A lot of people do not know that critics of the Gates Foundation include respectable figures such as the chief of malaria for the World Health Organisation. It’s all driven by facts, not irrational resentment or envy. Those who do their homework also understand the role of Bill's press in the mythology. █
“My background is finance and accounting. As a socially conscious venture capitalist and philanthropist, I have a very good understanding of wealth management and philanthropy. I started my career in 1967 with the IRS as a specialist in taxation covering many areas of the tax law including the so-called legal loopholes to charitable giving. […] However, the Gates Buffet foundation grant is nothing more than a shell game in which control of assets for both Gates and Buffet remain the same. […] The only difference is that the accumulation of wealth by these two will be much more massive because they will no longer have to pay any taxes.”
Summary: More OpenDocument Format (ODF) wins and an important reminder of people who try to harm it, sometimes while pretending to be “helping”
THE OTHER day we wrote about what Alex Brown had been doing in Wikipedia. For those who do not know Brown’s role in Microsoft’s OOXML fiasco, read [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21]. Regarding Brown’s edits (as we showed them a few days ago), one reader wrote privately to say, “I just wanted to let you know what Alex Brown appears to have done from those wiki edits (as far as I can go on the first page). All the criticism is magically gone. “whoops”.”
Right now he makes minor edits to ODF’s article, which is not as bad as the malicious edits from hAl, who got banned for his obvious warping of the ODF article, making it an ODF-hostile article.
But let’s concentrate on the positives, not the negatives from Microsoft and its known cronies.
The OpenDocument Web site introduces readers to two tools, Office-O-Tron and ODFPy, which Bart Hanssens describes as follows:
Office-o-tron is an online validator for office documents. It understands ODF (1.0, 1.1 and draft 1.2) and OOXML (“Transitional”).
Odfpy aims to be a complete API for OpenDocument in Python, essentially an abstraction layer just above the XML format. The main focus is to prevent the programmer from creating invalid documents.
Open Search Server 1.1 with Synonym and ODF Support
[...]
The first stable release of the Open Search Server Java software now includes a Web and file crawler and uploaded documents can be searched. The server can handle MS Word and Powerpoint, Open Document Format (ODF), HTML, XML and PDF files.
On 25 September 2009 the Norwegian Government adopted a new regulation on mandatory IT standards applicable to the entire public sector. As of 1 January 2010 open document standards will become mandatory for all public websites.
As the Minister of Government Administration and Reform, Heidi Grande Røys, stated, the new regulation ensures equal accessibility to the content of all public and communal websites. Users of any municipality or state will be able to visit the websites and read the documents regardless the type of software and computer equipment they use. It is a democratic right for all citizens to have equal access to public information and online services.
Weir and OASIS take ODF a step further into 1.2 while Weir and Hanssens are highlighting this new tool for verification of ODF signatures.
Via this page you can test the eID Applet Signature functionality. This test will demo the creation and verification of ODF signatures. ODF signatures are also supported by OpenOffice.org version 3.1.
KOffice 2 adds a mission statement placeholder to its Wiki while in Wikipedia someone removes the sentence: “The OpenDocument Foundation is not related to any entity doing standardisation work for the Open Document Format.” This is later readded and removed again. Test of patience?
Summary: Nokia — facing many new difficulties — unfortunately decides that a litigation strategy is the way to go
LONGTIME readers of Boycott Novell may already know that we have been skeptical about Nokia because of its approach towards software patents. As one of our readers from Finland put it a day ago, “It looks like the press release from Nokia about openness was a feint. It’s now suing Apple. I supposed some of the Microsofters on the inside, maybe even some of the same involved in screwing HTML5, are keen on undermining Apple. You could see indications of the possibility of patent trolling from Nokia when they dropped to LGPL for their newly acquired Qt.” We alluded to the subject in:
A Texas company has targeted Apple and a number of other technology companies in a new lawsuit regarding a handful of computer networking patents issued in the 1990s.
Here is information about Nokia’s lawsuit against Apple (from the British press):
NOKIA HAS called down upon itself the wrath of Steve Jobs by daring to sue the glorious Iphone religion.
Nokia dares to suggest that Apple’s Iphone technology did not spring virgin from the brow of St Steve of Cappuccino but actually had been previously patented by Nokia.
It seems that the Nokian kings of Espoo claim that the Iphone infringes Nokia’s patents for GSM, UMTS and wireless LAN (WLAN) standards.
Nokia, the world’s biggest mobile phone maker, has said that it is suing its US rival Apple for infringing patents on mobile phone technology for the iPhone.
