• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Welcome: One Thing to Know Before You Migrate to GNU/Linux

  The silly article goes on for lots of pages/clicks until five things are listed to denigrate GNU/Linux. The truth is there is only one thing to know about migrating to GNU/Linux. Any problems you encounter will be solvable and once solved will not recur.

• Is Linux Really Harder to Use?

  When North Americans learn to drive a car, they learn to drive on the right side of the road. Those in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, of course, learn to drive on the left. Neither option is “more difficult,” per se, they’re just different. Once you’re used to one approach, however, it can feel awkward at first to do the other.

  So it is with computer operating systems. Desktop Linux is simple, elegant and logical, but it works differently from Mac and Windows.

  In Linux, the graphical user interface (GUI) is optional, for instance. The desktop environment can be completely customized, and package managers let you install software in just a few clicks, no surfing the Web or searching for serial keys required.

• If Linux is not for Everyone, Neither is Windows

  When contrasting Linux and Windows, one frequently hears the fallacy that Linux is not an OS anyone can use. Read this reaction about it. That recurrent argument is based on several misconceptions that I would like to discuss but, first, let us clarify something: there exists no such a thing as an easy, perfect OS. There is always a learning curve when using a system and the more you get exposed to an OS, the more “manageable” it seems. But easiness of use is only a perception, a mirage. Now, let us take a look at the misconceptions.

Server

• July 2010 Web Server Survey

  Microsoft also experienced a loss this month, serving 648k fewer hostnames worldwide and also losing 265k active sites. A big contributor to this was a loss of 388k hostnames due to lower activity on Microsoft Live Spaces.

• Desperately Seeking LAMP 2.0

  Today, though, people are so lost in the fog of cloud computing, that they have largely forgotten about LAMP’s appeal. Cloud computing may well go beyond LAMP in terms of its power and potential, but so far it lags woefully behind LAMP in terms of simplicity and ease of implementation. Today, though, people are so lost in the fog of cloud computing, that they have largely forgotten about LAMP’s appeal. Cloud computing may well go beyond LAMP in terms of its power and potential, but so far it lags woefully behind LAMP in terms of simplicity and ease of implementation.

Kernel Space

• Enterprise Management Vendor Zenoss Joins The Linux Foundation

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that open source enterprise IT management company Zenoss is its newest member.

Applications

• Microsoft Exchange Alternatives for Linux

  Looking for a Linux-friendly groupware suite that can take the place of Microsoft Exchange in your organization? You’ll find a wide range of alternatives for Linux that offer most (if not all) of Exchange’s functionality.

  If your organization has standardized on Microsoft Exchange, switching may be a bit tricky (but can be done). But if your organization hasn’t started down that path, it’s a good habit to avoid. The good news is you’ll find several robust Exchange alternatives for Linux.

• Bibble 5, DAM for Linux, and data portability

  So I’m evaluating Bibble 5 Pro (version 5.1f). I had to process over 1,000 images this weekend and LightZone was killing me. I really like LightZone. But, damn… it is slow. It does have batch processing capabilities but they’re not particularly robust (there’s no way to apply some adjustments but not others, for example).

• Gloobus Preview + Nautilus Elementary = Absolutely Beautiful!

  Gloobus Preview is a beautiful file preview application for Linux. Select a file and click space bar to have a quick preview of the file, as simple as that. And when I say file, they include music, videos, images, documents and everything else!

• Instructionals

  • Latex editors and rubber

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux

      As I alluded to recently, the second round of Windows 7 vs. Linux benchmarks — with the first round consisting of Is Windows 7 Actually Faster Than Ubuntu 10.04 and Mac OS X vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu benchmarks — are currently being done atop a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook that is quite popular with business professionals. With the high-end ThinkPad W510 boasting a dual quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU with Hyper-Threading plus a NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics processor, we began this second round of cross-platform benchmarks by running a set of workstation tests. In this article we are mainly looking at the workstation graphics (via SPECViewPerf) performance along with some CPU/disk tests.

    • Ubuntu 10.10’s New File System: btrfs by Christopher Tozzi

      As far as production goes, btrfs is not yet an appropriate choice; as its documentation makes explicitly clear, it is “not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review.” So while the Ubuntu installer might provide btrfs as an option, I wouldn’t go putting it on the root partition of any production system until it has matured a little more.

