06.06.10
Posted in News Roundup at 8:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux rules supercomputers. It’s vitally important to servers. And, Linux is making gains on the desktop. Where Linux is really going to shine in the next twelve months though is in devices: tablets, smartphones, and TVs.
For example, more than a dozen Apple iPad-like tablets made their first appearance at the Computex computer show in Taipei, Taiwan. The vast majority of these devices run Android Linux or other embedded Linuxes such as the latest MeeGo embedded Linux.
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The full Altix UV 1000 machine, which first lashes together 256 blades into a fat tree configuration and then links these clusters together in an 8×8 2D torus, for a total of 16,384 cores, will be available by the end of the calendar year, delivering 74.3 teraflops in a global shared memory system running Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and SGI’s ProPack extensions. Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux is now supported on the Altix boxes, too.
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What’s remarkable about this analysis is that Google is forced by circumstance to live in all three worlds simultaneously. So the early-stage work on the Chrome OS runs into a media that is also looking at the mid-market efforts of Android and the mass market monetization of the base service and getting muddled.
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Applications
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If you’ve been looking for a nice WebKit based web browser for Linux, Midori is a browser worth checking out. Although it’s still in early stages of development (the current version is 0.2.5,) it provides a fairly complete set of features for a web browser.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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LIN: What will take Ubuntu to the next level?
Shuttleworth: In terms of looking forward and breaking into new areas of production, we are seeing sort of a real shift in the way people think about at Ubuntu in two different environments.
On the consumer front, we’re seeing a shift in the way people think about alternative platforms to Windows amongst the PC companies. It used to be a kiss of death to present yourself as a genuine alternative to Windows. But the success of the Web and the success of Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) have really made the PC companies think that it is possible to offer something that is perceived to be valuable even if it is not Windows.
So we’re seeing a rapid ramp-up of the number of PCs that ship around the world with Ubuntu, which is good for us. And those are going to folks who are not Linux enthusiasts and are not Linux specialists. So it has really raised the bar on the quality and crispness of the experience you have to deliver in order to keep those people happy.
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Linux is great — if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t, Linux, like any operating system, can be a pain. Enter Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux. On June 7th, Canonical will start offering new Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Desktop “Ubuntu Advantage” business support services.
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Android
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We have all seen the Google Nexus One, HTC Desire, Legend, Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 and plenty of other Android smart phones and by all means, we are very much impressed. But the availability of the open source platform does not end this year with these handsets alone. In fact, several new smart phones are already on the way.
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As per the usual chain of events, spy-shots lead to real products—in this case, the Motorola Flipout. Running Android 2.1, it comes in a quirky little swivel-design similar to the Kin One.
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So, don’t get too worked up over what comes out of Computex. They will be about the hardware, but it takes more than hardware to sell hardware. It will be months from now before we’ve digested this show and the pad phenomenon.
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Sub-notebooks
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Google’s focus is on netbooks at the moment, though today’s announcement shows that Chrome OS will not be mutually exclusive to the netbook market but notebooks and fully-fledged laptops, perhaps desktops also.
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Tablets
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If you were bummed when Microsoft pulled the plug on it’s Courier project, you might be interested in the Kno, another dual-screen e-reader/tablet that debuted at All Things Digital’s D8 conference yesterday.
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HP has clearly been recalibrating its tablet plans and Microsoft killed off its Courier project.
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Enterprise IT departments should revisit their application development strategies to follow some of the approaches used by Facebook and Twitter, argues RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady in a recent blog post. Specifically, he says you should invest application development resources only in applications that differentiate your business from your competitors, and rely on open-sourcing and permissive licensing to extend your reach and your development dollars. I believe he’s right.
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In his talk, Tiemman applies the lessons of Darwin to Deming toward transforming the model of IT using the open source way. Adaptability leads to reuse, which leads to sustainability.
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I tend to agree with the NY Times article that some woman tend to migrate to the human side of IT. Not that we are here to be the mothers/nurturers of the team, but I chose to work with the end users of OSS instead of developing code. I get more satisfaction from that, and does it make me less of a contributing member of the FOSS community?
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Mozilla
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Web developers already have localStorage, which is used for client side storage of simple key-value pairs. This alone doesn’t address the needs of many web applications for structured storage and indexed data. Mozilla is working on a structured storage API with indexing support called IndexedDB, and we will have some test builds in the next few weeks. This can be compared to the WebDatabase API implemented by several browsers that uses a subset of the allowable language of SQLite. Mozilla has chosen to not implement WebDatabase for various reasons discussed in this post.
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SaaS
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The Mountain View, Calif.-based WSO2 was founded by members of the Apache Software Foundation’s Web services community, and its products are based on Apache technologies. The WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) is based on Apache Axis2, and the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is based on Apache Synapse.
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Oracle/Solaris
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On behalf of the Nexenta project, I’d like to announce the availability of the Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 RC1.
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Healthcare
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Dr. John D. Halamka, is Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a practicing emergency physician, and holds several other positions, which are listed on his profile at his Geek Doctor blog. According to Halamka, his datacenter “holds a couple of petabytes of healthcare data for 3 million patients, and the entire infrastructure is run on Red Hat technologies. So I have multiple datacenters, multiple clusters of Linux servers, and we haven’t had downtime in a couple of years. I think the answer today is, no CIO in healthcare is afraid of open source.”
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BSD
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Following the September 2009 announcement that version 1.7 of DesktopBSD would be the “last and final release”, a small group of German developers have signed on to continue the distributions development. DesktopBSD is based on FreeBSD using the KDE desktop environment and is similar to PC-BSD which also focuses on a desktop version of the BSD variant.
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Government
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Tightly guarded secrets may be a thing of the past for government officials or space researchers as more industries adopt open-source practices, presenters at a conference said Friday in Seoul.
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As the UK’s new Government settles into power the direction in which it is taking ICT policy is becoming clear, the only question is how the admittedly great ideas will be implemented in practice.
Much informed analysis has indentified that despite the counter-intuitive pairing of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, they are in fact closely compatible in many policy areas.
ICT policy is one such area, and by far the majority of the excellent policy ideas from both party’s manifestoes have made it through to official UK Government policy.
Let’s start with a lightning tour of the big picture. Austerity is, of course, set to become the watchword for the coalition, and with Public Sector ICT spending running at over £14,500,000,000 per annum and rising some might say austerity is long overdue in this area.
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Openness
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Since arriving, we’ve managed to mobilize small teams of Gulf Coast residents, working with local nonprofit Louisiana Bucket Brigade. Thanks to the fishermen and charter boat captains whose livelihood is at stake, we’ve been able to get teams out on boats almost every day. Taken from balloons at as high as 1500 feet, our photography is of higher resolution and greater coverage than much of what the press has, and we’re now coordinating a nationwide effort to stitch the imagery into map overlays, which will be viewable in Google Earth as well as more traditional GIS tools. Most importantly, the data we are collecting is released into the public domain and is available for free here.
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Open Data
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Traditionally, transit agencies are the sole source of bus information for consumers. Agencies build their own countdown signs, launch their own websites, and build their own smartphone applications to get information to customers. Following in the footsteps of the NWS, MassDOT and the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) decided to open data for software developers for the first time in September 2009. Within two months, six trip planning applications had been built by developers including websites, a desktop widget, and smartphone apps. In Robin’s words, “These were as good or better than anything we would have built on our own.”
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The government has published millions of public spending data as part of what David Cameron says are efforts to lift its “cloak of secrecy”.
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But of course, that’s what always happens. Every increase in freedom to create or consume media, from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid. This fear dates back to at least the invention of movable type.
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Science
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Children with autism have a different chemical fingerprint in their urine than non-autistic children, according to new research published tomorrow in the print edition of the Journal of Proteome Research.
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Environment
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Tony Hayward, BP’s embattled chief executive, will risk incurring further wrath in the US over the Gulf oil spill tomorrow by defying calls from politicians to halt more than $10bn (£6.8bn) worth of payouts due to shareholders this year.
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New documents released over the weekend to the New York Times show that both BP and federal regulators at the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service had plenty of warning that the drilling operation at the Macondo well site was plauged with problems—dating as far back as June 2009. But despite known issues with the well and the blowout preventers, the operation continued until the April 20 blast.
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BP, struggling to maintain its image while taking responsibility for the worst oil disaster in U.S. history, has hired someone new to head its American public relations operation: Anne Womack-Kolton, the former campaign press secretary for Vice President Dick Cheney.
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A quarter of the land area of Earth is turning into desert. Three quarters of the planet’s savannas and grasslands are degrading. And because the main activity on rangelands is grazing livestock, on which 70% of the world’s poorest people depend, grassland deterioration therefore causes widespread poverty.
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That import, Christopher Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, had given a rousing speech to a crowd at Bethel University in Minnesota, near where I live.
His speech was on global warming and his style was convincing and irreverent. Anyone listening to him was given the impression that global warming was not happening, or that if it did happen it wouldn’t be so bad, and scientists who warned about it were part of a vast conspiracy.
I know a thing or two about global warming. I have worked in the field of heat transfer and fluid mechanics and I have published more than 80 papers on these topics.
I am a university professor and also an active consultant in the energy and environment industry. What I heard in his talk surprised me.
Monckton cited scientist after scientist whose work “disproved” global warming.
He contended that polar bears are not really at risk (in fact they do better as weather warms); projections of sea level rise are a mere 6cm; Arctic ice has not declined in a decade; Greenland is not melting; sea levels are not rising; ocean temperatures are not increasing; medieval times were warmer than today; ocean acidification is not occurring; and global temperatures are not increasing.
If true, these conclusions would be welcome. But there is a problem with this kind of truth – it is not made by wishing.
So I began a journey of investigation (the full results of which you can view here).
I actually tracked down the articles and authors that Monckton cited. What I discovered was incredible, even to a scientist who follows the politics of climate change. I found that he had misrepresented the science.
For instance, Monckton’s claims that “Arctic sea ice is fine, steady for a decade” made reference to Alaskan research group (IARC).
I wrote to members of IARC and asked whether this was true. Both their chief scientist and director confirmed that Monckton was mistaken.
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The United States is in danger of losing its ability to monitor key climate variables from satellites, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.
The country’s Earth-observing satellite program has been underfunded for a decade, and the impact of the lack of funds is finally hitting home. The GAO report found that capabilities originally slated for two new Earth-monitoring programs, NPOESS and GOES-R, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Defense have been cut and adequate plans to replace them do not exist.
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Eschel Rhoodie transported device used to detonate atomic bombs on flight from Israel in mid-70s, say journalists
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Two renowned South African journalists have revealed that Eschel Rhoodie, the apartheid government’s information minister who played a central role in establishing military ties to Israel, privately described in 1979 how he had transported “the trigger” as hand luggage on a flight from Tel Aviv. But they say they were unable to publish the account at the time because of censorship and the former minister’s concerns for his safety.
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Finance
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Many are waiting for Warren Buffett to speak out, for the first time, about his investment in Moody’s Investment Services before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission today. (He is due up at 11:30 a.m. and hasn’t provided the panel with any written testimony.)
But for those closely following the role of the credit raters in the financial crisis, the more-interesting testimony may come from a little-known former Moody’s executive named Gary Witt.
In Witt’s written testimony submitted to the commission, Witt says: “concerns that rating analysts and investment banking analysts worked too closely together prior to the issuance of securitized debt is a legitimate concern.” In particular, he describes a situation involving one of his staffers, a lawyer named Rick Michalek, who was removed from rating Goldman Sachs Group CDOs because the investment bank requested that he be taken off their deals.
“In my opinion, Rick Michalek was an exceptionally thorough legal analyst. His zealous document reviews were an added expense for investment banks who hired top law firms as transaction counsel with high hourly fees. It was my understanding that this behavior (exceptionally thorough document reviews that resulted in high legal fees being charged to investment banks) had led to a personal reprimand from Brian Clarkson, then head of structured finance.”
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We agree, the bills are far from perfect and will not prevent the next crisis. But while some will walk away in frustration, we think there are a few things left in the legislation that are worth fighting for. Chief among these is the Senate derivatives chapter, which is head and shoulders better than the House version. The main goal of the Senate derivatives chapter is to separate reckless Wall Street gambling from the taxpayer guarantee.
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While speaking at a recent Practicing Law Institute seminar, Reisner said the SEC has signed 10 cooperation agreements so far with other potential deals in the pipeline. The insiders are helping investigators in probes involving insider trading, financial and accounting fraud, stock offering frauds, and public company disclosures, he said.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Instead of offering outright support for campaigns, it seems some corporations have funneled funds into political organizations. According to an article in the Washington Post, the Chamber of Commerce, American Crossroads, and American Action Network have pledged to raise $127 million for the upcoming election season.
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But this is no ordinary PR operation. This is where white-knuckle lobbying and media buys merge with a handful of public charities Berman has created to spin and cajole public perception on a variety of issues. But for the most part, he attacks and intimidates those with contrary views, and under the banner of the public good serves the agendas of corporate America.
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Berman targets non-profit organizations with views that conflict with those of big business. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is one example. It lobbies against animal cruelty, which puts it at odds with beef, pork and poultry producers, dairies, puppy mills, captive (“canned”) hunting operations, and contract research labs that do animal experimentation for pharmaceutical and cosmetics manufacturers. Another favorite Berman target, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), lobbies for lower legal blood alcohol levels for drunk driving charges, and mandatory use of ignition interlock devices for convicted drunk drivers, which puts it at odds with alcoholic beverage manufacturers, whose business success depends on people drinking more.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Barrister and writer Tim Kevan has withdrawn the BabyBarista Blog from The Times in reaction to their plans to hide it away behind a subscription-based paywall. He commented: “I didn’t start this blog for it to be the exclusive preserve of a limited few subscribers. I wrote it to entertain whosoever wishes to read it.” In a further post he said, “I think the decision will prove to be a disaster. There are so many innovative ways of making cash online and the decision to plump for an across-the-board blanket subscription over the whole of their content makes them look like a big lumbering giant…Canute-like in their determination to stop the tide of free content and using a top down strategy which makes even the Post Office look dynamic.”
NASA Connect – AO – Observatories (3/17/2005)
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06.05.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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The global number of PCs on the planet is around 1400 million. The gadgets are additional millions. This dilutes the sensitivity of this data for understanding the share of OS on PCs. The w3schools number for GNU/Linux, 4.5% is much more believable but even that site has a bias to that other OS because it has sections for .asp, etc. The w3schools numbers likely do not include phones and gadgets. In May 2009, w3schools showed that other OS as 89.5%. In May 2010, w3schools showed that other OS as 88.3%, a drop of 1.2% when their new “7″ OS is stocking retailers shelves. This must mean a fair chunk of businesses’ XP machines are migrating to MacOS and GNU/Linux. W3schools showed XP dropped 11.9 points in the past year so about 10% of those that migrated away from XP went away from that other OS. That is a potential 300 million XP business machines with 30 million leaving the fold. It’s not an avalanche but a trickle in a crack in the dam. I expect as early adopters in business find GNU/Linux works for them the crack will widen. People who encounter GNU/Linux at work may well demand retailers supply GNU/Linux, bursting the dam. 2014 is the date of XP’s demise.
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We know GNU/Linux on the desktop is growing rapidly in deployments if not share and most of those deployments are in business because most users of PCs at home do not install operating systems. Google has simply been the most visible of late.
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The wild success of Linux in embedded space would lead to application development on an unprecedented scale for the various mobile Internet devices, which would lead to a renaissance of application development on the Linux desktop, which in turn would lead to the Ultimate Success of Linux on the Desktop and a world where we will finally get to say “This is the year of the $Expletive! Linux desktop.”
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Linux’s answer to that is pretty easy. Linux is in and of itself a good work. It helps people the world over. You can learn how to write code from it. You can learn how an OS works from it. It powers things like the OLPC XO series of computers.
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About a month ago we reviewed the AMD Athlon II X3 425 processor when coupled with an AMD 890GX + SB850 motherboard and in this review we are taking a closer look at that motherboard under Linux.
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Applications
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Checksuite monitors CPU load, disk utilization, possible hardware errors, broken symbolic links, memory swap, and several other system items. You can have it notify you via e-mail with verbose output, or notify you via cell phone with brief output – or both. It can also create individual log files or output directly to the screen if you run one of the programs manually.
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GNOME Commander is a free two pane file manager in the tradition of Norton and Midnight Commander, it is built on the GTK-toolkit and GnomeVFS. GNOME Commander aims to fulfill the demands of more advanced users who like to focus on file management, their work through special applications and running smart commands. This program is not aimed at users wanting the weather forecast in a sidebar in their file manager.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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On Tuesday, KDE released and update to its 4.4 software compilation (4.4.4) and I happily updated my own system from the Kubuntu repositories. It’s a beautiful thing and with each update (and that includes GNOME by the way), I grow more and more attached to my personal desktop environment. And yet, there are those who claim it’s pretty much over for the desktop as we know it.
All this flows very nicely into the discussion you are about to watch.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Every year, the KDE community in Spain organizes a local Akademy event: Akademy-es. This year’s event was held in Bilbao from 7th to 9th of May. The event gathered around 80 KDE contributors, users and Free Software enthusiasts from all over Spain and even people from other countries such as France and Ireland.
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The KDE PIM team meets regularly 3 times a year for stabilisation and planning.
Face to face meetings like this help strengthen community bonds and allow progress and discussions not possible with IRC or email. For more information, be sure to check out the quotes section of the meeting page. We look forward to the next meeting and to seeing the new direction our platform will take!
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My job currently involves improving the features and quality of KDE PIM and Akonadi on the desktop and on mobile platforms.
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Reviews
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YlmF is a refreshing product. It’s not a revolution, though. There have been other such projects in the past, including Lindows, Xandros and other cross-platform solutions, aimed at incorporating the best of both worlds and offering the user an optimal, blended experience, with familiarity and simplicity of Windows and the robustness and usefulness of Linux. Some have worked, some have not. In most cases, the fusion was not quite successful, often because of hardware issues and misguided expectations.
YlmF does not fall into this same trap and elegantly escapes doom by being a solid, robust distribution. Truth to be told, the rite of passage is much easier than it was years ago, when Linux desktop was still a rough and unpredictable journey. Nevertheless, YlmF achieves more by trying less.
Compared to Ubuntu, YlmF is a relatively humble fork. Much of the underlying parts are the same. Some of the programs are changed and you get codecs; other than that, YlmF keeps it simple. The only big, radical change is the user interface, which is exactly the aim of this distribution. Users have no idea what kernel is or how it works. But they can appreciate their desktop icons.
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New Releases
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The new updated version of Pardus 2009, Pardus 2009.2 Geronticus eremita announced with the new technologic features.
Updates in Pardus Technologies
Core Pardus technologies are updated to new versions, including many bugfixes, optimizations and new features.
Pardus manager family has been refactored and optimized for new KDE 4.4 / Qt 4.6 environments. Pardus KDE tools, Network Plasmoid for easy network profile switching and Service Plasmoid for easy service management are available in our repositories. These plasmoids can be placed either on the desktop, or any of the panels on the desktop for easier access.
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DigAnTel-3 is a hybird Digital / Analog Telephone system utilizing open source CentOS Linux, Asterisk 1.4.30, DAHDI 2.3.0, FreePBX 2.7.0, VoicePulse module, Openfire IM, vtiger CRM with click to dial, PostFix mail, and OpenVPN. DigAnTel is the glue to bind these technologies thus creating a unified open source telephony system for your home or business. The installation is completely automated and doesn’t require a working knowledge of Linux or Asterisk. The system supports traditional analog telephone lines, digital T1/PRI lines and digital VOIP circuits.
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Salix 13.1 has been released! Available in both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, Salix 13.1 is fully backwards compatible with Slackware 13.1. Salix 13.1 is built on top of a Slackware 13.1 base and offers a streamlined XFCE desktop environment with selected applications following the “one application per task” philosophy.
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On behalf of the whole Vinux community I am happy to announce the 3rd release of Vinux – Linux for the Visually Impaired, based on Ubuntu 10.04 – Lucid Lynx. This version of Vinux provides three screen-readers, two full-screen magnifiers, dynamic font-size/colour-theme changing as well as support for USB Braille displays. Vinux is now available both as an installable live CD and as a .deb package which will automatically convert an existing installation of Ubuntu Lucid into an accessible Vinux system! In addition, we now have our own Vinux package repository (from which you can install our customised packages with apt-get/synaptic) and a dedicated Vinux IRC channel. In the very near future we will also be launching a Vinux Wiki and releasing special DVD, USB and Virtual Editions of Vinux 3.0!
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It all started out with Parley. We justed wanted to test the amazing theming capabilities in the upcoming 4.5 release of Parley, and eventually we ended up doing a whole distribution 
Parley is a wonderful application that helps you learn all those beautiful languages out there using a flash card approach and an incredibly magnificant grading technique, so that you always know where you stand. Our Fluffy Bunny theme will also be part of the regular Parley release. So also users of other distributions will be able to enjoy our work.
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The majority of early distributions had a niche to fill. Slackware was for BSD/UNIX people, Debian was for the open source fanatics, Knoppix was for the mobile, Tinfoil Hat was for the paranoid, Red Hat for servers and enterprise environments, Mandrake for Desktops, and BuildRoot/OpenWRT for embedded systems. Where are we now? Those same distributions can fill those same roles, and for the most part all of the others are… well… superfluous. Untangle can serve as a router, and there is a little competition there. Yet, most of the 400+ systems out there are just like every other.
