game that is based on popular game Doom 3. Developed by fans of the Hexen series the game is a hack ‘n’ slash game inspired the original Hexen game.
Ubuntu Gamer reader ‘Cliff’ hit up our tip form to let us know about a game called H-Craft Championship, a sci-fi racer developed by indie developers Irrgheist.
H-Craft is a futuristic hovercraft racing game which sees players compete in championships to level up and unlock new vehicles to race with.
I know that some people bemoan the fact that these precious Linux jewels are now available for Windows users. They think that it lessens the need for people to move to Linux. However, I think that Linux is still a better OS for most people.
While digiKam doesn’t allow you to publish photos directly to a WordPress blog, you can work around this limitation. Enable the Post by Email feature on your WordPress blog, and you can use the SendImages Kipi plugin in digiKam to email photos directly to your blog.
To make this workaround work, you have to prepare your WordPress blog first. If you host your blog on WordPress.com, navigate to Dashboard | My Blogs and press the Enable button to activate the Post by Email feature. This will automatically generate a unique email address where you send your photos.
Red Hat Inc. has decided to keep its trademark fedora hanging in North Carolina, declining the overtures of other states Monday as it announced it will build its next corporate headquarters in the Raleigh area and create more than 500 new jobs over the next decade.
I was initially a KDE user, but for a long time, I’ve been using GNOME on Ubuntu. This is because there has always been some serious bug or the other in KDE, ever since the team overhauled the desktop. I have waited with eager anticipation for a bug-free KDE and a distro that would serve it in a nice package, but have had no luck. Even when KDE became usable again with version 4.3, no distro did it right. But when Fedora released version 14 on 2nd November, I had an uncanny feeling that this would be the distro I was waiting for. Yes, it was!
However, what bowled me over first was not KDE—it was the new Fedora website. Never have I seen such an outstanding presentation of free and open source software, or of an operating system, done so meticulously.
I did a full review earlier of Linux Mint Debian Edition and loved it. Now there’s an update to it and I couldn’t resist doing a quick look. If you aren’t familiar with the Debian version of Linux Mint, you’re in for a real treat. LMDE has quickly become my favorite Linux distribution. It’s a great blend of Debian and Linux Mint.
[...]
As I noted above, I really enjoy Linux Mint Debian Edition. It really has become my distro of choice, for now. It combines the power of Debian with all of the Linux Mint tools & features. Of course, I will still continue to distrohop because you never know when another distro could tickle your fancy just a bit more.
I can recommend Ubuntu. But I cannot recommend Gentoo. Why? Because all of this trouble and downtime was caused by an update. An update that Portage did at some point earlier. It was part of a whole system update. If the system had never been rebooted, I would still not know it. I would have no clue that the thing would not have booted up in the event of a power failure or whatever.
And that’s the problem. Linux was created by geeks, grown and nurtured by geeks, and unless something is done fairly soon to change the presentation and the image, it will remain a system for geeks. The only one doing very much about that at this moment is Mark Shuttleworth, who has invested his fortune, his time, and his vision to create SOMETHING that can present a real challenge to the Windows hegemony.
And Canonical’s emphasis on customization is an important point. So far, much of the hype surrounding the cloud has centered on the efficiency, ease of deployment and accessibility of cloud-based machines, with relatively little attention afforded to the extent to which users can customize software running in the cloud. cloud-init’s chief selling point, meanwhile, is the customizability it guarantees for Ubuntu-based cloud images.
In this sense, Canonical’s strategy for the cloud seems to stand out in unique ways. Whether it will pay off remains to be seen, but this is a topic to watch closely as the cloud develops.
Ubuntu Control Center is a nice simple application to sort things out easily and intuitively in Ubuntu. It is originally inspired from Mandriva Control Center and aims to centralize and organize the main configuration tools available in Ubuntu.
In my quest to make Linux Mint 10 by sole operating system, I needed to bring over two contact lists into Mozilla Thunderbird, which is the default email software installed with Mint 10. I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird on my Windows 7 system and I found that I like T-bird very much. I exported both of my contact lists from Outlook 2007 and T-Bird and copied the files over as .csv format. Before importing the files, I opened both and trimmed down the majority of fields, since I just wanted the names and email addresses of my contacts. The import went well and after merging both contact lists, I had the names and email addresses I needed.
MoonOS, an Ubuntu based Linux distro, recently hit version 4, codenamed “Neake”. This last release certainly marks a turning point for MoonOS, for it includes several drastic changes that set it appart from previous releases and even from other Linux distributions.
I’ve had a couple of encounters with #! before, starting with this review of version 9.04.01 and including this review of version 10 “Statler” Openbox (Alpha 2). I was pleasantly surprised by the features and minimalistic beauty of version 9.04.01, and I was later slightly let down by the relative lack of polish and removal of some features in version 10 (Alpha 2). Now, the #! developers have come out with a (actually, two) post-alpha release(s) of version 10 “Statler”.
Barry Kauler, the father of Puppy Linux, announced earlier today, January 6th, the immediate availability of Puppy Linux 5.2, a major version that is compatible with the popular Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system.
Puppy Linux 5.2 features lots of updated and improved applications, the new Quickset dialog to easily setup your system (language/locale and keyboard settings, timezone, video resolution), Browser Installer, Browser-Default, Quickpet, improved Puppy Package Manager, and a lot more for you to discover.
Yes, Apple’s iPhone is popular, and yes it looks like Verizon is finally going to release an iPhone, but Android phones have turned out to be even more popular.
Well, now we know. You can’t sell software using the General Public License (GPL) on the Apple App Store& because it conflicts with its Terms of Service (ToS) . The popular VLC media player, was the first major GPLed software to be pulled from Apple’s App Store, it won’t be the last. But, what about Google’s Android Market? I asked the experts and they tell me that, in general, GPL developers can offer their wares on Android.
In year 2007 The Open Handset Alliance was formed, which includes Google and other 33 companies. The aim of The Open Handset Alliance is to bring innovation into mobile devices and thus giving consumers a much better user experience.
