06.08.11
Posted in News Roundup at 4:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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From April 7 through 9 I attended Beyond, a series of lectures, workshops, and concerts promoted by the DISIS group at Virginia Tech – a.k.a. VTech – in Blacksburg VA. The festivities included presentations from Professor Brad Garton and Create Digital Music’s Peter Kirn, plus some incidental ramblings from yours truly. The concerts featured performances by VTech’s own Linux Laptop Orchestra, accompanied at times by percussionist extraordinaire Ron Coulter and a group from the Boys And Girls Club of Roanoke. Other performances included improvisations with some unique hardware controllers (more about those performances below) and original works composed by the participants.
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I’ve just begun to look into similar programming environments for the Android and the existing audio APIs.
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But when ERST support was added to Linux, a generic interface called pstore went in as well.
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Not sure how Windows kills itself, but Linux continues to work fine.
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Desktop
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Linux doesn’t live in the one size fits all world of the proprietary operating system(s). As a matter of fact, I see Linux on the desktop offering better compatibility than their proprietary OS cousins thanks to its diversity. Each distribution is able to offer a customized kernel calibrated best for the given tasks at hand.
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I have been frequenting Linux message boards and chat rooms for several years now. During my time spent in these places I would estimate that 95% of the issues I have helped people with (and seen posted) are related to the installation and setup of the operating system. This comes largely from the fact that most of the computers you can buy come with Windows by default. The experienced Linux user knows that they need to research their hardware before forking out their hard earned money for something that might not work too well with their favorite operating system.
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One of the reasons I like BluSphere (and am giving them this small plug) is because they give 5% of the profits on every notebook they sell back to open source projects.
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How about in the long term? Yes! The monopoly dies with “8″. How would you feel if M$ sold its PCs without “the tax” and “the tax” was larger than your margin??? Expect to see a lot more PCs shipping with Linux and expect to see a lot more PCs on retail shelves with Linux.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Embedded GPUs on Linux are a big mess due to their lack of fully open-source drivers, memory management complications, and other technical issues. However, there is some good news to report today and that’s on the emergence of a new open-source KMS driver.
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Applications
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At the moment my favourite way to do (simple) elaborations and conversions of multimedia file is FFMPEG. But i understand that is not exactly the most user-friendly tool around, so if you don’t want to open the terminal and read the man page of FFMPEG perhaps you could take a look at Yakito.
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Proprietary
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Skype’s code has been hacked and its innards published on the Web by Efim Bushmanov, a self-described freelance researcher in the tiny Komi Republic, about 870 miles from Moscow.
His aim, he said, was to make Skype open source.
Another goal: to find “friends who can spend many hours for completely reverse it” because he hadn’t finished the task.
The move has Skype fuming.
“We are taking all necessary steps to prevent or defeat nefarious attempts to subvert Skype’s experience,” said spokesperson Sravanthi Agrawal.
“Skype takes its users’ safety and security seriously, and we work tirelessly to ensure each individual has the best possible experience,” Agrawal continued.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Well if you have a yen for puzzles and Physics is of particular interest to you, then World of Goo is something that you should never miss exploring. The other is a true-blood MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) called Vendetta online.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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New extensions for the gnome shell appears by the day. Today its a ‘musicplayers’ extension. This new gnome shell extension will add a new menu to the gnome shell top panel and allows you to control various aspects of the allow you to control different music players through the menu.
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Back when I used to write full-length distribution reviews for a living, I always kept my eyes open for unique offerings. Unique distros were few and far between, but when those jewels were found – fun followed. Well, one of those gems of the Linux world appeared on my radar this evening. Zenix GNU/Linux is a Debian-based distribution that uses Openbox and Awesome WM to create something that’s just a little different.
According to the Website, Zenix is designed to be lightweight, yet not light in features or applications. Not that it comes with lots of software, but its developers’ choices aren’t necessarily those little known or commandline versions. To quote the Website, “The goal of Zenix is to provide a light weight “base” without sacrificing functionality expected of a Desktop.”
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Zenix is currently on Distrowatch.com’s waiting list…
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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“Enough”, told I myself.
I know now that Sabayon Linux is better than I though about it earlier. Some of the issues I had last time are solved.
But Sabayon still requires more tweaking than I would like to make. And it behaves itself quite strange way sometimes.
Does it mean I dump Sabayon? Not necessarily. I may come back to it later, but most likely with different desktop environment. KDE? GNOME? Guess or suggest!
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One of key problems in PMS Test Suite is getting actual test results. With the whole complexity of build process, including privilege dropping, sandbox, collision protection, auto-pretending it is not that easy to check whether a particular test succeeded without risking a lot of false positives.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc. rules the “enterprise” Linux market with their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product line. Novell Inc. (now owned by The Attachmate Group) is second with their SUSE Enterprise Linux product line. To the best of my knowledge, there aren’t any free SUSE Enterprise Linux clones but there are a number of free RHEL clones. CentOS is the most well known RHEL clone but with the seeming unending delay of the 6.0 release (July 11th is my guess), CentOS has received quite a bit of criticism leading some users to investigate alternatives. As a result, Scientific Linux is getting a lot of long overdue attention given the fact that it too is a solid enterprise clone… that has been around for a long time… that has a lot of support behind it.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Dnshosting.it, the advanced Internet solutions developer located in Italy, has migrated its Cloud Server offering from VMware to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in order to remain competitive in the Italian market and gain the advantages of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology.
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Adoption of open source systems in the South African enterprise is continuing unabated, with the country’s leading open source enterprise implementer, Obsidian, reporting a staggering 37% growth in Red Hat implementations in the past year. This is almost double the 21% global growth reported by Red Hat, the frontrunner in Linux-based enterprise systems.
“I think it’s fair to say that open source adoption in South Africa has matured, but is still a long way from reaching saturation point,” says Muggie van Staden, Obsidian CEO. “The question is less ‘who is using it’ than ‘who isn’t using it’, with a great number of large corporates running mission-critical systems on Red Hat.”
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Fedora
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I had no stability or other issues with KDE, which is at version 4.6 in Kororaa.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Have you heard of Ensemble? Are you excited about Cloud/Service Orchestration? What? Ok you’re not alone if you are scratching your head.
Ensemble is an implementation of a new idea that has been taking shape the last couple of years. Ever since Amazon hooked up a remote API to thousands of machines to provide access to their virtual infrastructure (and called it macaroni? err.. AWS), people have been dreaming up ways to take advantage of what is basically a robotic “NOC guy”. No longer do you have to pre-rack servers or call your vendor frantically to get servers sent next-day to your colo. Right?
Naturally, the system administrators that would normally be in charge of racking servers, applied their existing tools to the job, to mixed success. Config management is really good at modelling identical hosts. But with virtual hosts instantly available, this left those thinking at a higher level wanting more. Chef in particular implemented a nice set of tools and functionality to allow this high level “service” definition with their knife tools and simple ruby API.
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Phones
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Android
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Sprint will ship the 4.3-inch HTC Evo 3D 4G smartphone and seven-inch HTC Evo View 4G tablet on June 24 for $200 and $400, respectively. Both devices run Android 2.3, and offer the latest Sense UI layer — which is now supported with a new HTCdev developer site and an OpenSense SDK to tap the Evo 3D 4G’s 3D capabilities and the Evo View 4G’s Scribe pen technology.
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Recently, I predicted that the future of the PC may not be powered by the x86 processor architecture.
With ARM chips assimilating everything from smartphones to cars, and companies like Nvidia working on high performance CPUs based on the ARM architecture, the assumption that x86 will continue to dominate the PC no longer looks iron-clad.
One of the key catalysts for that realisation was Microsoft’s announcement that Windows 8 would support x86 and ARM. If Microsoft is picking up on a trend, you know it has momentum.
The thing is, if it makes sense to question one half of the Wintel alliance, surely it makes sense to question the other. If today’s PCs largely run Windows on x86 processors, could tomorrow’s be Android on ARM?
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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ViewSonic announced a new ViewBook tablet line, starting with a Android 2.2-powered, seven-inch ViewBook 730 with a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, all for $250. At Computex last week, the company also tipped a more powerful Nvidia Tegra 2-based seven-inch tablet called the ViewPad 7x, running Android 3.x.
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It’s like Christmas all year round with tablets. Expect explosive growth in shipments of Android/Linux tablets. If I get another job,
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FreeNAS is an open source operating system based on FreeBSD and, as its name implies, designed for networked storage. The project recently celebrated the release of FreeNAS 8, which racked up some 43,000 downloads in the first 48 hours after its release.
Techworld Australia caught up with Josh Paetzel, director of IT at iXsystems and project manager for FreeNAS 8, to talk about the current state of the OS, what lies ahead for it, and the relationship to FreeNAS 0.7.
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Ideology #2: Open source project should all play nice together
When Oracle announced their proposal to bring Hudson to Eclipse, a number of people complained to me and others why didn’t Eclipse Foundation force Oracle to work with Jenkins. There is a similar conversation going on with Oracle participating with LibreOffice. It seems people believe Apache should have rejected the project proposal, so Oracle would be forced to work with LibreOffice.
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At Eclipse, we talk a lot about community. Developing a community is an important part of being an open source project. It is from a community of users, adopters, and contributors that a project draws strength and longevity. Without a community, an open source project is just a bunch of code that might as well buried on a server behind a firewall somewhere in parts unknown.
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Events
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Improving Your Java development with Maven 3 and Hudson – Attend this webinar to learn about the advantages of upgrading to Apache Maven 3, including improved speed, greater stability and increased compatibility. Jason will also talk about the greatly improved support for Maven 3 within Hudson that is easy to configure and supports complex build scenarios with ease. We will cover the Eclipse IDE integration for both Maven and Hudson that improves developer productivity.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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The Google Chrome developers at Google proudly announced last evening (June 7th) the stable release and immediate availability for download of the Google Chrome 12 web browser for Linux, Windows, Macintosh and Chrome Frame platforms.
The new Google Chrome 12 web browser includes various interesting new features, such as the highly anticipated hardware accelerated 3D CSS support and a brand-new Safe Browsing mode.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Labs is generating a lot of buzz with its announcement of Webian Shell, which, as Digitizor notes, “basically consists of a browser which will replace the traditional desktop, and where the web applications are given more importance than the native applications.” You can download the early version of Webian Shell for Windows, Mac OS and Linux, but be warned that it exists in a very early version at this point. You can get a look at it here. Is Webian Shell an answer to Google’s Chrome OS?
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Is 3D the future of web video? A few months ago, when Google announced its WebM video format, based on technology it acquired from On2, with its VP8 video codec, many people interpreted the move as an effort to undercut entrenched video standards, such as H.264. Could 3D video have been the actual brass ring that Google had its eyes on, though? Both Mozilla and Google are making moves to support 3D video in browsers, and Google’s YouTube web video juggernaut is increasingly supporting 3D videos. This blog post from Mozilla illustrates the focus that it has on 3D and Google’s efforts to make YouTube a haven for 3D videos. You can also find a good discussion of WebM and 3D video here.
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SaaS
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CloudBees, the Java PaaS innovation leader, today announced a for-pay offering for its RUN@cloud Java Platform as a Service (PaaS). Developers can now decide, per application, whether they’d like to utilize a free plan (with limited memory and computing resources) or benefit from increased memory, more computing capacity and/or additional features through a pay-as-you go pricing scheme.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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TDF proudly boasts that the latest LibreOffice “incorporates the contributions of over 120 developers (six times as many as the first beta released on the launch date).” And, that, “The majority of these contributors have started to hack LibreOffice code less than eight months ago, and this is an incredible achievement if one recalls that the OOo [OpenOffice.org] project has attracted a lower number of contributors in ten years.”
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A third Oracle in-house lawyer has been granted limited access to Attorneys’ Eyes Only materials. You will recall in an earlier ruling the magistrate denied Attorneys’ Eyes Only rights to Dorian Daley, Oracle general counsel, and limited the rights of Deborah Miller and Matthew Sarboraria, but the status of Andrew C. Temkin was left for further determination based on supplemental filings.
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Experts are hired by the parties. The parties hire them to say helpful things. There are all kinds of experts, some more reliable and independent than others. Do you remember when one of SCO’s proposed experts came to Groklaw and in a comment admitted that he took on the assignment to get paid and hopefully to attract more such work? So courts are not as much in awe of experts as the title might lead one to believe.
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What’s in it for Oracle?
This is easy – Oracle off-loads OpenOffice.org, for which it has no further use, without damaging its relationship with IBM and other commercial OOo partners. They lose any revenues involved, but apparently they were resigned to losing those anyway. So for Oracle this is all up-side.
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From time to time TDF is required to engage in private correspondence with parties, yet we are committed in our bylaws after a suitable period to make this content public.
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CMS
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Acquia, the leading provider of commercial solutions for Drupal, today announced plans to partner with Engine Yard, the leading Ruby on Rails development and deployment platform for the cloud, to offer a fully managed cloud solution for Drupal and Ruby on Rails (RoR). This new partnership will accelerate development of social websites and custom web applications for professionals who use Drupal and RoR.
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Business
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Switchvox version 5.0 offers advanced features for integrating business applications and seamless mobile communications inside and outside the office
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Funding
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Project Releases
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The Naev devteam is proud to announce the release of Naev 0.5.0! This release is the result of over a year of hard work done by nearly 30 committers. This release is just a step in the path for ultimate greatness and a major step forward in the maturity of Naev. It has many major gameplay changes and signifies the coming of age of Naev, which has now exceeded the tag of Escape Velocity clone.
Due to the size of the 0.5.0 ndata, downloads shall from now on be hosted at Sourceforge instead of Google Code due to the latter’s arbitrary size limits.The rest of the project infrastructure will remain unchanged.
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Public Services/Government
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ast September, an ambitious code-sharing initiative named Civic Commons was launched at the Gov 2.0 Summit in a bid to help city governments use information technology better. This week, Civic Commons took a big step forward with a new management team in place and $250,000 of funding from Omidyar Network.
Former White House deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin will be the first executive director and Nick Grossman, former director of Civic Works at nonprofit Open Plans, will be its first managing director. Grossman was one of the lead architects of Civic Commons from its inception.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Informatica (NASDAQ: INFA) says it has unleashed the business potential of “big data” by offering support for social media data and Hadoop in the new Informatica 9.1 open data integration platform.
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Open Hardware
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Copenhagen Suborbitals is a self-described Danish open-source, privately-funded, non-profit organization with a mission to launch humans into space.
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Programming
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Google has released a research paper closely comparing the performance of C++, Java, Scala, and its own Go programming language.
According to Google’s tests (PDF), C++ offers the fastest runtime of the four languages. But, the paper says, it also requires more extensive “tuning efforts, many of which were done at a level of sophistication that would not be available to the average programmer.”
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What is OSCON Java? It’s a good question. There are many Java conferences on every continent except Antarctica. Why is O’Reilly throwing its hat in the ring?
The Java community has always been a broad, fractious, interesting mess, capable of doing surprising things with little warning, and that’s precisely why we’re attracted to it. It’s undeniable that Java is huge; it’s been in one of the top two slots on Tiobe’s Programming Community Index since Tiobe started in 2002. It’s always been one of the largest components of the technical book market. Java’s 2010 book sales represent a resurgence since 2008, but even in its weakest years, Java has always been one of the largest components of the book market. Beyond being huge, Java is one of the key languages of the open source movement. While there has been plenty of discussion over the years of the JDK’s status as open source software, there has been no shortage of open source projects. SourceForge lists more than 25,000 Java projects, more than any other language.
