08.26.10
Posted in GNU/Linux, Marketing, Novell, OpenSUSE at 6:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The Power of One Microsoft Way?
Summary: A new initiative from Novell helps explain Novell’s tyrannical nature when it comes to software, which it would rather use to dominate customers and suppliers, as opposed to share and decentralise
“The Power of One” is about to become a new slogan/motto/tagline at Novell, based on its marketing chief. The intention of this statement can easily be taken out of context:
In particular we recently launched a company wide initiative called “The Power of One”.
[...]
The Power of One is an important reminder to all that in most things “Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned”.
Novell has been struggling to give power to others. Just like Microsoft, Novell is a control freak. Consider for instance yesterday’s announcements about Fog Computing. Novell is all proprietary, unlike Red Hat. Novell’s marketing people do nothing to emphasise “open source” in Fog Computing, either. Even when Novell tries to give an illusion of “community” it is mostly just Novell staff in a “community” gown (even the new community manager of OpenSUSE). Consider this new post from Novell’s Andreas Jaeger. They have had trouble when board members evacuated OpenSUSE abruptly, so:
I see the following situations not handled:
* Less candidates than seats for a category (Novell/non-Novell)
* Equal number of candidates and open seats for a category (Novell/non-Novell)
* a board member resigning
* a board member disappearing and not engaging in the board
* a board member getting hired by Novell or leaves Novell
In order for Novell to not just give the impression of independence in OpenSUSE, something must be done. As it stands, OpenSUSE is all Novell (the management, the trademark, the direction, almost everything!) and this is going to cause trouble now that Novell sells itself. Based on OpenSUSE, someone has just created Me-OS. Maybe it’s time to fork OpenSUSE [1, 2, 3]. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Novell, Open XML, Standard at 5:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: After Microsoft ‘bought’ OOXML support from Novell, the company’s PR reps suggest that it is bad practice
“True Open Standards Aren’t Single Vendor Affairs,” says this new bit of Novell PR. It’s actually the headline.
3 years ago Novell helped OOXML, which was a single-vendor format Microsoft sought to pretend was backed by many. Novell was one of Microsoft’s examples of vendor support for OOXML, which is why we find Novell’s spin rather amusing.
Recently, a privately held log management vendor, LogLogic, announced that they were interested in having their proprietary log transportation and storage protocol become an industry standard. This is clearly a self-serving power grab with very little substance behind it. LogLogic is doing nothing more than taking a proprietary protocol they have created and attempting to co-opt industry attention by claiming they are making it an open standard.
Novell welcomes open standards and has a long history of working with other vendors to create and support open standards.
This is amusing because Novell harmed ODF when it did what it did for OOXML. 3 years later Novell can only hope that people have forgotten this embarrassing debacle. Novell’s vice president Miguel de Icaza, for example, said that OOXML was “superb”. That was before he became a Microsoft MVP. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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While the new kernel versions mainly correct minor bugs, X.org’s next generation X Server offers a range of improvements. Various code segments released by AMD developers allow the X.org open source drivers for Radeon GPUs to utilise the 2D and 3D acceleration features available with Radeon series 5000 graphics cards.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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O³Spaces has certified its Workplace Enterprise and Express document management solutions for the Univention Corprate Server (UCS) enterprise Linux operating system.
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Embarcadero, which acquired CodeGear in 2008, is set to extend Delphi beyond its roots as a language for building 32-bit Windows applications. Developers will be able to leverage 64-bit systems and run applications on Mac OS X and, later on, Linux and other platforms.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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GNOME Desktop
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High on the list of things I really enjoy doing is thanking people who contribute to free software. Also high on the list is using software that works well.
So I just wanted to combine the two and say a public thanks to GP Halkes, for writing and maintaing dwdiff.
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Reviews
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Most people that come into contact with Linux Mint tend to agree that it’s an excellent distributuion for beginners. In my opinion this is accomplished by the visual appeal and mint-specific tools you won’t find anywhere else.
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The Chakra Project looks very promising, albeit very unpolished at the moment. If they can manage to fix up the rest of the distribution, getting it just as polished feeling as the installer, this will definitely be one to look out for. I look forward to trying it out again once it hits a stable release.
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Red Hat Family
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Bryan Che, manager of cloud computing products at Red Hat, said that the DMTF was chosen among many different possible standards bodies because Red Hat has a history with the organization. “We do not want Deltacloud to be under the control of any one vendor, including Red Hat,” Che explained, which is why the project was moved to Apache and the API specs are being handed to DMTF. (Red Hat, by the way, is a member of the DMTF Cloud Management Work Group.)
