A federal appeals court on Tuesday affirmed a $290 million patent infringement judgment against Microsoft Corp. and reinstated an injunction that bars the company from selling current versions of its flagship Word software.
The i4i district court decision created some turmoil this past summer when the Eastern District of Texas court ordered Microsoft to stop selling versions of its flagship MS Word product that infringe i4i’s patent covering xml editing technology. The injunction was stayed pending appeal, but now the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has affirmed the lower court’s findings of validity and willful infringement and its award of enhanced damages and permanent injunctive relief. The only modification made by the court was to push-back the effective date of the injunction from sixty-days to five months (from the original order). Thus, “[t]he injunction’s effective date is now January 11, 2010.”
Microsoft has lost an appeal in a patent case that will force it to alter Microsoft Word to avoid an injunction on sales of the product.
Microsoft lost a patent case involving a company called I4i in May, after a jury ruled that Microsoft infringed one of i4i’s patents with a custom XML feature found in Word. In August an injunction was placed on sales of Word pending the appeal, which did not go in Microsoft’s favor Tuesday.
Here is the unofficial Microsoft response and some more official word. [pun] █
_____ * Internally, it was revealed that Microsoft advises staff not to ever look at patents, for fear that patent violations would become willful.
Summary: Microsoft’s Novell’s Miguel de Icaza does not properly explain that GNU/Linux users need to download proprietary software exclusively from Novell in order to make Silverlight content available
THE latest development around Moonlight was rather revealing because it is another case where Novell and Microsoft are spinning and spinning. Moonlight is still a “forbidden item” in Fedora and it is easy to see why. The multimedia codecs, which are essentially the main purpose of Silverlight (same for Flash, which was popularised by Web video), suffer from a restrictive agreements that Free software users simply cannot accept. As the FSF-faithful Sam Varghese and Microsoft-faithful Tim Anderson have independently pointed out (Anderson said so very explicitly, but only about a day after Varghese did), people must go through Microsoft’s Novell to obtain the “missing pieces”, namely everything that’s required to actually access content. Nowadays, RIA is mostly about video.
The facts did not prevent Miguel de Icaza from making remarks that deceive. A reader sent us a pointer to the following:
The development of Moonlight is the result of a 2006 patent and licensing agreement between Microsoft and Novell that included Microsoft’s promise not to sue users of Novell’s SuSe Linux for technologies patented by Redmond. This promise was officially called a “covenant not to sue” and seen as the best way to harmonize patent licensing issues with the GPL. One result was that users were free to use Silverlight technology with Moonlight, but only if they got Moonlight directly from Novell. “This is a model similar to how Flash is distributed: there is a well-known location where you get your plugin,” explained de Icaza on his blog, adding: “The open source world does not work that way though.”
Miguel de Icaza must know that the “open source” [sic] world does not prohibit redistrubution, so how come he implicitly claims that Moonlight does not suffer from a crucial restriction? That would be like calling Skype “open source” because they intend to liberate just the GUI part of the program.
Summary: Nicolas Sarkozy is not the only pusher against Google who is at the same time mating with Microsoft executives; Microsoft is not unique when it comes to workforce/tax abuse, either
A FEW days ago we wrote about the struggle against Google's book-scanning services, which are exactly the same as Microsoft’s. Based on prior cases that are very well documented and confirmed, we thought that Microsoft may have had something to do with aggravating Google in this case. Microsoft previously helped publishers sue Google over Books and a variety of other services like YouTube.
One of our respected readers, who prefers to remain anonymous, has sent us some interesting details connecting Microsoft to the party which is giving Google a hard time.
“What a coincidence… back in 2003, Microsoft’s own library effort was awarded recognition by the ‘Special Library Association’s (SLA) Business & Finance Division,’ whatever that is.” –AnonymousRegarding the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Association of Research Libraries, worth watching is this: “Libraries Online!: Microsoft Partnering with American Library Association (ALA)”
Also: “Even James Grimmelmann of New York Law School’s Institute for Information Law and Policy [...] insist that Microsoft’s funding of the institute’s research on the book settlement doesn’t influence its conclusions.”