At the same time, mobile application developers are given an opportunity to freely participate in Android application development using alliance’s Android Software Development Kit ( SDK ) which is released through Google’s developer website. Developers are therefore, free to develop any Android application they see fit and are free to market it to all Android mobile phone owners. This article will consist of four main sections:
1. Installation of Eclipse IDE, Oracle Java JRE, Android SDK and Android Developer Tool (ADT) a special Eclipse plug-in
2. Setting up Eclipse IDE with Android SDK and Android Developer Tool
3. Writing a simple Android Application: “Hello Android”
4. Testing Android application using Android Virtual Device
The GTVHacker dev team has won a cash bounty for being the first to successfully root and enable third-party application support on a Google TV device before Google – Google will reportedly be bringing support for Android applications to the platform some time later this year. According to developer Howard Harte, who originally announced the bounty at the end of November last year, the GTVHacker team used a hardware hack, adding serial console support to the UART1 header on the Logitech Revue, to enable root and install third-party apps on Google TV.
Cisco Systems unveiled a suite of Linux-based “Videoscape” IPTV hardware and software that blends TV and web content a la Google TV. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless plans to ship 4G LTE versions of Cisco’s Android-based, enterprise-focused Cius tablet and Linux-based ISR routers.
Not that tablets makers will have an easy ride. As the plethora of models on display show, for every Samsung Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom, RIM BlackBerry PlayBook, Dell Streak 7 and Asus Eee Pad Slider, there are countless no-name offerings. Of these a fair few are poor, some good, but all run the same operating system with the same UI, sport the same ports, and have the same basic look.
Intel’s Oak Trail platform consists of a Lincroft-based processor and Whitney Point chipset, targeting mainly tablet PCs and netbooks and is able to support any operating systems available on the market including Android.
Dell announced a seven-inch Android 2.2 tablet called the Streak 7, featuring a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, dual cameras, and compatibility with T-Mobile’s 4G-like HSPA+ network. The company also announced an unlocked, GSM-ready “Dell Venue” smartphone that runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, with a 4.1-inch AMOLED display and eight-megapixel camera.
While the United States seemed to move from a possible OpenID login to more of a “secure” intranet approach, Russia has moved from commercial software to open source. The two moves may not seem to have much in common, but they do. Control.
Under the banner of security, the U.S. has announced the creation of a “verified” ID program that looks for all the world like a walled, or at least fenced, section of the Internet. Russia has moved to open source not out of a philosophical belief in free software, but out of fear of American software hegemony.
Australia’s annual Linux.conf.au conference in Brisbane will go off as scheduled, despite massive floods bearing down on the Queensland, Australia city, according to the conference’s website today.
Google on Tuesday said that it plans to drop support for the H.264 video codec in its Chrome browser and to embrace WebM, the video codec that it acquired in 2009 and released last year as open source software.
There is one thing PHP desperately needs — an easy to use built-in web server. Every semester, as I face a new room full of hopeful newbies, I deal with one of the major pain points of PHP development — that PHP is worthless without a web server. I end up spending valuable time talking about Apache, when I should be talking about PHP.
I use Subversion in my day job as a technical writer for a software company. I use Ubuntu (9.10 Karmic Koala) and connect to the subversion repository via the shell. This is pretty much how the book was written, so all of the commands and tasks really fit my personal situation. Not only that, but the level of complexity (or lack thereof, if you’re a total subversion guru) is right at my level.
We are excited to announce that ActiveState is the proud recipient of an InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award! Komodo IDE has been named Best Python IDE, coming out on top against nine other Python IDEs tested. Komodo specifically got top points for ease of installation, documentation and ease of use–things that we pride ourselves on as well.
AMD starting to develop display processors to support ARM architectures is correct in terms of marketability and market potential, but its pace is too slow compared with Nvidia’s success with Tegra 2, according to Taiwan-based notebook makers.
Indecision by Haiti’s government and international donors’ single-minded pursuit of their own goals have crippled progress in earthquake-ravaged Haiti, a highly critical Oxfam report says.
“This has been a year of indecision and it has put Haiti’s recovery on hold,” said Roland Van Hauwermeiren, country director for the aid agency in Haiti.
The Obama administration said Friday it could support throwing out the disputed results of Haiti’s first-round presidential election if that step is proposed by a panel of experts examining the vote.
The international response to the earthquake that struck Haiti nearly a year ago was immediate and massive. The devastation was massive as well: The quake killed more than 200,000 people, injured more than 300,000, destroyed more than 250,000 homes and displaced more than 1.5 million people, 1 million of whom are still living in makeshift shelters in hundreds of camps.
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled [PDF] that Novell under the 1995 APA transferred to Santa Cruz “only the UNIXWARE product business and the portion of the UNIX source-code business that Novell retained following the Licensing Agreement — which did not include the UNIX trademark”, which went to X/Open.
Christina Taylor Green’s life has been ripped away from her. Her family and community will be devastated by the loss of this beautiful nine year old child. They need the opportunity to grieve in peace.
There is nothing stopping protesters from holding their own public memorial service, or rally. Then it would be an appropriate public thing.
Protesting at a private funeral can do is to further harm the people who are already harmed, exploiting the tragedy. Some people seek to do that. Even though it harms the public good.
Human society allows government the facility to enact laws so that it can support the public good. And sometimes it happens that governments do just that.
We are still being fed “The Governments version of the TRUTH” about incidents in Iraq. Sadly today’s “Media Mafia” seems to be content to let Big Brother control the flow of information.
A full one-third of women veterans report rape or attempted rape during their time in the military. The investigation into these incidents are often more like a cover-up story than a fully transparent investigation. A good example of the cloaked “government truth” type of investigation is illustrated by what happened in Pfc LaVena Johnson’s case.
I have just come back to France this Wednesday afternoon 22 December after being expelled in the middle of the night by the Israeli government, after being interrogated for 30 hours, detained and an attempt to forcefully ship me into planes, before I was able to meet with a female lawyer and warn the French Consulate.
Nick Clegg today promised to end virtual house arrest, contained in the current anti-terror control orders regime, but for the first time admitted that the government will retain restrictions for a small group of terror suspects who cannot be prosecuted in the British courts.