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Debian Family
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All my started projects about contributing to Debian gets stopped, until I see Debian as Debian. It’s a pity, but I have to migrate too many systems and that is a lot of work for the next days, only at home… and then I need a solution at work too. This is not for vicious, I’m going to loose skills learned about my OS of choice to jump to others where I will be a newbie. And Debian still has very very nice things.
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She conducted a survey (about 40 respondents) to ask what Debian’s problems are, and grouped them into categories like “motivation” and “communication” (tied for the #1 spot), “visibility” (#3, meaning public awareness and perception of Debian) and so on. She went on to make some suggestions about how to address these problems.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Keep in mind that the multi-touch feature is still very early in development. Even so, it already looks impressive as both Evince and Inkscape can’t handle multi-touch by default yet it works great as you can see in the videos above.
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Allison Randal has been appointed Technical Architect of Ubuntu at Canonical by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. Randal is known for her work as an architect of the Parrot virtual machine and chairman of the Parrot Foundation and is a board member of the Perl and Python Foundations.
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Ubuntu is already the most popular Linux distribution and probably the first ever Linux distro to overshoot popularity of Linux itself. Now, what Ubuntu needs is a lot of promotional activism from the community. Here is a few Ubuntu adverts from YouTube that I hope will inspire designers among you to get up and start working.
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Flavours and Variants
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This version especially seems to be stable, fast, and capable. I have taken to running it from a bootable USB drive and the performance has been very nice. Being able to drop these onto untrusted systems and use them as a browser, VPN client, and productivity tool has been handy. Using HoneyPoint Personal Edition, the nmap plugins and some other Puppy installs of security tools gives me a great platform for working incidents, gaining visibility and catching rogue scans, probes and malware that are in circulation when I pull in to help a client. Over and over again, the distro has proven itself to be a very powerful tool for me.
I suggest you take a look at the distro, LiveCD or USB and see how it can help you. I think you’ll find it fun, easy to use, and quite addicting. The pictures of the puppies dont hurt either.
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Phones
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Android
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Ryan launched the theme 4 days ago and so far it’s been well received scoring a 4.28/5 average with more than 5000 downloads.
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Although Google’s Android mobile operating system is principally designed for phones, it is also increasingly showing up on low-cost tablets and other kinds of mobile devices. The platform is rapidly emerging as a major contender in the e-book reader market, where it is attracting a growing number of hardware vendors.
Barnes and Noble’s popular Nook is arguably the most prominent Android-based e-book reader, but there are also a number of intriguing offerings from other vendors. Some are differentiating their readers by eschewing battery-friendly e-ink in favor of color LCD screens. These products take a more tablet-like approach and give users the advantage of a multifunction Internet-enabled device at nearly the same price point as regular e-book readers.
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The WordPress developers have announced the release of version 1.3.4 of their WordPress for Android app. Using the mobile application, users can easily post to and edit their WordPress blogs from an Android mobile device.
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The problem, according to a small but vocal group of developers and enthusiasts online, is that the Streak uses code licensed under the GNU General Public License, which allows third parties to both use and modify the code, provided that the company or person publishes the object code, either as part of a shipping device, on a physical medium, or publicly available via a server.
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Sub-notebooks
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Krim had already used Ubuntu servers for Netvibes and had been using Linux for 18 years so the OS choice for Jolicloud was a no brainer. Despite having scant experience with desktop Linux for a while, Krim’s team went full steam ahead with his next project. From initial conception to release, it took them just over a year to get Jolicloud rolled out.
“We built Jolicloud on top of Ubuntu because I met Mark Shuttleworth at a Google event and I used Ubuntu servers for Netvibes. This Debian based Linux had a good reputation and good drivers. We could have picked Fedora. To be honest we didn’t spend too much time thinking about it.”
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Mixamo has announced new support for Blender users looking to create high-quality character animations for their 3D projects.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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“Software should always be free because all users of software deserve freedom,” says Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project, and a longtime activist.
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In Bangalore, Linux was used exclusively and extensively by academia. Early adopters of Linux, the scientific community in the Indian Institute of Science and research organisations deeply benefitted from free, collaborative and open nature of the GNU movement. So, the earliest informal Linux Users Groups were perhaps born in these academic circles.
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Project Releases
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The release candidate process is progressing as planned. This second candidate has very few changes over the first, which means that unless any blockers are discovered with this release, we’re targeting the final release of Rails 3.0 for this week(!!!).
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Licensing
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Glyn argues that this “is worse than the GNU GPL with copyright assignment”, where a single copyright holder is able to provide a closed-source version. Is it really worse to have a situation in which everyone has an equal opportunity to go closed-source than one in which the control and power lies with a single vendor?