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Red Hat Family
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Another important advancement in this new version is the ability for the OS to manipulate the power usage of applications. These features are capable through the use of a tickles kernel, which enables timer interrupts. If applications are not using the CPU, the computer can basically go idle until an application needs it. This creates cooler-running CPUs, and reduces the overall power consumption. When tested on a laptop PC, we found that it did indeed run cooler with these features enabled, especially when using only a couple programs with everything else sitting idle.
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A Paranoid, or 5-star, security rating is the highest physical security rating that you can achieve on your computer. It entails enabling a set of OS-dependent and OS-independent features.
But why would anyone want to achieve such a high physical security rating on Fedora or any other distribution? Strict control of who can access your data if your computer falls into the wrong hands, that’s why. The point is, if your computer is stolen, or seized by agents of the state, you do not want to make it easy for them to access your data. In fact, you want to make it impossible for them to access your data.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The latest Ubuntu Linux release seems to have been a huge hit. Review after Review after Review have pretty much pegged it as the next best thing since sliced bread, but does this release of Ubuntu Linux live up to the hype?
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Variants
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Parsix 3.5 “Frankie” is a Debian-based Linux distribution designed to complete everyday desktop tasks. This release syncs with Debian testing repositories as of April 7, 2010. and features many improvements worth noting. Users will enjoy a new look and feel, enhanced installer, experimental USB installer and much more. Here’s a list of some of the new features in Parsix 3.5. View the official release announcement for more information.
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Operating system: Linux using BusyBox
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eReaders
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By now I’m sure that most of you already know that Apple’s iPad has drawn the attention of many people who might have otherwise bought a Kindle. Amazon is in for the fight of its life against Apple’s slick, new hardware. Apple’s iPad is selling like hotcakes and is no doubt already cutting into Kindle sales.
But Amazon has a secret weapon: Linux.
Apple will never, ever release a version of its iBooks application for Linux. Ever.
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Asus did not list the operating system used by the Eee Tablet, but a Laptop hands-on story claims the device runs a proprietary version of Linux on an ARM processor. In April, Asus and Acer both said they would support the Linux-based MeeGo operating system, with both netbooks and tablets speculated as potential products. However, the Eee Tablet, which does not appear to offer generic tablet features such as web browsing, does not appear to be based on MeeGo.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Also at Computex, prototype MeeGo tablets running on Intel’s Atom Z6xx (“Moorestown”) system-on-chip were shown by Wistron, Compal, Quanta, and CZC, while Acer said it would offer MeeGo on both netbooks and tablets.
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Android
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Like the Z6xx system-on-chip (SoC), the Aava platform was said to support Moblin, Android, and the Moblin- and Maemo-based MeeGo Linux distribution. Only Moblin support was initially offered by Aava, but since then, an Aava phone has appeared at the MeeGo project as an early MeeGo reference target for Z6xx-based smartphones (along with an ARM-based Nokia N900 design).
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At Computex, Shenzhen-based Joyplus announced four tablets that run Android, only two of which use the same CPU. The five-inch Joyplus M508 and seven-inch 5701 both tap the 624MHz Marvell PXA303, while the seven-inch M702 runs on a 600MHz WonderMedia Prizm MW8505, and the seven-inch M703 uses a 600MHz ARM926 CPU paired with a 600MHz DSP, says Joyplus.
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Tablets
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Formally announced early last week, the Dell Streak features a five-inch capacitive, multitouch touchscreen with WVGA resolution, a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and voice telephony.
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The Dell Streak, an Android-powered smartphone with a five-inch screen, got a boost at the D8 conference Wednesday night when Dell executive Ron Garriques said it would be available this July, both from a U.S. carrier and direct on Dell.com. We got some time with a nearly final model Thursday, and even made a phone call.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is dipping a toe into social networking with sudoSocial, an early version “stream publishing platform” available through Mozilla Labs.
The sudoSocial effort is a “stream publishing platform,” which roughly translates to a way to aggregate your social network feeds in one place. Sort of like FriendFeed or Facebook without the comments. A working demo is up on sudoSocial.me, where you can view some of the demo sites or sign up with your own if you like.
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Oracle
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OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 (build OOO320m18) was released today.
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Freedom
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Much like “Open Standard”, the term “Open Source is pretty hollow and vapid. It has been abused and watered down such to the point that a company can release some source code and only give you the ability to look at it, and maybe not you. Microsoft’s Shared Source program is an example of this. Shared Source sounds better than “Closed Source” or “Proprietary”, and they can even have their hobgoblin minions abuse Wikipedia to label everything as “Shared”. Suddenly they aren’t hording it, they’re “Sharing” it.
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“While the rest of the industry has been babbling on about the iPad and imitations thereof, Qi Hardware is actually shipping a product that is completely open source and copyleft. Linux News reviews the Ben NanoNote (product page), a handheld computer apparently containing no proprietary technology. It uses a 366 MHz MIPS processor, 32MB RAM, 2 GB flash, a 320×240-pixel color display, and a Qwerty keyboard. No network is built in, though it is said to accept SD-card Wi-Fi or USB Ethernet adapters. Included is a very simple Linux OS based on the OpenWrt distro installed in Linksys routers, with Busybox GUI. It’s apparently intended primarily for hardware and software hackers, not as a general-audience handheld. The price is right, though: $99.”
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Too often, we tell the person calling in to tech support, “Why didn’t you call earlier?”
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The deluge of information available on the Web has made the country ungovernable, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow.
“The political system is broken partly because of Internet,” Barlow said. “It’s made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We’re going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich.”
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All of this nonsense — the attribution appended to copied text, the inline search results popovers — is from a company named Tynt, which bills itself as “The copy/paste company”.
It’s a bunch of user-hostile SEO bullshit.
Everyone knows how copy and paste works. You select text. You copy. When you paste, what you get is exactly what you selected. The core product of the “copy/paste company” is a service that breaks copy and paste.
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Major League Baseball has asked a judge for a subpoena to help it identify people using Internet services provided by Charter Communications Inc to post pornography and other indecent material on the MLB.com website.
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Abundance
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Reader Bluejay alerts us to the news that Adams is exploring the topic again, in a slightly tangential manner. In a blog post highlighting his “theory on content value,” where it seems he’s reached something like the “acceptance” stage of navigating this particular topic — though, he’s doing so somewhat grudgingly.
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If the FTC wants to reinvent journalism, perhaps it should align with news’ disruptors. But there’s none of that in this report. The word blog is used but once in 35 pages of text–and then only in a parenthetical mention of soccer blogs. Discussion of investing in technology comes on the last page in a suggestion about tools for “improved electronic note-taking.”
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We were recently talking about some of the strawmen complaints that some (though, certainly not all) journalists put up in protesting the idea of “citizen” journalism (which should, more accurately, be called participatory journalism). One of the bigger strawmen is this idea that people think that amateur journalists mean that professional journalists aren’t needed. There may be someone out there who does believe it, but most supporters of participatory journalism believe the two work together quite well.
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Except, of course, any fifth grader could point out the obvious difference. Making a copy of your news (and linking back to it) is not “driving off with it.” No one has “driven away” the content. The content on the LVRJ website is still there. Not stolen at all. Might there be “infringement”? It’s possible. But, there are other issues to take into consideration — such as the actual impact on the LVRJ. It’s hard to make any reasonable claim that any of these sites did any damage whatsoever to the LVRJ. In fact, you could argue that all of them helped promote the LVRJ as a publication to follow on these issues.
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Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink have led eerily parallel lives. Both grew up in Midwest university towns in the 1970s, where they spent their formative years watching television after school and at night. Both later went to Yale (a BA in painting for Shirky, a law degree for Pink). And both eventually abandoned their chosen fields to write about technology, business, and society.
Now their paths are intersecting. In December, Pink, a Wired contributing editor, came out with Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. The book digs through more than five decades of behavioral science to challenge the orthodoxy that carrots and sticks are the most effective ways to motivate workers in the 21st century. Instead, he argues, the most enduring motivations aren’t external but internal—things we do for our own satisfaction.
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The more you think about it, the more this all makes sense, and the more you realize just how screwed up so many incentive structures are today, because so many people think that purely monetary incentives work best.
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Security/Aggression
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CyberSpy Software, which markets the controversial RemoteSpy commercial keylogging application, has agreed to rewrite the software and clean up its business practices to settle a case brought by the US Federal Trade Commission.
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For a while now, courts have said that you have no 4th Amendment rights at the border, and border patrol/customs officials have every right to search your laptop. For a variety of reasons, this is problematic. As we’ve explained before, the contents of your laptop aren’t the same as the contents of your suitcase in two very important ways:
1. You mostly store everything on your laptop. So, unlike a suitcase that you’re bringing with you, it’s the opposite. You might specifically choose what to exclude, but you don’t really choose what to include. With a suitcase, you specifically choose what to include.
2. The reason you bring the contents on your laptop over the border is because you’re bringing your laptop over the border. If you wanted the content of your laptop to go over the border you’d just send it using the internet. There are no “border guards” on the internet itself, so content flows mostly freely across international boundaries. Thus if anyone wants to get certain content into a country via the internet, they’re not doing it by entering that country through border control.
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“ARE you’all insane,” said part of one letter Shore sent on Feb. 26 (which he shared with HuffPost). “NO checks equal no food for me. DO YOU GET IT??”
In that letter he signed off as “Brad Shore” from Louisville. He said he did the same thing in several other messages sent via the contact form on Bunning’s website. “My assumption was that if he gets an email from Philadelphia, who cares?” he said. “Why would he even care if a guy from Philadelphia gets upset?”
Bunning might not have cared, but the FBI did. Sometime in March, said Shore, agents came calling to ask about the emails. They read from printouts of the messages sent via the contact form and asked if Shore was the author, which he readily admitted. They asked a few questions, and then, according to Shore, they said, “All right, we just wanted to make sure it wasn’t anything to worry about.”
But on May 13, U.S. Marshals showed up at Shore’s house with a grand jury indictment. Now he’s got to appear in federal court in Covington, Ky. on May 28 to answer for felony email harassment.
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Environment
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For an encore, Ms. Rosen, in her capacity as a managing partner of the London PR firm Brunswick Group, has been hired by BP to put a pretty face on the oil spill in the Gulf. Rosen is in the familiar company of log-rollers: BP has also hired 27 lobbyists who formerly worked in Congress or the executive branch.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The European Parliament’s website urging its members to sign Declaration 29 seems well-meaning enough, with a frightened-looking child and a plea to end sexual harassment, child porn, and pedophilia. However, privacy advocates are concerned over a semi-hidden rider on the declaration that allows EU member states to retain data from search engines, essentially eliminating any privacy EU citizens previously had when surfing the Web.
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Written declaration 29 has been marketed within the European Parliament using a very emotionally loaded picture of a child, and talking about the need to set up an ”early warning system” to combat sexual child abuse.
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Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular search engine, will begin turning over to European regulators data it mistakenly collected from unsecured Wi-Fi networks.
The data will be handed over to authorities in Germany, France and Spain, Google said late yesterday in an e-mailed statement.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Hachette Book Group and HarperCollins both told The Wall Street Journal that they had been contacted by the Texas AG’s office, but did not elaborate on the subject of the inquiry. Earlier, book industry publication Publishers Marketplace reported that Apple was the target of the state’s questioning.
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The Texas attorney general is making inquiries about the electronic book market, according to people familiar with the matter, a business where pricing recently has been shaken up by Apple Inc. and the way e-books are sold for the iPad.
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For a while, Amazon and Sony were the only companies that took the e-reader market seriously, but traditional booksellers seem to have decided they need in on the action. One of the largest, Barnes & Noble, launched its own, dedicated hardware, the Nook. Now, Borders has thrown its hat into the ring, and just about everything about its efforts appear to be distinct, starting with the fact that it will sell several devices made by third parties. The biggest hook for this latecomer may be the prices: both of the devices it’s offering so far are under $150.
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Of course, nothing either firm does has anything whatsoever to do with preventing unauthorized file sharing. It’s all about sending threatening letters and getting people to pay up.
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While companies like Verizon apparently won’t stand up to protect their users’ rights against the ridiculous and overly broad mass copyright infringement lawsuit filings made by a group called US Copyright Group (really a DC-based lawfirm called Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver), Time Warner Cable is pushing back, but mainly on procedural issues — not in any way to stand up for the rights of those being sued. Thankfully, it looks like the EFF, Public Citizen and the ACLU are trying to help out.
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Copyrights
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked judges in Washington, D.C., Wednesday to quash subpoenas issued in predatory lawsuits aimed at movie downloaders, arguing in friend-of-the court briefs that the cases, which together target several thousand BitTorrent users, flout legal safeguards for protecting individuals’ rights. Public Citizen and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Foundation joined EFF on the briefs filed Wednesday.
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David Akin has pointed to a new paper from Blayne Haggart, a doctoral student at Carleton who is focusing on copyright policy in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. The paper, being presented this week in Montreal, includes some interesting analysis of digital copyright reforms in each country. Given today’s introduction of the copyright reform bill, of particular significance are comments Haggart obtained from Michele Austin, who served as Maxime Bernier’s chief of staff when he was Industry Minister.
According to Austin, the decision to introduce U.S.-style DMCA rules in Canada in 2007 was strictly a political decision, the result of pressure from the Prime Minister’s Office desire to meet U.S. demands. She states “the Prime Minister’s Office’s position was, move quickly, satisfy the United States.” When Bernier and then-Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda protested, the PMO replied “we don’t care what you do, as long as the U.S. is satisfied.”
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The original lawsuit hung on the question over what obligations Starbucks owed Simon. The singer didn’t have any direct contractual relationship with the coffee chain. Instead, her deal was with Hear Music, a separate operating entity that provided Starbucks, its parent company, with albums to distribute in its stores. The singer previously argued that one could connect the dots easy enough such that the parent company had a duty to disclose material decision-making that would have a big effect on the marketing and sales of her album.
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A movie studio has won a lawsuit against Dutch Usenet community FTD. In a surprising decision, a court reasoned that by allowing the publication of the location of pirate movie stored on Usenet, FTD was effectively publishing the movie as if they had actually hosted it on their own servers.
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06.04.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Two uncertain years have taken their toll on people’s and business’ willingness and ability to budget for new PCs or even upgrade existing Operating Systems. This is golden for Linux since it is free. Not so golden for Microsoft.
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Server
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The Top 500 Project lists the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world biannually. They have released this year’s list and in terms of the operating system used it is Linux all the way with more than 90% of the supercomputers running on Linux.
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So why do Linux users care? Because the work accomplished by the Super Computer manufacturers (IBM, HP, Fujitsu, Cray and so on) is poured back into the kernel and ends up helping all users. Just remember that today’s desktop PC was considered a super computer not that long ago. Advances in multi-core technology driven by super computing requirements of a few years ago are now used by financial services companies in trading applications to power their business.
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Cloud Linux Inc., an innovative software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, today announces that Cartika, an industry innovator in cloud hosting services has increased density on its shared hosting servers by 5X using CloudLinux.
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Audiocasts
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A group of chip makers including IBM, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments have set up a new software-engineering foundation called Linaro. The foundation is dedicated to improving Linux distributions such as Android, MeeGo and Ubuntu used in consumer devices. There are around 20 engineers already working at Linaro, but the foundation will soon have over 100.
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Google
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Internet giant Google will launch its Chrome operating system in the Australian spring, with developers now eager to get their hands on the open-source software.
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Google’s Chrome OS is coming to a netbook near you sometime later this year. The Web-centric, Linux-based, open source platform will offer a lightweight, cost-effective alternative operating system for portable computing. Eventually, Google plans to expand the scope of Chrome OS to take on Windows on the desktop as well–a goal that requires both a solid operating system and a significant culture shift.
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Ballnux
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The benchmark was executed on the integrated bladed cluster with 4,092 cores of Intel(R) Xeon(R) X5670 processors running at 2.93 GHz with Novell’s SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise 11 operating system.
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The new Samsung H2 looks likely to use the same quirky Linux Mobile-based operating system used on Vodafone 360 – although we hope it will be overhauled as it wasn’t anywhere near rivalling the likes of Android or even Symbian when we used it last year.
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Users are advised to plug the phone into a Macintosh or Linux-based computer and delete the file manually from the microSD card. Users are then advised to reformat the memory card.
The discovery of the malware has blighted the launch of Samsung’s new smartphone, which runs on its own newly developed Bada OS.
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The Limo platform is a customized version of Linux that integrates with the Vodafone 360 to bring a great user-interface to users.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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While there is multi-touch support in Qt and also Clutter along with MPX capabilities in GTK+ 3.0, the widely-used xf86-input-evdev driver up to this point has not supported multi-touch. Developers, however, have been working on the said support for evdev, which is the generic Linux input driver.
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Applications
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GNOME Desktop
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The Pardus development team released a few minutes ago the new Pardus 2009.2 Linux-based operating system. Powered by the Linux kernel 2.6.31.13 and built on top of the newly released KDE Software Compilation 4.4.4 environment, Pardus 2009.2 (codename Geronticus eremita) comes with an amazing installer and bleeding-edge applications such as the OpenOffice.org office suite 3.2.1.3, the Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3 web browser or The GIMP 2.6.8 image editor.
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Red Hat Family
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Already one of the Triangle’s most successful technology companies, Red Hat soon could reach a big milestone. CEO Jim Whitehurst said during a meeting in London on Thursday that he expects $1 billion of revenue in 2012.
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The stock price of Red Hat Inc. crossed above the 50-day moving average on lighter than usual volume. The crossing of the stock price above the 50-day moving average may signal the beginning of a noteworthy bullish trend. Traders use moving averages to identify changes in trend, those who can make those trends work in their favor will increase the number of winning trades.
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Red Hat Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, will discuss results of its first quarter fiscal 2011 on Tuesday, June 22, 2010, beginning at 5:00 p.m. ET.
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The Fedora Scholarship program, sponsored by Red Hat, recognizes one high school senior per year for contributions to the Fedora Project and free software/content in general. With a selection process that looks at the student’s contributions to Fedora and other free software projects and uses members of the Fedora community as references, it’s a little different from most scholarships you might be used to seeing. In addition to $2,000 USD for each of 4 years of an undergraduate education in any field of the recipient’s choice, the scholarship includes 4 years of annual all-expenses-paid trips to the nearest FUDCon, the Fedora community’s main gathering of contributors, which happens once per year in different parts of the world.
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Fedora/Linpus
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical is preparing to introduce a new service option for Ubuntu Linux users, known as Ubuntu Advantage.
Slated for official release on June 7, Ubuntu Advantage is a comprehensive service that combines systems management tools, technical support, access to online resources, training and legal assurance, Canonical officials said.
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As well as making for a consistent platform for Linux across all major ARM devices, the other major advantage of the initiative, says Shuttleworth, is that it will speed up time to market for developers. “If you can develop your software for ‘linux on ARM’, rather than a specific CPU, you can choose the right hardware for your project later in the development cycle, and reduce the time required for enablement of that hardware.”
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Variants
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Vinux community has announced the 3rd release of Vinux – Linux for the Visually Impaired, based on Ubuntu 10.04 – Lucid Lynx.
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The first question that springs to mind when hearing of a new Linux distribution is not “what does it do?” but “why?” It would seem by now that virtually every possible angle has been covered, and that a Linux distribution must exist for almost any use case one could conceive of. Yet the recently-announced Peppermint Linux is slightly different in that it seeks to bridge the gap between standard desktop computing and “cloud” computing.
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One of the original targets of Linux was the under-powered computer gathering dust in the closet destined for electronic disposal. While that sounds like a noble goal, it isn’t reality for the majority of today’s Linux distributions. Xubuntu says it’s for the limited resource computer, but even it has a minimum memory requirement of 256 MB. You probably won’t have a very pleasant experience running Firefox on a machine with less than 512 MB of memory.
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Even if your name is IBM. Or Texas Instruments. Since they don’t want to go home, they’re getting together with friends. Linux will benefit.
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WNR3500L Open Source Linux Router to be FCC’s ‘Test My ISP’ Speed Sensor for the voluntary consumer measurement plan announced today
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OpenVox Communication Co. Ltd, a global provider of open source asterisk® telephony hardware and software solutions, has announced today that the industry first design-for-asterisk industrial embedded motherboard-IPC100 is released to the Open Source community. The IPC100 series motherboards can work flawlessly with OpenVox Mini PCI cards-A400M/B100M/B200M/B400M as well as any combinations to build a complete embedded IPPBX.
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Open-source ereaders aren’t exactly new – the txtr promises to give access to its underlying architecture, for instance – but the Australian QuokkaPad may have taken the longest to reach the market. The 8-inch LCD 800 x 600 touchscreen tablet is based on a 400MHz MIPS processor, and usually runs Linux 2.6.24.3 with the GPE Palmtop Environment UI on top; however, there’s also room for two other kernels, such as Android or Windows CE.
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Enterprise software supergiant SAP has poured ten million dollars of investment from its SAP Ventures arm into DeviceVM, whose Linux-based Splashtop quick-boot operating system is pre-installed on many of the top brands of notebook and netbook computers.