The former Labour home secretary John Reid, a supporter of control orders, said it was clear the deputy prime minister was backing off from plans to abolish the central thrust of the measures.
Throughout 2010 whistleblower website WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange were making headlines with the release of classified documents. Both the leaks and the controversy surrounding Assange have been covered extensively by the media.
I am writing to request that you undertake an immediate review to determine whether WikiLeaks could be designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in accordance with Section 210 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). In addition, I urge you to work with the Swedish government to determine the means by which Mr. Julian Assange can be brought to justice for his actions while recognizing and respecting Swedish sovereign law.
Since WikiLeaks released the US embassy cables on 28 November 2009 it has come under pressure on several fronts, from DDoS attacks to frozen bank accounts. We list the companies, politicians and organisations making life difficult for WikiLeaks and Julian Assange
WikiLeaks: Swedish government ‘hid’ anti-terror operations with America from Parliament by Andrew Hough, and Christopher Hope in the Telegraph.
The Swedish government asked American officials to keep intelligence-gathering “informal” to help avoid Parliamentary scrutiny, American diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks show.
In the complaint filed on 6th January, Pitchford alleges that Assange’s negligence has caused “hypertension”, “depression” and “living in fear of being stricken by another heart attack and/or stroke” as a result of living “in fear of being on the brink of another nucliar [sic] WAR”.
The wrecked Deepwater Horizon rig, ablaze 50 miles off Louisiana last week, is spilling an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil a day in what may be the US worst environmental disaster. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP
BP is more likely to escape the potentially ruinous charge of gross negligence, according to City analysts, after a powerful US commission blamed “systemic” causes for the Gulf of Mexico disaster.
Barack Obama’s national commission released part of its final report into the disaster last night on Wednesday night. The report, to be published next week, could influence several other parallel investigations into the spill that are yet to finish.
Japan and the US proposed to investigate and act against international anti-whaling activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as part of a political deal to reduce whaling in Antarctic waters.
Four confidential cables from the US embassy in Tokyo and the state department in Washington, released by WikiLeaks, show US and Japanese diplomats secretly negotiating a compromise agreement ahead of a key meeting last year of the International Whaling Commission, the body that regulates international whaling.
The American proposal would have forced Japan to reduce the number of whales that Japan killed each year in the Antarctic whale sanctuary in return for the legal right to hunt other whales off its own coasts. In addition, the US proposed to ratify laws that would “guarantee security in the seas” – a reference to acting against groups such as Sea Shepherd that have tried to physically stop whaling.
Dirty Business, the new documentary from the Centre for Investigative Journalism, began its nationwide screening tour last night in Berkeley, California, with the aim of debunking the myth of “clean coal” and kick-starting a debate on the future of energy in the US.
The film shows scarred mountains, abandoned family homes on remote hillsides, water courses toxic with sludge, respiratory fatalities and children whose growth has been stunted by pollution as some of the side effects of coal extraction and the power stations that burn it. And, of course, it shows the effect of coal combustion on global temperatures.
Gasoline prices are rising, averaging 41 cents higher a gallon than last year, so once again we are hearing the familiar refrain that this means we need to drill more.
A federal judge’s decision today to allow a state agency to move forward with a plan to open a Texas dump to radioactive waste from at least 36 states is bad news for Texans.
After a lengthy hearing, Judge Sam Sparks of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas voided a Dec. 30 temporary restraining order issued by a state court in Austin. That order would have kept the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission (TLLRWDCC) from voting Tuesday on a plan to allow a low-level waste dump near Andrews Texas to take radioactive waste from 36 or more states.
I believe that economic theory is merely a construct of “man” (not woman) and that there are alternative views of economics (all purporting to be an answer to something or other) but these concerns are not necessarily mutally exclusive. Man makes the theory; man makes the rules that govern the theory; and man changes the rules as he sees fit. Economics is not scientifically based in the way that the theory of evolution is. If it were (scientifically based) it would take into account the economic value of a woman who stays home and looks after her children. In fact, a good economy would pay that woman a living wage.
I do not think it matters if the average person like me thinks that if the deficit is huge that future generations will have to pay more taxes or that my check to pay my health care taxes is actually torn up by the government when they receive it. In fact, I get a great deal of satisfaction thinking that I am paying my health care expenses through the earnings from my own labor and by paying my taxes. I am also, incidentally, helping society as a whole as my tax dollars will assist those less well off to receive health care too. It is my commitment as a citizen of my country.
Higher unemployment and foreclosure rates, especially in South Atlantic and Mountain states, raised the nation’s economic stress in November, according to The Associated Press’ monthly analysis.
Federal prosecutors portrayed a California financial research firm as an incubator for insider trading as an eighth person connected to the company pleaded guilty Tuesday to securities fraud charges.
Big banks and other financial players are gearing up for new regulations in the next few weeks on the “Volcker rule” that are designed to curb “proprietary trading” by banks using their own cash without depriving the financial system of needed capital.
In recent months, as Goldman has fended off widespread accusations that it has become the leading example of the gambling culture permeating Wall Street — placing bets for its own profit rather than engaging in old-fashioned banking services — the company has insisted that trading made up no more than one-tenth of its revenues.
During a conference call last year, the firm’s chief financial officer, David Viniar, described the company’s private trades as comprising “10-ish type of percent” of its total revenues.
Barack Obama has begun a major overhaul of his inner circle, lending the White House a more business-friendly face with the appointment of an outsider banker, William Daley, as his chief of staff.
Daley continues the heavy Chicago bent of Obama’s White House. He is the son of the late Richard Daley, who was mayor of Chicago for two decades, and brother of the even longer-serving outgoing current mayor of Chicago, also Richard.
Today, with unemployment in almost the double digits and foreclosure unabated, President Obama decided that America needed more of the same. The President announced the appointment of JPMorgan Executive William M. Daley as White House Chief of Staff, replacing Rahm Emanuel. Tomorrow, news reports indicate that he will announce that Goldman Sachs adviser Gene B. Sperling will be appointed head of the National Economic Council, replacing Larry Summers.
If you get arrested in California, better hope there are no incriminating texts or e-mails or sensitive data stored on your phone.