Either way, Glyn also notes that the ability of the copyright holder to act as a monopolist is “hardly what Richard Stallman had in mind when he drew up the GPL”. This is probably true, but it should be noted that Stallman has defended selling license exceptions (also known as dual licensing), which is the practice that enables vendor-controlled open core strategies (which Stallman opposes).
In fact, it is worth considering that the issues that seem to cause the most controversy around open source-related business strategies – vendor-controlled open source projects, open core licensing, copyright assignment, and dual licensing – are all perpetuated by copyleft and the GNU GPL.
It doesn’t have to be the case that the GNU GPL leads to a dominant open source vendor, of course. Glyn explains how assigning copyright to a non-commercial entity, such as the Free Software Foundation, avoid this problem. Another approach (although one that has problems of its own), is to ensure that individual contributors own the copyright to their own contributions.
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After a lengthy gestation period, the third generation of the Universal Serial Bus is making its way to the market. But is it already obsolete?
Consumer electronics and computer vendors used the Consumer Electronics Show this past January to launch USB 3.0, an update to the popular standard external data transfer interface. The new speed of USB 3.0 generated a lot of interest.344
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For years, we’ve pointed out how various state attorneys general seem to focus much more on grandstanding against certain companies, rather than actually helping in certain situations. What was really amazing was the incredibly clear pattern every time it happened. It would involve an attorney general who was running for higher office, going to the press and threatening some company, even if there was no legal basis whatsoever for the threat. It’s as if every AG running for higher office has taken a page out of the playbook of Eliot Spitzer who used this strategy for years to get him headlines that took him right into the NY governor’s mansion (which, of course, he then left due to a different sort of headline a few years later…).
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Health/Nutrition
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Recent estimates blame agriculture for as much as 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and nitrogen fertilizers account for more miasma than all those methane-belching cows and sheep combined. But even as the power of the American food movement waxes, organic farms still make up less than 1 percent of this country’s cropland. The unignorable presence of that other 99 percent has forced many environmentalists to a singularly pragmatic conclusion: If there is going to be a significant attempt to slash the use of water, fossil fuels, fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides — the resource-sucking carbon and chemical footprint that has come to define the modern agro-industrial complex — the bulk of that effort will have to emerge from the operations of large-scale, conventional farms. The assault on business as usual will come from the everyday operations of Frank Muller’s farm.
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Security/Aggression
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A former Duntroon cadet, he rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and worked for US defence giant Raytheon.
He continued his defence career as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessment.
He caused a huge storm in 2003 when he resigned and spoke out against the Howard government on the Iraq war, saying there was no intelligence to indicate Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Dr Peter Bowden from Whistleblowers Australia says Andrew Wilkie is a hero.
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A 2008 cyber attack launched from an infected flash drive in the Middle East penetrated secret US military computers, a Pentagon official says.
The attack by a foreign spy service was the “most significant breach” ever of US military networks, Deputy Defence Secretary William Lynn said.
Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, Mr Lynn described it as a “digital beachhead” to steal military secrets.
[...]
Mr Lynn, a former defence lobbyist and military budget official under former President Bill Clinton, warned the Pentagon had to speed up the process by which it develops and acquires cyber defence kit.
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About four months ago, Ed Felten blogged about a research paper in which Hari Prasad, Rop Gonggrijp, and I detailed serious security flaws in India’s electronic voting machines. Indian election authorities have repeatedly claimed that the machines are “tamperproof,” but we demonstrated important vulnerabilities by studying a machine provided by an anonymous source.
The story took a disturbing turn a little over 24 hours ago, when my coauthor Hari Prasad was arrested by Indian authorities demanding to know the identity of that source.
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But they were forced to drop their haul when staff spotted the pair on CCTV and raised the alarm.
The security video then captured the duo running through the hotel and jumping 15ft from a roof into the car park to escape.
At that moment police arrived and arrested one of the offenders on suspicion of attempted burglary at the Hotel Rembrandt in Weymouth, Dorset.
But hotel staff were shocked when they received a call from the police three days later to say they were dropping the case because of insufficient forensic evidence.
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…a CD containing the scans of 112 patient records taken from the Intensive Care Unit of New Cross Hospital’s Heart and Lung Unit in Wolverhampton.
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Prior to this I discussed FPNs on Radio 4, when I made it clear that FPNs are a way of disposing of a case without any admission of fault on the part of the person who takes them and no criminal record of any kind. Nevertheless, anecdotally I gather that they have wrongly been treated as such in our criminal courts when it comes to good character directions in trials and so forth.
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Finance
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A review of the settlements shows an array of fraudulent and illegal actions.
