03.30.10
Posted in News Roundup at 8:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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For this testing of the latest Snow Leopard and Lucid Lynx operating systems we used one of our newer Apple Mac Mini systems that had an Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 clocked at 2.00GHz, an Apple Mac-F22C86C8 motherboard with NVIDIA MCP79 Chipset, 1GB of DDR3-1067MHz system memory, a120GB Fujitsu MHZ2120B SATA HDD, and NVIDIA GeForce 9400 graphics. Mac OS X 10.6.2 uses the 10.2.0 kernel, X.Org Server 1.4.2-apple45, GCC 4.2.1, and a Journaled HFS+ file-system. With Ubuntu 10.04 LTS not being officially released for a few weeks we used a daily snapshot from 2010-03-28 with the Linux 2.6.32-17-generic 64-bit kernel, GNOME 2.29.92, X.Org Server 1.7.6, NVIDIA 195.36.15 graphics driver with OpenGL 3.2.0, GCC 4.4.3, and an EXT4 file-system. Both the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems were left with their defaults.
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Available with Linux and IPv6, the EDS1100/2100 provides simple-to-configure, enterprise-level protection of electronic data using security protocols such as Secure Shell and Secure Sockets Layer.
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· Announced Distro: Parted Magic 4.9 Comes with GParted 0.5.2 and Parted 2.2
· Announced Distro: Tiny Core 2.10 Comes with Some New Art
· Announced Distro: Trisquel 3.5 Released
· Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 4 Switches to Upstart
· Announced Distro: Sabayon Linux 5.2 with KDE 4.4.1 and GNOME 2.28
· Announced Distro: SliTaz GNU/Linux 3.0 Has Arrived
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Product engineering and enterprise solutions company Calsoft, a 100-per cent subsidiary of the US -based Calsoftlabs, today announced its entry into the digital home market.
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The company said it would target services towards software platforms based on Linux, Windows and Android.
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5. My budget is $1400
What? That low a budget for a new, and surprisingly beefy laptop? Sure! Why not? I know this is doable. Granted, it isn’t doable with a vendor like Emperor Linux — as a matter of fact it flatly rules them completely out — but it leaves in plenty of other options for me.
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Server
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Canonical has definitely made some ISV progress in recent months, working more closely with companies like Groundwork Open Source. Still, Canonical insiders starting around September 2009 because to focus quite heavily on even better ISV support heading into the Ubuntu 10.04 launch. ISV support is particularly critical as Canonical strives to compete more effectively against Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linux on servers.
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IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) celebrated a decade of Linux on its System Z mainframe by recognizing the top winners, one of whom is Canadian, of the annual Master the Mainframe Contest.
Over the years the number of customers, vendors and use cases for running Linux alongside z/OS have grown, said Tom Rosamilia, general manager for IBM’s System Z division, during a presentation at the company’s Poughkeepsie plant and the focal point of much of the development and manufacturing of mainframes.
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Applications
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The default image viewer in Ubuntu, Eye of GNOME, now offers up a helpful dialogue when viewing a picture that has been set as your desktop wallpaper.
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All in all, we see Quanta Plus as a web development tool that’s almost there. Given some more time and a steady growth to its user base, this software can become the best free alternative to the IDEs that cost hundreds of dollars.
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Debreate is a graphical utility to aid in the creation of Debian packages. It automates packaging, so there is no need to create a build tree, Debreate will automatically construct one and build the .deb.
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Huzzah! New version of Rhythmbox is released with lots of bug fixes and other goodies!
Rhythmbox holds a special place in my heart: not only is it the best Linux audio player I’ve ever used (and I’ve tried every one I’ve ever ran across), but it’s one of those driving forces that keep me motivated.
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Proprietary
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I have been following the WINE project for quite a few years. These guys are doing an incredibly hard job in trying to keep up with a moving target and basically re-writing an operating system to run natively on top of another operating system.
Many people think of the WINE project as an emulator for windows yet the very name of the project explains that it is not true. The name WINE is, as you most probably know, a typical open source acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator. The very goal of the project is to recreate, without breaking any law, the functional equivalent of the windows operating systems libraries so programs written for windows can run natively under Linux.
[...]
When there is equivalent Linux functionality for any available windows program out there, why would people still want to use windows programs? If you must use a windows program, then pay the piper and buy yourself a copy of the operating system. Or even better, learn how to effectively use the equivalent Linux program and wean yourself off of the nipple and be a big boy for a change.
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Back in November there was an official announcement from Skype concerning an open-source Linux client. Details since then have been scarce on what exactly Skype plans to provide as open-source software, with some speculating just the user-interface/front-end side will be opened up.
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Instructionals
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A few weeks ago we looked at some of the GNU utilities that you can use to work with files, check MD5/SHA1 sums and check your disk usage. This time around I want to cover some of the utilities that you’ll use for working with text files.
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While there are quite a few services that offer free blog hosting, there are situations when you’d want to run a blog on your own server. This approach has its advantages, but setting up a server and then installing and configuring a blog system can be a daunting proposition – unless you choose to use Tonido, that is. This solution offers everything you need in one neat , easy-to-install package.
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Desktop Environments
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Hello again to all the KDE people. We are here with a third interview. Last time we had Tobias König, a KDE PIM developer. Today it’s the turn of Aleix Pol, a contributor to KDE EDU and KDevelop. As usual, there is also the original interview in Italian if you prefer to read that.
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SliTaz 3.0 (release announcement) is upon us and we decided to take this tiny distribution for a spin and see how well it caters to the minimalist crowd. This distribution weighs in at an incredible 30 meg download, but does it contain the applications one needs to have a functional machine? Let’s take a look.
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Element 1.1 is a distribution designed specifically for home theater or media center computers. This is obvious when you boot up Element 1.1 which brings users Firefox, Transmission, XBMC, Decibel Audio Player, VLC, and many other useful multimedia apps together on this customized version of the XFCE desktop.
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Unity Linux is not a conventional distribution of Linux. It’s a core on which developers can build their own distribution of Linux. We’ve set out from the start to provide an excellent minimum graphical environment that gave developers “just enough graphics” for them to create something. The smaller, the better. We elected to go with Openbox because of it’s size and stability. We selected using Mandriva as our base because of the number of packages they provide and the quality of those packages. We pushed lxpanel as a minimal panel because it provides just enough functionality for distro developers to see what they’ve installed after they’ve installed it…it also is familiar to most people whereas Openbox right click menu’s may not be. All in all, our target for the core release is developers. We’re not designing this basic desktop to be used by end users. We’re not trying to win any awards with our awesome minimalistic desktop skills. Why would we do this? To answer this, you have to take a look at our developers.
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Developer Steven Shiau has announced the release of version 1.2.4-28 of Clonezilla Live. Clonezilla is an open source clone system with features similar to Symantec Ghost Corporate Ed and Partimage.
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PCLinuxOS
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One of the reasons why I said PCLinuxOS is “A real distro-hopper-stopper is its ability to auto detect your devices. I have read elsewhere that mostly, only branded tvturner cards can work with linux. To my surprise, this is not the case with tvtime, the native tvturner software in PCLinuxOS and I guess it is available out-of-the-box on every versions of PCLOS (excellent job guys!).
This software (tvtime) is so easy to use. Just right click on it and a menu will pop out for you to select a task. To get your tvturner working, simply click on “channel management” then “scan for signal” and start watching your favorite tv show!
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Looking to dress up your PCLinuxOS desktop? Check out these nice PCLinuxOS wallpapers created by sakasa.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s commercial implementation of its open-source KVM hypervisor, Enterprise Virtualization 2.1 (RHEV) is just four months old, but changes in server hardware and end users’ desire to run fatter virtual machines has compelled Red Hat to kick out another release.
The beta testing program for RHEV 2.2 opened up Monday, and with the next release, Red Hat is doubling up the number of virtual CPUs that a virtual machine can employ to 16 and is quadrupling the main memory that can be addressed by a VM to 256GB.
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Red Hat launched Enterprise Virtualization Nov. 3 based on yet another hypervisor, KVM. Red Hat had arrived on the scene late, what with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft already partying like it was 1999 all over again. I wondered how long it would take for Red Hat to be able to demonstrate some uptake of KVM.
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Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) today announced the beta availability of its next virtualization platform — Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 2.2.
The RHEV 2.2 release is the first public announcement that Red Hat has made about the virtualization platform since its initial public release in November 2009. The RHEV solution suite includes a standalone KVM hypervisor as well as a server virtualization management product.
On the performance side, RHEV 2.2 can now support up to 256 GB of memory for a virtual machine, which is a four-fold increase over the 64 GB that RHEV supported in November. Additionally with the RHEV 2.2 beta, Red Hat is expanding the platform to support both desktop and server virtualization management.
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Linux specialist Red Hat has announced the release of the first beta for version 2.2 of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization product. The latest development release of its virtualisation solution adds several new features and capabilities, including support for both virtual server and virtual desktop environments from the same management platform.
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Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the first beta release of Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop, Server, and Netbook editions and of Ubuntu 10.04 Server for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and Amazon’s EC2.
Codenamed “Lucid Lynx”, 10.04 LTS continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.
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Ubuntu Netbook Edition is optimised to run on Intel atom based netbooks. It includes a new consumer-friendly interface that allows users to quickly and easily get on-line and use their favourite applications. This interface is optimised for a retail sales environment. It includes the same faster boot times and improved boot experience as Ubuntu desktop.
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Ubuntu 10.04 is now about five weeks away, which means the announcement of Lucid+1 (our vote is still for Manky Monkey) is around the corner. To kill the time between now and the announcement of what’s to come in the next version, we decided to take a look at the keywords used to describe previous Ubuntu releases to see how priorities have changed over the years
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Intrepid Ibex users are advised to upgrade to one of the current standard releases, Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) or version 9.10 (Karmic Koala), to continue receiving updates.
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Here’s what you need to know. End-of-life (EOL) is a normal part of the software lifecycle, whether it’s an application or a full-blown operating system. Software doesn’t actually die: once the EOL date passes, your application won’t pop up a dialog box with a tombstone on it that says “so long, and thanks for all the data.” In reality, it means that the developers who wrote the software and the community or vendor that supports it simply does not have the resources to keep providing support.
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Empathy is an open source instant messaging client that is built on top of the Telepathy framework. Empathy became a part of the GNOME desktop environment in 2008 with the release of GNOME 2.24 and is gradually gaining acceptance as the default instant messaging client in a number of mainstream Linux distributions.
Although it has the potential to bring a lot of value to the GNOME desktop, Empathy still suffers from some limitations and lacks several key features that can be found in alternatives like Pidgin. For example, it doesn’t support metacontacts or message formatting. It also hasn’t traditionally offered a whole lot of compelling GNOME integration to make it a must-have. The program is maturing, however, and will soon offer some impressive new features.
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USB 3.0 promises up to 5 Gbit data transfers. Manufacturer Lindy now brings two SATA hard drive enclosures and a hard drive docking/cloning station with USB 3.0 to the marketplace.
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Android
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Zerion Software is collaborating with SDG Systems to provide ruggedized Android solutions to the mobile workforce. Together, the two companies are working to build a field data-collection solution running the offline capable exZact mobile platform on rugged Google Android computers. Both firms see a tremendous opportunity in the marketplace for such a ruggedized solution to be used for Field Service, Task Management, and Work Order Management.
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Why is Android getting such traction? For a couple of reasons, but mainly because it is free. Google is offering Android as free open source software optimized for communications. That combined with an growing library of applications and capabilities makes Android reasonably attractive as an embedded operating system.
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Zerion Software is collaborating with SDG Systems to provide ruggedized Android solutions to the mobile workforce. Together, the two companies are working to build a field data-collection solution running the offline capable exZact mobile platform on rugged Google Android computers. Both firms see a tremendous opportunity in the marketplace for such a ruggedized solution to be used for Field Service, Task Management, and Work Order Management.
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Tablets
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The JooJoo, originally called the Crunchpad, has a 12.l-inch capacitive touchscreen, Wi-Fi, a 4 GB solid-state drive and built-in Webcam and microphone for video chat. The device is powered by a proprietary, Web-centric version of Linux that boots in less than 10 seconds, the company says.
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Italy-based Ekoore is shipping a tablet PC that runs Ubuntu Linux or Windows on an Intel Atom N270. The Ekoore ET10TA10 offers a 10.2-inch, 1024 x 600 backlit touchscreen, as well as 1GB of RAM, flash expansion, a 160GB hard disk drive (HDD), and WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, and USB connections, says Ekoore.
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‘Year of Linux on the Tablet’
LXer contributor H.Kwint dug deeper into the specifics, even putting together a handy table that compares some of the contenders, including Notion Ink’s Adam Tablet and Always Innovating’s Touchbook.
“It’s safe to say 2010 is the year of Linux on the tablet,” Kwint went so far as to say.
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A first version of an open source tool to help manage electronic petitions has been published on the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) for European public administrations.
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IELO, Mandriva, Nexedi and TioLive join forces to create the Free Cloud Alliance (FCA), an alliance of Free / Open Source Software publishers which provides 100% Open Source solutions for the fast growing market of Enterprise Cloud Computing. The Free Cloud Alliance (freecloudalliance.org) is the first Open Source Cloud Computing Stack which covers both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) with a consistent set of technologies targetted at high performance and mission critical applications.
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The Midgard Project has released the eighth maintenance release of Midgard 8.09 Ragnaroek LTS. Ragnaroek LTS is a Long Term Support version of the free software Content Management Framework.
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He had ported his software to Digital’s Unix system, and now the workstation hardware only cost 50,000 to run it, so the TCO had been reduced from 2.5 million dollars to 550,000 dollars, and was really only taking twice as long to run on the workstation than it had been running on the mainframe, but at one-fifth the cost. He was selling a lot more copies of his software, and of course he was also selling quite a few of our workstations. That was why Digital had invited him to our booth.
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Despite all that, the FOSS law community is still growing- which is a testament to the power of the collaborative model. To me, the heart of the test for ‘are people a community’ is ‘can I call on a known group of people for help in a pinch, and would they feel comfortable doing the same of me.’ In this informal, unstructured way, there is definitely a growing FOSS legal community of shared interests and relationships. When Mozilla started the MPL process I could list at least a half-dozen people who I knew would want to be involved and would give of their time. A few months in to the process, and the list is now much longer. This informal community- a diverse group including partners at high-profile law firms, counsels at FOSS-using companies, individual practitioners, and others like SFLC- was very helpful in laying the early groundwork for the MPL process, and has continued to be helpful as we’ve gotten further into it.
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Programming
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What can I say? These regional Ruby conferences, they’re all good, based on my experience. This one was only weakly regional; about half the attendees were Scottish, others from all over Europe, and with a strong faction of Americans whom I presume were thinking about the Ruby-and-Whisky combination. If you haven’t been to a Ruby conference, you should go sometime.
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Interested in working with EFF or Tor, and getting paid for it by Google? If you are a student and a coder, then we have good news for you: A few of our projects have been accepted for Google’s Summer Of Code 2010.
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Standards/Consortia
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The rise of ODF and demand on the part of governments for “openness” in formats and interoperability of applications has coincided – not coincidentally in my view – with a surge in offerings (desktop, web-based, mobile) in the office productivity space, providing the public sector for the first time in recent memory with greater choice and potential cost savings. It is no wonder that more governments are jumping on the ODF bandwagon.
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I think something becomes inevitable when the positive aspects are overwhelming. Consider Marion Marchich’s points in favor of ODF:
* Avoiding lock-in
* Thinking beyond the desktop
* Ensuring long-term access
* Saving money
* Creating meaningful documents
* Enabling interoperability
Not only are these all things that users want, but they are things that are inherent in an open format, and which incur additional effort to achieve (if they are even posssible) in a closed proprietary format!
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I don’t know about you, but the presentations I create today are much simpler in design than those I created ten years ago. For example, I now never create presentations that include
* animation and builds
* slide transitions
* sound
* video
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So just how much is really needed to create and represent presentations like those above? For the representation question, an appropriate query would be “what subset of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is necessary to include all the information necessary, and nothing more?’.
The creation side can vary quite a bit. Assuming you are using ODF, it would be possible though tedious to use a text editor and command line tools to create a file. I wouldn’t want to do that and would expect something with a better user interface to make slide creation and reuse easy.
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With BIS 3.0, your BlackBerry now supports the following: OpenDocument presentations (.odp), OpenDocument spreadsheets (.ods), OpenDocument text (.odt), OpenDocument text templates (.ott) and Windows Media Audio (.wma).
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A recent campaign to add more videos to Wikipedia is being used to try and push the advantages of the open source Theora video format over those encumbered by patents. For our imminent podcast, we’re asking whether you think this campaign will work despite poor results in a recent quality comparison, or whether this issue is less about quality and more about freedom.
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Security
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Without significant political changes, none of which appear likely, the United States is going to collapse. When and how it happens is hard to say, but the U.S. government’s spending is fiscally unsustainable, as the Government Accountability Office has been warning since 1992. As one such report said, that which is unsustainable will not be sustained.
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Internet cafe users in the British capital may want to watch what they download. Scotland Yard is advising administrators of public Web spaces to periodically poke through their customers’ files and keep an eye out for suspicious activity.
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Environment
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Greenpeace activists unfurled banners of every size today outside the offices of Dell in Bangalore, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen, just as Dell executives meet to discuss a roadmap to finally remove the worst toxic chemicals from their electronics. The message around the world to Dell’s founder and CEO: “Michael Dell: Drop the Toxics!”
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Billionaire tycoon David Koch likes to joke that Koch Industries is, “The biggest company you’ve never heard of”. But the nearly US$50 million that he and his brother Charles quietly funneled to front groups which deny that climate change is a problem is no joking matter. Our new report shows how that cash, between 1997 and 2008, went to groups working to prevent action being taken against climate change.
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Finance
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In 2,615 pages of financial reform legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress, there are no rules to ensure that banks keep enough cash-like assets when credit disappears.
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The Treasury Department announced Monday that it had selected Morgan Stanley to handle the sale of its massive stake in Citigroup, spurning an offer from Goldman Sachs, which was willing to do the job at virtually no cost to the federal government.
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Indeed, the big Wall Street firm has held off on plans for a major publicity plan designed to change public opinion.
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FOX Business Network’s Charles Gasparino reported on Monday that Goldman Sachs’ (NYSE: GS) weakened image may have kept the firm from being chosen to advise the massive government sale of its stake in Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C).
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They see it as counterproductive to issue bonds and then encourage institutions to trade against them, which in their minds might create some market pressure to tank the bonds. Goldman Sachs no doubt smelled some fat fees in the nascent market for CDSs on municipal bonds. In some ways, it was an ideal situation. Lots of hedging and speculative business to be had, and the bonds back then weren’t seen as likely to go belly up. They may have found a way to lay off the risk. The state thinks Goldman should have at least informed it of its efforts to get people to bet against their bonds.
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Goldman Sachs is no longer portrayed as an impeccable monetary binge, but as a greedy giant who continues the bonus party even after taxpayers helped them out of the financial crisis, the Norwegian newspaper observes, adding that the bank has become like a swear word among the bloggers by the name of “Goldman Sucks”.
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Two women have filed complaints against Wall Street banks, claiming they were discriminated against in their jobs after taking time off to have children. They are both seeking financial compensation.
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An auditor had raised red flags about Olson’s dealings in the Congo and referred its findings to the U.S. Justice Department for potential anti-bribery-law violations. As troubling, Terralliance had yet to close its books on 2007. Two lead board members, Joe Lacob of Kleiner Perkins and Joe DiSabato of Goldman, informed Temasek’s lead negotiator, Nagi Hamiyeh, that they intended to demote the charismatic but free-spending founder to chief scientist.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Facebook has once again decided to tweak its privacy policy, but this time the Mark Zuckerberg-run company has told its users to expect another overhaul ahead of making the changes – presumably in an effort to prevent the kind of protest the Web2.0rhea site suffered last year.
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03.29.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Sony’s spin goes something like this: By removing the feature, the company says it “will help ensure that PS3 owners will continue to have access to the broad range of gaming and entertainment content from SCE and its content partners on a more secure system.”
Translation: You get something you already have (“access to [a] broad range of gaming” etc.) in trade for nothing, while Sony gets to close what it now deems a hacker loophole. What’s good for Sony is good for you, in other words.
Except when it’s not (good for you, that is). Running Linux on the PS3 allows amateur developers to tinker with the PS3′s Cell processor, Sony sanctioned, and cobble together home-baked utilities and games. It’s also been used by researchers to build “discount supercomputers” to run scientific simulations that might otherwise “cost thousands of dollars.” North Carolina State University professor Frank Mueller called it “$50,000 worth of computer power for a mere $5000.”
The majority reaction on Sony’s PlayStation blog won’t surprise anyone.
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Sound works out-of-the-box and so did Compiz desktop effects (once enabled) which is better than I expected for this weak of a CPU and GPU configuration in this machine.
This is not meant to be a review for Mandriva 2010.0, rather some comments regarding Mandriva 2010.0 being installed on a Dell Latitude XT notebook giving insight on what works natively and what doesn’t. I’m impressed with KDE4 and the Mandriva distribution, but I’ll save that talk for another post.
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Graphics Stack
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If you wondered why NVIDIA chose today to announce its canning the xf86-video-nv driver for all future GPUs and diverting users to use the VESA X.Org driver (even though most of them will start out using the Nouveau driver) until downloading their proprietary driver, it’s because they have finally launched Fermi.
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Intel’s Zou Nan hai has published a patch for the Intel kernel DRM code that provides multiple ring buffer support for Clarkdale and Arrandale systems, in other words Intel’s new IGPs that are embedded onto CPUs such as the new Core i3 530 and its stellar integrated graphics.
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Ian Romanick has just released the 7.7.1 and 7.8.0 versions of the Mesa3D open-source OpenGL stack with the DRI/Gallium3D drivers. As planned, this release is coming right on time for the end of March with Intel preparing to make its quarterly Linux graphics driver update and there is also the release of X Server 1.8 coming in the near future.