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I started blogging at the urging of colleagues at IBM. In the Spring of 2005 the company was getting ready to launch a major blogging initiative to encourage its employees to participate in the rapidly growing blogosphere. My colleagues felt that as someone closely associated with IBM’s Internet strategy, it was important that I personally become an active blogger.
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Science
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Biological systems have caught the attention of computer scientists, who have been turning everything from RNA molecules to entire bacterial colonies into logic gates. So far, however, these systems have been relatively small-scale, with only a handful of gates linked up in a series. Today’s issue of Science leapfrogs past the small-scale demonstrations, and shows that a form of DNA computing can perform a calculation with up to 130 different types of DNA molecules involved. The system is so flexible that it’s also possible to use compilers and include debugging circuitry.
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Security
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RSA has finally admitted publicly that the March breach into its systems has resulted in the compromise of their SecurID two-factor authentication tokens.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Copyrights
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But would that really be true? Does building a more flexible, more modern copyright law really mean a lack of respect for copyright? Why wouldn’t it mean a healthy respect for building a system that matches better with the times — rather than the industry’s kneejerk reaction to just keep ratcheting up the punishments, enforcements and coverage of copyright?
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The most detailed part of the communiqué1 is that on copyright. It calls for an increased private censorship to prevent the sharing of culture online2, like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), just after the EU Commission announced its strategy to take on infringements “at the source” and after the U.S Protect IP Act was passed unanimously a committee vote in the Senate.
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ACTA
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A report on Internet policy by the UN Special Rapporteur on the protection of freedom of opinion and expression will be presented today. The report’s guidelines aimed at protecting fundamental freedoms clash radically with the course set by governments of the G8. This report will be essential to help citizens hold their governments accountable for policies undermining online freedoms.
Reader’s Picks
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Microsoft bungles Skype again. Microsoft boosters pretend this has nothing to do with Microsoft.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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It’s probably one of the more exciting things I’ve seen in the Senate in a long time.
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Of course, virtually every report you’ll read on this in the mainstream media has the facts wrong. This isn’t about cucumbers being dangerous, because e.coli does not grow on cucumbers. E.coli is an intestinal strain of bacteria that only grows inside the guts of animals (and people). Thus, the source of all this e.coli is ANIMAL, not vegetable. …
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Finance
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The call says the bill is essential for “hometown lenders” and to increase credit access for “small business and families.” But nowhere does it mention why financial interests are pushing it: because it increases from 25 percent to 36 percent the amount of interest lenders can charge consumers on small loans, allows for new fees, and other measures that boost lender profits.
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Privacy
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“When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said, “they will be stunned and they will be angry.”
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Civil Rights
Korean Gamers: APM Demonstration
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.07.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Richard Stallman is the ultimate nerdish power geek.
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Server
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Kernel Space
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Unlike ten years ago, college graduates today are finishing school equipped with some Linux knowledge and preference.
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Linux Foundation will award five scholarships and host a student-focused day at LinuxCon designed to help train the developers who will shape the next 20 years of computing
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Applications
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Android as a mobile platform is gaining more and more popularity day by day. However, Google is still yet to design a program that allows its users to synchronize their media across their phone and computers.
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Proprietary
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Just under a year ago I wrote about how Adobe had abandoned 64-bit Linux, at least temporarily. Linux users who chose to run a 64-bit OS were left with a range of unsatisfactory choices: use an outdated beta with known security vulnerabilities; run an FOSS alternative, most likely gnash, despite limits in functionality and compatibility; or run a 32-bit browser in a 64-bit operating system. At the time the move was surprising since reviews of the 64-bit beta, like this one by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Computer World, were quite favorable.
Three months later on September 15, 2010, Adobe announced a preview of Flash Player “Square”, development code for an upcoming release of a native 64-bit version of Flash Player 10.2. Unfortunately Preview 3, released on November 10, 2010, was the last Square release. Flash Player 10.3 was released for 32-bit platforms only.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.3.21 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
* Support for installation rollbacks in MSI.
* 8- and 16-bit bitmap formats in the DIB engine.
* Fixes in the XInput2 mouse support.
* Better support for text shaping in Uniscribe.
* Improvements to the Item common dialog.
* More MSVC runtime functions.
* Various bug fixes.
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Games
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E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is officially kicking off today in Los Angeles and will be running through Thursday. This, along with the Game Developers Conference, is one of the key times of the year for the electronic gaming industry. A number of game studios will be announcing new titles and other great announcements, but will there be anything Linux related?
Only time will tell if there are any Linux-related announcements to be found this week. If we know of any, it’s of course under NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) at the moment. But here’s a few random notes for what can be said at this tim..
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- Linux Game Publishing is still working on something, but they won’t be at E3 and this next port of theirs with almost 100% certainty isn’t a triple-A title.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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I’m at the Platform 11 sprint at Randa. We are here to discuss and shape the future of the KDE platform. It’s the first meeting of this kind since Trysil five years ago. Four people who were at Trysil also made it to Randa, including a respectable dinosaur, but it’s great to also have new and very new faces around.
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Many scientists use the LaTeX typesetting system as the preferred way to write publications. Among the various widely used add-ons, one special mention is the TikZ language, a powerful extension which is used to create publication-quality figures. Of course, like LaTeX, it takes its time to learn. The good news is that, like with LaTeX there is KDE software to fill in this gap: KTikZ, a graphical front-end to TikZ.
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GNOME Desktop
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Like many of you, I split my time between two excellent browsers: Firefox and Chrome. Neither feels really all so native in GNOME3 — although Firefox, as it mimics GTK+2 by default, fits in just a little better. Every time I started Chrome, however, I felt a bit frustrated with how much of a sore thumb it stuck out and decided to do something about it.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Verdict:
Version 15 of Red Hat’s community project Linux distribution Fedora showed great stability, and it was simple to add applications onto the platform. We had no problem with hardware drivers and the new GNOME 3 GUI was easy to use, even though initially we did seem to be blundering about. Fedora would suit corporate road warriors who would like a combined Fedora-Windows dual-boot system (in case of OS failure), or anybody interested enough to see how far Linux has advanced compared to Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Support for each Fedora version is limited to 13 months, so corporates would not roll Fedora out except to expert users. In any case, there’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) available, which eventually gets to use features that have cut their teeth in Fedora.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu corporate sponsor Canonical is developing a new Ubuntu Friendly hardware validation program for desktops, netbooks and laptops. The program will allow users to test hardware and the results of those tests will then be used to validate systems as “Ubuntu Friendly”. The program will be developed in parallel with the development of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot, and should be in place by the time Oneiric Ocelot is released in October.
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The man behind the distribution Mark Shuttleworth already had a few ideas to earn money with the project. Ubuntu includes a Music Store, a Cloud Service for data storage and synchronization and commercial apps in the Software Center (which is quite similar to Apple’s App Store).
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I guess the biggest enhancement for me is not so much related to Ubuntu. It’s that I completely deleted my Windows partition, with everything in it, i.e., everything I had before is now gone.
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Used responsibly, instant messaging (IM) offers the benefit of instant communication and collaboration on the corporate intranet. However, many companies, fearing IM’s adverse affect on productivity, tweak their corporate firewalls to block all ports ferrying IM traffic. A better approach is to control the IM server by bringing it in-house. The Java-based cross-platform Openfire application makes it easy to host your own instant messaging server.
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Events
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Hacking, learning, talking, walking and dining – The Linux Bier Wanderung (Linux Beer Hike) is all this and much more. Each summer around 50 Linux enthusiasts meet up for a week’s holiday. This year the 13th annual event takes the penguin-friends to Austria, specifically to the small village of Lanersbach in the Tux valley [1].
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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With the advancement of web technologies, it is not surprising that the web and web applications are increasingly playing an important part of our experience on the computer. In the coming week, Google is releasing its first Chromebooks – netbooks which are based completely on a cloud OS and in which the traditional desktop has been replaced by the web browser. Mozilla too has released the first concept of something along that line.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Michael Meeks published some interesting statistics on the completeness of the OpenOffice source code contributed to the Apache Software Foundation. His numbers actually came from a post from Christian Lohmaier to The Document Foundation discussion mailing list.
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Oracle’s donation of the OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation does no favours for the users or developers of open office suites, says Richard Hillesley…
Speaking at the time of Sun’s decision to release Java under the GNU General Public License (GPL), Marc Fleury, the founder of JBoss, claimed that “IBM reacted negatively” to the Sun announcement because “IBM’s approach to open source is what we call ‘strip mining’, which is to let the open source community do things – then IBM comes and packages them, adds proprietary code, and markets the result,” and concluded that “they have this dual strategy of proprietary products and low-end open source.”
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CMS
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His solution is a proposal to pull together a crack team of journalists, designers and technologists to devise some open source software that would combine the best elements of the Huffington Post, WordPress and I Can Haz Cheezburger.
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Education
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I have long saved money in education by using GNU/Linux on PCs and on thin clients with zero licensing costs. I always chuckle when I read the anguish of some people trying to eke out similar savings with that other OS. Yes you can save money by using thin clients with that other OS because thin clients are cheaper and CALs are cheaper than full licences (just barely) but the maths is really simple with GNU/Linux. $0 beats all other licensing regimes of that other OS. No need to agonize over four plans each with negotiated prices to work things out. Install GNU/Linux and go.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This is where GNU Free Call most clearly differs from most others who are looking to replace Skype. As GFC is already designed for use with any SIP capable client, we have no interest in re-inventing protocols or even how VOIP clients work. This is not the problems we are looking to solve. Rather than focusing on having people join or connect through yet another specific service provider to mediate their communications (whether iptel.org, ekiga.net, etc), we are interested in enabling anyone to discover and communicate with each other directly without the need for a mediating service at all. It is how users are empowered to discover each other which is hence most important in GFC’s design. This is best illustrated by the GFC client, which is in reality contact focused rather than communication driven. This I think becomes more clear from the GFC GUI design (and experimental client), as illustrated here.
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Project Releases
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VideoLAN and the VLC development team present VLC 1.1.10, a minor release of the 1.1 branch. This release brings a rewritten pulseaudio output, an important number of small Mac OS X fixes, the removal of the font-cache building for the freetype module on Windows and updates of codecs.
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Though it doesn’t typically come with EVERY Linux distro (it really should..), vlc is one of the most popular, and powerful open source media playing programs around.
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Public Services/Government
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Systems integrator (SI) Computacenter has taken fire in a growing bust-up over open source software at Bristol City Council, which MPs have been told proves the government’s open source ICT strategy is unworkable, writes Mark Ballard.
In a letter to MPs sitting on the Public Administration Select Committee, open source supplier Sirius Corporation said Bristol City Council had ditched its latest effort on the advice of its supplier Computacenter.
Mark Taylor, CEO at Sirius, accused Computacenter of skewing an open source proof-of-concept pilot in favour of vendor partner Microsoft.
Taylor told MPs this showed how the UK’s “oligopoly” of systems integrators ensured Cabinet Office open source policy “cannot and will not work”.
Computacenter and Sirius bid for the Bristol deal after the Council Cabinet voted to adopt an open source computing infrastructure last September, said the letter.
However Sirius claims it was thrown off the project after the two disagreed over its viabililty.
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Money is now much tighter in the public sector, so we’re wondering how the council is going to pay for the Office 2010 licence, particularly as council tax has been capped. Will public services and/or staff be cut to pay for the Counts Louse’s largesse to Microsoft? Perhaps someone – councillor or officer – from BCC would like to comment below.
Finally, another indirect effect of BCC’s return to the closed source fold is that this will have a negative effect on efforts to have Open Document Format (ODF) adopted as the standard means of exchange for public documents – something that is a reality in some of the UK’s EU partners.
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More SMEs testified in secret to the PASC inquiry in May. They were fearful their complaints about the systems integrators’ oligopoly – said to control 80% of the UK’s £19bn-a-year public sector ICT – would lead to their exclusion from government contracts.
[...]
Taylor’s letter to MPs alleged Bristol City Council had, in September 2010, asked its supplier at the time, Capgemini, to complete a pilot of the open source software stack by November. Capgemini simply ignored the request, said Taylor’s statement.
Capgemini was unavailable for comment.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Robotics wizard and two-time Battlebots champion Christian Carlberg first achieved notoriety shredding competitors’ robots with Minion’s 14-inch saw blade on one of TV’s first reality shows. Now he’s all fired up to begin shipping what may prove to be the “world’s first open source flashlight.”
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Programming
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Developers building atop platforms like iOS and Twitter should go in with eyes wide open, said Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson, who reminded entrepreneurs about the dangers of relying on someone else’s APIs. In a talk last night before an audience of entrepreneurs, Wilson said developers need to plan for the day when platform owners work against their interests.
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By ManuSporny On June 3, 2011 In RDFa, Semantic Web With 41 Comments Permanent Link to The False Choice of Schema.orgPermalink
Full disclosure: I am the current Chair of the group at the World Wide Web Consortium that created RDFa. That said, all of this is my personal opinion – I am not speaking on behalf of the W3C or my company, Digital Bazaar. I am biased, but also have been around long enough to know when freedom of choice on the Web is being threatened.
Some of you may have heard that Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have just released a new uber-vocabulary for the Web. As the site explains, if you use schema.org, you will get a better looking search listing on all of the search listings for Bing, Google and Yahoo. While this may sound good on the surface, it is very bad news for choice on the Web. There are few points that I’d like to make in this post:
1. RDFa and Microdata markup are similar for the schema.org use cases – they should both be supported.
2. Microdata doesn’t scale as easily as RDFa – early successes will be followed by stagnation and vocabulary lock-in.
3. All of us have the power to change this as the Web community – let’s do that. We will release a plan shortly.
The schema.org site makes it appear as if you must pick sides and use Microdata if you want preferential treatment. This is a false choice!
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Security
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Finance
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Two burly Collier County sheriff’s deputies and a homeowner’s attorney strode into the Bank of America branch on Davis Boulevard in Naples with a court order and an ultimatum for Manager Erich Fahrner.
Fahrner’s choice: Write out a check for $2,534 in attorney’s fees for the couple wrongfully slapped with a foreclosure lawsuit by the bank, or a William C. Hoff Storage moving crew waiting outside would start hauling out furniture to be sold at public auction.
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It’s telling that the first salvo is being leaked through Wall Street’s favorite reporter. Now it’s possible the firm was using Sorkin as a one-man focus group to test and refine their messaging and have him all prepped to go. Sorkin says he’s been in communication with Goldman officials “for the past several weeks”. But this may also indicate that the firm intends to make its case to the press and then let the press persuade the public.
I see that as a sign of serious weakness. The Levin committee provides a great deal of documentation to the public as well as a detailed summary of its findings. By contrast, Wall Street firms make an art form of cherry picking numbers and presenting them in isolation. And journalists don’t have enough knowledge of tradecraft to push back in a serious way.
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Internet/Net Neutrality (Canada)
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Every time you think the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the CRTC, has finally been chastised and in the process, learned a lesson, the bozos who run the circus come up with a new and silly act meant to help the broadcasters. And, as is usual with these folks, somehow ends up diminishing our choices as consumers and costing us more money in the long run.