* Predatory, deceptive and abusive lending related to mortgages
* Securities fraud, including creating investment vehicles designed to fail
* Accounting fraud
* Brokerage fraud
* Bribery of government officials
* Undisclosed conflict of interest in financial analysis and advice
* Lying to shareholders and investors
* Robbing consumers with abusive overdraft fees
* Robbing homeowners by overcharging them by hundreds or thousands of dollars, when they were already in bankruptcy and foreclosure
A review of cases reveals a pattern: no admission of wrongdoing, earnest promises to do a better job and a fine representing a fraction of the infraction. Because the fine is paid by shareholders, no one is held accountable and the whole incident is swept under the rug.
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High government salaries means soaring pension costs that taxpayers cannot afford.
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From that, we know that the New York Yankees’ valuation sits at a cool $1.6 billion, with the average club worth just under $500 million.
[...]
Maury Brown of the excellent Biz of Baseball blog has done a tremendous job of breaking down all the nitty gritty in the Deadspin exclusive. Here are some of the juicier tidbits:
• Of the five teams who had their info leaked, only the Mariners didn’t make a profit in a given year, losing $4.5 million in 2008.
• Thanks to the league’s generous revenue-sharing program, the Pirates received some $69 million from MLB over the 2008 and 2009 seasons.
• As it relates to revenues received from concessions – which are typically run by outside entities, which then cut the team in on some percentage of the profits – the Marlins made $1.64 per fan in attendance last season.
• The Pirates franchise, for all of its on-field ineptitude, invested some $44 million in player development over the ‘07 and ‘08 seasons.
Don’t think MLB will sit idly back as this story develops.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Once upon a time, the writers and analysts who covered Kaspersky Lab as it slogged towards victory against the likes of McAfee and Symantec included Dennis Fisher at eWeek, Paul Roberts at The451 Group, and Ryan Naraine of ZDNet. These men were among the top editors and analysts covering the anti-virus space of the day (2004–present).
Now, each and every one of these highly credentialed gentlemen produce superb content for Kaspersky Lab — as employees. They are contributing to the Company’s well-regarded global IT Security news site, Threatpost. With talent like Fisher, Roberts and Naraine working the levers, Threatpost is, well, a legitimate threat to the ZDNet’s, CNet’s, and SC Magazine’s of the world…
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We are writing today to ask that the White House Correspondents Association reconsider its decision to allow Fox News Channel a front-row seat in the White House briefing room in light of reports that Fox News’ parent company, News Corp., has donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association — a massive ethical lapse that demonstrates Fox News’ inability to function as an objective media institution.
Media outlets are supposed to cover elections and issues to inform voters, not help to elect candidates who espouse certain positions. With so much News Corp. money invested in the election of Republican gubernatorial candidates, can Fox News be expected to disinterestedly cover those races or Republican politics in general?
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Some felt the choice of O’Reilly was improper given his reputation for inflammatory rhetoric and bullying of people who disagree with him. One person who took exception to the award was Barry Nolan, host of another cable show produced by Comcast called “Backstage with Barry Nolan.” One month before the awards ceremony, Nolan emailed the Academy’s governing board and asked them to reconsider giving the award to O’Reilly. Nolan also made public his opposition to the award.
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David Barton, a Texas-based Religious Right activist and self-styled historian, recently cited the Muhlenberg tale as evidence that Christian pastors were involved in “every aspect” of the founding.
Unfortunately for Barton and his allies, the story is almost certainly untrue. No contemporary accounts of it exist. The tale first appeared in 1849 – long after Muhlenberg’s death – during a time when an influx of immigrants from Germany was eager to prove its loyalty by holding up a hero with genuine revolutionary credibility.
Most likely, the tale is a “pious legend” designed to inflate the importance of a historical figure by underscoring his essential goodness. It’s akin to stories of the young George Washington refusing to tell a lie about that cherry tree.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Good news for jobseekers who like to brag about their drinking exploits on Facebook: A new law in Germany will stop bosses from checking out potential hires on social networking sites. They will, however, still be allowed to google applicants.
Lying about qualifications. Alcohol and drug use. Racist comments. These are just some of the reasons why potential bosses reject job applicants after looking at their Facebook profiles.
According to a 2009 survey commissioned by the website CareerBuilder, some 45 percent of employers use social networking sites to research job candidates. And some 35 percent of those employers had rejected candidates based on what they found there, such as inappropriate photos, insulting comments about previous employers or boasts about their drug use.
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The Russians call it Kompromat – the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure. When I was attacked in this way by the government I worked for, Uzbek dissidents smiled at me, shook their heads and said “Kompromat”. They were used to it from the Soviet and Uzbek governments. They found it rather amusing to find that Western governments did it too.
