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06.12.11

Links 12/6/2011: Chromebooks Coming, New Pidgin

Posted in News Roundup at 11:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop
  • Pogo Linux Launches New Storage Division, Pogo Storage

    Pogo Linux today announced that it has launched a separate storage division, Pogo Storage. Pogo Storage expands the company’s storage offerings with cost-efficient, entry-level to mid-range enterprise solutions. The new division is dedicated to helping small- & mid-sized organizations implement emerging storage technologies and get the most from their storage budget.

  • Desktop

    • 10 reasons why Chromebooks will be a huge success

      As June 15th nears, the folks at Google must be busy biting their nails off. This is the big G’s first step into the world of operating systems, and they want everything to go just right. With the release of Chromebook, they will be competing with 3 operating systems which have been around for a very long time. Whether Google will manage to topple them or not, only time can tell; however, there are a few reasons that this might work out pretty well for them. Here are ten such reasons why Chromebooks will be a huge hit.

    • Serving a Printer to Google Cloud Print from Linux

      Been waiting for Google Cloud Print to finally come to linux?

      The wait is over!

      For now, Google has only released the ability to serve up a printer to the Google cloud via Windows while explicitly noting that the capability to do so in Linux is on the way. However, the entire ‘Cloud Aware’ printer scheme has seemed to always been referred to as coming-soon and that is probably a ways off yet. So I remain skeptical as to when we will actually see this ability. [update: There are some out there now and reviews are trickling in.]

      Luckily, Armooo posted a python script that you can run on Linux (and I assume *BSD, but haven’t tested just yet) to serve up your local CUPS printer to the Google Cloud.

      The script can be found here at his Github page and uses Python and PyCups to serve up your CUPS-enabled printer to the Google Cloud.

    • Savvy Senior: Tips on easy-to-use computers for seniors

      And since it runs on Linux software instead of the standard Windows or Mac OS, it’s a virus-free computer too.

  • Server

    • Time to say goodbye to Risc / Itanium Unix?

      Orange Business Solo – 450 mins, 250 texts, 50MB email and a new phone

      Twenty years ago open systems was the battle cry that shook the absurdly profitable proprietary mainframe and minicomputer markets.

      The proliferation of powerful and less costly x64-based systems that can run Solaris, Linux or Windows is making more than a few Unix shops think the unthinkable: migrating away from Unix for their mission-critical workloads.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Dolphin Review – Kubuntu’s Counterpart to Nautilus

        Those of you who are using Kubuntu are already familiar with Dolphin, the default file manager shipped in most KDE distributions. There are several very good file managers for KDE, and I must include here Konqueror or Krusader, however Dolphin’s goal is to offer as much as possible functionality while also keeping lightweight and fast. And yes, it does it perfectly well, offering powerful features and a clean interface at the same time.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • [Toorox] 06.2011 “GNOME”
      • Macpup 525

        Macpup 525 is the latest and is based on Puppy Linux 5.2.5 ,”Lucid Puppy”, An official woof build of puppy Linux that is binary-compatible with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx packages. This contains all the apps from Lucid puppy with the addition of Firefox 4.0.1. Extra apps like Opera or Gimp are available for easy download from the Quickpet App on the ibar or the Puppy Package Manager. This version also includes the Enlightenment E17 window manager. The EFL libraries version 1.0.999 and E17 version 59456 where compiled and installed from source.

      • Imagineos 20110605
      • ALT 6.0.0-20110611

    • Gentoo Family

      • Pardus and Xfce: a bright and powerful parade

        Pardus has been around for years, and occupies a luxury-car niche in the Linux world: easy to install and configure, extremely stable, very friendly, and very KDE-centric. I would say it’s comparable to Mepis in some ways. There are differences, of course. Pardus is a government-sponsored project, and it exists for the benefit of Turkish universities and research centers. The main support board is in Turkish, and the independent international one is hosted in Germany.

        Most of the current code has been developed from the ground up, and it is considered an independent distribution. As far as I know, it has no derivatives, either, and no spins. In the Linux family tree, it is the sharp-dressed uncle you saw at funerals and liked, but whenever you suggested visiting him your parents suggested that he was probably out of town.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tiny CompactFlash computer gains USB carrier board

      C Data Solutions announced a carrier board for its tiny CompactFlash-based Compact Computer (CoCo) that enables expansion via third party USB devices. The CoCo carrier board adds dual USB host ports to the uClinux-based CoCo, which offers a 500MHz Blackfin processor with 32MB SDRAM, 8MB flash, and an FPGA, and enables rapid prototyping of devices with a mix of CompactFlash peripherals.

    • Embedded Linux Skills Are Hot: Use Summertime to Sharpen Up
    • MontaVista, Rightware to build in-car infotainment using embedded Linux

      MontaVista and Finland’s Rightware Oy are developing a GENIVI-compliant in-car infotainment platform that uses the Linux operating system.