“What a coincidence,” says our reader, “back in 2003, Microsoft’s own library effort was awarded recognition by the ‘Special Library Association’s (SLA) Business & Finance Division,’ whatever that is. Is this anything to do with the current people objecting to the DOJ?”
Another person worth watching is Lee Dirks. “Lee also teaches as adjunct faculty at the iSchool at the University of Washington, and serves on the advisory boards for the University of Washington Libraries,” says his page.
Our reader found that suspicious. In relation to the above he asked, “what’s the name of that special Microsoft effort [in education]?” That would be EDGI.
Another reader responds to yesterday's post about how Microsoft lobbies to cheapen the workforce. “They’re all against jobs,” says this one politician and our reader adds: “You’re probably already aware of this issue, but here is a link which points out the disparity between the interests of American big business and the interests of the American people. After all, it’s already well known that Microsoft lobbies for more visas for cheap labour from overseas rather than strongly push for better educated American workers. Not surprisingly, the bigger picture follows a similar pattern.”
Summary: Europe is losing its intellectual freedom and sovereignty due to treaties for monopolies, surveillance, and artificial limits on programming
THE GREAT REPRESSION that occurs these days (partly owing to intellectual monopolies) has spurred strong — but by all means tongue-in-cheek — remarks from the FFII’s president, who says that “Swedish Patent Trolls were meeting in Stockholm, slides online, we need ACTA to send Microsoft and Linus to jail”
Their site says:
During the last couple of years intellectual property rights has grown in significance. Society has shifted. Intellectual property rights have come into focus in a way that we haven’t seen before.
That’s what they would hope, wouldn’t they? They created a meta-industry that benefits nobody except themselves. In the process, it empowers monopolies and slows down scientific progress.
The FFII has already warned about the Swedish presidency's role in legalising or at least legitimising software patents in Europe. To make matters worse, the Microsoft-EU deal on interoperability [1, 2, 3, 4] is a big disaster because it legitimises Microsoft’s software patents in Europe without any parliamentary veto power (or obedience to the constitution/s). Nellie Kroes’ agency should be brought back to the table and mend the agreement. There is great fury at the FFII at the moment and Scott Fulton admits that “Microsoft’s interoperability pledge not free enough for Free Software” when he writes:
The agreement between the European Commission and Microsoft announced last Wednesday did not mention “Free Software” by name. There is no corporation or partnership by that name, at least not officially, though up until the resolution of the dispute last week, there had been occasional hints from outgoing Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes that any agreement with Microsoft must take “free” into account, almost as though it were “Free Software, Ltd.”
It’s a very serious issue for many European developers, as Free Software had been treated as a worthy-of-all-caps entity in drafts of the European Interoperability Framework from last year. But recent discussions on revising the EIF have included suggestions from many sources, including a controversial one from the Polish government, that strike references to Free Software as a legal entity, especially as one that deserves equal protection as a limited legal body.
Thus the omission of reference to FS or FOSS from last week’s agreement drew a harsh warning from Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), one of the only entities to criticize the agreement for legal, as opposed to technical or operational, reasons.
This needs to be mended as the patent system seems to have been hijacked by a group of bureaucrats who simply do not understand technology and are therefore easy to fool. Multinational corporations lead them to recognising software patents, which are simply not legal under their sovereignty (and for good reasons!).
As TechDirt puts it in this new post about the UK, the patent system is seeking to retard science and technology with even more intellectual monopolies. Lawyers would absolutely love this.
But all such things really do is encourage more patenting, but less actual innovation. That’s because the tax rate on actual innovation — actually bringing these products to market successfully — remains significantly higher. So, if you do any research at all, you have every incentive in the world to try to just gain income from the patents directly (such as by threatening any company that actually does any innovation and demanding licensing fees) rather than doing the work of actually implementing the product yourself. After all, that’s exactly what the government is telling you to do. It’s saying that if you actually produce an innovative product, we’ll tax you at a very high rate.
Why Linux?