Well, Julian Assange has been getting the bog standard Kompromat. I had imagined he would get something rather more spectacular, like being framed for murder and found hanging with an orange in his mouth. He deserves a better class of kompromat. If I am a whistleblower, then Julian is a veritable mighty pipe organ. Yet we just have the normal sex stuff, and very weak.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Talk about a fashion don’t! Madonna is being sued over the rights to use the “Material Girl” name for the trendy juniors clothing line that she designed with daughter Lourdes. Apparel manufacturer LA Triumph slapped the superstar with a lawsuit Thursday, claiming that it had been marketing clothes under the “Material Girl” brand since 1997.
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Copyrights
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This is a paper on copyright law as it relates to the controversy of publishing Raymond Carver’s stories in their unedited form.
The controversy arose when Raymond Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, expressed her desire to publish these stories because Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, had dramatically changed their character and style. Indeed, she claimed that these unedited stories represented the “real” Caver, whom she wished to reveal to the world. However, Carver’s estate no longer owns the copyrights to these stories.
The issue is particularly interesting because the “original” versions of the stories are considerably different from the published versions as edited by Lish. Thus, there is some ambiguity as to whether they are covered by the copyright of the published stories; in essence, they are the building blocks of the published versions, and thus it is unclear whether they would be considered derivative works.
These questions aside, this papers explores the role of an editor and various ways that editors receive recognition for their efforts. It then explores joint authorship under American law, and how the Carver situation would be different in a jurisdiction where moral rights are recognized. Finally, “fair use” is applied to to the particular facts to permit the revelation of Carver’s unedited oeuvre.
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Jordan, whose real name is Ashley Gasper, claimed that the defendants wrongfully misappropriated his name and likeness by selling counterfeit DVDs featuring his “dramatic performances” and by using his name and likeness on the covers. The jury agreed with Jordan and awarded him approximately $2.85 million, including $2.5 million in punitive damages.
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As annoying as continuous Blu-ray player updates are, usually having the latest one is the best way to play more movies. Unfortunately the opposite was the case for Samsung (again) with the v2.09 update posted recently for its 2009 BD-Px600 line of players. Forum posters on CNET and AVSForum report the upgrade blocked them from playing Universal and Warner Bros. movies, which conveniently lock up after displaying the title image.
Android 2.2 Official Video
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Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Marketing at 2:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The latest batch of critical news about what Gates is doing (using his foundation) to change the structure and operation of schools in the United States (and increasingly beyond that)
TECHRIGHTS has published a few dozens of posts about ways in which the Gates Foundation became the underground department of education (it gradually becomes an international issue as even Vietnam and Greece get affected). It really is an attack on the independence of school systems because the personal agenda of one family is being served rather than the agenda of many parents who send their children to school. “YES The Gates foundation IS trying to tear down public education and replace it with CHARTERS,” says one headline from Democratic Underground this month. SeattlEducation2010, a site which we first mentioned last week, has a response to “an open letter to Seattle public school parents” by its schools’ coalition. It says:
The Alliance for Education is backed by Bill Gates and the Broad Foundation. Both organizations are big backers of charter schools and high stakes testing among other things
[...]
That seems innocuous enough. Who doesn’t want the best quality education for their children? Unfortunately, after several groups signed on to this statement, it was then used by the Alliance for the purpose of pushing the Race to the Top agenda fueled by Gates and Broad money.
“The Problem With Billionaire Philanthropists” is another new article which names Gates as a big problem because of education (note that Education Week is funded by Gates, but the following author does not seem to know it and we’ll cover this later):
In 2006, for example, Education Week named Bill Gates the single most influential person in education of the past decade – more so than President George W. Bush, who had passed the No Child Left Behind law. (Gates had just spent over $2 billion to promote the creation of small high schools, with much of this money wasted by his own account). Eli Broad, another billionaire — and strong charter school fan — has also spent a vast fortune to influence public education, long thought of as one of America’s most democratic arenas.
SeattlEducation2010 goes on and writes about “The Gates’ Foundation and the Department of Education.” It’s a guest article.
I conclude with a discussion about the final category, the Gates Foundation, particularly the waiver for James H. Shelton III, Assistant Secretary for Education and Improvement, and, to a lesser extent, Margot Rogers, the Secretary’s Chief of Staff (Note: Rogers has since left her post and Joanne Weiss, former COO of NSVF and head of the Race to the Top, is now Duncan’s Chief of Staff). I have focused on these two appointees because they hold important positions; their waivers allow for the most extensive contact with their former employer; and their background in philanthropy raises some interesting questions.