On Monday, the California Supreme Court ruled that police in that state can search the contents of an arrested person’s cell phone.
Citing U.S. Supreme Court precedents, the ruling contends that “The loss of privacy upon arrest extends beyond the arrestee’s body to include ‘personal property … immediately associated with the person of the arrestee’ at the time of arrest.”
Seeing her frail figure, looking much older than her 38 years, one wonders “Why is she doing this?” This is a lost battle, because the state is stronger than she is. She could be India’s Aung San Suu Ki – but because India is a “democracy”, not a dictatorship, hers will never be an international cause célèbre. Irom Sharmila lives in Manipur, in the north-east, and has been on a fast-unto-death for the past decade as a protest against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. AFSPA was imposed in Manipur decades ago as a bulwark against insurgency.
Venezuelan lawmakers on Monday imposed broadcast-type regulations on the Internet, barring some types of online messages under measures that opponents say are a threat to freedom speech.
President Hugo Chavez’s allies in the National Assembly approved the revised “Social Responsibility Law,” which extends rules for broadcast media to the Internet.
It seems that Sony executives either hadn’t been paying attention to the reports, or simply discounted them as another easily-corrected security hole, as they had not released any type of statement regarding the discovery until today.
After reading the statement that Sony provided to Edge Magazine, it appears that it is more likely the latter scenario.
It looks like Sony has found its much-needed solution to the recent breaking of the DRM key in its PlayStation 3 console, and it’s not very technical: the company has filed suit against those responsible for highlighting its security ineptitude.
We have seen a lot of wasted energy in the legal system over the years but Sony takes the cake. They are suing folks who revealed Sony’s utterly inept use of encryption to lock down the PlayStation3. They also sought an injunction blocking release/distribution of the encryption key that was found by reverse engineering. On the farm, we called that closing the gate after the horse had left.
This apparently allows unauthorised parties to decompile, modify and renew the signature of the PS3′s firmware. It allegedly also allows any type of software to be signed for non-modified PS3 consoles, which causes this software to be recognised as legal and enables it to be played back on such consoles. The first PS3 games that were copied illegally, based on the hack, have allegedly already appeared and are circulating. The motion says that this has caused SCEA considerable economic damage and loss, although no figure was stipulated.
Also known as GeoHot, George Hotz, familiar to many from his iPhone and Playstation 3 hacks, has released source code for a piece of software which can allegedly be used to sign homebrew programs so that they will run on Sony’s Playstation 3. The code is reported to run under the current PS3 firmware version, version 3.55, modified using jailbreak software (direct download), also released by Hotz.
So maybe that is the only, real reason why “Save as WWF” is so touchy: the people they are trying to dismiss as one handful of software-obsessed nerds only gave even more reasons why this whole campaign was a bad idea from the start. Let’s just admit it and go on (but using, of course, Free Software to reduce the environmental impact of computing!).
Posted in Finance, Novell at 8:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“What we [Novell and Microsoft] agreed, which is true, is we’ll continue to try to grow Windows share at the expense of Linux. That’s kind of our job. But to the degree that people are going to deploy Linux, we want Suse Linux to have the highest percent share of that, because only a customer who has Suse Linux actually has paid properly for the use of intellectual property from Microsoft. And we took a quota, you could say, to help them sell so much Suse Linux. That’s part of the deal. We are willing to do the same deal with Red Hat and other Linux distributors, it’s not an exclusive thing. But after a few years of working on this problem, Novell actually saw the business opportunity, because there’s so many customers who say, ‘Hey look, we don’t want problems. We don’t want any intellectual property problem or anything else. There’s just a variety of workloads where we, today, feel like we want to run Linux. Please help us Microsoft and please work with the distributors to solve this problem, don’t come try to license this individually.’ So customer push drove us to where we got.”
Summary: Novell’s leadership was sacking many workers (even low-grade SUSE developers) while taking about $6 million in bonuses every year and now potentially more
The VAR Guy, who has friends at Novell and sometimes accepts payments from Novell to plant their ‘articles’, has gotten some inside information that nobody else pays attention to. He explains: “The list above includes executives with extensive channel experience — such as Senior VP and Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon, who serves as the company’s current channel chief; and Senior VP of Worldwide Sales Javier Colado, who previously served as channel chief.
“According to a table in the SEC filing, certain executives could receive cash payments if the merger closes on March 9, 2011 and their positions are terminated on such date. In that scenario, CEO Ronald Hovsepian would receive a $6.85 million lump some cash payment plus certain health and dental coverage and 401K matching contributions. Also, Channel Chief John Dragoon would receive a $1.95 million lump sum if his position is terminated March 9; and former Channel Chief Javier Colado would receive a $2.39 million million lump sum cash payment if his position is terminated March 9.”
Is this the reward for having a company destroyed? And for passing a lot of patents to an abusive monopolist that threatens Novell products? This makes no sense. The company itself seems like it’s going into the ashtray, at least some major parts of it.
As Novell and Attachmate continue to perform the ritual mating dance of corporate acquisition, Linux and open source community members are holding their breath, waiting to see what will happen to the SUSE Linux and openSUSE product lines.
In the midst of this, one question seems to be missing: What will happen to NetWare?
To get an idea of where NetWare might be going, it would be a good idea of finding out where the status of the old NetWare product line, now known as Novell’s Open Enterprise Server (OES).
[...]
In some respects, the migration plan to OES is working. “…[M]ore than 75% of current NetWare-Open Enterprise Server customers have upgraded their systems to Open Enterprise Server on Linux,” Germanides indicated.
But what will AttachMSFT [sic] do with SUSE and OES? AttachMSFT has no history of committing to free/open source software and this is mostly fine given that Novell’s products portfolio is predominantly proprietary. To use proof from the past month, Novell’s PR team is helping SAP [1, 2, 3] (see our SAP wiki page), helping FogComputingofcourse, and delivering more proprietary software while citing Gartner
New releases from Novell are also of proprietary software, e.g. ZENworks 11 [1, 2, 3]. Novell once again gets ridiculed for concentrating on Vista 7 in ZENworks 11:
In the company press statement the word ‘Windows 7′ appears more than 4 times, whereas Linux pops-up only once, which made me wonder if its a Novell press release or from the new ‘proxy’ owner of Novell technologies — Microsoft.
