IRC Proceedings: October 21st, 2012
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IRC Proceedings: October 22nd, 2012
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IRC Proceedings: October 23rd, 2012
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IRC Proceedings: October 24th, 2012
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IRC Proceedings: October 25th, 2012
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IRC Proceedings: October 26th, 2012
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IRC Proceedings: October 27th, 2012
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IRC Proceedings: October 14th, 2012
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IRC Proceedings: October 15th, 2012
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IRC Proceedings: October 16th, 2012
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IRC Proceedings: October 17th, 2012
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IRC Proceedings: October 18th, 2012
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IRC Proceedings: October 19th, 2012
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IRC Proceedings: October 20th, 2012
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…it has been many years since we’ve seen such healthy competition among operating systems.
LG is in limelight these days, yesterday we posted a story about LG working on open source implementation of WebOS for their SmartTVs, then they announced 4K TV (UHDTV) and now they are joining the Linux for ARM expert Linaro to cooperate on new ARM technologies.
According to a press statement LG will contribute resources to work together with the resources from existing Linaro members. Linaro uses a unique business model where multiple companies create core open source software once with a shared investment in a single software engineering team, rather than by creating multiple, fragmented software solutions in isolation.
All evidence is pointing to Valve planning on a Steam for Linux beta launch next week during the Ubuntu Developer Conference (UDC). An external beta was already planned for this month with up to 1,000 external players being sought. If Valve intends to keep to its timetable that beta has to happen before the end of Wednesday next week.
UDC begins on Monday and runs through November 1. Valve software engineer Andrew Bliss is already scheduled to give a talk during the conference on Monday, and a page has also appeared on Steam for the official Linux Beta Access group, which already has over 2,500 members.
Now official Steam for Linux community group has been launched, indicating that Steam Linux Beta release is imminent. A new announcement by Valve should happen anytime now as only one week is left in October.
KDE has released a new version of Plasma Active. According to the announcement, the Plasma Active user interface is touch-friendly and works well across a range of devices, giving users a natural way to organize and access their applications, files, and information. Version 3 features an enhanced and expanded set of apps, improved performance, and a new virtual keyboard.
I wrote the other day about why the KDE Manifesto is important for the KDE community. Today I’d like to show how it can be used in practice with a real-world case study: the bodega server. Coherent Theory has been working on this content distribution system for a while and it does things rather differently in a variety of ways including:
* Free software licensed
* multiple owner-defined store fronts to the same (or different) bodies of hosted content thanks to a tag-based metadata system
* able to federate external content (a feature set I expect will evolve significantly over time)
* good for books, music, services, artwork, etc. as well as for applications; essentially any content or artifact that can be delivered over the network works just fine (which is why we don’t call it an “app store”)
* built-in purchasing system using a points mechanism which can be tied to monetary purchases (swipe integration is included), gift cards or pretty much any other system you can think of (e.g. in a school environment students could earn points through their performance in class)
Matthias Clasen has just posted the news that GNOME 3.7.1 will be released sometime today and then takes readers on a tour. The latest on Nautilus, tweeks to the control center, and other tidbits are discussed.
Details matter. Small aspects of a user interface make a huge difference. Get them right, and the experience becomes beautiful, satisfying and easy. Get them wrong, and it can be clunky, awkward and ugly. It’s only by paying attention to the details that we can raise the quality of the GNOME 3 user experience and make it fantastic.
he first release of Gnome desktop in 3.7 cycle is out. Among the most exciting features, this release comes with OwnCloud support in Online Accounts and support for faster recursive searching in Nautilus. This release is a early version of the next major release of Gnome 3.8.
(Ping! Zine Web Tech Magazine) – CloudLinux (http://www.cloudlinux.com), developer of the only operating system optimized for shared hosting services, announced today that Vietnamese distributor VinaCIS is the company’s exclusive partner in the Vietnamese marketplace. For web hosting providers and shared hosting users in Vietnam, this presents an opportunity to make shared hosting plans more stable, dependable, and profitable.
After Red Hat (RHT) reported Q2 results, its stock fell 4.3%. Profit missed analyst estimates by a penny, revenue barely beat, and its profit and sales outlook for the quarter ending in November lagged views.
But shares of the software company, which specializes in migrating companies from Unix and Windows-based systems to less costly Linux open-source software systems, have recovered since Sept. 25. The stock is up 21% for the year.
Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal is here already. A lot of new features has been added, but overall performance remains a major cause of concern. Feedback from our readers also point to such a direction. You can find a number of interesting reactions from users in our previous post discussing Ubuntu and Project Butter. Meanwhile, lets find out what all can be done to make the latest Ubuntu 12.10 fast and usable as it should have been in the first place. 20 things to do after installing Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal.
Here at GeekTech, we’re big fans of tiny Linux computer boards like the Raspberry Pi. If you wanted even more power after the Raspberry Pi got itsturbo on and a serious RAM upgrade, you might want to take a look at the amped up specs on the Cubieboard.
on26Oct
Over the next five years, 65 percent of enterprises will adopt a mobile device management (MDM) solution for their corporate liable users, according to Gartner, Inc. With the increased functionality of smartphones, and the increasing popularity of tablets, much of the network traffic and corporate data that was once the primary domain of enterprise PCs is now being shifted to mobile devices.