Unlike Windows and Mac OS X, which cost money and offer (with some minor exceptions) only one set of features and capabilities for all users, Linux is free and comes in many different flavors. Regardless of what the person on your list likes to do, you’ll almost certainly be able to find the perfect distro for him or her. And if you can’t, you can probably roll your own—try doing that with Windows.
Do Steve Ballmer or Steve Jobs really need any more money? I think not. Rather than giving Microsoft or Apple any of your money during these frugal days, keep your cash and go with Linux instead.
I compared the hardware requirements of a popular Linux Desktop: Ubuntu 9.10 with Windows 7 both of which were released last month.
Hardware Windows 7 Ubuntu 9.10
RAM (MB) 1024 MB 256 MB
Processor (MHz) 1000 MHz 300 MHz
Disk Space (MB) 16 GB 4 GB
In order to emulate these results, you’ll need the Linux kernel 2.6.31, a modified version of X.org 1.7, and supported hardware and drivers. So we’re not quite at the point where you can just pick up a netbook with a multitouch display, install Fedora or another Linux distro, and expect to tap your way to bliss with up to 10 fingers on the screen. But we’re getting closer.
GNU/Linux (especially 2.6.18+)
Never has their been such an uproar in computing as a free kernel and free utilities– all done very well with rapid, mindful if darwinian skill. Linus Torvalds crafted Linux, and has been holding on for dear life ever since. Coupled with the GNU utilities and two main window manager branches (Gnome and KDE), Linux underpinnings now grace objects from tiny wristwatches and clever cell/mobile phones, to IBM mainframes and everything in between. The promise of Linux for civilians is slowly but surely being realized through distros like Ubuntu, Novell/SUSE, Mandrive, Knoppix, and others, but the enterprise server market belongs to Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, and communities formed around each of these. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t worth in the literally hundreds of distros out there.
Everyone has posted their predictions for 2010 but here’s the real scoop on what’s going to happen in 2010 with Linux and Linux-oriented hardware and software products. Get ready to see the biggest increase in Linux adoption in history. You can say you saw it here first. These are in no particular ranking or order.
If your new year’s resolution is to kick the Microsoft habit, here are some Linux versions you might want to look at.
Switching to a new operating system is never easy. Particularly if you were brought up on a staple diet of Microsoft Windows. But it’s not as hard as it used to be to switch to Linux because there is a good selection of quality Linux versions that are easy to install and comfortable to use.
Inkscape 0.47 by Nathan Willis – Totally solid release with lots of new cool tools and functions
The free open source vector graphics editor Inkscape has released an update packing several new features, new tools, effects, and improved SVG compliance. Version 0.47 is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, as well as source code. Ubuntu users can also add the Inkscape Testers package archive to automatically upgrade.
It was a little rough getting there, but KDE 4 has reached a point where I’m using it on all my machines. The pain was worth it (barely) and KDE is by far the most satisfying desktop environment for my personal use.
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If you are in the market for a new bittorrent client, especially once based in QT – I highly recommend giving qBittorrent a look. It’s a solid and reliable client with well implemented features and under active development so chances are good it will continue to improve!
So, there you have it. A rather long description for what is really a rather easy process. As I said at the beginning, if you have Bluetooth and aren’t using it, you are missing out on some convenience and functionality that you would probably like. it’s not hard, especially if you start out like I did, and just get a Bluetooth mouse. You can have it connected in less than a minute, and the confirmation that your system has Bluetooth, and it works, is a good feeling. The experience you gain from doing that can be used for the next step, which might be connecting your mobile phone, and transferring pictures. Then you’re really on your way!
So, we spoke about a list of top pentesting livecd’s here. We might have to update that list soon! Pentoo is a Live CD and Live USB designed for penetration testing and security assessment. Based on Gentoo Linux, Pentoo includes Nessus and Metasploit for penetration testing and security assessment. The user interface is the Enlightenment window manager. Pentoo is optimized for Pentium III architecture. Pentoo supports package modularity in the same fashion that Slax does.
Microsoft has restricted Windows 7 Starter to make sure it’s no competition for the more full-featured versions of Windows 7. For example, “It’s got to have a super-small screen, which means it probably has a super-small keyboard, and it has to have a certain processor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” That ringing endorsement for Windows 7 Starter Edition was made by some guy named Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.