      All the same, the new file system promises a number of significant advances on both Ubuntu desktops and servers. In my experiments with it, it’s also worked pretty well, and I’m excited to explore the new possibilities it offers to Ubuntu users as it continues to develop.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Android is Awesome

        The question becomes “Why do OEMs not push GNU/Linux?”. The answers are many. OEMs have a tight margin. If unit sales were to drop even a little, their margins and income could drop seriously. They do not want to take the risk so, at best, they want GNU/Linux to be a sideline as Dell has made it. That seems quite unwise in view of the performance of Android. Margins can increase quite a bit per PC if the licence for the OS is taken out of the total. An OEM can either increase share by cutting prices a bit more than competitors selling that other OS or an OEM could charge what they would charge for that other OS and keep the change, increasing margin. Combinations are also possible, cutting a bit in price while cutting out payments to M$. The fact that no large OEM has done this suggests that M$ is paying them handsomely to keep out GNU/Linux.

10 things traditional software customers want to know about open source

I talk to many customers who have installed what I’ll call “traditional” or “commercial” software but what some people call “closed” or “proprietary” software. The most savvy customers understand that most traditional software contains a lot of open source software, and you need to think about open source not just at the application but also at the library level. These customers usually have enterprise installations and either run or outsource huge data centers, have multiple hardware and software platforms, and care a lot about quality of service, service level agreements, maintenance, support, and cost.

Oracle

• Will Illumos Bring OpenSolaris Back To Life?

  Today sees the launch of the Illumos Project, heralded last week in a message on the OpenSolaris mailing lists. The announcement caused much excitement, with many assuming it was a fork of OpenSolaris or another OpenSolaris distribution.

• Illumos sporks OpenSolaris

  If you were hoping that someone would fork the OpenSolaris operating system, you are going to have to settle for a spork. You know, half spoon and half fork. That, in essence, is what the Illumos, an alternative open source project to continue development on the core bits of OpenSolaris, is all about.

  The disgruntled OpenSolaris community has been ignored by Oracle since it acquired Sun Microsystems back in January, and the project’s governing board has threatened to commit ritual suicide by the end of August to try to get Oracle participating in the open source Solaris development effort.

• OpenSolaris’ child, Illumos, goes forward without Oracle

  Nexenta, an open-source organization that’s been trying to “combine the OpenSolaris kernel with the GNU/Debian user experience has announced a new open-source effort called “Illumos”. Illumos, Nexenta proclaims “is a 100% community-driven and owned effort that aims to provide an alternative to a critical part of the OpenSolaris distribution, freeing it from dependence on Oracle’s good will.”

  This effort, Simon Phipps, former chief open-source officer for Sun and an Illumos supporter, said is not meant to be a fork of OpenSolaris. Still, as the group said in their announcement, “Oracle has significantly reduced their support for OpenSolaris as a distribution.” Actually, that’s too kind. Oracle has essentially ignored OpenSolaris and paid no attention to the OpenSolaris Governing Board.

• Illumos launched as OpenSolaris derivative

Funding

• Status.net Gets $1.4M to Take Open-Source Twitter Into the Enterprise

  Status.net, which distributes open-source microblogging software similar to Twitter, has closed a round of financing that it plans to use to take its services into the enterprise market. The Montreal-based startup has raised $1.4 million from New York venture fund FirstMark Capital, along with BOLDstart Ventures, iNovia Capital and Montreal Start Up, and FirstMark partner Scott Switzer — founder of the open-source advertising platform OpenX — will join the company’s board of directors. The new round brings the total amount raised by Status.net to $2.3 million.

Government

• EU: Practical Guide to using Free Software in the Public Sector

  Thierry Aimé, member of the team of the French Ministry for the Budget, Public Accounts and the Civil Service, has authored a “Practical Guide to using Free Software in the Public Sector”.