While I am not aware of any other analysis of waivers for Executive Agency appointees, various media outlets have picked up on the Gates Foundation’s significant involvement in federal education policy: Michelle McNeil of EdWeek noted multiple Gates employees filling the Department of Education; Sam Dillon of the New York Times reported on the foundation’s role in helping some states write their Race to the Top application, including complaints the foundation was trying to hand-pick eventual winners; Dana Goldstein of The American Prospect wrote about the i3 fund and how much of the federal agenda is “borrowed” from the philanthropic community; Libby Quaid and Donna Blankinship of the Associated Press began one article with, “The real secretary of education, the joke goes, is Bill Gates,” and noted the foundation’s growing influence on education policy; Erik W. Robelen and Michele McNeil noted in EdWeek that some observers suggest the Education Department and philanthropic organizations are “collaborating to an extend that may well be unprecedented”; Clay Holtzman of The Puget Sound Business Journal noted the similarities between the foundation’s agenda and the federal Department of Education’s agenda; and a recent Washington Post headline read, “Gates Foundation playing pivotal role in changes for education system”.
From the same author we found some other posts which go as far as warnings about "neo-eugenics". “A New Civil Rights Movement or A Neo-Eugenic Mass Treatment of Children,” says one of the headlines. It’s a grey area, just like abortion at the Gates Foundation, not just birth control. Either way, sticking to education, the thing about Gates’ staff is that they are trying to control, not to help. If they also help while they control, then that’s just an added value (bonus), but it rarely actually happens. Here is another school which is shaped by Gates:
The new STEM school, financed in part by the Gates’ Foundation, looks to Nova High School as an example of project-based classes.
They are hiring marketing firms to do their legwork:
What I want to focus on briefly is how the Alliance shamelessly used our students to promote their, rather the Gates and Broad, agenda last night. Under the umbrella of the Alliance for Education and paid for by Broad and Gates money is their offspring “Our Schools’ Coalition” developed and produced by Strategies 360, a national marketing firm paid for by Stand for Children. Stand for Children, also backed by Gates’ money, apparently has joined forces with the Alliance or at least they did last night.
Another issue we covered here before is the throwing of millions at more self-serving ‘studies’ (ones that support Gates’ position). Here is a new complaint about it:
This is the business perspective that has been the model for the Broad Foundation and Gates in terms of how they think schools should be run and children taught.
This report was sponsored by the Alliance for Education and has received funds, $9M from Bill Gates and $1M from the Broad Foundation. Some of that money was used to pay for this report as is described on page 2.
This report is a precursor to merit pay, high stakes testing and ultimately charter schools. This has been the method that the Broad Foundation and Bill Gates have used in other school districts around the country to introduce their ideas of “venture philanthropy” in our educational system.
I’ll hit some of the highlights.
“About this study:
This study was undertaken on behalf of the 43,000 school
children who attend the Seattle Public Schools.”
Or on behalf of Bill Gates? I didn’t know that the students and parents of the Seattle School District or any school board members asked for this study.
This is really scaring some teachers. Suddenly they need to look up to some private foundation rather than their government.
A good example of education going more private in Gates’ hands is Hillsborough. For background see:
Gates is advertised in just about any article about those Hillsborough schools [1, 2, 3]. Hillsborough is the model example Gates is trying to present before expanding the same policies he’s pushing for to other school districts. Here is more PR (and putting of the teachers under examination). Over in Memphis, which is another Gates experiment in schools, there is this new article:
Is $1,500 a day enough for a new Memphis City Schools consultant (Aug. 18 article, “New venue / Consultant’s ideas for turning around failing schools earned failing grade from parents at last stop”)?
[...]
Oh, well, Supt. Kriner Cash probably needs help figuring out how to spend the gazillion dollars MCS is getting from the Gates Foundation.
We wrote about this scheme in Memphis under:
There are other schools which are controlled by Gates:
Vince served as teacher leader of The Discovery School, one of five Gates Foundation “small schools” within Mountlake Terrace High School, where he has taught for 22 years. Vince was twice named the state journalism adviser of the year and Edmonds School District Educator of the Year.
Why is the Gates Foundation treating school boards and teachers like pupils? It is demeaning.
But unlike in baseball, which has a wealth of commonly accepted statistics that are better than batting average, teaching doesn’t, at least not until such efforts as the Gates Foundation’s yield results.
As another example of spin:
But to prevent those outcomes, more of us must step up to intervene. Help from foundations such as the Belk Foundation is especially needed. The work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation shows how transformative such help can be when it is targeted on education issues. The Gates Foundation has been instrumental in promoting strategies and school innovations that have become national models for improving educational outcomes for struggling students from economically disadvantaged homes.
No, that is just the story they are telling because they are forcing change, appointing their own people to run things, and/or funding people to move their agenda. There is also full-time paid staff allocated/assigned to it. As a new example from the news:
Mark Milliron, Deputy Director of Postsecondary Success at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, stresses that the United States is simply not producing enough trained workers.