Ubuntu 9.10, however, is an excellent desktop Linux distribution. While I’ll be the first to admit that Ubuntu 9.10 has its rough-edges when you install it yourself on some systems, Dell has always done an excellent job of fitting Ubuntu on its systems.
The recent release of a major new version of Ubuntu means it’s time for new versions of various remastered distros. This time around it’s Linux Mint 8. Linux Mint, as you may already know from previous releases, takes Ubuntu to another level by slicking it up with tools, multimedia codecs and more. Linux Mint 8 makes it easy to get started with Linux even if you haven’t run it before. Pretty much everything you need for your daily computing tasks is included in Linux Mint 8 or available in the Linux Mint software repository.
This write-up was intended as a very high-level review of my experience setting up this unusual system, and is by no means a step-by-step walkthrough. There is plenty of detailed information available online on websites such as plugcomputer.org and computingplugs.com that can prove invaluable to get things working on the SheevaPlug. As remarked before, the system is sold as a developer’s kit and setting it up is definitely not for the faint of heart or for those who avoid the terminal like the plague. In the end, I had a lot of fun getting this to work and the system is working beautifully. I learned a lot in the process and am amazed yet again at how flexible Debian is as an operating system for just about any computer, even embedded systems like this one.
Look up open source. You’ll get 203,000,000 results. How come? While credit goes to many, including Bruce Perens, who chose the term, I see widespread usage largely as the direct result of a “call to the community” by Eric S. Raymond on 8 February 1998. Plus the runaway successes of Linux, Apache and thousands of other open source code bases, and the Internet they all run on. (And the Net is essentially a pile of open and free protocols.)
As demonstrated by the nearly 500 open source downloads on this list, open source software has benefited from an explosion of creativity in the last several years. Indeed, the first decade of the 21st century could be called “the Decade of Open Source.”
Since 2006, Datamation has put together at least 15 different lists of open source software, for file sharing, enterprises, small businesses, windows users, netbooks, security professionals, and others. (And check out the hot new open source list from late 2009). For this list of open source downloads, we revisited all those applications that we’ve featured before, culled out the projects that are no longer active (or no longer open source), made updates, and organized them alphabetically in categories.
Following hot on the heels of US President Barack Obama, Albert II, King of the Belgians, just relaunched his website on Drupal. Check it out at http://www.monarchie.be. The site was built by Connexion.
A Qt application, running inside the Native Client sandbox, inside the Firefox browser Vergrößern
Source: Qt Labs A first shot at creating a port of the Qt toolkit to Google’s Native Client (NaCL) environment allows Qt applications to run as applets within a browser. The port is not yet complete, but it already offers mouse and keyboard support, rudimentary support for the QtGUI and QtCore libraries and several more complex widgets. The biggest problem with the current port though is that the event handling in NaCL is polling based which makes applications spin using 100% of the CPU; the developers descibe this as “not quite our preferred style”.
Talk about a slap in the face. Goldman Sachs (GS), in a bid to keep employees away from the UK’s new onerous bonus tax, is threatening to shift a chunk of its London bankers over to highly troubled spain.
They’re not going to take it sitting down. Goldman Sachs told the British Treasury that it would move up to 20 percent of its London staff to Spain if the government does not relent on plans for a windfall tax on bonuses, The Independent writes.
In the first six months of 2010, about 6,000 employees of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will take a break from their spreadsheets and move across the southern tip of Manhattan to a new 43-story, steel-and-glass skyscraper.
The $2.3 billion steel-and-glass skyscraper was given a Liberty Bond tax break that allowed it to sell tax-free bonds to support the tower’s construction.
The Goldman PAC raised $205,000 in the past month, so these are just initial numbers, but the early filings show that Goldman is hitting up the left, the right and the center, but the company is also being opportunistic. Waters is the third ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee and Lincoln is chairwoman of the Agriculture Committee — which could have a role in regulation of derivatives.
Working people, seniors and oraganizers from Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, Americans for Financial Reform, NY Jobs for justice, NYPIRDG posed as carol singers today outside the New York downtown offices of Goldman Sachs on West Street protesting the banks plan to hand out $150 billion compensation and bonuses today.
