Thiruvananthapuram: All 141 legislators of the state assembly were Tuesday given a brand new HCL laptop each.
Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan handed over one laptop to Leader of the Opposition Oommen Chandy at the banquet hall of the state assembly.
It is yet to be decided if the legislators would be charged for the computers, speaker of the assembly K. Radhakrishnan told.
Ubuntu 10.04, a.k.a. the Lucid Lynx, is set to hit the Web in April. Lucid will be Canonical’s third Long Term Support release, and I expect it to break new ground for the organization in the server space, owing in large part to its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud functionality.
Toward the end of the year, I expect to see devices shipping with Google’s Web-centric Chrome OS, which may well set the stage for a new batch of rich Web applications in 2011 and beyond.
One last bit of advice. Sometimes you might suspect that a piece of hardware is defective but, you don’t have a utility available to actually test the device. For example, I had a client complaining that the network adapter on an HP workstation had gone bad. I replaced the motherboard (which had an integrated network adapter).
When I got back into Windows I tried to access the Internet, but the network adapter still wouldn’t work. So I reloaded drivers, verified IP settings and performed numerous other tests. Still, I could not get this PC online. I concluded that something inside of Windows was causing the problem, and the only thing left to do was to reinstall Windows. The client wasn’t willing to redo a system based on a hunch, so to test my hypothesis I booted the system using an Ubuntu Live CD.
Ubuntu Live CD is a version of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system that runs completely off of a CD without having to install it to the PC. This let me boot into a completely different operating system on the same PC, without modifying the current Windows configuration.
Getting the Windows look is only another step in the same direction. We’re going to try and ape the current generation of Windows – the newly released Windows 7 – and merge some of its features into the Linux desktop, and we’ve decided to use KDE to do it.
Was 2009 the year of the Linux desktop? It’s a rather silly question, honestly, and a Google search will show that for the last number of years, there have been constant predictions that that year was the year of the Linux desktop. And, guaranteed, in January there will be more predictions that 2010 will be “the year of the Linux desktop!”
But why this focus on a particular point in time? Recent distributions already prove that Linux is more than capable for the desktop, and this has been true for years. 2009 brought about GNOME 2.28 and KDE 4.3, both forward-progressing desktop environments. Are they perfect? Of course not. But let me pose this question: Is Windows on the desktop perfect?
Linux on the desktop is entirely subjective: For some, the year of their Linux desktop was 2009, or last year, or the year before that. For others, Linux won’t be good enough until 2010, or 2011, or even further.
I’ve been wondering about this particular issue for a few years now. I’m secretly hoping that Chrome with it’s cloud based storage will finally push OS developers in the right direction and will make them start thinking about finally separating system and data files by default. Or maybe not.
This might make me sound like an old fogey, but I really do miss the old games like Space Quest, The Curse of Monkey Island and Return to Zork. The problem isn’t that I don’t have the games anymore, but rather that they were designed for my 386 computer running DOS. Thankfully, I’m not alone in my fits of nostalgia. The developers over at www.scummvm.org have reproduced the “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion” developed by Lucas Arts and packaged it into a virtual machine (thus, ScummVM). That virtual machine is open source and available for just about any platform you can imagine.
PacketFence is a free and open source network access control (NAC) system. This Linux-based application primarily provides network access control, monitoring, and intrusion detection.
The GIMP is a multiplatform photo manipulation tool. GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. The GIMP is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction.
François Dupoux announced on December 28th the immediate availability of the SystemRescueCd 1.3.4 operating system. The new release is powered by Linux kernel 2.6.31.9, with an updated Btrfs filesystem from Linux kernel 2.6.32 and Xorg Server 1.6.5.
Hacktolive.org announced today, December 29th, yet another version of their Ubuntu-based Linux distribution… with “super powers.” Super OS 9.10 (formerly known as Super Ubuntu) includes patches, tools and technologies that are missing from a standard Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) default installation.
The new Karmic Koala contains more updates than any Ubuntu release in some time. Users will certainly notice one thing from the start: The system boots up much more quickly. The reworked design also stands out. While it still features the brown tones for which Ubuntu is known, it also reminds one a bit of the Mac OS interface.
At the moment Canonical seem set to release the next version of their OS in late April 2010, this latest version will be version 10.04 and is named Lucid Lynx, this is their first major release since Karmic Koala which was released in late October 2009.
I wanted to detail the the wallpaper challenge that Charles and I announced in the latest http://mintcast.org (episode 28). Please post here or email the podcast with any questions. Good Luck!
We hooked up the appliance’s LAN and WAN ports, and from the tidy web interface set up the firewall to perform NAT on the WAN port. A failing of many competing products has been their inability to hide the underlying Linux kernel for management, but Igaware has made a good job of this, so Windows users don’t need to know about Linux.
Now bitter industry rival SK Telecom is looking to generate just as much buzz by getting out of the gate early on premium phones powered by the Google-backed Android operating system.
SK Telecom, the country’s biggest mobile telephony operator, currently plans to release its first Android phone, produced by Motorola, sometime around mid-January, industry sources said.
AndroidSpin, an Android focused news site, has reported that the very first Android based smartphone, the T-Mobile G1, will be getting an over-the-air update.
This will upgrade its software with Android 2.0 or possibly Android 2.1, which incidentally is the operating system of soon-to-launch Nexus One also know as the Google Phone.
Notion Ink, a Hyderabad-based technology start-up, has developed the first touchscreen tablet which uses Google’s open source operating system Android, Nvidia’s yet-to-be launched Tegra processor chips and a power-saving display screen from the US-based fabless developer Pixel Qi.