      The two companies said in a press release that the product uses Rightware’s 3d user interface product, which is called Kanzi, on top of a GENIVI compliant MontaVista Linux.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Has the Time Come for an Android Market Drug Test?
        • Android Market Webstore adds compatibility alerts

          Google upgraded its Android Market Webstore to inform users whether a given app is compatible with their Android devices. Meanwhile Google Maps has been updated with live tracking of public transportation in six cities in the U.S. and Europe, and Microsoft is trying to lure Android developers with new resources including an “Android to Windows Phone 7 API mapping tool” website.

        • 4.5-inch Samsung Infuse 4G is zippy fun, says review

          Samsung’s Infuse 4G on AT&T is a speedy Android 2.2 “Froyo” smartphone that offers a lot for its $200 price, including a 1.2GHz Hummingbird processor, an eight-megapixel camera, and a big 4.5-inch screen with Super AMOLED Plus display technology. The Infuse 4G’s delights make it clear why Samsung is quickly dominating the Android smartphone market, this eWEEK review says.

        • Mot spins dual-core Photon 4G and 4.1-inch prepaid Triumph

          Motorola Mobility and Sprint announced a Photon 4G smartphone that runs Android 2.3 on a 1GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, offers a 4.3-inch qHD display, and has an optional, Atrix-like “laptop dock.” Motorola also announced that its 4.1-inch Triumph, running Android 2.2 on a 1GHz processor, will be exclusively available from Sprint’s Virgin Mobile USA prepaid service.

        • New multi-threading multicore architecture targets Android tablets

          A fabless startup called ICube announced a new multicore processor architecture aimed at Android tablets, claimed to be the first to handle both CPU logic and graphics processing in a “truly integrated” single core. The Harmony Unified Processor Technology architecture offers up to four processing threads per core, and will first appear later this year in a 65nm, dual-core IC1 SoC, says ICube.

        • Save Time with Android’s Hardware Keyboard Shortcuts

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Hackfest Benefits WMF, Community

    On May 24th and 25th, the Wikimedia Foundation hosted a CiviCRM coding sprint in our San Francisco office. CiviCRM is the premier open source constituent relationship manager; WMF uses it to store donor and contribution information. Our CiviCRM database contains more than a million contact records and a million contribution records.

  • NetRexx is now open source

    NetRexx, a variant of the Rexx script language, developed by IBM, has been made open source software under the aegis of the Rexx Language Association (RexxLA). The first indication that the language was to be made open source came in February, but now the process has been completed.

  • Events

    • Linux Foundation charters bus for road trip from Corvallis to LinuxCon

      The Linux Foundation is hosting a “Linux Learners’ Student Day” on August 16, the day before the full convention gets under way. It’s partnering with the Oregon State University Open Source Lab to host the student day, and is chartering a bus to take students from Corvallis and Portland up to Vancouver.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Home Tab and New Tab Conceptual Mockups

        -Creating an interface that is unique to Firefox in a browser market headed towards commoditization (back+ forward+fast!)
        -Ambient application-level notification
        -Introducing the concept of tab browsing to users of the home button
        -Building up the user’s mental model of the features that will also be available on other platforms, like the iOS application Firefox Home

      • Firefox 5 release: new speed, same illness (quick review)

        Firefox 5 started without any issues this time. First of all, it checked compatibility of installed plugins. Unsurprisingly, nothing was found. I did not install any plugins in Firefox, because I do not use this browser.
        Once started, I could measure memory usage for cold-started Firefox 5 and Chrome 12. I closed all additional processes opened by installed Chrome Extensions via Chrome Task Manager for clearness of experiment .

      • Mozilla releases SeaMonkey 2.1

        Mozilla and the SeaMonkey Project developers have released version 2.1 of their “all-in-one internet application suite”. SeaMonkey, formerly known as the Mozilla Application Suite, is the successor to Netscape Communicator and includes a web browser with advanced email and newsgroup support, an IRC chat client and HTML editing support.

  • CMS

    • Joomla Quietly Crosses 23 Million Downloads, Now Powering Over 2,600 Government Sites

      According to BuiltWith, of the top million websites using content management systems (or CMSes), three systems own more than 75 percent of the total market share: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. (All of which are open source, by the way.) Many are likely most familiar with WordPress, which TechCrunch has covered quite a bit (and uses to power most its sites, for full disclosure). WordPress is the most popular CMS on the Web, running 62 percent of the top million websites that use a CMS, according to BuiltWith, with Joomla now ranking second at 10 percent.