[...]
SAP’s goal for DeviceVM is to create an enterprise-IT grade version of the same type of software Google plans for its Chrome OS operating system: A quick-booting — three seconds on a Lenovo — rock-solid Linux boot with only a standards-compliant browser and a few other essential apps onboard. Such a lightweight configuration is easier to maintain and, at least in theory, less prone to bugs and security problems.
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The Linux-based Splashtop runs separately from a device’s underlying OS and includes a number of applications, including a Firefox-based browser; music, photo and chat functionality; and Skype calling.
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Midwest Server Repair LLC, a small home based computer business based 12 miles from the University of Notre Dame, has created a Linux PC, which, serves as an alternative to the modern Microsoft computer.
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Phones
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Joint venture formed to further mobile operating systems based on Linux, as HP CEO confirms Palm buy was all about WebOS
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CounterPath Corporation (TSX-V: CCV; OTCBB: CPAH), an award-winning provider of desktop and mobile voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) software solutions, today announced Bria for Linux.
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CounterPath, a provider of desktop and mobile voice over internet protocol (VoIP) software offerings, has unveiled a new retail version of Bria for Linux softphone client that features support for multiple VoIP accounts and Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04.
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ABI Research anticipates that Linux-enabled smartphones, led by the success of Google’s Android, will comprise 33% of the worldwide smartphone market by 2015. With more than 60,000 smartphones shipping per day, Android has catapulted ahead of other Linux mobile platforms.
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Victoria Fodale, an analyst at ABI Research, said Tuesday in a research note that the Scottsdale, AZ-based marketing research firm anticipates that Linux-enabled smartphones, led by the success of Google’s Android, will comprise 33 percent of the worldwide smartphone market by 2015. “With more than 60,000 smartphones shipping per day, Android has catapulted ahead of other Linux mobile platforms,” according to the note.
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More than 60,000 smartphones ship per day and the Android has leaped ahead of other Linux mobile platforms, said Victoria Fodale, a senior analyst at the firm.
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According to research published by analyst firm ABI, Linux-enabled smartphones, led by the success of Google’s Android, will comprise 33% of the worldwide smartphone market by 2015. With more than 60,000 smartphones shipping each day, Android has catapulted ahead of other Linux mobile platforms.
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Opera Devices SDK 10.30 for Linux uses Opera Presto 2.5, the same core engine as Opera Desktop and Opera Mobile. It has a great support for web and industry standards. It also provides support for extended validation certificates and fraud protection, which ensure users can browse safely with the Acer LumiRead.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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The much-awaited Nokia’s first phone running on Linux Maemo operating system, N900 has finally made its debut in the Indian market.
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We don’t see or hear nearly enough of it, but the Maemo smartphone platform is powerful, open source and performs on the Nokia N900 on a level that’s comparable to the experience you get with a desktop computer.
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trackingTelefonica has announced that it will jointly explore with Intel and Nokia how to leverage MeeGo’s capabilities in order to deliver innovative converged services to its customers.
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Meego, the mobile Linux Operating system introduced by Intel and Nokia, has officially been launched with a netbook version ready to go.
Version 1.0 of the MeeGo Core Software platform (CSP) and the Netbook User Experience will offer the first true taste of a platform that has been created after Intel’s Moblin merged with Nokia’s Maemo platform back in February at the MWC.
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Android
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So far, Dell has kept much of its Android software work under wraps. When it exhibited its Aero phone at the CTIA trade show in March, it kept the handset powered off.
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A remarkably small device given its functionality, the Pro weighs in at 118 grams and measures 9 x 5.2 x 1.7 cm. Inside this tiny shell, Sony Ericsson has managed to squeeze a 600 MHz processor, allowing the Mini Pro to run applications without a hitch. Running on version 1.6 of the open-source Android OS, the X10 Mini Pro has access to plenty of applications to use this processing power on. With over 38,000 applications on the Android Marketplace, and more being added every day, there is something for everybody. Open-source tools and support allow you to create and publish your own applications as well, should you be unable to find what you’re looking for.
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Tablets
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Plenty of pics as we get hands on with Intel’s slim slate, codenamed ‘Redvale’, which runs MeeGo 1.1 open source mobile OS on an Atom Moorestown platform.
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The device, which uses Nvidia’s Tegra processor, can be used as a notebook with an onscreen or Bluetooth keyboard, and has a stylus. It is Linux-based with Flash support and a full browser, and the company says they believe it will have 6 to 8 hours of battery life.
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This Linux-based eReader rocks two 14.1” capacitive IPS displays, making the device closer in size to a newspaper than a book.
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The device is known as the Kno. It boasts of dual 14-inch screens and is based on the Linux operating system. The device is designed for students and is expected to appear in the market at the end of the year. Still it is not officially confirmed, but the device will be available for under $1,000.
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The reason his organisation usually focuses on open source software is because it is licensed in a way which allows for the language of its interface to be changed easily. The opposite of open source software is proprietary software, where the company that develops it forbids you to change it.
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The BBC is using open source technology to provide visitors to its 10 national radio websites with a live text service.
The live text tells users what’s on air now and what is coming up, whether it be the current number 1 on the Chris Moyles show, football match commentary on Radio 5 Live or the latest comedy on Radio 4.
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Africa
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That major computing companies are unlikely to want to invest heavily in Africa is not lost on the continent’s brain trust.
Sure, there could be some investment in major cities, but for the most part, the continent’s on its own. The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa is fine with that. OK, perhaps “fine” would be overstating it, but FOSSFA knows that’s the reality and so is bringing together the most skilled computing minds together to develop and distribute applications throughout Africa in local languages.
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Tectonic, one of the only websites in Africa specialising in open source news, has been relaunched.
The site, which closed down in July last year, began publishing again on June 1.
Tectonic editor and founder, Alastair Otter, closed the site last year saying that other projects and pressures had made it difficult to keep it running. “At the time I was involved in a number of other projects and the added pressure of maintaining the site, which wasn’t my primary job, became too much.”
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Events
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The event, says Gardler, is a salute to “the spirit of traditional business-academia knowledge exchange” but he emphasised the practical nature of TransferSummit; “Unlike other events, our reach goes beyond the theoretical: we’re focussing on the strategic solutions that improve collaboration between commercial and academic concerns”. The aim is to allow participants to understand, share and discuss the strategic and tactical mechanisms, such as community outreach, academic / business partnerships, spin-outs, start-ups, applied research, intellectual property licensing and collaborative think tanks, so that they can grow their organisations effectively and in an open source way.
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The fifth annual Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) took place May 27-30 in Brussels, Belgium, bringing together the developers of the open source creative application suite: GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, Scribus, Rawstudio, Blender, and a dozen other related projects, such as the Open Font Library and Open Clip Art Library. As is tradition, most of the projects gave update presentations, and both time and meeting space was set aside for teams to work and make plans.
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No, this isn’t egoism talking–it’s all about the 6th International Conference on Open Source Systems, hosted at the University of Notre Dame.
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Databases
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Oracle
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The OpenOffice.org development team have issued the first point update to the 3.2.x branch of their open source office suite for Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris. The maintenance update addresses a number of bugs and security issues found in the previous 3.2 release, but adds no new features.
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CMS
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WordPress is one of the great open source success stories with both its software and the WordPress.com site itself. Google ranks WordPress.com the 12th most visited site on Earth with 120 million unique visitors.
WordPress version 3 is now in the final phases of development with a release candidate now out for early testers on self-hosted WordPress installations. Those that use WordPress.com however don’t have to wait. WordPress is leveraging it’s massive 120 million unique visitor base to actually help test the latest version of WordPress 3.
[...]
So what’s new in WordPress 3?
Lots, but at the top level WordPress 3 gets a new custom menus system (that’s now deployed for WordPress.com users). That’s going to be a big deal for many users, as it will lead to a new generation of theme development.
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Business
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As more and more Open Source eCommerce programs (OSC) appear, many of the improvements are invisible to customers. But features that can really help the store to sell more goods are the product information pages and how they display product images to the customer.
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More than a third of organisations worldwide are lacking in support at senior management level for document management. That’s according to the annual survey from the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) also known as the association for enterprise content management.
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Project Releases
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Fixes in the 2.6.1 Lyngen release include external dependencies support on MeeGo, merging test results from Phoronix Global IDs, system sensor monitoring adjustments, and misaligned graphs/charts, among a few other small glitches. The Unigine test profiles have also been updated against their latest Sanctuary, Tropics, and Heaven updates.
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Government
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For instance we all know that Linux can offer significant savings compared to using Microsoft software for example. There are no license fees just maintenance costs.
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Openness
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GnuBio is a new Harvard University spinout that is poised to become an “eBay of Biomarkers,” according to founder John Boyce. Boyce, who spent several years at Cambridge-based genome sequencer Helicos Biosciences Corp., has joined with Harvard professor of physics and engineering Dave Weitz and Jessica Tonani, former associate director of product marketing for Santa Clara, Calif.-based gene sequencing company Affymetrix Inc., to create a company that is part genome sequencing, part database management, part social network. It promises to join together millions of biologicial samples that are currently siloed at institutes around the world, and to do it using an open source platform.
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Open Source Bridge is a completely volunteer-run conference dedicated to the concept of “open source citizenship:” in which developers learn from one another and connect across projects.
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Open Access/Content
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Take that, Wikihaters. A new study says Wikipedia is as accurate a source for cancer information as a professionally reviewed resource — assuming you can wade through the lousy prose.
Cancer researchers from Thomas Jefferson University compared the accuracy of oncology information on the popular open-source encyclopedia with that on the National Cancer Institute’s Physician Data Query (or PDQ), a professional database that is peer-reviewed and edited. Both were fact-checked against textbooks to see whether cancer patients can trust the information they’re getting online.
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Standards/Consortia
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A new open source project converts Flash animations to JavaScript/HTML5 on the fly, allowing them to be viewed in any modern web browser without the use of a plug-in.
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The Google Chrome developers have released the latest developer channel (a.k.a. the Dev channel) version of Chrome. Version 6.0.422.0 of its WebKit-based web browser features a number of bug fixes and adds support for the latest open WebM / VP8 video format introduced by Google as part of the WebM Project. Once Google considers the Dev builds to be stable enough, they are promoted to its Beta channel for future testing.
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Playing videogames and constantly checking Facebook for status updates could be killing empathy among college students, according to a new study from the University of Michigan (UM).
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Environment
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Specialists working to contain BP disaster dealt new blow by opening of Gulf of Mexico hurricane season
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Energy secretary blames predecessors for avoiding tough decisions in ‘classic example of short-termism’
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The rapid decline of mammoths and other megafauna after humans spread across the New World may explain a bone-chilling plunge in global temperatures some 12,800 years ago, researchers reported Sunday.
The 100-odd species of grass-eating giants that once crowded the North American landscape released huge quantities of methane — from both ends of their digestive tracks.
NASA Connect – AO – Archeoastronomy (3/17/2005)
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This is a kind of crosspost summary of a new copyright amendment bill that was announced yesterday. Bill C-32 attempts to ‘modernize’ copyright law in Canada to bring it up to spec with other developed nations (aka to meet US agenda).
The bill would make it illegal to circumvent or break locks of any kind on digital media, even for personal use. This supersedes all other provisions of the bill, which means you may be a criminal if you
* Own and play region-locked DVDs from other countries
* Play regular DVDs on Linux
* Play Blu-Ray Discs on Linux
* Transfer media to an iPod Touch / iPhone / iPad using Linux
* Listen to DRM’d music on Linux
And anything else that involves protected content that lacks official Linux support.
Speak up while you can. Find your MP and write them an email telling them why you are opposed to C-62.
We don’t want a US style DMCA, please don’t let that happen.
Edit: Android is also Linux, so this applies to all of you Android users too!
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And all this Zappa stuff has what, exactly, to do with Linux? Zappa may have been as much of an influence on Linux and FOSS development as LSD was on Apple, although the Zappa influence on Linux isn’t thought about as much as the Apple-counterculture connection.
An awful lot of people were responsible for the early growth of GNU/Linux and Free and Open Source Software, most of whom were not famous like Linus Torvalds or Richard M. Stallman. One of them, Clay Claiborne of Cosmos Engineering, was the first person to sell Linux pre-loaded on a hard drive. This may not sound like a big deal now, in 2010, but back in the dial-up 1990s, when most Linux distros came on stacks of floppies, this was a major step forward for GNU/Linux usability.
Was Clay influenced by Zappa? “Of course,” he says.
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Software defects? Well, according to windows xp professionals eula there is plenty of wriggle room. I quote
LIMITED WARRANTY FOR PRODUCT ACQUIRED IN THE US AND CANADA. Microsoft warrants that the Product will perform substantially in accordance with the accompanying materials for a period of ninety days from the date of receipt.
Notice the key word substantially? That is their escape hatch. Even if you find a bug and wish something done about it under warranty, what is done is entirely up to microsoft.
In fact, if you really read, I mean really read the eula, microsoft have covered their rear ends any which way from here to kingdom come. There is no way you can bring legal action against them, no way you can claim damages and you don’t have a snowballs chance in the Sahara of winning if you did try.
Not just microsoft either, as I mentioned before, just about every software is produced as is. No ifs, buts or maybes. Either take it or leave it, like it or lump it. You have no hook to hang your legal coat on. So to anyone who tries to bring out that legal liability myth I simply go phffft!
This myth is just another FUD campaign to scare people away from open source. It holds no water and is as transparent as glass and just as fragile.
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A lot has changed since I first started knocking on doors to solve my problems. First and foremost, there are a LOT more doors. Second, there are a lot more people to ask as open source finds itself becoming more and more mainstream. What doesn’t seem to have changed much are the responses.
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Realising this hurdle many committed Linux enthusiastic dedicated their time and energy to simplify the usage of Linux distributions. Today Linux is available for a wide range of products. Linux has become increasingly popular in recent years, partly owing to the popular Mandriva Linux, Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu distributions. In fact these distributions now come with user friendly GUI that gives a look and feeling of other proprietary operating systems that user are currently using.
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Audiocasts
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This week on Linux Outlaws: Google and OSI fighting over WebM, FSF enforces GPL in the iTunes Store, Poettering now aiming at the init system, Microsoft sponsoring LinuxTag, Pac-Man madness and much more…
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Kernel Space
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With yesterday’s automated kernel tests via our Phoromatic-powered test farm that monitors the Linux kernel performance on a daily basis with the results being available at kernel-tracker.phoromatic.com. Using the 2 June kernel from the Ubuntu mainline PPA no longer causes a major performance hit and all of the test result values have returned to their levels prior to this kernel bug that lasted about one week.
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Applications
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One of Whyteboard’s main features is its ability to annotate PDF files. You can load a PDF into the application, where it is converted into a series of images, then draw as you please over the images. Developer Steven Sproat says the program has proven to be beneficial in teaching environments. “I’ve received feedback from schoolteachers in Italy who are using the program in their lessons. I developed the program to be really easy to use; the teachers I mentioned are teaching six-year-olds who also use the program, so things must be as straightforward as possible.”
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Proprietary
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For FreeBSD and Linux, we have numerous font fixes, improvements to X11 mode, and the KDE file selector freeze is fixed.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Dariusz Dawidowski let me know about his new game “Maxi Mini Golf” which is a Commercial mini golf game that offers 36 holes, realistic physics, special score system and up to four human players.
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Aquaria has gone open source under the GPL! Now all four of the games that pledged to open in the Humble Indie Bundle are officially open source — the others are Lugaru, Gish, and Penumbra Overture. I am especially excited about the modding possibilities for Aquaria because of its excellent level editing tools. Here’s a video showing an early version of the editor:
I show off their editor more in the beginning of the Aquaria Design Tour
This kind of freeform layer-based manipulation is the basis for most modern 2D games, so it’s important to have good tools. Having access to a user-friendly editor like this could be a big head start both for Aquaria modifications and for separate total conversion projects.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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And we’ll also need to open up the decision-making structure. That is to say, contributors who have shown themselves to be trustworthy and good at what they do deserve the right of having a say in the decisions. Take, for example some of the contributors of the past year: there are a couple of cases where they know the code better than people working in the Qt offices. We have come quickly to the point where we have to say “I trust you that this contribution is good”. This is part of the meritocratic process that we want to have in place.
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Invisible Things Lab is creating these lightweight, throwaway VMs that work with traditional virtual machines in Qubes, the open-source, Xen-based OS it plans to release in beta later this summer. Qubes was architected to minimize the attack surface in the VM environment.
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Stéphane TELETCHEA is working in a french research laboratory. He is also contributing to Mandriva Linux as a tester and packager for some years now. Below is his testimony in Mandriva Linux use for his daily work.
We started using Mandriva Linux (Mandriva at that time) in the laboraty for the great combination of an ease of use and a very strong development platform. At that time I was a starting my PhD and trying to migrate from aging SGI Indigo 2 to more powerful standard PC-based computers. I did test other distributions at that time but Mandriva was the only one offering a lot of scientific applications (one that comes to my mind is XmGrace). Perl/bioperl, python, fortran, gcc and libc stacks were and are still very up-to-date but functional as if they were tested for years. This very good combination of stability and recent releases also helped some colleagues in improving their programs (for instance with the stricter checks coming in c++ in the gcc 4 series). This stability was also very appreciated while writing my PhD thesis where LyX and Pybliographer, on top of the Tetex stack, showed no crash leading to text loss. The pressure was sufficiently high in other domains to appreciate this part (those using Word or even Writer can not understand the beauty of (La)TeX).
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Debian Family
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Every two years or so, Debian puts out a new “stable” release. This is my favorite distribution because of the minimal number of bugs and the huge software repositories and the powerful package manager. Right now, Lenny (5.0) is the stable release, and Squeeze (6.0) is in testing. Sometime “soon” Squeeze will get frozen, which means the regular flow of package migration will stop, and from then on it will only get bug and security fixes through a method of back-porting. Once the number of “release critical” bugs is reduced to an acceptable level (which used to mean 0, more recently it means 50 or so), then Squeeze will be released as the new stable version.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Pre-releases of Maverick are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.
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Whether you intend to download and install Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 1 or not the following meerkat-themed wallpapers will certainly get you in the Maverick-y mood.
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It’s convenient to have a server install that’s entirely separate from the desktop install, and while it may not be as visually slick as the desktop version, that’s not really what you want on a server. The install was straightforward; I really liked the package collections; and everything was functional on first bootup. Five years of support is good, and all the software installed was fairly up-to-date (within a couple of release points, which is reasonable given the testing cycle needed for a long-term release). Ubuntu provides security updates regularly, so any security improvements in more recent releases should be rolled out to your servers quickly.
One problem I found was that the documentation available online is a bit shaky. In some cases, it still refers to earlier releases, which isn’t very reassuring. However, Ubuntu is obviously making an effort with its documentation, and it’s easier to find information than it is with some other distros.
Overall, Lucid Lynx is an impressive offering and definitely something I’d be happy to use for my own servers. More console-driven system management tools and better documentation, would make it an even better option.
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At our last UDS in Belgium it was notable how many people were interested in the ARM architecture. There have always been sessions at UDS about lightweight environments for the consumer electronics and embedded community, but this felt tangibly different. I saw questions being asked about ARM in server and cloud tracks, for example, and in desktop tracks. That’s new.
So I’m very excited at today’s announcement of Linaro, an initiative by the ARM partner ecosystem including Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and TI, to accelerate and unify the field of Linux on ARM. That is going to make it much easier for developers to target ARM generally, and build solutions that can work with the amazing diversity of ARM hardware that exists today.
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Variants
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Everything is stable. Everything just works. No messing around.
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As a Linux, Peppermint is not particularly notable except for its suitability for machines with low hardware specs, or users who do not want system resources wasted on bells and whistles like 3D cubes and wobbly windows. Peppermint should run quickly on just about any PC. Regarding the Prism aspect, it’s harder to draw a conclusion. Mozilla is still developing Prism so its full capabilities have not yet been reached, but the current state does not seem to be especially remarkable. Much of the functionality can be replicated (though perhaps not as well) with simple browser shortcuts. When Prism has more polish it may be a central part of how we interact with our computers, but for now Peppermint is mainly a small, fast and simple OS, albeit with dreams of something bigger.
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The Kno, a dual-screen device aimed at the college market, falls in the latter category. The tablet/e-reader, which was first shown in public on Wednesday at the D8 technology conference in Southern California, allows students to view textbooks on its digital screens much as they would appear in their analog versions, with text, color images and graphics.
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Kno promised to launch a double-screened Linux-based e-reader designed for students at D8, and the undercover startup didn’t disappoint — believe us when we say it came out in a big way.
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The Kno is a big device, having two 14.1 inch (1440 x 900) capacitive touch screens. Each screen has its own battery, giving the Kno 8-hours of battery life, but a hefty weight of 5.5 lbs (I suppose all that glass contributes to the weight as well). As a point of reference, the iPad weighs 1.5 lbs and people complain it’s too heavy. On the other hand, the Kno is so big that you’d probably lay it on a desk to use it. And the target audience is students; if Kno (the company) has its way, students will be carrying around a Kno (the device) rather than a stack of textbooks. That’s the reason for the huge screens; most textbook pages can be shown ‘full size’ on a 14″ screen. Five and a half pounds doesn’t seem so bad compared to a backpack full of textbooks.