It claimed all Apple’s iPhone models shipped since the Cupertino-based firm debuted its popular device in 2007 infringed the patents.
Here is IDG’s coverage and TechDirt’s take on it. Basically, this is another case of a company going aggressive with patents amid its downfall. Sounds familiar? Well, Microsoft does the same thing and president of the FFII now writes: “Microsoft says royalties do not conflict with the “free” business model.” He points to this new document[PDF] and argues: ‘You will find the same terms from ACT copy/pasted from the Microsoft letter, such as: “respecting the owner’s IPR, implement clear, transparent and balanced IPR policies which do not discriminate and allow competition among different business models, and which seek to ensure the effectiveness of procedures for IPR disclosures”.’
“Basically, this is another case of a company going aggressive with patents amid its downfall.”Since ACT is a Microsoft front, such a connection between texts would almost be predictable. “It would be nice to draw a table between the two to see how they managed to use the same terms,” tells us the FFII’s president.
Going back to Nokia, its litigation strategy is almost akin to that of SCO, except for the fact that there may be truth in Nokia’s allegations.
This behaviour from Nokia comes at a very bad time just after they hosted an event for Qt developers and around they same time that their “Linux killer” goes open source. There is new coverage about it this week, e.g.:
Ever since the announcement about Symbian going “open source” (not Free software) we have warned about Nokia and patents on numerous occasions. Not so long ago in the past we saw Symbian being used as a Trojan horse to partly legitimise software patents in the United Kingdom, for example. Nokia now owns the whole of Symbian, but it uses the “foundation” to pretend that there is Independence that’s inviting to a ‘community’ (mostly volunteer developers and partners). It ought to be mentioned that Symbian’s main man quit the foundation just a couple of days ago and Nokia reported horrific financial results a few days before that.
According to a recent patent application, Apple have applied to be recognized as the creators of “Advertisement in Operating Systems” attributed to the technology’s inventor, Steve Jobs.
As one final side note, CSIRO is an entity that we wrote about the other day because of its patent assault on the entire industry. As we put it at the time, “CSIRO is suing a lot these days [1, 2, 3] following the patent-in-a-standard scam [1, 2, 3].” Here is TechDirt’s good new take on the subject:
CSIRO Taxes Innovators To Fund Innovators?
[...]
A few years back, the Australian tech research agency CSIRO was awarded a patent with several claims over basic concepts used in WiFi. While we have tremendous problems with the idea of any government agency patenting anything, CSIRO wielded this patent and aggressively fought against a bunch of large tech companies, and it recently convinced them to pay a $200 million settlement. At some point, tech firms realize it’s often just cheaper to pay up than to keep fighting a bogus patent claim.
How is this helpful to development and what role does Nokia play in development if Trolltech/Qt developers are ever assigned to write patent applications rather than develop? And what if programmers are fired to give room for more lawyers (either defensive or confrontational)? It is a sad day for Nokia and those in the Free software community who trusted Nokia. █
Summary: Open Core proponent compares the FSF to religion as means of daemonisation and Jason Perlow does this by showing a humourous photo from Linus Torvalds, then throwing in another insult at Richard Stallman
“To resist freedom-hostile software is not an intolerant action; it is responsive and defensive…”Jason Perlow, a self-admitted opponent of the FSF’s values [1, 2], is now using a photo of Linus Torvalds (captured in Tokyo the other day) to smear the FSF. He conveniently ‘forgets’ that the FSF has nothing to do with Microsoft and it’s not a response to Microsoft, either. The GNU project was started in the early eighties.
It seems safe to say that pro-GNU/Linux people who are also strongly pro-Apple are those who basically go for “anything but Microsoft” and are therefore the real so-called "Microsoft haters", as opposed to genuine proponents of Free software. They basically view Microsoft — not proprietary software, software patents, and unethical business conduct — as the single problem. It’s like targeting a boogeyman rather than behaviour; like targeting “terrorists” rather than addressing the cause of terrorism.
If it’s a case of just wanting to eradicate Microsoft and not elimination of users’ and developers’ rights as a whole, what gives? And who would then wonder the tendency to accept DRM, TPM and TiVoisation in Linux, for example? To resist freedom-hostile software is not an intolerant action; it is responsive and defensive due to gradual erosion of control. Software used to be free before proprietary ‘zealots’ came along. And it’s getting worse all the time, surveillance-, permission-, and ownership-wise. █
“FSF did some anti-Apple campaigns too. Personally I worry more about Apple because they have user loyalty; Microsoft doesn’t.”
This is a pure rumour, sourced from random tweets. But it comes from Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome and Mono, so it has a certain investment of radiance.