Licensing

• BusyBox and the GPL Prevail Again

  I thought you’d want to hear about what’s just happened in the Software Freedom Conservancy v. Best Buy, et al case. It’s another BusyBox case regarding infringement of the GPL, mostly about high definition televisions with BusyBox in them, and while the case is not finished regarding other defendants, it’s certainly set another precedent. One of the defendants was Westinghouse Digital Technologies, LLC, which refused to participate in discovery. It had applied for a kind of bankruptcy equivalent in California. Judge Shira Scheindlin of the Southern District of New York has now granted Software Freedom Conservancy, a wing of Software Freedom Law Center, triple damages ($90,000) for willful copyright infringement, lawyer’s fees and costs ($47,865), an injunction against Westinghouse, and an order requiring Westinghouse to turn over all infringing equipment in its possession to the plaintiffs, to be donated to charity. So, presumably a lot of high-def TVs are on their way to charities.

Openness/Sharing

• How Lawyers Can Help Us to Share

  Berkeley attorney and Shareable.net contributing editor Janelle Orsi is the co-founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), which aims to help social enterprises, worker-owned co-ops, and other mission-oriented enterprises sort through legal red tape. The co-author of The Sharing Solution, published by Nolo in 2009, Orsi also has a private legal practice focused on mediation and helping people share housing, cars, land, and other commodities. We talked to Orsi about the legal gray areas that social entrepreneurs can find themselves in, and what SELC is doing about them.

UK.gov smiles and nods at commentards

More than 9,500 comments were published on the Programme for Government website, which was launched on 20 May, days after the formation of the coalition.

Whitehall departments published their responses late last week to no fanfare, revealing as they did that not one policy will be changed as a result of the exercise.

Change is good. But show your work!

An anonymous bug filer noticed that the Times seemed to have changed a statistic in the online version of a front-page story about where California’s African Americans stood on pot legalization. As first published, the story said blacks made up “only” or “about 6 percent” of the state population; soon after it was posted, the number changed to “less than 10 percent.” There’s “>a full explanation of what happened over at MediaBugs; apparently, the reporter got additional information after the story went live, and it was conflicting information, so reporter and editor together decided to alter the story to reflect the new information.

There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it’s good — the story isn’t etched in stone, and if it can be improved, hooray. The only problem is the poor reader, who was reading a story that said one thing at one time, and something different when he returned. The problem isn’t the change; it’s the failure to note it. Showing versions would solve that.

New online business model will succeed, says Rupert Murdoch

The Politics of Email: Son of Reagan liberally attacks Apple, Google and Microsoft

Michael Reagan, the eldest son of former US President Ronald Reagan, has accused people who use email services from Apple, AOL, Google, Hotmail and Yahoo! of “supporting the Obama, Pelosi and Reid liberal agenda” and ultimately “hurting our country”.

No Wonder it Sold for a Dollar

Newsweek is running an amazingly bad story today titled “Taliban Seeks Vengeance in Wake of WikiLeaks”. Granted, I have my own beef with Julian Assange but how can an editor let that article go out when the author admits there is no known correlation or causation…

Why we can’t ditch 3D glasses just yet

This is the first in a series of blogs based on a seminar given at the BBC by Buzz Hays, chief instructor for the Sony 3D Technology Center in Culver City, California – where they teach the professionals how to make better 3D. The series starts with an answer to the most common complaint about 3D.

The Ghosts of World War II’s Past (20 photos)

Environment/Wildlife

• Fires still spreading in parched Russia

  Russia is mobilising more forces to fight hundreds of wildfires still raging across a vast area east and south of Moscow amid a record heatwave.

• Rand Paul: Mine safety regulations aren’t needed since “no one will apply” for jobs at dangerous mines

  In April, two miners were killed at the Dotiki Mine in Western Kentucky after the mine’s roof collapsed. The non-union mine had been cited for 840 safety violations by federal inspectors since 2009, and the Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing issued 31 orders to close sections of the mine or to shut down equipment during the same period. But when asked about the incident, Kentucky’s Republican Senate candidate, Rand Paul, said “maybe sometimes accidents happen.”

Finance

• Why not Elizabeth Warren?

  Whether Elizabeth Warren heads the nascent Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection has become the first pitched battle in how the recently passed financial reform laws are put into practice. If the episode so far is any indicator, the battle between interests and reformers is far from over.

  Detractors say that Warren lacks experience, that she’s not impartial, and that she could make it so expensive to extend credit that only the richest Americans and biggest businesses could get a mortgage, a credit card, or a loan. But these knocks against Warren obscure the likely impact that she would have on the bureau. And mostly, they are straw men.