With there being just more than three months left until the planned release of X Server 1.8, Keith Packard has just issued the second snapshot for those interested in trying out this developmental X.Org server. The first X Server 1.8 snapshot came two months ago, but this second snapshot is arriving later than expected after having to deal with some bugs.
In separate commits, a few dozen lines of code dealing with Cairo’s surface code was also re-factored. The Wayland Display Server still will not work with all of the latest mainline packages in an “out of the box” configuration, but we’re getting closer to a point where more Linux desktop users can experiment with this unique display server that fully leverages kernel mode-setting and other newer technologies.
Google Map Saver is a portable software program that feels more responsive and less complicated to use. The user can enter a location or point of interest and the program will download the available data from Google Maps. Then just click on the Go! button and the map of the location will be displayed, this process takes only a few seconds on a fast Internet connection. The usual Google Maps controls are available including zooming in and out, moving around with the mouse or switching between map, satellite and terrain view. The ability to save loaded maps as images, so that you can use them offline or take them anywhere with you is really nice.
In just a bit over a month should be the release of KDE 4.4, or more properly known now as KDE Software Compilation 4.4. A month and a half ago was the first beta release, but now KDE Software Compilation 4.4 Beta 2 is ready and has been released to the public this morning.
December 21st, 2009. Today, KDE has released a second preview the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC), 4.4 Beta 2. The second beta version of KDE SC 4.4 provides a preview and base for helping to stabilize the next version of the KDE Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform.
The list of changes this time around is especially long.
Parted Magic Logo Developer Patrick Verner has announced the availability of version 4.7 of Parted Magic, an open source multi-platform partitioning tool. Parted Magic can be used to create, move, delete and resize drive partitions and will run on a machine with as little as 64MB of RAM. Supported file systems include NTFS, FAT, ReiserFS, Reiser4 and HFS+, LVM and RAID are also supported. The latest 4.7 release is based on the 2.6.32.2 Linux kernel with squashfs-lzma compression and includes several bug fixes, performance improvements, updates and new features.
“On my last visit to Zimbabwe,” he says, “I saw an entire lab of 87 Computer Aid computers running Ubuntu [a free, open-source operating system]. Ten years ago, no one really used open-source software of this kind, because despite the philosophical reasons for doing so it was often impractical. But it seems that those problems may be disappearing.”
Businesses can never have enough hard drive capacity, and two new offerings from NAS (network attached storage) expert MicroNet Technology help ensure that even a fast-growing organization has plenty of storage headroom.
MontaVista Software LLC announced a partnership with CriticalBlue to integrate the latter’s embedded multi-core analysis Eclipse plug-in into the MontaVista DevRocket integrated development environment (IDE). The CriticalBlue Prism plug-in enables MontaVista Linux customers to run simulations to analyze and tune the behavior of their code on multi-core processors, says MontaVista.
Worse, if efforts to enable Android apps to run on distros like Ubuntu succeed, then we may see closed-source software being used on the free software stack there, too. Ironically, Android’s success could harm not just open source’s chances in the world of mobile phones, but even on the desktop.
The free software community needs to address these problems by encouraging many more developers to build great Android apps that are truly free. In fact, we have an excellent example of how to do that with the rich ecosystem of Firefox add-ons that are free software. Moreover, this should be an attractive challenge to ambitious coders given the exciting possibilities that mobile offers for new kinds of programs (and not just those based on trendy areas like augmented reality). Maybe the time has come to shift the emphasis away from trying in vain to conquer the legacy desktop, towards excelling on mobile, likely to be the main computing platform for most of humanity.
Some packages are already Ubuntu One aware or at least have optional Ubuntu One integration; Tomboy Notes, for instance, to keep track of all those little ideas floating around in your head. You can also load up the evolution-couchdb package if you would like to keep your contact information in sync using Ubuntu One. Client packages come in a desktop-agnostic python version, and a nice GNOME-integrated version (which comes with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix). There is also a KDE client under development if you’d like to give it a try.