His first tweet:
“VMware is creating a new Linux distro, according to the recruiting spam they are sending on Linked In.”
This ought to lead to speculations.
A couple of months ago, Matt Asay published a post which asserted that “VMware puts squeeze on Red Hat with SpringSource buy” and there are other important issues to take into account [1, 2]. █
On previous occasions we wrote about Gartner’s Magic Quadrant [1, 2], which the firm is now being sued over (preferential placements likely for customers such as Microsoft and private investors like Bill Gates). From ZDNet: [via]
Friday October 23rd will see Gartner argue a motion to dismiss a complaint by ZL Technologies Inc about the famed Gartner Magic Quadrant. According to court papers, Gartner will argue to dismiss based on First Amendment rights citing that the Magic Quadrant is not meant to represent statements of fact but is based on pure opinion.
IDG operates similar groups and practices using IDC and its Web site too remarks on the case:
On Friday, a judge in San Jose will hear arguments regarding Gartner’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed in May by ZL Technologies that seeks to not only eviscerate the Magic Quadrant but also punish Gartner severely for ever having foisted it upon the IT world. (That some of you are cheering grants ZL’s case not a scintilla of validity, but point taken.)
For those who believe that the plaintiff’s arguments lack substance, here is another allegation and selected antitrust exhibits that involve Gartner and Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4]. This is not much different from what analysts in Wall Street are doing to drive stocks up and down (see video below). █
Summary: New articles/posts about Vista 7 and some experiences that got captured in video (as Ogg)
THE previous post contained some new links that compare Vista 7 to GNU/Linux or put these two sides in context. It is not worth spending much time speaking about Microsoft’s launch parties and other such bogus celebrations. Here is just one perspective:
Early adopters always take a hit. But the same problems with Windows continue even though 7 was supposed to be the resolution for the mess that Vista was. When you take into account all the forced compliance issues with Vista and now 7 it does make you wonder if Microsoft has a hand in selling hardware like wireless cards, printers and scanners. In the past Microsoft has done many shady things like being sued for monopolies, paying for good press, bench mark fraud, and flooding the internet with so called “reviews” written by employees.
People once relied on PCs for e-mail, for instance, but many now get their messages on smart phones and Web browsers through services such as Hotmail or Gmail. Developers are putting their juice into making iPhone apps rather than PC software, or into so-called cloud applications, which run online instead of in Windows.
Has Microsoft built a faster train while the rest of the industry is making planes and automobiles?
It said it had been “demonised” and repeatedly denied doing things which have been attributed to Vista. It attributed photos of it wearing a T-shirt saying “The Wow™ starts NOW!” to youthful foolishness. Windows 7 also decried the leak of Microsoft’s latest dismal quarterly results on Wikileaks, saying the contents were complete fiction and a breach of private matters between the Microsoft National Party and the financial authorities.
Our reader ‘Goblin’ has found various videos that already show people having problems with Vista 7. Here are 3 examples. █
US armstech mammoth Raytheon has announced that its “government insider threat management solution” for information security will be powered by Linux. Penguin-inside crypto modules to be used in Raytheon’s mole-buster tech have now passed tough federal security validation, apparently.
Apple and Linux advocate IBM both tried hard to cramp Microsoft’s style this week before the Windows 7 rollout even got under way. On Tuesday, Apple launched a new iMac, MacBook, and Mac Mini line, while IBM joined with Linux distributor Canonical to introduce a new “cloud-and-Linux-based” offering called IBM Client for Smart Work.
IBM Client for Smart Work is similar to solutions IBM has already been offering in other parts of the world, including Europe and Africa, where Linux is better accepted as an alternative to Microsoft Windows for desktop PC use, said Antony Satyadas, global marketing strategist for desktops at IBM.
IBM chose to announce a tie-up with Canonical to punt an Ubuntu and Lotus cloud offering that might appear, maybe sometime next year. Who knows. They were quite explicit that they were aiming to steal Microsoft’s thunder.
Red Hat chose yesterday to meet journalists and declared “Microsoft was untouchable – until recently”. Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff is making appearances all over London, including one at a Google conference on cloud computing.
Meanwhile the tide of Fedora, Mozilla and Open Office betas continues unabated.
Norbit has seen the benefits in using Linux both embedded in Norbit products as well as on their business servers. Based on this, Norbit wanted to make the transition of their PCB layout environment to Linux. This was another reason why they turned to CR-5000, as the Linux version of the solution has been widely adopted by some of the leading electronics companies, giving Norbit the confidence that this would deliver the cutting edge design capabilities at the same time as the security of an open-source operating system.