Last time the genius’ at the CRTC had the brilliant notion that behemoths Rogers and Bell should have the right to tell their sub-buyers like Teksavvy what they could charge for internet use. This blew up in the CRTC’s face when most Canadians saw through the money grab by the big providers and began a protest that made the suggestion disappear faster than a Liberal leader in the 21st century.
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The Conservatives hold their convention later this week with 80 resolutions being considered for possible debate in the plenary session. The resolutions are proposed by local chapters and at least two focus on Internet access and net neutrality. Resolution P-063 (Durham) on broadband states:
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Departments and agencies are hoarding hundreds of patents and copyrights each year, violating the federal government’s long-standing rules on so-called intellectual property, says a new report.
For more than 10 years, federal policy has been to assign contractors the rights to any intellectual property produced during their work for departments and agencies.
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The government delivered its Speech from the Throne on Friday, which included a commitment to “introduce and seek swift passage of copyright legislation that balances the needs of creators and users.”
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Copyrights
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The music industry has backflipped on its long-held demands that repeat music pirates be disconnected from the internet as a new UN report declares such a policy would be a breach of human rights and international law.
But film studios, represented by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), are still backing the controversial measures, arguing protection of intellectual property is a human right. It has released research saying film piracy costs the Australian economy $1.37 billion a year.
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Revisions to the Copyright Act are essential to Canada’s digital economy strategy as incentive to move the creative economy forward, and also to satisfy demands by its trading partners that Canada implement the WIPO “Internet Treaties”. Bill C-32, which died with the election call, included many new exceptions from infringement and some confusing language that would have led to costly litigation. It was clear that many proposed changes, some unintentionally, eroded creators’ rights.
Arts and culture industries provide over 630,000 jobs and contribute $46 billion to Canada’s economy. Copyright revision should be supportive of these industries, big and small, and encourage their growth. The works of creators are the foundation of all such industries. A bill like C-32 would make it significantly more difficult for creators to carry on their copyright-reliant businesses, cause them significant income losses, and be a real barrier to the continuing growth of Canadian digital content and Canada’s digital economy.
HUGE explosion on the Sun on June 7, 2011
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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These days, Linux has managed to draw more attentions from those users who want to get faster result from their complicated task. It is an open space operating system, and it allows the users to accomplish their challenging task properly.
Whether you want to use the Linux in your system or want to know the graphic design for Linux system, you need to move for the online media. Here, you can get numbers of important information through which you can know the importance of graphic design for Linux system. With the Linux you can monitor the system files, networks, and many important applications of a system easily and fast.
At present, Linux is the vital opportunity for maintaining the system safe and secure. It is not requiring any types of anti-malware, anti-spyware, or anti-viruses for maintaining fast and secure system. With this system you can not face any kind of problems like severe system damages. It’s time to install it in your computer.
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Desktop
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That desktop, however, is not the topic of this blog. Instead, I want to go on the record to say that the recent announcement of ASUS Pre-installing Ubuntu 11.04 on three of their EeePC machines (1001PXD, 1011PX, and 1015PX) is not big news.
Although the Linux community will stand up against me to say that any time a company sells a piece of hardware with the Linux operating system pre-installed is a win; this “win” just doesn’t feel like a win. Why?
We’re talking about netbooks. Again.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The second -rc release for the Linux 3.0 kernel is rather quiet and not too exciting. Linus pushed out this new kernel release in the early hours of the morning.
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Applications
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It’s based on mplayer, so regarding audio and video you have the same feature of this software, BUT, there is also a native integration with Shoutcat to search for radio station and listen to them, and a search engine to search video on youtube.
After all the motto of this software is ”UMPlayer plays everything!”
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Bottom Panel is a new GNOME Shell extension which, as the name says, adds a bottom panel to GNOME Shell. The panel includes a window list, workspaces switcher which you can right click to set the number of workspaces and a button to display the message tray (because the tray hot corner is hidden by the panel).
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We all love Google’s new cloud music service, but I’m not loving that Linux was forgotten when the Music Manager client was written. It’s one of those things where I’ll have to sit down and configure Wine (a helper application that runs Windows applications on Linux) to run it, and I don’t have time or patience to do that just yet. Wine is picky, and while it may be easy, it may just be horribly difficult. If you’ve used it, you know what I mean.
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Desktop karaoke application OSD-Lyrics has been updated with exciting new features.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Ever since the release of Maniac Mansion on the Commodore C-64, and probably even earlier than that (Guild of Thieves for instance), I was fascinated by adventure games. You know, the click and point type of adventure games where you had to pick an action and combine that action with something or someone on the screen. Lucas Arts made that genre popular, today it is just a shadow of its former past.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC), Qt
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After blogging about Polka, my experiment with a radically new take on an address book, I got a lot of great feedback. I appreciate all the comments, questions, and encouragement. Two people made me particularly happy, as they not only sent feedback, but also contributed some welcome work. Sascha Manns built packages, and Saleel Velankar created a beautiful logo. Free software rocks.
[...]
My first attempt resulted in a port of Polka to MeeGo. MeeGo is a system targeted at touch interfaces, and being Qt based it seemed to be close enough for a getting Polka to work on it.
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In essence, this means there is no KDE 5, and there will never be. During the sprint here in Randa, we’ve spent a lot of thinking about the future of the KDE Frameworks, and we will be forthcoming with plans to further modularize these frameworks, which consist of what’s currently found in the kdelibs, kdesupport, kdepimlibs, kde-runtime and kdepim-runtime modules.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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There has been much work put into Mageia but in today’s computing world your product has to be far more than merely functional With so many other distro’s competing for your attention, I think Mageia is not yet ready to become a player at the top of the league for Linux distro’s with the RC seeming more like a beta. My requirements of an OS are not satisfied with Mageia and should I remain with this distro, I would not be as productive. That is not acceptable and so for me its goodbye, with an appreciation that KDE is not for me either. I will certainly be looking at the Gnome flavour of Mageia on a secondary rig and I would expect a more favourable opinion since I do love Gnome.
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Gentoo Family
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Do you think there is only one penguin Tux? You are wrong. There is whole family of them. They are all brothers, because they have same father: Linux kernel code by Linus Torvalds. But they are not identical. They have their own names: Debian, RedHat, Slackware, Arch. Eac
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Red Hat Family
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If you needed a demonstration that Oracle is not CentOS, then look no further than the fact that only two weeks after Red Hat announced its Enterprise Linux 6.1 update, software giant Oracle has kicked out its Linux 6.1 clone. This is despite Red Hat’s attempts to slow down the RHEL cloners and others – such as Oracle and the former Novell – that offer technical support for RHEL distributions.
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The Dow dropped 2.33% in four days for its fifth straight weekly loss, the longest such slide since since July 2004 — back when Greece was the pride of Europe (at least in soccer). Seven years on a Moody’s cut of the country’s credit rating, allied to May’s paltry payroll increase of 54,000 here at home, sent exchanges into a tailspin. DuPont (DD), down 1.72% after Friday’s grim jobless data, was appropriately among the blue chips’ worst performers; its most famous product gave Ronald Reagan the nickname of “Teflon President” after he won a reelection landslide despite 7.2% unemployment but with the rate now standing at 9.1%, President Obama has a hard act to follow. Bank of America (BAC), which fired John Thain after he amassed a $1.2 million bill on an office restoration, wrote a check for $2,534 in attorney’s fees rather than lose its office furniture.
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Fedora
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As quite often happens with Fedora releases, I think version 15 is great in some respects and falls behind in others. Take, for instance, YUM — it’s probably faster than it has ever been and I was quite impressed with the command-line program, but the GUI front-ends still lag behind their counterparts in performance. This release handled my hardware really well and comes with some interesting technology previews — whether you are a fan of GNOME 3 or not, I think we can agree it’s nice to see a distribution offering it for people to try and, on cards/drivers which don’t support 3-D effects, the display “falls back” nicely to the classic theme. I think it’s good that the developers have managed to increase compression on the live disc without negatively impacting performance, but I wonder why they didn’t use the opportunity to add more software as there is about an extra 100 MB of space available on the CD.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As you might have heard, we are planning to close down the “Ubuntu Ready” programme in time for Oneiric Final Release.
The aim is to simplify the public Canonical endorsed certification programme to only one:“Ubuntu Certified“.
To straighten out any confusion about what our certification offering will be here is a quick fact sheet about certification:
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These tidy bullet points list a few examples:
* Raised the visibility of Linux overall.
* Generated excitement and given desktop Linux much-needed accelerant.
* Entered commercial arenas both server and desktop: Dell, independent Linux OEMs like System76, ZaReason, Emperor Linux; commercial training and support.
* Inspired hosts of derivatives such as Vinux, Mint, Mepis, nUbuntu, Gnoppix, Ulteo, moonOS, SuperOS, and dozens more.
* Created good name recognition for “Ubuntu” out in the real world.
* Created a welcoming, supportive developer community that supports noobs.
* Streamlined and popularized the LiveCD.
* Maintains multiple official editions– Ubuntu Server, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Kubuntu– that all share the same repositories, with 100% compatibility.
* Pioneered an easy installer.
* Created UCK, Ubuntu Customization Kit, for easily creating your own customized Ubuntu LiveCD.
* Created netbook/tablet/touch versions before any other distro.
* Continually pushing ahead on multiple fronts.
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With Ubuntu 11.04 the Ubuntu Linux brings a new look to the desktop called Unity. I have installed Ubuntu 11:04 on a desktop computer and very soon, I will install it on my laptop and net-book. There have been mixed reviews of Unity; I have found Unity to be different and will take a bit of time getting use to. That said I would encourage all of us to give Unity an extended test period.
The gnome desktop has been my standard desktop for many years now, so it is only natural that a departure from the norm will feel a bit strange. So you may be asking why do it?
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One of the primary goals in the Ubuntu community is to encourage and inspire people to get involved in different parts of the project. Getting people involved typically requires a few key steps:
* Inspire – Get someone interested in joining the community.
* Provide Opportunities – Find something for them to do.
* Review – Review their work to help them be successful and have their work included.
[...]
There are a couple of things that are obvious and yet don’t work. For example, lots of upstreams think they should form a non-profit institution to house their work. The track record of those is poor: they get setup, and they fail as soon as they have to file their annual paperwork, leaving folks like the SFLC to clean up the mess. Not cool. At the end of the day, such new institutions add paperwork without adding funding or other sources of energy. They don’t broaden out the project the same way a company writing documentation and selling services usually does. On the other hand, non-profits like the FSF which have critical mass are very important, though, which is why on occasion we’ve been happy to contribute to them in various ways.
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When we debate our goals, principles and practices in the FLOSS community, we devote a great deal of energy to “how things should be”, and to the fact that “men are not angels”. I think the approach of James Madison is highly relevant to those discussions.
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Flavours and Variants
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Pinguy OS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. The latest version – 11.04.1 is based on Ubuntu 11.04, but comes with the Classic GNOME 2.32.1 desktop instead of Unity.
Pinguy has launched Pinguy OS Mini, a stripped down version of Pinguy OS which comes with all the tweaks and fixes that are available in the main Pinguy OS 11.04.1, but without most of the applications preinstalled in Pinguy OS.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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I finally purchased a tablet PC for testing usability of recent GNU/Linux desktop on touch devices. Though there are not so many choices that meet my requirements (PC compatible, reasonably fast and cheap, and available in my country), Acer ICONIA TAB W500 looked fine. Actually F-15 final installed on that device without any problem and GNOME-Shell works fine on it (the peformance is not that bad as I expected from its 1GHz CPU clock).
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This type of thinking also deeply effects the free and open source culture. Since one of the reasons for using FOSS is ultimate control (and responsibility).
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Industry observers have been predicting for years that open-source software will achieve mainstream adoption. Five years ago, open source was in its “nascent stages” and its future “was promising but still unknown,” said Michael Skok, general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners. He presented the fifth annual Future of Open Source Survey at Computerworld’s Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. The latest survey results “clearly demonstrate” that open source “has gone mainstream,”
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Events
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The Linux Foundation will be teaming up with Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSL) for Linux Learners’ Student Day, to be held in Vancouver on August 16 (the day before LinuxCon begins). The program includes sessions from OSL presenters on Linux basics, Python, embedded systems, and careers in open source.
“The OSU Open Source Lab is very excited to be leading the sessions for Linux Learners Day,” said Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Outreach Manager. “We see educating future generations of Computer Scientists as one of the most important parts of our mission to serve the open source community.”
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Though the final version of Firefox 6 isn’t due until August or so, this Aurora release can now be downloaded for Linux, Mac and Windows from the “Future of Firefox” page on the Mozilla Project’s Web site.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Things are never dull here in the Linux blogosphere, but there’s no doubt they would be a whole lot less entertaining without Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL).
How else, after all, would we get the opportunity to ride on a thrilling emotional roller coaster such as the one Oracle’s had us on since it acquired Sun?
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The world of LibreOffice and OpenOffice(.org) has been heating up recently with several exciting and, at times, bewildering developments. The Document Foundation remains very active as is LibreOffice development, but Oracle has given up on OpenOffice and slapped LibreOffice in the face by giving it to Apache. Perhaps the most important announcement was the release of LibreOffice 3.4.0.
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CMS
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I recently extracted some data from the Drupal project’s CVS and Git logs to see how the number of code contributors and total contributions have changed over time. If there was any doubt of our continual growth, the resulting charts demolish it.
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DuckDuckGo is a silly name, possibly based on the duck, duck, goose game. Even the developers of the so knighted search engine admit as much. But under this seemingly simple and somewhat unprofessional moniker lurks a very powerful, refreshing and unique search engine. We checked.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Yet reading NATO’s new draft general report on cybersecurity, one gets the impression that what the alliance worries about most these days is not an “armed attack,” but a cyberattack on its network servers, or the infrastructure of any of its member countries.
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Cablegate
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A crowd of supporters were in Leavenworth Saturday to protest the holding of a prisoner on Fort Leavenworth suspected of leaking thousands of documents to the website Wikileaks.
The Rally for Bradley Manning drew people from across the state and from areas like Chicago and Oakland, Calif. — close to 200 people in all, according to one of the event’s local organizers, Jim Davidson of Lawrence, Kan.
The event started at Leavenworth’s Bob Dougherty Park, where Davidson said about 15 speakers from different organizations supporting Manning’s release, from Iraq Veterans Against the War to gay rights organizations, addressed the crowd before a march to the intersection of Seventh Street and Metropolitan Avenue, in front of Fort Leavenworth’s Grant Gate.
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The Afghan man with a grizzled beard puts his life at risk every time he chats with U.S. Lt. Col. William Chlebowski.
As an informant for the U.S.-led coalition, the middle-aged man — whose name wasn’t disclosed for security reasons — talks to insurgents one day and snitches on them the next. He’s part of a network of Afghans across the country who tip coalition forces to the location of roadside bombs and weapons caches and share information about what militants are doing and planning.
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Is the founder of WikiLeaks the ministering angel of press freedom as his pale appearance might suggest? Or is he the demonic leader of the most dangerous hacker collective on the web? As one outspoken critic suggests, is he “worse than the Stasi,” or does he represent hope for those struggling against oppression? Either way, by the end of 2010 it became clear that a hitherto unknown organization had forever changed the global media landscape. Within a few months, some of the best-known newspapers – The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Le Monde – began to woo this small group of enthusiastic members of information transparency movement.