Overall this distro is pretty slick. It generally succeeds on the stated goal of delivering a Linux version that’s easy to install and works well either as a replacement for your original Netbook OS or alongside. With the extensive list of supported Netbooks, it should prove to be a winner. You have no more excuses if you’re looking for a solid Netbook OS without the Windows baggage.
The webpages on the Jolicloud site are also well thought out and well designed. More information about Jolicloud and support can be found on the community page. While you are here you will also notice that you can contact the Jolicloud crowd through Facebook, Flickr or IRC. The online documentation is quite good, although not as good or extensive as the documentation you will find in mainline GNU/Linux distributions such as Fedora, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu.
Announced in February, the Dell Mini 10 appears to be the one of the more popular netbooks on the market, along with the similar, scaled down Mini 10v. The Dell Mini models are also some of the few netbooks from mainstream PC vendors that currently offer Linux (Ubuntu) as a pre-installed option.
During a working visit and as part of the 5th edition of the free software forum which was recently held in Tunisia, Mr. Robert Sutor, Vice President of Open Source and Linux at IBM met with Mr. Hadj Gley Minister of Communication Technologies and Mrs. Lamia Chafei Sghaier, Secretary of State to the Minister of communication technologies in charge of Informatics, the Internet and free software.
During his visit, Mr. Sutor presented projects and programs aiming at fostering partnership between IBM and Tunisia namely in the sector of technological innovations and open source softwares.
Identi.ca is the best-known open-source alternative to Twitter. The microblogging platform is used by lots of people in the open source community, and is a good choice for the business or organization that wants to customize an internal microblogging strategy. Laconica is also worth looking into.
Take a look at the Debian developer map again. You’ll see that Debian is certainly not an Americans-only project, or even an English-speakers-only project. South America has a respectable dotting of developers, and Western- to Central-Europe are packed.
I have strong feelings about Free Software. It emerges from an ethos of personal empowerment, and with open source it has become a dominant force in computing. Yet there are plenty of sharp people — at least women and South Asians — who, somehow, become culturally excluded from participating.
Even though the open source licensing of SaaS app doesn’t guarantee that the app will flourish after the demise of the original developer/vendor, it lives long enough to ensure business continuity and, with some luck, it can even flourish. I still feel it is still a better option to have open source as an endgame for SaaS. Even if the open source version is of no use to the users, the very fact that it will be available as open source helps the users trust SaaS more than what they do now. It gives them a confidence that their business continuity will not be affected with a move to SaaS.
In June SAP moved up its membership level at the Eclipse Foundation from Strategic Consumer to Strategic Developer, meaning that SAP commits to having at least 8 full-time developers on the project. However, what is more important than the membership level, is that SAP contributed a lot more code than in the past. SAP now has 13 active contributors at Eclipse and contributed more than 1.8 million lines of code in 2009 which makes SAP the third largest corporate contributor to Eclipse. In 2009 SAP even initiated or co-innitiated two new projects at Eclipse, i.e. the Eclipse Pave project and the Eclipse EGit project.
After going from proprietary to Open Source product, Qlusters shutting down shop, openQRM now gets a bright new future, openQRM Enterprise GMBH could well become the RedHat of the Open Source Enterrpise Management tools, or Open Source Entrprise Virtualization tools, or Open Source Cloud tools ..
Bad Homburg-based OTRS AG, the company behind popular open source help desk system Open Ticket Request System (OTRS), will float on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange on the 23rd of December, 2009.
Ebenezer recognised his office, it was in the early days. He was there laughing and joking and so were his old friends. The atmosphere was jubilant. No one minded that all the computers had blue-screened with cryptic messages, they were all toasting the new Government and the newly signed ‘Memorandum of no-understanding’ that would guarantee many years of great prosperity.
Last night a colleague of mine was giving me a lesson in accounting (as I am going to start rolling out Point Of Sale systems with him). The lesson was valuable and, in a word, confusing (accountants do have a language of their own). At one point in the lesson I brought up open source, and he nearly turned red saying, “Nothing is free.” That statement got me to thinking about free, open source, and open source projects. He is right – nothing is free. At some point, someone had to make some sort of investment into a project to bring it to life (be that investment money, time, labor, etc). This thought sparked another and led me to, are you ready…
According to new data from the StatCounter.com, Firefox 3.5 is now the most popular browser version in the world at 21.9 percent, surpassing IE 7 21.2 percent.