With most employees coming to work nowadays toting their smartphone, and or Tablet, and it makes sense for businesses to adopt MDM. With more and more enterprise apps coming on the market and as remote access technology improves, more enterprise content will be stored on these devices. Users are already synchronizing corporate content into public clouds for later retrieval on the devices.
If you are serious about using your Raspberry Pi (RPi) as a platform for writing and testing code, you’ll appreciate the WebIDE software developed by Adafruit. This server-based solution turns your RPi into a flexible coding environment which you can access and use from any machine with a browser. Although WebIDE is geared towards Python, it can handle other languages, including Ruby, JavaScript, and shell scripts. Better yet, WebIDE seamlessly integrates with the Bitbucket code hosting service.
Using the provided installer script, you can deploy WebIDE in an RPi in a matter of minutes. Alternatively, WebIDE can be installed manually, and the project’s website provides instructions on how this is done. By default, WebIDE is configured to run on port 80, which can be a problem if your RPi is already running the Apache web server on that port. In this case, you need to configure WebIDE to run on another port. To do this, open the config.js file in the nano editor using the sudo nano /usr/share/adafruit/webide/config/config.js command, specify an alternative port, and restart WebIDE.
Google’s top 4 free Android apps are available via Google Play. In order of downloads, they are – Facebook, Pandora Internet Radio, Instagram and Facebook Messenger.
Google’s Android operating system will be used on more computing devices than Microsoft’s Windows within four years, data from research firm Gartner showed on Wednesday, underlining the massive shift in the technology sector.
Samsung announced today the immediate availability of Arndale, a new community development board designed around its Exynos 5 Dual system-on-chip (SoC).
It features the implementation of both the world’s first dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore processor and the world’s first quad-core ARM Mali-T604 GPU based on 32nm High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) process technology.
We are already pretty well acquainted with the upcoming Nexus devices thanks to all the leaked photos of Quick Start Guide, camera photos, photos of the devices themselves and LG executive revealing info, Nexus is all over the internet. Since we already know so much about the new devices, let’s digest some news about the new accessory they will come with i.e. the wireless charging pad.
Earlier this week we had seen that Canonical was going to start putting more resources towards getting Ubuntu ready for the mobile world. The first developer devices for this project is actually and not surprisingly Google’s Nexus 7. As we continue to move closer to the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), there is not an install so that developers can easily get Ubuntu 12.0 loaded up on their Nexus tablet(s). I personally don’t own a Nexus 7 tablet, but with this news, I will definitely be getting one and throwing Ubuntu on it despite my hatred for unlocking devices (not really a hatred, but more scared that I’ll brick it!).
Jailbreaking Is Now Legal For Smartphones—But Not TabletsThe Digital Millennium Copyright Act outlaws attempts to “circumvent” digital rights management schemes, but Congress is able to grant exemptions to the rule. Yesterday a bunch of changes were published—making it legal to jailbreak phones, but not tablets.
When it comes to keeping secrets, Google is the last one you can count on. Almost complete information about new LG Nexus Phone has been unfurled over the past few weeks, with hands on reviews, photos and most strikingly, LG executive himself providing some vital info about the device to be launched.
The current 6.x and 9.x long term support (LTS) branches of the open source Tiki wiki, CMS and groupware solution have been updated to versions 6.8 and 9.2 respectively. Whereas Tiki 9.2 has more than 500 code changes, focuses on fixing various bugs and also includes several improvements, the 6.8 release only includes a patch to close an undisclosed security hole.
Cloudera, one of the leading commercial sponsors of Hadoop, is now aiming to enable faster Big Data queries by introducing a new technology codenamed Impala. The goal with Impala is to enable rapid and interactive queries.
The name Alan Clark is a familiar one to those who follow open source governance. Clark sits on the Board of Directors at the Linux Foundation. He was also the former Chairman of the Board of the openSUSE Foundation, and Clark was recently selected to be the first Chairman of the newly formed OpenStack Foundation Board.
Fans joining the Windows 8 launch were greeted by FSF activists, one dressed in GNU buffalo like mascot. The main aim of these activists were to spread awareness about dangers of Windows 8. They distributed pamphlets and DVDs of Trisquel, a free GNU/Linux OS to people attending the event.
CoffeeScript creator Jeremy Ashkenas has announced the release of version 1.4.0 of his programming language that compiles into JavaScript. The first upgrade to the language since mid-May brings relatively few changes. Among them, the CoffeeScript compiler has been updated to allow developers to strip Microsoft’s UTF-8 BOM (byte order mark) from source files before compiling them.
After six months of development, Proxmox Server Solutions has released version 2.2 of its Virtual Environment (VE) virtualisation platform. The system supports virtual machines running both under a Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and in OpenVZ containers. Both can be simultaneously and transparently operated and managed on one system. While KVM completely virtualises almost every operating system, OpenVZ conserves resources by only running Linux guests on a common kernel in isolated containers. The company says that this strategy puts its product ahead of alternatives like VMware’s vSphere, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Citrix’s XenServer.
According to its developers, version 2.5 of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-based open source web framework for Ajax applications, offers significant performance improvements. Apparently, the overall code base has been reduced by 20 per cent, and the download size of the sample application dropped 39 per cent.