In later posts we are going to give more new examples where Novell promotes proprietary software, even its competition’s. It wasn’t always that way; the management did a poor job and it now rewards itself for this. █
Summary: The regulatory process regarding CPTN in Germany is hindered by a Microsoft manoeuvre which avoids contact with the German Federal Cartel Office
SOME SEEMINGLY-conflicting reports either confirm or refute the claims we covered the other day. It seems to be a bit of both and while AttachMSFT [sic] looks for a loan with which to buy Novell, it seems likely that Microsoft (MSFT) will get Novell’s patents after all.
Sources close to Novell told me that was indeed the case. The CPTN group will be re-filing to obtain the patents. Their plans haven’t changed a bit. A Microsoft representative confirmed that CPTN was still planning on buying the patents. The PR rep said, “This is a purely procedural step necessary to provide time to allow for review of the proposed transaction.”
Now, this is not to say that the Novell deal is sure to happen. I find it more than a little odd that Attachmate was still looking for just over a billion dollars to close the deal in late December. Microsoft is already helping Attachmate buy Novell and Attachmate was already getting a steal of a deal on Novell.
As a consequence, if the sale of Novell’s patents to CPTN is allowed to go ahead, this will significantly increase the legal threat level for Free Software.
This is why FSFE is extremely concerned about the sale of Novell’s patents to CPTN. We have shared our concerns with the German competition authorities on December 22, 2010.
CPTN apparently withdrew its filing with the German authorities on December 30. This could mean that the companies behind CPTN are changing their strategy, or that they’re merely reformulating their application. It definitely doesn’t mean that the danger is over.
The competition authorities should only allow this deal if there are effective measures in place to prevent the patents in question from being used against Free Software in an attempt to restrict competition. As an effective measure, CPTN Holdings should be required to make the patents in question available under conditions which allow their use in Free Software, including in programs distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL) and other copyleft licenses.
But IT World has pointed out that this relates only to Germany and that CPTN continues to exist as a US limited liability company registered with the Secretary of State for Delaware (see here).
Further, Microsoft has told TechFlash that the withdrawal from Germany is a “purely procedural step necessary to provide time to allow for review of the proposed transaction.”
“Procedural” indeed.
Such is the concern over the deal that in December, the OSI lodged an official complaint with the Federal Cartel Office, asking regulators to investigate the sale of the patents.
OSI president Michael Tiemann announced the OSI’s request to German regulators in a blog post on December 29, the day before CPTN quietly wrapped up operations.
Going back a month or so, we have this analysis which discusses Microsoft’s partners/allies too:
Novell’s Patents Bought By Microsoft, Apple, EMC, & Oracle (From ZDNet) This news raises even more questions about the Novell acquisition. Is VMware really out of the picture? Is Apple getting into the enterprise space? Will Microsoft even get the lion’s share of the IP?
Android will be a potential target of CPTN, as a former Novell employee (Zonker) helps explain in a new column. Google also seems concerned about Nortel patents, thus showing everything that is wrong about the patent system especially once companies implode. To quote this recent report about it:
Apple, Nokia and Google are all expected to bid for Nortel’s huge patents hoard. The winner could help decide the licensing structures for LTE.
LTE deployments and trials may be stacking up, but one significant aspect remains fraught with uncertainty – the patent position.
In previous generations of mobile technology, individual IPR holders might argue bitterly over rights and royalties, but the process was well understood – and took place strictly behind closed doors, with bilateral agreements.
In other news, there is another investigation which seeks to block the Novell deal [1, 2] and it is covered in a press release that says in the beginning:
Novell Inc. announced on November 22, 2010 that it had agreed to sell the company to Attachment Corporation for $6.10 per share for a total transaction value of $2.2 billion. Attachmate is owned by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo. In conjunction with the sale, Novell announced that it has agreed to sell certain intellectual property to CPTN Holdings LLC for $450 million in cash.
Levi & Korsinsky LLP is going to challenge this deal, so maybe it’s premature to say that Novell is sold. It is also possible that Microsoft won’t get Novell’s patents at the end. █
Posted in Bill Gates at 7:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Insisting on controlling the use of one’s gift of money is another low form of philanthropy. Today’s givers want to control others’ lives.”
–Dr. Diane Ravitch
Summary: Critique of some investments from the Gates Foundation, including an acknowledgement of conflicts of interest
PEOPLE who were born greedy often stay that way and people who disregard the law have almost nothing to lose if they do that again. There are legal rules and ethical rules, although some obviously intersect. Corporations typically work hard to remove legislation which limits a corporation’s freedom (the word “freedom” is routinely misused here to mean “deregulation”), whereas people look for stronger legislation that can protect them from corporations, which of course deserve no rights because they are not people with emotions or nerves. This business philosophy debate is one we’ll return to later when we heavily cover patent news, but for the time being it ought to be emphasised that the Gates Foundation is not a person anymore; it has balance sheets, it does not pay tax, and it is run by a selected, authoritarian group of people (i.e. hierarchically structured) such that unethical people who have had trouble with the law (e.g. Tachi, Gates) call the shots and they are tied to the corporations they came from or invest in. It would be short-sighted to suggest that these people will stand on the roof of buildings and scatter money, metaphorically speaking. One must check where money goes and what for. There is usually a Return on Investment (RoI), which is possible because of diversification in the foundation — that is — a wide range of subjects are intruded, not with a diversity of research paths in them but only one monolithic path that suffocates the rest. People have complained that the Gates Foundation dampens their area of research once it enters; essentially, those who do not explore the same path as Gates et al. struggle to get funding. It grants Gates and any company he associates himself with a monopoly. It is no joking matter and the issue came up in some respectable newspapers which Gates had not bought like typically does.