• Why We Really Shouldn’t Keep the Bush Tax Cut for the Wealthy

  From a strictly economic standpoint — as if economics had anything to do with this — it makes sense to preserve the Bush tax cuts at least through 2011 for the middle class. There’s no way consumers — who comprise 70 percent of the economy — will start buying again if their federal income taxes rise while they’re still struggling to repay their debts, they can’t borrow more, can no longer use their homes as ATMs, and they’re worried about keeping their jobs.

• Geithner defends Obama policy on tax cut extension

  Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday it would be “deeply irresponsible” for the Obama administration to support a wholesale extension of Bush era tax cuts, including breaks for the wealthy.

  Geithner said in a nationally broadcast interview that President Barack Obama strongly believes those reductions should be retained for the “95 percent” of taxpayers with individual incomes under $200,000 a year and families below $250,000.

• Geithner tells bankers not to fear new financial regulations

  Timothy F. Geithner, traveling salesman, swept through Manhattan on Monday making a pitch to skeptical bankers, business leaders and even the mayor.

  His central message: Far-reaching financial regulations signed into law by President Obama last month aren’t something to fear. Rather, they are the foundation of a stronger economy for the months and years ahead.

• In devising punishments, SEC faced with competing interests

  What’s $75 million?

  For Citigroup, it’s a week of profits, less than 0.1 percent of its market value, a rounding error on a balance sheet worth more than $2 trillion.

• Countrywide settlement pays fraction to investors

  Former shareholders of fallen mortgage giant Countrywide Financial Corp. are in line to recoup a fraction of their investments now that a Los Angeles judge has approved a settlement worth more than $600 million settlement.

  The payoff doesn’t come close to compensating for the money lost by investors. But it could prompt more lenders to settle legal disputes at the center of the housing bust.

• 99 Weeks Later, Jobless Have Only Desperation

  Ms. Jarrin is part of a hard-luck group of jobless Americans whose members have taken to calling themselves “99ers,” because they have exhausted the maximum 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits that they can claim.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Julian Assange Responds to Increasing US Government Attacks on WikiLeaks

  It’s been ten days since the whistleblower website WikiLeaks published the massive archive of classified military records about the war in Afghanistan, but the fallout in Washington and beyond is far from over. Justice Department lawyers are reportedly exploring whether WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange could be charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for publishing the classified Afghan war documents. Meanwhile, investigators in the Army’s criminal division have reported

• Secretive group seeks recruits, finds skepticism

  A secretive volunteer group that tries to track terrorists and criminals on the Internet went to the Defcon hacker conference this past week in hopes of recruiting information security experts, but it will first have to overcome some skepticism.

  That’s because most information security professionals have never heard of the group, called Project Vigilant. The group’s director, Chet Uber, came forward Sunday at a press conference run by Defcon organizers to try to recruit volunteers from among the show’s attendees. “We need more people,” he said. “By increasing the numbers, we increase the likelihood that we will get the work done.”

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• No, The Fifth Amendment Does Not Complicate Net Neutrality

  Lyons then tries to twist this into a claim that it’s like an easement on physical property. Again, this is simply untrue. The third parties are not proactively going onto anyone’s network. They have set themselves up and connected directly to the open internet (via their own ISPs to which they pay handsomely for bandwidth) and the only times their content crosses those other networks is when the end users (i.e., the customers of these ISPs) reach out and request that the content be sent to their computer. That’s how the open internet works. If the ISPs don’t like it, they shouldn’t have offered an internet service. To twist this and claim that the internet is somehow a “private network” of these ISPs and service providers who connect to the open internet are somehow “invading” that private network is the height of sophistry.

Intellectual Monopolies

• FBI claims no-one may publish its seal

  The FBI ordered wikipedia to remove its seal from the article there about the bureau. It threatened to litigate. Unfortunately for the FBI, the law it cited is the one that forbids making counterfeit badges, and Wikimedia’s lawyers mocked them in its response.

  John Schwartz in the NYT: “Many sites, including the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display the seal. Other organizations might simply back down. But Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau’s lawyers had misquoted the law. ‘While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version’ that the F.B.I. had provided.”

• Wikipedia and FBI in logo use row

  A row has broken out between Wikipedia and the FBI over the use of its seal.