The catch (because there always is one with stats) is that on a cumulative basis – that is including all versions of IE currently in use and all Firefox versions currently in use – IE is still ahead.
THE MOZILLA FOUNDATION will be celebrating after the web counter outfit Stat Counter revealed that its open source Firefox browser overtook Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the world’s most popular browser for the first time.
Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month at what the various open source CMS projects are up to. But rather than blindly putting out an update for January, we thought we’d look farther ahead into what everyone wants to accomplish throughout next year. Call it our open source 2010 predictions with less guesswork and high hopes.
If you’ve ever wanted to run your own blogging platform, bug tracking system, or wiki but were afraid of getting in over your head, BitNami is definitely worth checking out.
But Stallman — a legend in the programmer community for more than a quarter century — considers it his life’s work to proselytize the free-software gospel, educating the lay people who’d otherwise assume that Microsoft or Apple are exclusively synonymous with computing.
“They think it’s natural that the software developers will have power over them,” he says. “My mission is to point out to them that that isn’t natural. It’s wrong. It’s an injustice. And they shouldn’t stand for it.”
Some in the open-source community (a note about semantics anon) have griped that Stallman is a stubborn utopian, whose Manichean worldview and rhetoric are counterproductive to the larger cause.
Others hail him as a principled and pugnacious advocate for freedom and cooperation, waging war against any and all outside interference with the way we engage with technology — which, of course, is these days tantamount to the way we live.
The OpenNebula team is proud to announce the availability of OpenNebula 1.4 (Hourglass), a new stable release of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Manager.
collectd Logo The collectd developers have released version 4.9 of their open source tool for collecting, transferring and storing system performance statistics. The latest release of collected daemon features a number of new plugins, such as as the ContextSitch, CPU, cURL and Network plugins, and the integration of Python as a new language binding.
At first pass, it’s hard to argue with this reasoning, particularly when many of the Google efforts are free and available as open-source software, which anyone can adopt, modify and use.
Plus, Web latency remains a chronic, thorny problem with many improvement opportunities, and Google has the financial and talent resources needed to lead the way and tackle the bottlenecks.
You’re probably talking about this terrible security disaster already: the largest database leak ever. Arweena, a spokes-elf for Santa Claus, admitted a few hours ago that the database posted at WikiLeaks yesterday is indeed the comprehensive 2009 list of which kids have been naughty, and which were nice. The source of the leak is unclear. It may have come from a renegade reindeer, or it could be the work of a clever programmer in the Ukraine. Either way, it’s a terrible black eye for Santa. Arweena promised that in the future, access to this database would be restricted on a “need to know” basis. And you know who that means!
Bucks rookie Brandon Jennings has been fined $7,500 for posting a message on his Twitter account after Milwaukee’s 108-101 double-overtime win over Portland last weekend.
A privacy group has filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Justice for allegedly failing to disclose information about the use of devices that capture black ‘n’ white images of people stripped naked.
The allegations aren’t the first time a large internet company has been accused of breaching customer privacy when releasing data it claimed was anonymized. In 2006, AOL released 20 million search queries from 658,000 users. Although the company removed names and other personal information, the disclosure proved to be a debacle after privacy advocates showed the data could still be used to identify the people making the searches.
As we count down to end of 2009, the emerging star of this year’s holiday shopping season is shaping up to be the electronic book reader (or e-reader). From Amazon’s Kindle to Barnes and Noble’s forthcoming Nook, e-readers are starting to transform how we buy and read books in the same way mp3s changed how we buy and listen to music.
So, as the UN Conference toiled away through the night hammering out the final agreement, the Klimaforum was disassembling itself, and the attendees were morphing into party mode. But all were aware that after the weekend blowout the workload was going to have to ramp up severely if we were to avoid catastrophic climate change. My take is that this Conference achieved a very valuable thing: now we know what each nation is willing to do when some pressure is applied. Yes, the answer is “not nearly enough to avoid catastrophic climate change,” because that would require replacing coal as a source for electricity by 2030.