GWT is built around a Java-to-JavaScript compiler that allows developers to almost exclusively use Java when writing an application’s client and server code. The user interface code is translated into JavaScript and deployed to the browser when required. The technology recently became a discussion topic when Google introduced its Dart alternative to JavaScript; however, Google has assured the GWT community that it will continue to develop GWT for the foreseeable future.
Open source shouldn’t just stop at the world of software. In fact, more and more manufacturers are warming up to the cause.
We’ve covered the extraordinary open source robotics work going on over at Willow Garage a number of times. It is a project that originated at Stanford University. Robots being developed within it run the open source ROS (Robot Operating System) software. Now comes Suitable Technologies, a spinoff of Willow Garage doing some innovative things in the arena of remote presence robotics.
The W3C has published a Working Draft for a push notification API for web applications. Currently, there are more than a dozen different approaches to sending push notifications from a server to a client, including EventSockets, PubNub and Urban Airship. The W3C draft, authored by Eduardo Fullea of Telefónica and Bryan Sullivan of AT&T, is a new approach that can use several different protocols and is intended to become a standard endorsed by the W3C.
The wave of new voter restrictions and scare tactics being implemented for the 2012 elections — such as voter ID laws, early voting restrictions, threatening billboards, misleading mailers and vigilante poll watchers — could intimidate countless numbers of Americans from exercising their right to vote.
A new paper examines the metabolic restrictions of a raw diet, and suggests that our primate cousins are limited by their inability to heat their dinners. It bolsters the cooking hypothesis of Richard Wrangham, a primatologist and professor of biological anthropology at Harvard who believes cooking is our legacy.
Brazilian biomedical scientists Karina Fonseca-Azevedo and Suzana Herculano-Houzel note that the largest primates do not have the largest brains, a perplexing question. Encephalization (a larger brain size per body size than you’d expect) has long been thought to be a key feature setting humans apart from other primates, and mammals as a whole, but there is no consensus on how or why this happened.
The United Nations is to set up a dedicated investigations unit in Geneva early next year to examine the legality of drone attacks in cases where civilians are killed in so-called “targeted” counter-terrorism operations.
And, in fact – credit where credit is due – Bob Schieffer did ask a question about drones.
Oil companies operating in the North Sea have been fined for oil spills on just seven occasions since 2000, even though 4,123 separate spills were recorded over the same period, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has confirmed.
One of the world’s leading naturalists has accused US politicians of ducking the issue of climate change because of the economic cost of tackling it and warned that it would take a terrible example of extreme weather to wake people up to the dangers of global warming.
As the world’s biggest publicly-traded oil and gas company, there are few countries in which ExxonMobil does not operate.
From cosying up to the Kremlin for Arctic oil exploration, to angering the Iraqi government by working in Kurdistan, the Texas-headquartered giant is not free from controversy.
Among workers aged 16-24 the jobless rate towered at 52.34 percent in the third quarter, only slightly down from 53.27 percent in the previous quarter, the institute said.
Neoliberalism is an evolving ideological paradigm which can be traced back to the work of Hayek and von Mises in the 1920s and even earlier than that. I won’t however, do a historical survey here of the various developments and nuances. Instead, I’ll just rely on the definitions and specifications of this body of thought that seem to me to be the clearest statements of the current state of the paradigm.
In Pennsylvania and across the nation, investors are making big bucks off of charter schools, and donating huge sums to the politicians who protect their interests.
Regardless of political persuasion, there isn’t one person I’ve met who isn’t infuriated by the fact that they pay more in federal taxes than a combined majority of most billion-dollar corporations. But what’s even more infuriating is that under the Budget Control Act that was passed after our austerity- crazed Congress forced it into being during the Summer-long debt negotiations of 2011, budgets for numerous essential social programs will be cut to the bone this January, under the false guise that our country is too broke to pay the bills.
The owner of a Milwaukee industrial equipment maker has joined other U.S. employers in telling their workers what might happen to them if President Obama gets re-elected.
FREEDOM GROUPS the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will be in a US federal appeals court today as they fight government attempts to get internet user IDs without warrants.
The ACLU and EFF are pushing back government advances on Wikileaks and Twitter where, they argue, there is a threat to liberty and privacy and want it made public whenever the government requests access.
If you’re a registered voter and surf the web, one of the sites you visit has almost certainly placed a tiny piece of data on your computer flagging your political preferences. That piece of data, called a cookie, marks you as a Democrat or Republican, when you last voted, and what contributions you’ve made. It also can include factors like your estimated income, what you do for a living, and what you’ve bought at the local mall.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), led by Russian diplomat, Yury Fedotov, has just released a report (pdf) arguing for more surveillance and retention of data on all communications, even in the total absence of suspicion. Coincidentally, the Coordinator of the elegantly named 1267 Committee that was in charge of the report is British – and the British government recently proposed (even if it is likely to be rejected at national level) the most extensive suspicionless monitoring ever considered in a democratic society – the Communications Data Bill.
Patent protection helped transform agriculture into agribusiness
According to the genius lawyers at Philip Morris, consumers seeing this are going to be confused into believing that Philip Morris is actually endorsing the product.
Techdirt has written before about the aggressive enforcement habits of the Tolkien estate, once in connection with the name “Tolkien”, and once regarding the word “Hobbit”.