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Besides the Mesa 7.8 release announcement hitting the Mesa mailing list over the weekend, also catching our interest is a new discussion concerning S3TC texture compression in this open-source software stack. One of the developers working on Spring RTS, an open-source real-time strategy game engine for Linux and Windows, is wanting the open-source Mesa developers to implement S3TC texture compression/decompression. But this is a rather sticky situation.
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Over the past two weeks, we have published a variety of articles looking at different aspects of the open-source Linux graphics stack. These articles range from comparing the Gallium3D and classic Mesa performance to comparing the kernel mode-setting and user-space mode-setting performance. Today we are continuing with this interesting Linux graphics coverage by publishing benchmarks comparing the performance of the Radeon Mesa DRI graphics driver to AMD’s Catalyst 10.4 proprietary driver. Is the open-source driver finally catching up to AMD’s highly optimized driver? Continue reading to find out.
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Applications
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I could spend most of the day just sifting through dockapps.org. I’ll admit that a lot of them look a bit outdated, but some of them are quite smooth. I mentioned two a lo-o-ong time ago that are still very attractive — wmhdplop and wmforkplop.
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Short post to help people get the most out of Gwibber as a lot of readers keep asking me “How I got a ‘multiple columns/tweetdeck style’ Gwibber?”.
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This is the home of libquicktime, a library for reading and writing quicktime/avi/mp4 files. It provides convenient access to quicktime files with a variety of supported codecs.
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As a writer, I can instantly see the benefit of having access to the back side of a window. As a consultant and administrator, the perks of this idea are also readily apparent (imagine slapping a network diagram on the back of the Network Manager tool on your Ubuntu server…you would never forget where that diagram is).
Of course what this very idea does (besides open up huge possibilities) is showcase the flexibility and open nature of the Linux operating system. It is this sort of thinking that keeps Linux at the forefront of innovation. And these types of ideas will continue to make the Linux desktop the single most impressive desktop available.
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Astrology is a set of traditions, beliefs and systems which hold that there is a connection between the movement of heavenly bodies and events that take place on Earth such as human affairs, and personality. Astrologists use the position of the planets to try to predict future events, and to inform the psychological understanding of an individual’s psyche.
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Instructionals
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BackupPC is, well, “BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Linux, WinXX and MacOSX PCs and laptops to a server’s disk.” (BackupPC Website)
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Desktop Environments
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Clementine is a modern music player and library organiser. Clementine is a port of Amarok 1.4, with some features rewritten to take advantage of Qt4.
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The GNOME desktop environment and its underlying Gtk+ widget toolkit—which provide a user interface and a standard set of applications for Linux—have an elaborate theme system that enables users to customize the appearance of their desktop.
GNOME has attracted a vibrant community of open source artists who are collaborating to produce aesthetically sophisticated visual styles for the desktop environment. Many custom GNOME themes are published in online galleries so that they can be downloaded and installed by regular end users. The most popular of these repositories is the GNOME-Look.org Web site, which has become the de facto standard home of downloadable GNOME theming content.
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I think that is the audience Igelle is targeting: not the type of people who run Debian, Gentoo and Fedora, but the sort of people who enjoy technology like OS X, iPods and iPads. People who want to find a balance between the simplicity of a dedicated appliance and the power provided by Linux. In short, it looks like Igelle has the potential to make the netbook/tablet/mobile device market a very interesting place in the coming year.
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Minimalist
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Lightweight desktops have a multitude of uses, on netbooks, for mobile devices, for older hardware, for users with limited requirements of their systems, for connecting to applications in the cloud, and for bare knuckled programmers who prefer to work closer to the metal.
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It’s been a year since the last “stable” release of Slitaz, and whether or not the yearlong break is part of the development plan, I have been chomping at the bit, waiting for this new version.
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If I could build an entire system — and I have tried — I would want it to turn out just like Slitaz. Even my lightest, fastest efforts with outdated software in custom-built configurations can’t stand up to what Slitaz gives you for nothing. It’s fantastic stuff.
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Ubuntu
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There has been quite a bit of controversy of late in the Ubuntu and Linux communities regarding the decision by Canonical to move the buttons within the Window Manager of Ubuntu to the left hand side as opposed to the right. A lot of people are upset that this is actually more of a pain than an advance in usability and want it restored but it looks like we can expect it to stay regardless of the feedback from the community. Canonical seems convinced this is a good change and doesn’t seem eager to listen to their community on this particular topic. We’ll have to see how this affects (or doesn’t) the adoption of 10.04.
In the interim, the first beta release has been made available and we decided to take it for a test run and see the changes for ourselves. Come along for the ride why don’t you?
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Ubuntu is set to release their next Long Term Support version at the end of April, and we now have a beta version to look at and see what we can expect. There are some pretty big changes coming in Lucid Lynx, many of which are partly or fully implemented in the current beta. There are the surprising changes, the controversial changes, and the just plain cool. Though the full release is still a month away, Ubuntu 10.04 is clearly shaping up to be an impressive release.
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While not technically a feature of 10.04 itself, the opening of Ubuntu One Music Store will coincide with Lucid’s release, and support for it is already built in. The simplest way to access it is by opening up Rhythmbox, the default audio player. In the panel on the left, you should see Ubuntu One. Clicking that will let you browse the available music.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #186 for the week March 21st – March 27th, 2010. In this issue we cover: Mark Shuttleworth: Less is more. But still less, Ubuntu Server Survey 2010 released, Ubuntu One Music Store now in public beta, Ubuntu One Blog: Updates to web contacts, Call for LoCo Council Elections, Launchpad read-only 11.00-13.00 UTC March 31st, 2010, Planning For 10.10 – Growing Our Translations Community, Ubuntu participates in Google Summer of Code, Reviewers Team – Where are we, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS – Free Culture Showcase Winners, Full Circle Magazine #35 & Podcast #3, and much, much more!
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Variants
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I was just installed a popular distro in Indonesia called Blankon. This distro is based on Ubuntu 9.04. Off course with all features and capabilities of Ubuntu 9.04. Here I want to write my opinion or self review regarding this Blankon Linux.
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Although not many readers of OMG! Ubuntu! use Xubuntu I thought it’d be polite of us to check in with the Xubuntu team and see what was going on in their forthcoming release of Xubuntu 10.04.
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The Palm Pre Plus and Pixie Plus are coming to AT&T though the timing of the release is up to the carrier to announce at a later date.
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ARM
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The Atomic netbooks are still too pricey, heavy and brutal. Many consumers considering buying a netbook may be waiting for the expected flock of new offerings with ARM power, a kind of hardware-vapourware. The netbook will continue to have a growing market, just not with x86.
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TFA also does hint that with ARM it is conceivable that devices for power users and servers are just around the corner. In the Year of ARM, all things are possible. AMD and Intel are now producing chips with multiple cores each of which is more powerful than necessary. ARM can just walk in and take up slack because there is no way Wintel can offer more than ARM can. We see that in smartbooks now. There are more apps available for ARM on smartbooks than that other OS because developers can move phone apps to ARM on a smartbook very easily. There are tons of phone apps out there.
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This personal change is one of the biggest reasons that I am committed to free software. Using Windows only reinforced my belief in my own incompetence at fixing or improving things. By contrast, free software proved to my that I was capable of far more than I had ever imagined.
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As a new member of the Board (as of 1 April), I thought that it would be useful to explain why I wanted to join the OSI Board and what I hope to achieve during my term. As you can see from my bio (on the Board member page), I’ve been involved with software, both proprietary and open source, for my entire career, both in industry and in the research community.
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Can you see now what the real problem is? Especially considering that even recent law proposals at the national level aren’t so robust after all? This sentence may be just the first confirmation that several laws already approved, even with the best intentions, are in fact weak enough to not be enforceable. At this point, I really wonder how many local Free Software laws in other Countries are in the same situation. If you know the answer, please tell me! As far as Italy is concerned, it will be very interesting to hear what the new Piedmont Regional Council, that will be elected on March 29th 2010, will say about this, since there should be in it at least some of the 31 candidates that had officially committed to support Free Software if elected. Even other italian Regions, however, will have to rethink very carefully their Free Software strategies.
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Oracle
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We’ve known that Oracle is to make some Solaris / OpenSolaris changes, but all signs have been that they would move forward with the OpenSolaris 2010.03 release in March as planned. OpenSolaris 2010.03 will supersede OpenSolaris 2009.06 that was released last June.
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Openness
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Ian White, the CEO of Urban Mapping, makes his living collecting and selling geo data. For next week’s Where 2.0 has put together a panel of government mapping agencies (the UK’s Ordnance Survey and the US’s Census Department) and community-built mapping projects (Open Street Map and Waze). Crowdsourced projects like Waze and Open Street Map have forced civic agencies to reconsider their licensing. They have similarly encouraged larger companies like Google, NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas to implement their own crowdsourcing platforms (like Google Mapmaker and Tele Atlas’ MapShare). Ian and his panelists will discuss all of this in Base Map 2.0 on Thursday at Where 2.0 – you can consider their conversation as Part 1 of the panel.
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Open Source Hardware is hardware that has an open license. You can copy it, develop it, and even sell it yourself. You must provide attribution to the designer and you must also release the derivative source files under the same license. This applies even if you use a proprietary program for your designs.
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A search engine is being created to help historians find useful sources.
The Connected History project will link up currently separate databases of source materials.
Once complete, it will give academics or members of the public a single site that lets them search all the collections.
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Programming
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Geany is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that was created to be light-weight and independent as possible. I’ve used Geany for sometime now. I haven’t used it on C or anything like that, but I use it (daily) for xhtml, css, and php. When I learn JavaScript and Python I will be programming those in Geany also.
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Standards/Consortia
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Document Freedom Day is a global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Open Document Formats and Open Standards in general. Every year on the last wednesday in March, we celebrate his day. This year in The Netherlands in conferencecentre “Het Brandpunt” in Baarn, the former residence of the Dutch queen, we will have five speakers who will talk about the importance of open documents and open standards for the Dutch government.
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IBM’s former server chief, Robert Moffat, is heading to court on Monday after he agreed to waive his right to a grand jury in a case related to the Galleon Group insider-training scandal, according to court documents.
The waiver sets the stage for Moffat to enter a plea in the case relating to his involvement in an insider-trading scheme that netted some stock traders millions of dollars in illicit profits.
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Nokia on Friday said it will acquire Novarra, a privately-held company based in Chicago that specializes in mobile browsing.
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BT is annoying business broadband customers by hijacking their browsers to nag them to download a branded desktop utility.
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A two-week old report by the Washington Post is only now gaining traction in the tech section. It appears that Apple has boycotted Fox News based on Glenn Beck and his ludicrous statements, including calling President Obama a racist and branding progressivism a “cancer.”
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Security
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Zurich Insurance has promised to improve its information security after losing personal financial information on 46,000 British clients through careless handling of unencrypted backup tapes.
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The countries of hackers originating malware-laced spam runs have been exposed by new research, which confirms they are often located thousands of miles away from the compromised systems they use to send out junk mail.
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As Britain heads for the next general election, the Labour government is rushing through a new surveillance law that gives the customs office the right to open your mail without you present, replacing the old system that only allowed the government to read your mail after notifying you, giving you a chance to appeal, and only then could they open it, with you present.
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INSPECTOR PIERRE KNACKER of le Paris Yard has fingered the collar of the 25 year-old unemployed bloke who hacked into US President Obama’s Twitter account.
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Whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks is planning to release a video that reveals what it’s calling a Pentagon “cover-up” of an incident in which numerous civilians and journalists were murdered in an airstrike, according to a recent media advisory.
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The UK Government holds more data on citizens than it needs to, according to members of the Chartered Institute for IT (the British Computer Society).
Nudging two-thirds (61%) of the 400 IT professional members questioned said the state held more data on citizens than necessary. Only 17% believed that citizen’s rights were adequately protected by the current regulations.
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The leading domain name registrars in the United States appear to be dragging their feet on the deployment of DNS Security Extensions, an emerging standard that prevents an insidious type of hacking attack where network traffic is redirected from a legitimate Web site to a fake one without the Web site operator or user knowing.
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The campaign to freeze accounts associated with former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and former Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko led to the birth of Internet scammers, posing as family members with millions of dollars to hide from the authorities.
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CIVIL liberties groups have condemned a sinister new plan for Scottish police forces to spy on ordinary citizens using unmanned surveillance drones.
The Big Brother-style move will mean the public could be monitored constantly, under the pretext of a crime crack-down.
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The home secretary has revealed plans for primary legislation requiring passport applicants to be fingerprinted and enrolled on the National Identity Register
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Environment
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Greenpeace held protests outside the offices of Dell in Bangalore, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen on Monday, to demand firmer commitments from the company that it will phase out harmful chemicals from its products by 2011.
Officials at Greenpeace said that the environmental group planned the action ahead of a meeting on Monday at Dell headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, at which Michael Dell, the company’s CEO, is scheduled to discuss the phasing out of the harmful chemicals.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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If you thought corporate “astroturfing” (fake grassroots activity) was a problem at sites like Yelp and Amazon that feature user reviews of products, imagine how much worse it would be if the U.S. government employed a couple hundred thousand people to “shape the debate” among online political forums. Crazy, right? What government would ever attempt it?
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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I suppose if terrorists were precision bombers who had to place their charges to the millimetre in order to succeed, this would make sense, but given that no one’s ever shown that terrorists attacks involve carefully photographing the attack-site (as opposed to simply walking up to it, finding a likely spot, and blowing up), this is simply a good way of absorbing police/security time that could be spent chasing actual bad guys.
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Back in 2008, Matt Blaze put the push for immunity for telcos that participated in GW Bush’s illegal wiretapping program in context: “As someone who began his professional career in the Bell System (and who stayed around through several of its successors), the push for telco immunity represents an especially bitter disillusionment for me. Say what you will about the old Phone Company, but respect for customer privacy was once a deeply rooted point of pride in the corporate ethos.
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A co-founder of popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia praised Google for its decision to stop censoring Internet searches in China and called on other major U.S. companies, including Microsoft and Facebook, to follow.
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It’s been a long time but it seems Commissioner Cecilia Malström is the next person to pick up the poisoned apple of net filtering and apply cynical arguments from the proponents of these measures. Feels like 1996.
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Lost Battles
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A small-scale study shows that some French people are changing their habits and getting pirated music and movies from sources not covered by the law.
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The government could face a public backlash over its plans to switch national radio stations over to digital transmission, peers have warned.
The Communications Committee of the House of Lords says there is “public confusion and industry uncertainty”.
It said people were still buying analogue radios which will be out of date in a few years’ time.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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I get an additional 20 percent on top of my customary royalty if you buy it from me, and you get a book that has no DRM and no crappy “license agreement” requiring you to turn over your firstborn in exchange for the privilege of handing me your hard-earned money.
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Late last year, a draft of the European Union proposal for the intellectual property chapter of the Canada – EU Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement leaked online. The leak revealed that the EU was seeking some significant changes to Canadian IP laws. Negotiations have continued and I have now received an updated copy of the draft chapter, complete with proposals from both the EU and Canada. The breadth of the demands are stunning – the EU is demanding nothing less than a complete overhaul of Canadian IP laws including copyright, trademark, databases, patent, geographic indications, and even plant variety rights.
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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If you believed Rupert Murdoch’s droppings and other offerings from the lamescream press corpse, you’d think the net was a minor event, a passing fancy which, while it’s having a certain effect on traditional media, isn’t terribly important in the overall scheme of things.
The reality is: modern 21st-century communications wielded person-to-person, direct, have already permanently unseated the old-style print and electronic media outlets. Increasingly, ordinary people are talking to each other one-on-one, or group-to-group, via blogs, citizen journalist sites, IM, chat, cellphones and other hand-helds, and so on.
Rupert, et al, don’t stand a chance.
[...]
Bottom line, although ACTA being touted as a trade agreenment, it’s the thin end of a wedge which would ultimately give the cartels what amounts to governmental-type control over what people do and how they do it not only online, but off.
But for the first time in history, People Power rules. And they know it.
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The copyright industries wanted border-searches on anything digital you were carrying that could be used to infringe copyright, from your phone to your iPod to the laptop that had your confidential client documents, your personal email, your finances, pictures of your kids in the bath, etc.
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IFLA and its members are gravely concerned by the extreme secrecy surrounding the ACTA negotiations and the complete lack of transparency related to ACTA’s procedures, provisions, and priorities, which is unprecedented for a global-norm setting activity among democratic nations. The issues involved have many facets and should be discussed in an open and fair manner at WIPO, the appropriate forum for such topics.
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My latest Guardian column, “Does the BPI want MPs to debate the digital economy bill properly?” addresses the British Phonographic Institute’s weird, vehement silence on Parliament’s debate on its pet legislation, the dread Digital Economy Bill. Vehement silence? Oh yes.
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“No changes in domestic” law promised the partners currently negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. A leaked 56-page recent consolidated version of the much-discussed agreement shows that this might not be completely true. The draft version with a lot of bracketed text shows that some countries are more open about the potential need to change their domestic laws than others.
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These three points have been repeatedly documented in each and every piece of information that has been disclosed, since the beginning of the ACTA process:
* ACTA is policy laundering1 in which an international negotiation is used to circumvent democratic debates at national or European level and adopt policy that the Parliaments will have no choice but to reject completely or adopt as a whole. Congress might not even be consulted in the case of the United States2.
* The promoters and drafters of ACTA have created a mixed bag of titles3, types of infringement and enforcement measures, in which life-endangering fake products and organized crime activities are considered together with non-for-profit activities that play a role in access to knowledge, innovation, culture and freedom of expression. ACTA would create a de facto presumption of infringement.
* In the negotiations, the EU is pushing the worse parts of the former directive proposal on criminal sanctions for IPR enforcement (IPRED 2, withdrawn because of uncertain legal basis), that is criminal sanctions for abetting or inciting to infringement.
Till The Clouds Roll By (1946)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Datalight Inc. announced support for Linux kernel versions up to 2.6.29 with new versions of FlashFX Tera, the file-system independent flash memory manager and Reliance Nitro, its high-performance file system. FlashFX Tera version 1.2 offers out-of-the-box support for over 300 different flash memory parts from various suppliers, expanding the choice for OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) using flash memory.
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Desktop
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Security software company AVG has released a free Linux-based boot utility that can be burned to CD or DVD as well as extracted to a USB flash drive.
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MAC or PC?: Neither — Linux. I think the best operating system around is Ubuntu Linux and I’ve been using it pretty extensively for the last year or two.
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Server
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During celebrations at its Poughkeepsie plant of a decade of opening its mainframe to run Linux apps, a Canadian student is recognized as a winner of the 2009 Master the Mainframe Contest. An exec explains why the mainframe is “middle-aged”
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Hosting-oriented Linux operating system developer CloudLinux (www.cloudlinux.com) issued a white paper this week, offering the details of a study conducted by the company on server load issues faced by companies in the shared web hosting space.
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In the sequel to “Happy Feet,” the Penguins will be the same size. But the data center will be much smaller. The digital production company Dr. D Studios has packed a large amount of supercomputing power into a smaller package in its new rendering facility in Sydney, Australia.
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Applications
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GnuPG & Gpg4winGNU Privacy is a free software encryption application that is a product of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Software project. GnuPG provides a complete free software implementation of the OpenPGP standard RFC4880, making it interoperable with other OpenPGP complaint systems. Out of the box GnuPG provides a command line interface (CLI) with numerous optional graphical add-ons available for nearly all platforms.
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Browsers
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The results? Opera was slower than the development version of Google Chrome on Linux. Not by very much, but Opera scored 523.2ms vs Chrome’s 394.8ms and didn’t blow past Chrome as expected. Note that I re-ran the tests several times, but the links are to representative results.
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Two years, and this time around no attempts. For the 2nd year in a row, Google Chrome has gotten through the Pwn2Own competition without being hacked.
The competition, which focuses on security holes in mainstream software, is in its 4th year. To commemorate the anniversary, total prize money this year was increased to $100,000, with $40,000 being allotted to the hacking of Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari browsers at $10,000 for the first hack on each respective software.
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Games
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The first version was released May 31st 2005, released entirely GPL and free over the net, a first for a project of its kind. Since then it has been downloaded over 1.5 million times, and the game is still being updated and developed, currently at version 2.5 and new releases being developed.
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Many believe that Wine and other Windows emulation solutions may be their only recourse for high-quality gaming enjoyment. That, however, it not entirely true. There are plenty of smaller, independent gaming houses developing and releasing premium commercial games for Linux alongside Mac and Windows offerings. Search hard enough and you’ll find games ranging from low-resource puzzle solvers to 3D first-person shooters.
Let’s have a look at some of the games recently released for Linux and a few up-and-coming prospects for the future. Stop Wine-ing. Start playing.
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Any game that is based on the browser alone will work fine in Linux. For browser based games like Farmville, these will all work in browsers as long as there are the Flash and Java plugins. These work the same in Linux as on any other operating system.
The second type of gaming is open source games. There are quite a few free games that are made for Linux as well as other operating systems. Since these are open source, it’s easy for programmers to port various versions of the game for the different operating system choices that exist.
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The MythTV developers have announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC1) for version 0.23 of their open source digital video recorder (DVR). The latest development preview of the media centre for Linux includes several changes, updates and new features.
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Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a single open source middleware platform integrated into a single, simple SOA integration and business process automation platform. The architecture is designed to find, integrate and orchestrate SOA business services, enterprise applications, and other IT assets into automated business processes.
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“Lucid Lynx” is the codename given to Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux 10.04, now in beta, which adds social networking features and a new look to the popular Linux distribution. A final release is due April 29, the company said.
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Wind River, which is owned by Intel, and Cavium will sell versions of Wind River’s VxWorks and Linux multicore software optimised for Cavium’s OCTEON family of multicore processors.
“Our partnership no doubt sends a strong message to the market about our long-term commitment to support multiple generations of Cavium products,” said Roger Williams, vice president, Alliances and Business Development, Wind River.
In November, Cavium Networks agreed to acquire MontaVista Software for $50m, in a deal which confirms the growing importance of Linux software support for processor suppliers.
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Korenix is pleased to release the brand new embedded programmable Layer3 Routing Computer – JetBox 5430-w with Linux computing capabilities and -40 ~80oC wide operating temperature range designed to provide advanced network performance in front-end industrial control applications.