In the web services and data farm sector we see the most action. Electricity and bandwidth are the two major costs for service providers. Virtualisation technologies have really hit the data farms and are now moving into the business and the public sector. Virtualisation can reduce electricity consumption of server side services by 60%.
In this area Linux-based virtualisation using KVM has a great story. If you want cool make the VM host a lovely blade and maybe turn off the air con?
2.) Economic conditions are driving reassessments of all enterprise and smaller business IT and planning, including desktop, laptop, netbook and other PCs. This does not mean that desktop Linux will necessarily benefit, but if the server side is any indication, it will gain considerably more interest and use.
What Ryan has achieved so far with FatELF is the file format specification along with documentation and then patches to the Linux kernel, file, binutils, and gdb. The patches still to be written are for module-init-tools, glibc, and elfutils. Support for non-Linux platforms right now is just one of the goals.
Ryan has also constructed a proof-of-concept virtual machine that demonstrates FatELF.
Unigine Corp’s CEO, Denis Shergin, told Phoronix this afternoon that Heaven for Linux should be available in one to two months. According to Denis, the Linux build of Unigine Heaven is done, but they are waiting for new drivers to be released before pushing out this impressive tech demo.
Red Hat has seen some stronger than expected quarters this year, as companies look for ways to stretch their diminishing budgets. The downturn, said Mayer, has given Red Hat a foot in the door, as CIOs try to balance the need of delivering to the business, but doing so with less money. The answer has often been that they cut costs where it impacts least, which includes where the end user will notice.
Two million businesses using Google Apps is nothing to sneeze at. Latin American adoption of Linux is quite high, as is anti-Microsoft sentiment. Our students today will be interacting with those “world’s offices” in a myriad of ways, all of which are focused on the web, rather than Windows.
For the average Linux user, I would imagine that there is no better time to invest in new hardware and install their OS of choice. And with the release of Ubuntu 9.10 just around the corner, the timing of the Windows 7 release could not be better!
Ubuntu is a modern, stable, reliable and secure computing platform that includes most of the applications we all use every day, such as a compatible office suite (Word-processing, Spreadsheets, Presentations) OpenOffice.org, email and calendaring, web browsing and image manipulation tools.
When comparing Linux and Windows 7, it’s really amazing to see how far Linux has come. There are some paradigms in Linux (such as contextual browsing, scalability, fast boot times, and netbook-specific releases) that Windows just cannot compete with anymore. That is not to say that Windows is a bad OS (though it is ridiculously expensive) it just means that Microsoft will have a harder battle going forward to stay relevant.
If anything, 2010 is going to be a great and exciting year. Here we are near the end of 2009 and the stage has already been set for a great battle. Windows 7 has been released, Ubuntu 9.10 is about to be out in the wild, and Google’s Chrome OS is in development. Also in 2010 the next generation of GNOME will be released, and KDE will also up the ante with version 4.4. Times like these make me extremely happy to be a geek!
Many people have never heard of the Linux operating system. Linux is a free operating system that is a perfect fit for laptop and desktop computers. Linux’s popularity has increased with the spread of Netbooks and several Netbook manufacturers ship their machines with Linux as the default operating system. The attractive price and availability of Linux has been bringing a lot of attention to this alternative operating system.
I use Linux on my personal Netbook computer. I bought the Netbook about two years ago for $249. My Netbook is very small, extremely portable, and provides all the computing power I need when I am on the road. Linux is the perfect fit because it is a “small” operating system that uses very little memory and other machine resources. My Netbook is small enough that I use an old hard drive carrying case to hold the Netbook when I travel and find this much more portable than my bulky old laptop case.
GigaTux announces a special sweetener deal to get people hooked on our UK Linux-based Virtual Private Server packages. GigaTux is more than happy to admit their reasoning for this deal, “We think that you will be so impressed at the quality of our VPSs that we’ll gain your custom for the long term.”
A fairly common Linux storage question: Which is better for data striping, RAID-0 or LVM? Let’s take a look at these two tools and see how they perform data striping tasks.
The new IBM Systems Director VMControl Enterprise Edition offering, combined with IBM Tivoli software, gives businesses a single point of control across multiple types of IT systems and virtualisation technologies. It can cover UNIX/Linux, mainframe and x86 systems, as well as storage and network infrastructures.
Last weekend a few Phoronix benchmarks were underway of the Linux 2.6.32-rc5 kernel when a very significant performance regression was spotted. This regression caused the PostgreSQL server to run at about 18% of the performance found in earlier kernel releases. Long story short, in tracking down this performance regression we have finally devised a way to autonomously locate performance regressions within the Linux kernel and potentially any Git-based project for that matter. Here are a few details.