We recently discussed the common fallacy that “copyright is in the Constitution”, but that’s only one example of copyright defenders misrepresenting a document to support their cause. Another favorite, often invoked by folks like Rob Levine and David Lowery, is the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a relatively toothless document in the US (compared to the Constitution) but one that feels good to have on your side.
The lawsuit claims a line spoken by actor Owen Wilson in the Woody Allen film infringes on the author’s literary rights; a spokesman for Sony calls the complaint frivolous.
The FSF has fought for years against the threat of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). Users should have the right to modify, share and learn from the software on their devices, and technical measures put in place in the name of DRM offer a substantial roadblock. It’s even worse when those measures have the force of criminal law behind them, threatening people who simply want to change the software on their computers with jail time. The FSF wants to create a world in which there is no DRM. Until then, at the very least, users shouldn’t have to worry about legal consequences for disabling these malfeatures on their own devices.
We’ve argued for a while that copyright is frequently used as a new form of mercantilism, the mostly discredited economic theory that basically said that the government should be heavily involved in “protecting” local industries with monopolies and tariffs. Adam Smith’s seminal works, which more or less created the field of economics were really, in part, a critique of mercantilism, and how it could cause more economic harm than good. When you take a wider view of copyright law and policy (especially in international trade), it’s not difficult to conclude that it’s very similar to classic 17th century mercantilism.
A month before the controversial “six strikes” anti-piracy plan goes live in the U.S., the responsible Center of Copyright Information (CCI) is dealing with a small crisis. As it turns out the RIAA failed to mention to its partners that the “impartial and independent” technology expert they retained previously lobbied for the music industry group. In a response to the controversy, CCI is now considering whether it should hire another expert to evaluate the anti-piracy monitoring technology.
Summary: Another CEO of a massive American company wants the patent system to be scraped as it slows down innovation and “[t]here are patent trolls everywhere”
DAYS after the CEO of Amazon slammed the US patent system we find that another CEO of a large company (neither Apple nor Microsoft, obviously) slams the patent system. It’s one of the most popular CEOs (among his employees) and here is what he has to say:
On the subject of intellectual property, Chambers is critical of the U.S. patent process and said he would “completely throw out everything, and start from the beginning.
“It is a mess; There are patent trolls everywhere,” said Chambers, noting that patent problems impose huge costs on every company.
But Chambers was also critical of the trend by tech companies of suing one another over alleged patent violations. He didn’t name names, but, speaking to the audience, he said for “his peers” in the room, “you shouldn’t be suing your peers.”
Patent litigation, he added, slows down innovation.
TechDirt adds:
[I]‘s nice to see Cisco CEO John Chambers speak out against the patent system by calling out both the trolls and the big tech companies for abusing the system and hindering innovation.
Take note, Apple and Microsoft. Fellow monopolies are getting fed up. It’s not even monopolies that always benefit from this system, either, just their lawyers and some collateral damage (patent trolls). █
Summary: Samsung’s phones alone outpace iPhone sales (at 1:2 ratio) and Android tablets approach majority market share
Apple must be nervous. Its fake apology (court-mandated retraction, for lying about Android) is rather telling. I convinced several friends and also my wife to buy Android and avoid Apple simply because Android is better; it’s no longer just a matter of price. The bad PR Apple has been getting for its frivolous lawsuits is not helping either. Here is a new example of bad PR:
Apple was recently slapped with a court order in UK, after losing an appeal, to apologize on its UK website that Samsung did not copy it’s iPad design. Apple has complied with the judgment and posted a link at the bottom of their UK website which takes a user to the Samsung / Apple UK judgment page.
But all the news sites we come across slam Apple with headlines like “Apple Publishes Non-Apology To Samsung On Its Website To Comply With U.K. Court Ruling” or this article:
So Apple posted an ‘apology’ on its website today, and as you can probably guess, it’s not much of an apology at all.
“9th July 2012 the High Court of Justice of England and Wales ruled that Samsung Electronic (UK) Limited’s Galaxy Tablet Computer, namely the Galaxy Tab 10.1, Tab 8.9 and Tab 7.7 do not infringe Apple’s registered design No. 0000181607-0001,” Apple’s half-arsed apology reads, although there’s no mention of the word “sorry”, or even the word “regrets”, anywhere to be seen.
The cheeky apology goes on to point out that Samsung didn’t copy the Ipad because it isn’t “cool” and uses a quote from the UK judge that says Samsung’s tablets “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design”.
By not apologising Apple has only gotten yet more negative publicity. Pamela Jones, who used to defend Apple, calls it “bratty”:
Apple has posted on its website, as ordered by the UK court, and upheld on appeal, a rather ungracious notice that Samsung did not copy Apple according to the UK court (but Apple adds it still thinks it does and other courts agree with it). I would like to show it to you, so you can see the kind of legal advice Apple is following, because what the UK court held was that nobody would imagine that a Samsung phone is an iPhone.
Apple did not provide you with a link to the order telling Apple to publish a notice on its websites either, so here it is. Ask yourself as you read it and then read Apple’s notice if it followed the order’s spirit or even its letter, except in the most strained way.