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With the addition of Paragon NTFS for Linux and HFS+ for Linux, users will be able to attach their Windows and/or Mac-formatted external HDDs to the iConnect Wireless Data Station, thereby turning it into an NAS device.
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Phones
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Palm Pre overclockers will be thrilled to find out that new custom 720MHz and 800MHz Linux kernels have finally been released by unixpsycho and caj2008, and you can check out the demonstration as well as installation instructions from the video above.
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The new e-reader will likely end up working on various Linux platforms, not just Android.
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ST-Ericsson has developed a Linux-based chip platform that could reduce the wholesale price of smartphones to less than €100.
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Nokia
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With MeeGo set to launch on ARM-based and Intel Atom-based devices this month, we grabbed a few minutes with Peter Schneider from Nokia recently to talk about MeeGo, the first fruit from the Nokia-Intel joint venture announced last June.
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Android
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Mentor Graphics, which has developed a set of Android software development tools, will host two talks on Android for embedded systems, including one that will describe how Android or Linux can co-exist with a real-time operating system. A third talk will be hosted by Bill Gatliff, an independent consultant.
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2) Android Operating System
Yes, Android runs on a lot of different phones, but it’s also the operating system for the Nexus One phone. The difference between the Nexus One and all the other phones is that Google owns it and puts its own stamp of approval on it.
The open source Android operating system on the Nexus One phone means that Google will be employing their own engineers to make the Nexus One more efficient. This “in house” approach of Google will more than likely launch the Nexus One far ahead of their competitors that are equally powered by Android.
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“Don’t worry,” Schmidt smiles. There’s another kind of Android, which is totally open source. “Other companies do whatever they want, and we don’t even know about it. So when we go to these conferences, all of these random devices show up with Android in them, that we’ve never heard of. Which is the benefit of open source and very, very exciting. So it looks like we have got a huge, huge success with Android.”
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Android’s smartphone army is at least 20 phones strong, plus a ragtag rear guard of e-book readers, tablets and set-top boxes.
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Sub-notebooks
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Intel has launched a Moblin version of its AppUp Center, offering a storefront for developers looking to sell applications for the Linux-based Netbook operating system.
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The Intel Appup Centre Beta goes live today in the US and Canada and will be coming to 27 European countries at the end of the month.
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Two Asus Eee PCs are currently circulating the news, the first of which revealing that the AMD-powered Asus Eee PC 1201T has finally reached American shores thanks to Newegg.com. The 12-inch Eee PC seems priced just right, costing penny-pinchers $389.99. The drawback is that the device comes naked, baring no operating system whatsoever but can easily be solved with your favorite Linux distro.
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The Google Chrome OS which is a Linux based operating system includes a newly released Chrome OS app launcher which is similar to the Windows start menu.
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Tablets
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In a development that it claims will be a game-changer in education, technology company Marvell has announced the prototype of a $99 tablet computer that students can use to surf the web, interact with electronic textbooks and other digital media, and collaborate with each other around the globe.
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Behold: the OpenPeak OpenTablet 7. It is a Linux tablet running on the Intel Moorestown 1.9 GHz chip. For those of you who don’t remember, Moorestown is an Atom-derived CPU for mobile platforms like smartphones.
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I’m currently in full-on development mode on two projects, a Mac application and a website, and while I’ve been toiling I’ve found some terrific open-source code that has saved me weeks of programming time. So this column is a bit of a goody-bag of assorted open-source utilities that I’ve been using in earnest.
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Also available are a number of “open source” GIS applications. Open source software is usually free, written by a community of users who all have access to the source code. The users constantly refine the software, posting new versions and specialized add-ins to the basic application. Open source products lack the flash of commercial packages, but often work as well or better than the high-priced types. There is an index of open source GIS products at http://opensourcegis.org.
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Nowadays her conceptions are commonplace in the world of technology. Sadly, her gender remains drastically under- represented and that imbalance remains particularly bad in the one area of computing that one would expect to be the most open to new ideas and communities – open-source software development.
Anyone can join an open-source project. Communally run, you need no interviews or prior experience to contribute. All you need is a computer and an internet connection to start work on these free-to-join, free-to- distribute, free-to-use,software and hardware projects.
In practice, open-source lags behind other disciplines in its gender diversity.
A 2006 census of the Ubuntu community, one of the more consciously welcoming of open- source projects, showed only 2.4 per cent who were identified as women. This is profoundly worse than the level of involvement by women in technical professions or academic computer science, which has levels of between 10 and 30 per cent.
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Exadel Fiji extends JSF by allowing the use of Flex with JSF components and within a JSF page. It comes with ready-to-use charting components based on Flash as well as universal wrapper which allows to wrap any Flash component as JSF component.
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This is the version of document viewer we will be releasing as open source software in the very, very near future.
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Going Open Source is another important step in WeWebU’s growth strategy. They have decided to adopt a Commercial Open Source business model in addition to the traditional license sale. Stefan Waldhauser, co-founder and CEO of WeWebU, is excited: “I think Commercial Open Source is a significant trend in the software industry. Since our foundation ten years ago, WeWebU has always been driven by technology and the power of innovation. A Commercial Open Source strategy fits perfectly to our OpenWorkdesk offering and the objective to deliver the best way to build Composite Content Applications.”
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The UTM offering, called Ubiq-Freedom which is available under an open-source licence includes open-source software such as Squid caching proxy for the Web and IP tables for the firewall.
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More recently Bletchley Park played host to a national partnership, designed to encourage the UK local authorities to work together to save £60 million a year across their educational ICT budgets, through the use of open source solutions.
“The 17 Local Authorities comprising the North West Learning Grid will now be looking at the feasibility of implementing open source solutions in all areas of their education services,” said the CEO of the North West Learning Grid, Gary Clawson, in October.
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Security researchers on Friday unveiled an open-source device that captures the traffic of a wide variety of wireless devices, including keyboards, medical devices, and remote controls.
Keykeriki version 2 captures the entire data stream sent between wireless devices using a popular series of chips made by Norway-based Nordic Semiconductor. That includes the device addresses and the raw payload being sent between them. The open-source package was developed by researchers of Switzerland-based Dreamlab Technologies and includes complete software, firmware, and schematics for building the $100 sniffer.
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Users are able to program a virtual robot in C++ and modify the virtual environment to suit a wide range of situations.
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Magento (formerly known as Varien), the company behind an open source ecommerce platform aptly named Magento, relaunched their Solution Partner Program in April 2009. And in last year’s Open Source 50 report, Magento was listed in the “Best of the Rest” section based on limited information and feedback from solution partners about the partner program. Fast forward to the present, and the company is showing some partner momentum. Magento’s story offers some important lessons for other open source partner programs.
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Google
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There are other tools and services that you can use for web app scanning. Nikto is one and it is open sourced. The formerly open source tool Nessus is another. There are also software as a service providers such as White Hat security who do web app scanning. NTSpyder is another non-open tool for web app testing.
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Their goal is to cultivate the next generation of open-source software developers in evolutionary biology and promote the open, collaborative development of reusable, interoperable, standards-supporting informatics tools. And for the first time, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, a umbrella group that guides the development of BioPerl, Biopython, BioJava, BioRuby, and several other open source bioinformatics projects, has also been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s GSoC.
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Events
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Open source software adoption in the embedded systems domain is gaining growing interest within the European industrial and academic communities. Despite it represents the key towards flexibility, cost reduction and increased competitiveness, it is not easy to assess and evaluate Open Source software quality, thus making industries still skeptic about its integration into proprietary solutions.
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Not familiar with the conference? The Open World Forum is “the leading summit bringing together decision-makers and communities to cross-fertilize free/Open Source technological, economic and social initiatives to build the digital future.” This conference discusses the future of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) projects, presents its Innovation Awards, looks at current trends and examines all of this in terms of the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap (news, site).
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This year for the first time, O’Reilly’s Open Source convention contains a track on health care IT. The call for participation just went up, soliciting proposals on nine broad areas of technology including health data exchange, mobile devices, and patient-centered care.
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SaaS
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Coupling open source software with cloud computing expertise could help Abiquo make a big splash with U.S. customers looking to create and manage virtual resources pools on premise or in public environments. And with support for VMware, Xen, Virtual Box, KVM and now Microsoft Hyper-V, the Spanish start-up promises to deliver vendor-neutral, interoperable management at a reasonable price.
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Oracle
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Sun Solaris 10 was previously available for free without support after submitting a valid email. With the Sun acquisition finalized, Oracle has only given customers a 90-day free trial of Solaris 10, hoping to gain some paying customers from those with existing Solaris 10 systems. This change could lead to a mass migration to Linux vendors. Most of Linux’s new customers come from Unix migrations, and Solaris 10 is the largest Unix platform.
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Business
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Alfresco’s cloud efforts are part of a broader channel effort at the company, which has shown momentum in the past year or so. Alfresco landed near the top of the 2009 Open Source 50 report, which tracks the most promising open source partner programs (the 2010 research is under way now).
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The growth of open-source software in the commercial sector was also noted, and the promotion of open-source projects by commercial open-source companies was cited as a factor. (REvolution Computing promoting the R Project was one example given.) The other theme I spotted was innovation: while lowering costs is still the #1 ranked feature of open-source, access to new methods and the rapid pace of innovation in FOSS compared to proprietary software is now being listed as a critical reason to switch.
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During his seven year stretch as CEO of MySQL, Mickos turned the open source database market on its ear, growing MySQL from a startup to one of the most prominent open source company in the world. He grew MySQL to the point thatSun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA) swooped in and acquired it with a $1 billion offer, an unheard of sum for an open source company.
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Openness
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There is no evidence Sunstein’s theories of governmental information control have to do with the apparent increasing persecution of open source leak outlets, but it does seem to stem from the same kind of authoritarian instinct.
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Wikipedia is close to rolling out a new design that it hopes will make the “user-edited” encyclopedia easier to use and navigate, and thus potentially appeal to new users more than the slightly clunky-looking current site.
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FLOSS Manuals, true to its name, produces manuals for free software applications. The manuals themselves are freely licensed and often written in book sprints. This January, as part of the Transmediale festival in Berlin, FLOSS Manuals attempted its first non-manual booksprint — a considerably harder task, as no structure is implied. Only the book title, Collaborative Futures, was given — a collaborative experiment about the future of collaboration.
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In the midst of Treena Grevatt’s twitter reminders of the early start of cycling in Ottawa (and her retweets of wise words and links such as this to remind motorists like me!), it was encouraging to read the recent story entitled Kids traffic safety curriculum goes open source.
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Before Peter Suber became Mr Open Access, he was a philosopher by trade. This is evident in the long, thoughtful essays he writes for the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, which help console us for his absence these days from the world of blogging.
Here’s the latest of them, entitled “Open access, markets, and missions”. It asks some deep questions about what kind of scholarly publishing we should strive for: market oriented or mission oriented?
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Dr. John Hilton, who until just recently was a doctoral student of mine, has written a great dissertation on the impact giving away free ebooks has on sales of printed books. The findings may surprise you.
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Apple’s e-book reader application, iBooks, may be more widely available than anticipated, thanks to the inclusion of more than 30,000 free e-books from Project Gutenberg.
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Standards/Consortia
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Internet Wideband Audio Codec (Active WG)
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Today we have quick fire and semi or completely anonymous attacks on people, brands, businesses and just about everything else. And it is becoming increasingly findable on the search engines. Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, etc. are the new printing presses, and absolutely everyone, even the random wingnuts, have access.
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The UK government needs to be “less deferential” towards the US and more willing to say no to Washington, a group of MPs have said.
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Illustration: Markus Hofko
Early this year, the big brains at Google admitted that they had been outsmarted. Along with 33 other companies, the search giant had been the victim of a major hack — an infiltration of international computer networks that even Google couldn’t do a thing about. So the company has reportedly turned to the only place on Earth with a deeper team of geeks than the Googleplex: the National Security Agency.
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Security
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Do this, do that, sit up, shut up and obey, we’re in charge.
[...]
“Anyone who has turned on a commercial radio station recently will have worked out his latest trick: a mass propaganda splurge before an election campaign. Get on a bus, and it can be 100 percent state adverts – advising how Big Brother will help you get a job, buy a car, see off door-to-door salesmen, give you a job in the prison services – anything you want.”
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You may have read about the ‘confusion’ caused when Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary crashed like an elephant from a great height on the small social innovation project already known as MyPolice.
That the good Inspectorate a) failed to spot the existence of the MyPolice incumbents, b) demonstrated a complete inability to change anything when it was noticed, and c) thought that two entirely different propositions having exactly the same name wouldn’t confuse people are all pretty damning in their own ways.
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Labour’s plan to allow tax inspectors to open private mail before it is delivered is unacceptable in a democracy
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Wikileaks, the crusading non-profit web site that publishes documents companies and governments don’t want released, is alleging that the U.S. State Department and possibly the CIA have been spying on the group and its volunteers, following them on airplanes and even monitoring their production meetings in an Icelandic fish-and-chip restaurant. In a blog post on the Wikileaks site, the group’s co-founder, Julian Assange, asserts that the spying “includes attempted covert following, photographing, filming and the overt detention & questioning of a WikiLeaks’ volunteer in Iceland.”
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If it could further ram home the point that violent crime is very rare – and its prevalence is something that’s continually hyped-up by those with a vested interest in accentuating negativity for the furtherance of their own agendas – it would be perfect.
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Indonesia has launched a new biometric system to improve security at its airports and seaports.
The system captures facial images and fingerprints of arriving passengers and are checked against the immigration database for clearance.
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Following reports of multiple attacks on the offices of Democrats who voted for healthcare reform over the weekend, Republican House whip Eric Cantor held an angry press conference on Thursday claiming that his office had been attacked by gunshot and accusing Democrats of “dangerously fanning the flames”. But on closer examination the “attack” on Cantor’s office turns out to be ambiguous at the least.
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Of concern to British politicians, too, is that a former prime minister has been stone cold silent about being on the payroll of an immense multinational oil corporation, specializing in oil exploration in Iraq, and one that coincidentally happens to find itself in another challenging part of the globe.
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Science
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Garibaldi, a rock climber in his spare time, did the math to disprove the theory, which involves a mysterious structure known as E8. The resulting paper, co-authored by physicist Jacques Distler of the University of Texas, will appear in an upcoming issue of Communications in Mathematical Physics.
In November of 2007, physicist Garret Lisi published an online paper entitled “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.” Lisi spent much of his time surfing in Hawaii, adding an alluring bit of color to the story surrounding the theory. Although his paper was not peer-reviewed, and Lisi himself told the Daily Telegraph that the theory was still in development and he gave a “low” likelihood to the prediction, the idea was widely reported in the media, under attention-grabbing headlines like “Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything.”
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Environment
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Under mounting pressure over illegal logging of its national parks, Madagascar’s transitional government on Wednesday reinstated a ban on rosewood logging and exports.
The decree (no. 2010-141), which prohibits all exports of rosewood and precious timber for two to five years, was announced during a council meeting held yesterday at Ambohitsorohitra Palace in Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital city. Madagascar’s Minister of Environment has already proposed a plan to address the illegal timber trade, according to the Madagascar Tribune.
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Hollywood movies and popular television shows featuring cute monkeys and other primates are driving demand for them as exotic pets, only to leave the animals psychologically damaged.
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To conservationists it was a gratuitous act of provocation; but to the Japanese officials whose embassy served bluefin tuna sushi to guests hours before last week’s UN vote on a trade ban on the fish, it was a show of confidence that their diplomatic offensive had worked.
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Earlier this month, we told you about a WildAid public service announcement starring Chinese basketballer Yao Ming that discouraged people from eating shark’s fin soup.
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Simon Lewis, an expert on tropical forests at the University of Leeds in the UK, says the Sunday Times’ “inaccurate, misleading and distorted” story by Jonathan Leake in January left readers under the wrong impression that the 2007 IPCC AR4 report made a false claim by stating that reduced rainfall could wipe out up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest. Lewis filed a formal complaint this week with the UK Press Complaints Commission.
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If investment is, in fact, directly proportionate to results, then you might one day be able to wave goodbye to the lingering cloud of pollution that keeps your skin ghostly white year-round. According to a new report called Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race? China outspent every country in the world, clean energy-wise, in 2009, beating the $18.6 billion spent by the US nearly two-to-one.
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The head of the UN’s climate change panel has accused politicians and prominent climate sceptics of “a new form of persecution” against scientists who work on global warming.
In a strongly worded article published on the Guardian website, Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hit out at those in “positions of power and responsibility” who try to portray “dedicated scientists as climate criminals”.
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High court rules that decision to expand Heathrow airport must be reconsidered in respect to UK climate change policy
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Finance
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Charlotte Hanna did. The former vice president of Goldman Sachs Group filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court in Manhattan this week, claiming that the bank demoted her because she elected to take advantage of its part-time track after her first maternity leave, then fired her while she was on her second.
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Among the banks that rule Wall Street, Citigroup got a bailout that was bigger than the rest. Now the company is about to pay a king’s ransom for its federal rescue.
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Against all the odds, a glimmer of hope for real financial reform begins to shine through. It’s not that anything definite has happened – in fact most of the recent Senate details are not encouraging – but rather that the broader political calculus has shifted in the right direction.
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Just when you thought you’d had enough of Goldman Sachs running things — and running them into the ground — along comes Meg Whitman. Most Californians know she’s using her fortune to run for governor. They probably don’t know that she was once on the board of Goldman Sachs, and most likely still would be if she hadn’t been cited for a practice one law firm describes as “essentially … an illegal bribe … to corporate leaders.” Then came the Congressional investigation, and the investor lawsuit, and … well, it was probably best to just leave the board.
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Goldman Sachs is looking to open a branch office in Warsaw, in a move to take advantage the Polish government’s plans to sell $10 billion worth of assets in share offerings this year, Bloomberg News reported.
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Former Goldman Sachs vice president Charlotte Hanna has filed a lawsuit against the financial giant, claiming she suffered discrimination and then termination for bearing children. Following the birth of her first child in 2005, Hanna returned to work part-time.
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It’s simply excellent how Goldman has managed to dress up xenophobia AND racism as “shareholder value maximization”. Amazing what you can get out of a Harvard MBA.
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In February, major news organizations reported that the Federal Reserve Board is investigating the role that Goldman – a major recipient of federal bailout funds during our own financial meltdown – played in the Greek debt crisis. The firm used complex financial instruments called “derivatives” to help the Greek government hide the fact that it was in debt up to its eyeballs and getting in deeper.
That, in turn, allowed Greece’s participation in the Euro, Europe’s common currency, under what may have been false pretenses. “One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from budget overseers in Brussels,” the New York Times reported. The deal, “hidden from public view … helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.”
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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With its roots in software that some classed “spyware”, Phorm proposed helping ISPs make more money and advertisers more relevant audiences. Installed on ISPs’ networks, its technology would monitor consenting customers’ every web visit to build an anonymised profile of their browsing habits against which to target ads.
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Big news from Russia today: RBK Daily, a respected Russian news agency, reports (in Russian) that the Russian government might soon be launching a “national search engine”. According to RBK’s anonymous sources inside Kremlin, it would aim at satisfying “state-oriented” needs such as “facilitating access to safe information” and “filtering web-sites that feature banned content.” It’s going to be an ambitious project: the government is prepared to invest $100 million in this new venture, does not want to allow any foreign funding, and intends to build it in cooperation with the private sector.
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In my Media Guardian column this Monday, I will suggest that we need a Bill of Rights in Cyberspace as a set of amendments to John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Note that I do not suggest the establishment a Constitution of the Internet; I think that would violate the tenets Barlow so eloquently if grandiosely sets forth. We don’t need government in cyberspace; we need freedom.
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Google’s face-off with Beijing over censorship may have struck a philosophical blow for free speech and encouraged some Chinese Netizens by its sheer chutzpah, but it doesn’t do a thing for Internet users in China. It merely hands the job of blocking objectionable content back to Beijing.
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A recently leaked European Council proposal seeks to create a “Great Firewall of Europe,” instituted to block sites that depict the abuse of children. As with other censorwalls, it’s unlikely that this will performed as intended, since paedophiles will circumvent it with proxies, or by using P2P or email or private websites to trade illegal material. But the creation of a continent-wide network censorship scheme is likely to cause new problems, inviting authorities to shoehorn ever-greater slices of the net into the “illegal” category — this has already happened in Australia and other countries that have built Chinese-style censorship regimes.
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The Canadian National History Society was forced to change the name of its magazine, The Beaver, founded in 1920, because the name of the magazine caused it to be blocked by Internet filters.
One teacher wanted to show students some pictures that would illustrate the effects of atomic testing. “However when I went to bring the wikipedia page up at school during class, it was blocked by our internet filter, BESS. The name of the islands? ‘Bikini Atoll,’” said Doug Johnson, quoting the teacher. Johnson, a director of media and technology at a Minnesota school district, put out a call in July for stories about how Internet filtering hobbles education, and got an earful. (“Censorship by Omission”)
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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“The BBC has quietly added DRM to its iPlayer content. This breaks support for things like the XBMC plugin as well as other non-approved third-party players. The get-iplayer download page has a good summary of what happened, including links to The Reg articles and the BBC’s response to users’ complaints.”
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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I suggest, is to reallocate copyright’s benefits to give more rights to creators, greater liberty to readers, and less control to copyright intermediaries.
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This talk, delivered at the 2006 AALS mid-year meeting, briefly addresses the politics of copyright legislation before segueing into the politics of intellectual property scholarship. I urge that the metaphor of a “copyright war,” used by both copyright owners and copyright reformers, is uncomfortably apt. It reflects a polarization of the copyright community that has affected copyright scholarship in unhealthy ways, encouraging scholars to choose sides in the copyright wars and to tailor their scholarship to fit.
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The Times and the Sunday Times are to start charging for content online in June.
Users will be charged £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription for access to both papers’ websites, publisher News International has announced.
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An exact date hasn’t been confirmed, but it was made clear that there will be no access to the content of these papers on Nexis from around the time the paywall goes up. LexisNexis hasn’t commented yet.