• Copyrights

  • Pirate Bay Founder Appeals “Political Gagging” Court Order

    Early 2010, a Swedish court banned Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij from operating the site. Last month, the site’s former spokesperson Peter Sunde was also banned and faces a heavy fine for non-compliance. He has now appealed that decision, with his lawyer describing the court ruling as “political gagging”.

  • Digital Economy (UK)

    • Hadopi’s secret 3-strikes security spec leaked

      Government certified security software: the French government’s Hadopi wants to spy on everything on your computer, every time you log on, otherwise you cannot defend yourself against breach of copyright allegations. How far does this breach our right to privacy or freedom of expression?

      [...]

      Although the consultation is supposed to be public, the details of the specification that Hadopi is requiring were kept secret. The leak is significant because it reveals a proposal for surveillance on Internet users’ own computers.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Learning – Taking a Step Forward

One of the biggest challenges we face when we get on site is in familiarizing the child with their new Linux system. Most kids have had Windows exposure from the first time they touch a computer. Getting them through the initial system shock of a new environment has had its challenges.

In some cases, we’ve done a 30 day check-in to see how the child is doing with their new computer and have found the parent or guardian has put Windows on it. Maybe because the child wasn’t familiar with it…

[...]

I am soliciting researchers, ideas, coders, artists, volunteers, and bloggers to help us move this project forward. Sure, the current parameters are pretty loose but that’s why I have put this in front of you.

Guy spends $1500, makes system that can listen in on your mobile phone calls

And of course he used Linux to save on the Windows license fee.

Migrating From XP to “7″

A recent poll found 20% or respondents indicate they would switch to GNU/Linux as a result of the ending of support for SP2.

Server

• VoIP Week in Review

  Vox Communications, which offers a feature-rich, low-cost, high-quality alternative to traditional phone services by providing VoIP and smartphone applications, has exceeded 20,000 VoIP lines on its award-winning Voice over Internet Linux-based server clusters.

Google

• Google and the culture of participation

  With the WWW2010 conference in Raleigh the first week of May, a slew of open source rock stars were in our hometown. Chris DiBona, Public Sector Engineering Manager at Google, was able to visit the Red Hat office and talk with us during his trip. The focus of his talk was the enormous culture of participation that companies like Google and Red Hat—and technologies like the internet—attempt to embrace and extend, despite naysayers and proprietary business habits.

Kernel Space

• Patch turns Transmeta Crusoe into a full i686

  A rather simple kernel update released recently is all what it takes to turn a ten-years old Transmeta-powered computer or appliance into a functional computer again.

  By “functional” we mean one which is able to run the latest Linux software without crashing. And that happens because of the work of one stubborn Arch Linux contributor. The main problem is that Transmeta´s original Crusoe CPUs really implement the full i586, which is the Pentium I, or more appropriately, a “crippled i686” implementation, that lacks one particular processor instruction “long NOPs”.

• New Linux Kernel Borrows Google Packet Speeding Tech

  The technique is one of a number of new features that come with the latest update of the open source operating system kernel, Linux version 2.6.35, which Linus Torvalds released on Sunday.

  In addition the usual round of bug fixes and optimizations, the new version has a number of new features to make it more usable in today’s bustling multicore, networked environments.

• http://chromeossite.com/2010/08/02/chrome-os-vs-jolicloud/

• Vanilla Linux 2.6.35 Goes Turbo

• Next Linux kernel is out

• New Version of the Linux Kernel Arrives

• Linux kernel 2.6.35 released

• Linux 2.6.35 Includes Speedy Google Code, Less Bloat

  The 2.6.35 release also includes new improvements to the Btrfs filesystem, continuing efforts begun by the previous Linux 2.6.34 kernel, which debuted in May to add and enhance support for additional filesystems.

• Linux 2 6 35

• Linux 2.6.35 arrives bearing network, multicore gifts

Applications

• 5 of the Best Free Linux Educational Music Software

  Music education is a field of study connected with the learning and teaching of music. Music is an essential part of the fabric of our society, and the intrinsic value of music is widely recognized. Human culture uses music to carry forward its ideas and ideals.