Rather than ask involved/affected people what they think is right and then offer money to get it done, the Gates Foundation typically makes the decision internally and then funnels money into the obedient branches, in order to get the job done (e.g. feeding the Africans by making them dependent on Monsanto, which Gates Foundation makes profit from as an investor). In the case of schools, Gates is habitually accused of “bullying” schools for management to change/operate the way he wants them to, otherwise they will receive no funds (in some cases, doors revolve, e.g. new school management is installed by Gates). It’s reverse blackmail and there are strings attached. As Diane Ravitch recently put it in the context of education, “[i]nsisting on recognition for philanthropy (cf. Mark Zuckerberg) is the lowest form of philanthropy. It is ego-driven.” Gates Keepersnotes that there are strings attached even when Gates throws a bone to the homeless, based on this report.
Tough luck, homeless people. Without matching funds you will not see the benefits of this Gates Foundation grant.
The article also notes: “For every $1 provided by the foundation, another $2.50 has to be raised from government and other sources.”
More importantly: “For the first two years of the program, up to $1.3 million will be available from the Gates Foundation. The necessary $3.2 million in matching funds, though, have not been found.”
Several studies including one conducted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2007 revealed that the Philippines is No. 6 in the list of top countries having the biggest illegal trade of tobacco.
Tina Rosenberg raves about kangaroo care and blogs twice about it. She is compelled to mention USAID and Gates Foundation funding for this south to north intervention. But the Gates Keepers get no hits when they search the Gates Foundation website using the term ‘kangaroo’. Hm? Does the Gates Foundation fund kangaroo care or doesn’t it?
It’s probably this project and regarding USAID, we wrote about it many times in relation to Gates Foundation staff which moved there [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. This gives the foundation more diplomatic control, which it cashes out using politicians as we noted this morning.
Whether we continue to cover the Gates Foundation on a regular basis or not, we urge all readers to think sceptically and remember who funds journalists that specialise in this area, as well as other areas. Coverage in Techrights is driven by interest and concern, not anger, so those who imply that Gates Foundation critics must be hateful/jealous/insane are resorting to nothing but ad dominem attacks, which nullifies their argument/s immediately. █
Seeding fake consensus using an echo chamber tactic
Summary: One by one the Gates Foundation buys a particular segment of media outlets from all across the world, ensuring that they mirror the stories told by Gates Foundation PR
It is easy to see what is happening here. Even philanthropy.com, which has spent a lot of its space/time glamourising Bill Gates (only to receive antagonism in the comments for one-sidedness), eventually published: “Why Is the Gates Foundation Giving So Much Money to Journalists?”
A $1.5-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to ABC News has led some observers to wonder why the philanthropy is helping a for-profit news organization.
The grant is also raising further questions about the Seattle foundation’s growing involvement in journalism.
The financial commitment from Gates, announced last week, is helping ABC News conduct a yearlong report on global health, a primary focus of the foundation’s work. The news outlet is putting up $4.5-million.
But Marc Cooper, a journalist and faculty member at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, says it’s “grotesque” that ABC News—which is owned by Disney and reportedly pays anchor Diane Sawyer a salary of at least $12-million—is taking money from Gates.
He also questions why the Gates foundation is giving that money to ABC News, rather than directly to the health projects that ABC will be discussing in its reporting.
As Mr. Cooper then notes, this criticism “doesn’t even address the possible issue of conflict of interest.” He asks: Will the ABC News coverage look into possible corruption or inefficiencies in Gates-backed projects?
Another mysteriously-named Web site, nonprofitquarterly.org, posted “What Do Donors Want?”
“What do donors want?” seemed to be the question behind a series of grants that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently awarded to two private consulting firms to encourage more philanthropy, particularly among high-net-worth individuals.
It’s about the “pledge”, which is a gimmick that helps billionaires avoid tax and bad PR (amongst other benefits). We explained this earlier today, in relation to Buffett as well. Powerful men (usually men and their wives) increasing adopt the same strategy and those whom they fund to conduct research have implicit pressure on them to please the finding sources. It is a real problem in general, also when companies fund research associates and Ph.D. students.
The Columbia Journalism Review recently weighed in on the Gates Foundation and a critic explained how control of the press enables Gates to “toy with African farmers or Indian sex workers” (we covered this today in this and that post, respectively). The article was summarised in here:
It has been two weeks since the Columbia Journalism Review (their motto: Strong Press, Strong Democracy) published two articles on the Gates Foundation grants to mainstream mass media. Robert Fortner covers the issues very well. Some journalists come out looking more than a bit sleazy.
The Foundation is messing with the wrong people. You can toy with African farmers or Indian sex workers or even vaccine scientists who don’t have much of a voice. But some mass media people will raise their voices loud and clear.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on the author’s personal blog in July. With a few updates, we are running it as the first in a two part series exploring the implications of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s increasingly large and complex web of media partnerships. This part deals with a partnership between the PBS NewsHour and the Gates Foundation formed in 2008. Part two, running tomorrow, will examine a partnership with the Guardian, a British newspaper, announced in September, and one with ABC News announced on Wednesday.
How did PBS NewsHour correspondent Ray Suarez catch the global health bug? Simple, he said in a recent talk answering that exact question. Suarez explained: “The executive producer of the NewsHour, Linda Winslow, came into my office and asked me if I was interested in covering global health for the program and I said ‘yes.’ ”
But the actual reason is, following that conversation, Suarez wrote a proposal for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation resulting in $3.6 million of funding for NewsHour programming on global health. The Gates Foundation also sponsored the event at which Suarez was speaking. The moderator came from the foundation too, posing questions and selecting others from the audience, the funder interviewing a journalist whose global health education it had financed.
Suarez has heard gripes about Gates Foundation funding before. He defended the arrangement as giving an under-reported subject increased coverage while preserving “complete editorial independence.” Continued Suarez: “The foundation doesn’t hold the purse strings, encouraging some stories and discouraging others. And we don’t get approval before we embark on projects.”
[...]
In October 2008, the same time it awarded the NewsHour funding, the Gates Foundation granted the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) $2 million with a remit to “inform policy making and program development and implementation” for U.S. global health policy. The Kaiser Family Foundation doesn’t specify precisely how it uses these funds and publishes no annual reports on its website. Concerning its spending and governance, the KFF website only alludes to the possibility of such funding:
With an endowment of over half a billion dollars, Kaiser has an operating budget of over $40 million per year. The Foundation operates almost exclusively with its own resources, though we do occasionally receive funds from grant-making foundations, primarily to expand our global programs.