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So here we go. After much speculation, we now know that News Corporation’s two flagship titles in the UK, The Times and The Sunday Times, will charge users to access online content starting in June. No freebies, no tiered access models, just a paywall. And the price, at £1 per day, is the same as the cover price of the print edition.
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Ofcom’s annual Children’s Media Literacy Audit for 2009 also had bad news for the music industry, finding that 44% of children between 12 and 15 thought downloading shared copies of films and music for free should not be illegal.
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Veterans of World War II who sang war songs at a free concert last year have now been told that they must pay fees to copyright holders. A collections society says they are owed money since the veterans sang the songs in public. The controversy has prompted an announcement in Russia’s parliament.
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In an advisory report two economy professors are urging a government to rethink new anti-piracy legislation currently being drafted. The professors argue that harsher anti-piracy measures will only benefit the large media companies and prominent artists, at the expense of users and upcoming artists.
The Spanish Government has recently proposed new legislation under which BitTorrent sites could be taken offline without a judicial order. The new Sustainable Economy Law, sponsored by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, further includes a wide range of measures that are aimed at protecting copyright holders from online piracy.
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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For the past two years, most of the ACTA discussion has centered on two issues: (1) substantive concerns such as the possibility of three strikes and a renegotiation of the WIPO Internet treaties; and (2) transparency issues. The leak of the comprehensive ACTA text highlights the fact that a third issue should be part of the conversation. The text reveals that ACTA is far more than a simple trade agreement. Rather, it envisions the establishment of a super-structure that replicates many of the responsibilities currently assumed by the World Intellectual Property Organization. Given the public acknowledgement by negotiating countries that ACTA is a direct response to perceived gridlock at WIPO, some might wonder whether ACTA is ultimately designed to replace WIPO as the primary source of international IP law and policy making.
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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a plurilateral agreement negotiated outside of the WTO’s processes and protections, is the biggest set of new laws to hit international Intellectual Property. Many organizations have had serious concerns about the potential civil liberty and economic impact of ACTA. A draft text of ACTA has been leaked here.
[...]
6) Seizure of goods at the border: a potentially injured party may apply for the suspension of the release of potentially infringing goods- and that one application is valid for ONE YEAR from the date of application. This places the work burden on the government as opposed to the private companies who fear infringement (regulatory capture). Singapore proposes an alternative that applies to specific shipments and lasts for 60 days only.
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Last September, as debate raged about the government’s plans to crack down on illegal file-sharing – and the extent to which they might have been influenced by lobbying – the BBC put in a freedom-of-information request to the Department for Business. We requested information about any correspondence relating to online piracy or illegal file-sharing.
Now, after a long wait, we’ve been supplied with a stack of letters to and from Lord Mandelson and other ministers relating to this issue. Those looking for a smoking gun – perhaps a despatch from a Hollywood tycoon warning “Cut ‘em off or else!” – may be disappointed.
But the letters do show a sustained campaign of lobbying in favour of the Digital Economy Bill by music-industry trade bodies – and by opponents trying to persuade Lord Mandelson that some of its measures will be damaging to civil liberties, as well as being costly and ineffective.
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Rather than calling for a full debate on the bill’s provision allowing the record industry to take away your family’s internet access if they believe (but can’t prove) you’ve infringed on copyright, the LibDems have joined the other parties in supporting a short, 45-minute half-day second reading.
After that, the Digital Economy Bill will disappear into “wash up,” a fast-track, no-debate way of passing bills, usually reserved for bills that everyone agrees on and that need to get pushed through before an election.
Will Norris introduces CitizenSpace (2009)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Send this to a friend
03.28.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Sorry, guys, we’ve had that for years. Another marketing guys ploy got in the way of migration to “7″ so they took away the requirement to use virtualization. .
Wake up! M$ is jerking your change. Chroot has been around in the ‘NIX world since 1982. They tried to get you to buy new hardware to run “7″ and XP by virtualization but you realized your present hardware was adequate. Don’t migrate to “7″, just because M$ wants more money.
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Virus
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Most of us have experienced the need to disinfect a virus-laden system — though a near-total immunity is one of the many benefits of being a Linux user. If public health officials in northern England are to be believed, though, the term “computer virus” may be in for a new meaning.
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Desktop
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Chuck is my average user desktop Linux success story. He has been so for about six years now. Chuck does not want to go back to Microsoft operating systems as he sees no benefit to that. He does see some negatives to going back though. He would have to go back to buying and installing anti-malware software and keeping that up to date. He would have to go back to worrying about malware infections through e-mail or cracked web sites. Certainly if Chuck were using a Microsoft operating system I would do all I could to secure his PC for him. But I could not guarantee Chuck would never get malware “owning” his PC in that case. I am not there to watch over Chuck every time he opens an e-mail or browses web sites. With desktop Linux Chuck and I both know that he does not have to worry about those problems. Chuck is happy to use Linux as an average PC user.
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But a couple of things happened recently that convinced me Linux has finally, truly, really, no-kidding gone beyond being a contender against Windows for the average desktop user. It has become clearly superior to Windows for the average desktop user.
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I was at MicroCenter in Cambridge, Massachusetts yesterday. I was helping one of my students find a new laptop that would work well with Ubuntu.
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Among the three major operating systems, you may know that Linux has the lowest market share on the desktop but is leading the server market. However, Linux on the desktop is slowly but surely going mainstream that’s enough to scare the crap out of Microsoft.
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One thing holds true: the longer I use Ubuntu, the happier I become with the system. When Windows 7 came out, I moved almost completely away from Windows and I haven’t looked back. With the extra control I have to customize my computer to suit my needs, the extra money that I have from not paying for expensive programs and the extra time I have as a result of being able to quickly solve any problems that arise, I’m free to dabble in the endless possibilities of a Linux-based computer.
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Company ZaReason introduced 10-inch netbook called Teo. The model possesses quite standard for devices of its class characteristics. It is equipped with 10-inch screen with a resolution of 1024×600 pixels and is based on Intel Atom N450 processor with a clock speed of 1.66 GHz. Also “on board” ZaReason Teo – Integrated Intel GMA 3150 graphics, 2 GB of RAM and hard disk 160 GB (it is worth noting that the amount of memory larger than normal for netbooks 1 GB). Communication possibilities Teo presented 10/100 Ethernet and Wi-Fi 802.11 b / g / n.
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Server
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Nearly three-quarters of the respondents (72%) said they see Ubuntu as ready for their mission-critical deployments. Mission critical applications in the respondents view included backup, file server, scientific applications, email and security tasks.
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Dell
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Dell has announced that it will be adding Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) to its infrastructure solutions. The company plans to offer “blueprints” for optimising deployments of UEC of Dell hardware such as the PowerEdge C-Series. UEC joins the ranks of the proprietary solutions from VMWare and Microsoft, for which Dell already offers blueprints for deployment.
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Today is a very important day for Joyent, and for software development.
Joyent recognized early on that Web development was unlocking transformative new capabilities for software developers. We were founded with the idea of building applications to make business more productive, and we knew that Joyent needed infrastructure that could scale quickly to satisfy user demands, that could provide a persistent, stable platform for applications, and that could meet the day-to-day performance requirements needed to run a business.
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On Wednesday Dell announced a comprehensive overview of its enterprise strategy. Significant in its announcement, was the addition of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) as an infrastructure solution, joining the proprietary offerings from VMWare and Microsoft. This is the first major offering of a true open source Cloud solution backed by a major corporate vendor.
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Graphics Stack
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The VESA driver does not provide much besides user mode-setting for most all VESA-compatible graphics cards and its acceleration is limited to ShadowFB (a shadow frame-buffer on the CPU). It is really not a solution for anything besides being useful when recovering from a bad X configuration or other problems. Fortunately, for the end-user, this will not be the case with most distributions. The real reason NVIDIA is likely canning their xf86-video-nv mess is since the Nouveau driver is reaching a point where its entering the limelight with its mainline DRM, kernel mode-setting support, and emerging Gallium3D support for providing OpenGL acceleration in free software. The Nouveau kernel code entered the Linux 2.6.33 kernel a few months back. As of last December though, Andy Ritger told us that at that point they were not going to change their nv driver support strategy based on Nouveau.
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Applications
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Chances are you sometimes come across an MP3 file that won’t play properly or does something quirky in your favorite music player. You can try ripping or downloading the file again, or you can fix the problem yourself with MP3 Diags. This utility has two main goals: See what’s inside MP3 files and identify errors and potential issues, and change MP3 files to conform to standards and contain all the useful information they are supposed to contain.
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Prey is licensed under the GPLv3 license and available for free download from the project’s Web site.
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Proprietary
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Opera 10.51 (and 10.52) for Linux has been completely rewritten from scratch, with the hope of resolving long time outstanding issues says Ruari, one of Opera’s developers in this blog post.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Metal Beetle has released a new development preview version of Space Exploration: Serpens Sector, a role-playing game based on classics like Starflight and Star Control.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Looking for an Evernote replacement on Linux? Take a look at BasKet! The BasKet Note Pads project is moving full steam ahead once again. The project has just released the first beta for BasKet 2.0, which is the long-awaited port to the KDE 4 platform using Qt4 and KDE 4 platform technologies like Akonadi and Nepomuk.
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Last weeks I’ve been looking (again) whether or not it was possible to create a working sqlite back end for Akonadi. The last time I tried was around august last year and by then sqlite just wasn’t able to meet the multi-threading requirements that Akonadi has for its database back ends. A couple of sqlite releases later things seem to have changed. I managed to clean up some problematic code paths in Akonadi server and voila, we’ve a sqlite back end that is on par (unit test wise) with the mysql back end.
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While looking for some applications similar to Google Earth I bumped into this KDE educational project Marble. Its a 3D Atlas and Virtual Globe application that aims to help students, teachers or anyone, in learing more about Earth, Mars, Moon and Venus. It provides a whole lot of features other than just the Atlas, with an interface similar to Google Earth.
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Finally, this new version of Film Grain tool will be available for digiKam 1.2.0, which will be released in few days. I hope that you will enjoy this tool…
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Clementine is basically a port of Amarok 1.4 to Qt4. Techie Buzz author, Sathya Bhat, has already covered Clementine when it was at a very early stage of development.
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Michał (the lead K3b developer) is busy preparing K3b 2.0 for release. However we have some rough plans how to proceed after that release. I’d like to share them with you.
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KDE developers have always put big efforts on this department, and this version continues to deliver. This is obviously very subjective, but I am liking what I am seeing. I have to admit I was hoping for a bigger step forward, but it is a nice progression over KDE 4.3.x. Some new menus have been added, some features have been rearranged and a few seem to have been removed.
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GNOME Desktop
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Leaving your coworkers a nice message is easy and can brighten up their dull afternoon. We’re pretty sure that this method can only be used for good and not evil, but if you have any other suggestions of messages to leave, let us know in the comments!
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The first stable release of GNOME Media Player – formally GNOME VLC – is now available.
This release sees the fresh-faced newcomer gain support for 3 engines (VLC, Xine and GStreamer) for playing media, with the option to easily switch ad-hoc between them.
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Sabayon
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The Sabayon 5.2 release features Xorg 7.5, GNOME 2.28, KDE 4.4.1, XBMC 9.11 and much more. Sabayon is know for offering cutting edge features, great application selection and out-of-the-box experience that is unmatched by any. The Sabayon 5.2 release also comes with a uniquely blue theme that I found to be quite attractive, check it out.
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The 5.2 release of the Gentoo based Linux distribution, Sabayon Linux was released yesterday. For those unfamiliar with Sabayon, it is based on a binary distribution of Gentoo Linux.
The download ISO files approximately 1.6 gigabytes (for the Gnome edition) and can be downloaded from the Sabayon Linux website.
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New Releases (Not Just GNU/Linux)
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We’re proud to announce that Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop Version 2 (CDH2) is officially released.
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Sabayon Linux 5.2 is here for Linux enthusiasts who want the latest packages and the best performance, but don’t want to spend days getting things working properly. True to its mission statement, Sabayon 5.2 comes with pretty much cutting-edge software for both its GNOME and KDE flavors. The latest kernel, the newest GNOME and KDE software and eye candy for the most demanding users, they’re all here.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat’s exceptionally strong fourth quarter and 2010 year-ending financial report released earlier this week shows that the company continues to defy the recession with its strategy of building a far-ranging services, middleware, and cloud business on top of its server-oriented open source Linux distribution. In its fiscal 2010 fourth quarter Red Hat earned $195.9 million in revenue, an increase of 18 percent from 4Q 2009, one year ago, and the company saw a 46 percent increase in 4Q profits, says Red Hat.
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The internal email “chatter” list went crazy. Responses ranged from the rule followers–and a few sore losers–who cried, “Isn’t this a violation of your employment contract?” to the hard core open source crowd who said, “Hey, Red Hat should publish everyone’s salary.” But there was one passing statement that intrigued me: an employee from Norway mentioned that he didn’t see what all the fuss was about; his country made everyone’s salary public information.
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Fedora
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This all would not be possible if it was not for the Fedora Community, so we thank everyone that is, has been and will be involved with Fedora. Let us all rocket to better places with the new and upcoming Fedora 13.
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Ubuntu
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“It takes a long time to build traction in the enterprise market, but I now see that traction,” Shuttleworth said. “Our growth is something to be proud of.”
As ever, he’s optimistic that the business will bear fruit. Revenue is growing, he said.
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Ubuntu’s future 10.10 operating system is going to make a small, but contentious change to how file sizes are represented. Like most other operating systems using binary prefixes, Ubuntu currently represents 1 kB (kilobyte) as 1024 bytes (base-2). But starting with 10.10, a switch to SI prefixes (base-10) will denote 1 kB as 1000 bytes, 1 MB as 1000 kB, 1 GB as 1000 MB, and so on.
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Finally, Mr. Gooey-Aubergine seemed to be the most excited about the possibility of adding an Ubuntu Menu. “Think of all the things we could do with that!” he exclaimed. “We could be the first Linux distribution bundled with a one-click “Upgrade to Debian” feature! Although,” he admitted, “we haven’t passed that one by Mark yet.” Nor, as it turned out, had he asked Mr. Shuttleworth about the “uninstall” option.
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Mark Shuttleworth posted a suggestion he got from Pablo Quirós for the free space on the top right window corner (now that the button(s) will be placed on the left side of the Metacity), on the Ayatana mailing list.
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Ubuntu Artwork Pool in Flickr is now officially closed for further submissions and the shortlisting process is already underway. More than 1000 odd submissions were made and that itself speaks volumes about the resounding success of this novel idea of engaging with the community. After 15 Awesome Wallpaper Collection from Ubuntu Artwork Pool, we proudly present to you, 15 more wallpapers from the official Ubuntu Artwork Pool.
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This month:
* Command and Conquer.
* How-To : Program in Python – Part 9, Digitally Retouching a Photo in GIMP – Part 2, and Installing Google SketchUp using Wine.
* Review – Motorola Milestone/Droid.
* MOTU Interview – Pedro Fragoso.
* Top 5 – Android Applications.
* Ubuntu Women, Ubuntu Games, My Opinion, My Story, and all the usual goodness!
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The end of March is near, and in about a month, we will be seeing Lucid Lynx, or Ubuntu version 10.04.
[...]
I also began thinking about Ubuntu’s quick release cycle. Do they need to release new versions every six months, or should they give themselves more time in between versions to try and release something more refined say once every year?
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If you haven’t already downloaded a copy of 10.04, it’s probably time. At Beta 1, it’s probably stable enough for those who consider themselves only ‘mildly adventurous’ to give it a try. It certainly looks different. Gone is the staid brown (or orange) of old, replaced by a playful, somewhat seductive purple. The new colors frankly made me wonder what Ubuntu was promising with 10.04 LTS. Given that this is a long term support release, I have to think it’s meant to be less of a fling and more of a long term relationship. You see, Lucid Lynx could also be called 10.04 SNR; the Social Networking Release. I’ll cover that topic and some social networking dangers and pitfalls in my next post when I tell you why being too social can be a bad idea.
Until next time . . .
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A new version of Ubuntu is released every six months, but Ubuntu 10.04 will be a little special. That’s because it is marked as Long Term Support (LTS). Most versions of Ubuntu get 18 months of security updates, but this will be supported for 3 years. So if you do not like upgrading this is the version for you.
Before we go any further, we should point out that this is a beta version of Ubuntu 10.04, not an official release. It has worked without any major problems on our test machine but it should not be used on an important computer. That said, if you have a spare computer, it is worth giving a go.
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Qi Hardware was founded in 2009 by several former developers and engineers from the Openmoko project, which initially set out to build a completely-free Linux-based mobile phone, but has since turned its attention to other projects. Qi’s business model and product roadmap is decidedly more incremental than Openmoko’s, perhaps reflecting lessons learned from the previous company. Qi is self-funded; the plan is to use proceeds of Ben sales to fund the development on the next NanoNote revision as well as other projects.
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Android
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I won’t continue on as this is not so much a review but more of my thoughts on a subject which Ive had strong opinions on in the past (Mobile phone computing) Whilst my Winmob experience probably prevented me from getting excited about it in the past, Android and the HTC has changed all that. I can now be productive on a mobile and whilst the touch screen is not the best keyboard in the world for me, I’m getting used to it and am certainly productive if Im on the train or wanting to keep up my online presence whilst on the move.
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Out of all of these the one that appears to have the most traction is Android. Google is actively developing the OS, developers are building apps for the platform and you have a choice of manufacturers.
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Sub-notebooks
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Guess what? After using just the first beta for a day on my Lenovo S10 with a gigabyte of RAM and the first generation Atom, I’m not eyeing up Windows 7 anymore. Not only is this free, but it feels just as fast (if not faster) than Windows 7. This is seat-of-the-pants only, but let’s just say that it’s a significant upgrade from XP Home.
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IBM, Canonical and Simmtronics today announced they will market a low-cost, Intel Atom-based Simmtronics netbook in emerging markets. The Simmbook will be preloaded with the IBM Client for Smart Work Linux distro, based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and will first be made available in Africa for just $190, says IBM.
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Canonical and Simmtronics on Thursday announced that the Simmtronics netbook, the Simmbook, is now available to emerging markets for just $190
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The Skylight runs over a Linux-based OS, also called Skylight.
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If you are a netbook user and have not yet checked out the Jolicloud OS, you may want to give it a quick look or two. Just to offer a quick explanation about what Jolicloud is, it is a Linux based operating system that is built on Ubuntu. It favors web apps, takes full advantage of the ‘cloud’ and is also excellent in being a relatively simple OS to install. Other perks of Jolicoud include quick boot times and support for a wide variety of netbooks.
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Tablets
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Windows tablets, Google Android tablets, the iPad. We’ve heard a lot of talk about tablets over the last few months. Here’s one that’s a little different. The Ekoore ET10TA looks like a typical Windows tablet, complete with a 10 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display and a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor. But it ships with a choice of Windows or Ubuntu Linux.
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IntraHealth and the Senegalese Ministry of Health are using a simple mobile information system based on FrontlineSMS:Medic, a free, open-source software platform that enables large-scale, two-way text messaging. The software was customized for the project in partnership with RAES, the African Network for Health Education. Providers send health data via cell phones to a centrally supported automated response server in Dakar, where it is analyzed by Ministry of Health staff.
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Open source needs an app store.
No, I am not crazy. Well, not about this, anyway. I know that apps for Linux, and open source apps in general, are free and easy to download and install. They are also numerous. Very. To the point where it has become increasingly difficult to keep track of which apps are available to do which tasks. And that’s me talking–someone who is supposed to know what’s what in the community.
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My county lives and dies by volunteer labor. If we didn’t have so many generous, far-sighted volunteers filling key positions we’d be in sorry shape. The fire departments are all volunteer, and they are required to have the same training and skills as big-city paid departments. Search and rescue, sheriff’s reserves, home health care and hospice, and on and on and on…all of these jobs that are ordinarily paid positions are capably filled by skilled, committed unpaid volunteers.
Sound familiar? It is true that a lot of FOSS development is paid, but a sizable amount is still done by unpaid volunteers. The value of diverse, open development and distribution should speak for itself, given its long and successful history, and yet one of the biggest unanswered questions is how can a person make a living from FOSS? Those folks who are quickest with answers like “give away the code, sell service and support” are people who have jobs with paychecks, and have never tried it.
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This is my quick take on these three computing cultures in an already too long blog posting. In summary, I think that Apple culture is going the way of mobile gadgets, windows culture is as hard and mouldy as two week old stale bread and the open source culture is undergoing a renaissance and bringing computing back to an even keel. I also believe that a very important factor is that the younger generation are much more technologically savvy than my generation of fat balding greybearded eldergeeks 
They realise the intrinsic value and it is their thoughts and opinions which are influencing the change in the current cultures. What do you think? How are the current computing cultures evolving and how will they evolve in the future?
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GIMP
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Suddenly the graphics world is all atwitter about this miraculous new feature they’re previewing in Photoslop. A Photoslop team guy has a video up with a “sneak preview” of what they’re calling “Content-Aware Fill.” As soon as I saw it, I remembered some plug-in that I’d tried in Gimp long ago, but couldn’t remember what it was.
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I mention two podcasts worth to follow. Jeff Curto’s “The History of Photography” and The World’s “Technology Podcast“. And then there is the Haus der Photographie in the Deichtorhallen, which has good exhibitions and a good bookstore. The map in the bbegin was provided by the Open Street Map Project.
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They can rest assured – it is possible and it has been around for years, e.g. in the GIMP plugin by Paul Harrison called Resynthesizer.
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GIMP 2.7 seems to always start in multi-window mode, even if the user closes GIMP in single-window mode. Although this may have just been a misconfiguration with our GIMP, proper configuration won’t be completely implemented until GIMP 2.8′s release.
There is another thing. If you maximize the window and then switch tabs it unmaximizes, bringing the window back to the size it was before maximizing.
With minor GEGL improvements, the current development version of GIMP 2.7 doesn’t appear to have that many new features. We’ll review GIMP again in a while. Until next time…
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Mozilla
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One of the coolest things about Firefox is its extensibility. Everyone has their collection of favorite Firefox add-ons and I thought I would share mine. Some provide improved organization, some have a certain “WOW!” factor, and others just look pretty.