  • Project Releases

    • Pidgin IM client updated to 2.8.0

      The Pidgin development team has announced the release of version 2.8.0 of its open source instant messenger application. Pidgin 2.8.0 implements basic silence suppression for voice calls to prevent wasting bandwidth for silent periods during a call, and adds the DigiCert High Assurance CA-3 intermediate CA certificate which is needed for validation of the Facebook XMPP interface’s certificate.

  • Licensing

    • Open Source Has Nothing To Do With Filtering Apps!

      Now, Having explained so much about Free Software will Mr Mike Isaac of Wired explain how Google’s banning an app violates the ‘license’ or philosophy of Open Source or Free Software?

      Isaac wrote, “The word open speaks directly to the hacker ethos — open source software is made to be shared, pored over and freely distributed. Open networks were made to be entered, explored and (occasionally) exploited. Open markets, self-governed. For better or for worse, it’s pure libertarianism at its finest.”

      The word ‘Open’ has been exploited by greedy corporates more than ever which leads to confusion and FUD. That’s why we recommend using the word Free Software to be clear of what you are talking about when you refer to THE open-source movement. You can see what kind of confusion is there even among writers. Greg Crowe of GCN writes,

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Project London: Filmmaking goes open-source

      In 2009, the live-action sequences were shot for “almost nothing” by Hubert and executive producers Ian and Phil McCoy. Thousands of hours of postproduction followed and, as the film developed, so did the Blender Community. Artists gained skills and their portfolios grew — one used his Project London work to get a job with the US government creating 3D military models. “It’s really what we want, that the volunteers will be able to get something out of it too,” says Hubert. As the team hit the software’s limitations, they simply amended its code. “Nathan Vegdahl [a key contributor] made something that would auto matically scan a folder for new submissions, start the render, and organise all the resulting frames,” says the director. “It saved us a ton of time.”

    • Open Hardware

      • HexBright is the first open source flashlight

        The HexBright Flex, which is slightly longer than the Prime model at 5.25 inches, offers a light intensity of up to 500 lumens which is five times greater than that of conventional LED flashlights. It is fully rechargeable through its micro-USB port thanks to its 18650 lithium-ion battery which is easily replaced. The Flex will ship with four default modes including hi, medium, low and flash, but one thing that differentiates it from other flashlights, besides its brightness, is that it can be re-programmed via USB. This allows the flashlight’s microprocessor firmware to be re-flashed when connected to a PC.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Interoperability and Open Standards: Help Make It Happen

      In a previous column, I mentioned that I was invited to talk at a meeting at the European Parliament about innovation prizes last week. That’s not something that often happens, and I frequently get to hear about meetings only after the event, when it’s too late, which is very frustrating. But happily here’s one on the 16th June entitled “Interoperability and standards: making it happen“ that I’ve come across in time…

Leftovers

Clip of the Day

Bloopers en casamientos


Credit: TinyOgg

Painting Tax With a ‘Charity’ Brush

Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Microsoft, Patents at 6:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“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.”

The Gates and Buffet Foundation Shell Game

Shell on the beach

Summary: The loophole which plutocrats are exploiting and how we can tackle the problem or at least help people recognise this problem

TECHRIGHTS strives to promote ethics and to promote critical thinking, encouraging people to educate others about the difference between public relations and investigative journalism. As part of our investigation we sometimes deviate a bit from software and from patents, provided that a link/bridge remains. Politics cannot be explained without some science and, conversely, what happens in science cannot be accounted for while totally ignoring politics. Face it, it’s the way life goes. It is also the way government procurement is often being done. People in power tend to help other people in power (usually politicians help the rich and vice versa). Human engagement and civilised affairs have always been about “friend helps a friend/kin” (or “dog-eat-dog”). Software makes our life much easier, but for many of us (especially the ‘bottom’ 90% which the West likes to forget about or merely exploit) it can make life a lot more miserable. Software can help those on power “capitalise” on the labour and health/welfare of others. So we duly apologise for not always talking purely about technology. We worry about how it affects people’s life, e.g. their freedom, their relationship with their neighbours, etc.

“It is really all taxpayers who pay for it. They give their tax dollars for one man’s (or woman’s) self-promotional PR campaign.”In the coming weeks we are going to catch up with the Gates Foundation, which serves Microsoft as a lobbyist and a financier of Linux-hostile patent trolls. It is difficult to counter the message echoed by the press when the Gates Foundation spends approximately one million dollars per day (on average) just buying positive coverage rather than giving anything, but we are going to try. As Rusty explained in a recent episode of TechBytes, this trick is not unique and it has been done for many decades if not centuries. The basic idea is, people to whom tax would be at the range of many millions or over a billion realise that it might be cheaper to just set up an entity which exempts them from tax and then uses those savings to do some reputation laundering. In essence, money which was supposed to be paid back to the public as tax is being misused to portray some very greedy people as heroes of a nation. It is really all taxpayers who pay for it. They give their tax dollars for one man’s (or woman’s) self-promotional PR campaign. To make matters worse, in Gates’ case the tax haven as also used are an investment and lobbying vehicle which pushes governments to give taxpayers’ money to companies the foundation invests in (for profit).