One has to be abundantly careful here because of the self-fulfilling prophecy which gets spread when they refuse to hire locals and thus discourage them. It looks like the same tactics that Gates and Abramoff used to get more visas to enrich themselves, by cursing the intelligence of people in the US educational system. Vilifying the existing system (as Gates is doing) in order to change it is the crudest tactic. Money talks and rich people get to tell the government what’s right for education. Some days ago in CNET we found this reminder:
For instance: In 2005, midway through the Bush administration, Microsoft’s Bill Gates told a Washington audience that curbs on immigration and guest workers would provide a boost to research institutions in China and India. A year earlier, then-Intel CEO Craig Barrett warned that the U.S. must dramatically improve its education system.
That’s just an excuse and a pretext for taking over that system, not just import cheaper labour that receives no benefits. Gates has his share of education lobbyists, too:
Additionally, several Gates and Broad Foundation-funded lobby groups have been disseminating inaccurate information relating to the current contract negotiations and the issues involved.
More here:
In truth, the Alliance has an “education reform” agenda that is largely funded by Los Angeles AIG billionaire Eli Broad’s foundation and Bill and Melinda Gates’ foundation. LEV is also primarily funded by the Gates
[...]
As for the poll that the “Coalition”/Alliance/LEV/Gates/Broad paid for that allegedly claims parents and community want “merit pay,” by all accounts it started off as a highly questionable and biased “teacher quality” survey, which was withdrawn when genuine school community members protested, and reemerged as a very slanted push-poll taken of a curious cross section of community members (including some teachers via their private cell phone numbers).
This is the first time that we see proper lobbyists being employed to push such an agenda. The rest is mostly additional evidence for what we already knew. █
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08.25.10
Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 7:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: One last response to the provocation from Microsoft (charm offensive), which IDG’s fauxpen source blog is still spinning (third time now)
IT WAS ONLY a matter of time until IDG trolled yet again for Microsoft. For those who missed the “OOXML Paoli” series, here are prior posts from this week:
So now it’s the turn of Julie Bort’s colleague to use the same old tricks. He is a Microsoft partner (through his employer) yet he writes a lot about “open source” and from IDG he spins the latest debacle as “Open Source” being intolerant of Microsoft (like calling people who are on the receiving end of an abusive relationship “zealots” or “intolerant”). One has got to love this part:
Anyway, the real shame is that Microsoft is much more embracing of open source and they will probably never get credit for it.
Microsoft is trying so hard to make it proprietary-reliant, more reliant on Windows for example. What credit does it deserve for that? Shockingly I agree with Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, for a change. He says that Microsoft needs to take a crown jewel like Windows into the GPL’s domain in order to prove “love” for Free/Open Source software (the “freedom” part matters). It will never happen of course, not in the foreseeable future. Here is another important point:
Put an end to the whole “open source infringes on our patents” rhetoric/FUD/nonsense. If not put an end to it, come clean as to what these infringements are so that the it can work with the open source community to rectify outstanding issues. As CEO, this job should fall to Ballmer, and the open source community should expect a statement shortly (although I wouldn’t hold my breath).
[...]
Without taking measurable actions to prove that it supports open source, Microsoft’s love of it as it stands could be little more than a return to the old ways of embrace, extend and extinguish.
Adrian’s colleague Dana Blankenhorn has been writing some reasonable posts recently and this too is one of them:
Of course just because Microsoft loves open source that doesn’t mean it does what the open source movement wants it to do as opposed to what Microsoft wants to do. Microsoft loves open source because it has found a way to twist it in the direction of its own self-interest.
Yes, that’s exactly it. Microsoft is trying to change and redefine Open Source to the point where it can relate to this bogus, twisted, and subverted definition, wherein even Windows-only software for Fog Computing can be labeled “Open” and proprietary Office formats can be called “Open” too. That’s Paoli’s expertise. Here is a funny new cartoon about what Microsoft is trying to achieve. █
“More Open Than Open [...] I am constantly amazed at the flexibility of this single word.”
–Microsoft’s Jason Matusow, integral part of the ‘Open’ XML corruptions (further background in [1, 2, 3])
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Posted in Apple, EFF, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents at 6:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at HTC’s counterclaim, filed after Apple sued Linux via HTC/Android; Apple refuses to have its phones tested for environmental impact; EFF goes hard on Apple for what it calls “traitorware” (iOS)
Apple’s case against HTC is also Apple’s case against Linux. Groklaw has begun covering this case, which helps show that Groklaw does not always take Apple's side.