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Secret internal American government cables, accessed by Dawn through WikiLeaks, provide confirmation that the US military’s drone strikes programme within Pakistan had more than just tacit acceptance of the country’s top military brass, despite public posturing to the contrary. In fact, as long ago as January 2008, the country’s military was requesting the US for greater drone back-up for its own military operations.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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THE UK could be forced to rely on overseas countries for more than two thirds of its oil and gas supplies due to a “severe” decline in energy production in the North Sea, US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks have revealed.
Cables seen by The Scotsman reveal that Britain’s gas and oil reserves are declining by 8 per cent a year, and that the country will import 60 to 80 per cent of its oil and gas supply within less than ten years.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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As if we need further proof of the commercial sector encroaching on the right to free speech, we have an interesting story from India. Perhaps a sad indictment of todays business where they view the net and its billions of users with greedy eyes, wanting the attention drawn to their products but not wanting you to put your opinion forward unless it favours them.
Vodaphone is alleged by a customer (Dhaval Valia) to have sent a take down notice ordering removal of Facebook comments in regards to his unhappiness at the service Vodaphone provides. What Vodaphone did not count on (and maybe shows ignorance on their part) is that the story would hit the web and expose even more people to the incident (certainly more so than the Facebook users who saw the customer’s complaint)
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A new report finds that Canadian government departments are hoarding hundreds of patents and copyrights each year in violation of the government’s own IP policy.
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Copyrights
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It sounds great doesn’t it? I think it sound great too, but, and this is a big one, do you really want to trust Apple or Google with all your data? What happens if you don’t pay your fee to Apple? What happens if the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) demands a copyright audit of all my music on iTunes Match?
Charlie and the Apple Factory
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.06.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Server
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Applications
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Games
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Helena The 3rd is a new fun action platformer for Linux inspired by good old NES game, Blaster Master. The game innovatively combines 2D and 3D environments where you control a high-tech tank blasting your way through challenging levels and hordes of enemies.’Helena The 3rd’ – New Indie Action Platformer Game for Linux
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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One of the other nice little bits of news that was shared at the Randa Multisprint: Kdenlive, a terrific video editing tool that is Free and Open Source Software built with Qt and KDE technologies, is getting a little closer to the KDE community
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome 3 is the first major release of the popular desktop environment in over eight years. Many identify Gnome as being the face of Linux, because most early distros (and many current ones, of course) adopted the desktop in order to put bells and whistles on the ever-maturing kernel at the back.
Gnome 3 is radically different from previous releases. It’s got a polished user interface that’s been tuned for usability and a slicker code base to please application developers.
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New Releases
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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I quite like Kanotix and its somewhat odd blend of older KDE, access to stable packages, and a brand spanking new kernel, and the feeling of a small dedicated community of Tux friends. Think I’ll give testing a rest on sda5 and keep Kanotix around for a while.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Ricoh announced a new Ricoh eWriter Solutions (EWS) business unit, with a tablet-based document management platform for enterprises that want to move paper processes online. The “eWriter Solutions” platform combines back-end eWriter Workflow Services for forms management with a Linux-based, 9.7-inch Ricoh eQuill tablet — featuring an E Ink Pearl screen and a five-megapixel camera, says the company.
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Toshiba has announced that its 10.1-inch, Tegra 2-based Thrive tablet will ship with Android 3.1 on July 10, starting at $429. Meanwhile, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 will ship on Verizon and T-Mobile with Android 3.1 on June 8, according to reports — although another rumor claims the Samsung launch will be delayed due to bugs.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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I suppose IBM feels that keeping its own product closed source/non-free is in the best interests of IBM but I think they are short-sighted. The reason Linux, ODF, Android, and so many other open technologies work so well is not because of the individual contributors but because the FLOSS community is the right way to produce software. Any non-free implementation is liable to be more limited, buggy and frail than the FLOSS equivalent.
Attempting to put OpenOffice.org under ASL is nonsensical in the long run. Either or both of these things will be true:
1. It will cost IBM more to develop.
2. LibreOffice will eventually become a superior product.
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Get answers to top questions about the office suite’s future, now that Oracle has given the codebase to Apache
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CMS/Freedom
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Rumour has it that several well known publishing brands have moved from their traditional print versions into online-only entities in recent times. For these reasons I ended up surfing for open source publishing topics this week.
Maverick new players in this space might be interested in checking out http://theopensourcenewspaper.org/ and its ancillary references to Drupal, the free and open source software package for publishing, managing and organising a variety of content on a website.
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“The human race has a susceptibility to harm, but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record. He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. Because he harnessed ‘Friday Night,’ that is, ‘Everybody needs to get laid,’ and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality. And he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal, namely ‘I will give you free Web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time.’ ”
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Business
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Due to the inherent freedoms in open source software, solutions built on them can cost less to implement and less to own–not solely due to the lack of license fees, but because they are simply better solutions. As I point out to prospective clients who are unsure about paying for pre-sales: While you may not be willing to explore open source, you can bet your competitors are, and they can use their savings to better serve their customers.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Kuhn has been around in Free Software circles for a long time; he knows the movement well and has contributed an enormous amount to the progress it has made.
It takes dedication, perseverance and idealism to work and keep working in this area. Kuhn has all three in spades and exemplifies the type of person who is needed more and more as commercialism makes inroads into, and often sullies, the ideals that gave birth to FOSS.
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Standards/Consortia
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More Standards for Europe and faster: this is the main objective of a series of measures that the European Commission proposed on 1 June 2011. Standards are sets of voluntary technical and quality criteria for products, services and production processes. Nobody is obliged to use or apply them but they help businesses in working together which ultimately saves money for the consumer.
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Android is an important operating system based on Linux. Many mobile devices come with Android. And now WebODF is available for these devices. You can see the entry in the Android market.
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The U.S. Supreme Court gets hot, like the weather, in June, when decisions in all the most controversial cases, like those involving Walmart and Microsoft, come cascading down as the justices join a frantic race to get out of Dodge for the summer recess.
Many controversial cases are decided in June, the last full month of the term, regardless of when they were heard. The prevailing theory is that the issues in the cases are so weighty it takes time to get a clear majority. But another theory once popular in the Supreme Court press room says the justices want to rule on controversial cases at the last minute, just before they leave for parts unknown, because they don’t want to hear all the bitchin’.
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Google’s move is bad news for three groups: those who are tired of the upgrade treadmill, those who prefer alternative browsers (like Konqueror or Epiphany), and those (like me) who are trying to reuse older computers. I’m quite certain that there will be no Google-compatible browser that runs on a Pentium II with 192 MB of RAM.
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Health/Nutrition
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Jack Kevorkian, 83, the zealous, straight-talking pathologist known as “Dr. Death” for his crusade to legalize physician-assisted suicide, died June 3 at a hospital in Royal Oak, Mich.
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Mobile phone users may be at increased risk from brain cancer and should use texting and free-hands devices to reduce exposure, the World Health Organisation’s cancer experts said Tuesday.
Radio-frequency electromagnetic fields generated by such devices are “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) announced at the end of an eight-day meeting in Lyon, France.
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Security
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Anonymous has been hard at work. After hacking into Iran’s government servers and getting away with over 10,000 email messages, they have launched yet another attack, this time targeting Middle Eastern government officials, in what the collective calls support for the Arab revolutions.
As reported on Twitter, a document was released on PasteBin, a site that already bears the reputation as a hangout for hackers, revealing the log-in details of hundreds of government officials from Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco and Jordan.
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Anonymous has hacked into Iranian government servers and procured over 10,000 email messages from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Ministry’s website is still down as of this writing, and the servers are under Anonymous control. One of the Iranian members of Anonymous involved with the operation sent me a message from the compromised email servers as evidence that they were still under Anonymous control.
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Most people know to ignore the e-mail overture from a Nigerian prince offering riches in exchange for a bank account number. That is a scam, plain to the eye.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The Chinese military accused the U.S. on Friday of launching a global “Internet war” to bring down Arab and other governments, redirecting the spotlight away from allegations of major online attacks on Western targets originating in China.
The accusations Friday by Chinese military academy scholars, and their urging of tougher policing of the Internet, followed allegations this week that computer hackers in China had compromised the personal Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including government officials, military personnel and political activists.
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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that the F.B.I. would investigate allegations by Google that China was the origin of clandestine attacks on its Gmail service.
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Cablegate
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc and other banks disclosed estimates of potential losses from legal issues after pressure from Securities and Exchange Commission staff, according to documents released on Friday.
In a letter to Goldman on February 22, Stephanie Hunsaker, the senior assistant chief accountant in the SEC’s division of corporate finance, questioned an assertion by Goldman management that the bank was unable to come up with solid loss estimates.
Other major banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co, and Citigroup Inc, and Morgan Stanley received similar requests.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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First thing you do, tear this article out of the magazine and carefully set it on fire. It’s about the jockeying for position and revenue among the big players in social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube. And the analysis isn’t bad for—whaddyacallit—history. But it wasn’t written in the past 12 minutes. So more likely than not it’s already hilariously out of date. (“Google?” you may be asking, perplexed. In case the brand has in the interim disappeared from the scene, like Webvan and John Tesh, listen up: “Google” was a search engine.)
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Censorship
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The Helsinki Administrative Court has ruled that domestic websites may not be placed on the secret blocking blacklist maintained by the police.
This is the latest turn in a long legal fight by Finnish activist Matti Nikki, whose website lapsiporno.info (translates as “childporn.info”) was put on the secret blacklist in February 2008 and has remained on the list ever since.
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What is with Arab dictatorships and their thinking that cutting their people off from the Internet is a good idea? First, it was Egypt. Then, it was Bahrain, and finally Libya gave it a try How’s that working out for you guys? Egypt’s government was overthrown; Bahrain’s ruling family is hanging on thanks to outside support and mercenaries; and Libya’s in the middle of a bloody civil war. All-in-all, trying to cut the people’s communications’ life lines just angers the protesters even more and draws the world’s disapproving attention.
The state-run Syria News site reported earlier today, June 3, 2011, that “The Syrian government has cut off Internet service (3G, DSL, Dial-up) all across the country (Arabic link), including government institutions.” Later the same site reported that the Internet is available across parts of Syria [but that the] “Internet was ‘broken’ in Damascus, Syria’s capital, and Aleppo, and the provinces.”
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Radio and television news anchors may no longer say the words “Facebook” and “Twitter” on air, unless the terms are part of a news story. This prohibits French news organizations from urging their audience to “follow us on Twitter” or “check out or Facebook page,” or other such promotions.
The ban actually stems from a decree issued by the French government on March 27, 1992, which forbids the promotion of commercial enterprises on news programs. To sticklers of objective journalism, this may seem a reasonable rule. But as expat blogger Matthew Fraser points out, this type of regulation is absurd, especially when Facebook and Twitter have become so widely established in everyday life.
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Civil Rights
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On June 3, EFF will begin live coverage of a critical discussion about online freedom of expression held by the 47 member states of the U.N Human Rights Council during its seventeenth session in Geneva. The meeting will include the introduction of a landmark report to the Council by United Nations Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue that advocates safeguards to protect free expression online including privacy and anonymity.
La Rue has spent the past year meeting with local organizations, including EFF, in numerous cities around the world. He has traveled to Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Cairo, Johannesburg and Delhi to gather information about key trends that stifle free expression online. These actions include the blocking of content, monitoring and identifying activists and critics, criminalizing legitimate expression, and adopting restrictive legislation to justify such measures. In his report, La Rue recommends that United Nations member states recognize the legitimacy of anonymous expression (a core EFF value) and the critical protection it affords. La Rue argues in his report that “privacy is essential for individuals to express themselves freely.”
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The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression has released an important new report that examines freedom of expression on the Internet. The report is very critical of rules such as graduated response/three strikes, arguing that such laws may violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Canada became a member in 1976). Moreover, the report expresses concerns with notice-and-takedown systems, noting that it is subject to abuse by both governments and private actors.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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A United Nations report said Friday that disconnecting people from the internet is a human rights violation and against international law.
Reader’s Picks
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Anti-Trust
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M$’s plan to absorb the ARMed ecosystem is getting push-back. M$ wanted to talk with only a few “special” players and the gang said “no”. … [Microsoft wanted the five chip players to each choose only two of their downstream system partners to join] … the players in the ARMed ecosystem need their whole channel involved, nearly 100 parties, if products are to be delivered. The ecosystem is thriving with Android and they don’t need to be divided over “8″. M$ cannot win. If they get everyone on the same page, it will take time they don’t have.
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[ARM] is just the beginning. M$ wants to tell the world how to make PCs. They even plan to make “activation” easier for end-users… To do that, no doubt they will try to insert some M$-only signature into the hardware. Fat chance
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Cablegate
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Privacy
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Civil Rights
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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if things keep moving forward we should have something that people can use that will have some basic privacy and security functionality within a year. Whether we’re going to have a full Facebook replacement in a year, I think we’re probably a little more than a year away from making that happen
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Intellectual Monopolies
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We were on the air with it two years before (Mission Abstract Data) even applied for their patent. … I find the granting of this patent insane. The research done to determine what was already out there in the field was abysmal
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will the FUD cloud that just happens to surround all Microsoft competitors go away, or will another stupid lawsuit get filed, so articles like this can make ugly headlines? I don’t know why journalists love to write about litigation against large companies, siding with the “underdog”, as here, but it makes it easy for anyone wanting to smear a competitor, just by getting a small proxy to bring the litigation, a la SCO, powered by Microsoft money. Look how that turned out. Were all the articles that plastered our screens in the beginning of that litigation accurate, all about IBM being in trouble and Linux doomed? How about the mainframe FUD? IBM so far wins every battle, and that ought to tell journalists something the next time a proxy shows up claiming that big bad company X or Y is being mean to little competing business. Look for who the little business is being backed by, and then you’re more likely get the story right.
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Trademarks
LEGO Sandcrawler MOC
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.05.11
Posted in News Roundup at 11:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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ELECTRONICS FIRM Kogan has sprung out of nowhere with its announcement of the world’s first laptop running Google’s Chrome operating system (OS).
The Agora laptop is available to buy now and will be delivered on 7 June according to Kogan. The company has jumped ahead of Acer and Samsung to release the world’s first laptop that runs Chrome OS. The Agora laptop is priced at £269.
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Server
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Peterson explained that having the visibility into the video delivery experience enables the service providers to intelligently fine-tune the delivery, either by adding bandwidth, deploying an on-net (internal) CDN, or partnering with an off-net (external) CDN vendor to move popular content closer to the subscribers.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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While out celebrating the 7th birthday of Phoronix, Intel pushed out a new acceleration architecture for their open-source Linux driver. This new acceleration architecture is called “SNA” for “SandyBridge’s New Acceleration”, and it brings incredible results not only for Sandy Bridge, but for previous generations of Intel graphics as well. The results provided by Intel are absolutely stunning.
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I’ve reported before about the efficiency of Lrzip. Now Con did a useful and fun thing: He created an lrzip archive of all the sources of all 2.6 linux kernels. And guess how much space it took? Update: Guess how big an archive of *all* Linux sources since 1.0 is.
A few hints:
- All sources in a tar are 10.3 GB.