Poettering is concerned the in the upcoming Ubuntu release Canonical has “again” done “some genius thing” to make PulseAudio on Ubuntu perform worse than it could.
So in the past Ubuntu packaged PA in a way that, let’s say, was not exactly optimal. I thought they’d gotten around fixing things since then. Turns out they didn’t. Seems in their upcoming release they again did some genius thing to make PA on Ubuntu perform worse than it could. The Ubuntu kernel contains all kind of closed-source and other crap to no limits, but backporting a tiny patch that is blessed and merged upstream and in Fedora for ages, that they won’t do. Gah.
Yesterday evening NVIDIA pushed out the 190.42 Linux driver update (and also updates to their OpenSolaris and FreeBSD drivers too), which is to serve as a release candidate.
This new S3 Graphics Linux driver has numerous bug-fixes, x86_64 Linux support, “API support”, support for Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, and now it supports OpenGL 3.1 too.
Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. The format includes a subset of the PostScript page description programming language, a font-embedding system, and a structural storage system.
Pichai said that Google’s goals for Chrome — speed, simplicity, and security — have resonated really well with users. He also said that Linux and Mac versions are coming soon.
After a few months of development, AWN (Avant Window Navigator) 0.4 is available for beta testing.
In case you don’t know, Avant Window Navigator (Awn) is a dock-like bar which sits at the bottom of the screen (or at least it used to, read on!). It has support for launchers, task lists, and third party applets.
This is the first update to GNOME 2.28. It contains the usual mixture of bug fixes, translations updates and documentation improvements that are the hallmark of stable GNOME releases, thanks to our wonderful team of GNOME contributors!
As explained on Userbase, Nepomuk is a promising new technology which aims to make the user’s data easier to find. Not only through the now common search and indexing, but also by making use of more complex relationships between documents, contacts and all sorts of data. While the full potential of Nepomuk is still shrouded in mystery for most of us, for developers it is an exciting area of work where academic research and Free Software development come together.
Most people nowadays have more than one computer. Often, you are using one, and would like to do something in another. In this video, I will explain how trivial it is to do that without leaving your seat in a modern Linux using KDE.
We will use the following:
* Avahi, a zeroconf implementation to let you find your computers in your network without worrying about IP addresses, DNS, etc.
* krfb, the KDE Remote Frame Buffer. This is a program to share your desktop over the network.
* krdc, the KDE Remote Desktop Client, a VNC, RDP client, which is what you use to see a desktop shared via krfb.
If personal computing is moving to the web, then where are all the lightweight Cloud focused distributions? Meet xPUD, a brilliant little distro that boots straight to a fullscreen browser. It uses a simple, unique interface, and includes everyday software such as a media player and more! We talk with the lead developer about what makes this operating system unique.
Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Emirates Group IT, operating under the brand name Mercator, a global provider of business technology solutions, delivering business transformation, process improvement and return on investment to more than 100 customers in over five continents, has standardized its IT operations on a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware after a three month pilot program..
At the Red Hat Summit in September, Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) v5.4, the fourth update to RHEL 5. This release marks a notable change in the open source OS leader’s virtualization direction.
Red Hat, which sells subscriptions to an open source server operating system based on Linux, posted positive results for the financial quarter ending 31 August 2009, with software subscription revenue up 15 per cent year on year to $156.3m (£94.4m), and net income totalling $28.9m (£17.5m) compared with $21.1m (£12.8m) in the same period last year.
Werner Knoblich, vice president and general manager of the company’s Europe, Middle East and Africa region, tells Computing about successful open source subscription models, ongoing battles with proprietary vendors for a level playing field, and opportunities for open source software in cloud computing.
Fedora 12′s public beta is now out — what timing, right? — and while a cursory glance at the feature list as a whole doesn’t sport anything revolutionary, there’s more than a few goodies worth singling out.
This week the Fedora community announced the availability of the Fedora 12 beta. We took a look under the hood and explored some of the important technical features, including significant improvements to virtualization and netbook support.
[...]
Fedora 12 has a lot of compelling technical improvements under the hood. The new virtualization features and netbook-related enhancements are particularly impressive and will bring a lot of value to the distro.
The CentOS developers have announced the availability of version 5.4 for i386 and x86-64 architectures. CentOS 5.4 is a free Linux distribution based on the source of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (RHEL), which was released at the beginning of September. The 5.4 release includes several changes over version 5.3 including both new and updated packages based on RHEL 5.4 and custom changes by the CentOS developers.