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For many users of Mozilla’s open source Firefox Web browser, Firefox is simply a tool for looking at Web content. For others, Firefox is an enabling tool to actually help develop content and code for the Web.
This week, Mozilla released the results of a developer survey it conducted in November 2009. The survey received responses from 5,054 developers spread across 119 countries and provides some insights into how developers work with Firefox — and what about Firefox makes it so critical as a tool for developing.
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Oracle
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Business
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It included a partial explanation of my theory that those strategies do not exist in isolation, but are steps on an evolutionary process, and also introduced our model for visualizing the core elements of an open source-related business strategy.
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Reductive Labs, the home of Puppet, the open source leader in data center automation, has announced that it has changed its name to Puppet Labs. This name better represents the focus of the company on guiding development of Puppet, supporting the large and growing Puppet community and delivering premium tools and services to enable broader deployments of Puppet in large enterprises.
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OrangeHRM, Inc. is pleased to announce that it released the latest version of OrangeHRM, its open-source HRM software today. Release 2.6 incorporates a Performance Module, a new feature designed to help small- and medium-sized enterprises conduct formal employee performance reviews.
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Mickos is a smart guy. He has deep institutional knowledge of the industry. For Eucalyptus to be wildly successful, it’s going to have to be bigger than just open source, as The VAR Guy points out, i.e., bigger than just an open license attached to otherwise ordinary software. Customers pay for value, and that value, as Mickos thinks, sits at the nexus of cloud, open-source, and collective computing.
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Mickos also said that part of the reason MySQL kicked off so much open source code for community use was that revenues from it were constant.
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More and more organizations are relying on open source software to build, test, deploy, and run mission critical IT applications. From small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, organizations worldwide are continuing to find open source as a cost effective means to deliver quality business applications. With a wealth of commercial and open source software options widely available, how does an organization know if an open source product is right for them?
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Open Source or Enterprise License
The company provides its cloud management product as an open source Community Edition and as a commercial Enterprise Edition. The former is offered via the GNU Lesser General Public License Version 3. Abiquo 1.5 will be available within 45 days.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU
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Standards/Consortia
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But developing standards and open source software are not the only areas where people and companies would like to launch collaborative activities among nationally and internationally distributed participants. The question is, will they know how to go about doing so?
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The third in a series of plugfests, aimed at lead developers of commercial and open source ODF implementations, experts from local and regional governments, members of the OASIS TC’s and other stakeholders.
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Finance
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The Financial Services Roundtable, which lobbies on behalf of around 100 of the country’s top banks, credit card companies and insurance firms, will undertake a professionally-organized public relations campaign to try to improve the tarnished image of the financial industry.
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One of Wall Street’s main lobbying groups is starting an image-improvement campaign aimed at showing the financial industry as trustworthy and a positive force after more than a year of being chastised in Washington.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The NAIC, which comprises the insurance commissioners from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories, is having its spring meeting today through Sunday in Denver. The fact that more than 1,700 insurance industry executives are also at the meeting should give you an idea of how important the NAIC is to insurers. Just as members of Congress are far out-numbered by lobbyists on any given day in Washington, the commissioners are far, far outnumbered by insurance company executives who come to NAIC’s conferences to try to influence everything the commissioners do.
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I have been transfixed by the long health care reform debates in the US, which finally culminated with the House of Representatives passage of the health care reform bill on March 21, and which President Obama signed into law two days later. The House also passed the reconciliation bill which the Senate subsequently approved on March 25. The health care reform bill is now the law of the land.
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DRM
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However, now it appears that it’s even pissing off EA employees. Slashdot points out that the editor of EA.com got really frustrated over the game kicking him out because his DSL was flakey:
“Booted twice — and progress lost — on my single-player C&C4 game because my DSL connection blinked. DRM fail. We need new solutions.”
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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So what’s Hollywood doing? They’re just making it more expensive. Yes, they’re jacking up the prices on 3D movies, in a typical short-term strategy. Rather than recognize how this might just drive more people to more seriously consider getting a 3D setup at home, Hollywood’s simplistic business modeling seems to be “let’s see how much we can squeeze out of people as quickly as possible.”
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Toymaking giant LEGO is suing a small Minneapolis nonprofit, saying it benefits from the high-profile name.
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Mardi Gras Indians have been around for more than a century — more than two, some say — and are generally thought to have originated as a way to pay homage to the American Indians who harbored runaway slaves and started families with them.
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Back in January, we noted that Chris Morrison, the manager of Damon Albarn’s bands, Blur and Gorillaz, stated at a conference that “piracy can be stopped,” while also suggesting he wanted to personally beat up anyone who shared Albarn’s music (oddly, this was right after he had admitted how much wonderful free publicity Albarn had gotten from a leak of the Gorillaz album). Now it looks like Morrison and a former partner of his are involved in a silly and amusing new propaganda campaign, funded by Universal Music, to try to equate file sharing to drunk driving in some cases and racism in other cases. Seriously.
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Sony Entertainment has shut down Beyonce’s official YouTube site. Congrats to Sony Entertainment for wisely spending its legal dollars and working on behalf of its artists.
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The Times and Sunday Times newspapers will start charging to access their websites in June, owner News International (NI) has announced.
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Unfortunately, the details look like the rumor was wrong, or the plans changed entirely, because now it looks like both publications are going with your standard everyday super expensive paywall. Starting in June, both publications will begin charging a whopping £1 per day or £2 per week for access — which is actually pretty steep, especially in a market where there’s an awful lot of competition. On a yearly basis, it’s only a bit less than what Newsday is charging for its website — which has been a colossal failure.
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We are at a crossroads with respect to the under-developed equitable defense of copyright misuse. The defense may go the way of its sibling, antitrust-based patent misuse, which seems to be in a state of inevitable decline. Or – if judges accept the proposal of this Article – courts could reinvigorate the copyright misuse defense to better protect First Amendment speech that is guaranteed by statute, but that is often chilled by copyright holders misusing their copyrights to control other’s speech.
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One fight stems from the secretive negotiations over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which began under President George W. Bush. Copyright holders have pressed for provisions that could force Internet Service Providers to do more to combat online piracy, such as cutting off broadband accounts that are used repeatedly for infringement. Such three-strikes provisions are anathema to tech advocacy groups, which also fear that the agreement would make it harder for them to bring some fair-use balance to the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
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The RIAA, MPAA and the Screen Actors Guild teamed up to submit their own filing, and as the LA Times noted “it’s a doozy.” Consider it a wishlist of protectionist, anti-consumer, anti-innovation policies, basically demanding that the White House prop up their own businesses, because of their unwillingness to adapt:
Among other things, the “creative community organizations” urged that:
* The federal government encourage ISPs to use, and companies to develop, monitoring, filtering, blocking, scanning and throttling technologies to combat the flow of unauthorized material online;
* Copyright holders be able to combat infringement by making a database of their works available to service providers, rather than submitting individual takedown notices. And once a work is taken down, service providers should be expected to employ “reasonable efforts” to prohibit users from uploading or even linking to them again;
* Copyright owners be able to block unauthorized streams of live broadcasts without going through the formal notice-and-takedown process;
* The federal government press search engines, social networks, hosting companies, domain name registrars and online advertising and payment networks to cooperate with copyright holders on efforts to combat piracy (“Encouraging these intermediaries to work with content owners on a voluntary basis to reduce infringements, and assuring these intermediaries that such cooperation will not be second-guessed, should be top priories that call for the personal intervention of senior government officials if necessary.”);
* A federal interagency task force work with industry to interdict prerelease bootlegs of Hollywood blockbusters and crack down on U.S. services that assist foreign piracy hotbeds;
* States adopt “labeling laws” that “defined unauthorized online file sharing and streaming as a felony,” giving state and local law enforcement jurisdiction to go after unauthorized copying online;
* States use consumer protection laws to go after file-sharing sites that “expose consumers to intrusion, viruses and revelation of personal data.”
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Every year italian families must spend hundreds of Euros in textbooks for every child, while the cost limits set by the government are regularly violated in spite of denounces and warnings from consumer associations. In order to solve this problem, Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini proposed to deduce cost (and weight!) of textbooks by encouraging schools to adopt digital textbooks starting from 2011.
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ACTA
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I’ve been remiss, as the VC’s (sort-of) copyright/Internet law guy, in not commenting previously about a truly outrageous bit of executive branch over-reaching on Hollywood’s behalf. I am referring to the ongoing negotiations about ACTA, the multilateral “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.” [See Jonathan Adler’s posting earlier today about ACTA here] The US Trade Representative’s office has been conducting these negotiations entirely in secret (on some ridiculous trumped-up ‘national security’ rationale) for several years now on this Agreement; a current draft was recently leaked to the press, and it confirms many peoples’ worst fears. Here’s my attempt at a summary of what’s going on — if you’re interested in more details (and I hope you are), I’ve listed at the end of this posting some excellent sources of further information.
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In short, ACTA is geared up to do almost exactly what I predicted in a “Recent Development” in YJIL last year (The Origins and Potential Impact of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), 34 Yale J. Int’l L. 261 (2009)). It amps up IP protection and criminal sanctions, without respecting existing international institutional process and involving the interests of developing countries.
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Michael Geist points us to a rather thorough review, by Margot Kaminski, of some of the more troubling aspects of the leaked ACTA draft. Kaminski highlights 24 different points, but we’ll just pick out a few key ones. For example, she notes that ACTA would create an express lane for intellectual property cases in the courts, and questions: “Why should copyright take precedent over other cases and have such a fast turnaround?” There are a few concerning things about border searches. While ACTA negotiators and defenders keep insisting that ACTA won’t mean border searches for individuals, the draft highlights a few things that are troubling. For example, the US, Canada and New Zealand want to change the exemption criteria for border searches from the current “small quantities of goods of a non-commercial nature” to the much lower standard of “reasonably attributable to personal use of the traveler.” In other words, this does, in fact, grant more powers to customs and border patrol to search laptops and iPods and the like, if there’s any indication of more information that is “reasonably attributable to personal use,” — though, that standard seems quite vague and subjective.
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Secondly, Devigne denied the second item in the answer to Hammerstein, who asked about the Commission’s name and shame list. It seems riddiculous to deny such an approach and plan given the “Global Europe” strategy contents, also given earlier statements from the directorate. They would no do that, indicated Devigne. How pathetic!
Oh, and let’s not mention the desasterous performance of Devigne regarding admitting that they won’t respect the parliament’s resolution on limit to counterfeiting. There he stressed being in line with the acquis again.
Sean Shah, software developer at Eye.fi (2009)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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03.26.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts
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If you’re a recent Linux convert, you’ve probably noticed you cannot install iTunes on your new system. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your favorite podcasts anymore – there is plenty of Linux podcast software available that are capable of managing and downloading podcasts.
Rhythmbox, Banshee and Amarok all include built-in podcast management, as do a number of other Linux media library applications. I’m not interested in using my music player to download music, however I want a program that does podcasts and only podcasts. If you feel the same way keep reading – here are three lightweight podcast managers for Linux.
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This week on Linux Outlaws: Mini-review of the new Crunchbang, is the Palm Pre dead?, Nexuiz is forked, lots of Microsoft sillyness and a Steve Jobs cheese sculpture…
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Desktop
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As Laptop Magazine recently discovered, Mobinnova, an upstart smartphone and soon-to-be notebook producer, has dropped Windows CE in favor of Android for its upcoming Mobinnova Beam.
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Igel announced a new all-in-one thin client that runs Linux. The UD9 includes a 21.5-inch display, a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, plus an optional touchscreen, wireless networking, and a smart card reader, the company says.
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Yes, make no mistake. You can have all the advantages: cost effectiveness, speed, a clever use of hardware resources. But where the migrations fail, it is in human beings. And how does this happen??
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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FatRat comes with many very interesting options. For one, it can download from HTTP(S)/FTP, RapidShare free and even YouTube. But FatRat can also download torrents, (it has BitTorrent support) has RSS feed support + special functions for TV shows and podcasts, support for SOCKS5 and HTTP proxies and even remote control via Jabber and a web interface and of course, a scheduler. FatRat has way to many options to list them here so check it out for yourself by installing FatRat (instructions further down).
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First off you need to download Memtest and I would suggest burning the bootable ISO image onto a CD. That is perhaps the easiest way to use Memtest. Owing to its popularity and usefulness, Memtest is also included on a number of Live CDs including the likes of Ubuntu and System Rescue CD.
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Instructionals
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Booting. Sometimes it seems like it takes forever. What’s the computer doing all that time? How do you find out?
The Linux boot sequence is surprisingly simple, and the best part is that almost all of it is controlled by shell scripts you can read — and even edit yourself.
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While TiddlyWiki is probably the most popular desktop wiki out there, it’s not the only fish in the sea. And if you don’t fancy TiddlyWiki’s approach to managing content, or you are looking for a desktop wiki that can help you to manage not only your notes but also appointments and contacts, then you might want to try Wiki in a Jar.
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New Releases
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The best, refined blend of GNU/Linux, coming with bleeding edge edges is eventually here! Say hello to Sabayon Five-point-Twoh, available in both GNOME and KDE editions!
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Debian Family
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Can you install Debian with the live image? I’m not sure you can. There is some talk about modifying the running live system to invoke the installer, but it looks like you’re better off grabbing a Squeeze image and creating a real Debian install disc, whether it be the first full CD, a DVD or even Blu-ray image, or a much-smaller network-install or business-card install image (the latter two which I favor, since the newest packages are pulled from the repository and you don’t need to do a massive update right out of the box).
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Ubuntu
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It’s true, I’ve given Ubuntu a thrashing from time to time, but it was deserved. (See Hey Ubuntu, Stop Making Linux Look Bad and Two Simple Suggestions for Ubuntu) Now, it deserves a little of something else.
Last week the first Beta of Ubuntu 10.04 was released, providing a solid glimpse of what will comprise the final release in a month’s time. It looks damn good.
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I have the beta of the latest Ubuntu on a spare partition on my HD, mainly out of curiosity. My impressions in one sentence:
“Looks okay, but it’s not for me.”
Basically, the same reaction as I have to Windows 7 and Mac OS X.
The install was fast and painless, boot times up to GDM were quick (quicker than my main Arch install, even), but Ubuntu’s GNOME is as slow as ever and starts a load of services I don’t need (bluetooth? I don’t even have bluetooth hardware in my PC), but deselecting them doesn’t seem to make any difference.
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With the new application icon and splash screen, these new buttons and a bevvy of win in the feature set Guayadeque continues to impress.
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It’s one small step for Dell, and one big strategic win for Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux cloud strategy. Specifically, Dell on March 24 said it would support Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) as an infrastructure solution. Apparently, Canonical and Dell have been developing this UEC relationship for more than six months. Here are the details and the implications for channel partners.
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Looking at this list it makes me wonder if I have a good reason to stick with Ubuntu, and the conclusion is I don’t, I could switch to an alternative distribution, DEB based, RPM based, Slackware or any other kind that’s out there but I like to think I give back to the Ubuntu community by way of my How to compile your custom Kernel articles and my Git repository. For now I’ll stick with Ubuntu and yes I will be updating to Lucid Lynx when it comes out.
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Last week we published benchmarks looking at the ATI Radeon KMS vs. UMS performance and found the user-space mode-setting support with the ATI driver (that is also limited to using DRI1 with these older code-paths) to perform significantly faster than the newer kernel mode-setting routes in most instances. To see how the performance difference is on the Intel side between the kernel mode-setting and user-space mode-setting implementations we ran a set of benchmarks on this side as well using Ubuntu 10.04.
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Franklin Wireless Corp. announced two mobile WiFi hotspot routers based on embedded Linux that each weigh only 2.46 ounces. The R526 shares CDMA 1x EVDO Rev. A+ bandwidth with WiFi clients while the R536 WiMAX Wave II shares WiMAX connectivity, says the company.
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Opengear announced a new version of its Linux-based ACM5000 line of serial device servers, claimed to be the first to offer remote monitoring over 3G cellular network devices. The ACM5004-G is equipped with four serial ports, an Ethernet port, and a USB port, and supports EDGE, GPRS, GSM, HSDA and HSUPA networks.
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Android
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…4G smartphone slated to come to market, the Android-powered handset boasts some serious specs, which is fueling a frenzy of positive posts in the days since it was unveiled. A full list of HTC Evo 4G features is at the Sprint Web site, but the features making the geeks go ga-ga include: Android 2.1 OS, a QualComm SnapDragon 1Ghz processor, a 4.3-inch touchscreen, HTC Sense UI, 8-megapixel auto-focus camera with HD-capable video camcorder and a forward-facing 1.3-megapixel camera, built-in mobile hotspot functionality allowing for eight wireless devices, live video sharing with Qik, 1GB of built-in memory and 512 MB RAM, in addition to all the typical smartphone specs we’ve come to expect.
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Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) announced the availability of a mobile virtualization reference platform for its Android version of the OKL4 microkernel hypervisor (“Microvisor”). The Android “One Core” platform appears to be the first implementation of version 4.0 of OKL4, which offers security and performance enhancements, says the company.
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Sub-notebooks
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Fusion Garage is shipping a the Linux-based tablet formerly known as the CrunchPad. Rights to the “JooJoo” are still being legally contested by TechCrunch, which claims to have co-developed the device, but the 12.1-inch tablet is available anyway for $500, complete with a 4GB solid state drive (SSD), WiFi, Bluetooth, and a nine-second boot-time.
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The category of collaboration software is growing and changing quickly, encompassing fields like CRM dashboards, enterprise intelligence and analytics. In this category, the very nature of open source software gives it a clear advantage. It doesn’t seek to own the platform, the protocol, the exchange format or the community.
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Open source is no longer considered the wild underdog, but it will need more new companies making money off the trend, the one-time CEO of MySQL stressed Wednesday at the EclipseCon 2010 conference.
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Miro, the open source Internet TV / podcast downloader and player, has been updated to version 3.0 and is now able to display embedded or standalone subtitles for videos. When a video is playing in Miro 3, a drop down menu displays any automatically located subtitles. Alternatively, the user can select their own subtitle files.
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Mozilla
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2. Extensions
Part of Mozilla’s appeal is its library of extensions. Users can easily find extensions ranging from business integration to social networks that extend the functionality of the browser far beyond its default installation. Extensions can’t be underestimated. If users can find value in their extensions, they won’t leave Firefox. It’s a major advantage to have as Microsoft is losing its own users.
3. It’s open source
Although the average, mainstream user might not care about Mozilla being open source, it really does matter. Open-source software is widely considered superior to closed applications, thanks to the ability for the entire community to work on improving a single piece of software. Closed software, like Internet Explorer, is a different story altogether. Since it’s closed software that only Microsoft can work on, it lacks the benefit of having thousands of eyes working on improving it. The browser is also a major target for hackers.
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Oracle
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Oracle’s decision to limit Solaris 10′s free usage to 90 days could be a boon for Linux vendors
Recent changes to Solaris licensing could further encourage Solaris 10 users to consider Linux — and result in fewer new users considering Solaris at all. If you’re a Solaris customer, don’t overlook this license change.
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BSD
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The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team this week put out the FreeBSD 7.3 release which is about four months after FreeBSD 8 was released.
FreeBSD is known as a solid, stable and reliable open source operating system. It should come as no surprise then that many users of FreeBSD don’t jump to the next major version number right when it becomes available, but rather stay with the legacy version for a while.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU
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Project GNU urges people working on free software to follow standards and guidelines for universal accessibility on GNU/Linux and other free operating systems. Multi-platform projects should use the cross platform accessibility interfaces available that include GNU/Linux distributions and the GNOME desktop. Project GNU also advises developers of web sites to follow the guidelines set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative.
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Standards/Consortia
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There’s been a lot of talk lately about HTML5 and whether Flash is in it for the long haul. Word on the street is that HTML5 will be able to deliver rich content without the need for a proprietary plugin clogging up your Web browser.
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Such patients have difficulty processing social emotions such as empathy or embarrassment, but “they have perfectly intact capacity for reasoning and other cognitive functions,” says Young.
A 2007 study by Damasio, Young and their colleagues showed that such patients are more willing than non-brain-damaged adults to judge killing or harming another person as morally permissible if doing so would save others’ lives. That led the researchers to suspect that the brain-damaged patients lacked appropriate emotional responses to moral harms and relied instead on calculating, rational approach to moral dilemmas.
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A Russian awarded $1million (£666,000) for solving one of the most intractable problems in mathematics said yesterday that he does not want the money.
Said to be the world’s cleverest man, Dr Grigory Perelman, 44, lives as a recluse in a bare cockroach-infested flat in St Petersburg. He said through the closed door: ‘I have all I want.’
The prize was given by the U.S. Clay Mathematics Institute for solving the Poincare Conjecture, which baffled mathematicians for a century. Dr Perelman posted his solution on the internet.
Four years ago, the maths genius failed to turn up to receive his prestigious Fields Medal from the International Mathematical Union for solving the problem.
At the time he stated: ‘I’m not interested in money or fame. I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.
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When his wife was diagnosed with a hereditary disease, Peter Johnson wanted to help. Using a program called Folding @ Home, he found a way to make a difference — by doing genetic research on his home computer. Due to the sensitive nature of his wife’s illness, Peter requested that his last name is changed for the purpose of this story to protect his family’s privacy.
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I really really really wasn’t going to write this post, but so many people kept submitting it, I figured it needed to be done. The Telegraph has some ridiculous story claiming, without any actual evidence, that Facebook is “linked to the rise in syphilis.” Quite a claim. The evidence? Oh, that’s not included.
[...]
So, yes, you have a bit of weak correlation combined with self-selected anecdotal bias. And that proves what? Uh, absolutely nothing.
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If you tell your browser to ignore certain things on a website, that should be your choice. This add-on is there to help people who want it, such that it makes Facebook more useful to them. It’s too bad that as Facebook gets bigger, we’re hearing more and more stories of this kind of bullying activity.
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Security
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INTERNET SEARCH GIANT Google has added some rudimentary geolocation technology to thwart Gmail hackers.
Pavni Diwanji, engineering director at Google, blogged that your Gmail account will automatically notify you if there’s any suspicious activity.
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IN WHAT MUST BE bad news for Gary McKinnon’s defence team a US court has dismissed Asperger’s syndrome as a hacking defence and thrown the book at Albert Gonzalez.