It is rather amusing to see this. It helps validate stereotypes about Apple. Since Microsoft destroyed Nokia — a tragic story in its own right — and took it down to obscurity we find that Android is marching strong and Apple sales disappoint. Android is growing at Apple’s expense in tablets, not just smartphones, with high profits and an impressive sales rate. Dominic Kennedy writes:
Samsung has maintained its leadership position in the worldwide smartphone market, posting another record quarter for itself and the industry, and more than double the total volume of Apple. It’s the first time since 4Q09 that a single company has held more than 31% market share in a single quarter.
Gartner, typically an Android- and Linux-hostile firm, admits that Android will also beat Windows, but it says it can take four years. This is nonsense. Android is activated about half a billion times per year (and growing). It can outpace Windows by the end of next year in terms of installbase. In terms of sales, it might already be the number one OS.
Jim Zemlin recently noted Android’s amazing growth. It brought Linux to many fingertips, but let us go further and aspire or push for freedom at the applications and hardware level, not just the OS. Peripheral networks, e.g. carriers, spectrum, are another key area for activism. Techrights intends to take it up a notch when it turns six, hopefully with more coverage just like in the old days. Celebrations are premature in a world full of moles, corrupt politicians, and a patent system turned into government-imposed protectionism (e.g. against South Korean firms). █
Summary: Tracking the latest of Intellectual Ventures, Black Duck, and Ohloh, which were all founded by Microsoft veterans and executives
We recently discovered that attempts are under way to make public a lot of information about about the secretive patent troll that Microsoft created to extort a lot of companies behind closed doors. Mr. Masnick’s great Web site says:
We’ve written about patent trolling giant Intellectual Ventures many times, including how it is notoriously secretive about almost everything. Its deals with companies (often involving them forking over hundreds of millions of dollars to not get sued) are hidden away behind strict non-disclosure agreements. It also hides the various patents in over 1,000 shell companies. At other times it “sells” patents to independent trolls, but most people believe that it still gets a cut of any revenue that comes out of those trolling operations.
An operation called IP Checkups — a “patent analytics firm” — is trying to shine some more light on IV’s secret patent portfolio and has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to investigate the company’s patents.
We have already gathered a lot of information about it, and much of it is bound together by our wiki. We correctly identified this racket as a source of future abuse back in 2007. Another firm that got our attention is Black Duck because that too is a company founded by Microsoft folks, who later hired yet more Microsoft folks (Ohloh) and used as their main output GPL-hostile messages (every few months for years). Some of the Microsoft veterans boast code search, but they had always been Microsoft-leaning, even before Black Duck acquired them. Here is the latest:
Black Duck Software today announced enhancements to Ohloh, the world’s most comprehensive developer resource for evaluating and tracking open source projects, contributors and code. Organizations can now aggregate their open source contributions across many projects, providing new visibility into community growth and top contributors. In addition, Ohloh Code, the leading open source code search engine, has graduated from beta, providing fast access to the world’s open source code base.
As we showed years ago, Ohloh is saturated with C#. Be wary of companies set up by people from Microsoft. The problem is, the vast majority of people do not know which companies those are. Another such company, founded and run by an ‘ex’ Microsoft manager, is called OpenLogic. It too has spread GPL-hostile messages while selling proprietary software (not “open” like the company’s name).
Techrights is not out to daemonise companies or individuals; it strives to alert when FOSS-hostile forces masquerade as pro-FOSS (e.g. Microsoft Florian on Microsoft’s payroll), so it’s merely a reactionary force. It’s self defence. █
Original photo by Matt Buchanan; edited by Techrights
Summary: NPR the latest to argue for a patent system overhaul following high-profile fiascos; Apple is making devices worse for everyone while blocking from import those that are not
Apple is still quite prominent in patent news, owing of course to a record fine it has lobbied for, even at the cost of misconduct. In news that got mentioned this week, BSP’s case is being inherited:
In the US, electronic component distributor Avnet has acquired IBM analytics re-seller BrightStar Partners (BSP) and its BSP Software for an undisclosed sum. The news broke as IBM Cognos vendor Motio filed a counter-patent infringement lawsuit against BSP.
All these patent lawsuits involve software patents, which IBM promotes. Some suggest curious workarounds for the current patent system, with NPR dedicating a whole episode and TechDirt writing:
In something of a follow up to This American Life’s famous episode about the horrors of software patents, the Planet Money team brought on Mark Lemley to talk about how to fix the patent system. If you’re aware of Lemley (or read Techdirt) what he talks about isn’t all that surprising. He does note that, even if software patents are particularly silly, he doesn’t agree with trying to carve them out specifically. Instead, he’s still mostly focused on fixing the patent system by properly enforcing the laws already on the books. That means having the USPTO and the courts actually recognize that too many software patents are on general ideas (“functional claiming”) when that’s not allowed.
Swapnil Bhartiya uses the latest Apple call for Android ban to say:
The US patent system has become an abuse mechanism for companies like Microsoft and Apple which are using it to cripple competition and discourage innovation in the mobile industry.
In the end it’s American consumer who is losing.
One has got to love the reaction of Jobs Witnesses who say that it’s important to have devices like these taxed or banned. As if making unavailable the competition would somehow improve their lives. Or that these lawsuits somehow improve innovation. Destruction is never good for anyone, perhaps with the exception of a dead leader — one who favoured "thermonuclear" war rather than peaceful co-existence and fair competition.
It is worth noting that Apple is snubbing court orders:
In other words, it’s the petulant Apple “complying” with the UK judge, while at the same time making sure to add a “but, but, but… the judge is really wrong — other than the part where he likes our design.”