How can users protect themselves from the loss of important data when a computer goes missing? Well, the latest release of Ubuntu makes this not only possible, but frighteningly easy!
The Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Release Candidate has been released and is available for download. In addition to the GNOME version of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Mythbuntu versions have also been released. Anticipation continues to build for next weeks’ release of the Ubuntu 9.10 stable version which will provide significant improvements and updates to the popular Ubuntu Linux desktop.
Canonical on Thursday made available the Release Candidate of its latest Linux-based operating system, Ubuntu 9.10, on the same day Microsoft launched the long-awaited Windows 7.
What’s new in Kubuntu and Xubuntu 9.10 RC? Kubuntu 9.10 Release Candidate is built on top of the KDE 4.3.2 desktop environment and it includes the following applications and features:
7. How is the Ubuntu partner ecosystem growing?: When IBM and Canonical launched a joint Ubuntu desktop initiative in North America on Oct. 20, 2009, IBM claimed that “hundreds” of partners would back the effort in 2010. Sounds promising.
I also know training partners like Fast Lane and Bridge Education are helping to educate Ubuntu VARs and IT managers. But what other steps is Canonical taking to grow the Ubuntu channel partner ecosystem?
nUbuntu was born as a security testing xUbuntu flavor. However, due to the too big effort needed to keep a whole distribution up to date, despite it being based on the work by Ubuntu teams, it is seldom updated.
The previous version of Ubuntu, version 9.04, offered the ext4 filesystem as an option, but not as a default. After six-months of testing and stabilization I am also happy to announce that ext4 will be enabled by default in Ubuntu 9.10.
I have been very happy with the ext4 filesystem. I have seen impressive speed improvements over ext3, and now use ext4 on each of my systems that supports it. Again, another impressive step toward a faster and more performance-driven Ubuntu experience.
Wind River and PrismTech announced a jointly developed “Spectra SDR” software-defined radio (SDR) middleware platform for both military and public sectors, compatible with Wind River’s Linux and VxWorks distributions. Meanwhile, Wind River launched a blog feature, starting with President Ken Klein explaining how Wind River is a “firewalled subsidiary” of Intel, committed to independence.
Klein stresses Wind River has a three-pronged approach to the mobile and embedded Linux sectors: The Open Handset Alliance’s Android work, LiMo and Intel’s Linux-based Moblin strategy, which, he stresses, is coming on strong.
Device makers are facing a challenge as consumers are demanding full functionality in their devices and mobile devices are becoming more complex and feature-rich. In addition to full functionality, consumers want the convenience of long-lasting battery life. Unfortunately for device makers, these two design goals can only be achieved at the expense of one another. As developers are being pulled in these two separate directions, what can be done to ease their pain?
With the advent of the new computing architectures such as multicore processors and Intel’s Atom in embedded systems, developers who want to use the Linux operating system are presented with a dilemma. On the one hand, in embedded applications good performance is essential. But at the same time, Linux is becoming established as an embedded operating system option.
Timesys® Corporation (http://www.timesys.com), provider of LinuxLink, the first commercial software development framework for building custom embedded Linux® based products, today announced the availability of a suite of Linux products and services supporting Altera Corporation’s Nios® II embedded processor. The Timesys LinuxLink software development framework gives Nios II processor users access to a low-cost, intuitive environment for developing a wide range of Linux-based products.
Entourage Systems announced the third Android-powered, dual-display e-reader of the week. The Entourage Edge opens up like a book, with one inside panel devoted to a 9.7-inch E Ink display, and the right panel offering a 10.1-inch touchscreen that provides WiFi (or optional 3G) based web browsing and media playback.
In order to spur further growth in the mobile market Google has dedicated a lot of resources to Android, the open-source Linux-based operating system for mobile phones, and the results are starting to be felt with a flurry of new Android-based smartphones hitting the market recently or in the short term future. But it now looks like the company isn’t content with letting others build Android phones, as it is apparently close to launching its own device, which should be available at retailers as early as this year.
Many people use the open source application Tor on the desktop for anonymous browsing sessions. Thanks to a grant from the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge and the team behind The Guardian Project, now Android mobile phone owners can use Tor to browse privately on their handheld devices, too.
There are plenty of questions still to be answered such as cost and how the Else can compete with the iPhone or Android app stores. The phone is a showcase for the Access Linux Platform, an implementation of the LiMo standard, which is a rival version of Linux for mobiles to Google’s Android.
It was unclear whether Edge Intuition supports some or all of the next-generation LiMo R2 specification, which underlies the Vodafone’s 360 H1 phone. However, an ALP 3.0 subset was said to have been one of two R2 “Reference Implementations” available to LiMo members. The other was the Azingo Mobile 2.0 stack, which appears to have been used by Vodafone for its 360 H1 phone.