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At present it is the NHS patient records system that is muddled between paper and online records – but this could change very soon. As we make clear in the report, the Government’s National Programme for IT (NPfIT) is slowly rolling-out across the country at great expense and, as was revealed by the British Medical Association (BMA) earlier this month, with very little regard for patient privacy.
To read about the full horrors of this system, please do head to The Big Opt Out – the website of the NHS Confidentiality campaign, which was set up to protect patient confidentiality and to provide a focus for patient-led opposition the government’s NHS Care Records System.
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Mekki sez, “The city of Ottawa has launched a security campaign funded by Transport Canada (federally) that asks people to report any ‘suspicious behaviour’, which includes photographers and sketchers. They explicitly list ‘An individual taking photos or pictures [...], drawing maps or sketches’ as things to report. My friend Sarah Gelbard teaches in the Architecture department at Carleton University in Ottawa. She had her students do a project on transit in the city last year. They all went to transit stations and took reference pictures to help plan out their projects. Security stopped and questioned several of them. And this was before this new campaign. I’m afraid what might happen now if people started calling in the “suspicious behaviour” of students taking photos of a transit station.”
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Environment
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For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island’s gone.
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Heartland, a N.J.-based provider of credit and debit card processing services said that unknown intruders had broken into its systems sometime last year and planted malicious software to steal card data carried on the company’s networks. The company, which is among the largest payment processors in the country, claimed to have discovered the intrusion only last week after being alerted by Visa and MasterCard of suspicious activity.
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China has sent 1.4m tonnes of emergency grain supplies to drought-stricken southern provinces that are struggling to cope with the worst drought in decades, the local media reported today.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Sydney Morning Herald reported that 147 comments were submitted to the government on its proposal to begin blocking certain Web sites – particularly those that present harm to children.
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Over the last few years, WikiLeaks has been the subject of hostile acts by security organizations. In the developing world, these range from the appalling assassination of two related human rights lawyers in Nairobi last March (an armed attack on my compound there in 2007 is still unattributed) to an unsuccessful mass attack by Chinese computers on our servers in Stockholm, after we published photos of murders in Tibet. In the West this has ranged from the overt, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, threatening to prosecute us unless we removed a report on CIA activity in Kosovo, to the covert, to an ambush by a “James Bond” character in a Luxembourg car park, an event that ended with a mere “we think it would be in your interest to…”.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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Thanks to the recent PRO-IP Act, the US has for the first time has an “Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator” responsible for pulling together all the resources of the federal government. What should the IPEC be doing with her time and resources? The “core content industries” have an answer: she should turn the online world from a “thieves’ bazaar to a safe and well-lit marketplace” by encouraging network admins to deploy bandwidth shaping, site blocking, traffic filters, watermark detectors, and deep packet inspection.
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Perhaps the most common mistake that paywall supporters make is forgetting that people haven’t paid for the news in 180 years. Newspaper readers used to pay for paper, ink, trucks and delivery boys—and often barely paid enough to cover that bill. Now they pay for internet connections instead. Then and now, the reader only pays for access—advertising always has and will continue to pay for everything else.
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How exactly Hammonton will enforce a copyright of a public meeting baffles this author, but looks forward to seeing the explanation in Council. Remember, any production by the Town of Hammonton is paid for by public dollars and owned by the public.
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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The much-criticized cloak of secrecy that has surrounded the Obama administration’s negotiation of the multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was broken Wednesday. The leaked draft of ACTA belies the U.S. trade representative’s assertions that the agreement would not alter U.S. intellectual property law. And it raises the stakes on the constitutionally dubious method by which the administration proposes to make the agreement binding on the United States.
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After speaking with people in or close to the negotiations, European Commission and Spanish Presidency of the EU, this is some of what I have gathered despite dealing with very tight-lipped people:
1. The negotiations are not going that well and many issues are still wide open. It is doubtful they could wrap up soon.
2. There is a significant problem in making US and EU legislation compatible on a number of issues. One of the important topics of contention, but not the only one, is probably the differences between US “fair use” and the “commercial scale”, term the EU negotiators seem adamant on leaving very ambiguous to be interpreted later a la carte, even with all the risks involved.
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As well they should. This is a point that we’ve raised repeatedly, noting not just the similarities between the methods used for censorship in authoritarian countries and ACTA, but also in the way that those countries will almost certainly use ACTA to justify their own censorship.
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The controversial digital economy bill will be pushed through in the “wash-up” leading up to an election, after the government confirmed that it will receive its second reading in the Commons on 6 April – the same day that Gordon Brown is expected to seek Parliament’s dissolution.
Where’s Microsoft? (2005)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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At the initiative of the Free Software Unit under the Ministry of Communication Technologies and with the support of CEPEX and the National Federation of ICT, nine Tunisian companies took part for the first time, at the European exhibition “Solutions Linux / Open Source” held in Paris from March 16 to 18, 2010.
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Desktop
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If you are a Microsoft/Windows or Apple/Mac user Netflix will allow you to instantly play a movie, but if you are a GnuLinux user, they will not allow you to play any of your favourite movies. They have no support for GnuLinux operating system.
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Here, like a C function in an infinite loop, I repeat again the blazing original ideas that so far I am still the only tech blogger to have ever uttered:
* Perhaps Linux is not for everyone.
* Perhaps computers are not for everyone.
* Perhaps Linux is a self-rewarding idea. If you’re enlightened enough to seek it out, you’re automatically enlightened enough to use it.
* Perhaps Linux could not replace Microsoft without becoming just as evil as Microsoft.
* Perhaps Linux is more successful in the industrial sector than the desktop because it’s an industrial system for industrious people.
* Perhaps the desktop (as in year of Linux on) doesn’t matter.
* Perhaps it has nothing to do with how operating systems are designed.
* Perhaps it has nothing to do with computers at all.
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Server
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Available with Linux and IPv6, the EDS1100/2100 is the best choice when critical data needs to be remotely and securely accessed anywhere, at any time, via the Internet.
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B&L Associates wanted to provide these benefits for the steadily growing Linux community as well. In 2007, it was estimated that Linux held almost 13% of the overall server market. However, that number could be larger because it is based solely on the number of Linux servers sold and not on the number of machines running Linux. Moreover, 60% of Web-servers now run Linux.
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Linux Graphics Stack
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AMD has just put out their monthly update of the Catalyst Linux driver. Though as we already know based upon AMD giving Ubuntu a new driver, the support for X Server 1.7 is not coming until next month, which also offers official Eyefinity support and other changes. As such, Catalyst 10.3 isn’t too interesting.
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I’ve just done a 1.6.1 release of radeontool from my personal repo, it contains both radeontool and avivotool, and is probably full of ugly but whats in distros now is older and worse.
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Woah, here comes a pleasant surprise from AMD with their Catalyst Linux driver. AMD yesterday released a Catalyst 10.3 Linux driver that really didn’t bring anything too exciting (and it still doesn’t support X.Org Server 1.7), but today they’ve delivered a new preview driver that’s based on Catalyst 10.3 and it brings OpenGL 3.3/4.0 support!
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With Mesa 7.8 arriving this month, we took the time to benchmark a few recent releases of the Mesa 3D stack with the Radeon DRI driver to see how the OpenGL performance has changed — if at all — over the past few months. In this article are our R500 Mesa benchmarks from the Mesa 7.6, 7.7, 7.8-rc1, and 7.9-devel releases.
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David Airlie has just asked Linus to pull in his latest DRM branch for the Linux 2.6.34 kernel. This branch provides fixes to the DRM core, Nouveau, and Radeon KMS. The new Radeon DRM code brings fixes, but it also brings a clean-up to the ASIC tables and GPU recovery support.
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Applications
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Mozilla is moving to a different release model, which may necessitate distribution changes. The idea is to include feature upgrades as part of minor releases—many of which are done to fix security flaws—which would come out every 4-6 weeks or so. Major releases would be done at roughly six-month intervals and older major releases would stop being supported soon after a subsequent release. Though the plan is controversial—particularly merging security and features into the minor releases—it may work well for Mozilla, and the bulk of Mozilla’s users who are on Windows.
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High dynamic range imaging (HDR) is an important technology for photographers. It is a collection of techniques that allow a wider dynamic range of luminances between the lightest and darkest areas of an image.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Unigine Heaven has finally arrived! Unigine Heaven, a tech demo / benchmark that offers heavenly graphics and was released for Windows 7 back in October with a DirectX 11 renderer, is now available on Linux with its OpenGL 3.2 renderer. As we suspected, the Linux support has arrived with the release of Unigine Heaven 2.0, which includes an updated Windows binary as well.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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We’re cool with people re-submitting their Plasmoid if they make some improvements or catch some odd bug after sending it in and we will be testing Plasmoids against the latest ScriptEngine in the 4.4 branch, though if your Plasmoid requires (for whatever reason) the ScriptEngine from trunk we can probably accomodate that in the judging.
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Red Hat Family
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UK VARs have reported a turnaround in end-user attitudes towards open source software, just as Linux kingpin Red Hat posted a double-digit sales surge.
Red Hat has grown consistently throughout the downturn and its run shows no signs of slowing after it logged its fourth quarter and full-year results. The New York-listed outfit’s share price has doubled over the last 12 months.
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Strong increases in both full-year and quarterly net income and revenue as open source enterprise software vendor capitalises on recessionary climate
Open source enterprise software vendor Red Hat has posted an 18% rise in revenues to $195.9 million for the final quarter of its financial year, and a 44% increase in net income to $23.4 million.
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Fedora
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Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 218 for the week ending March 21, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.
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Debian Family
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Ubuntu
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So there you have it, Linux passed this test with flying colors, performing consistently throughout the whole month under some intense use. In addition, I want to note that I have not had a single issue or crash during these past 30 days, which may not be a surprise under Linux standards, but significant when comparing it to other operating systems.
I always recommend people I know to use the software that best fits their needs. I am no die-hard Linux fanboi and have no problem acknowledging Linux flaws or weaknesses. Having said so, I still feel many people try Linux and simply follow their first impression. Eventually, it is mostly an exercise of “Well, this is not how I do it in Windows”, and they just go back to what they know better. If they got past that getting-used-to phase, though, I believe Linux could add a lot of value in terms of performance, consistency, security and flexibility. At the end of the day, that all translates in higher productivity for the end user which, unless you are using your PC as a gaming console or a media center, is what it’s all about, isn’t it?
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The current button arrangement redesign in Ubuntu causes numerous bugs in GNOME and Ubuntu. The Metacity team now wants to step in.
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The default messaging client in Ubuntu 10.04 remains Empathy and although it has some detractors still smarting over the switch from perennial favourite Pidgin Empathy remains a fully capable and easy to use messaging client.
Lucid sees Empathy ramp up a gear in the usability stakes partly spurred on by the awesome work of the Ubuntu 100 paper cuts initiative that sought to fix the little niggles that tend to get over looked by developers.
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Correcting all applications to comply to the units policy is a goal for lucid+1 (Ubuntu 10.10). We are too late in the release cycle for the change in lucid (Ubuntu 10.04). My current plan is to create a library for inputing/outputting bytes to users. The user can then configure this library to display the units in base-2 (KiB), base-10 (kB), or the historical totally fucked-up format (KB).
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It has been a truly amazing year since we embarked on our “cloud” journey at Ubuntu, hence I thought I’d review some of the highlights.
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At the heart of Ubuntu development are gifts. People join our community and contribute in a diverse range of ways. This includes documentation, translations, advocacy and many other efforts. Every day we are afforded with many of these fantastic contributions, and if people take the time to contribute a gifts, we should work hard as a community to do the right thing and review and utilize it in Ubuntu if it meets our quality needs.
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Variants
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The Lubuntu project started in March 2009, with the purpose of creating a lighter and less resource demanding alternative to the Xubuntu operating system, using the LXDE desktop environment. The ultimate goal of this project is to join the ranks of Kubuntu and Xubuntu, and become an officially supported derivative of Ubuntu.
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The company is hoping to sell the technology, which it has developed for Linux and Android on ARM-based architecture systems, to OEMs and ODMs creating TVs with embedded computing technology, set-top boxes, highly portable devices such as smartphones and smartbooks, and even the in-car entertainment industry – although has yet to release pricing information.
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The Advanced firmware pack also supports services such as Flash, VoIP (Linux only), a native SAP GUI, NoMachine NX and ThinLinc printing as well as other web, multi-media, video conferencing and peripheral controls.
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The camera was hooked up to a small, Linux-based computer that was set to wake up the camera at set intervals and snap a picture. A GPS unit allowed Harrison to recover his camera when the balloon eventually came back to Earth.
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Phones
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Its also equipped with WiFi, Bluetooth and plays any of the following formats supports TXT , MP3, WAV, AMR, AWB audio files, 3GP, MPEG4 and AVI video.
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ChinaGrabber is selling an unlocked, quadband GSM cellphone that runs Linux on a 624MHz Marvell PXA310. The $570 BPhone features a 5-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen with 180-degree rotation, plus WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and up to 16GB flash expansion.
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Nokia
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The N900 is the first linux-based Phone from Nokia. The operating system on the Nokia N900 is Maemo 5 (Fremantle). Maemo is based on the popular Debian linux distribution. The N900 can be seen as an internet tablet with phone capabilities.
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Android
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Well, at least part of the answer appears to be that Google is sharing advertising revenues with carriers that use Android, according to multiple sources who are familiar with the deals.
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Sub-notebooks
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Encouraged by early results on Windows, Intel said today it will add a beta test version of popular Intel AppUp Center for Linux.
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The Simmbook is one of the first Netbook to provide direct access to the cloud by offering a package of online collaboration tools. The OS is not cloud-based but LotusLive is a robust enough application suite to give customers a cloud environment that should prove useful and less expensive than the costs of a Windows-based operating system.
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Fast Boot
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The Asus Eee PC 1201T takes a leaf out of the HP Mini 110-1106vu’s book by coming with a pre-OS Linux utility called Splashtop, an instant-on stripped down operating system which logs you online within seconds of turning on the netbook.
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The Skylight runs on a custom Linux kernel and Kang noticed that the device lagged when having more than 9 apps open in the background. Playing back YouTube wasn’t smooth either, despite having the ability to play Flash, this is likely to be fixed before launch. The built-in 3G sim card slot is welcome along with the HDMI port.
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On a handset running Symbian ^3, he showed me features such as multi-touch, multi-tasking, 3D support, improved shading and transparency on the screen interface, a social address book linked to Facebook and Twitter and moveable and customisable web-based widgets.
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As in the last two years, we’ll be holding a FOSSBazaar face to face meeting at the LF Collaboration Summit. The Collaboration Summit takes place from Wednesday April 14 to Friday April 16 in San Francisco and our meeting will be on Thursday and Friday.
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Jordanian Minister of Education, Ibrahim Badran, announced Jordan’s intention to start BLOSSOMS II in ten selected high schools of the kingdom. BLOSSOMS (Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies) is an Open-education initiative started by MIT in partnership with Jordan and Pakistan.
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Eclipse
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The Apache Maven project is used by over 3 million Java developers as a project and build management solution. Java developers also widely use the Eclipse IDE. At the intersection of Eclipse and Maven is the new Maven Studio for Eclipse announced this week by Maven commercial backer Sonatype.
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Today at the EclipseCon event, the Eclipse Foundation announced the expansion of its EclipseRT top-level project with Gemini and Virgo, a pair of newly approved projects that both provide implementations of the OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) runtime.
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Oracle
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Oracle is committed to whipping the Java Community Process into shape, but it looks like a limited workout’s on the agenda.
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Government
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ESRI has sent an open letter to government – with a number of co-signatories who are in effect competitors – fretting about the proposal (commitment really) to make a number of OS datasets free.
Below is the letter, which I’ve blockquoted to make it clear what’s the letter and what’s not. I’ve inserted some comments, based on my personal knowledge; and of course some of this is coloured by my advocacy of the Free Our Data campaign.
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Openness
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From the press release,
Rolf Thiele, deputy director of the USB Cologne, states: “Libraries appreciate the Open Access movement because they themselves feel obliged to provide access to knowledge without barriers. Providing this kind of access for bibliographic data, thus applying the idea of Open Access to their own products, has been disregarded until now. Up to this point, it was not possible to download library catalogues as a whole. This will now be possible. We are taking a first step towards a worldwide visibility of library holdings on the internet.”
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“In times in which publishers and some library organisations see data primarily as a source of capital, it is important to stick up for the traditional duty of libraries and librarians. Libraries have always strived to make large amounts of knowledge accessible to as many people as possible, with the lowest restrictions possible,” said Silke Schomburg, deputy director of the hbz. “Furthermore libraries are funded by the public. And what is publicly financed should be made available to the public without restrictions,” she continued.
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Can Facebook be blamed for a rising STD rate? The incidence of syphilis has quadrupled in the areas of Great Britain where the social networking site is most popular, reports the Daily Telegraph, causing some experts to wonder whether it’s paved the way for casual hookups.
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Seaweed could hold the key to tackling obesity after it was found it reduces fat uptake by more than 75 per cent, new research has shown.
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A petition to hold an emergency general meeting of the British Computing Society (BCS) has been turned down because the signatures were electronic.
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Science
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I love this study. It’s a great application of simple logic, though it wasn’t so simple to do: they had to use a lot of time on a monster 8 meter telescope to do it!
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Security
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The US government disburses a significant amount of foreign aid to many countries and, in recent decades, that money has been used as a carrot to induce more acceptable behavior from its recipients. In a variety of laws, Congress has required that the executive branch certify that a nation has made progress in areas like human rights or narcotics control before different forms of aid to that country can be approved, including continuation of “most favored nation” trading status. Now, there’s a move afoot to extend this protocol to another area of concern: cybercrime.
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A Frenchman will face trial after hacking into Twitter accounts, including that of U.S President Barack Obama, a French prosecutor said.
The 24-year-old man from central France was arrested on Tuesday and could face up to two years in prison in France for fraudulent access to a computer system. The arrest followed a joint operation between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the French police, according to French state prosecutor Jean-Yves Coquillat.
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That little lock on your browser window indicating you are communicating securely with your bank or e-mail account may not always mean what you think its means.
Normally when a user visits a secure website, such as Bank of America, Gmail, PayPal or eBay, the browser examines the website’s certificate to verify its authenticity.
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Today two computer security researchers, Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm, released a draft of a forthcoming research paper in which they present evidence that certificate authorities (CAs) may be cooperating with government agencies to help them spy undetected on “secure” encrypted communications. (EFF sometimes advises Soghoian on responsible disclosure issues, including for this paper.) More details and reporting are available at Wired today. The draft paper includes marketing materials from Packet Forensics, an Arizona company, which suggests that government “users have the ability to import a copy of any legitimate keys they obtain (potentially by court order)” into Packet Forensics products in order to impersonate sites and trick users into “a false sense of security afforded by web, e-mail, or VoIP encryption”. This would allow those governments to routinely bypass encryption without breaking it.
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Ive been contacted by a school governor who doesn’t want to see their school bounced into fingerprinting the kids, and wonders what to do. They’ve prepared this draft briefing for a governor’s meeting this weekend. Looks pretty damn good to me. Is it right? Anything to add?
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Instead of shutting down as pointless, fusion centers gradually began expanding into sharing information about all crimes. Fusion center activity over the years has also raised concerns about government surveillance of legally protected political activity.
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The Transportation Security Administration is said to be considering installing bluetooth sensors at US airports to sniff out personal electronic equipment and track its movement—and by extension, the movement of the human carrying it. USA Today reports that “the aim is to track how long people are stuck in security lines,” and that wait time data could then be posted on websites and inside airports.
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Cyber attacks threaten the “very existence” of the US, according to a top FBI official charged with worrying about such things.
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A Dutch investigative reporter has demonstrated that it is possible to carry potentially explosive liquids through security at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport and onto a transatlantic flight.
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New research conducted by Big Brother Watch reveals that there are at least 100,000 non-medical personnel in NHS Trusts across the country with access to confidential medical records
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Environment
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AS OLD hands tell it, protecting a threatened species used to be a relatively straightforward affair at the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Government officials would turn up at the triennial meetings and, after listening to advice from scientists, conservationists and their own environment ministries, were likely to agree to a “listing”.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Online, music-video site Vevo bought a slot on the YouTube home page that referred users to the “Telephone” page on Vevo.com, which crashed the morning of the clip’s premiere. The video broke all Vevo single-day traffic records and had already generated close to 4 million views on YouTube in less than 24 hours.
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Corporate Accountability International (CAI) surveyed five states (Minnesota, Maryland, Colorado, New Mexico and Oregon) and found that taxpayers in those states are shelling out between $78,000 and $475,000 a year for government to buy bottled water, a resource that essentially flows free from public taps.
[...]
As people become more aware of the uneccessary expense and environmental problems caused by bottled water, companies like Nestlé are fighting back with campaigns portraying bottled water as “Earth-friendly”, and touting the company’s “environmental stewardship.”
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The Democratic National Committee is launching a radio ad campaign co-opting the conservatives’ slogan “Hands off My Health Care!” The ads warn voters that the consumer protections conferred upon them in the newly-passed health care reform bill will be stripped away if they vote Republicans into office.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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European privacy regulators are looking more closely at whether the Facebook and YouTube practice of allowing users to post videos, photos or other information about others without their consent violates their privacy. The Associated Press reports:
The Swiss and German probes go to the heart of a debate that has gained momentum in Europe amid high-profile privacy cases: To what extent are social networking platforms responsible for the content their members upload?
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U.S.-based GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest domain name service, announced Wednesday it will no longer register new Web sites in China.