- The 2.6.39.1 kernel is 73 MB as a tar.bz2 archive.
- Now it would be less, because the first kernel was smaller (just 32 MB).
- So taking the average (73+32=105/2=52.5) times 39 would be just 2GB (compressed!).
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All users of the 2.6.39 kernel series must upgrade.
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Graphics Stack
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In early 2012 we can expect to see the release of X.Org Server 1.12 with various touch improvements and other input related work. Also being queued up for the 1.12 release is support for smooth scrolling.
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Applications
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Most desktop distros include at least one music player, which many people won’t even think about changing. But with Ubuntu 11.04 dropping its old Rhythmbox application and opting instead for Banshee, our curiosity was piqued: which are the best music players for Linux?
We compiled an initial shortlist of three that we felt everyone should try: Rhythmbox, the default Gnome player; Amarok, the default KDE player; and Banshee, a player that has been around for a while and has now supplanted Rhythmbox on Ubuntu. To this we added Songbird, a music player built on the Mozilla codebase; and the doughty VLC, which has been playing media in various formats and on various operating systems since 1996.
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OpenShot Video Editor is a free, open-source video editor for Linux licensed under the GPL version 3.0.
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Astronomy is a branch of science that deals with the study of celestial objects (including stars, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, meteor showers, nebulae, star clusters and galaxies) and other phenomena.
Like many others, I was introduced to the world of astronomy by the venerable Sir Patrick Moore. For anyone who does not know, Sir Patrick is an amateur astronomer who has presented The Sky at Night, the longest-running television programme, for over 54 years, and has made an outstanding contribution to astronomy.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Just found this platform game by the name of Fowl Space by Pixelante Game Studios which sports some attractive silhouette style visuals.
Fowl Space is available on Windows, Mac and Linux and is available for pre-order priced at $10.
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Big Little Team game development studio has released a new teaser video of their upcoming air combat game Molten Sky.
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Wow plenty of news lately! My latest titbit is about a game called Smuggle Truck by Owlchemy Labs which is curently available on Pc/Mac and also on IOS in the app store. The Pc and Mac version is priced at £3.15, but they are also working on a Linux version of the game
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Color It By Numbers is a fascinating series of coloring books that will leave no child indifferent. They are special in that numbers identify colors to be used in filling picture areas. This is an exciting process that helps develop the imagination. While painting the pictures, your child will quickly learn new numbers and colors while also gaining computer skills. This turns coloring into a useful pastime.
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Naev 0.5.0 has been released after being in development for more than one year. Naev 0.5 brings huge changes and new gameplay elements over the last version making it essentially a new game. We have covered Naev many times in past with teaser videos showing development progress of the game.
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Desktop Environments
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A special interest group was recently started to improve the usability and visual appearance of the Xfce desktop environment. It is defined on the Xfce wiki as follows:
“The Xfce Design SIG aims at improving the usability and visual appearance of the Xfce desktop environment. Our goal is to bring interested users, designers and hackers together to ensure neither of them is working in a vacuum. By establishing a context in which they can collaborate on smaller and larger design-related projects we try to increase the chance of the proposed changes to be merged into the official Xfce repositories. “
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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One positive reaction from Pat is the fact that KDE is his favorite DE at this moment and i really hope that it would remain the same in the future
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Necessitas is the project bringing Qt to the Android operating system. It has recently become part of KDE and now celebrates its second alpha release – its first as part of KDE.
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GNOME Desktop
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John Stowers (the GNOME Tweak Tool developer) has updated the old skype-notify Python script to work with the new GNOME 3 notifications.
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The 10 of may the backtrack team has released the version number 5 (codename “revolution”) of their penetration tool.
Yes backtrack it’s a live Linux Distribution made with this goal, be the best penetration and learning tool around.
It’s Based on Ubuntu Lucid LTS (10.04). Kernel 2.6.38, patched with all relevant wireless injection patches. Fully open source and GPL compliant. In this release you can choose to have Gnome or KDE and install it on 32 or 64 bit computer. The former release supported only 32 bit installation.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I have been watching the Mageia development since it was first announced. As soon as I saw that Mageia 1…
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Earlier this week there were Fedora 15 vs. Ubuntu 11.04 benchmarks looking at the overall system performance as well as the power consumption. Both of these Linux distributions had performed close to one another, as is expected considering the similarities in their kernel and other packages, but there were some discrepancies in the disk tests. Speculations in the forums were that some of the performance differences might be attributed to SELinux, so here are some tests seeing the performance impact of SELinux on Fedora 15.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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My first impression? It’s broken. My reaction to that? It’s an alpha, so that’s to be expected. Nowhere to go but up from here.
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Git 1.7.5.3 was released on May 26, 2001 and as of yesterday, besides the git packages being available for Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10 and 11.04, I also added the git packages for Ubuntu Oneiric.
As per git 1.7.5.3 I also added a start menu for the git application git-gui. After installation you can find the menu item in under the menu Development.
The packages are available in the repository in my Ubuntu PPA on launchpad.
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Whether you’re new to Linux or an old salt, it’s worth following Tony Bradley’s series of columns, currently being posted on PC World’s site, where he describes his effort as a Windows user to go through a self-imposed 30 days of immersion in Ubuntu. You can find Part 1 of his series here, and Part 2 is here. Bradley’s reports on installing and learning to live with Ubuntu shed much light on how users familiar with Windows and other proprietary operating systems approach Linux. The reports are also good fodder for discussions on Ubuntu’s usability, or lack thereof.
Bradley makes reference to Ubuntu’s “scorched Earth, leave no prisoners” installation process, which jettisons Windows from the hard disk and dedicates the whole thing to Ubuntu. However, he quickly revises that assessment and moves on to discussing Wubi and tools that allow users to have Ubuntu and Windows together on one system.
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Flavours and Variants
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We updated Netrunner Chromatic with a maintenance release to 3.1.
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MeeGo allows anyone to build their own user experience on top of the platform. Actually, this is expected of any serious manufacturer. Sure, there are some reference UXs available, including Tablet, Handset and Netbook, but none of these are quite product-ready, and are not necessarily even intended to be.
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HP is actively considering licensing its WebOS operating system to other manufacturers, according to industry reports. “It’s not correct to believe that [WebOS] should only be on HP devices,” HP CEO Leo Apotheker was said to have told an audience at AllThingsD’s D9 conference.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The new tablet was running Google Inc.’s (GOOG) popular Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” operating system, the second most used tablet OS in the world behind Apple, Inc.’s (AAPL) iOS (found on the iPad and iPad 2).
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About 20 minutes later we had Linux Mint installed on his laptop, and he was surfing the Web wirelessly using Firefox. Although he faced a punishing charge from Sony, he found a helping hand at his local public library. But I wonder: Do other public libraries help community members install Linux on computers? Do other public libraries hand out Linux CDs and/or CDs with OpenOffice? Perhaps a few public libraries do. For the most part, though, community members in other towns have few options when Sony requires a fee of $139 for a restore DVD.
Hmmmm. I wonder if that $139 includes the shipping and handling fee? If I were Sony, I’d charge $39 for shipping and handling. Might as well gouge people when they are at their most vulnerable, right? Might as well humiliate that high-school student in front of his parents. Serves him right for misplacing his restore DVD.
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Commercial software purchases can quickly eat away at the budget you have. The good news is that there are many free Web tools and open source software for students that will help you stay on task and organize your busy student life.
If you are a student you’re probably wondering how to manage the cost of tuition, books and living expenses – and still pay for the software you need for your student laptop or desktop computer for research and assignments.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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As we’ve recently covered, Mozilla has moved to an agressive rapid release cycle for its Firefox browser, with the latest version 4 quickly emerging as the most popular version of Firefox. At the same time, though, Mozilla is pursuing rapid release cycle for other projects, including its Thunderbird email engine. Thunderbird is now out in a new beta version 5.01, featuring a number of upgrades.
Thunderbird is now based on the same Gecko rendering engine that Firefox is based on. Among enhancements in the new beta version of Thunderbird, there are these:
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SaaS
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Download a free trial of VeriSign’s SSL certificates
VMware has invited Scala programmers onto Cloud Foundry, its open source “platform cloud,” an online service for building and readily scaling applications.
When it first launched in April, the service let you build with Java, Ruby on Rails, the Ruby framework Sinatra, and Node.js, the current It Platform of the Silicon Valley development world. Now, VMware had added support for Scala, the Java Virtual Machine–based programming language that drives such big web names as Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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A follow-up to my previous post on the Apache Incubation proposal to move OpenOffice.org over to Apache and continue the project there. In that post, I described how Apache projects are run via a meritocracy, that members gain additional rights and responsibilities based on the approval of their peers, etc. But I have received a variety of questions related to this, and I’ve done my best to track down some answers. So here are what I found out, in my words, paraphrasing the questions and giving answers, possibly with my mistakes, but I’ll correct them as they are identified.
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OpenOffice.org derivatives. The large ecosystem of OpenOffice.org derivatives can benefit from the continued development under the Apache umbrella, the success of the incubation process would help them all given the permissiveness of the license.
OpenOffice.org moving to Apache seems a good news for all stakeholders to me. Of course as usual code is the only things that matter, and all you need to do is just to wait and see, or if you like you can join and participate.
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Just last week we were talking about the role of contributor licensing agreements (CLA’s) and why some organizations/projects preferred to have the copyright in contributed code assigned rather than licensed, i.e., so the organization/project would be in a better position to enforce the copyright. A prime example of this centralized copyright ownership has been in a number of projects owned or managed by Sun Microsystems, includin OpenOffice. Of course, Sun is no longer Sun, and we have all been waiting to see what Oracle’s intent would be with the various open source projects they acquired. Well, we are now getting our first insight with the proposed donation of OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation.
While the jury is still out on what exactly this assignment means for OpenOffice, I think it’s safe to say that the Oracle announcement has elicited a range of reactions, a number of which have been less than enthusiastic. The biggest issue is the license change. The Apache Foundation requires all code donated to them to be under the Apache License. Since OpenOffice.org was not under that license, it means that the project changes from a true copyleft license to a more permissive license that allows companies to take the code proprietary. What kind of reaction will this draw from those who have been contributing freely to OpenOffice. Are they as likely to continue to contribute? Will Oracle be willing to continue to fund developers on the project? Will Attachmate, the new owner of Novell, allow their developers to continue to contribute to LibreOffice, the fork from OpenOffice? What realistic expectations should the Apache Foundation have?
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Public Services/Government
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[Editor's note: The Raleigh Public Record is a sponsor of CityCamp Raleigh]
More than 100 people are planning to converge downtown Raleigh this weekend for a three-day brainstorming session on how to use technology to increase the transparency of local government.
CityCamp Raleigh is looking to attract everyone from programmers to city officials to the “unconference,” which will be split between speaking events, work sessions and presentations all aimed at using the Web to connect citizens with government data. The event, which kicks off Friday at Vintage 21 on West Street, will mimic others by the same name held around the world from Chicago to Brighton, U.K.
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So, in spite of all the naysayers here, FLOSS is alive and well on the desktop and making significant gains over the last few years. FLOSS is used on the desktop in more than twice as many institutions since 2008. There are obstacles to adoption but performance is not one of them. When people get around to thinking objectively about FLOSS they will choose it. The largest reason for not choosing FLOSS? “It’s not what users want.” As if IT is a democracy in education or anywhere else. Institutions should choose software that fits the current and future needs of the institution. Budgets and performance should be far more important than what the users want. Users are largely not knowledgeable about choices and only know what they have used previously, not a basis of rational thought.
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Licensing
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This month openSUSE community manager, Jos Poortvliet, discusses copyright assignment and the buzz surrounding ‘Project Harmony’. As always, don’t forget to leave your comments and feedback – your opinion could feature in a future issue of Linux User magazine…
Identi.ca has been buzzing with ‘project Harmony’ discussions lately. Harmony aims to be the ‘Creative Commons’ of Copyright Assignment Agreements (CAAs). A CAA is basically a contract you sign where you give away ownership of your code, and some free software projects already allow or even demand this for contributions. The Free Software Foundation itself, for example, requires a CAA.
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Tech contract negotiations frequently involve a lot of argument about who gets to own the copyright generated. They essentially boil down to points of principle, rather than reasoned argument. Like many other complex issues, it’s worth going back to first principles. What does “owning the copyright” mean?
It means:
1. You can use the copyright yourself;
2. You can stop other people from using the copyright
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Programming
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New data released this week shows a new center in the open source developer’s universe, as GitHub takes its place as the number one forge tool.
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Have you ever claimed you could build a faster machine than top-tier vendors, but needed proof? We dig into five off-the-shelf sub-$500 configurations to figure out what they can and cannot do. The results probably won’t surprise Tom’s Hardware regulars.
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You Tube continues to prove that it is the future of where the internet is going to be in the next few years by introducing the ultimate in internet media viewership. Meeting the demand from a growing number of 3D enthusiasts, You Tube introduced the 3D channel and today has close to a thousand and more 3D videos. Augmenting its
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Security
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Sony Pictures Entertainment has issued a statement blaming “a group of criminal hackers known as ‘LulzSec’” for attacking its web sites.
In the statement signed by chairman and CEO Michael Lynton and co-chairman Amy Pascal, Sony said the “cybercrime wave that has affected Sony companies and a number of government agencies, businesses and individuals in recent months has hit Sony Pictures as well.”
LulzSec previously claimed it had penetrated databases attached to sonypictures.com, sonybmg.be and sonybmg.nl.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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“Miami Beach police did their best to destroy a citizen video that shows them shooting a man to death in a hail of bullets on Memorial Day. First, police pointed their guns at the man who shot the video, according to a Miami Herald interview with the videographer
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Cablegate
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The Nation magazine, in partnership with the Haitian weekly newspaper, Haïti Liberté, has launched a series of reports based on more than 19,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. Called “The PetroCaribe Files,” the series begins with an exposé of how the United States—with pressure from Exxon and Chevron—tried to interfere with an oil agreement between Haiti and Venezuela that would save Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, $100 million per year.
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Ireland’s foreign-affairs minister assured the US ambassador in Dublin in 2006 that the Irish government was prepared to change the law that had allowed the acquittal of five anti-war activists for damaging a US Navy plane.
The revelation that a senior Irish official discussed possible amendments to domestic criminal law with the US ambassador is contained in a Wikileaks cable (see below) that has not been published or reported upon elsewhere, but which has been seen by Counterpunch.
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Finance
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Wall Street’s most notorious bank was subpoenaed by the Manhattan district attorney. The DA wants more information about Goldman’s business activity leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.
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A prosecutor in New York has subpoenaed Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs for information related to the financial crisis, a person familiar with the development said Thursday.
The broad request from the Manhattan district attorney, issued last month, stems from an April report by Senate investigators that accused Goldman Sachs of abusive behavior, according to the source.
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Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) shares are dropping on news that a Manhattan Prosecutor is subpoenaing the company.
In addition to this bad news, Moody’s has put the debt of Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) on credit watch.
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A new inquiry into Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s (GS) activities during the financial crisis, prompted this time by Manhattan’s district attorney, has Goldman scrambling once again to control its image.