More than a year after reckless Wall Street gambling collapsed the economy, no employee of a major American bank or financial institution is behind bars. This fact is all the more astounding when it comes to AIG.
AIG was at the heart of the financial meltdown. Their “innovative” use of risky credit default swaps (a type of insurance policy on bonds) helped transform boring bond trading into a highly leveraged, high-velocity global business.
AIGs built up a $500 billion swaps portfolio, but didn’t have the cash when the bond market started to tank. The result? A $180 billion taxpayer bailout. While some of that money may be paid back, we are likely to lose a chunk of it for good.
The American taxpayer owns 80% of AIG right now, and AIG doesn’t like it at all. It wants to pay back that money lickity split. Wells Fargo and Citibank paid back TARP bailout funds last week. Of course, we didn’t find out until late in the game that Citi was only able to do so because it received billions of dollars in tax breaks from the IRS.
The authors want to see the communications between the AIG Financial Products division, the emails between AIG and their counter-parties at the financial firms, and more. As experienced hands at determining the timelines and circumstances of financial fraud, these three know exactly where to go to find out the truth – the email record. And as an 80% owner in AIG, the trustees of the taxpayers could make this a reality by demanding such disclosure from the board.
Despite frequent press confusion, Wikileaks is nothing to do with Wikimedia at all — “wiki” is a generic term for “mass-editable website” and they use MediaWiki, but there’s no connection.
With the news that Australia has decided to censor the internet, a group of protesters decided to set up a website complaining about this effort by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy (who laughably called internet filters “100% effective” based on absolutely no metrics). In setting up this protest site, they were able to register the domain stephenconroy.com.au. Not surprisingly, that got some press attention, and suddenly the Australian domain authority, AuDA, took notice.
The Australian company that runs the .com.au domain registry has been accused of abandoning its own procedures to censor a website satirising communications minister Stephen Conroy’s ISP filtering regime.
OK, I’m going to try and explain why Big Music genuinely doesn’t get what’s happening with the online stuff. It’s easy to dismiss the thoughts coming out about ‘3 Strikes Laws’, and Bit Torrent being to blame for the death of musicians’ livelihoods etc. as being a bunch of really rich people want to keep their massive piece of the pie – and there is some of that, for sure. But there’s also an entire way of thinking that explains why they feel the way they do.
As in the innovator’s dilemma, however, the labels still don’t recognize this. They can only think in terms of the incremental change of “how can we sell more units of music.” That’s the only change they’ve ever really known. They’re not prepared for a situation where the selling of music may not even make sense, and the level of control over an artist has changed dramatically. But they still view — as is often the case in the innovator’s dilemma — as something to be dismissed. The fact that musicians can record for less money… well, it’s not as good as having a record label bankroll you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And, of course, acting in a maximalist manner also means little respect for anyone else’s intellectual property or free speech rights. We’ve already noted that some musicians have complained about a contractual gag order, that forbids any musician performing at any Olympics event to speak ill of the Olympics ever. However, it appears that the Vancouver Olympics folks are taking the maximalism even further. Michael Scott points us to a complaint from a musician who wrote a song which she thought the Olympic committee might like. She sent it to them, and was surprised to get back a contract demanding she sign over all ownership and royalties associated with the song before they would even listen to it. And, of course, it would also grant them the ability to do whatever they wanted with the song.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a deluge of DMCA notices and pre-settlement letters that CoralCDN experienced in late August. This article actually received a bit of press, including MediaPost, ArsTechnica, TechDirt, and, very recently, Slashdot. I’m glad that my own experience was able to shed some light on the more insidious practices that are still going on under the umbrella of copyright enforcement. More transparency is especially important at this time, given the current debate over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
Given this discussion, I wanted to write a short follow-on to my previous post.
Daniel Moore, the artist who has memorialized some of the Alabama Crimson Tide’s greatest football feats, has objected to part of a judge’s order that says he can’t reproduce his artwork for things such as calendars.
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