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Today, the Congressional Executive China Commission conducted a hearing titled Google and Internet Control in China: A Nexus Between Human Rights and Trade? They had originally invited me to testify in a similarly titled hearing, “China, the Internet and Google,” which was postponed and rescheduled twice: the first attempt was foiled by the Great Snowcalypse; the second attempt scheduled for March 1st was postponed again at the last minute for some reason that isn’t entirely clear. Meanwhile I had already gone and written my testimony, improved by very helpful input from the CITP community. Unfortunately, when they rescheduled the hearing they said I was no longer invited. They wanted the hearing to have different witnesses from recent related hearings in both the House and Senate. Given that I appeared in both hearings it seems reasonable that they’d want to hear from some other people.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The Open Source Initiative Board has added OSI to the list of organizations asking that the BBC not be allowed to add digital restriction measures to digital broadcasts in the United Kingdom. The BBC’s request to do so is being reviewed by the UK regulator, OfCOM, and OSI is supporting the position statement from the UK’s Open Rights Group and encouraging others to do likewise.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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For some months now, I’ve been touting “Avatar” as a good example of how the film industry should be concentrating on enhancing the experience of watching films *in the cinema* – something that no copied DVD can reproduce – thus making unauthorised copies pretty much into marketing devices that encourage people to go to the cinema for the full experience.
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ACTA/Digital Economy Bill
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Just in case anyone does not appreciate how difficult it will be to change the USTR direction on ACTA, note that today the USTR proudly put this letter on the USTR Blog:
http://www.ustr.gov/about-us/press-office/blog/2010/march/new-information-ustrgov/acta
(Maybe best to first skip down to see who signed it).
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But, really, it’s incredibly telling that the USTR is only willing to promote the letters it’s received in support of ACTA, isn’t it? Lots of people have been contacting the USTR with concerns about ACTA, and those don’t get highlighted on the website at all. It’s as if the USTR wants to make it clear that it works for the RIAA and the ITA, rather than the citizens of the country. It’s reached the point where it’s obvious that the USTR’s focus is not on creating a good trade agreement, but on the trade agreement that some lobbyists wanted. It seems obvious that the USTR is not interested in understanding the complaints, but only in getting ACTA finished.
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The United States is nudging the international community to develop protocols to suspend the internet connections of customers caught downloading copyrighted works, according to a leaked draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
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Well, as I pointed out yesterday, the reason for this cognitive dissonance is that the Digital Economy Bill should really be called the *Analogue* Economy Bill: it seeks to preserve the old way of doing business in the world of music and films, where people bought CDs and DVDs – physical objects that cost money to make. Today, by contrast, the marginal cost of producing an MP3 file, say, is as near zero as to make no difference.
Prof. David Eisenberg volunteers at a Lindependence 2008 Intalllfest 02 (2008)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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03.25.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I learned a little from my dalliances with Apple products. I learned a lot from PCs running DOS and Windows. I’ve learned the most about computers from Linux.
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Desktop
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For the average IT consumer the term Operating System equals with Windows. Few of them are aware that there is life beyond Windows. There are many open source operating system out there, the majority are Linux based. Lately the most popular Linux distribution is Ubuntu (current version is 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala). Of course for those of us who were “born into Windows” it could be hard to make the switch to Linux. There are pros and cons about Linux systems. The most important pro is that it is completely free! One of the major drawbacks would be the fact that sometimes it is hard to find the right drivers for your machine.
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So this is not about a single heroine in technology – it is about a general movement: I am convinced, especially Ubuntu with it’s focus on an intuitive interface seems to keep the entry level very low and therefore attracts user groups that might be a suprprise for a lot of people. I know dozens of techie people stating that free operating systems are way too complicated to use for them. When telling about “My Mom Runs Ubuntu” they run out of reasons. At least there is nothing more convincing on using free software than people that are just using it on a daily basis without the need of telling everybody as they just take it as normal.
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Mackenzie Morgan – (maco) – I met Mackenzie at SELF in 2009. Mackenzie is one of the first folks who offered me feedback on my blog posts, tips on how to be a better Ubuntu User, and how to navigate the community better. Mackenzie recently became an Ubuntu MOTU, and is active in several areas of the Ubuntu Community.
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If your Windows PC has been infected with some net nasty, be it malware, viruses or that fake Facebook password reset slimeware, and you can’t boot up your Windows PC or are stuck with ransomware pop-ups that are popping you out of your mind and stopping your from working, AVG’s new Linux-based emergency boot CD, DVD or USB stick is freely downloadable and ready to help you thrash threatware and get you back to a working PC!
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Server
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Of course, this being Linux Magazine, I’m not going to spend much time discussing Microsoft’s HPC value proposition, but there are real reasons why Windows, and Mac OS X for that matter, don’t have a big foothold in HPC. I covered this five years ago when I wrote Why Linux On Clusters? and what was true then is true today. I’ll save you the detailed reading. Clusters are about building machines around problem sets. To achieve an efficient design you need flexibility and choice. Open source and the Linux OS provide the best flexibility an choice.
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Kernel Space
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A new open source project, dubbed Opendedup, has appeared with the goal of creating a deduplication-based file system for Linux called SDFS.
The project’s developer Sam Silverberg says today’s deduplication solutions only solve the problem of storing deduplicated data, not reading and writing inline data.
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Now, because I’ve given you this tip, you’ll probably never need to use it. Still, it’s good to know USB audio is very supported under Linux, and the devices are fairly standard. Plus, it’s easy to add multiple audio devices with USB audio, which makes things like podcasting much easier!
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Applications
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More than a year ago we first talked about some of the Compiz 0.9 plans that involved merging Nomad and Compiz++ into Compiz and a host of other changes after the future of Compiz was called into question. Compiz Fusion was dropped too and Compiz++ is the C++ rewrite and also brings several other changes, such as Compiz no longer being just a compositing window manager, but the different components have been separated out.
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You’ve heard that Linux is a very secure operating system. You’ve heard it’s practically immune to viruses (practically being the key word). You’ve heard it’s tough to crack. These are all true…and with good reason. Linux is such a strong operating system for two primary reasons – by design and with the help of security systems like AppArmor and SELinux.
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I got from a rotten 6 requests per second with WordPress to a whopping 9500! If you’re on Linux and running Apache, installing varnish is a breeze! Especially if you’re hosting a well cacheable site like a blog.
I’m running on a Linux Debian virtual server (provided by Kabisa) with 1 VCPU core and 512MB of memory. Nothing fancy.
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Proprietary
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We are pleased to announce that Bordeaux now runs on StormOS and Nexenta systems, over the past couple weeks the StormOS team has successfully completed the first initial port. And work can now be focused on the UI changes that are coming in our next release.
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Instructionals
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Console gives life to your cmd/powershell in windows. It features tabbed terminals/alpha and much more. If you’re used to screen/mrxvt/urxvt and those transparent terminals, you’ll feel at home with console.
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Games
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Hobiger elaborates: “Over the years sudoku players have developed a large array of techniques to exclude possible candidates from cells. HoDoKu supports more than 90 techniques, more than any other software I know. You can search for all implemented techniques at any given state during solving and display them graphically.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME is raising funds for a system administrator, and just yesterday a ruler has been added to the top of various GNOME websites to show people progress.
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Xfce
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Shook up my Xfce desktop a bit. I’ve always been a fan of darker environments, especially those with blue tones. This one’s mysterious and fantastic. I did keep the same icon theme as last month, as I don’t have anything more suitable installed at the moment. I’m still looking for something a bit more suited to my current setup.
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Red Hat Family
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Annual subscription revenue of $639 million, up 18% year-over-year
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Open-source vendor Red Hat (RHT) late Wednesday posted quarterly results that beat analyst views, but its profit outlook for the year lagged.
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For those following along at home, this left Red Hat at $748.2 million in total revenue for fiscal year 2010, an increase of 15 percent over 2009, and subscription revenue up 18 percent over 2009 at $638.7 million.
Not bad for a company that gives all of its software away.
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Shares of Red Hat Inc closed at $30.17 in the previous trading session and opened today at $30.29. RHT is currently trading at $30.72, up $0.55 (+1.82%) in today’s trading session.
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Quarterly billings set a record, according to Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst.. Despite the global recession, Red Hat also added 350 employees over the past year, the company noted.
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Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of JBoss Enterprise Web Platform 5.0, which is designed specifically to support the next generation of lightweight Java applications. JBoss Enterprise Web Platform 5.0 is the third and final component of JBoss Open Choice, Red Hat’s middleware strategy to deliver a choice of Java application server solutions that address the variety of programming styles used in today’s business applications.
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Open-source software vendor Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) updated a trio of its JBoss products this week with new SOA, Web server and developer tools.
The new updates include the JBoss SOA Platform 5.0, Enterprise Web Platform 5.0 and JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS) 3.0 releases. At the core of Red Hat’s product updates are features and enhancements that aim to optimize the products and make them more usable.
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Fedora
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It’s important that Fedora always be able to make opportunities for fresh and energetic leadership that will help take our Project, and the distribution we make, to the next level of achievement. Regardless of what I’m doing next at Red Hat, part of my job early on will be to give as much assistance as possible to the next FPL, just as Max Spevack did for me, allowing that person to successfully take over this position, and continue leading Fedora into the future.
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Fedora 13 Beta is due to come out soon, with a following wind, and the QA group is already hard at work testing candidate builds.
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Debian Family
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I am somewhat surprised with the number of Linux distributions with Debian roots. A total of 129. This list doesn’t even include all the Ubuntu variations like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, etc.
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Ubuntu
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I spent most of this week in various shades of the new Ubuntu, with everything from pure command-line installations to full-blown Gnome desktops, and just about anything in between. I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs, but it was nice to get back to the system that started me out, so to speak.
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Well the pantheon of win is about to be joined by another digital artist who’s wallpaper collection of consistently impressive standards has really wowed me.
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We’ve blogged previously about the new-look installation slideshow (designed by Dylan McCall, Michael Forrest and Otto Greenslade) that will greet all users installing of Ubuntu 10.04 – but today finally saw it get pushed into actual being with plenty of changes – most of which fix issues readers expressed during the initial designs.
The ever-so-slightly misaligned Ubuntu logo of before is now almost perfectly centred with its frame.
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The new Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Ubiquity Slideshow which we were telling you about ~2 weeks ago is now live and you should be able to take a look for yourself by downloading an Ubuntu 10.04 daily build starting tomorrow (or by updating the installer but that didn’t work for me – the package is probably not in the repositories yet).
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In an unusual decision and what could be considered an unwelcome change for the user interface, Canonical has also chosen the default configuration of the Metacity window manager to use a reverse positioning of the maximize/minimize icons on the upper left of each window.
This is a departure from the conventional Microsoft Windows-like positioning on the upper right of each window used in previous releases, which may take getting some used to by new Linux users. It certainly annoys this one and I hope Canonical considers returning to the previous default setting it had for release, although the company has said publicly that its design changes were not up for debate.
[...]
Additionally, I was surprised by the use of Yahoo! as the new default home page for Ubuntu in Firefox, although this can easily be changed.
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Variants
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Trisquel GNU/Linux 3.5 is released, it is an opensource linux distribution based on Ubuntu: “Trisquel GNU/Linux 3.5, code name ‘Awen’, is ready. This release is a fully free Ubuntu 9.10 derivative that includes extra software, better multimedia support, more translations and faster configuration. For this release ext4 is used for the root file system and XFS for the home one, to have a balance between speed and usability. Some important features include a much faster boot process and the ability to encrypt the home directory. All packages were updated, including: Linux-libre kernel 2.6.31, X.Org 7.4, GNOME 2.28, OpenOffice.org 3.1.1, a Mozilla-based web browser 3.5.
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Gosalia (codename Mad Monkey) is based on the latest stable release of Ubuntu, which is 9.10. Unlike Ubuntu though, Gosalia takes up a hefty 2 GBs out of your DVD. There’s only one direct link to the ISO (32-bit only) but I didn’t encounter any connection problems. The speed wasn’t all that great, but neither was it painful. Again, a torrent would have been a speedier choice.
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Interestingly enough, the official Samsung firmware for several different models is based off the Linux kernel.
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Phones
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A strong argument can be made for or against a future with Pervasive Computing. Some people will argue the middle – the devices that make sense to become smarter and Internet aware will happen naturally over time. This is perhaps a more realistic argument and that having a smart toaster isn’t worth the extra dollars, energy and growing landfills full of obsolete ones.
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SDK version 1.2 also makes it possible to turn screen rotation on and off in the browser, according to Phonesreview, with an updated rendering engine to speed up the system and keep things as smooth as possible.
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Android
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Rumours are hot on the subject of Google’s Nexus One being available on the Verizon network. Of course with this week’s CTIA Wireless Conference we were expecting to have heard more by now.
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We’ve been rumoring a WiMAX “HTC Supersonic” for a while now, and Sprint just dropped the hard news: the phone will be dubbed the HTC EVO 4G, will be released this Summer and it’s easily the best specced phone we’ve ever witnessed. The hardware is of quite obvious HD2 descent, but with Android onboard and some nice aesthetic tweaks, the EVO 4G takes on a life of its own.
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Sub-notebooks
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Jolicloud has released its new web application platform today that is based on Google Chrome rather than the Mozilla Prism of old. Current users need simply to update the system for the new platform to be installed. The new system should be faster with a smaller memory footprint and enables HTML5-ready browsing.
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The candidates mentioned in those two articles are Open-Xchange, Scalix, Zimbra, Zarafa, Citadel, and OpenGroupware. I also found OpenChange directly from my Google search.
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Recently, Nagios, an open source application for network, server and application monitoring, has been the subject of a dispute. The operators of the French Nagios site nagios-fr.org claimed that Nagios Enterprises was forcing them to give up the domain because of postings about ICINGA, a fork of Nagios. At the centre of the dispute is Ethan Galstad, creator of Nagios and CEO of Nagios Enterprises. The H talked to him about what had happened and asked how he plans to take the Nagios community forward.
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Even before then, as a 19 year old student, Galstad had run into issues with a program to crack the password of Trumpet WinSock software. He named the program TrumpCrack and gained his first experience of a threat of legal action from Trumpet’s lawyers. “It was a scary thing for me back then”. Those experiences led Galstad, when approaching trademark issues with the community, not to use attorneys to send a letter but make personal contact, either himself or Mary Starr (Nagios Enterprise’s Vice President); “It lets people know that there’s a real person on the other end”. Galstad has gone as far as having told the company’s lawyers to only send letters when there’s “a real serious problem that we’ve brought to their attention”. Concerning the trademark policy itself “not everyone is going to agree, nor everyone is going to understand, but the guidelines are there for very specific reasons”. Galstad feels he is being as fair as possible with the trademark policy.
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Among open source applications, there are an increasing number that focus on boosting productivity. Pervasive themes throughout the world of technology–such as collaboration online–are heavily influencing that. Open source tools focused on productivity include useful Firefox extensions such as iMacros (which lets you record repetitive, multi-step tasks and then execute them with one click) and full-blown collaboration platforms. Here, you’ll find our updated list of six productivity enhancement tools. Everything found here is free.
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IBM does because they hire people to do Eclipse. Most people actually get a pay-cheque. So there isn’t a business model for Open Source. And so this is the challenge for us. How do you create hybrid models that still give you revenue? That’s part of the reason why we’ve started the Innovation and Technology Trust. The intention is to support Open Source and emerging technologies that need endorsement and visibility in the IT eco-system in India. If there are other communities out there that need the support and backing, the trust is there for this.
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Each year for the past three years I have conducted an annual survey of users of Open Source eCommerce programs to help encourage and foster professionalism and improvement in the OSC industry. Each year there have been some surprises and insights, and this year is no exception.
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Hospitality solutions provider GuestCentric has integrated its booking engine Joomla, says Travolution.
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Interviews
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Parallels Logo Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels, has now clarified his position on open source. In a brief memo to the open source community, he says “In a recent interview I jokingly tried to buck the trend of common perception and play devil’s advocate regarding open source and the community”.
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We’ve discovered a lot of great ideas here at The Economist Innovation Conference in Berkeley, California. Pixar’s President spoke on how the company creates great films and Paola Antonelli of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) discussed the history of the @ symbol, among other presentations and workshops.
Now one of the biggest forces in social media, founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg, has taken the stage to speak about the open source movement, the origins of WordPress (WordPress), and how it has fostered innovation.
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Education
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The Educational Testing Service contracted with Grunwald Associates LLC to conduct a study of educators around the nation, “An Open Source Platform for Internet-based Assessment: A Report on Education Leaders’ Perceptions of Online Testing in an Open Source Environment,” which was released today.
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An Open Source Platform for Internet-based Assessment: A Report on Education Leaders’ Perceptions of Online Testing in an Open Source Environment synthesizes the findings from over 80 interviews with state assessment and technology leaders (representing 27 states) and national education opinion leaders (representing both public and private organizations). The study found that more and more states are rapidly moving toward Internet-based high-stakes testing, and that there was interest in understanding how an open source platform might work in an online assessment environment.
“Open source software is being used in both higher education and K-12 today, though not for high-stakes assessments. Given the right circumstances, as revealed in this study, we believe it is an option for the future and could be used in the K-12 education community to a great advantage,” ETS Senior Vice President and General Manager, K-12 Assessment Programs, John Oswald, explains. “Not just for assessment, although this research is specifically around that idea, but as an innovative way of using technology — we are aware of open source technology and naturally wanted to explore its benefits.”
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Events
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The Palmetto Open Source Software Conference will be held at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center and USC from April 15-17.
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In an intimate, upcoming Bunker Session event taking place in San Francisco, staffers from OStatic parent GigaOM will discuss the convergence of cloud computing and open source. The event is Wednesday, March 31st, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:00 pm., and speakers are seen below.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla continues to actively develop for Nokia’s Maemo/MeeGo platform, the host of the first-ever Firefox for Mobile 1.0. The problem is that Firefox is far from being widely available in its cell phone-friendly form, extensions and all. The Nokia platform’s short reach makes up just a fraction of the mobile market, and Firefox is only available on two devices–the Nokia N900 and the N810 Internet Tablet.
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SaaS
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Right now if you think about the way software-as-a-service is delivered, Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google are the most commonly cited examples. All these companies deliver their software using what is known as the multitenant model. Just as multitenant software knocked on-premise vendors for a loop, new distributed, open-source models for delivery of SaaS software will have a powerful impact.
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The development of open-source SaaS software will result in an increased availability of software that provides great flexibility for enterprise and personal use, according to Forbes.
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Today, I fired up Google Earth to find that the ‘points of interest’ category had been removed, and a single checkbox is in its place. Certain layers are now entirely inaccessible. Google triggered a user revolt, but admitted fault, and promised to restore full functionality someday. In the meantime, I’ve found a lack of plausible alternatives.
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Databases
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As Oracle continues to shed the former open-source software personnel of Sun Microsystems, other companies are benefiting from the transition. Among those is cloud computing and hosting vendor Rackspace, which recently hired four of the key open source developers behind the Drizzle database effort, a spin-off from the Sun-owned MySQL database.
Rackspace uses MySQL today in its infrastructure but has said that it sees its limitations when it comes to cloud deployments. That’s the reason behind the company’s interest in Drizzle. In some ways, Drizzle is an enhanced version of MySQL, providing additional cloud scalability features, but Rackspace said the project is not quite ready for prime time yet — but with its investment, it’s hoping to help get it there.
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As organizations seek to move applications to private cloud environments, they are also reassessing the technical and economic viability of their current IT platforms. As a result, organizations are seeking open source-based solutions that are cost effective and can provide the scalability and elasticity to meet the demands of a cloud computing environment.
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Oracle
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Basically it means that Oracle does see a future for the open-source version of MySQL, as long as it does not conflict with the roadmap for its own proprietary database tools. How Oracle handles this remains to be seen. When contacted, Oracle refused to make any comments, though in an earlier analyst call, Oracle CEO – Larry Ellison, had said that ‘Oracle will make MySQL better’, with Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief open-source architect, promising that Oracle will continue to support the open-source MySQL database.
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I continue to be impressed with Oracle’s commitment to partners and extremely excited by the new business opportunities the acquisition can provide to Sun’s value added partner community.
Sun’s channel partners are some of the best companies in the industry. As they move from the Sun Partner Advantage Program to Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized, I think they will be impressed with what OPN Specialized can offer — providing their business with the ability to differentiate themselves across the Oracle product portfolio, including Sun servers and storage.
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Business
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Can Marten Mickos capture open source lightning in a bottle — twice? He previously built MySQL into an estimated $100 million open source database company that Sun ultimately acquired for $1 billion. Now, Mickos is stepping into the CEO role at Eucalyptus Systems, the open-source cloud platform provider. Here’s what Mickos has to say about his new position, and the implications for the channel.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU
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John Gilmore, one of the founders of Cygnus Solutions and a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), won this year’s award for the Advancement of Free Software. Gilmore, who also gave a presentation at the conference on the future goals of the free software movement, said that, “Free software has been very good to me, and I’m glad that I have been good to it.”
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Releases
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The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the release of Scribus 1.3.6. This version is another major step on the way to the next stable release 1.4.
Compared to the work on Scribus 1.3.5, the development of Scribus 1.3.6 was focussed on stabilising the code base, and especially on weeding out issues that were mostly due to the porting of the code from Qt3 to Qt4.
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Government
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Last week’s speech by Gordon Brown outlined Labour’s vision for building Britain’s digital future. In this Right to Reply article, Steve Shine, executive vice president of worldwide operations, Ingres, the open source database provider, looks at why any future strategy needs to be based on open source technology, rather than tied to specific vendors.
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While the idea of open government is still an abstract one to many, the Obama administration is already seeing real results from its efforts to be more transparent in its activities, Obama’s chief information officer said this week.
In testimony Tuesday before the U.S. subcommittee on federal financial management, government information, federal services, and international security, federal CIO Vivek Kundra attempted to shed light on how the administration’s Open Government Initiative is already fostering innovation and improving the performance of the U.S. government.
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Korea’s lackluster performance in open-source software continues to hit the country both at home and abroad.
The state-run National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) disclosed Thursday the results of research regarding the international open-source software industry. Korea chalked up rather disappointing results.
Out of the four categories assessed, Korea ranked fourth when it came to national policies for open-source software, sixth in overall environment and seventh for usage of the programs.
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Openness
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Regardless of your own feelings, there are people who find that this open source religion to be more reasonable and in line with their own spiritual and world outlook. From my investigation, a large number of these people are somewhat “geeky” in nature and have been exposed to open source principles through the open source software movement. But that doesn’t make it any less real for them.