Microsoft folks say that Apple “slams” Samsung, but all it should say may be, “Apple slams the courts.” The arrogance at Apple cannot get any more lucid than that. There are more DRM patents coming from this empire of lock-down. To shed some details:
The patent, titled “Cross-transport authentication,” requires authentication controllers to be located at either the ports on a portable device and attached accessory, or the transport connector which can be a wire or cable. As seen with Apple’s Lightning connector, the authentication module can take the form of a chip integrated at one side of the cable, providing the necessary permissions for an accessory to interface with a portable device.
Yet more DRM. And some people still wonder why Apple is bad and why its devices are better off shunned. It’s not a fight between brands; it’s a fight between philosophies. █
Much has been said about the look and feel of Microsoft’s new Metro interface and how the operating system that sits on 90-plus percent of the world’s desktops is now getting an upgrade that would be better suited for tablets and touch screens.
That interface, and the direction that personal computing seems to be heading, represents a big opportunity for Linux… but perhaps not the one you’re thinking of.
Intel had to find a way to get into the tablet market, but people only want to buy iPads and Android-powered ones. So Intel surrendered the consumer market altogether in favor of enterprise “solutions”, like its new Intel learning series “solution” for education, which relies on tablets nobody heard of with operating systems nobody heard of running proprietary education software nobody heard of. To sell those, Intel was looking for suckers, and in minister Nicolas Sehnaoui, it found the perfect sucker.
Students in America are getting iPads, students in Africa are getting Kindles, but students in Lebanon will be getting MANDRIVAs.
Google’s Android OS only accounted for a 3.9% share of the smart phone market in 2009 (according to Gartner Group); last year that rose to 64% of the smartphone market. In 2011, smartphones for the first time outsold PCs (including tablets.) With hundreds of millions of those smart phones running Android, the consumer market is fully accustomed to Linux-based software.
If Microsoft has reinvented and reengineered itself to be able to position its OS to serve not just the desktop WIMP space, but also now the touch-enabled search-centric mobile-first always-on cloud-driven market — then this is a reinvention that was never going to happen without the firm facing a little criticism.
Konstantin Kochereshkin has announced yesterday, October 24th, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta release of the upcoming Rosa Desktop 2012 Linux operating system.
Last month, I suggested that the transition to Windows RT bares the same hurdles as transitioning to Linux. Many obstacles blocking our path, like Adobe and PC gaming, are considering Linux; the rest have good reason to follow.
Consumers who bought Vista or “7″ believing what they were told are justified in thinking “8″ is unnecessary. After all their current hardware idles all the time and it’s choked with RAM and storage. What could anyone possibly want from “8″? A new PC? Nope. They might buy a tablet this year however it won’t be running that other OS because all their friends don’t have that.
Parallella is an attempt to make Linux parallel computing easier and is advertised as a “supercomputer for everyone”, but will it come to fruition?
Parallella is designed to be “a truly open, high-performance computing platform that will close the knowledge gap in parallel programing.” The Parallella computing board is built around Epiphany multi-core chips out of the Cambridge-based Adapteva semiconductor company.
In the discussion that followed when it was found a nasty EXT4 file-system corruption bug hit recent Linux kernel stable releases, one user proposed that EXT4 be put in a feature-freeze mode and future work then be put towards an “EXT5″ file-system, to which Ted Ts’o did respond.
In the Phoronix Forums discussion about the EXT4 corruption bug hitting the Linux 3.4/3.5/3.6 kernels, Ted Ts’o, the EXT4 file-system maintainer, ultimately jumped in on the discussion to respond to the numerous and polarized opinions of Phoronix readers.
Within the forthcoming Linux 3.7 kernel there is support for Xen virtualization support on ARM when using a Cortex-A15 SoC. While not yet merged to mainline, KVM virtualization support for the ARM architecture is also coming about.
Patches are now up to their third revision that enable KVM/QEMU support on ARM when using Cortex-A15 hardware. There’s kernel patches still needed to go upstream, which one would hope will happen for the Linux 3.8 kernel.
The latest Phoronix benchmarks to share of the AMD FX-8350 “Vishera” processor are performance-per-Watt results for the Piledriver eight-core processor compared to the previous-generation Bulldozer FX-8150. Tests were conducted when running at stock speeds as well as overclocked settings.
Rob Clark has provided a status update on Freedreno, his reverse-engineered ARM open-source graphics driver for the Qualcomm Snapdragon / Adreno hardware.
The latest update on Freedreno came on Tuesday via his blog. Aside from getting the stencil buffer working and fixing batching problems in the 2D driver, Rob has also begun eyeing a Gallium3D-based driver and he’s already implemented DRI2 support within the xf86-video-freedreno DDX driver.
Astronomy is a branch of science that deals with the study of celestial objects (including stars, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, meteor showers, nebulae, star clusters, galaxies) and other phenomena such as gamma ray bursts and supernovae.
Astronomy is particularly well suited to the layperson. It is a wonderful hobby which has almost no age limits, it is open to individuals of all financial means, and there is always the potential for an amateur to discover something that has eluded professional astronomers, or to help monitor stars and track asteroids. Professional astronomers are in a very fortunate profession. They have the opportunity to continue their love of astronomy, travel the world, make significant discoveries, and get paid at the same time.