This is the second in a two-part series about the implications of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s increasingly large and complex web of media partnerships. The first part, published on the author’s personal blog in July and cross-posted with updates to CJR yesterday, described a two-year-old partnership with PBS NewsHour. This installment examines more recent agreements with the Guardian and ABC News.
The independence of the Guardian’s global health journalism has a new guarantor: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Manchester, U.K.-based paper recently announced a global development section co-sponsored by the foundation. Such non-profit funding deals are not unusual in the media today and, like many others, the partnership agreement states that the Guardian has editorial independence.
The Gates Foundation is not just any foundation, however. It is the largest charitable foundation in the world, and its influence in the media is growing so vast there is reason to worry about the media’s ability to do its job. With Gates’s support, the Guardian aims “to hold governments, institutions and NGOs accountable for the implementation of the United Nations millennium development goals,” according to its press release. The site unveiling came in the run up to a September U.N. meeting to assess progress on the goals, which are supposed to be met by 2015.
[...]
Take the journal The Lancet, which, in May 2009, published an editorial, which asserted that “the Gates Foundation has received little external scrutiny.” The same issue featured two papers that found fault with various aspects of the foundation. The Lancet sought a reply from Gates Foundation but met only a stony silence: “The Lancet was sorry that the Foundation declined our invitation to respond,” concluded the editorial. “Now is an inflection point in the Foundation’s history, a moment when change is necessary.”
One year later, it is The Lancet which seems to have changed. In May, The Lancet assisted in installing the Gates-funded Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) as de facto arbiter of progress on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), knocking UNICEF from its official perch.
The Lancet co-sponsored a symposium in May with IHME on maternal and child health at the Kaiser Family Foundation. The day before the event, The Lancet published an IHME study measuring progress on the child mortality MDG. The study quickly leapt to New York Times headlines. Last week, the UN groups published their figures immediately ahead of the MDG meeting. The New York Times turned a deaf ear. They’d heard it already. As the Guardian reported: “[T]he timing of this report is a no-brainer. But, interestingly, the numbers are not new. The Institute of Health Metrics in Seattle got there first.”
The IHME symposium also drew a lot of criticism, however, when it invited potential detractors to a discussion of child and maternal mortality and then sprung on them a new, extremely complicated paper (with a 219-page web appendix) and offered them a chance to comment the next day. According to symposium panelist Ed Bos of the World Bank:
The symposium and the Lancet article [on child mortality] by Rajaratnam were of course planned to happen around the same time, and while I knew that this was coming, the article was not shared, even when requested, until the evening before. Instead of the full article, I received a one-page summary of the findings, on which I based my comments.
There is no conspiracy. Just poorly thought-out programming on the part of the Gates Foundation.
Here is a very illuminating interview of Gates media people by Tom Paulson, a Seattle mass media insider who is transparent and courageous. He asks the difficult questions, but the media people, predictably, duck most of them. Too bad. This would be a good chance for them to show that they have considered the difficult issues instead of only spinning them.
Interesting to see that Kate James thinks that British newspapers write about development because they have a colonial past. Why then did the Gates Foundation fund one of the UKs most important papers, the Guardian? Did the Guardian need money despite the British colonial past?
The Gates Foundation loves metrics. How do they measure editorial independence? Or do they just deny that it can be an issue?
Control of the press facilitates mind control. So again we feel compelled to share the video below. The Columbia Journalism Review‘s motto is: “Strong Press, Strong Democracy”. By “strong” they don’t mean bribed/commissioned; independence is required. █
Summary: Africa is debated in Rupert Murdoch’s rags, wherein the African population is kindly asked to kneel for Bill and accept his plans for the continent
A FEW days ago we showed that the Gates Foundationcontinues to buy the media in Africa (there is also a translation into Spanish). The “rich uncle from America” syndrome means that they “know” what’s best for other people and insist on using money to promote the plan which they consider to be “best”. See the links at the very bottom for additional background.
In order to distance itself — at least somewhat — from the decision-making process, the Gates Foundation creates all sorts of organisations such as AGRA, which we last covered some days ago. To say that some shell called “AGRA” manages African’s agriculture would simply sound better than saying that Bill Gates manages African’s agriculture (for the benefit of Gates-backed companies like Monsanto).
Techrights is troubled not just because this strategy is deceitful but also because Gates bought the media which could potentially expose the blunder and bring it to more people’s attention (instead, it spoon-feeds Gates’ PR). In today’s post we add to our record some of the latest articles on the subject, accumulated gradually since late October.
“It’s an Orwellian sort of language because Gates relates to BREAD in the intellectual monopolies sense.”The Gates Foundation has this programme called BREAD, which we covered here before. It’s an Orwellian sort of language because Gates relates to BREAD in the intellectual monopolies sense. This latest headline is stating this quite explicitly: “NSF, Gates Foundation policies on sharing data and intellectual property in agricultural basic research grant program (BREAD)”
Do intellectual monopolies belong here at all? Non-producing countries that rest on their laurels love to use intellectual monopolies in order to keep Africa in the dark ages and, with very limited success, hinder the Chinese revolution. China has gained a lot of leverage over the West in recent years and we can give some news on the subject by looking at yesterday’s/this week’s papers which say:
At issue is the imbalance in their financial relationship. China’s central bank said Tuesday that Beijing’s holdings of foreign cash and securities amount to $2.85 trillion – a jump of 20 percent over the year before – despite Chinese promises to try to balance its trade and investment relations with the United States and other countries.
A state-owned Chinese bank says its New York City branch has begun offering accounts denominated in China’s tightly controlled yuan in a new move to expand the currency’s global reach.
China too has begun exploiting Africa, but that’s another subject. We’ll cover this shortly when discussing the purpose of Chinese patents.
If there is a point which is important to get across here, always check what bodies that are called names like BREAD, AGRA, or GAVI actually do, who founded them, and who funds them. Therein lie many answers. Now that Gates is paying millions of dollars to All Africa (major news site), do not look at the corporate press for answers. Cowardice and self-censorship are part of the sponsorship.