As you can see the Nokia N900 is a very capable device, even with this early software build currently loaded on it. I plan to post many more videos and thoughts on other areas of the device so stay tuned for more coverage. Please do let me know if you have any questions on the N900 and I will try to answer those as well. I am working on a post related to the N900 and enterprise usage for posting here.
There is no word on the type of distribution of the OS, but with the move back to Linux as some might perceive it to be might very well be the start of moving back to SSDs instead of hard drives for netbooks.
The Neochange, et al, survey also asks, “What is the most important factor for realizing value from enterprise software?” The answer “Gaining user buy-in and ensuring effective usage to deliver business impact” garnered a 71.7 percent vote. That’s more easily achieved with open-source software, in particular, which allows enterprises to evaluate and use software long before they opt to purchase support or add-on services/software (if, indeed, they ever elect to do so).
Ideally, what we need is a completely open source cloud computing infrastructure on which applications providing people with things like (doubly) free email and word processing services could be offered. Now, it’s clearly not possible to create the kind of huge facilities that Amazon, Google and Microsoft are building around the world. Not even Mr Shuttleworth, with all his millions, could sustain that for long without charging somewhere along the line. So simply running open source programs like Eucalyptus is not going to work. The trick here is not to fight the battle on the opponents’ terms, but to come up with something completely different.
The current co-creation landscape is broad and varied. The diagrams below outline several different models of collaborative creation that have been employed to help develop products and services. Below each diagram you will find a link to an organisation that represents an example of co-creation.
The Open Database Alliance was announced in May this year, after which we have put in some months of frantic activity to get all the essential pieces into place that allow an organization to function and be filled with life. Among other things we needed to decide on the country to choose and the seat, which ended up being Zürich, Switzerland.
For example, OSS vendors can increasingly include community members in discussing and executing the marketing strategy. Furthermore, a vendor could initialize a community board where the vendor discusses release cycles and development issues with community members. Both efforts could later lead towards a community-owned association that holds the trademark and decides upon the development roadmap.
To follow up on the big success of CeBIT Open Source 2009, the theme focus will get an especially attractive location at the trade show site in Hanover, Germany in 2010. The conference organization and Linux Pro Magazine are now calling for open source projects to apply for free exhibit space at CeBIT Open Source 2010.
The largest IT trade show on earth will take place from March 2 through 6 in Hannover, Germany. The Deutsche Messe organization that runs the trade show initiated Open Source as a theme focus for the first time in 2009, and the surge of visitors into a constantly packed hall exceeded all expectations. It’s clear that Open Source will play a major role again at CeBIT in 2010. As an incentive, the theme will get a prominent new location in Hall 2, where exhibitors, the Open Source Forum and the Open Source Project Lounge will find a new home. As in 2009, commercial enterprises as well as free projects will have the opportunity to present their work to the general public.
The current version of Fennec – which is available in an early alpha form for Maemo devices such as Nokia’s latest N900 smartphone – is based on the Firefox 3.6 rendering engine, which is a step ahead of the engine used in the current desktop release of the browser. This technology means that when Fennec finally hits ‘phones, it will offer the a complete browsing experience – in Lilly’s words, “a browser that [does] everything – JavaScript, CSS, Flash, SVG [Scalable Vector Graphics], video and audio.”
But at some point, you need to convert many of those free folks into paying clientele. Some businesses have done a remarkable job converting free audiences into paying customers — the prime examples including Google (free search to paid search) and Red Hat (free Linux to subscription Linux). But free can also kill a company (prime example: Netscape).
The Blender Foundation have received sponsorship to hire a full-time Blender developer for 9 months to work on Blender 2.5. If the project goes well, they will pay for another period to work on other Blender projects. Ton just announced that Matt Ebb (Blender coding/animation guru) has agreed to fill the position. The sponsoring party remains undisclosed (“but it’s not Steve Jobs, don’t worry!”).
Europe’s head of competition has criticized Oracle for what she characterised as a lack of cooperation over the investigation of Oracle’s planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, a spokesman for the European Commission said.
The main goal of the Python development community at this point should be to get widespread acceptance of Python 3000. There is tons of work to be done before we can be comfortable about Python 3.x, mostly in creating solid ports of those 3rd party libraries that must be ported to Py3k before other libraries and applications can be ported. (Other work related to Py3k acceptance might be tools to help porting, tools to help maintaining multiple versions of a codebase, documentation about porting to Python 3, and so on. Also, work like that going on in the distutils-sig is very relevant.)