• Instructionals

  • Work the Shell – Simple Scripts to Sophisticated HTML Forms

  • Set up Ubuntu Lucid Server PV DomU at Xen 4.0 (kernel-xen-2.6.34.1-0.0.19.40d88ce) on top of opensuse 11.3

  • Camera LED As Flashlight on Non-Rooted Android Phones

• Wine

  • HOWTO: Starcraft 2 on Linux with Wine

  • Bordeaux 2.0.6 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD Released

  • Wine 1.3.0 Released

    The Wine development release 1.3.0 is now available.

    Whats new in this release:

    * Beginnings of a user interface for the builtin Internet Explorer.
    * Support for cross-process OLE drag & drop.
    * New builtin wscript.exe (Windows Script Host) program.
    * Open/save dialogs remember the last used directory.
    * Translation updates.
    * Various bug fixes.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KRunner Dictionary Plugin Finally Available

    KRunner is one of the reasons (but not the only one) that I love KDE SC. With this new plugin, it just become a lot better. It will not be included in KDE SC 4.5 (since it is supposed to be released tomorrow :p), But, hopefully, it will make it to KDE SC 4.6.

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Tenth Annual Debian Developer Conference – World’s Largest GNU/Linux Distribution Developers’ Conference about to start

    The Debian Project, the team behind the free Debian GNU/Linux operating system, would like to invite you to participate in the upcoming Debian Conference which will take place from August 1 to 7, 2010, at New York City’s Columbia University in cooperation with the Columbia Computer Science department. This year’s conference is the first DebConf to be held in the United States in the 11-year history of the event. This year, more than 300 developers from all over the world, including Brazil, Argentina, Bosnia, Mexico, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Venezuela, and Latvia, will participate.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Kernel 2.6.35 available for Ubuntu 10.04

      The Ubuntu kernel developers tagged the 2.6.35 kernel as Ubuntu-lts-2.6.35-14.19 in their repository. For a step by step article to to compiling the 2.6.35 kernel follow my how to compile article.

Devices/Embedded

• Barnes & Noble Doubles Down on the Nook

  B&N plans to free up room for Nooks in part by shrinking space devoted to CDs; in this era, you gotta think that it probably would be deemphasizing sales of music on shiny discs no matter what. It says it’s not going to carry fewer dead-tree books.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Cinemo Announces Support for MeeGo

      Cinemo, developers of performance enhanced embedded multimedia technologies for in-vehicle infotainment, consumer electronics, and industrial embedded computing, have announced full implementation of its solutions for the MeeGo open source Linux platform.

    • MeeGo to Power In Vehicle Infotainment, Joins Host of Linux Running Your Life

  • Android

    • Android Handset Sales Beat iPhone Amid Froyo 2.2 Update Frenzy for Evo, Droid

      Two separate reports today place sales of Android handsets ahead of Apple’s iPhone for the first time amid a frenzy of Froyo, or Android 2.2, update news for major smartphones including the Evo 4G and Droid.

      Verizon’s Android 2.2 update for the Motorola Droid — and perhaps Droid X — should begin by next week, and news of the upgrade comes on the heels of Sprint’s announcement that Android 2.2, dubbed Froyo, is going to start rolling out tomorrow for the HTC Evo 4G.

    • Android Deployments Up 886% Over Q2 2009

      International smartphone trend reporting firm Canalys released its Q2 2010 report today highlighting the growth of Android compared to the previous year and the continued success of Nokia, though the release was quick to point out that the competition is closing the gap.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Can’t wait for Chrome OS? Jolicloud’s cloud-based OS hits v1.0

  • Chrome OS vs Jolicloud

    As Google continues to twiddle it’s fingers over Chrome OS a rival ‘cloud OS’ called ‘Jolicloud’ has been making waves for the last few months. Jolicloud Operating System was developed by a company which was started by the founder of Netvibes; the OS has been gaining popularity and already seems like a viable alternative to Google’s Chrome OS.

• Tablets

  • Will Amazon Turn The Kindle E-Reader Into A Fully Fledged Tablet?

    Looking at the Kindle more closely, one can see the similarities with existing tablets on the market; Freescale ARM-11 CPU running at 532 MHz, 4GB internal memory, Wi-Fi and running a Linux-based OS. The only things missing are a decent colour touchscreen and a clear commitment from Amazon to proceed further.

10 Experimental PHP Projects Pushing the Envelope

As the saying goes, “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” But in the world of programming, stretching boundaries is just part of the fun. The PHP community has never been one to shy away from bending their favorite language more ways than a shopping mall pretzel, and as the ten wild projects introduced in this article indicate, the fervor for experimentation is as strong as ever!