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Phones
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According to Hurd, HP was actually more interested in Palm’s IP — specifically webOS, which he wants to put on “tens of millions of HP small form-factor web-connected devices.” Sure, that makes sense, and it lines up perfectly with HP’s plan to “double down on webOS” and put it on everything from netbooks and slates to printers, but hey, Mark? You should really look into the smartphone business when you get a second, okay? Just trust us on this one.
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The first Acer netbooks to hit the market in 2008 were running Linpus Linux Lite, a custom Linux distribution optimized for small screens. While you don’t see many Linux netbooks anymore, the folks at Linpus haven’t given up on the mobile space, and they’re showing off the latest versions of Linpus for netbooks and tablets.
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Webia Technologies introduced their budget-priced Bonux set-top-box prototype at Computex 2010 and it’s showing a lot of promise. The device is running an ARM11 SoC processor clocked between 700-720 mhz and the demo that they showed was speedy enough to make more than just a few people notice.
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Best Free and Open Source CRM Software: Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy for managing and understanding clients and sales prospects to help enhance customer satisfaction and thus increase profit and reduce operational costs. CRM software is needed to collect the correct information about a company’s customers and arrange that information for proper analysis and action. It is a tool for organizing, automating, and synchronize business processes for sales activities, marketing, customer service, and technical support. The information gathered by a CMS software needs to be kept up-to-date, accessible to employees, and provide the knowledge for employees to convert that data into products better matched to customers’ needs.
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Events
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I’M AT Open Source Bridge, a conference in Portland, Oregon for those who don’t only write software that’s free, but who care about it enough to plan, organise, and speak at an entirely volunteer-run programming conference. Portland is the second (and perhaps, the denizens here would say, the first) city of free software.
It’s a strange time for this community, caught between their ideals and the business world. Back in the early 1990s, Linus Torvalds, then a post-graduate at the University of Helsinki with a strange hobby of building a competitor to Windows in his spare time, would speak jokingly of his plans for “World Domination. Fast!”
Now, 20 years on, the world domination phase of open source software has been and perhaps gone.
Free software is ubiquitous and invisible: it powers Google and Yahoo!, a sizeable chunk of Fortune 500, and most of the internet’s infrastructure. I’ve seen it in use from Beijing to Tajikistan (which has volunteers who convert it to run in their native Tajik language, which Microsoft and Apple won’t deign to).
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The second Innovators barcamp – a meet-up organized by the Italian innovators group to pass from talking about innovation to do it in and for public administrations – was the perfect venue to share some ideas about “Open Source & Multi-sided Markets“.
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Mozilla
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Get ready to say goodbye to Firefox’s multitude of dialog boxes. Recent design mock-ups show Firefox moving toward an “in-content” look where settings, the add-on manager, themes and other “things which formerly appeared in dialog boxes” will now become just another tab in your browser.
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Funding
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When Diaspora set out to raise money to build an open Facebook alternative site, they had a pretty modest goal: $10,000. Of course, they were raising the funds through a less than traditional means — using Kickstarter, an online fundraising site. Still, they shot past that goal in 12 days. And within 20 days, they had raised over $100,000. Yesterday, the fundraising closed, the final tally: just over $200,000.
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Openness
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“Linux is subversive”: so begins “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric Raymond’s analysis of the open source way. The subversion there was mainly applied to the world of software, but how much more subversive are the ideas that lie behind open source when applied to politics.
That is precisely what the increasingly-important open government movement aims to do, an area I’ve been covering in this blog partly because of its close kinship with open source, but also because of the major implications it has for the use of open source – not least because open government tends to promote its deployment. But what exactly is open government, and how does it flow from open source?
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First of all, I think we already have a data point on such radical transparency. Open source is conducted totally in the open, with all decisions being subject to challenge and justification. That manifestly works, for all its “naked transparency”.
Now, politics is plainly different in certain key respects, not least because hackers are different from politicians, and there has been a culture of *anti*-openness among the latter.
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The World Intellectual Property Organization is opening its doors to the public on Saturday for a glimpse at the organisation’s activities, during its first-ever “open day.”
Visitors will be given the opportunity to ask WIPO staff, including the director general, questions during the day. The event is part of a larger Geneva weekend event to coincide with World Environment Day on 5 June. The UN Environment Programme is organising events on the Place des Nations, and the gardens of the Palais des Nations will also be open to the public on 5 June, and on 6 June the International Peace Bureau will have events along the Geneva lakeside.
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Open Data
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In a very timely fashion, data.gov.uk has come up with a blogpost explaining for any local authorities who want to know (and are listening/reading) how to publish itemised local authority expenditure.
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The following guest post is from Chris Taggart of OpenlyLocal, who advises the Where Does My Money Go? project on local spending data, and is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data.
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Programming
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Here’s the interesting thesis: languages which allow you to write ugly code let you skim programs to find bad code. Languages which force you to write uniform code take away your ability to skim programs to find bad code.
In other words, the superficial visual differences between good Lisp code and bad Lisp code or between good Python code and bad Python code or good assembly code and bad assembly code or good Java code and bad Java code (or good Befunge and bad Befunge code, if you haven’t had enough DFW yet) are smaller than the superficial visual differences between good Perl code and bad Perl code or good C code and bad C code or good C++ code and bad C++ code or good PHP code and bad PHP code.
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We don’t want to say we told you so. But we did. For the past few years, we’ve been repeatedly asked (with many a raised eyebrow) why our data assessing national-level anti-corruption mechanisms in countries like Bulgaria, Poland, Latvia, and Romania were so strong…amongst the strongest globally, in fact. Our answer has been straightforward: the EU and NATO accession processes in those countries had a real impact in terms of forcing governments to adopt some world-class anti-corruption institutions. Just don’t expect them to last forever, we cautioned.
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Science
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Man and machine can now be linked more intimately than ever, according to a new article in the journal ACS Nano Letters. Scientists have embedded a nano-sized transistor inside a cell-like membrane and powered it using the cell’s own fuel.
The research could lead to new types of man-machine interactions where embedded devices could relay information about the inner workings of disease-related proteins inside the cell membrane, and eventually lead to new ways to read, and even influence, brain or nerve cells.
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Consider the facts: Indian-Americans make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population; this year, an estimated 30 NSF-ers will compete at Scripps, 11 percent of the 273-kid field. Recent winners include Sai R. Gunturi from Dallas, who nonchalantly reassembled pococurante for a national title in 2003. Sameer Mishra from West Lafayette, Ind., nailed guerdon in 2008. And four-time finalist Shivashankar made it back-to-back titles for North South Foundation competitors last year, air-writing Laodicean for the win. If Shivashankar hadn’t come through, it’s possible another North South graduate would have: Four other NSF kids cracked the top 10 behind her.
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Security/Aggression
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Angela Epstein, the Manchester-based columnist and ID cards poster girl, has written a furious lament for the scheme – and she’s so angry she’s started a Facebook group.
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Hoping to understand what a new generation of mobile malware could resemble, security researchers will demonstrate a malicious “rootkit” program they’ve written for Google’s Android phone next month at the Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas.
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Joe Lieberman wants to give the federal government the power to take over civilian networks’ security, if there’s an “imminent cyber threat.” It’s part of a draft bill, co-sponsored by Senators Lieberman and Susan Collins, that provides the Department of Homeland Security broad authority to ensure that “critical infrastructure” stays up and running in the face of a looming hack attack.
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In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.
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Environment
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Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), an ardent supporter of the oil industry and adherent of the “drill here, drill now” chant, appeared on KTOK radio yesterday to discuss BP’s oil disaster in the Gulf. Like Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who dismissed the oil spill catastrophe as an “act of God,” Cole sought to downplay dangers inherently associated with offshore drilling.
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Some reports in the media attempt to downplay the significance of the release of oil from the Deepwater Horizon accident by arguing that natural oil seeps release large volumes of oil to the ocean, so why worry? Lets look at the numbers.
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An Alaskan bay bitterly contested by fishermen and miners has become the site of a landmark study on population dynamics — and the findings favor the fish.
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How many species share our planet? According to a recalculation by an international research team, the number is significantly lower than we thought – only around 5.5 million.
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Finance
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Greece announced Wednesday its plans for a big sale of state-owned assets, as the struggling government moved to shrink its huge budget deficit and fulfill the terms of an international rescue package.
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New claims for unemployment insurance fell for the second straight week, fresh evidence the job market is slowly improving.
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JPMorgan Chase was fined a record £33.32 million ($48.6 million) on Thursday by the financial regulator in Britain for failing to keep client funds separate from the firm’s money.
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Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said the collapse of a deal to sell American International Group’s Asia life insurance division won’t undercut chances for taxpayers to be repaid the $180 billion set aside to bail out the insurance conglomerate.
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Geithner said Wednesday he did not think the Group of 20 major industrial and developing countries would reach agreement at upcoming meetings in South Korea over the question of imposing a new tax on banks.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Google spokeswoman Christine Chen said in an e-mail that the patent in question “is entirely unrelated to the software code used to collect Wi-Fi information with Street View cars.” In a follow up e-mail, Chen added that Google files “patent applications on a variety of ideas that our engineers come up with. Some of them mature into real products or services, and some of them don’t.”
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Google will begin handing over to European regulators the rogue data it intercepted from private WiFi internet connections within the next two days, in an effort to defuse growing controversy over its latest privacy blunder.
[...]
“We screwed up. Let’s be very clear about that,” Mr Schmidt said. “If you are honest about your mistakes it is the best defence for it not happening again.”
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“The European Parliament is issuing a written declaration about the need to set up an early warning system to combat sexual child abuse. However, the substance of the declaration is to extend the EU data retention directive to search engines, so that all searches done on for example Google will be monitored. If you are a citizen concerned about the right to privacy and freedom on the Internet, you can help by sending e-mail to the MEPs from your country and explaining the issue to them.”
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Sure, Steve Jobs might be a one-man email PR machine, but his pal Randall Stephenson at AT&T doesn’t appear to be quite as gregarious — as reader Giorgio Galante found out today, sending AT&T’s CEO two emails in two weeks results in a phone call from AT&T’s Executive Response Team and a warning that further emails will result in a cease and desist letter.
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Paul Chambers, a former trainee accountant who was fined £1,000 after posting a message to the social network Twitter joking about blowing up an airport, is to appeal against his conviction.
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The Committee to Protect Journalists denounces Israel’s editing and distribution of footage confiscated from foreign journalists aboard the Gaza-bound flotilla that was raided on Monday.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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When Cross puts all those stories together like that, you realize how much of the last few years has really been about the entertainment industry effectively dismantling the core concepts put forth by Stevens in the Betamax decision. A key component to what helped make the internet free to become the internet we know, love and use every day, is slowly getting chipped away by special interests who don’t want to allow that freedom because it undermines their business models. When you put all of that together in one place and realize how much has already been eroded, it’s downright frightening, and it makes you wonder what great new technology won’t be built and won’t be widely used because of these policies.
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A qualifying copyright holder is a new concept under the Digital Economy Act. But what is it? And is Ofcom introducing a two-tier copyright regime, where those with the valuable rights get privileges and individual authors get side-lined?
NASA Connect – Good Stress (10/21/2004)
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Send this to a friend
06.03.10
Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Alliance
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A group of chip makers including IBM, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments on Thursday unveiled Linaro, a new software-engineering foundation dedicated to improving Linux distributions, including Android, MeeGo and Ubuntu, used in consumer devices.
The new foundation hopes to take the success Linux has seen in large enterprise software and translate that to the consumer world of TV, tablets, smartphones and netbooks, which is dominated by several main OSes, including Windows, Symbian, Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone OS.
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Chipmaker ARM and a group of allies have joined forces to back a non-profit Linux company to develop tools for cellphones, tablet PC and similar small devices.
The alliance with Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments was announced yesterday at Computex 2010 and significantly ups the stakes in the battle for future mobile dominance.
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Ballnux
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Thanks to another Bluetooth SIG listing we now know Samsung is prepping a music player with our beloved Android OS. First spotted a little over a week ago by Samsung Hub and Chocoberry…
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Graphics Stack
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Do we got alternative to X ? There’s Wayland, but it’s far from being usable. There’s DirectFB, but that’s not very portable. None seems candidate to replace X some days to me.
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Applications
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Free chat client Pidgin version 2.7.1 has just been released with many improvements and fixes pushed to Bonjour, ICQ, XMPP and MXit protocols. The major gainer is the MSN protocol that gets support for direct connections, with faster file transfers to aMSN and the official MSN client. I haven’t tested the file transfer speed but from the screenshot posted at Quantum Logic (a Pidgin developer’s blog) and re-posted here above, file transfer in Pidgin is now pretty fast. Buddy icon and custom emoticon also load faster.
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Linux is a very strong platform for budding artists, photographers, animators, and designers. With inexpensive hardware, free software, and a modicum of talent and inspiration, anyone can create professional-looking computer graphics.
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Brasero may be the resident disc-burn app on a lot of Linux distros, but GnomeBaker is by no means a second-tier option. The application puts its own twist on many of the same functions Brasero takes care of, and some users may find it flat-out easier to use. For instance, GnomeBaker features a tabbed interface that lets you keep track of multiple screens at once.
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If your microblogging activities are limited to the Identi.ca and Twitter services, Gwibber might be overkill for your needs. In that case, Pino is exactly what you need. This microblogging client is lightning fast, and it’s not overloaded with features you might never use. But it does support multiple accounts, URL shortening, notifications, and even spell checking.
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Freemind, the open source Java based mind mapping application, makes a great writing planning tool. A final release of version 0.9 has been a long time coming, but the current release candidates are very usable and stable, and I would recommend making the extra effort to install one of these rather than an 0.8 “stable” release. Fortunately, the 0.9 RCs have made it into the standard Ubuntu 10.04 repository.
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Proprietary
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For a long time – in fact, from the beginning if my memory serves correctly – Skype has “promised” that Skype-to-Skype calls will “always be free”. Well, it turns out that promise is worth exactly as much as any other promise Skype has ever made, or will ever make for that matter. A big, fat nothing.
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Instructionals
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Games
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I gave in finally and decided to buy X-plane, which has a native Linux version, great right? Well fairly great… As I waited for the CD’s to arrive, I noticed that there was a demo version online, so I downloaded and installed it. At which point I ran into my first problem. My 64bit version of Ubuntu was missing a lib file needed for the installer to run. After hours of searching the net, I was able to place the correct 32bit lib file in the correct 32bit lib folder, and then create a link from there to the 64bit lib files. At last the installer worked. After hours of downloading the rather large installer, X-plane hiccuped on install, missing another file. I patched that file in and tried it one more time. It worked, I watched the sweet intro, and played it a bit with the keyboard and mouse as I awaited the arrival of the game.
[...]
X-Plane continues to be developed, while the Microsoft Flight Simulator series ended with FSX. The hope is that X-Plane will get better and better. I hope the developers at X-Plane will realize that their Linux customer is important.
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Desktop Environments
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so, in this post we are going to list top ten fluxbox themes for light themes and other dark themes
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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There’s still more. Like full KIO support in all file dialogs. Or performance improvements in the GUI and the backend code. Or support for setting volume labels on FAT32 file systems. Or fully tested support for devices with more than 2^31 sectors. Or…
You get the idea. In any case, I hope you’ll agree that KDE Partition Manager 1.1 is going to rock.
This concludes part six in a sequence of entries presenting some of the new features of the soon-to-be-finished KDE Partition Manager 1.1. The previous parts were:
1. Mount Management
2. SMART Status Reports
3. Support For 4096-Byte Sectors
4. Improved Size Dialog
5. Options Galore
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME Shell is the defining technology of the GNOME 3 desktop user experience. It provides core interface functions like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide a delightful and easy to use experience. The GNOME Shell is currently in active development and while many planned features are not yet implemented it is stable enough for everyday use.
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Reviews
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Slackware Linux is still going strong. The Slackware Linux Project released Slackware 13.1 on May 24th.This is just a little by shy of the 17th anniversary of Slackware 1.0 and not quite a year after Slackware 13.0. Delve back into yesteryear with me; you’re in for a treat.
[...]
You’ve probably surmised that Slackware isn’t for everyone as a full-time OS. It’s not. Slackware is for users who like a basic, solid Linux distribution that makes very few assumptions about how the system is going to be used. That approach means that Slackware is perfect for a small percentage of Linux users.
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Red Hat Family
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Tieto and Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, have collaborated to advance open source offerings. Tieto is the first Finnish organization to join Red Hat’s Advanced Partner program. This partnership will also cover Sweden, Denmark and other major European markets and will enable Tieto to offer value-added IT services combined with Red Hat’s enterprise class open source middleware and platform solutions. Customers will benefit from more accessible and cost effective technology.
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Variants
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Rating
Desktop ready: 4/5
User-friendliness: 4/5
Overall rating: 4/5
Mint Linux 9 is an SAGeek Recommended product.
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Snapdragon is a powerful ARM-based processor aimed and optimized for smartphones, but up to now has been a single chip offering, though it ran at 1GHz, making it one of the fastest smartphone processors on the market. The processor is known for its low power consumption and long battery life and powers newer phones, including the Droid Incredible, HTC EVO 4G, and the Google Nexus One.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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MeeGo support included in “Oak Trail” platform, Acer committed to MeeGo on upcoming netbooks.
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Intel has released more details and the deployment roadmap for the company’s MeeGo operating system (OS), highlighting its desire for consumers to start utilizing the open source platform.
During his keynote here Wednesday at Computex 2010, Peter Biddle, director of Intel’s AppUp products and services, noted that while he is “no longer worried” about attracting developers to create content for the MeeGo platform, it is consumer adoption that now preoccupies his thoughts. “We need more consumers!” he declared.
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Android
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These are cellbots, if you couldn’t think of any reason for getting yourself an Android yet, here is one.
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At the moment of this writing the Android app is still in alpha state. So a little patience may be in it’s place. I have no doubt android will provide a great platform for the future of home remote control.
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Acer has announced the availability of a limited edition version of their Liquid e handset. Called the Liquid Ferrari, it’s a glossy, sexed up looking Liquid e with a few special features added in. With a shiny Ferrari F1 red finish, the smart phone includes exclusive content, including videos, wallpapers, and specific ringtones that “allows you to personalize your phone with the inimitable sweet music of the Ferrari engine.” Other subtle tweaks such as designing the microphone to look like an air intake inlet ensure the handset stands out in a crowd and provides a “stronger sense of belonging to all Ferrari fans”.
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So we’ve been hearing rumors about the Dell Streak being some kind of a rugged bad boy. Word is, the Gorilla Glass display on this 5-inch slate is good enough to withstand pretty much anything a human would care to throw its way.
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Tablets
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Yukyung Technologies showed off a Viliv-branded, Android-based tablet at Computex equipped with a 10-inch, 1366 x 768 touchscreen. The Viliv X10 Tablet with Android offers an SD card reader, USB port, HDMI, webcam, and WiFi, and “could be an incredible iPad alternative,” according to a hands-on Laptop story.
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Events
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Jon “maddog” Hall is the Executive Director of Linux International, a non-profit organization of computer vendors who wish to support and promote Linux-based operating systems. The nickname “maddog” was given to him by his students at Hartford State Technical College, where he was the Department Head of Computer Science. He now prefers to be called by this name. According to Hall, his nickname “came from a time when I had less control over my temper”.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Weave is no more — at least in name.
Firefox Sync 1.3 is now available, marking the official shift in name from Mozilla Weave, which had been the name of the application since it was created in 2007.
Weave started out as a Mozilla add-on for Firefox that was intended to provide a Mozilla services backend. The initial target of that services backend was data synchronization and now with the 1.3 release, synchronization or Sync is the name of the app as well.
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GIMP
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Jim sent me a screenshot of GIMP 2.7 in single window mode. Looks good and I am going to try it soon. Click on the image for a 100% view.
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Project Releases
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Developed by Sourcefabric, previously known as Campware, the latest Campsite release is the first release under the new Sourcefabric name.
Version 3.3.6 is not a major upgrade over previous releases but does add a number of security fixes and improvements. The next major release will be version 3.4 at the end of June.
[...]
Version 3.3.6 is not a major upgrade over previous releases but does add a number of security fixes and improvements. The next major release will be version 3.4 at the end of June.
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Google, in an attempt to be more open about its tracking mechanisms, has announced that it has open sourced the RLZ library that is built-in to the Chrome browser. RLZ, a previously closed component of the open source based browser, is responsible for generating promotional tokens which are non-unique and not personally identifiable. The tokens are used by Google as a parameter in URLs to, for example, track search queries to Google made from Chrome. The Apache 2.0 licensed RLZ library now has its own Google Code project, where the details of the RLZ parameter are also explained.
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Licensing
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Many of you surely know the Android operating system developed by Google. Maybe not everybody know it’s not fully free software.
This is why activists from LibrePlanet Italia and Software Freedom Law Center created a fully free software Android alternative called Replicant.
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Open Hardware
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The DIY movement is growing every year, with no signs of slowing down. In May, Make held its fifth annual Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, where 95,000 people came to celebrate the unique rewards of DIY. This year, Maker Faire is also coming to Detroit and New York. I hope you can come and participate in the transformative power of DIY.