The disclosure Thursday of a subpoena of the firm by the district attorney comes just weeks before Goldman is scheduled to meet with one of its most important constituencies: retired partners who have moved on to found prominent hedge funds, perform government service, or dabble in a range of endeavors. Goldman calls them home twice a year to hear from top management about the state of the firm.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) is closing in on the sale of Litton Loan Servicing LP to Ocwen Financial Corp. (OCN), two months after writing down the value of the mortgage- servicing business by about $200 million, according to a person briefed on the negotiations.
The sale of the unit to Ocwen, a mortgage servicer based in West Palm Beach, Florida, may be announced within days, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are private.
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The Wall Street investment bank has received a subpoena from the office of the Manhattan district attorney, which is investigating Goldman’s role in the financial crisis, said one person familiar with the subpoena.
It comes amid increased enforcement scrutiny of the company, which has faced blistering criticism that it shorted — or bet against — the mortgage market before it collapsed and that it knowingly sold bundles of bad mortgages to its clients. Goldman denies these accusations.
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.. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) won’t face criminal prosecution related to sales of mortgage-linked securities because such a move could threaten the U.S. financial system, according to Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. …
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New York prosecutors have delivered a subpoena to Goldman Sachs seeking information on the investment bank’s mortgage and derivatives business, a person familiar with the matter said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Today the National Academies Press announced it would offer its entire PDF catalog of books for free, as files that can be downloaded by anyone. The press is the publishing arm of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, and publishes books and reports that scientists, educators, and policy makers rely on.
Tomb Raider “Turning Point” Debut Trailer [US Version]
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.04.11
Posted in News Roundup at 9:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Richard Chapman sent me a link to a log of activity for the International Space Station.
* The server was migrated from that other OS to GNU/Linux
* The client was migrated to “T61p”, a Lenovo model that ships with that other OS… The ISS started with Lose ’95 on clients back in the day.
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Desktop
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Ubuntu project sponsor Canonical has announced that its Ubuntu Linux distribution will be pre-loaded on new ASUS Eee PC series netbooks. According to Canonical, the Taiwan-based computer manufacturer began shipping three new Ubuntu-based Eee PC models through its sales channels on 1 June.
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Chris Kenyon, VP of OEM services at Canonical told The INQUIRER, “The deal with ASUS is an important one for Canonical which will put Ubuntu in the hands of a larger audience, people who would not necessarily download Ubuntu, but would be happy to buy a computer knowing that it will work perfectly on that hardware. Also, Canonical’s extensive work with manufacturers helps make all future versions of Ubuntu run perfectly on specific machines and individual OEM’s hardware.”
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Kernel Space
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This is a very short blog post as both Wim Coekaert and Ewan Mellor beat me by some time in publishing this great news: I was too busy traveling and celebrating. The fantastic news is that Linux 3.0 will have everything necessary to run Xen as both as a management domain and as a Xen guest.
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The Xen team has been working for years to get everything needed to run the Linux kernel as Dom0. Some of the components were added last year, but the final elements have now been added to handle everything.
Another addition that will make the mainline Linux kernel more Xen friendly is pvops, a mode which will enable the kernel to switch between paravirtualization (pv), hardware virtualization (hvm) or paravirtual-hardware virtualization (pv-hvm).
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Over time, software developers tend to learn that micro-optimization efforts are generally not worthwhile, especially in the absence of hard data pointing out a specific problem. Performance problems are often not where we think they are, so undirected attempts to tweak things to make them go faster can be entirely ineffective. Or, indeed, they can make things worse. That is a lesson that the kernel developers have just relearned.
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On the forums, reaction to the news has been mixed, with some wondering if Linus is falling prey to the current trend of large major version number jumps to give the impression of significant progress.
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Graphics Stack
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It was back in May of 2009 that DisplayLink began providing open-source Linux support for their USB-interfaced graphics processors in the form of documentation and code. Shortly thereafter, frame-buffer and X.Org drivers for DisplayLink USB hardware arrived and it quickly matured. By early 2010 it was possible to produce interesting results with these USB graphics adapters doing things like driving nine monitors over USB from a single computer.
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There was some initial thoughts that the Wine developers would be interested in the D3D state tracker as this natively implements the Direct3D 10/11 APIs where Wine’s existing Direct3D implementation largely lacks 10/11 support for now. With Wine’s Direct3D implementation, they’re also translating the Direct3D calls into OpenGL. The benefit of this is that it’s more platform agnostic and doesn’t place a requirement on the graphics driver being based on Gallium3D. The downside of translating the Direct3D calls into OpenGL is the associated overhead placed on the processor. In the future it could also be of use to the ReactOS in their development of a free software operating system that is Windows API/ABI compatible.
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Applications
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In a former article I’ve talked about the XMPP:Jingle protocol to find a good replacement for Skype.
Some people asked me about Ekiga, is this a good software or not ? and how you can use it ?
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Aupeo, a Pandora-like music streaming service, has just rolled out its first smartphone app for iOS and Android devices. Although its wide range of music, genres, subgenres, and preference-tuning features are impressive, Aupeo’s eye-candy-rich smartphone app is frustrating to use.
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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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Or was it ‘Day One’? I can never quite decide… Either way, it was Wednesday, though after spending Tuesday night awake in the airport I was a little disoriented.
The WebWorld Sprint has begun at the Linux Hotel near Essen in Germany. All the attendees arrived throughout Wednesday and – in contrast to conditions in Randa the sun has been shining on us. Yesterday evening we had a barbecue in the hotel garden, enjoyed some evening sun and then got to the first of the meetings about the extravagant number of KDE subdomains and our plans for the sprint.
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This functionality did not come out of the box with Kubuntu 11.04, but a little investigation revealed that it was added when I tried out the latest release of Muon Suite (The awesome Package installer which should replace kpackagekit on the next version of Kubuntu) I must have installed a package called plasma-runner-installer and probably forgot all about it.
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GNOME Desktop
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Another article about the GNOME Shell. Nothing really to see here, it’s just opinion, and yours is as good as mine. If you are bored however, read on.
Recent trials with GNOME 3 using the Fedora Live CD’s did not go so well. They always dumped me into fallback mode which is, despite some claiming it to be a solution for GNOME 2 lovers, nowhere near good enough as a tide me over, and it looked unfinished. To be fair these were all before Fedora 15 final arrived, or were built on Fedora 14 but at that time GNOME 3 was still in development.
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At present GNOME 3, with or without Shell, does not look like a serious desktop for serious work.
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I’m amazed what GNOME team accomplished with GNOME 3.0, this is just an amazingly modern, slick and very usable desktop and at the same time original and not going after OSX or any other desktop. GNOME 3 is far from perfect but for a first release it’s a really solid one.
Only downside so far I found is that GNOME 3.0 makes usage of Compiz impossible and incompatible, so you can wave goodbye to great usabillity and eyecandy from plugins like Cube, Wobbly, Expo, Wall and Zoom Desktop. Hopefully GNOME 3 development team will provide some layer of compatility between mutter and compiz so that compiz plugins could still be used with GNOME 3.
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Allan, who is working for several gnome applications, posted an update to the recent gnome status about the development of gnome 3.2. One of the updates planned for the latest version of the desktop is a modified overview mode. There are two important changes to the overview mode compared with the version 3.0. One is a modified buttons (windows/applications) that allow you to view the appropriate category.
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Gnome 3 looks to the future without fear. It even looks like the future, when everybody will have hooks implanted in their foreheads so they can look at their smartphones while they’re walking down the street. I’m getting old, and I’ve been kind of cranky for a while now. I don’t especially want to learn a new human interface. My phone is dull—borderline retarded, even—but I can usually make and receive calls on it, most of which are on the order of “this is Dr. Proctologist’s office confirming Edward’s appointment”. I don’t hate Gnome 3, but that’s because I don’t hate anything about Linux, and I don’t let myself hate anything in (or out of) Linuxland until I’ve used it for a couple of weeks, and I’m not a hateful sort of person anyway, and I haven’t managed to find the time to use Gnome 3 very much yet.
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But Foresight’s my favorite. Since I installed it, I’ve been gravitating to it: given a choice (all three of my computers are multi-boot, and two have Foresight), I’m going into Foresight more than any other distro
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After some useful feedback from visitors to my GNU/Linux & BSD Logo Zoo, I made version 2.0 at last. This time I included Plant distros, too. With them, I tried to take into account as many other distros as I could, but let me apologize if your favorite distro is still missing.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the June 2011 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editors Andrew Strick and Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Decision was made to replace *buntus, but there was no decision so far about the replacement system.
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Overall, I think Mageia is a good, solid distribution.
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I have been watching the Mageia development since it was first announced. As soon as I saw that Mageia 1 had gone from a release candidate to a final release I started the Transmission torrent download of three of the ISO files to keep and used one of them (mageia-dvd-1-i586.iso) to check it out with VirtualBox.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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Piper Jaffray currently has an Overweight rating on Red Hat and a price target of $57.
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Santos developed TurboVNC so it could enable its geoscientists to work on reservoir models using light clients, with all of the processing being done in central servers.
Also competing for the award were Nissan, DreamWorks, Verizon and Emirates. The award winner was chosen by voting by the open source developers at the summit.
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Fedora
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My laptop is IBM ThinkPad Lenovo X200 which uses an Intel graphics card.
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The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced that Ricky Elrod is the recipient of the 2011 Fedora Scholarship, a program now in its fourth year. The Fedora Scholarship program recognizes college and university-bound students across the globe for their contributions to free software and the Fedora Project. Elrod has spent significant time working within Fedora’s Infrastructure Team, a group of volunteers that manage the servers and applications that run Fedora. He was selected from an impressive applicant pool and plans to continue his education at the University of Akron this fall and major in Computer Science.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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uGet is a GTK+ download manager that runs on both Linux and Windows. The latest uGet 1.8.0, released today, brings support for Torrent and Metalink files (by using aria2), Ubuntu AppIndicator as well as GTK3 support.
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For six years I spent my professional career using and supporting Linux on the desktop. Outside of work and subsequent employment with Imagineer Systems & Memset I’ve been using Macs. A few days ago I decided to head back to Linux.
[...]
Ubuntu is a marvellous operating system. It’s clean, consistent and does what it says on the tin.
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The first alpha of what will become Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” has been released by the Canonical and Ubuntu developers. This development milestone is the first on the roadmap which sees another two alpha and two beta versions before the final release on 13 October. The Alpha 1 is specifically aimed at developers as an early snapshot of ongoing work after the major system-wide changes have been made.
Oneiric Ocelot is based on Linux kernel 2.6.39 and uses Gcc 4.6 as the default compiler. Network-manager version 0.9 has also been introduced in Alpha 1, which the release notes point out has broken API compatibility. GNOME 3 has also been brought into the system, and some components have been changed, while other desktop elements are in transition, to make use of GNOME 3′s APIs; this does not mean that the controversial Unity desktop is going away, just that underpinnings are moving from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3. Packages in transition, and their impact, are now being tracked. Progress, planned development and specifications are documented in the Blueprints for Oneiric web page.
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Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot alpha 1 has been released today and it comes with GNOME 3 (the GNOME application stack such as Gedit 3, Nautilus 3, etc. – but it doesn’t come with GNOME Shell by default; however, GNOME Shell is available in the official Ubuntu 11.10 repositories) like we saw in our previous Oneiric post and of course, Unity by default. Also, the classic GNOME session has been replaced with Unity 2D so starting with Ubuntu 11.10 alpha 1, those with hardware that doesn’t support the regular Unity will be logged in to Unity 2D.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The Barnes & Noble NOOK Color is turning out to be a ridiculously versatile device. Originally positioned as a color eBook reader which just happened to run Google Android, it didn’t take long for hackers to figure out how to root the tablet and install their own apps. Now another hack shows that it’s possible to run a completely different operating system on the eReader: MeeGo Linux.
MeeGoExperts spotted a demo of a NOOK Color running MeeGo at Computex in Taiwan. The responsible party is a company called Nomovok which develops MeeGo and other open source applications.
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.0, a major release of the free office suite for personal productivity developed by a community of sponsored and volunteer developers, and supported worldwide by local communities of volunteers. LibreOffice 3.4.0 is the second major release of the suite since the announcement of The Document Foundation in September 2010 and incorporates the contributions of over 120 developers (six times as many as the first beta released on the launch date).
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One of the unresolved issues in the Oracle v. Google case is whether certain Oracle in-house counsel, including their general counsel, will be given access to documents produced by Google which Google has declared as “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL – FOR ATTORNEYS EYES ONLY!”
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BSD
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Programming
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So because the code’s open, I was able to fix my problem and the rest of the world gets to benefit from it. Everybody wins.
And the fact that I was able to make those changes, and then share them with everybody else, really is quite an amazing thing.
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If smartphones progress significantly in the ergonomics, they could slice into the netbook market chunk. Tablets also pose a risk, as they blend phone use with netbook size and comfort, although they remain pricey and not as good as the competition, yet.
Currently, it looks as if the netbook is not going to die anytime soon. Half across the globe, it is still the most cost-effective computing device, in terms of price, size, capabilities, and overall usability. Not quite a high-end gaming rig, but then, it has some ten inches of screen equity, a decent resolution and enough hard disk space to store a handful of data. Internet connectivity can also be quite good. But all this may change.
Netbooks will hold as little as 5% market and as much as 30%, all depending how the competition with the smartphone turns out. This will mainly be dictated by the giants like Intel and AMD. The big CPU vendors may eventually choose to leave the smartphone market dominance to ARM and focus on other segments.
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Cablegate
Reader’s Picks and Comments
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that Windows 8 would would launch sometime next year. His firm says otherwise. “It appears there was a misstatement,” a Microsoft spokesperson recently said
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Microsoft has delayed its Windows 8 program after vendor outrage over the extremely tight restrictions that it would have placed on chip vendors and OEMs developing Windows 8 devices. DigiTimes is reporting that Microsoft has postponed its Integrated Development Program (IDP) for Windows 8 over the next two weeks.
Don’t hold your breath.
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IE share drops to 55%.NetApplicationsc can’t hide the negative trend for IE but the data is probably worse for Microsoft.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Censorship
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the Syrian government Friday shut down all Internet services. Internet monitoring firm Renesys reported that starting around 7 a.m. EDT today, close to two-thirds of all Syrian networks were suddenly unreachable from the global Internet. In just 30 minutes, routes to 40 of 59 Syrian networks were withdrawn from the global routing table, Reneys’ chief technology officer James Cowie said in a blog post. The shutdown has affected all of SyriaTel’s 3G mobile data networks as well as several of the country’s ISPs
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Privacy
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TV Watches You. US Cable companies wanted to put cameras in their boxes, now TV makers want the same.
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Civil Rights
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
Larry Lessig 50th Birthday Lip Sync Tribute
Credit: TinyOgg
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.03.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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1. Know your operating system. Knowing what operating system and version you have is a great help for when you have problems and need outside help. It also helps for when you wish to install programs so you can choose the correct one for your operating system.
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Well, June has arrived for another year, and that means the dog days of summer can’t be far behind.
Scorching temperatures have already begun to beat down upon parts of the Linux blogosphere, in fact, which may be why there’s nary a barstool to be found down at the seedy but well air-conditioned Punchy Penguin Saloon, where Linux Girl plans to stay until, oh, say, October or so.
There’s been plenty to discuss in recent days, of course, what with Computex going on and all the excitement over Oracle’s (Nasdaq: ORCL) OpenOffice move, but many bloggers have preferred to keep their spirits up with a spirited debate instead.