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox To Make History, About To Surpass IE in Europe

    August has arrived. Time for a browser market share update. There is quite a bit of news this month, which, depending on your view, can be modified in virtually any direction you prefer. Microsoft likes the version in which IE has gained market share and pushed back Firefox and Chrome. Mozilla may like the one that embarrasses Microsoft and shows that it is about to overtake IE in Europe and Google will most likely state that there is a very good chance that it has now more than 10% of the market.

Databases

• Happy 10th Birthday, Firebird!

Oracle

• The Illumos Project decloaks on August 3

  A number of the community leaders from the OpenSolaris community have been working quietly together on a new effort called Illumos, and we’re just about ready to fully disclose our work to, and invite the general participation of, the general public.

• Sun takeover latest – Oracle still painfully silent

  OpenSolaris is far from alone in the orphanage. However, there are several organisations showing an interest in helping Oracle’s unwanted stepchildren. Since the takeover was completed, Sun’s former chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, has been involved in setting up ForgeRock, a company which provides a new home for a host of Oracle’s apparently unloved and unwanted open source projects.

Project Releases

• An official beta release of the 2.2 version of GLX-Dock is available.

  An official beta release of the 2.2 version of GLX-Dock is available.

Openness/Sharing

• Marketing Software Skills

  Here’s the thing, software isn’t the only Open Source industry. In fact, many other open source businesses are very profitable and are generally skills that have been around for quite some time.

  Let’s think about Open Source for a moment. The first line of the Wikipedia article states…

  Open Source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials.

  To me, it’s just the way we’ve always done things.

• Open Access/Content

  • Copyright and Open Access for Academic Works

    In a recent paper, Prof. Steven Shavell (see Shavell, 2009) has argued strongly in favor of eliminating copyright from academic works. Based upon solid economic arguments, Shavell analyses the pros and cons of removal of copyright and in its place to have a pure open access system, in which authors (or more likely their employers) would provide the funds that keep journals in business. In this paper we explore some of the arguments in Shavell’s paper, above all the way in which the distribution of the sources of journal revenue would be altered, and the feasible effects upon the quality of journal content. We propose a slight modification to a pure open access system which may provide for the best of both the copyright and open access worlds.

Do Not Call List Tops 200 Million, Some Scammers Still Ignore It

The Federal Trade Commission announced a milestone this week: its Do Not Call registry has just passed 200 million numbers.

It’s quite amazing that any of this came to pass, really. When the registry was being considered back in 2002, telemarketing opposition was fierce, and for obvious reasons. The industry was large, powerful, and willing to be unbelievably annoying. It also saw quite clearly that a tough Do Not Call rule would chop off its business at the knees.

Man faces jail for videotaping gun-waving cop

Police officer Joseph Uhler was caught on film charging out of his unmarked car and waving his gun at a unarmed motorcyclist pulled over for speeding. When the footage was uploaded to YouTube, authorities raided Anthony Graber’s home, seized his computers, arrested him, and charged him with “wiretapping” offenses that could land him in jail for 16 years.

Security/Aggression

• Bad guys could read RFID passports at 217 feet, maybe a lot more

  Radio frequency ID tags embedded in U.S. passports can be read hundreds of feet away, potentially making it inexpensive and easy to pick American tourists out of crowds for illicit purposes, a demonstration at Black Hat 2010 showed.

• Trust, transparency, and WikiLeaks: Who gets to have control?

  I’m not willing to argue that involuntary transparency–or as we’re calling it in this case, a leak–is by definition wrong in all cases. And leaks are hardly new–think of the WWII military refrain, “Loose lips sink ships.” History has been changed, sometimes clearly for the better, by involuntary transparency. If you’d like to consider it further, George Mason University has a webpage devoted to the history of leaks. And more than one person, including Daniel Ellsburg, has noted that it’s difficult not to think of the WikiLeaks story as the 2010 version of the Pentagon Papers.