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Standards/Consortia
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The real battle is in the hearts and eyes of the artists who are paid to create incredibly beautiful objects in the span of just a few hours. The designers will make the final determination. As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they’ll keep their place on the Internet.
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The VideoLAN Project developers have announced the availability of a release candidate for version 1.1, the next major release, of their popular VLC Media Player. According to the developers, the latest 1.1 branch of VLC is much faster and more stable, thanks in part to a substantial amount of “important code clean-up” and rewrites. VLC is a free open source cross-platform multimedia player for various audio and video formats.
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Google has asked the Open Source Initiative to delay its consideration of the WebM license (requested by Bruce Perens) for a couple of weeks; the company has also requested some changes in how the OSI does business.
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Security/Aggression
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A woman was fined £80 for littering after wardens caught her throwing bread crumbs – to the birds.
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The county’s surveillance operation will increase dramatically with major new schemes being introduced to Whitchurch and Ludlow.
A new state-of-the-art headquarters will be launched in Shrewsbury which cameras across the county will be linked to – giving officers the ability to monitor people from a central location.
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West Berkshire Council has taken remedial action after a USB memory stick was lost that contained sensitive information on children and young people.
The memory stick, which was neither encrypted or password protected, contained information relating to the ethnicity and physical or mental health of the children.
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Among practices specifically invited to join the rollout, one in six has refused to do so, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from 91 PCTs.
In 36 areas which have begun the rollout and provided complete figures, 1,732 practices have been invited to participate – with 286 so far declining to take part.
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The RCMP and Manitoba’s ombudsman are investigating allegations of corruption, secret surveillance and harassment at a rural municipal council. The former top administrator of La Broquerie, southeast of Winnipeg, says town politicians installed hidden surveillance cameras in nearly every room in the town hall to spy on rival councillors, staff and the public, and hired a security company to sweep offices for bugs possibly planted by opponents.
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The California Court of Appeal has held that a man who set up a bogus MySpace profile of his former church pastor can stand trial for criminal “personation.”
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A sticker found on a trash can at a Washington, D.C., airport last week depicting what appeared to be a suicide bomber is actually the logo of a popular graffiti artist. His fans have plastered his stickers around the world since around 2005.
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Then, there’s the matter of America’s own spy, communications and navigation satellites. Most of these could be taken out by a sufficiently advanced enemy, perhaps with serious consequences. If this was done by using another fully-orbital spacecraft along ASAT lines (as opposed to a suborbital rocket launch directly aimed to get in the way of a spacecraft) it might be difficult or impossible for the USA to know who had done it – or even if anything had actually been done.
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Environment
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Finance
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The European Union yesterday called for a single supervisor of credit-rating companies as politicians in the 27-nation bloc demanded a new regional agency to increase competition in the wake of the sovereign debt crisis.
The European Commission proposed giving the power to investigate, issue fines and revoke licenses to a new EU authority. The Brussels-based commission also proposed reining in risk-taking behavior and compensation at financial companies to prevent a repeat of the credit crunch.
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The FSA has levied its largest ever fine of £33.32m on J.P. Morgan Securities for client money breaches over a seven-year period.
The regulator says J.P. Morgan Securities was guilty of an error in which it failed to protect client money by segregating it appropriately.
Between 1 November 2002 and 8 July 2009, the company failed to segregate the client money held by its futures and options business (F&O) with JPMorgan Chase Bank.
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Reporting/Civil Rights
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In a 1996 law review article, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan warned that campaign finance laws “easily can serve as incumbent-protection devices, insulating current officeholders from challenge and criticism.” The DISCLOSE Act, a speech-squelching bill supported by the man who nominated Kagan, is a good example.
President Obama and congressional Democrats say the DISCLOSE Act, which is expected to come up for a vote soon, is aimed at ensuring transparency and preventing corruption in the wake of Citizens United v. FEC, the January decision in which the Supreme Court lifted restrictions on political speech by corporations and unions. But the bill’s onerous, lopsided requirements suggest its supporters are more interested in silencing their critics.
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Nobody, including the press, is very happy with the press these days. So state Sen. Bruce Patterson, a man of luxuriant mustaches and florid expressions, came up with an idea: Regulate’ em.
Set up a board to check reporters’ credentials, license them as if they were manicurists or lawyers, and charge them a registration fee. Then issue those who pass muster and pay the state the designation of “Michigan Registered Reporter.”
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Dear FTC. Instead of worrying about whether bloggers are disclosing all they should when writing about products, perhaps a little more attention should be focused on TV programs and product placement? This season’s 24 took things to a new level, where plot points were constructed around featuring a product. Is a tiny mention in credits at the end really disclosure enough?
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The Federal Trade Commission has been nosing around how to save journalism and in its just-posted “staff discussion draft” on “potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism,” it makes its bias clear: The FTC defines journalism as what newspapers do and aligns itself with protecting the old power structure of media.
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With Rupert Murdoch’s The Times of London going behind a paywall, we’re already seeing some of their writers bailing out. A bunch of folks sent over the news that the writer of the Times’ legal blog, Tim Kevan, has set up shop on his own blog, outside of the paywall.
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On Friday, I broke a tasty story about a woman suing Google, claiming bad directions caused her to get hit by a vehicle. Today, I discover our story is everywhere, often with no attribution. Come along and watch how the mainstream media, which often claims bloggers rip it off, does a little stealing of its own.
Woman Follows Google Maps “Walking” Directions, Gets Hit, Sues was the story I posted on Friday afternoon, Pacific Time. I was tipped to the lawsuit by Gary Price of ResourceShelf. Gary hadn’t written about it himself but thought Search Engine Land would be interested in it. He came across it through the regular monitoring of search-related news that he does across a variety of resources (Gary watches many, many things — he’s a research guru extraordinaire). Gary downloaded a copy of the suit via the PACER Service and sent it to me.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Someone had to be the first, and AT&T decided that it would be the one to take the plunge – the carrier has announced that it will completely eliminate unlimited data service from new mobile subscription plans.
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Copyrights
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Plenty of folks, from copyright lawyers to Internet entrepreneurs to investment bankers, have been watching the long-running legal battle between Viacom and Google/YouTube carefully, well aware that a decision in the case could have a profound effect on the future of the Internet. But most YouTube users probably haven’t given it the same attention. They should, and in an amicus brief filed in support of YouTube last week, a group of YouTube video creators explains why.
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This is the same mistake that the RIAA and the SMPTP are making today. They think they’re in the business of selling discs. They’re not. They’re in the business of delivering entertainment. And they’ve forgotten that. At least, their lawyers seem to have forgotten it.
This isn’t the first time the entertainment industry has made this mistake. Almost forty years ago, Sony started selling Betamax videotape recorders for home use. Universal and Disney promptly sued, claiming that home video recording would create the opportunity for copyright infringement and they would lose billions of dollars. The Supreme Court ruled against them. Under the fair use provisions of the copyright law, it’s legal to record media at home for personal use. Even if some people might use videotape machines for illegal purposes, that was not sufficient justification for denying fair use to everyone else.
After losing that lawsuit, Disney and Universal (and all the other studios as well) began selling their movies on Betamax and VHS tapes, and later on DVD. Videotape sales became an enormous market for the studios and eventually DVD sales accounted for at least half, often more, of a film’s total gross income.
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While we’re still not convinced you can trust the Associated Press’s reporting on its own lawsuit with Shepard Fairey, the AP is now reporting that the judge in the case has indicated that the AP will almost certainly win, and that Fairey should give in and settle.
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Voltage has hired the U.S. Copyright Group to oversee the litigation and go after alleged file sharers. The group has sued alleged movie pirates on behalf of the makers of such films as “Far Cry” and “Call of the Wild 3D.” Some of the people accused of pirating those movies, including Jon Harrison from Irving, Texas, have already been notified and are well along in the process.
Harrison showed CNET the documents he received from Verizon–his Internet service provider–and the U.S. Copyright Group. To be sure, without seeing the actual notices that will be sent as part of the “Hurt Locker” suit, we don’t how they’ll differ. But there are likely to be many similarities.
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The film, which cost only $15 million to produce, has so far grossed $150 million worldwide. Nevertheless, the firm maintains that this mere 1000% return represents “a direct decline” in the film and entertainment industries.
Nicolas Chartier, one of the film’s producers and co-founder of Voltage Pictures, went on to prove how out of touch he is with the real world by claiming that anyone that disagrees with him is a “moron”. Thus, by extension, he believes that Radiohead, Trent Reznor, Stephen Fry, Michael Moore, the Featured Artists Coalition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Larry Lassig and the entire Creative Commons movement, the Open Rights Group, the Pirate Parties worldwide, scores of his film’s fans, and countless others are all morons.
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Let’s run an experiment and see if piracy is harmful to sales.
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Sure, it’s not really piracy. The free preview is a transparent marketing stunt by Lionsgate, the studio behind the film, which has decided to hide the movie from critics and instead put the first few minutes in front of its target audience during the run-up to its release. To that end, they’ve enlisted the movie’s co-star, a genuine Internet phenomenon, to help promote that effort.
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It really does make you wonder why the MPAA and the RIAA have bothered with all of this. It hasn’t even remotely slowed file sharing down. In fact, their actions have helped advertise The Pirate Bay worldwide and made those running it into celebrities. And, even if they eventually do shut down the site, a dozen others will quickly step up to take its place. At some point, you have to wonder when they will realize it’s time to figure out ways to focus on building a better business model rather than trying to do the impossible and deny what technology allows.
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Today, exactly four years have passed since The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police. While the entertainment industries hoped that this would be the end of their troubles, in hindsight they’ve created a a multi-headed hydra that is impossible to kill. The events that unfolded could easily be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster.
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Canada
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Barry Sookman appears to be missing in action – only two tweets, and no posts since May 27, 2010.
Michael Geist has posted The Canadian Copyright Bill: Flawed But Fixable – since I haven’t read the entire bill yet I don’t know if I can agree, but I’ve disagreed with him a lot in the past. Quite frankly Michael’s too damned moderate for my tastes.
Ars Technica has an article – “Canadian DMCA” defends DRM, legalizes DVRs – which points out that Digital Locks over ride consumer rights. What they don’t consider is that Digital Locks also over ride artist rights.
Mike Masnick over at TechDirt is also covering this – Canadian DMCA Introduced; Digital Lock Provision Trumps Any And All User Rights – Mike’s a bit weird at time, but I think his title hits the mark.
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For those of you who have been counting, this is the third effort, in the past five years, by Canada to amend the Copyright Act. The previous two each died on their order papers – victims of Parliamentary instability. That is unlikely to happen this time. It appears the government will endeavor to fast-track the bill into law.
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Yet all the attempts at balance come with a giant caveat that has huge implications for millions of Canadians. The foundational principle of the new bill remains that anytime a digital lock is used – whether on books, movies, music, or electronic devices – the lock trumps virtually all other rights. In other words, in the battle between two sets of property rights – those of the intellectual property rights holder and those of the consumer who has purchased the tangible or intangible property – the IP rights holder always wins.
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ACTA
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But, of course, according to various folks at the USTR and the Copyright Office, now that ACTA’s been released, it’s proven that all the “fears” from online sources were misguided. Right?
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While ACTA has now been released, the review still happened. Hephaestus points us to the news that the analysis found that negotiators were not allowed to keep the document secret (pdf) from Parliament, and that if it had continued to the Parliament could have taken legal action. The key points:
* Confidentiality cannot be used as a justification for not complying with the obligation to keep Parliament fully informed. Where a degree of confidentiality is justified to ensure the proper conduct of negotiations, the Council and Commission may request that agreed measure on the confidentiality of the documents be applied.
* The obligation to inform Parliament cannot be modified or limited by any agreement among the institutions or by an arrangement with third parties which does not involve Parliament. Where documents originate from a third party, the Union negotiator may be justified in agreeing not to disclose such information without the consent of the third party concerned. In such circumstances, Parliament should nonetheless be provided with sufficient information.
* In the case of a persistent refusal to provide it with sufficient information, Parliament could initiate proceedings for illegal failure to act.
NASA Connect – ATE – Globe Program (5/20/2004)
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 3:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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· Announced Distro: Slackware 13.1
· Announced Distro: Fedora 13
· Announced Distro: StressLinux 0.5.113
· Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 7
· Announced Distro: SME Server 7.5
· Announced Distro: Zenwalk Linux 6.4
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Desktop
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So don’t look to Google to drive Linux (or Mac) “desktop’ adoption. Google likely can’t change calcified opinions of “what a desktop OS should look like” (i.e., Windows), but it is actively defining the future of that desktop with two open-source initiatives:Google Android for mobile and Google Chrome for Web browsing.
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In the previous article this blog discussed the value of PC gaming in bringing Linux to the mainstream home user, and in particular the importance of stable drivers as an enabler of this revolution, but what about the other technologies that will underpin a truly first-class linux user experience? In many cases the mainstream user won’t be aware of the technologies that provide this user experience, and even if they did they really wouldn’t care, because the limit of their interest is that the computer and it software environment work seamlessly to meet their user needs. This does mean however that those technologies, and their progress towards maturity, are not of interest to those with a nerdier bent.
[...]
Other technologies of note include:
1. Btrfs, a new filesystem under development that is designed (among other goals) to be able to leverage the capabilities of solid state drives which are now entering the consumer market for computer hardware. Its first use is likely to be on MeeGo driven nokia smartphones as well as the Ubuntu 10:10, but its adoption will spread rapidly in 2011 as its development matures.
2. Multi Pointer X which along with X Input 2 will allow truly multi-touch friendly GUI’s capable of working with many unmodified X windows applications. This much delayed feature will hopefully come of age now that there are a myriad of touch-screen devices and computers demanding the attention of consumers.
3. Packagekit is a front end for various package management systems being adopted by many linux distributions as it provides a consistent and reliable application installation/management/removal experience regardless of the desktop environment used.
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There you have it. The rankings are as follows:
Ubuntu 21 points
PCLOS 20 points
Linux Mint 20 points
Kubuntu 12 points
Windows 7 6 points
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So, now, I will back up this as an image and wipe the hard drive to Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze to make it useful. Six hours of work were needed just to bring that other OS into a very basic form from which my successor may want to start. With no budget, I wish him well (it’s a long story…).
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Server
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Try as I might I could find no evidence that any of them run Windows Vista. In fact, not many of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers run anything other than Linux. 473 of the fastest 500 Supercomputers in the world run Linux. That is 94.6%.
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South Africa’s Tsessebe supercomputer, based at the Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town, was listed at position 461.
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Ballnux
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If you need reminding, Samsung’s Bada OS is based on the Linux Kernel by the Koreans, meaning it also has its own application store as well. We should be seeing many more phones running this platform in the near future as Samsung looks to create a whole new range of affordable smartphones.
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Kernel Space
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Linux 2.6.35 will deliver better network throughput, support the Turbo Core functionality offered by the latest AMD processors and de-fragment memory as required. On LKML, a discussion on merging several patches developed by Google for Android is generating large volumes of email.
Two weeks on from the release of Linux 2.6.34, on Sunday night Linus Torvalds released the first pre-release version of Linux 2.6.35 to concluding the merge of the major changes for the next kernel version, expected to be released in about ten weeks. The merge window has once again stretched to around 14 days, after its abbreviation in Linux 2.6.34 caused confusion among some subsystem maintainers.
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Instructionals
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Games
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The Pandora team is currently building a batch of some 4,000 handhelds, and completed ones are already being shipped. One of their forum mods, x68000, received the first mass-produced model, which he showed off with some unboxing pictures.
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Gish source code is available from GitHub and is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).
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Great computers games are like love at first sight. The moment you power on the game, you know it’s something different and you know you’re going to love it. This is what happened to me with Live For Speed. While reading about VDrift, a cross-platform racing simulator, on Wikipedia I noticed a reference to Live for Speed (LFS). The game had a free demo available, so I downloaded it.
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Reviews
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The release of Linux Pardus 2009.2 is near so I wanted to give the Beta a run and see what’s new before I actually get my hands on the final release a few days/weeks from now. Unfortunately, the link to the beta from DISTROWATCH was broken. In all fairness, that link is broken on the Pardus official WEBSITE as well. I kept looking and was lucky enough to find a link to the Release Candidate, which actually makes more sense for a fair preview article. In fact, this RC is so complete that this almost feels like a review!
[...]
Some time ago I compared Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7. Back then I stated that Windows 7 made things very simple at the expense of diversity and choice. In other words, everything was intuitive because options were very limited and mostly predefined by developers. I was essentially justifying that Ubuntu’s arguably more complicated interface was the result of its great flexibility and freedom. PCLinuxOS 2010, Linux Mint 9 and specially Pardus 2009.2 have demonstrated that a much better job can be done in making the Linux desktop accessible to anyone without compromising its power.
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People sometimes ask which distribution to try if they want to learn how Linux works. Common answers are Gentoo, Arch, or Debian. However, I disagree. Each of these distros teach users their particular brand of Linux. There’s only one truly pure Linux, and that is Slackware.
Slackware is the oldest surviving Linux distribution. In its early years, Patrick Volkerdin rolled up a kernel, init, libraries, desktop, and applications to make Linux easier for users. And that’s still what he is doing today. He doesn’t change anything, he doesn’t customize anything. Every component is exactly how the original developers intended. For example, users get a vanilla kernel and default desktop configuration.
[...]
So, all in all, besides the partitioning requirement and the lack of multimedia support, Slackware is just as up-to-date and easy-to-use as any Linux distribution. Like a split personality, today’s Slackware is steeped in tradition yet surprisingly modern.
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New Releases
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SystemRescueCd 1.5.5 is the latest update to the Gentoo-based system rescue Linux distro. It comes with updated kernels and several other changes. The biggest new additions are new tools to make USB installs easier on both Windows and Linux host machines.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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As announced previously, here comes the last development release for Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring. This is essentially a bug fix release.
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The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the June 2010 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.
In the June 2010 issue:
How Can YOU Contribute To PCLinuxOS?
Creating A Local PCLinuxOS Repository
Xfce 4.6.1: An Overview
Xfce 4.6.1: Xfce Settings Manager – Part 1
Xfce 4.6.1: Customize Your Xfce Menu
OpenOffice: An Overview
Ms_meme’s nook: If My Friends Could See Me Now
Computer Languages A to Z: Lisp
Command Line Interface Intro: Part 9
Zip-Player Plays Music Archives: Part 2
Screenshot Showcase
Alternate OS: ReactOS
Game Zone: Warzone 2100
Configuring USB Speakers on KDE 4
and much, much more!
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Red Hat Family
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A Norwegian company that claims to be among the top providers of Internet-based services in northern Europe will begin using platform infrastructure developed by Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the Raleigh-based software maker announced Tuesday.
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Sitting at the heart of every Linux OS distribution is a Linux kernel. When it comes to the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 release, the issue of which kernel is being used is not a cut and dried answer, however.
RHEL 6 is currently in its first beta release, with a feature freeze now in place. Currently, the mainline Linux kernel is nearing its 2.6.34 release, while the most recent stable release is the 2.6.33 release, which came out in February. But instead of either sticking with the 2.6.33 Linux kernel or holding out for 2.6.34, Red Hat is taking a different approach.
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Cloud architecture has to be defined in a way that allows applications to move around, or clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins, warned Red Hat’s CEO James Whitehurst.
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Fedora
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I also like the more polished desktop look and feel. Menus are simpler and more consistent thanks to the work of the Fedora Desktop team. The Fedora Design team has also been hard at work in making the icons in the default installation match a single look and feel. I’m looking forward to trying out other desktop features in Fedora 13 including its solutions for scanning, microblogging and photo management. (Heading on vacation soon, and plan to take a lot of pics!) I’m able to rely on Fedora to just work out of the box more than ever before.
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The tests carried out included OpenArena, Warsow, World of Padman, PostgreSQL, Unpack-Linux, Bullet, C-Ray, x264, NAS Parallel Benchmarks, John The Ripper, and TTSIOD 3D Renderer. This testing was done by the Phoronix Test Suite.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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According to a posting on the Ubuntu developers mailing list, Ubuntu developers are planning to push the next release of Firefox, 3.6.4, to the current Ubuntu release, Lucid Lynx 10.04, and to older versions such as Hardy (8.04LTS), Jaunty (9.04) and Karmic Koala (9.10). These older versions currently have Firefox 3.0 and xulrunner 1.9 both of which are no longer supported by Mozilla.
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Though lacking any so-called killer features, Parsix GNU/Linux 3.5 is a solid release and can be used on both home and production machines. There are some weird sound-related issues and the video driver installation process can frighten some more inexperienced users, but other than that, there aren’t really any reasons to not take a look or two at this distro.
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In only a couple of years, millions of Australians will directly be using the open source Linux operating system in their everyday personal and professional lives.
[...]
“But wait!” I hear you cry out. “Linux’s desktop market share is not growing, and even the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution is failing to gain traction amongst the mainstream. How can you possibly claim that Linux will become extremely popular in Australia?”
The answer is easy. By and large, the millions of Australians who will shortly rely on Linux will not even know it is there.