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PC users owe it to themselves to consider their options, and those options include a broad array of Linux distributions tailored to virtually every need.
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Desktop
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Asus has started selling its Eee PC netbooks preloaded with Ubuntu 10.10.
Asus will initially sell the 1001PXD, 1011PX and 1015PX, with more models added through the year.
The original Asus Eee PC 701 – which kickstarted the netbook craze in 2007 – ran on a version of Xandros Linux, prompting speculation that Linux was on the verge of a mainstream breakthrough. It was quickly superseded by Windows XP, however, with tales of high return rates of Linux-based netbooks.
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The Traditional Desktop computer, on the other hand is a Jack of all trades, a multipurpose, powerhouse tool. With the conventional computer you have flexibility and power. Once again that is not what the Chrome OS is meant to give.
So, being that the mobile netbook/tablet market and the traditional desktop market are not compatible with the new ChromeOS Operating System and the devices optimized for it. What can we use it for? Where, in the vast operating system lanscape, we can find its niche market?
In the medium to large Desktop monitors… I think! With the ChromeOS installed there, we only need to add a keyboard with a touch pad and/or a mouse to have a working, comfortable, Internet access device. Simple to setup, simple to use, and optimized to do what 95 percent of the traditional Desktop Users do with their computers. Surf the net for work and fun.
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Independent Ubuntu computer manufacturer System76 refreshed their popular 15.6″ Serval Professional line earlier this year, upgrading the laptop with an impressively fast second gen Intel Sandy Bridge i7 quad core processor, powerful Nvidia graphics, a lovely 1080p display and lots of options for optical drives and storage.
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Server
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Netcraft has produced their monthly rating of reliability of hosting companies. Out of 41 listed, only 5 run that other OS while 24 run GNU/Linux.
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Kernel Space
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The two-figure version numbers are still creating quite a bit of hassle that the developers are working hard to overcome. Inaccurate work by hardware manufacturers causes problems with rebooting and with the handling of UEFI hardware. The maintenance of kernel series 2.6.38 is soon to be discontinued.
Only hours after the first release candidate of Linux 3.0 was issued, the developers released the first patches to improve the way the kernel handles version numbers which consist of two, instead of three, numbers. Changes include a workaround which allows the version of the depmod program that was current until recently to cope with Linux 3.0. At the same time, a patch to fix the cause of the depmod problems was incorporated in version 3.13 of the module-init-tools, which were also released shortly after Linux 3.0-rc1. Several developers have suggested that, due to these and similar problems, Torvalds should consider using version number 3.0.0 instead of 3.0; however, the alpha male of Linux kernel development has so far not commented on this.
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2011 is a year of milestones. Not only is it the year that sees Linux User magazine turn 100, but it’s also a year that Linux celebrates it’s 20th birthday. What better way to commemorate these auspicious occasions than with a walk down memory lane courtesy of past Linux User editor, Richard Hillesley?
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Hello, I’am Efim Bushmanov a freelance researcher and here is my project files on skype research.
While “Wall Street Journal” makes politics and skype today’s trend, i want to publish my research on this. My aim is to make skype open source. And find friends who can spend many hours for completely reverse it.
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Just weeks after Microsoft announced it had acquired Skype for $8.5 billion, a Russian researcher has announced that he has successfully been able to reverse engineer the official Skype desktop implementation in an attempt to make the service open source.
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Good news for Free Software and open protocols: There has been a sucessful attempt to reverse engineer Skype (Magent URI). Nice timing, shortly after Microsoft’s acquisition Skype could finally be broken.
He is also including modified Skype executables allowing debugging etc., which is usually prevented by really elaborated anti-features (encryption, kills itself if there is a debugger etc.). The sample code is able to send a message via Skype, awesome!
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Instructionals/Technical
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I’ve been using graphic photo manipulation software programs for nearly 20 years. After using several, I’ve come to the conclusion that all of them are quite similar in features, bells, and whistles. The main difference comes in how they carry out the task at hand. That is to say, the menus, tool bars, and commands are laid out differently from program to program. So, migrating from one program to another isn’t difficult, it’s just that you need to learn (or relearn) the “moves” and menus in order to get the application to respond to your input.
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Games
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Oil Rush is a real-time naval strategy game based on group control. It combines the strategic challenge of a classical RTS with the sheer fun of Tower Defence genre. OilRush was expected to be available by 2010 itself, but it didn’t happen. OilRush RTS game for Linux is now available for pre order and you can expect a release very soon. Price: $19.95
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The bottom line is, if you work a lot with text, consider working with raw text and a powerful editor. Putting the whole thing through an HTML-based piece of software like WordPress or even LaTeX-powered software/front ends like LyX is always possible to do at the end. But the real power is in words; the lighter and faster, the better. To improve access to files and information of interest, divide the text editors/sessions into separate desktops. This reduces movement between desktops and enables focus on particular activities, leaving distractions aside. If you have to open the file manager a lot, then perhaps a better workflow is being missed. Shortcuts too can help.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Final Thoughts: The last time I used an LXDE-based distribution, LXDE was considered a geeks-only desktop environment. Since then, it seems to have developed into a nearly fully-featured desktop environment. It is usable by all, but not yet at the level of a KDE desktop. The main problem with Fedora Spins is that they do not seem to have received the same level of development attention as the main edition. But if you are looking for an alternative distribution to a GNOME 3-based distribution, and have the time to tweak and customize a lightweight distribution to fit your needs, this LXDE spin might be what you are looking for.
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Last week, Fedora 15 was officially released. I installed a copy on my laptop, and quickly got back to work. The install process was the fastest I’ve seen for any Linux distro – about 15 minutes to install the complete operating system from the LiveCD installer.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Over the last few months we have crossed the barrier of over 100 server models certified across all Ubuntu releases currently in maintenance. Last monthly alone we add 30 new servers to the certification list.
We have been working with DELL to certify a large portion of their PowerEdgeline via what we call component equivalency.
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A new official Ubuntu YouTube channel has popped up stuffed with short promotional videos.
Called ‘Celebrate Ubuntu’, the channel was set up by Canonicals’ Iain Farrell as a result of discussions held at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in May. Those discussions centred around the idea of creating a ‘community toolkit’ that, as Iain explains on his blog, ‘…would allow anyone excited enough to show off and celebrate their use and love of Ubuntu.’
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We added Family Farm to the Software Center last week and I took a few hours (of non-work time!) to have a look at it. Summary is that it’s a fun simulation game for the whole family where your job is to build up your farm.
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Most VARs in the open source channel are happy just to get free code contributions from their users. Canonical, however, has taken community engagements one step further with the announcement of a user-driven hardware-certification program. Will it work? Here are some thoughts.
Most software vendors can probably think of more than a few things they’d rather do than test hardware to make sure it works well with their products. Hardware certification demands many tedious hours, not to mention the acquisition of lots of hardware. Nonetheless, for companies like Canonical, whose main product is the Ubuntu operating system, hardware certification is a must-have to appeal seriously to users who want to be sure the Linux-based OS will be compatible with their computers.
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With the extensive Linux power consumption tests that I’ve been carrying out to solve some nasty Linux kernel power regressions and find other areas for optimization, one of the requests that has come in frequently is to compare the power consumption of the KDE, GNOME, Unity, Xfce, and LXDE desktops. After the article earlier this week to look at how the desktop environments / compositing window managers affect OpenGL performance, I carried out a quick desktop power test. In this article are battery power consumption results for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Lubuntu.
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Last week the PowerUser community ran a poll to decide the new logo/branding for our community and the submission by Thorsten Wilms was selected as the winner. Many thanks to Thorsten and all the other people who submitted artwork, they were all fantastic.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint is currently my favorite Linux distribution of all and is the one I use almost exclusively on a regular basis. Since the release of Linux Mint 9 LTS “Isadora”, I have made it a point to review new releases of Linux Mint. Six months ago, I previewed Linux Mint 10 “Julia” GNOME RC. Since then, I have also reviewed two versions of Debian-based Linux Mint. However, due to Ubuntu’s fixed 6-month release schedule, I haven’t been able to check out the latest version of Ubuntu-based Linux Mint until now.
Regular readers of this blog know Linux Mint needs no further introduction. The only things to consider while reading this are that Linux Mint also has a Debian-based version that is going strong, while Ubuntu’s state of transition (what with Unity, Wayland, et cetera) could pose difficulties for Ubuntu-based Linux Mint in the future.
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One of the many features the Enlightenment desktop has that sets it apart from other desktop environments/window managers is the profiles. Those that have used Bodhi Linux or have compiled Enlightenment from source should already have some idea of what profiles are.
Profiles are a powerful tool, they control the layout of your enlightenment desktop. I’ve found those coming from other desktops (such as KDE or Gnome) often confuse the idea of profiles with theme. Themes control the colors of your desktop and the appearance of your gadgets.
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Phones
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Android
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The open nature of the Android Market is becoming diminished as Google realizes it needs to take a more active role in its policing it.
Over the weekend developer Yong Zhang, known on the Android Market as yongzh saw his Android developer account revoked and all the apps he offers removed from the Market. The apps he was offering were all emulators for popular older systems including the NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, Atari, Game Gear, and Game Boy. But Google has seen fit to remove all of them ( including Nesoid, Snesoid, Gensoid, N64oid, Ataroid, Gearoid, and Gameoid).
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Android has been a hot topic at Computex Taipei this year, with various players discussing the pros and cons of developing apps for the respective hardware platforms such as ARM or x86. However when it comes to the MIPS platform, CEO and president of MIPS, Sandeep Vij pointed out that in terms of the application universe, well over 90% of the apps that are available in the Android marketplace work on MIPS.
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The open source w3af project released a 1.0 stable version this week after five release candidates and months of development. W3af enables developers and security researchers to audit, discover and test Web applications for vulnerabilities.
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Don’t expect Oracle’s donation of the code of OpenOffice.org to The Apache Software Foundation to settle anything about the troubled office suite. If the situation does improve, it will be small thanks to Oracle.
According to Oracle, the donation is proof that “Oracle continues to demonstrate its commitment to the developer and open source communities. Donating OpenOffice.org to Apache gives this popular consumer software a mature, open, and well established infrastructure to continue well into the future.”
However, from the way that the donation was done, and the situation it leaves the project in, it looks very much like a last spiteful gesture toward the rival Document Foundation, the project that develops LibreOffice, the OpenOffice.org fork. The result is a future that leaves the future as troubled as the present. At the very least, to some observers it appears to show a disdain for the community that borders on arrogance.
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IBM is still making Lotus Symphony. Remember Symphony? (Don’t worry, it slips my mind occasionally, too.) But IBM is still pushing this OpenOffice.org-based suite as a business desktop application, and Big Blue will be much happier keeping OpenOffice.org with the Apache Software Foundation than The Document Foundation.
Why? Because when, not if, the OpenOffice.org proposal is approved by the Apache Software Foundation, the OpenOffice.org will be licensed under the Apache Software License (ASL) v2. This means IBM and any other Apache OpenOffice.org project member can innovate the heck out the source code and not be obligated to give back to the mainline OpenOffice.org code, since the ASL is a non-copyleft license. IBM and other OpenOffice.org contributors will also be able to re-license OpenOffice.org code under any license they want, including a proprietary license, should they wish. It also keeps a major Open Document Format project ensconced within IBM-friendly governance.
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It seems that IBM and the ASF are encouraging individuals from the LibreOffice world to sign on as ‘Initial Committers’ to their new project.
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Why The Document Foundation is a better choice than the Apache Foundation
Another point to consider is the developers who will be taking care of OpenOffice. With OpenOffice in the hands of the Apache Foundation, they have to get a new team of developers to take on the development of the project. I am not saying that the Apache Foundation is not capable of doing that. But, for a completely new team to take over a project the size of OpenOffice can be very tough. In fact, that was what happened to Oracle after almost all of the previous developers left. But, The Document Foundation has most of the previous OpenOffice developers. After forking OpenOffice, they are developing one of the best office suite around – LibreOffice.
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IBM has announced its supporting role in the new OpenOffice.org code base submitted to The Apache Software Foundation Incubator. This is all part of an effort for the company to continue its long-standing commitment to open source. The firm will contribute staff resources to collaborate with the Apache community during the project’s incubation period to further the Open Document Format standard.
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The Java Community Process may get a welcome and much-needed breath of fresh air if a new proposal from Oracle is approved.
The proposal, entitled JCP.next JSR 1, which is actually Java Specification Request 348, would see a reorganization of the existing Java Community Process to make the JCP a more open environment in which developers can work.
According to the JCP Program Office, JCP.next JSR 1 (JJ1) “will focus on changes to the JCP Process Document in the following areas: transparency, participation, agility and governance. The Process Document describes the formal procedures used in the JCP program.”
JSRs, by the way, are defined as “actual descriptions of proposed and final specifications for the Java platform.”
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The ASF is best known for project like the ubiquitous Apache HTTP server — but Apache is home to dozens of projects. Still, doesn’t OpenOffice.org seem just a bit out of place here? Jagielski says no. “Although Apache is mostly known for server-side code (either complete servers, middle-ware, libraries, etc…) we do have some client-side and userland projects. Apache OFBiz is likely the best example.” In fact, Jagielski says what is “typical” for Apache is “building (or even “re-building”) communities around those codebases.”
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Public Services/Government
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On Wednesday, the Commission laid out its strategy for reforming the way EU public institutions deal with standards. Open-source advocates welcomed the strategy, saying it would promote competition, reduce lock-in and lead to faster standard development.
[...]
Taylor added that Oasis would not have had to cede control of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard to ISO in 2008, if the European Commission had not mandated this as a condition for accepting the standard. “Under this new arrangement there’s potentially no need to go to ISO,” he said. “Hopefully what we will get is faster standards to market without adding levels of bureaucracy.”
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Licensing
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My Thoughts
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Cablegate
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iLeaks founder Julian Assange has been awarded the Martha Gellhorn prize for Journalism.
The prize is awarded annually to a journalist whose work has “penetrated the established version of events and told and unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or ‘official drivel’, as Martha Gellhorn called it.”
Gellhorn, who died in 1998, was a well-known war correspondent and author.
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Finance
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Hundreds of employees worked closely in teams, devising mortgage-based securities — billions of dollars’ worth — that were examined by lawyers, approved by management, then sold to investors like hedge funds, commercial banks and insurance companies.
At one trading desk sat Fabrice Tourre, a midlevel 28-year-old Frenchman who was little known not just outside Goldman but even inside the firm. That changed three years later, in 2010, when he achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the only individual at Goldman and across Wall Street sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for helping to sell a mortgage-securities investment, in one of the hundreds of mortgage deals created during the bubble years.
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What was Timothy Geithner thinking back in 2008 when, as president of the New York Fed, he decided to give Goldman Sachs a $30 billion interest-free loan as part of an $80 billion secret float to favored banks? The sordid details of that program were finally made public this week in response to a court order for a Freedom of Information Act release, thanks to a Bloomberg News lawsuit. Sorry, my bad: It wasn’t an interest-free loan; make that .01 percent that Goldman paid to borrow taxpayer money when ordinary folks who missed a few credit card payments in order to finance their mortgages were being slapped with interest rates of more than 25 percent.