HTC denies infringing the patents, of course, but they also say as a first affirmative defense that four of the patents are invalid for “failure to comply with one or more of the conditions for patentability set forth in Title 35 of the United States Code, including, but not limited to, utility, novelty, non-obviousness, enablement, written description and definiteness in accordance with 35 U.S.C. §§ 101, 102, 103, 112, and/or 116, or are invalid pursuant to the judicial doctrine barring double-patenting”. HTC also claims prior art, marking, laches and marking defenses, and it says it has license agreements with third party suppliers to do what they do the things Apple is suing them over. It asks the court to declare the patents invalid. Here’s a recent case highlighted on EFF’s site where some of those types of defenses worked perfectly.
Both Apple and Microsoft are already known for their severely negative impact on the environment [1, 2]. The manufacturing material and processes just don’t bode too well. Watch what Apple is doing now, according to Adam Vaughan.
Apple blocks iPhones from green ranking scheme
Apple has refused to allow its iPhones to be included in the UK’s first-ever green ranking scheme for mobile phones.
The scheme gives phones a rating of zero to five based on their environmental footprint and major manufacturers including Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung have signed up. The network O2, which is launching the rating system today, said 93% of the devices its customers use will be covered.
Launched in partnership with sustainability advisers Forum for the Future, the green ranking scheme scores handsets on the ecological impact of their raw materials, the manufacturing process, packaging, how long they are likely to last, energy efficiency and how easy they are to reuse or recycle.
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on why the company had decided not to join the voluntary labelling scheme, but highlighted its environmental reporting online.
What is Apple so afraid of?
Last but not least, Apple patents spyware:
The EFF weighed in on Apple’s recent security software patent. The EFF’s post, Steve Jobs Is Watching You: Apple Seeking to Patent Spyware, states, “This patent is downright creepy and invasive – certainly far more than would be needed to respond to the possible loss of a phone. Spyware, and its new cousin traitorware, will hurt customers and companies alike – Apple should shelve this idea before it backfires on both it and its customers.”
We actually covered this earlier in the week. The EFF generated a lot of negative press for Apple. They deserve it. Apple is a patent aggressor (see above). █
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Patents at 6:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: NZICT represents not New Zealand but large vendors from outside New Zealand (and their local allies who help those foreigners occupy New Zealand)
NZICT is beginning to look more and more like the ‘ACT’ of New Zealand. For those who don’t know, ACT is a pressure group of Microsoft (NZICT represents more than just Microsoft though).
ACT essentially masquerades as a representative of 3,000 or so small businesses in Europe. ACT uses this costume to pretend that small businesses are in favour of Microsoft’s policies and agenda, e.g. OOXML, software patents, RAND, etc.
The fact that NZICT does not actually represent NZ (as in New Zealand) was pointed out in Techrights before, e.g. in:
The following message from today helps show just what NZICT is really made of:
From: Peter Harrison <cheetah100@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 11:11 PM
Subject: Re: [NZOSS-Openchat] New NZICT head .. New Direction?
To: ian@karearea.gen.nz, NZOSS Open Discussion List <openchat@lists.nzoss.org.nz>
On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Ian Beardslee <ian@karearea.gen.nz> wrote:
An interesting comment, probably brought about by the noises we have made.. “Medary says his election will giving the organization a more New Zealand face and moderate the dismissive reaction of some local sources who consider NZICT is primarily a lobby for big multinationals.”
This is nothing but a PR exercise. Without substantial changes to the constitution of NZICT it remains an organisation in the pockets of the Multinationals, regardless of the puppet fronting it. So long as the general membership are confined to a couple of seats on the board the organisation will remain a mere policy launderer of the large vendors.
Let me be clear though; I have no problem with these vendors expressing their point of view. I support free speech. However such speech is understood in context of their own self interest, not the interests of NZ. The NZICT tries to pretend it is the voice of NZ computer companies when in fact it’s membership does not even include companies like Orion Health – the biggest software export earner in NZ. It’s constitution was expressly drafted to exclude the majority of small NZ software houses from having any influence.
But perhaps I was too quick to dismiss the new chair. So I look up Simpl and find out the following:
“Simpl is a Microsoft Gold Certified Global Partner in Custom Development, Data Management Solutions, Information Worker, Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Networking Infrastructure.We work closely with Microsoft in New Zealand and also enjoy direct relationships with Microsoft in Redmond, Microsoft UK, Canada, AsiaPac and New Zealand. Simpl is one of Microsoft’s leading Global Health Partners.”
Wow – colour me shocked. Who would have thought that the new chief would have “direct relationships with Microsoft”.
Victoria Barret from Forbes Magazine has suggested breaking up Microsoft. Microsoft is not just Microsoft but an entire 'ecosystem' of shared interests and commonwealth. Maybe it’s time to give it an audit/probe. No other company in the software industry causes so much damage to its peers, even internationally. █
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