I have written previously about the rapid encroachment of the Linux-based Android operating system into the Australian mobile phone market, a phenomenon which, I anticipate, will eventually see dozens of Android handsets flood into Australian hands and pose a strong challenge to other mobile phone vendors such as Apple, Research in Motion and others.
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At each event, attendees will be given demonstrations of the Resolve on Linux…
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The Kno, with its dual 14-inch screens and touch-based Linux operating system, is aimed at students and is slated to hit the market at the end of the year. Kno isn’t talking price just yet, but the company’s goal is for it to be well under $1,000.
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The Linux OS-powered iPlayer interface is good looking, easy to read and incredibly simple, but it’s not as fast as, say, the similar service on Virgin Media. We used a 10Mbps broadband connection, though it should work on a 2Mbps service – any slower and you’ll have to use “normal” as opposed to “high quality” settings.
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Just a few months after the MeeGo Linux project was formed by the merger of the Maemo and Moblin projects, it looks like MeeGo is making some pretty serious progress in the marketplace.
The other day we reported that it looked like Asus was going to launch devices running MeeGo in 2011, and a press release issued today pretty much confirms it. Acer officials say the company palns to beat Asus to market with a MeeGo-based netbook before the end of this year.
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What is MeeGo in the first place? As defined on its website, “MeeGo is an open source, Linux project which brings together the Moblin project, headed by Intel, and Maemo, by Nokia, into a single open source activity.” The aim is to provide a Linux-based OS for netbooks, handheld devices, televisions and set-top boxes, as well as in-vehicle computers.
I downloaded the OS image from the site and immediately ran it on VMWare Fusion 3.1 on my Macbook Pro. Giving it 1GB of RAM and a single core to work with, the image booted up but that was it — did not display anything on the screen. I tried this three times with different configurations and nothing.
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I did install it without any problems on an Asus EeePC 1000HE, however there are a great number of existing netbooks out there and it might not work as seamlessly on other makes and models.
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The Linux-based MeeGo operating system gained traction at Computex, with prototype tablets shown by Wistron, Compal, Quanta, CZC, and others, and Acer announcing it will offer MeeGo on both netbooks and tablets. Meanwhile, Phoronix benchmarked MeeGo for Netbooks and found it to be faster than Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Fedora, and Moblin.
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Android
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What does openness mean? Is a platform that is open to outside programmers open? Is a platform that has an open content store open? Is a platform that’s open source open? All those definitions are still in flux, I think.
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Victoria Fodale, an analyst at ABI Research, said Tuesday in a research note that the Scottsdale, Arizona-based marketing research firm anticipates that Linux-enabled smartphones, led by the success of Google’s Android, will comprise 33 percent of the worldwide smartphone market by 2015.
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Sub-notebooks
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Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai announced that the company’s browser-centric operating system will be released this fall. Chrome OS is built on top of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, but uses a completely custom user interface based on Google’s Chrome Web browser.
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Google has confirmed that its upcoming lightweight, browser-centric Chrome OS operating system will launch in the late autumn. Speaking to the press at this year’s Computex PC trade show in Taiwan, Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai said, “We will be selective on how we come to market because we want to deliver a great user experience,” adding that, “We’re thinking on both the hardware and software levels.”
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With Ubuntu she says that the screen shows up the fonts much better than other solutions due to the font rendering technology Canonical chose to use. From what we’ve seen it looks very crisp on-screen.
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Tablets
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If MeeGo based devices even have a chance on the market is still a big question mark. MeeGo got created by Intel and Nokia earlier this year by merging Moblin and Maemo. MeeGo is a Linux-based software platform and so will be Google Chrome OS. And of course HP has now Palm’s webOS, which at its heart is also Linux.
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Confident with their first success, Sharp decided that it was time to go beyond the conventional “Notebook” design and to start offering a real Linux-powered handheld slate, known now as the Netwalker PC-T1.
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While several tech bloggers spotted a Wistron tablet running MeeGo tucked away behind glass at the Intel booth at Computex, the folks at Engadget got to spend some hands-on time with another MeeGo tablet. The Quanta Redvale tablet has an Intel Atom Moorestown processor and runs MeeGo Linux.
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Android
Android is the newcomer to the smartphone market. Android began as a mobile variant of the aforementioned open-source Linux OS, and was then acquired by Google. The Android OS is now available as an open-source platform again, and its users rave about it. Android presently (mid-2010) holds about 10 percent of the smartphone market, but is predicted to dominate the market with Symbian by 2012. Android phones are presently available from T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and AT&T.
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You might not recognize the name Geeknet, but you probably know its popular tech sites such as Sourceforge, Slashdot, Ohloh, Think Geek, Freshmeat, and the recently acquired Geek.com.
When Geeknet opened a new data center in Chicago two years ago, the network operations team wanted to centralize management of hundreds of systems serving the Geeknet Web network.
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Africa
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CAN, a Usakos-based organisation, says its objective of establishing what would be called the Namibia Open Source Software Institute (NOSSI) in Omaruru, Erongo Region, during the course of this year, is to promote the use of free and open source software, which it strongly feels would benefit the country.
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Because open source gives you equal rights with other software developers, it can be used effectively to localize software in small language groups, such as those found across Africa. And the applications can be deployed using technology that is already in place, so the results are truly independent.
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Mail
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In March, the provider of business-class open source collaboration software moved to increase its U.S. sales presence by adding Behshad Behnam as vice president of sales, Americas. The former Parallels executive spearheads service provider initiatives for Open-Xchange.
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Events
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Schedules at upcoming industry conferences are revealing indicators. Consider the speaker line-up at LinuxCon in mid-August:
* Ravi Simhambhatla, Chief Information Officer at Virgin America
* Chris Wright, Red Hat
* Bdale Garbee, Hewlett-Packard
* Tim Bird, Sony Corporation
* Wim Coekaerts, Senior Vice President, Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle Corporation
* David Rientjes, Google
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Mozilla
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Firefox 3.5 is already the most widely used browser in the world. A lot of openness in the web that we enjoy today and that we take for granted is because of the open source browser, Firefox. Light the world with Firefox video is a nice depiction of Firefox through the years. But how many of you actually knew that there are a number of Firefox based browsers which are as good or oven better than Firefox? Here is a list of 5 Firefox based browsers you should know.
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SaaS
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Databases
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With Big Blue behind Hadoop, companies with Big Data problems may find the open source technology is available in more manageable forms.
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It remains to be seen just how much momentum Apache CouchDB can garner because most of the people using it discovered it as a result of using Linux on the desktop. While not officially supported on Windows just yet, the Apache CouchDB is POSIX compliant, so it runs on most Windows systems. Given those issues, making the rest of the world aware of Apache CouchDB will take some effort.
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Open Data
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Wikipedia’s “crowdsourced knowledge” model has created a spectacular resource, but everyone knows the big caveat: if the data’s important, don’t trust the online encyclopedia without verifying it first. So how well would a similar crowdsourcing model work for a detailed street-level map of the world?
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The product is a fully-integrated, open source geospatial platform for manipulating maps and data that provides enhanced capabilities like the ability to edit vector data through a web interface, imagery delivery and customized web application development. OpenGeo will provide unlimited support and bug fixes for PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers and the rest of the open source platform to help OBIS extract intelligent data more easily from its 27 million record database and improve the ease of use for its global audience.
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Open Hardware
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Hexaboard’s architecture is Open Source under “Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0″ license.
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Francisco Paz (aka TheCorpora) has released new information about his open source robot Qbo. The diminutive wheeled bot stands only 456mm (18 inches) tall but is packed with sensors, including two high definition web cameras in its eyes. TheCorpora plans on using Qbo’s stereoscopic vision to let it react to people and objects in a realistic manner with face tracking, depth perception, and gesture detection. The robot will also be capable of speech recognition and synthesis. If all goes according to plan, the Qbo could serve as a versatile open source platform, allowing programmers to explore and perfect the ways in which humans and robots interact.
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Standards/Consortia
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Opera is also a big fan of Google’s open source video codec VP8, and has already implemented it on its desktop browser.
“When Google chooses to buy a company for a significant amount of money and then make the codec available freely, a lot of companies have jumped,” said von Tetzchner.
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Neuroscientist Craig Bennett purchased a whole Atlantic salmon, took it to a lab at Dartmouth, and put it into an fMRI machine used to study the brain. The beautiful fish was to be the lab’s test object as they worked out some new methods.
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Environment
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The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is probably the biggest ecological disaster of all time. It’s probably also the biggest corporate PR of all time.
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A leaked letter from the United Nations’ climate chief suggests the Copenhagen climate summit failed because the presence of 130 world leaders paralysed decision-making and the Danish presidency backed the US and other western nations over the interests of the poor.
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Finance
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Remember long ago in late April when people actually discussed Goldman Sachs and its criminal charges of CDO fraud? Not really? Now may be a good time to remember what some said was the biggest fraud investigation in history, because according to new developments not only is Goldman still in very hot water (Fox Business disclosed earlier that the SEC added veteran litigator David Gottesman to its group of attorney trying the Goldman case), but according to a new report by Reuters’ Matt Goldstein, the firm lied to Calpers in March, when it was seeking a consulting mandate from the pension giant, claiming it was not “the target of a formal investigation.” Calpers apparently is not too happy about this: “Calpers spokesman Brad Pacheco told Reuters the pension fund’s investment staff “will be reaching out to Goldman for an explanation on their response.” The investment staff is finalizing contracts for Calpers’ consultant pool, which will be effective July 1.” Needless to say, Goldman’s chances of taking a slice out of Leon Black’s pie are looking bad to quite bad.
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Congressional proponents of a necessary reregulation of our financial services industries received a break as the European credit crisis sent the markets on another retreat from risk; the zeitgeist is taking a break from the V-shaped recovery crowd as well. Accordingly, the Senate was able to pass an omnibus bill that was significantly more far-reaching than anything that could have emerged from the dysfunctional legislature only a few months before.
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Germany pressed ahead with its drive for tougher market regulation as the Cabinet on Wednesday approved a bill that would cement in law curbs on speculative trading practices – a move the finance minister said was aimed at speeding agreement on stronger European rules.
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By definition, the government runs a deficit when its spending exceeds its revenue. It typically finances the difference by borrowing. Of course, future governments are burdened with paying the principal and interest on the government debt created today, which is why many critics of deficit spending conclude that such deficits leave us worse off in the future.
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Seizing on a disastrous oil spill to advance a cause, President Barack Obama on Wednesday called on Congress to roll back billions of dollars in tax breaks for oil and pass a clean-energy bill that he says would help the nation end its dependence on fossil fuels.
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In our continuing financial debate, one of the central myths – put about by big banks and also not seriously disputed by the administration – is that reigning in “too big to fail” banks is in some sense an “anti-market” approach.
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Ratings agencies came under more fire Wednesday for their role in the financial crisis as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission questioned former and current executives at the ratings firm Moody’s and Buffett, chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, which is Moody’s biggest shareholder. The hearing focused on how agencies, such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, wound up assigning high ratings to complex financial products packed with risky mortgages that went bad when the housing market collapsed in 2007.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A £500,000 public dialogue over GM food could be abandoned after a second member of the steering group overseeing it resigned, the government’s independent food watchdog said today.
The Food Standards Agency, which had been commissioned by the Labour government to gauge the public mood on growing and eating the controversial foods, said that it would ask the coalition government if it should continue with the dialogue.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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To give you an example of what we see, here is a screenshot from a popular open source wireless sniffer, kismet. (We use a slightly modified version.)
Google was trying to do the same thing that my wireless research group was doing — again, no ethical problems there. However, they claim to have “inadvertently” also listened to the content of communications. (This is called “payload” data.) Here’s the problem with the story we’re getting from Google: the word “inadvertently.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The classic block game Tetris has frequently been the subject of legal disputes. The rights to the trademark are currently held by The Tetris Company, a corporation located in Hawaii that licenses the name to other parties. The Tetris Company, which routinely threatens legal action against clones of the popular game, has sent a DMCA takedown notice to Google, prompting the search giant to remove 35 Tetris-like games from the Android market.
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The big music labels and movie studios have stepped back from the lawsuit business. The MPAA’s abortive campaign against individual file-swappers ended years ago, while the RIAA’s more widely publicized (and criticized) years-long campaign against P2P swappers ended over a year ago.
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Fed up with the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), India hopes to whip up an anti-ACTA chutney so spicy that negotiators have no choice but to purge every trace of the loathed agreement from their systems.
Though countries like Morocco are involved, rich countries have driven the ACTA process. The World Trade Organization—ignored. The World Intellectual Property Organization—bypassed. Instead of using the very fora that they played such a role in establishing, countries like the US, EU, Canada, Japan, and Australia formed a coalition of the willing. ACTA has been negotiated in secret, though the recently released negotiating draft text envisions a permanent secretariat that will receive new members.
NASA Connect – The Venus Transit (3/18/2004)
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06.02.10
Posted in News Roundup at 11:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I would like to introduce you to a chronology of events that occurred in the early 80’s and 90’s.
For Richard Stallman things began to look bad with the collapse of the free community in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT in the ’80s, with modern systems of operating time, none of them free software came with an agreement confidentiality, he said, is not allowed to share or modify the software and if you want something changed, ask us to do it for you.
This sounded anti-social to software-sharing community that had existed for many years at MIT, which he enjoyed and agreed to share their programs with universities and businesses. And to see or to change the source code of an unknown program to create a new was fairly common.
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Desktop
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A fairly clear conclusion that can be drawn is that Ubuntu is the more popular distro. Most of the statistics point to this. Less clear is the 2nd most popular. Distrowatch says Linux Mint. Google Trends says Debian. Linux Tracker says Debian for one and Fedora for the second. Overall then, I’d go for Debian being the second most popular. If you consider that Ubuntu is based upon Debian, this would actually make Debian the most popular distro by far as you could count all the Ubuntu installations, all the Ubuntu installations, all the Ubuntu-based distros installations and all the Debian-based installations. Fedora would then be my choice third most popular.
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Kernel Space
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One of the companies that we have been collaborating with on some of the features for the Phoronix Test Suite has been CloudHarmony, which is a company that seeks to provide an assortment of information on different cloud computing platforms and offerings from the various firms. Using the Phoronix Test Suite they have been benchmarking a plethora of different cloud computing platforms and today they have published a huge batch of results — benchmarks from over 150 different cloud server configurations from 20 different providers!
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Linux 2.6.35 will deliver better network throughput, support the Turbo Core functionality offered by the latest AMD processors and de-fragment memory as required. On LKML, a discussion on merging several patches developed by Google for Android is generating large volumes of email.
Two weeks on from the release of Linux 2.6.34, on Sunday night Linus Torvalds released the first pre-release version of Linux 2.6.35 to concluding the merge of the major changes for the next kernel version, expected to be released in about ten weeks. The merge window has once again stretched to around 14 days, after its abbreviation in Linux 2.6.34 caused confusion among some subsystem maintainers.
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Graphics Stack
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The first version of the X protocol for the X Window System emerged in 1984 and just three years later we were at version 11. However, for the past 23 years, we have been stuck with X11 with no signs of the twelfth revision being in sight, even though there is a whole list of X12 plans and hopes on the FreeDesktop.org Wiki. Julien Danjou, an XCB developer, has written a lengthy blog post looking at the situation and the prospects for the X protocol.
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Applications
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Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to the best lyrics finder tool I have ever used, osd-lyrics. Just imagine, while you are listening songs and facebooking or whatever you usually do, an application is fetching and displaying lyrics “in sync” with the song being played. “Well, many player plugins do that, nothing new “. Alright then, “well” first of all these plugins don’t display the lyrics in sync and secondly this software supports more than 10 different music players, yup! its player independent.
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The terminal window allows the user to access a console and all its applications such as command line interfaces (CLI) and text user interface software. Even with the sophistication of modern desktop environments packed with administrative tools, other utilities, and productivity software all sporting attractive graphical user interfaces, it remains the case that some tasks are still best undertaken with the command line.
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Instructionals
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Sure is easy to get the Cloudera hadoop packages up and running in Debian and RPM based distributions. All you need to do is add repositories and issue an instruction to your package manager!
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Desktop Environments
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Enlightenment has been quite interesting to me. It has not even got a beta release so far yet I like to use it. That is because, it does things differently. It is very efficient, keeps the CPU far more cooler than any other desktop environment, has nice effects already built-in, and is far snappier than most mainstream desktop environments [I am not interested in comparisions here; so I won't point to any other desktop environment in particular.].
[...]
Overall, E17 is nice. It is nice to note that E17 keeps with latest development in software. For now, it is bleeding edge; however I suggest give it a shot before believing anything about it. Its a nice experience.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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June 1st, 2010. Today, KDE has released a new version of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). This month’s edition of KDE SC is a bugfix and translation update to KDE SC 4.4. KDE SC 4.4.4 is a recommended update for everyone running KDE SC 4.4.3 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Users around the world will appreciate that KDE SC 4.4.4 multi-language support is more complete. KDE SC 4 is already translated into more than 50 languages, with more to come.
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The Amarok Project has released version 2.3.1 of its popular open source music player for the KDE desktop, code named “Clear Light”. The first point update to the 2.3.x branch of Amarok is a maintenance release that addresses several bugs in the previous release and includes a number of new features.
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Another new feature in KDE Partition Manager 1.1 is the ability to “shred” partitions when deleting them. Unlike when just deleting a partition (which basically means its entry in the partition table is deleted but the data remains on disk for the time being, until it is eventually overwritten with something else) this will actually overwrite the data before the partition is removed from the partition table.
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This might sound strange, but I generally don’t endorse the floppy distros that are still available here and there on the Internet, and as a general rule, still work fine. I don’t hold any prejudice toward them, but I find that they’re out of date, intended for specific hardware arrangements, or just a bit too … personalized.
[...]
Probably the one floppy distro that I would consider keeping around is blueflops, and it’s for that same reason — hardware support. Another two-floppy adventure, this one lists quite a few network cards as options, particularly for desktops. And since blueflops has the 2.6.18-ck1 kernel, I would almost consider using that as a jumping-off point for upgrading to a current kernel. Almost.
blueflops says it will run on an i386 with 8Mb and swap, and I’ve tried it on machines with only 16Mb and gotten fair results. The software list isn’t as long as some of the others, but it will probably get you online and from there, you can decide on your direction.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Basefarm, one of Northern Europe’s leading suppliers of Internet-based operations and services, is migrating its CentOS-based systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With its migration, Basefarm gains the value of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, including reliable support, a robust certified ecosystem and access to the latest tested and quality-controlled Red Hat Enterprise Linux technology.
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Fedora
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The installation was quick and painless, and the subsequent reboot was extremely fast and clean — from POST screen to login screen within 10 seconds.
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In short, Fedora 13 leaves once again a good impression. For professionals, has better performance than other popular distributions and for home users Ubuntu or Linux Mint which are perhaps more intuitive to begin working with Linux. Only regret, too long and unworthy startup time of a modern Linux distribution. But in the world of Linux, personal taste matters more.
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But having said this, there are a couple of caveats that require mentioning — personal ones that really don’t take anything away from Fedora 13′s shine. Pet peeve number one: No GIMP on the install. Easily installable upon completion of the installation, I know, but still.
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This article originally appeared in issue 87 of Linux User & Developer magazine.
Linux User & Developer, one of the nation’s favourite Linux and Open Source publications, is now part of the award winning Imagine Publishing family. Readers can subscribe and save more than 30% and receive our exclusive money back guarantee – click here to find out more.
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Debian Family
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Yesterday I’ve been invited to visit EDF R&D center at Clamart, near Paris. They wanted to discuss their Debian usage and present some of the cool stuff they’re doing. The most interesting component is an in-house Debian-based distribution called “calibre”, which has been presented at RMLL 2008.
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EDF is generally keen of contributing back to Debian (even though the team behind calibre is still small), and I’ve been happy to walk them through how they can contribute.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu’s longstanding policy of not pulling in new major versions of packages into their stable repositories is facing a slight change. Canonical along with the Ubuntu development community have been making it easier to deploy Mozilla Firefox web-browser updates into existing Ubuntu releases.
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With each and every release, Ubuntu Linux seems to get that little bit easier and friendlier to use. To put it through its paces, we downloaded the CD image of the latest iteration, Ubuntu 10.04, burned it to a disc and booted directly from it.
In the past, many Linux distros booted up as a live CD from that point, and once you’d arrived at the desktop screen, there sat the icon to install the operating system to your hard disk. Ubuntu 10.04 instead offers you a welcome half-way house, in that mid-boot you can choose whether to try a live CD without writing files to your system, or go for the full install. We opted for the latter.
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The Evolution mail client has been the default such application in Ubuntu since I got to know of Linux. Sure it is the default GNOME mail/calendar application, but I really am of the view that Ubuntu needs to drop it in favor of say Mozilla’s very brilliant Thunderbird.
For one thing running Evolution on my machine makes me wonder if it is IE in disguise. It is, for starters, very heavy on my system resources. My hdd light keeps blinking to hell when I click on that application at any time. It also seems to take an eternity to respond to my mouse clicks.
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Variants
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Founded by Michelle and Michael Hall, Qimo is designed for users three years and older and is pre-installed with free and open source games that are meant to be both educational and entertaining.