A couple of days ago, Tomas and I, gave a presentation at the Gentoo Miniconf. The subject of the presentation was to give an overview of the current recruitment process, how are we performing compared to the previous years and what other ways there are for users to help us improve our beloved distribution. In this blog post I am gonna get into some details that I did not have the time to address during the presentation regarding our recruitment process.
As Canonical looks to recoup some of its investment in the Ubuntu Linux project it was widely thought that the firm would follow Red Hat’s route of offering paid product support, but instead Ubuntu 12.10 is the first glimpse of how Canonical apparently wants to recoup its investment. The firm’s decision to release Ubuntu 12.10 with Amazon adverts has added a sour taste to what still remains an accomplished desktop Linux distribution.
Last week marked eight years since Ubuntu made its appearance on the GNU/Linux scene. Since October 2004, there has been a release of this distribution every six months, the initial buzz being very loud and then gradually fading away.
With the release of version 1.3, the team at the Yocto Project has added a number of developer-visible features to its embedded distribution builder. First announced in October 2010, the open source collaboration project (a Linux Foundation workgroup) is aimed at device builders. It provides templates, tools and methods for developers to create Linux-based systems for various embedded systems and processor architectures such as ARM, MIPS, PPC or x86.
It was in 2003, IRCTC felt the need of a high-performance and high-availability system to handle the high load of its operations and partnered with open source-based solution provider Red Hat to run its IT infrastructure, in order to automate and streamline its processes.
The Chromebook has inserted itself into my life in a way I never expected. Sorry, MacBook Pro — I just don’t need you right now
Acquia, a provider of paid cloud services specifically designed to support the Drupal open source web content management platform, is introducing a new concept it calls “Open Web Experience Management” or OpenWEM. It looks like digital marketing has officially come to Drupal.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has laid out a roadmap toward meaningful use certification of its VistA EHR system, with a version that’s being updated and improved in the OSEHRA open source community.
The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA), a non-profit organization, manages a public/private community formed to modernize VistA for open source and to contribute to the VA-Defense Department’s integrated electronic health record (iEHR).
Aidan O’Riordan, systems analyst with Cork City Council’s IS operations, confirmed that the council is undertaking the projects in a way that will be compatible with open source work that will be carried out by the LGMA and the Local Government Efficiency Review Group.
[...]
Cork City Council already uses some existing open source applications and servers and is looking to build on that. To date, open source at the council had been restricted to operational applications, like network monitoring solutions or list servers rather than end-user applications, O’Riordan said.
For a high school French teacher looking for a creative approach to verb conjugation, new lesson plans are only a website away. The same is true for a biology teacher covering a unit on mammals, or a history teacher trying to spice up a lesson on the Gettysburg Address.
I’ll be honest about my viewpoint to start this piece: I hate geo-restrictions, particularly on digital goods. I simply cannot see how they benefit anyone. Customers are blocked or pay different prices for like goods, often times angering them (not something you typically want to do to customers). Companies feel the brunt of this anger, or else at least feel the impact of the a restricted customer base through their own unwillingness to deal fairly in a global marketplace. Perhaps most importantly, for savvy customers, there are tools to simply get around the artificial barriers these companies erect, making them just more useless DRM-like nonsense.
Security flaws in airline boarding passes could allow would-be terrorists or smugglers to know in advance whether they will be subject to certain security measures, and perhaps even permit them to modify the designated measures, security researchers have warned.
Perhaps “hacked” is the wrong word, because it can imply both criminality and lawful exploration. But we’ll stick with “hacked” here, in the sense of “some reverse engineers have figured out how you can adapt, or jailbreak, your PS3 to make it interoperable with software of your own choice.”
The PS3 has been hacked before, but Sony was able to inhibit the hack with an update to its own firmware. This is much like the history of jailbreaking on Apple’s iOS, where hackers typically uncover a security vulnerability and exploit it, whereupon Apple patches the hole and suppresses the jailbreak.
Political cycles present the obvious opportunity for prognostication. Polling is happening daily. Rather than present another poll, let us take this opportunity to make a simple prediction.
There will be no pre-election BP Deepwater Horizon settlement despite an $18 billion deal being on the table last month and a rumored $21 billion settlement this past Friday, October 19.
Documents obtained by Greenpeace show officials controlling information about wildlife affected by the disaster
As I reported in this week’s The Nation magazine cover story “Mitt Romney’s Bail-out Bonanza,” the Romneys are in a special partnership with the vulture fund that bought Delphi, the former GM auto parts division.
The United States filed a fraud lawsuit against Bank of America Corp, accusing it of causing taxpayers more than $1 billion of losses by selling thousands of toxic mortgage loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
I remember when Wen Jiaao first became prime minister. There were such high hopes, and they’ve never really abated: Wen has always been seen as “the good CCP leader.” As if by magic, he was always on the scene as tragedies struck, be they earthquakes or floods or winter storms in Guangzhou at Chinese New Year time or high-speed rail crashes. And there was something genuine about the Man of the People, the one who cared about China’s disenfranchised. And maybe he really does care. He would have to be a damned good actor if he didn’t.
Debate has once again surrounded social media and the topic of whether individual’s should be able to post anonymously and give false details when creating a social media account. Andy Smith, head of security at the Public Sector Technical Services Authority, caused controversy by advising internet users that giving false details to social networking sites was a “very sensible thing to do”.