• Mozilla Employee Hacks into Black Hat Video Stream

  The Black Hat security conference attracts the creme de la creme of the security industry. This year the organizers even offered a paid live stream for those unable to make the trip to Vegas. Called Black Hat Uplink, the service carried a $395 price tag. But as security expert Michael Coates found out, the price could be waived entirely, thanks to “a combination of logic flaws and misconfigured systems which provided access to a testing login page that could be used with user credentials that were not fully “registered” (e.g. no payment received). “

Environment/Wildlife

• How Sinar Mas is expanding its empires of destruction

  Sinar Mas group is notorious for its destruction of millions of hectares of Indonesian rainforest, peatland and wildlife habitat. Two divisions within the group lead the destruction: pulp and palm oil. Recently, the group has diversified into coal.

Finance

• Goldman’s Expensive Tastes Anger N.Y.C. Neighbors

  Local New York City residents are up in arms over a plan by Goldman Sachs to replace a discount shoe shop, a pizza joint, a recently closed New York Sports Club gym and a budget inn outside its new $2.1 billion headquarters with a string of designer restaurants and a luxury hotel. The Telegraph reported that the bank is being accused by denizens of “breaking promises.”

• Lenders Freeze Global Assets of Ex-CEOs by Using U.K. Courts

  Iceland’s failed Glitnir Bank hf and other lenders claiming they were stung by internal fraud during the financial crisis are winning U.K. court orders freezing the worldwide assets of ousted executives with ties to Britain.

  Glitnir in May froze the assets of Jon Asgeir Johannesson, its former principal shareholder, and won a second court victory last week after he violated the order by paying bills. Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank, which defaulted on $12 billion of debt, and Intercontinental Bank Plc, the bailed-out Nigerian lender, won similar orders against former executives in the past year.

• Goldman Defends Its Collateral Calls to AIG

  Goldman has long been criticized for benefiting from the U.S. taxpayer bailout of AIG. Taxpayers pledged up to $182 billion to address problems at AIG’s financial products division.

• Financial News: Fund Sues Goldman Sachs Over Oil Bets

  An emerging markets hedge fund affiliated to Citigroup (C) has sued Goldman Sachs (GS) for its alleged failure to uphold its part of a trade involving Venezuelan oil warrants.

  Emerging Markets Special Opportunities Ltd, a hedge fund managed by Citigroup affiliate EMSO Partners, claims that over a three-year period Goldman failed to deliver oil warrants it had paid for.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Anti-P2P lawyers accused of copyright hypocrisy

    Have the copyright enforcers been caught with their hands in the cookie jar? The blog TorrentFreak today published its claim that the US Copyright Group, which has filed more than 14,000 lawsuits against anonymous P2P movie sharers, ripped off another copyright settlement group in crafting its own settlement website.

  • US Copyright Group Caught Red Handed Copying Competitor’s Website

  • What About Creating A Digital Transmission Right

    As soon as you set up this bureaucratic structure, what really happens is that much of the money that could have gone directly to the artists (or to the artists’ business partners) goes instead into the massive overhead required to keep the “collection society” working in the middle. This isn’t a solution that helps musicians. It’s a solution that helps bureaucratic middlemen.

  • DMX Wins Major Direct Licensing Royalties Case; May Fundamentally Change Performance Royalty Landscape

    A court decision this week may fundamentally change how composers, songwriters and publishers are paid royalties for public performances of their music, as the precedent created has laid the groundwork to shift many more music performances out of the hands of ASCAP, BMI and SESAC and into direct license deals with publishers and writers.

  • Marvel Issuing Takedowns Over Thor Trailer; Hey Marvel: Trailers Are Advertising

    It’s a trailer. The whole idea of it is to act as advertising for the movie and get people more interested in seeing the movie. And having people put it online for you makes it free advertising, which is even better. So why take it down at all?

  • ACTA

    • Protecting Pizza, Port and Parma™

      The latest round of CETA negotiations took place last week in Brussels, with the GI issue (along with protections for industrial designs that cover the fashion industry) a top priority for the European delegation. The Canadian government unsurprisingly faces some opposition to the demands from domestic producers.

      Similarly, the ACTA negotiations, which have become increasingly acrimonious, have hit a major roadblock with the Europeans demanding extensive new enforcement powers — including criminal and civil penalties — for GI violations. The U.S. and Canada have been resisting the demand, leading Karel de Gucht, a European commissioner, to warn last week that this was a “red line” issue that could cause the EU to rethink the merits of the entire treaty.