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This free, open-source software is so popular that the ISU geosciences department will host the 1st International MapWindow GIS Users and Developers Conference March 31-April 2 at Disney World in Orlando, Fla. At least 60 users and developers from around the world are expected to attend the conference. Attendees include representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and several private companies and universities.
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Standards/Consortia
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Young said all of the ISPs involved in Project Canvas were promising to make IPTV work like TV all of the time. Fundamentally based on an open source standard, Canvas would create the mass market needed to engage with consumers.
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Overseas claimants will be discouraged from launching libel cases in UK courts and a “public interest” defence may be introduced to protect investigative journalism, under legal changes unveiled today.
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We’ve had a few discussions concerning the available damages awards for bogus DMCA takedown notices. Unfortunately, if you’ve had your content taken down incorrectly, the damages you can get from those who sent the takedown, are greatly limited. This is a big problem, because bogus takedowns are regularly sent for a variety of reasons, including attempts to silence speech and because a copyright holder is taking a machine gun approach to dealing with infringing content. The case that’s received the most attention on this has been the Lenz vs. Universal Music case, involving Universal Music’s failure to take fair use into account in taking down a short video of a baby dancing to music.
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The earthquake not only smashed markets, collapsed warehouses and left more than 2.5 million people without enough to eat. It may also have shaken up the way the developing world gets food.
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47 local and international NGOs and civil society groups held a meeting last week to comment on the upcoming donor conference in New York. Afterwards 26 groups signed a statement that decried the absense of local input in the reconstruction plans that are being put forward. The statement is available online here (in Spanish).
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Science
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Beardy biz kingpin Richard Branson was overjoyed yesterday to announce that his passenger-carrying suborbital “SpaceShipTwo” rocket thrillride craft has left the ground for the first time. However it remained attached to its jet-powered “mothership” for the entire flight: independent operations aren’t expected for some time.
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Security
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A decade ago, I observed that commercial certificate authorities protect you from anyone from whom they are unwilling to take money. That turns out to be wrong; they don’t even do that much.
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It starts with a tip, a scrap of intelligence, a fingerprint lifted from a suspected terrorist’s home.
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They never touched the floor — that would have set off an alarm.
They didn’t appear on store security cameras. They cut a hole in the roof and came in at a spot where the cameras were obscured by advertising banners.
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Lawmakers are proposing a national identification card — what they’re calling “high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security cards” — that would be required for all employees in the United States.
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Convicted TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez earned $75,000 a year working undercover for the U.S. Secret Service, informing on bank card thieves before he was arrested in 2008 for running his own multimillion-dollar card-hacking operation.
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Radical Islamist plastic surgeons could be carrying out the implant operations in lawless areas of Pakistan, security sources are said to warned.
Explosives experts have reportedly said just five ounces of Pentaerythritol Tetrabitrate packed into a breast implant would be enough to blow a “considerable” hole in the side of a jumbo jet.
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There needs to be much more thought given to the privacy and health concerns – how are those employed being trained and vetted and how dangerous is the radiation these machines produce?
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The women launched a campaign after becoming concerned at motorists jumping red lights, talking on their mobile phones or drinking coffee while driving near two schools in Reddish, Greater Manchester.
They say inconsiderate drivers are creating chaos and causing dangerous jams while pupils try to cross the road.
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Police battling the threat of terrorism have unveiled a new tactic – they are targeting internet cafes.
As evidence suggests that several people convicted with terrorism acts have visited internet cafes while plotting their crimes, the Metropolitan Police are trialling a new initiative in which owners agree to monitor what customers are looking at, and report any suspect activity to police.
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This is one of those bills that sounds good for the headlines (cybercrime is bad, we need to stop it), but has the opposite effect in reality: setting up needless “standards” that actually prevent good security practices. It’s bills like both of these that remind us that technologically illiterate politicians making technology policy will do funky things, assuming that technology works with some sort of magic.
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Last week marked the second anniversary of the detention of the internationally recognized award-winning human rights activist Dr. Binayak Sen, who’s worked as a public health professional in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh for twenty-five years.
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Health
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Generic drug makers are applauding the latest change to the health care bill – eliminating the ban on patent settlements.
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Basically, big pharma companies threaten (and often sue) the makers of generic drugs, just before a drug is about to go off patent. There is no actual patent infringement as the basis of the lawsuit, but the lawsuit acts as a negotiating ploy, with part of the “settlement” being an agreement from the generic drug maker not to enter the market. It’s a blatantly anti-competitive move. Basically, the pharma companies leverage their gov’t granted monopoly to build up a bunch of cash, which they can then use to pay off potential competitors in order to keep that monopoly for years past the expiration of the patent.
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My decision came last Tuesday morning. There’s a place where I go in the Capitol, just to kind of reflect — before I have to make very important decisions. It’s in the rotunda — right next to Lincoln’s statue. It’s just a bench. And I went over there early Tuesday morning, about seven in the morning when the sun was just coming up, and no one else was around — there wasn’t a sound in the Capitol at that moment in the morning. And I just sat down there in a quiet place and thought about this decision. And that’s literally where I made up my mind that, notwithstanding how much there was in the bill that I didn’t like, that I had a higher responsibility to my constituents, to the nation, to my president and his presidency, to step forward and say, “We must pass this bill. And we must use this bill as an opening toward a renewed effort for a more comprehensive approach to health care reform.”
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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For several years, it has been a poorly kept secret that any Web site you went to could secretly search your browser’s history file to see what sites you had previously visited. All the site owner had to do was ask. And while browser history “sniffing” has been around for a long time, companies are finally starting to actively take advantage of it. The time to act to prevent this clear threat to personal privacy is now.
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A BRAZILIAN court today fined US internet giant Google for not blocking pages of dirty jokes on its social networking site Orkut.
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Police have been handed ‘Chinese-style’ powers to enter private homes and seize political posters during the London 2012 Olympics.
Little-noticed measures passed by the Government will allow officers and Olympics officials to enter homes and shops near official venues to confiscate any protest material.
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Google co-founder Sergey Brin has called on Washington to take a stand against China’s censorship of the internet, urging the US to make the issue a “high priority”.
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Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights
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The central tenet of copyright law has been, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” and the mechanism for this is both copyright and patents, or more specifically, “securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Unfortunately, over the years, all too often we’ve lost sight of the beginning of that sentence, in the assumption that any increase in those “exclusive rights” must surely “promote the progress.” And, yet, as we have expanded and stretched copyright law time and time again — and almost never contracted it — no one ever seems to ask for any actual evidence that stronger and lengthier copyright law leads to promoting more progress.
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The International Olympic Committee appears to think it has the rights to all sport, given a recent letter to ICANN that raises concerns on the .SPORT gTLD proposal in particular, and new gTLDs in general.
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In a desperate cry for media attention, the filmmakers behind the flopped Danish movie Winnie & Karina have accused Piratgruppen of stealing their film. In two libelous press releases they fabricated a piracy threat from the local group of copyright critics, hoping to draw attention to the upcoming DVD-release.
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Digital Economy Bill
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In other words, the Secretary of State gets to decide what counts as misuse, and reputational damage. Clauses 20 and 21 give further powers to take over management of a registry and change it’s constitution, again by fiat.
Prof. David Eisenberg volunteers at a Lindependence 2008 Intalllfest 01 (2008)
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03.24.10
Posted in Boycott Novell, News Roundup at 7:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Let’s see … Softlayer, Zenoss, Canonical, Red Hat, Fedora, HP, IBM, Rackspace, Novell, and The Linux Fund are our commercial sponsors. Most of them had people submit session proposals, which was nice (and by that I mean they submitted talks independently of (usually before) being sponsors. We’ve also had several nonprofits lend us support in one way or another, like GNOME, Mozilla, the Linux Foundation. And the media sponsors have done a terrific job just helping us get the word out, which is vitally important when you’re an event that no one has heard of before. That includes the Linux Journal (which is based out of Houston), LWN, Linux Magazine and Ubuntu User, LXer. They’ve not only allowed us to advertise, but have run our announcements and written blog entries to help spread the word.
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The ZaReason Teo, that I just discovered on Amazon.com, looks like the successor of the Terra A20, which was the first netbook by ZaReason, who build laptops, desktops, and servers running Ubuntu Linux or derivatives.
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Linux system builder ZaReason appears to have launched a new Linux netbook. While there’s no information about the new Teo netbook on the ZaReason web site, you can already order one from Amazon for $460.
The Teo bears a more than passing resemblance to the original MSI Wind U100 10 inch netbook, and I wouldn’t be surprised if ZaReason was working with MSI to supply the chassis and possibly some other components. Spec-wise, the netbook has a 10 inch. 1024 x 600 non-glare display, a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 Pine Trail processor and 160GB hard drive.Amazon says it should get 8 hours of battery life.
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Kernel Space
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The systemtap team announces release 1.2.
prototype perf event and hw-breakpoint probing, security fixes, error tolerance script language extensions, optimizations, tapsets, interesting new sample scripts, kernel versions 2.6.9 through 2.6.34-rc
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Applications
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Although its name sounds like that of a bacterium, Coccinella is a nice cross-platform open source Jabber client. While Jabber, and IM clients in general, are a dime a dozen, Coccinella sports a few nifty features that make it worth considering if your are in the market for a Jabber client.
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Ailurus makes Linux easier to use. You can study Linux skills, install some nice applications and change GNOME settings by this small application.
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Please note that this first public release of VLMC 0.0.1 is going to be a preview release, so there is still a whole lot to come. Here is the release schedule as planned by VLMC developers during FOSDEM 2010.
* February 17th: Feature Freezet
* March 3rd: String Freeze
* March 24th: Release (only for win32 as of now).
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Can it be true: is this really a piece of scanning software that can recognise your scanner first time? On Linux? Read on for our verdict on this commercial scanning program that provides an impressive amount of control over the picture-grabbing process…
[...]
Our verdict: There simply isn’t anything to compare with it on Linux, or possibly any other platform you may choose. 9/10
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Instructionals
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VirtualBox
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Games
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While Iran has been making a concerted effort of late to beef up its presence in the international game market, developers located there still must oversome a series of obstacles to create videogames.
The Washington Post takes a look at the PC game Garshasp, the Monster Slayer, which was created by a team of 20 Iranians operating as Fanafzar Game Studios. The game, an action-adventure title for the PC set in a world of mythological monsters, and steeped in Persian history, is scheduled for a global release soon, but the developers are choosing to delay a domestic release in Iran, saying that “this is not the right time to promote our game” in their own country.
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Developing a current generation game without current generation software sounds like an impossible task – unless you’re Fanafzar Game Studios.
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It emulates:
* Atari Lynx
* GameBoy
* GameBoy Color
* GameBoy Advance
* NES
* PC Engine (TurboGrafx 16)
* PC-FX
* SuperGrafx
* NeoGeo Pocket, NeoGeo Pocket Color
* WonderSwan
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As I explained when I covered 0 A.D. in the fall, I’m excited about the project because it promises to set several important precedents. Besides bringing a high-quality, fully open-source RTS game to Linux users–who currently have to subsist mostly on half-baked, amateur games, if they play anything at all–the 0 A.D. developers are helping to break new ground by building a professional-quality game on the open-source model (the developers of Glest and Battle for Wesnoth deserve similar credit in this regard, but theirs is a lonely world).
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Yesterday the 2.0 release of the Unigine Heaven tech demo was released for Microsoft Windows users. This Windows release was greeted finally by the OpenGL Linux release of this impressive demo too. While we had published benchmarks and screenshots of the Unigine Heaven Linux release, this was based off of an internal build that we had received from Unigine Corp back in December — long before the 2.0 release came about with its optimizations, updated engine, and new artwork. Due to this, we have now published a new set of Unigine Heaven performance numbers for Linux from a selection of ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards along with many new screenshots.
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Unigine Heaven is the latest technology demo / benchmark that shows off the latest state of the Unigine Engine, which continues to constantly advance and has picked up many new features since the Unigine Tropics release in 2008.
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Last November, game engine developer Unigine gave all Radeon HD 5000 users a fun tool to push their cards to the limit. Called “Heaven”, the benchmark was the first on the market that both utilized DirectX 11 abilities and wasn’t based around an actual game. Like Futuremark, Unigine builds its benchmarks with the mindset that what’s exhibited will be seen in real games in the years ahead, assuring that it will remain a relevant benchmark for a little while.
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I think all the games I tried out have some good points none of them are bad but I think if they made a MMORPG with the Savage2 1st/3rd person engine it would be awesome.
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Desktop Environments
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There is an ongoing discussion on a Gnome mailing list which points out that Gnome and KDE might collaborate for a new project: a FLOSS alternative to Dropbox.
One might think: well, we have Ubuntu One – but that’s only for Ubuntu (even though work is done to port it to other Linux distributions too – or it was done at some point) and also it’s KDE integration is still experimental (and not official as far as I know). And finally: many will agree that Ubuntu One is not the best implementation of this great idea so there is room for some competition. And also, the Ubuntu One server is not open source (only the client is) and it seems there are no plans to open-source it.
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GNOME Desktop
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Arista is an easy-to-use multimedia transcoder for the GNOME desktop. It focuses on the goal of transcoding media, namely the devices you wish to play the media on. It is designed for use by people who are not familiar with audio and video encoding and want an easy way to get multimedia to their devices. It supports input from DVD and V4L devices as well as regular files.
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Parted Magic, a Live Linux with programs for partitioning and data rescue, is available in version 4.9. Apart from bug fixes, it includes a few new features.
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Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Above is the screenshot of the new PCLinuxOS with LXDE as native desktop environment. This baby is still in beta stage but compared to its predecessor, this version is almost complete. Having Firefox 3.6 with built-in flash as browser – watching videos via youtube and the likes is a breeze out-of-the-box.
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Red Hat Family
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For many in the IT world, the last twelve months are likely ones that they’d rather forget as companies laid off employees and struggled to deal with the ravages of the recession. But for Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the past year has been a pretty good one financially: Red Hat is set to report its fourth-quarter fiscal 2010 revenues after the market close today and the forecast is positive.
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Red Hat owns the brand and the quality assurance that goes with the Red Hat trademark, but does not “own” the software it sells. For this reason CentOS and Oracle are able to provide rebranded versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux which provide “complete upstream compatibility” with Red Hat’s product without fear of legal approbation.
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Ubuntu
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I’ve held off from mentioning last nights arrival of some new (albeit WIP) icons for Lucid simply because I know how such‘minor’ posts irritate some of you.Sods law then that I wake up to an inbox full of people asking why I haven’t mentioned them already!
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In preparation for the rollout of Ubuntu Server 10.04 Long Term Support next month, Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Linux variant, and the Ubuntu community polled Ubuntu users to see how they use the operating system.
Canonical is also keen on finding out what Ubuntu shops think of the focus on cloud computing and how relevant it is to them today as well as in the future. In the wake of the delivering of the Ubuntu 9.10 release late last year, the company solicited responses to an online survey of Ubuntu users through the Ubuntu forums and a variety of Web sites and other channels; a total of 2,650 finished the survey, although as you can see from the report, quite a number of people did not respond to important questions that Canonical asked.
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I immediately went to purchase it, by clicking the checkout and signed in to my Ubuntu One account. Although it threw a wobbly when I refused to add my Lucid beta 1 desktop to my One account, I re-ran the purchasing process and it took me straight to billing. Thanks to Rhythmbox and Ubuntu, iTunes – and very probably my Windows dual boot – won’t be darkening my desktop again.
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This year, we’ve once again updated our list of top open source security apps. While the list isn’t exhaustive by any means, we tried to include many of the best tools in a variety of categories. We dropped a few projects from last year’s list that have gone inactive or closed source, and we’ve added a few newcomers that are worth your consideration.
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Variants
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It’s too soon to talk about what’s going on upstream but you can expect faster boot, the release will be an LTS release, there’s going to be many little improvements in Gnome itself and of course we’re getting a new kernel. I saw the controversy about the position of the window buttons in Ubuntu 10.04. There’s no plan to change anything in Linux Mint, we’re happy with the buttons staying on the right-hand side and away from the File, Edit, View menus.
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The Roboat is an autonomous robotic sailboat powered by Linux.
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Tokyo-based Ubiquitous Corp. announced the availability of an ARM-focused technology claimed to load Android or Linux in one second. QuickBoot Release 1.0 preferentially restores memory areas necessary for booting from nonvolatile storage to RAM, says the company.
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Phones
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Many thanks to Smart Mobs for bringing this to my attention…
If somebody writes a book with “open” and “mobile” in the title I pretty much have to read it. Though you can buy a paper copy of Open | Mobile on Amazon you can also download a free PDF from the authors’ site — which is what I did.
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Based on those requirements, it would seem I am leaning towards an Android-based unit. Not because I can hack it if I feel like it (I do not have that much free time) but because it meets my requirements. Would I like to have a Pré? Of course.
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I got the planned episode 136 nearly ready – a photography trip to Hamburg. But then came an urgent job from Chicago and overturned the schedule. (No, John, it wasn’t urgent, it was convenient to have a bit more time to edit the Hamburg show).
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credativ UK joins its German counterpart in offering the Open Source Support Card for Linux distributions.
Today, credativ is launching its unique pre-paid Open Source Support Card. Businesses using Linux distributions such as Debian and CentOS stand to benefit from expert support without being tied into a contract, in contrast to other commercial Linux support vendors.
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Choices for word processing applications abound for Linux users, but many of them are little more than glorified rich-text editors. AbiWord has the look and feel of a polished application like Microsoft Word but without the unneeded complexities that can bog some writers down.
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The first public release of the BIND 10 open source DNS server is now out. But don’t rush to update your servers just yet — it’s still years away from being ready for production use.
The ISC (Internet Systems Consortium) has been talking about BIND 10 since at least 2007 when the BIND 9.4 release came out. Last year, the ISC told me that work had actually started on development of BIND 10 and now here we are a year later and the first public milestone.
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Mozilla
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Web-based applications are fantastic, except for that whole “running in the browser” thing. Looking to free your browser-based apps from your Web browsing? Take a look at Mozilla Prism.
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SaaS
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Running applications in the cloud is an ambitious dream, but one that keeps stumbling against the reality of dedicated, native applications, particularly those running on mobile devices.
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Oracle
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Today, Oracle announced the latest release of Oracle® Berkeley DB, the high-performance, small footprint open source embeddable database engine for mission-critical ‘edge’ applications.
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CMS
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More proof that Drupal is for smart people: Mensa is using it for their main website.
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Business
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Recently I was in the audience for the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) keynote panel on the future of open source, and part of the discussion was about the rapidly increasing use of open source in both the public and private sector. No one seemed surprised by this fact, but there was some disagreement on the cause. The one thing all the panelists agreed on was this: IT departments are suddenly much more accepting of open source. One of the panelists asked the question, “What is driving IT’s acceptance of open source?”
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“Open source isn’t about saving money, it’s about doing more stuff, and getting incremental innovation with the finite budget you have.” – Jim Whitehurst, CEO, Red Hat
In his keynote remarks on Wed., Jim emphasized what many other speakers at OSBC re-iterated. Business units are demanding more innovation through technology, and they need to get it done without getting more budget. With the low acquisition costs of open source software, and easy access to information from open source communities, it’s enabling IT departments to innovate faster and be a hero in their businesses.
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BSD/UNIX
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Did I mention speed? This GNOME 2.26 desktop just flies. It’s a pleasure to use, and if I can manage to install FreeBSD 7.2-release and get the same speed with working Java and Totem, I’ll be very, very happy. Working Flash, should I manage it, will be an added bonus.
And thanks, Dru, for the inspiration to do my first serious FreeBSD test.
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These days, Evi lists her office as being “my sailboat, Wonderland, somewhere in the Caribbean.” She has a relatively low profile in the Linux community, despite being one of the authors of (and the inspiration behind) the Linux Administration Handbook, but the USENIX crowd knows her well. Her time at CU launched a whole generation of hackers who are in the field for the joy of it, and every one of them thinks back fondly to one of the people who got them started. Well done, Evi; you helped make all this happen.
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Openness
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Governments worldwide have taken great strides in improving the accessibility of public information in the last year, but it’s just the beginning. Opening of government information will be a gradual process, but these initial steps and realized success have enough momentum to accelerate this process – making both governance and citizenship better in near future.
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Standards/Consortia
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In at least eleven EU member states, groups promoting the use of open standards and open source software, are preparing for Document Freedom Day, 31 March. With workshops, presentations and demonstrations, they aim to make computer users aware of open formats for electronic documents. Many groups will focus on public administrations and governments.
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This year on March 31, along with more than 200 groups in 60 countries, we will observe the third Document Freedom Day. This grassroots effort aims to educate the public about the importance of open formats and open standards.
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Security
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According to the SIFY news site: When deployed, the grenade showers the targets with a dust so spicy that in trials subjects were blinded for hours and left with breathing problems.
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“Wikileaks announced on Mar 21 (via its twitter account) its intentions ‘to reveal Pentagon murder-coverup at US National Press Club, Apr 5, 9am.’ It appears that during the last 24 hours someone from the State Department/CIA decided to visit them, by ‘following/photographing/filming/detaining’ an editor for 22 hours. Apparently, the offending leak is a video footage of a US airstrike.”
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In Italy, the government of neo-Fascist Silvio Berlusconi, the media magnate who detests the very idea of having anyone else in control of any news media, has drafted legislation to impose government examination of all videos before they can be uploaded to the Web. In a related case, an Italian judge convicted Google executives of violating a child’s privacy rights because someone posted an abusive video on Google Video and Google staff didn’t remove it fast enough to suit the judge.
In contrast, in Iceland, the Wikileaks organization, devoted to open publication of information about government malfeasance, is receiving support from legislators.
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Environment
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During my time with OpenNMS I was migrating toward biodiesel. Biodiesel is a cleaner-burning renewable fuel that is made from fats, oils, and greases. I was making the stuff in my backyard and signed up for the fledgling Bio Fuels program at Central Carolina Community College.
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Aside from being eco-friendly, this smart little machine could change the way people in under-developed nations tackle the challenge of having clean clothes to wear. The Open Source Washing Machine Project got underway in the spring of 2008 during a workshop examining ways to implement open source hardware to improve the quality of life in impoverished nations.
Ricardo Mireles, Free Open Source Software advocate in Los Angeles 03 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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