Here is a well thought-out piece from an African wondering where the Africans were in the Gates/Ridley debate and making some important points. Maybe Bill’s intern who wrote his piece was African.
Gates Keepers alleges that an intern must have composed Bill’s article in this Murdoch-hosted debate about Africa [1, 2]. Cherish this beautiful example where Africans get treated like a toddlers and white Westerners patronise the very same people whom they exploit, playing softball in Murdoch’s ‘press’ (one billionaire helping another, as the implicit rule goes). There is also the obligatory CNN propaganda, but it’s not as classic as the one over at Murdoch’s.
Gates Keepers laughed when Bill tried to treat a journalist to lunch. Doesn’t he know any better? Journalist pay for their own lunches. That way they cannot be bought for the price of a burger. Maybe the Gates Foundation funding of journalists is just lunch writ large.
Finally, Gideon Rachman’s trenchant observations on Bill’s style of discourse are brilliant. One gets the impression that the lunch gave Rachman heartburn.
The same person later wrote about the “last hurrah”, which some call “Bill Gates’ second empire” (mirrored in [1, 2]). No empire has managed to spread to so many continents and Rachman calls it internationalism (“globalisation” without the negative connotation). To quote:
Once inside the portals, the Gates Foundation feels like a cross between a United Nations agency and a high-tech start up. In true Silicon Valley style, nobody ever wears a tie and the staff is cheerily multinational. Yet rather than being computer geeks, the foundation’s people are more likely to be medics, or experts on seed technology – and to have last worked in government, or agricultural research, or a teaching hospital, rather than in the corporate world.
The promotional material and PowerPoint presentations shown to visitors have all the bright professionalism of a sales graph for a Microsoft product. But here the graphs will typically illustrate the foundation’s progress in reducing infant mortality around the world rather than success in shifting the latest version of Microsoft Office.
[...]
In that sense, the foundation is behaving like a business, looking for neglected niches in the market. But, perhaps above all, the Gates Foundation reflects the founder’s restless intellectual energy – and his determination to bring the optimistic vision, drive and flair for technology that created Microsoft into entirely new areas.
[...]
At a troubled time for the US and the western world, it is difficult to leave the Gates Foundation’s offices without feeling a little more positive. It exemplifies a very west-coast blend of optimism about the future, internationalism, and belief in technological progress.
Yet I left Seattle wondering whether the foundation also represents a last hurrah for a world that is now passing. In the old world, ideas, money and expertise flowed from the western world into the developing world. Over the next decades, as Bill Gates himself would happily acknowledge, much of the dynamism is likely to come from the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
The “last hurrah for a world that is now passing,” eh? Whose hurrah is it? We’ll close with this rhetorical question and a quote from China. █
“Gates has created a huge blood-buying operation that only cares about money, not about people.”
Summary: Admission of problems inside the Gates Foundation, from none other than the lavish Bill himself
THE POWER games of the Gates Foundation are not amusing. They are hurtful to a lot of US teachers for example. People’s expertise and reputation are being ignored as a plutocrat takes over fields that he simply does not grasp and cannot understand. Economics would be one example because Obama takes advice from Gates rather than from Economics professors.
To Gates’ credit, he recently admitted that his misguided PR+investment scheme was “naïve”. To quote The New York Times:
In an interview, Mr. Gates sounded somewhat chastened, saying several times, “We were naïve when we began.”
Here is an informercial interview with Melinda, one of the cochairs of the Gates Foundation. One ‘reader’ asked about the Gates Foundation view of countries in conflict and Melinda just didn’t answer the question! She is extremely practiced, or well briefed, on not answering difficult questions during interviews.
Interestingly enough, Tom Paulson has really decided to explore the Gates Foundation. Being the experienced journalist which he is (but not yet bribed by Gates), his recent output is worth following:
Bill & Melinda Gates: The world is, in fact, getting better
Bill and Melinda Gates want people to stop being such gripes and start paying attention to success.
Yeah, yeah, it’s easy to poke fun at that kind of talk – especially from the super-rich.
But some things, in fact, are getting better. And unlike most of the world’s super-rich, the Gateses are actually “investing” in making the world a better place. They also want to convince skeptics why this is actually a good investment for all of us.
That was the point of their “Living Proof” event, webcast live today from London.
The event was done in collaboration with the ONE campaign, an organization co-founded by Bono which advocates on matters of global health and poverty — and which, apparently, doesn’t like to answer questions from the media regarding its finances, but that’s another story.
(Oops, there I go again being a typical journalist and focusing on the negative.)
That is a bit of sarcasm of course. As for Bono’s scandalous organisation, we wrote about it at the time.
One of the best analysts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on the blogging scene is Tom Paulson on his Humanosphere. In this article he appears to be happy about the good news, which turns out not to be new at all, that Bill and Melinda are giving out on air. The world is getting better we all agree. But Bill and Melinda have set out to show that ‘aid’ is contributing to it. This they have failed to do.
Child mortality rates are not necessarily dropping because of aid. Bill offers no graphs to show greater declines in countries with more aid. Or any proof that aid had anything to do with declines in child mortality.
Melinda is particularly insistent that smaller families are caused by lower child mortality. She keeps repeating this simplistic argument. Smaller families in countries undergoing demographic transitions are not simply caused by declines in child mortality. Aid has not been very successful in bringing down child mortality but has been enormously successful in bringing family planning methods to poorer countries.
The decline in polio is partly caused by aid. Its continued persistence may also be caused by aid that funds ineffective campaigns or facilitates movement of people.
Keep up the good work, Tom. And please don’t be fooled when Bill and Melinda feed you a bunch of well-packaged crap.
In a later post we will show that Paulson too is concerned about the Gates Foundation’s hijack of the media which covers topic of interest to it. █
I have discovered that the functionality implemented in pelican_config is not working on v2.3. For most people, this is no problem. For those of you who would like to user permanent storage, use the older method – there’s a prompt at boot time. For pelican_config users, mount your $PELHOME by hand.
Content is available under CC-BY-SA