Guido von Rossum, author of the Python programming language, has proposed freezing the grammar and semantics of the language for a “period of several years”. By doing so, von Rossum is hoping to facilitate the move from Python 2 to Python 3.
US bank customer Dalton Chiscolm could learn on Friday if he is one step closer to becoming the world’s first ever billion-trillionaire.
Mr Chiscolm sued Bank of America in Manhattan’s federal court in August for “$1,784 billion trillion”, in a complaint that boiled down to poor customer service.
In the last week, the FCC was questioned by three different letters representing a group of 72 Democrats, a group of 18 Republicans, and a group of minorities — blacks, Hispanics and even Asians who are against Net Neutrality. Could it be that they receive funding from AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc. and they are just spouting the public line? Sure looks that way. Follow the money and its clear this could be a put on job.
Environmental activists held a hoax press conference Monday morning, pretending to be the business group — and pretending to announce that the chamber was dropping its opposition to climate-change legislation now in Congress.
Rick Berman could not agree more. Berman operates a Washington-based consulting business that manages grassroots and advertising campaigns for a host of business interests – although nothing, he says, to do with insurance this time. In union circles, he is particularly well-known (and vilified) for his antilabor work.
“Money and lobbyists have checkmated each other” in Washington, bringing both sides to a draw, he said.
“Now it is a contest not for money, but for votes,” he said. “If you can get [people] to write, urge the senator to take a position and promise to remember it when they vote, that’s the new currency of lobbying.”
A former top lobbyist for a satellite television company is seeking to mobilize sports fans to further the interests of the industry he once served.
David Goodfriend, a former lobbyist for Dish Network, is forming a coalition that claims to give sports fans a voice on Capitol Hill. But the initial funding would come from satellite television and other companies that compete with the rival cable industry.
The order comes after three unsuccessful attempts by the government to delay disclosure of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) pending the Solicitor General’s decision whether or not to appeal.
When the Federal Trade Commission released its new guidelines on using testimonials and endorsements in advertising, it wasn’t clear how the rules were going to be enforced or what bloggers who did product reviews and the like needed to do, other than informing their readers when they are being compensated to talk about products or events on their blogs.
[...]
Though Talcott focuses on the advertisers, he does not neglect bloggers/reviewers entirely. He cautions that they should not blindly pass on advertiser statements about the products or services.”Internal procedures can require that published reviews be based not solely on advertiser-supplied copy, but also on the author’s independent evaluation of the product…a blogger [can] be liable for the misstatements of an advertiser,” he says.
The US Federal Communications Commission has voted unanimously to begin the formal process of listening to a pair of modern-day religious factions howl at each other over proposed rules for an open internet.
Can you frame this conversation as free vs. paid? No. Not if you are trying to get someone to pay you cash directly for something that is ubiquitously available for free. Free vs. Paid is not the great debate, it’s a no-brainer — free wins! Valueless vs Valuable, Scarce vs Ubiquitous, Demanding of attention vs Commanding of attention are the debates and the winners will be the individuals and organizations that can most effectively translate the value of content into wealth.
10 years after Napster 1.0, the music industry is still asking for utterly impossible rates, free equity, and all kinds of veto rights as far as the use of content is concerned. Someone out there, please: tell me how this is going to be different with Spotify, MOG, iMeem, rdio etc?
Since offering several albums for free via digital download in late July, Mr Majerczak has noticed a surge in physical sales; not just CDs but T-shirts and vinyl as well.
“Sales have definitely increased, which I’m sure in part has been a result of our new digital model,” explains Mr Majerczak, 22, who started the label from his Ivanhoe bedroom in 2006.
vvv
News aggregrator NewsNow.co.uk has told British newspapers to lay off the legal threats and accept that linking to news stories is good for their business.
What’s much more entertaining is seeing how entertainment industry lobbyists are cheering this on. I’m beginning to think that they actually believe that kicking people off the internet will make people buy more of their content. Incredible. First up, the MPAA’s Dan Glickman (who’s being pushed out of his job for being woefully ineffective):
“Today’s decision is an enormous victory for creators everywhere. It is our hope that ISPs will fully honor their promise to cooperate and that the French government will take the necessary measures to dedicate resources to handle the enormous task ahead.”
A victory for creators? Really? By kicking fans off the internet for promoting their works? Yikes. Someone’s out of touch.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Roy is a Software Engineer, interdisciplinary researcher, and an advocate of fair competition. He holds a doctoral degree in Medical Biophysics. Contact us (encrypted/PGP)
Send this to a friend 
Content is available under CC-BY-SA