In an age where our personal information is becoming more and more valuable as a commodity, it is clearly sensible that people don’t share data unless it is absolutely necessary. The answer to the problem is that internet services need to reassess how much personal information they request from a user, for instance is it really necessary for a social network site to ask for your full birthday and gender?
Ankara is pursuing a systematic campaign of intimidation against the Turkish media, including the prosecution and jailing of writers, and demands for those who challenge government policies or actions to be sacked, two independent investigations have concluded.
On 23 October, a vote will take place in the European Parliament on the ACAA (Conformity Assessment and Acceptance of Industrial Products) protocol attached to the European Union-Israel Association Agreement. The ACAA protocol must be rejected because Israel openly and knowingly violates international human rights law. Members of the European Parliament must vote no to ACAA and choose to stand for human rights in Palestine and worldwide.
Allegations bordering on surreal often focus on an elite paedophile network linked to the establishment, and a question by respected MP Tom Watson in Parliament on Wednesday about a “powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and No 10″ raised a small possibility that some of these theories may be based on fact.
Whether or not abuse is linked to powerful individuals shouldn’t in fact matter. More pressing is the fact that children are being abused in care, as the recent Rochdale “grooming” case and historical scandals like the massive North Wales homes scandal uncovered in the 1990s goes to show.
The lack of data on missing children is crucial to monitoring this problem. The most horrific (unsubstantiated) allegations mooted online involve the abuse and ultimate murder of children in care.
Russia’s lower house of parliament has overwhelmingly approved a new bill widening the definition of high treason in what critics say is part of the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent.
Free speech is dying in the Western world. While most people still enjoy considerable freedom of expression, this right, once a near-absolute, has become less defined and less dependable for those espousing controversial social, political or religious views. The decline of free speech has come not from any single blow but rather from thousands of paper cuts of well-intentioned exceptions designed to maintain social harmony.
In a stunning development, following an obscure vote of Heads of State at the Africa Union in 2007 (Assembly Council/AU/Dec. 138(VIII)), the AU Scientific, Technical, and Research Commission has proposed a draft statute to establish the Pan-Africa Intellectual Property Organization (PAIPO). This proposed legislation will be presented to a meeting of the African Ministers in charge of Science and Technology on 6-12 November 2012 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The statute, drafted by true believers of IP-maximalist ideology, proposes to establish a region-wide intellectual property organization with the sole agenda of expanding IP rights, strengthening enforcement, harmonizing regional legislation, and eventually facilitating the granting of IP monopolies by a central granting authority that may well be legally binding on Member States.
In the near future, human development can potentially be dictated by corporate America, through the Bill & Malinda [sic] Gates Foundation and their $8.3 U.C. Davis grant.
Skimming the Agricultural Development section of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation web site is a feel-good experience: African farmers smile in a bright slide show of images amid descriptions of the foundation’s fight against poverty and hunger. But biosafety activists in South Africa are calling a program funded by the Gates Foundation a “Trojan horse” to open the door for private agribusiness and genetically engineered (GE) seeds, including a drought-resistant corn that Monsanto hopes to have approved in the United States and abroad.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has approved $20 million in new monies toward the development of “golden rice” — an untested, highly controversial GE (genetically engineered) crop that threatens biodiversity and risks bringing economic and ecological disaster to Asia’s farms.
The leader of the Golden Rice project is Gerald Barry, previously director of research at Monsanto.
Sarojeni V. Rengam, executive director of Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP), has called the rice a “Trojan horse.” According to Rengam, the rice is “… a public relations stunt pulled by the agri-business corporations to garner acceptance of GE crops and food. The whole idea of GE seeds is to make money.”
The demonization of file sharing by copyright maximalists blinds many companies to the fact that it is marketing in its purest form. That’s because people naturally only share stuff they think is good, and thus everything on file sharing networks comes with an implicit recommendation from someone. Not only that, but those works that appear on file sharing networks the most are, again by definition, those that are regarded mostly highly by the filesharing public as a whole, many of whom are young people, a key target demographic for most media companies.
The rather long list of “People Most Hated By The Internet” — that guy who sued the Oatmeal, RIAA, Hunter Moore, Julia Allison, Violentacrez… — would be incomplete were it not to include John Steele. Steele is a lawyer who has partnered with the pornography industry to go after “pirates” who download their XXX films without paying for them. He has filed over 350 of these suits, and says he is currently suing approximately 20,000 people.
The U.S. Government has just submitted its objections to Megaupload’s motion to temporarily dismiss the criminal indictment against the company. Megaupload’s lawyers had argued that a dismissal would allow the cyberlocker to rehabilitate itself, but the U.S. believes this can’t happen as Dotcom has sworn that the old Megaupload won’t return. According to Kim Dotcom the DoJ’s opposition is “full of frustration.” “Their bluff case is falling apart,” he says.
Hollywood-backed anti-piracy outfit BREIN has won a landmark case against XS Networks, the former hosting provider of torrent site SumoTorrent. The Court of The Hague ruled that the provider is responsible for damages copyright holders suffered through the torrent site’s activities. The Dutch verdict has far-reaching implications for the liability of hosting providers for the conduct of their clients.
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