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It’s been a long time since I last looked at Mint, and a lot has changed since. After Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was released, I thought I would take a look at Linux Mint 9 “Isadora” to see what they are doing with the latest Ubuntu base, which was already wonderful as it is. After playing with the latest Mint for just a short period of time, I’ve already fallen in love with it.
[...]
Overall: 5/5 (Great!)
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Qualcomm says its Snapdragon chipsets are being used in more than 140 different devices including Acer’s Liquid and Neotouch smartphones, Dell’s Streak 5 Android tablet, HP’s Compaq Airlife 100 smartbook and HTC’s Droid Incredible and Nexus One smartphones.
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Nokia
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For those not familiar with MeeGo you better study up on it because it has officially arrived. MeeGo is the joining of two open source Linux operating systems — Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo — which was announced at Mobile World Congress earlier this year. It offers online and computing capability focused around multitasking, multimedia playback and strong graphics processing for a range of devices — not just netbooks or mobile phones. Up until now we haven’t heard that much MeeGo talk, mostly just rumored rumblings, but my have the MeeGo gates opened.
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Android
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At Google I/O 2010, we announced that there are over 60 Android models now, selling 100,000 units a day. When I wear my open-source hat, this is exciting: every day the equivalent of the entire population of my old home city starts using open-source software, possibly for the first time. When I put on my hat for Android Compatibility, this is humbling: that’s a whole lotta phones that can all share the same apps.
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Acer’s been hinting at entry into the Android smartphone market for some time now and now it is official. The Stream is the company’s first Android device.
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So here we are continuing our addiction with free and opensource wallpapers. Android operating system is spreading like wildfire. Smartphone manufacturers are scrambling to produce their version of Android phone and all this has just started. Let’s celebrate this stellar success of a free and open source software called Android with some stunning android wallpapers. Top 15 Android Wallpapers from around the web.
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Tablets
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When chairman Jonney Shih unveiled the Asus Eee Pad on stage at Computex today, the crowd of journalists almost rushed the stage with excitement.
Unlike the similarly-named Asus Eee Tablet, which is designed to compete with e-Readers like the Nook and the Kindle, the Eee Pad is designed to go head-to-head with the Apple iPad.
The Eee Pad is a Windows 7-based device that uses an Intel CULV Core 2 Duo processor and a touch-sensitive capacitive screen. It can be used as a multimedia player, e-reader, Web-browser, or, with the help of a keyboard docking station, full-featured PC. Asus will be releasing two versions of the Eee Pad. The EP101TC will come with a 10-inch screen and the EP121 will ship with a 12-inch screen. Asus claims both systems will deliver at least 10 hours of battery life.
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Check out the new look, updated Samba.org web site – complete with new logo ! We really like it as it meant we had an excuse to get new Samba Team t-shirts, and stickers for our laptops. Thanks to SerNet for taking care of our new 21st Century look.
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Governance
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Open source governance means how you control the flow of open source code into and out of your organization; how it is used in your products and services; how it is used to run your business; and the business and legal processes around all of this.
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Africa
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Computer Aid Namibia has unveiled plans to establish a free and open source software institute in Omaruru. The new institute will be known as the Namibia Open Source Software Institute (NOSSI) and will promote the use of free and open source software in the country.
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South African (and global) geeks now have a new magazine to keep themselves entertained with. The first issue of The SA Geek magazine was launched today.
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Mozilla
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The keyword for the introduction of Mozilla Firefox 3.5 was speed. That helped start a whole new race in which Firefox led early, but fell soon behind Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and later even Opera. Now with even Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 looking to erase the speed gap, and then some, a newly published Mozilla developers’ page characterizes Firefox 4 — whose first public betas may be only a few weeks away — as feature-laden.
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GIMP
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Like the last time, I’d like to begin by showing you what the model looks like when GIMP-ed against some real background. Just a single image for now. Later, we’ll have a full gallery of images and fancy effects. Here you, my flying aircraft carrier in low, slow flight above a harbor in a Vietnam-like setting, firing its twin belly cannon in support of ground forces. Air cavalry futuristic style.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Free software activist Richard Stallman certainly wouldn’t say so. Stallman started the Free Software Foundation based on four principles.
1. Information, such as computer software, should be freely accessible.
2. The information should be free to modify.
3. The information should be free to share with others.
4. The information should be free to change and redistribute copies of the changed software.
While not all of these principles apply to music, he says, some of them should apply. And a lot of music fans and musicians tend to agree with him. In many ways, the corporate side of the music industry’s attitude toward musical content mimics Microsoft’s or Adobe’s or Apple’s attitude toward software. This attitude often does nothing to help those who create or those who enjoy the content in question; it does everything to make money for the corporations who oversee licensing and purchase fees.
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Openness
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A common Drumbeat questions is ‘what do you mean by open web?‘ Having a solid answer is especially critical as reach out to teachers, lawyers, filmmakers and other people new to Mozilla.
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There were some smirks and sniffs as rookie Liberal MP Michelle Simson told caucus colleagues this week that sometimes it’s easier to do the right thing. It was not a message her colleagues enjoyed hearing.
Ms. Simson is the first MP to take the bold step of publicly revealing her MP expenses. Last year, with little fanfare, she posted the information on her website, fulfilling an election campaign promise to her constituents that she would show them how she spent their money.
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Creative Commons is a non-profit corporation that provides free licenses that give content producers a number of methods, in accordance with international copyright laws, to share their works with others. If your particular endeavor is one that may “positively impact Creative Commons’ mission of fostering creativity [...] and work of communities that use or benefit from CC licenses, tools, and technologies” then it may be elligible for a grant ranging from $1,000 to $10,000.
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Open Data
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NB: The Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) is not yet final and is still being reviewed.
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While the Open Data movement has yet to demonstrate its killer app, it shows much promise. It will take commitment from both innovators and the city governments to sustain the momentum over the year, but these early successes suggest that open API’s and killer coders may be able to revolutionize the way cities operate and interact with their citizens.
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If you want Internet access to federal court records in the trial of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, you have to pay 8 cents a page. The fee applies to any federal-trial court documents through a government-run system of electronic records known as Pacer.
Carl Malamud thinks it’s outrageous that court documents are fenced off. The open-government activist, who crusaded to make the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR database publicly available, has turned his attention to the legal system — and not just court records.
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In October 2009 Cambridge University Library launched a cataloguing project which will make records for its collection of 4,650 incunables available and searchable online for the first time. The incunabula collection, part of which goes back to the late 15th century, is internationally renowned and includes some 134 unique items. The scope of the project is to create specialist records for all the incunables in the Library’s online catalogue, Newton, with special emphasis on copy-specific information such as anomalies, rubrication, decoration and illumination, annotations, binding, marks of ownership, and provenance, enhancing and bringing up to date the short-title catalogue published by J.C.T. Oates in 1954, and including the 256 items acquired by the Library since.
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Alexander S. Szalay is a well-regarded astronomer, but he hasn’t peered through a telescope in nearly a decade. Instead, the professor of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University learned how to write software code, build computer servers, and stitch millions of digital telescope images into a sweeping panorama of the universe.
Along the way, thanks to a friendship with a prominent computer scientist, he helped reinvent the way astronomy is studied, guiding it from a largely solo pursuit to a discipline in which sharing is the norm.
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A case in point is a project to create a genetic road map using the same wiki platform that supports Wikipedia.
It started under the name of GenMAPP, or Gene Map Annotator and Pathway Profiler. Participation rates were low at first because researchers had little incentive to format their findings and add them to the project. Tenure decisions are made by the number of articles published, not the amount of helpful material placed online. “The academic system is not set up to reward the sharing of the most usable aspects of the data,” said Alexander Pico, bioinformatics group leader and software engineer at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease.
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The following guest post is from Olav Anders Øvrebø, Assistant Professor at the University of Bergen, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on EU Open Data. This text was first published as a European Public Sector Information Platform Topic Report on ePSIplatform.eu.
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Open Access/Content
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Anecdotes are not data, one dead swallow doesn’t mean the end of summer, and so on… but I just heard yesterday about a second small independent toll-access journal whose sponsors may be discussing winding it down.
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The SOAP Project (*), funded by the European Commission, would like to announce the release of an online survey to assess researchers’ experiences with open access publishing.
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Open Hardware
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My new book is out! Made by Hand is about the fun and fulfillment I got from making my own stuff. I wrote about my not-always-successful attempts to do things like raise chickens, keep bees, grow and preserve food and make my own musical instruments.
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Programming
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To summarize one has to think of the scope, lifetime, funding / cash inflow, time to market for the project before starting to write or design code. Thus saming coding style methodology does not suit all projects. Most often Agile methodology suits most projects and developers.
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The OpenJPEG library is an open-source JPEG 2000 codec written in C language. It has been developed in order to promote the use of JPEG 2000, the new still-image compression standard from the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG). In addition to the basic codec, various other features are under development, among them the JP2 and MJ2 (Motion JPEG 2000) file formats, an indexing tool useful for the JPIP protocol, JPWL-tools for error-resilience, a Java-viewer for j2k-images, …
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Standards/Consortia
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When it was revealed Wednesday that developer and noted open web champion Tantek Celik was joining the Mozilla Foundation, a wave of congratulations swept across Twitter and the blogosphere. But not everyone was happy to learn that Celik — the former chief technologist at Technorati and before that an open standards advocate at both Microsoft and Apple — was joining the company behind the Firefox browser. Ben Metcalfe, a programmer and startup adviser, said on Twitter that while he was happy for Celik, his hiring meant that “none of the open web usuals remain independent.”
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Science
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An RNA-based drug has treated an infection of the deadly Ebola virus – the first drug to have been shown to do so in all recipients.
Ebola Zaire virus kills 90 per cent of the people it infects. There are experimental vaccines that protect people given it before they are exposed to the virus, but there has been no drug to help those who are already infected.
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NASA boffins report that an unknown object approaching the Earth from deep space is almost certainly artificial in origin rather than being an asteroid.
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Security/Aggression
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Marcus Morris was told that police they had taken his VW Polo because the open window – which he had accidentally left down – meant the vehicle was at risk of theft.
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Concerns over the use of security cameras in public toilets in Pembrokeshire have been raised by a local Assembly Member.
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Environment
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Shell, which works in partnership with the Nigerian government in the delta, says that 98% of all its oil spills are caused by vandalism, theft or sabotage by militants and only a minimal amount by deteriorating infrastructure. “We had 132 spills last year, as against 175 on average. Safety valves were vandalised; one pipe had 300 illegal taps. We found five explosive devices on one. Sometimes communities do not give us access to clean up the pollution because they can make more money from compensation,” said a spokesman.
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With the Gulf Coast dying of oil poisoning, there’s no space in the press for British Petroleum’s latest spill, just this week: over 100,000 gallons, at its Alaska pipeline operation. A hundred thousand used to be a lot. Still is.
On Tuesday, Pump Station 9, at Delta Junction on the 800-mile pipeline, busted. Thousands of barrels began spewing an explosive cocktail of hydrocarbons after “procedures weren’t properly implemented” by BP operators, say state inspectors. “Procedures weren’t properly implemented” is, it seems, BP’s company motto.
Few Americans know that BP owns the controlling stake in the trans-Alaska pipeline; but, unlike with the Deepwater Horizon, BP keeps its Limey name off the Big Pipe.
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BP’s failure to stem the leak in the Gulf is an environmental tragedy, with the associated sight of American citizens standing on British flags. If we have a special relationship with the US, we as a country should be using the innovative talent, all innovative talent at our disposal to find a way to stop this. And fast. The long term damage to the US coastline and marine systems is heart-breaking to see.
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The millionaire CEO of foreign oil giant British Petroleum, Tony Hayward, is upset at the inconvenience caused to him by his company’s devastation of the Gulf of Mexico. In this TP excerpt, Brad Johnson has the stunning video of the tone-deaf ‘apology’ from the leader of the company whose recklessness and hubris has already claimed 11 lives and spewed 20 to 100 million gallons of toxic oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
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As you may have heard, before the big BP disaster the government’s chief oil drilling regulator let most drilling go forward in the Gulf of Mexico with very little environmental review. Somehow, the Minerals Management Service decided that there was little chance of disaster and thus gave the entire central and western Gulf an exclusion from a requirement for comprehensive environmental reviews.
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The Obama administration is suspending proposed exploratory drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
The US interior secretary, Ken Salazar, will say in a report to the White House today that he will not consider applications for permits to drill in the Arctic until 2011. Shell Oil was poised to begin exploratory drilling this summer on leases as far as 140 miles offshore.
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In the wake of the largest oil disaster in U.S. history, two just released polls by USA Today/Gallup show that Americans are increasingly skeptical of increased offshore drilling — and increasingly support environmental protection. In the one month since the April 20th explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig, support for more offshore drilling has dropped by nearly 20 percent – a big change in a short period of time.
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This is basically criminal misconduct. But hey, what’s the point of getting upset over 11 deaths and a mere environmental catastrophe? We need the oil. Let’s just help the oil companies get beyond this.
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Christopher Reddy, an associate scientist and director of the Coastal Ocean Institute at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, asks “What if carbon dioxide were as black as oil?” in a great new article on CNN.com. This is a very thought provoking question and well considered by Reddy.
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If Velib’ has changed the face of Paris by providing it the largest bike sharing system in the world with 1,800 stations and more than 20,000 bikes, there’s still plenty of work to be done in the French capital. After nine years of slow but steady improvements originating from an environmentally minded city hall, Paris is about to hit the accelerator pedal.
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Record temperatures in northern India have claimed hundreds of lives in what is believed to be the hottest summer in the country since records began in the late 1800s.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs may have found a way to compromise with the Securities and Exchange Commission that will allow both sides to declare victory.
The clock is ticking on the SEC’s case against Goldman Sachs. Sometime in the next few weeks, Goldman will either go to federal court with a substantive denial of the SEC’s allegations or agree to a settlement.
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A couple of days ago in Japan, Ben Bernanke said that the benefits of low interest rate policies that politicians want “are not sustainable and will soon evaporate, leaving behind inflationary pressures that worsen the economy’s long-term prospects……thus political interference in monetary policy can generate undesirable boom-bust cycles that ultimately lead to both a less stable economy and higher inflation.”
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Get it? Reading books on behavioral economics not only didn’t help, it probably gave you a false sense of security that made you even more vulnerable to Wall Street’s deceptive con game … and given their current $400 million lobbying efforts to kill reforms, you can bet another meltdown is destined to happen again, soon.
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When the lobbyists for the big banks announced last summer that they would kill the consumer financial protection agency, anyone versed in the ways of Washington would have believed them.
After all, the big banks had all the lobbying muscle, money and connections. Time and again, the big banks’ lobbyists and their allies declared the agency dead.
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Auto dealers are facing the toughest fight yet in their effort to win an exemption from new financial regulations.
The dealerships waged a high-stakes battle in the House and won an exemption in December from a new consumer financial protection regulator that is part of much broader financial legislation targeting Wall Street. Auto dealers last week won non-binding support in the Senate for the same carve-out. Republican and Democratic lawmakers have given their backing.
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Indeed, if any structural changes to Wall Street follow from this law, it is likely to be that the biggest banks get even more powerful than they already are, despite the size limits being placed on them.
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The dollar surged to a fresh four-year high against the euro Tuesday as worries that European banks could still face large loan losses next year added to concerns about the continent’s economic outlook.
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The government announced plans to auction 465,117 warrants it received from Cincinnati-based First Financial Bancorp as part of its effort to recoup the costs of the $700 billion financial bailout.
The Treasury Department said Tuesday that the auction of the First Financial warrants will take place on Wednesday. It set a minimum bid price of $4 per warrant. A warrant gives the purchaser the right to buy common stock at a fixed price.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Conservative-Liberal Democrat government in the UK is planning to introduce a register of lobbyists similar to that being discussed by the EU institutions, in an attempt to restore trust in politics following an expenses scandal that hit parliament last year.
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Look, for example, at the campaign contributions of commercial banks — traditionally Republican-leaning, but only mildly so. So far this year, according to The Washington Post, 63 percent of spending by banks’ corporate PACs has gone to Republicans, up from 53 percent last year. Securities and investment firms, traditionally Democratic-leaning, are now giving more money to Republicans. And oil and gas companies, always Republican-leaning, have gone all out, bestowing 76 percent of their largess on the G.O.P.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Recently, a few articles have been published regarding Tor, Wikileaks, and snooping data coming out of the Tor network. I write to remind our users, and people in search of privacy enhancing technology, that good software is just one part of the solution. Education is just as important.
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For reference, these articles are unclear and blur concepts about Tor and Wikileaks. An article about Julian Assange of Wikileaks in The New Yorker is the source of the confusion. Ryan Sholin deliberates on one paragraph from the New Yorker story. Ethan Zuckerman responded to Ryan’s thoughts about Tor here. We thanked EthanZ for the accurate response in an Identi.ca dent. It seems Slashdot and Wired Threat Level have picked up on just that one statement in the article by the New Yorker.
We hear from the Wikileaks folks that the premise behind these news articles is actually false — they didn’t bootstrap Wikileaks by monitoring the Tor network. But that’s not the point. The point is that users who want to be safe need to be encrypting their traffic, whether they’re using Tor or not.
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Hotels in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, are being forced to install electronic surveillance equipment amid an ongoing security clampdown in the city, industry sources said.
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David Blunkett this morning claimed he may sue the government for a refund on his £30 ID card, which new laws will render worthless by the end of summer.
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Google has mapped every wireless network in Britain in order to use the information for commercial purposes, it has emerged.
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Angry at Google · I was a little surprised at this, which opens with “Google mouthpiece Tim Bray…” A couple of clicks reminded me that I was reading someone who hides behind the (albeit stylish) alias Kontra and who has previously hated on me with considerable glee.
While everyone knows that there’s a lot of perfectly-reasonable worry about Google’s pervasiveness and reach, the company itself seems too inchoate and chaotic to hold any particular single feeling about for any length of time. But Kontra genuinely loathes Google right down to the ground. (I can testify with some force that at Google there is a notable lack of conspiratorial intent to Do Bad Things With All That Data, but then you might choose to discount that testimony because of the logo on my paycheck.)
Having said all that, I think Kontra is something of an anomaly. I wish he’d decloak though; anonymous polemics leave a very sour taste.
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It looks like Mark Zuckerberg would not have got Facebook going if he’d started it at a British University. The founder of a UK site integrated with Facebook and Twitter allowing students to flirt has been fined £300 for bringing his university into disrepute. FitFinder only started last month but rapidly expanded to universities across the country.
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Zuckerberg doesn’t seem prepared for a job of this immensity. Like Page and Brin (and Jobs), maybe it’s time he stepped back, and put his company in the hands of a real business person because right now, Facebook is doing a great job of alienating its users. (It’s worth noting that Apple faltered under the leadership of John Sculley, but returned to prominence after Jobs came back in the late 90s.)
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A B.C. border guard e-mailed himself the passport details of attractive women who came through his inspection line so he could hit on them later on Facebook, according to an internal government investigation obtained by the Vancouver Sun.
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Surveillance is everywhere today, and thanks to Facebook and Google, we are all now voyeurs, monitoring each other electronically. Perfect timing, you would think, for the new exhibition at Tate Modern Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera which sets out to explore our relationship with the camera and its use to capture the unaware, the unashamed and the downright unpleasant.
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On Friday 21st May, three representatives from NoDPI met David Hendon, Director Information Economy at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. With David was Rupert Marsh, Head of User Impact Policy.
David explained the new ministerial structure for DBIS. Ed Vaizey is now Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries in both BIS and DCMS. Overall, however, the new Coalition Government had not yet communicated detailed policies for his area. We observed that the Phorm controversy had rarely reached ministerial level, and that the Civil Service was likely to continue to take the lead on deep packet inspection and associated issues. This underlined the importance of our meeting.
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WikiLeaks receives about thirty submissions a day, and typically posts the ones it deems credible in their raw, unedited state, with commentary alongside. Assange told me, “I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.” Because Assange publishes his source material, he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter how speculative.
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Two French television journalists were detained Tuesday in Papua after filming a human rights rally by some 100 students, an immigration official said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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This month, he will make his most ambitious gamble yet: He will try to redesign the way the Internet and the media work by putting up a “paywall” around the Times of London and the Sunday Times, two of his British newspapers.
And this time he is doomed to fail.
It’s too late to start charging for newspapers online now. The content isn’t good enough, and newspapers themselves are a product of technologies that simply don’t work in a digital economy. All Murdoch is going to achieve with this move is to kill off one of the most famous media brands in the world.
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You would have thought that what with local initiatives like the Digital Economy Act and global ones like ACTA, the copyright maximalists would be satisfied with the range and number of attacks on the Internet and people’s free use of it; but apparently not. For here comes the Gallo Report, an attempt to commit the European Union to criminalisation of copyright infringement and a generally more repressive approach to online activities.
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The vote, in JURI committee of the European Parliament on the Gallo report “Enforcement of intellectual property”, including the rapporteur’s repressive amendments, reflects the asphyxiating influence of corporate lobbies on EU policy-making. The ALDE group, which had stood for fundamental freedoms on several occasions, this time sided with the entertainment industries. This vote should make EU citizens react and convince MEPs about the stakes of our evolving digital societies. Beyond the vote of the Gallo report in plenary session, there are other upcoming legislative battles where the public interest of creativity and access to knowledge can be upheld against an obsolete vision of copyright.