One wonders if Barack Obama was fully aware of Geithner’s deceitful performance at the New York Fed when he appointed him treasury secretary in the incoming administration. The president was probably ignorant of this particular giveaway, as were key members of Congress. “I wasn’t aware of this program until now,” Barney Frank, D-Mass., who at the time chaired the House Financial Services Committee, admitted in referring to Geithner’s “single-tranche open-market operations” program. And there was no language in the Dodd-Frank law supposedly reining in the banks that compelled the Fed to reveal the existence of this program.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Of course, on its own the report can’t achieve much in these three areas. But by raising these issues in a public way it has effectively put down markers. It means that when writing about the area of copyright and its enforcement, we can point back to statements about the need for evidence-based policies, and the fact that practically all the studies trotted out by the content industries are worthless, or that the economic damage of piracy is by no means a given.
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James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage: Together with Paradis, you will be working on the fourth attempt at Canadian copyright reform. Bill C-32 provides the starting point, but we need to establish a stronger link between copyright and innovation by instituting greater flexibility on digital locks and fair dealing.
The next four years also offers the chance to create a true national digital library as the foundation of a digital cultural policy. Canada has only digitized 13 per cent of its documentary text and less than one per cent of its video, audio, and photographs. You should assume a leadership position by actively working with provincial and local groups to develop a world-class national digital library that makes Canadian culture available from coast to coast and around the world by July 2015.
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ACTA
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The Green Group (Greens / EFA) in the European Parliament are working hard to ensure that the European Parliament does not give its consent to the ACTA treaty. På ett möte i dag antogs att gruppen kommer att driva kravet på att alla av unionens förhandlingsdokument skall offentliggöras, i enlighet med den förfrågan som EDRi (European Digital Rights) framförde till utskottet för Internationell handel (INTA) den 11.e maj i år. At a meeting today was that the group will drive the requirement that all the Union’s negotiating document to be published in accordance with the request that EDRi (European Digital Rights) expressed to the Committee on International Trade (INTA) on 11th May this year. Vidare kommer man fortsätta driva kravet på att skicka ACTA-avtalet till European Court of Justice (ECJ) och kommer att försöka få upp sin resolution på dagordningen vid nästa plenarsammanträde. Moreover it will continue to drive the requirement to send ACTA treaty to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and will try to bring up his resolution on the agenda at the next session.
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Wireless Games Contorller Demo)
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.02.11
Posted in News Roundup at 12:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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If you think there’s only one type of geek, you apparently don’t know many geeks. It could be argued that there are as many kinds of geek as there are geeks in the world. Still, they can be loosely broken down into groups and sub-groups, recognizing that there is overlap and some exceptions. The chart at the bottom of this post is one rather amusing way of looking at the “evolution of the geek.” Personally, I’ve been really surprised to discover a rather striking contrast between Linux geeks and Ruby geeks, having spent time with “members” of both communities over the past couple of years in New York.
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Server
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Internet Solutions (IS) has acquired a majority stake in Synaq, the Johannesburg-based managed Linux service provider and messaging company, for an undisclosed sum.
IS says the deal will help it address the demand from the small and medium enterprise market for managed communications services.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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ClearOS is a network and gateway server for small organizations and distributed environments.
Guest: Michael Proper and David Loper
Download or subscribe to this show at twit.tv/floss.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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The rolling-release Arch Linux distribution has just enabled floating point textures for Mesa. This was the hotly-debated feature for Mesa that provides OpenGL floating point textures and render targets, but is disabled by default since its protected by patents in the United States and elsewhere. Arch Linux users when building new versions of Mesa will receive this support irrespective of their physical location.
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Applications
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Recently, myself and my colleagues at Pelagicore decided to try to ditch Skype for an open replacement. We have been suffering stability issues with Skype for a long time, but our customers rely on it for contact with us and most people know how it works. However, recent events such as Microsoft buying Skype and cancelling support for Asterisk motivated us to try the alternatives.
What we want to avoid is some sort of lock-in, and at the same time, we want it to be easy to have people join. After some discussions and tests we decided to go for Jabber and libjingle. This is what Google Talk uses, so anyone using GMail is automatically in. This was a big benefit for us, as we run Google Apps on our domain.
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The PiTiVi team is proud to announce the immediate availability of our new 0.14 release, with major new features, bug fixes and usability improvements. We hope you can use and enjoy the improvements in PiTiVi 0.14, and report bugs you may encounter (bugs are a fact of life! Help us hunt them out!).
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Proprietary
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This researcher has successfully reverse-engineered many of pieces of the Skype protocol (version 1.4 of the spec) for RC4 and arithmetic compression, etc. He also has a “send message to Skype” open-source code example. Version 1.4 of the protocol is slightly out-of-date right now.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The desktop wars may be finally ending, but not quite the way we may have expected.
Take the GNOME Shell interface, which reviewers admire for its general direction but have some issues with the actual execution within GNOME 3.
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LightDM, the cross-desktop display manager that provides a clean API for writing multiple user-interfaces and for delivering fast performance, continues to mature. With the Ubuntu 11.10 release in October, Ubuntu is using LightDM instead of the GDM from GNOME as the display / log-in manager. For those concerned that the KDE side may be not getting enough love, it actually is and there’s been progress made on a Qt-powered interface.
David Edmundson, a KDE developer, has written a Qt library for making simple greeter engines. “I’ve written a Qt library for making greeter engines, as well as a very basic demo greeter which is more for testing than a real demo of what can be done. This library is designed to be very QML-ready, with a strong emphasis on using models rather than simple lists.” LightDM is meant to be extended to handle various interfaces from Qt or GTK to having HTML/CSS-driven interfaces for this promising log-in manager.
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GNOME Desktop
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The user interface shell of the open source GNOME desktop environment was completely redesigned for GNOME 3.0, which was released last month. The update brought a multitude of significant changes to the environment’s underlying technical infrastructure and the user-facing desktop experience. Fedora became the first major Linux distribution to ship the new GNOME environment with the official launch last week of Fedora 15.
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The gnome developers are hard at work making the first linux desktop, that do not look like a cheap windows/mac rip off, even better. There are stupid mistakes they made along the way, but still Gnome 3.0 gives the best experience free software can offer by default. Obviously there are more feature need to be included to make it a complete replacement for your good old Gnome 2.x. For the time being you can use these extensions to get some functionalities back.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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100+ contributors in 10+ teams [...]
* 2 × 14.226 binary packages
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Red Hat Family
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Some of you may have heard that Robyn, Max, Sebastian, and I will be teaching a workshop on open source community participation to our fellow Red Hatters in Raleigh next week (June 8th, 2011). It’s the first run of such a workshop, and remixes some of the things we’ve done at POSSE for a more general audience – in a sense, we’re removing the discipline-specific (“you’re a college professor!”) parts and seeing how our stuff generalizes to folks already working in (open source) industry.
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Fedora
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Here are few things you can do after installing Fedora 15 to make the experience better. You may have to enable sudo to follow some of the tips or you can run the commands in terminal by logging in as root (su). The following are in no particular order. Feel free to skip the ones you do not need.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If smartphone hardware can run Android, a Linux-based operating system, why can’t it run a full-blown Linux distro? In fact, you can run Ubuntu on many Android-powered phones.
To get Ubuntu to run on a smartphone, some have started the OS side-by-side with Android, others have used emulators or virtualized hardware. On occasion a developer steps up and creates a bootable, functional Ubuntu image. If you’ve got an HTC Desire HD, you can count yourself as one of the lucky ones!
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Education and learning has always been an important part of the Ubuntu culture. It is important to us because we always want to present an environment in which everyone is welcome to participate, whatever your skills, location, or experience.
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A month has been passed since the eventful release of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. Many loyal Ubuntu users turned hostile with this release and Canonical’s new Unity interface is at the receiving end for what it does and what it doesn’t. I actually liked the new Unity approach to desktop and I believe that it has got a great future, provided that Canonical is able to rectify the bugs and usability issues in time. This post is for those who would like to use Unity. A quick recap of Ubuntu 11.04 tips and tricks that we published during the month.
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Ubuntu announced its 6.06 Server release 5 years ago, on June 1, 2006. For the LTS Server releases, Ubuntu committed to ongoing security and critical fixes for a period of 5 years. The maintenance period has now ended for Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server.
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS was a major milestone for the Ubuntu project, being the first long-term release. Its retirement evokes memories of Ubuntu as a younger project, and reminds us of all that we’ve accomplished together in the five years since we released the “Dapper Drake”.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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Android
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Intel on Tuesday touted “ultrabooks,” tablet and laptop tweeners that would resemble MacBook Airs, and said these lightweight devices will account for 40 percent of the laptop market by the end of 2012.
Speaking at the Computex show in Taipei, Sean Maloney, Intel’s executive vice president, said these ultrabooks will continue to improve annually. While the ultrabook phrase will generate initial buzz, these devices are evolutionary. What’s initially unclear is how an ultrabook differs from the netbook—a market under fire from tablets. Intel frequently touts next-gen reference designs. Anyone remember the mobile Internet devices (MID)?
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Amid all the brouhaha about the low power–chip tussle between Intel and ARM, another processor architecture has been quietly advancing into the same tablet and smartphone battleground: MIPS Technologies, which has announced a partnership with Beijing’s Ingenic Semiconductor to port Android 3.0, aka Honeycomb, to the Chinese chipmaker’s upcoming ultra–low power system-on-chip.
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According to Nvidia CEO Huang Jen-Hsun, Android is the fastest growing operating system in computing history
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Matt Asay doesn’t get sharing. The world needs software and FLOSS is a great way to produce it. If someone needs some software and can produce it they should. They also get to use all the software floating around in the community of FLOSS to go along with that. That is the right thing to do. Otherwise that software may not be written and our world in which we are social beings depending on and supporting each other will be poorer. It is a moral imperative of every human being and their organizations to try to make the world a better place. That’s good for everyone, not just the one doing the good work.
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Free whitepaper – Five Tips for Effective Backup and Recovery in Virtual Environments
Google has open sourced a framework for realtime video and audio inside the browser. Known as WebRTC, the framework is based on technology the company acquired with its $68.2 million purchase of Global IP Solutions (GIPS) last year.
“We’d like to make the browser the home for innovation in real time communications,” Google said in a blog post. “Until now, real time communications required the use of proprietary signal processing technology that was mostly delivered through plug-ins and client downloads.” The framework lets developers build realtime applications using HTML and JavaScript APIs.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Today we took Spread Firefox offline as I shared earlier. I want to thank everyone that has worked hard on Spread Firefox over the years. When it took off in 2004, it was truly innovative as a social network and organizing ground for our grassroots marketing efforts.
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As Mozilla continues to contend with claimed performance problems with its new Firefox 4 browser (although some reader responses to our post on the matter argue that there are none), it is achieving new milestones. According to data from StatCounter, which specializes in web analytics, the Firefox 4 browser claimed a hefty 14.2 percent of the global browser market in May–higher than the 13.2 percent claimed by the longstanding version 6. Meanwhile, the Firefox 5 beta has arrived, and there is even a new version 6 of the browser in the Aurora channel. Mozilla is moving full steam ahead with its new rapid release cycle for Firefox, competing directly with Google Chrome’s development schedule.
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FUD of the Day
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CMS
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We know that if you’re not a contributor and don’t follow us on Github, it’s hard to see Diaspora grow and evolve. Now that Diaspora is moving into its second year and a new phase of development, here are some numbers on the progress we’ve made.
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Standards/Consortia
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This may not sound like such a big deal until you realize that I am a big advocate of Open Source and Open Standards. In the Enterprise, I believe that these technologies are absolutely essential to building best of breed heterogeneous computing environments. But at home? Eh, not so much.
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The Golden Age of ever-decreasing PC prices is over, at least as far as Intel is concerned.
Speaking to investors in London last week, the chip giant’s CFO Stacy Smith boasted how the vendor had broken the pricing death spiral that has bedevilled the PC industry for most of its history.
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Security
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NATO leaders have been warned that Wikileaks-loving ‘hacktivist’ collective Anonymous could pose a threat to member states’ security, following recent attacks on the US Chamber of Commerce and defence contractor HBGary – and promise to ‘persecute’ its members.
In a toughly-worded draft report to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, General Rapporteur Lord Jopling claims that the loose-knit, leaderless group is “becoming more and more sophisticated”, and “could potentially hack into sensitive government, military, and corporate files”.
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The Internet has been an amazing force for good in the world—opening up communications, boosting economic growth and promoting free expression. But like all technologies, it can also be used for bad things. Today, despite the efforts of Internet companies and the security community, identity theft, fraud and the hijacking of people’s email accounts are common problems online.
Bad actors take advantage of the fact that most people aren’t that tech savvy—hijacking accounts by using malware and phishing scams that trick users into sharing their passwords, or by using passwords obtained by hacking other websites. Most account hijackings are not very targeted; they are designed to steal identities, acquire financial data or send spam. But some attacks are targeted at specific individuals.
Reader’s Picks and Comments
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Anti-Trust
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Lodsys didn’t expect the kind of letter it got from Apple, and it took it as a clear indication that Apple intended to litigate, if necessary, and Lodsys didn’t want that to happen in California, so it didn’t honor its word to developers that they had 21 days to respond to the cease and desist letters and went ahead and sued in Texas. Natch. However, that doesn’t at all mean that the litigation will happen in Texas, if Apple intervenes
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we cannot unilaterally publish the letter because it refers to information that was obtained with an obligation of confidentiality to Apple and we do not have their permission to do so.
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Microsoft muscles ARM makers with odious restrictions. Techrights has documented this for netbook makers and Barns and Noble has called it anti-competitive in court.
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is putting “troublesome” restrictions on makers of processors used to run the coming Windows tablet-computer operating system, Acer Inc. (2353) Chairman and Chief Executive Officer J.T. Wang said.
“They’re really controlling the whole thing, the whole process,” Wang said at the Computex trade show in Taipei without identifying the restrictions. Chip suppliers and PC makers “all feel it’s very troublesome,” he said.
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M$ is apparently trying to dictate to the world on what kinds of ARMed systems M$’s “8″ will run. … By trying to freeze the market and dictate hardware compatibility, M$ will only delay its roll-out and restrict itself to a niche. … M$ cannot force all manufacturers to use Qualcomm;s chips and Qualcomm cannot supply the whole market. … No one wants to wait for M$ to get its act together while hundreds of millions of units could be sold.
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Hardware
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Civil Rights
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“We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place,” the general said. “None of them were.” … The women were also beaten and given electric shocks
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we’ve seen a number of Fortune 500 companies that have been caught not once, not twice, but sometimes three times violating the trust of the American people, submitting false claims, paying kickbacks to doctors, marketing drugs which have not been tested for safety and efficacy … The behavior of a company starts at the top … The power to ban or “exclude” an individual rests with the inspector general. It’s routinely applied to low-level violators, but rarely to people of Solomon’s rank.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, the previous Minister for Public Service and Administration, recently described software patents as “an issue which poses a considerable threat to the growth of the African software sector”, adding that there had been “recent pressure by certain multinational corporations to file software patents in our national and regional patent offices … all of the current so-called developed countries built up their considerable software industries in the absence of software patents”. She said that for those same countries to insist on software patents now “is simply to place patents as barriers in front of newcomers”
Choose Ubuntu (new video, not an endorsement)
Credit: TinyOgg
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