Philanthrocapitalism needs to be scrutinised more. The relevance to us is that one such entity that engages in philanthrocapitalism (the largest of its kind) is harming people’s freedom and promotes Microsoft. By researching its behaviour we can help demonstrate what others like it are doing as well. The tricks are universal because the loopholes are mostly the same anywhere one goes.

Our most comprehensive coverage of this subject is from 2009 and to a lesser degree 2010 as well. At some stage we realised that it became repetitive as even though there was clearly news to be shared (e.g. Gates ‘buying’ another media outlet or gets caught in another major scandal), the principal symptoms were the same and elucidating it all was a cyclic exercise consisting similar counter-arguments. Like many other sites that reach a point where the unique conceptual material is exhausted, we are probably going to cover the Gates Foundation using links summaries and excerpts. Our readers are smart enough to infer the necessary from these and our wiki page on the subject contains rebuttals to most of the key points. █

Links 12/6/2011: Steel Storm: Burning Retribution For GNU/Linux, KDE SC 4.6.4

Posted in News Roundup at 2:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux (and Windows) on a new HP Pavilion laptop

    Second surprise: copying 13000 files (4 GB) from a DVD to the hard-disk is extremely slow in Windows 7: 10 hours! Well, estimated. I lost patience after 2 hours and rebooted. Doing the same operation on Linux: 7 minutes. Amazing.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE SC 4.6.4 Is Available for Download

        The KDE team has just announced a few minutes ago (June 10th) the fourth maintenance release for KDE Software Compilation 4.6. This is a minor update, focusing on bug fixing and translation updates.

  • Distributions

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • X.org, wayland and all that awesome low-level stuff

        So, as of today, I am proud to announce that Mandriva 2011 is powered by the latest, shiniest and greatest X.org server 1.10.2 and Mesa 7.10.2, with all the awesomeness which comes with that. I had to write some small patches to fix some Intel Sandy Bridge crashes here and there, but I think that Mandriva today has probably the most up-to-date X.org stack out there.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Review of Sabayon 5.5 Xfce

        Sabayon, despite being in the top ten on Distrowatch, isn’t as publicized as other popular distributions. Xfce is my desktop of choice, so I thought that I would review the Xfce version of Sabayon 5.5, the newest edition.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Projects I would love to see packaged in Fedora

          I suspect this won’t be my last post like this. I use to just package them up myself but I’m finding that the amount of packages I maintain is increasing and the time I have to actually maintain them is decreasing and I know there’s people that are likely better suited to some of these packages than I am.

    • Debian Family

      • People behind Debian: Philipp Kern, Stable Release Manager

        Philipp is a Debian developer since 2005 and a member of the release team since 2008. Since he took the responsibility of Stable Release Manager, the process has evolved for the best. I asked him to explain how the release team decides what’s fit for stable or not.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Review: Pinguy OS 11.04 Mini

            Upon the advice of a commenter in one of my previous posts, I am reviewing Pinguy OS 11.04 Mini today. That commenter asked that I test Pinguy OS 11.04, and mentioned the existence of a Mini edition, so I became intrigued, because Pinguy OS is more known for being an “everything-and-the-kitchen-sink” distribution than anything else, so I thought it would be cool to see what the Mini edition would have in store.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org: Missing the Big Picture

      LibreOffice (LO) was forked from the LGPL’ed version of OpenOffice.org some 8 months ago, while also creating a new organization for this: the Document Foundation (TDF). During this time the LibreOffice community has worked on cleaning up the source code, integrating features from another fork, (Go-oo, which was used in most Linux distributions), merging features from subsequent versions of OpenOffice.org and also creating new features themselves. They have a healthy community going with a number of core developers (mostly employed) and a large number of volunteers. There is also work on creating a real foundation much like the KDE e.V in Germany, and they received substantial donations to this goal.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • ‘Proprietary software keeps users helpless’

      Richard Matthew Stallman started the GNU’s Not Unix project in 1983 to create a totally free operating system, and later the General Public License to guarantee its freedom. By 1991 much of GNU was finished, although it was lacking a kernel – that’s where Linus Torvalds and his Linux kernel come in.

      Despite the success of GNU/Linux, Stallman hasn’t opted for an easy life: he campaigns tirelessly to protect our software freedoms, alerting us to potential threats that new technologies bring.

Reader’s Picks

Clip of the Day

Miami Beach Memorial Day Shooting May 30th 2011, cellphone video


Credit: TinyOgg

IRC Proceedings: June 11th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 1:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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