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I plan to write up a more detailed analysis of the WIPO open ended consultation on the treaty for persons who are blind or have other disabilities. I did want to make a few quick notes, however.
Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay and Mexico proposed a schedule of work on the treaty, which would end with a diplomatic conference in early 2012. The details of the proposal had been widely shared verbally for several weeks, and did not come as surprise. Their written submission was given the World Blind Union and other NGOs on Wed.
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Brazil read a fairly detailed critique after lunch, and a number of blindness groups, NGOs and countries offered critical comments on certain aspects of the proposal, which had not been vetted before by the World Blind Union or other NGOs working on access to knowledge issues.
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Sharing is a means to build community, to distribute (and then re-distribute) the resources we need more efficiently, and to tread more lightly on our environment. Sharing is also a flourishing industry that’s accomplished an incredible amount, but is really just getting started.
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Copyrights
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The UK’s largest internet service providers will start collecting the details of customers who unlawfully download films, music and TV programmes early next year, in order to send them warning letters under a code of practice proposed today by the media regulator Ofcom.
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The code of practice applies to ISPs with over 400,000 customers, meaning that it will initially apply to BT, TalkTalk, Virgin Media, Sky, Orange, O2 and the Post Office, who together control 96% of the market. Ofcom, however, will review unlawful filesharing activity on a quarterly basis and can extend the code to cover smaller ISPs and the mobile phone companies if it spreads.
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Recession or no, the music industry has been hitting a high note lately. Reports indicate that, on average, revenues are on the rise for musical artists. Income from concerts and ancillary merchandise (such as souvenir T-shirts) has become a key revenue source for most performers. New vehicles for delivering music in innovative and exciting ways are being introduced regularly. And consumers are getting more music at lower prices.
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Many in the recording industry say the villain in this opera is file-sharing, which allows computer files to move back and forth freely among networks of users on the Internet. The recording industry sees no coincidence in the fact that file-sharing has exploded during the same period that the market for CDs has withered.
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Due to several verdicts against them, The Pirate Bay team were ordered to pay the entertainment industries $6 million in fines. As predicted, actually getting hold of the money is not going to be an easy job for them. Thus far, the debt collecting agency has only seized $30,000 of the total sum.
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Does Stephen Harper have a secret agenda — when it comes to rocking out?
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The Toronto Star and National Post reports that Bryan Adams was quietly invited to a private meeting at the Prime Minister’s residence, offering the chance for a jam session and some lobbying on copyright.
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With the next round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations scheduled for later this month in Lucerne, Switzerland (governments have been painfully slow this round in confirming dates, location, and agenda), the global politics behind the agreement escalated over the weekend with Indian officials acknowledging that they plan to establish a coalition of government opposed to the agreement. Reports indicate that a major concern involves the possible seizure of goods in transit, which raises access to medicines fears with the potential detention of generic pharmaceuticals.
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With the passage into law of the dread Digital Economy Act comes Ofcom’s guidelines that are the first step toward rules for when and how rightsholders will be able to disconnect entire families from the internet because someone on or near their premises is accused of copyright infringement.
Consumer rights groups and privacy groups – such as the Open Rights Group, the Citizens Advice Bureau, Which, and Consumer Focus – participated in the process, making the Ofcom rules as good as possible (an exercise that, unfortunately, is a little like making the guillotine as comfortable as possible).
Contributing back to society: eejot.org
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06.01.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Telstra today revealed it would launch its Linux-based T-Box integrated media centre set-top box from mid-June at a stand-alone price point of $299, with a sledload of free and pay-per-view content available and an associated revamp of its broadband plans in the works.
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Desktop
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Rob Pregoraro at the Washington Post asks the question, “How can an operating system with those virtues, the open-source Linux, remain confined to a tiny minority of desktop and laptop computers at home? “. He’s missed the mark. GNU/Linux is not confined to a tiny minority of computers at home. It may be in the USA but globally, GNU/Linux is on about 10% of PCs. We know that because Ballmer told us and that was a while ago. 30% of netbooks run GNU/Linux and almost all ARMed devices do not run that other OS.You can buy “no OS” and GNU/Linux PCs from most OEMs and some retail outfits.
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The new download stats interface from sourceforge.net geeknet shows what are the countries from where firebird is most downloaded and what operating system is used to download it and the most unexpected thing is that Linux is in the Top
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The $249 Community version is a much easier sell: a low-power PC that could easily run your audio collection into your stereo, has more than enough power for homework or basic image editing, and is unlocked so you can load anything you want on it via Gentoo’s package manager. There are definitely things you won’t want to do on a Zonbu (editing video comes to mind), but for most things, you’ve got more than enough machine here.
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But I don’t want to bore you any further with a story that probably happens everywhere to everyone and all the time in the daily Windows world… While hardware problems occur in Linux just as well, at least the people you talk to about them don’t treat you like an idiot but really know their stuff.
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Schools
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In my earlier post ‘How to Sell Linux’ I looked at three different ways how to popularize Linux and make it more mainstream as well as a household name. In the post I will look specifically at how I would sell Linux to schools, examining all the aspects of such a deployment and how I would do it and what distro and software I would use.
Here is the order I will look at things in this post-:
1. What Distro would be used?
2. What Software would be pre-installed?
3. What would be the Incentive?
4. How Cost Effective would it be?
5. How quickly could new users Adapt?
6. Poll and Conclusion
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Building on the last post, I welcome the opportunity to share some of my experiences with deploying Linux in schools. It is a very broad topic however I will stay with the previous outline. First of all, it is a matter of migrating schools to Linux, not selling them. Second, the approach is different based on whether the school in located in a developing country, the EU or North America.
Before I speak to the suggested list of considerations, which I have reordered based on feedback from my deployments and numerous other sources,I want to say that’ the single most factor for any migration plan to be successful is to is to manage the ‘human factor’ of resistance to change. Effective training and support are critical while technical and functional problems are marginal’ This is where FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt) comes into play and is heavily leveraged by proponents of proprietary software.
1. What would be the Incentive?
2. How Cost Effective would it be?
3. How quickly could new users Adapt?
4. What Software would be pre-installed?
5. What Distro would be used?
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Server
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For anyone who wants to look at the raw data, it’s available at the Top 500 site. Just think, out of the 500 fastest computers on the planet, Linux is used on 455 of them, over 90%, Microsoft Windows is used on 5 of them, exactly 1.0%, and Mac OSX isn’t used at all.
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One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
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Kernel Space
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Linux Foundation has launched a series of free Training Webinars to meet Growing Demand for Linux Professionals. These webinars are taught by well-known Linux developers directly building on their own experience.
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A week ago we reported that Intel’s next X.Org driver (the xf86-video-intel 2.12 DDX) would render text/glyphs faster thanks to optimizations done by Chris Wilson, but this was not all that was in store for this Intel Linux driver that’s updated quarterly. With the most recent Git, there are more performance optimizations.
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Applications
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Just a quick update. I’ve released version 0.4.0 of Lightspark, a free flash player implementation. This release was focused on improving stability, so all the crashes found by many testers should be fixed now. Thanks a lot for testing, several issues were related to particular graphics hardware and I would have never found them without your collaboration. Please keep testing and reporting any issue.
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Now, let’s explore the 9 terminal emulators at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screenshot of the software in action, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.
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Wisotool currently supports 60 games and/or benchmarks (see list below). Please consider contributing support for your favorite game, its not (too) hard. Im especially interested in recent or beta games; ideally wisotool would support (worthwhile) games on the day they are released.
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Instructionals
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I just spent many hours getting a 4GB USB key into a state where it can be used to boot Linux Mint 9 (based on Ubuntu 10.04). Here are some notes on the problems I had to solve.
In the past, I’ve used unetbootin to create bootable USB keys. When I did this with the Linux Mint 9 ISO image, the resulting USB key booted up just fine, but the installer application hung when trying to run the partition editor. I narrowed this down to an assertion failure in libparted. Apparently it doesn’t like the geometry on some USB keys. This is a known bug.
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Desktop Environments
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In fact, modern applications, proprietary and FOSS alike, seem to me explicit admissions that icons do not work very well. Many applications provide mouseover help to help users identify the icons. The KDE desktop goes one step further, offering thumbnails to help you see what each icon does or contains. If icons worked the way they are supposed to, then why would these supporting structures even exist?
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This concludes part four in a sequence of entries presenting some of the new features of the soon-to-be-finished KDE Partition Manager 1.1. Part one was about Mount Management, part two dealt with SMART Status Reports and part three offered a very technical look behind the scenes on the topic of Support For 4096-Byte Sectors.
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New Releases
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Salix is a Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast and easy to use. Salix is also fully backwards compatible with Slackware, so Slackware users can benefit from Salix repositories, which they can use as an “extra” quality source of software for their favorite distribution. Like a bonsai, Salix is small, light & the product of infinite care.
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Red Hat Family
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DeKoenigsberg is probably better known–for now–by his last job title: Senior Community Architect at Red Hat. It was more from this experience that he addressed the OSS 2010 audience on Open Source Projects, Educational Opportunities.
DeKoenigsberg told the attendees of educators, researchers, and students that academic institutions are missing a real opportunity for instruction if they aren’t teaching with open source software. For one thing, working on a 5,000-line senior capstone project nowhere near conveys the sheer scale and complexity of a million-line project. And an open source project is the only kind of project a student developer could even get near something that big.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Barely a few weeks after Canonical released Ubuntu 10.04 aka Lucid Lynx, they already announced plans for Ubuntu 10.10 aka Maverick Meerkat, with a release schedule aimed to launch Meerkat in October 2010.
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So I also installed the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the Toshiba Netbook we have. Used Wubi as before. It was very slow (10+ minutes) on bootup however. Luckily the internet is full of information and a few minutes of googling produced this forum thread that had me change a setting in the BIOS. Now it boots quickly. There’s another page on How-To Geek about doing this install.
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Welcome to The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is Issue #195 for the week of May 23rd -May 29th, 2010 and is available here.
In this issue we cover:
* Track the Desktop Team and UNE in Maverick
* Ubuntu Server update for Maverick Meerkat
* Ubuntu Foundations and Maverick Meerkat 10.10
* Maverick Community Team Plans
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As you know, Ubuntu and Linux are hugely configurable. Find some spare time and you can customize anything starting from the boot up messages to the gradients used on the buttons and the scroll bars. While one might not attempt such extreme feats very often, administration and configuration are standard tasks that you might perform every now and then.
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In recent Linux related news I have been reading about the Ubuntu Control Center (UCC) and the Ubuntu Application Menu (Global Menu). The projects looked extremely interesting so I decided to install them and give them a try. Note that directions for download and installation are provided in the links above.
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Variants
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Parsix team is proud to announce that the final Parsix GNU/Linux 3.5r0 ISO images are available for immediate download.
This release provides a stable computing platform for your daily uses and tasks. Package repositories are synchronized with Debian testing repositories as of April 7, 2010. Frankie ISO images will not fit on CD and a DVD is required to burn them. These images are compiled using SquashFS 4.0 with LZMA compression and for the first time GRUB 2 is used as default Live-DVD boot loader. The kernel build system has been modified and improved vastly to produce better kernel packages.
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Qimo is a desktop operating system designed for kids. Based on the open source Ubuntu Linux desktop, Qimo comes pre-installed with educational games for children aged 3 and up. So If you want to teach your children to use Linux from an early age, Qimo is the perfect for your kids.
Qimo’s interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want.
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Nokia
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MeeGo Linux is being developed as a platform for smartphones, netbooks, internet connected TVs, in-car systems, and other devices where Windows may not always be the best option. The project is backed by chip-maker Intel and smartphone maker Nokia. And so far, every device I’ve seen running MeeGo has had an Intel chip — usually a low power Intel Atom processor.
But in an interview with The Inquirer, Nokia vice president Alberto Torres explained that MeeGo is an open platform and that it will be available for device makers to use on a wide variety of hardware. In fact, Nokia’s first MeeGo device will have an ARM-based chip rather than an Intel x86 processor.
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If you have graced my page before then odds are you know I love my N900. This past Wednesday Nokia released the PR 1.2 update for the N900 and one of the features they added was support for the front facing camera to make video calls via the VOIP services Skype and Google Talk. I made my first video call this evening on my N900 and it works quite well!
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Android
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Sub-notebooks
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The Asus App Store is basically a branded version of the Intel AppUp Center. It’s designed as a place where netbook users can go to find software that’s guaranteed to work well on devices with Intel Atom processors and small screens. Asus will preload the App Store software on all Windows netbooks starting in the second half of 2010.
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This year marks the 50th anniversary of 17 African states gaining independence.
Now, a wave of homegrown programmers, developers and software makers claim to be heralding a new era of African independence.
Earlier this month, the Idlelo conference, organised by the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), brought together the continent’s cleverest coding minds at Accra, in Ghana, to discuss new software opportunities in Africa.
Unlike the bigger, foreign developers – who have mainly targeted the urban markets – the coders at this event looked at how to reach the rural, relatively poorer communities of Africa.
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Oracle
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But wait. Today I just found in [osol-discuss] forums that Opensolaris 2010.06 will be expected to release on June 2010. The release date has not been stated yet but it is expected to be announced shortly after Oracle announces Fiscal Year results, which means in a couple of days or so.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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David Reyes Samblas Martinez is the founder of Spanish Copyleft Hardware store Tuxbrain, and attended the famous Open University of Catalunya. He’s also the subject of this month’s Fellowship interview, in which he answers questions on hardware manufacturing, e-learning and Free Software politics.
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Openness
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Whether open source is a license, a community or more is debatable, but what’s not is that none of it would be possible without the people behind it.
Anyone who knows Linux knows the name Linus Torvalds. Free Software? Richard Stallman. Open Source Initiative? Eric Steven Raymond.
There are many, many more names. Some well-known to people in the open source community, others who toil in relative anonymity.
That’s why I liked the appeal for funding for Signal Boost: A Free/Open Source Narrative, on Kickstarter.
[...]
A young woman, M.J. de Blanc, has picked up and moved to Boston to write a book. It’s the story of open source, but as she notes in her explainer video, not about FLOSS – it’s about FLOS, Free Libre Open Source. She left off the second S – software – for a simple reason: She wants to write about the people, not the programs.
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Open Data
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Yet as new technologies have made it possible for governments to make information more accessible to the public, governments have become increasingly creative in inventing excuses to keep it hidden.
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In an unusual move for such a significant news item, the UK government announced over the weekend that they were ordering all government departments to embark on a voyage of transparency.
There were some very good ideas in the announcement, including a mandate to publish details of all ITC procurements. And there is no doubt that a mandate for open data is a fantastic move.
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This is the story of how Google, for a period of three years, locked me out of their groups service, how I eventually found my way back in, and what it cost me.
Yeah, I guess this is a bit off topic regarding to software development. However these days many of us store important data and value in services like Google’s. Services with terms like: “Google may stop providing the Services to you at Google’s sole discretion, without prior notice to you”. I guess I never took it too seriously, as the companies would probably get seriously bad PR, if they did something like that. Deleting emails for billions. My error was forgetting the case where you are the only person being locked out.
I my case the lock wasn’t from email, but from Google Groups. Not as critical as email would have been, but still, well, rather inconvenient. The lockout meant that I was unable to manage the PyChess mailing list. I was unable to fight the, at that time, increasing spam level; and more importantly I couldn’t reply anybody in my community.
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Science
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In very rough terms, the sun’s activity ebbs and flows in an 11-year cycle, with flares, coronal mass ejections and other energetic phenomena peaking at what is called solar maximum and bottoming out at solar minimum. Sunspots, markers of magnetic activity on the sun’s surface, provide a visual proxy to mark the cycle’s evolution, appearing in droves at maximum and all but disappearing at minimum. But the behavior of our host star is not as predictable as all that—the most recent solar minimum was surprisingly deep and long, finally bottoming out around late 2008 or so.
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For the first time, human embryonic stem cells have been cultured under chemically controlled conditions without the use of animal substances, which is essential for future clinical uses. The method has been developed by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and is presented in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
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Environment
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A fight breaks out as student Vikas Dagar jostles with dozens of men, women and children to fill buckets from a truck that brings water twice a week to the village of Jharoda Kalan on the outskirts of New Delhi.
Three thousand kilometers (1,900 miles) away, near Xi’an in central China, power-plant worker Zhou Jie stands on the mostly dry bed of the Wei River, remembering when he used to fish there before pollution made the catch inedible.
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Internal documents from BP show that there were serious problems and safety concerns with the Deepwater Horizon rig far earlier than those the company described to Congress last week.
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Prolonged exposure to crude oil and chemical dispersants is a public health danger, environmental scientists warned yesterday as BP spent a third day trying to initiate a “top kill” operation to cap the ruptured well on the sea bed.
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A delicate “top kill” operation by BP appears to have halted the gush of oil and gas from its ruptured Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, although experts warned that the underwater leak was still far from being permanently fixed.
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If efforts fail to cap the leaking Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico (map), oil could gush for years—poisoning coastal habitats for decades, experts say.
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BP has challenged widespread scientific claims that vast plumes of oil are spreading underwater from its blown-out rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The denial comes as the oil giant prepares for a new operation to put an end to the worst oil spill in US history – which could see the leak get worse before it gets better.
The company’s challenge to several scientific studies is likely to put it further at odds with an increasingly angry Obama administration, which has accused it of playing down the size of the leak in an effort to limit possible fines.
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The 189 member nations of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) last night struck a deal on a series of small steps towards disarmament, including a 2012 conference to discuss a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.
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A 1960s-style campaign of direct action must ignite on the streets as a catalyst for decisive action to combat climate change, according to President Mohamed Nasheed of the imperilled Maldives. Nasheed told the Hay festival that it was the United States, not China, that was the biggest obstacle to a global agreement to check carbon emissions.
Nasheed, who held an underwater meeting of his cabinet last autumn and is presiding over the relocation of people from some islands because of the effects of warming oceans and rising sea levels, put his hopes in the emergence of “huge” grassroots action after the failure of talks in Copenhagen in December.
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Finance
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A Canadian national who the U.S. government says swindled $70 million from 40,000 investors on six continents carried out the same kind of Ponzi scheme the one-time bank robber mocked on his website, federal investigators allege.
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Forged out of the ashes of World War II and the end of the Cold War, the European Union was meant to create peace and prosperity across the region. But Europe’s debt crisis has laid bare deep financial and cultural divisions within the 27-nation bloc that may never be bridged.
The fateful decision to make the EU effectively a halfway house – tying its member countries into a joint currency and interest rate decisions, while allowing them to retain control over national budgets and taxes – has left the fractured grouping at a crossroads.
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A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college.
Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure.
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The economy trudges ahead yet debt dogs many Americans, stressing them out even as they firm up their own financial foundations.
There are new jobs produced but old worries persisting for people despite belt-tightening and boosted savings, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll.
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FOR decades, until Congress did away with it 11 years ago, a Depression-era law known as Glass-Steagall ably protected bank customers, individual investors and the financial system as a whole from the kind of outright destruction we’ve witnessed over the last few years.
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The complaint begins by explaining the relationships between Lehman and JPMorgan. Lehman was a full-service stock broker. JPMorgan provided clearing services for Lehman’s securities business. JPMorgan was the lead lender and administrator on a $2 billion unsecured revolving line of credit. Lehman also had a large derivatives portfolio with Jamie Dimon’s bank.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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While the magazine publishers may rightly be concerned about private control of a platform that many of them are counting on for their long-term salvation, the German state is at the very least ambivalent about the subject of censorship. This is the country that has banned Wikileaks, sought a ban on violent games, and voted to censor child porn (only to have the president kill the ban as unconstituitonal).
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Bangladesh has blocked access to Facebook after satirical images of the prophet Muhammad and the country’s leaders were uploaded, say reports.
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Pakistan lifted a ban on Facebook on Monday after officials from the social networking site apologized for a page deemed offensive to Muslims and removed its contents, a top information technology official said.
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Copyrights
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Lists of Britons who infringe copyright are to be drawn up by the UK’s biggest ISPs, under proposals from the regulator Ofcom.
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This week Ottawa will try once again to update Canada’s copyright law that Industry Minister Tony Clement says has holes big enough to “drive a Mack truck through.”
The Copyright Act of Canada has not had a significant rewrite since 1988, at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy and an iPad was just a twinkle in some inventor’s eye.
The trick — one the Conservatives and Liberals before them couldn’t master — is to find a balance between right of consumers’ and the rights of the artists or creators to not have their work ripped off.
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Media reports last week indicated that the government plans to introduce its long-awaited copyright reform bill within the next few days. The bill is sure to spark widespread debate since all Canadians — whether consumers, creators, businesses, or educators — have a significant stake in the outcome.
The internal dynamics that led to the bill are by now fairly well known. Industry Minister Tony Clement, emboldened by last summer’s copyright consultation that generated unprecedented public participation, argued for a forward-looking, technology neutral bill with flexibility as a core principle. Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore advocated for a U.S.-style protectionist approach, with priority given to digital locks that can be used to limit copying, access, and marketplace competition.
NASA Connect – VT – Parallax (3/18/2004)
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