Breaking News! Notion Ink, a Hyderabad-based company, has developed the first touchscreen Tablet PC, which uses Google’s Android Open Source Operating system. The tablet PC was developed by six IITians and an MBA. It will be displayed at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in January 2010.
If you’ve got some free time on your hands this holiday season, check out these open source versions of popular games you grew up playing. They’re loads of fun, but don’t blame us if they make you a little nostalgic.
On Sunday 27th of December at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) in Berlin, security researchers published open source instructions for cracking the A5/1 mobile telephony encryption algorithm and for building an IMSI catcher that intercepts mobile phone communication.
For the last year we have compiled monthly statistics on the top Open Source eCommerce programs, including several free or nearly-free proprietary programs that are sold for less than some OSC programs. “Open Source” means free to look at and to modify, not free of cost: about half of the top OSC programs reviewed are sold for a fee.
McObject’s eXtremeDB is based on its open source system, Perst. Perst is designed to be embedded in Java, Java ME, and Microsoft .Net applications. The ExtremeDB commercial version of Perst comes in a high availability version that includes transaction logging.
MyYearbook.com, an early user of eXtremeDB, was launched in 2005. It is also a user of the open source PostgreSQL system for relational database work, Harris said.
2. Innovation is killed in free software.
The common perception is that if everyone can copy ideas, innovation will be stifled. In fact, freedom is often the key to innovative and successful software.
* Anyone is allowed and encouraged to work upon it;
* Many people are willing to participate;
* There is no need to re-invent everything, ideas can be improved upon directly.
Non-proprietary software stands out in many areas: consider, to name just a few:
* Applications: Firefox (web browser), Inkscape (vector drawing).
* Complete systems: Apache (web server), OpenBSD (os), and of course, GNU/Linux.
* Formats and protocols: HTML (web pages), BitTorrent (file sharing), ODF (office documents).
* Server applications: Drupal (Content Management System), WordPress (blog).
About two weeks ago, it became clear the final version of Firefox 3.6 would be pushed back to early 2010 . And we’ve known since September that Firefox 4.0 wouldn’t ship until late 2010 — although according to Mozilla’s most recent meeting notes 4.0 may be pushed back to early 2011. But while we wait for the official versions of these browsers to come out, let’s take a look at what’s in store for the world’s second-most popular browser.
Technologies such as virtualization that underlie Amazon EC2, along with open source software like MemcacheD used heavily by Facebook and other large web-shops, have been important enablers of cloud services.
Rather than offer the applications to clients and leaving them to get on with the task of integrating them with cloud services, however, Sun is customising the software to work with mainstream cloud service providers such as Amazon and Eucalyptus.
MySQL co-creator Michael “Monty” Widenius has launched a web campaign to try and prevent Oracle from gaining ownership of the open source database which is part of the properties it acquired along with Sun Microsystems in April.
In a desperate last gasp bid to stop Oracle buying Sun Microsystems and its precious MySQL kit and kaboodle, the database’s co-creator – Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius – has launched a campaign to “help keep the internet free.”
If you’re like a lot of IT organizations, you’ve got servers from Hewlett-Packard, routers from Cisco, operating systems from Red Hat and Microsoft – and you may even have Solaris from Sun somewhere. For good measure let’s throw in a few databases from MySQL that occasionally take a virtual table or two from your SQL Server farms – and let’s not forget to mention the Oracle database that runs your CRM software. To top things off you’re running a slew of other open and closed source software that all together keeps your business running.
Questionmark, a provider of testing and assessment software and support services, announced recently that its Moodle Connector can now be accessed free of charge as an open source Community Edition as part of Questionmark’s Open Assessment Platform initiative.
There are other reasons to doubt the importance of a graphical installer as the big reason BSD Unix systems do not get the “love” that is heaped on Linux. The answer to why Linux gets more hype and attention is much more complex than that, and includes such concerns as marketing power — in large part because its community is full of people who will talk about how great it is without even understanding half of what they are saying. That is true of anything popular, and says nothing bad about Linux itself, of course.
Speaking of electronic texts, we’re talking open source here. If they don’t exist as Flexbooks or some other format that my teachers and students could easily use, then I want my teachers to be subject-matter experts who can generate open content. There, of course, is another dividend of corporate sponsorship: contribution to a growing store of high-quality educational content.
The GENIVI Alliance, an automotive industry association driving the development and adoption of an open in-vehicle Infotainment (IVI) reference platform, will be demonstrating the initial implementation of the GENIVI 1.0 platform in Las Vegas during International CES 2010, January 7th – 10th.
Of course, these aren’t the only problems with the bill. Most glaringly, both the Senate and House bill would leave millions uninsured,6 a far cry from the vision of universal coverage so many of us have fought for. That remains a long-term goal.
‘Tis the season for predictions, so “Information Age” bravely goes out on this limb: Most technology predictions for 2010 won’t come true. The more we learn about how innovation happens, the less straight the lines of advance look.
“Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments,” said Roman engineer Julius Sextus Frontinus in 10 A.D. This end-of-progress view has been echoed many times, including by Charles Duell, commissioner for the U.S. Patent Office, who in 1899 said, “Everything that can be invented has already been invented.”
For the last 40 years, Unix operating systems have helped to power mission-critical IT operations around the globe. Now, as Unix enters middle age, its backers are busily developing the new specifications that they hope will carry the OS forward into the next age of computing.
I spoke to a number of people quoted in the article, but I thought it was also worth sharing at length what Chris Messina, a designer and open source advocate, told me.
U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a “neutron initiator” for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.
It’s been several days since the chaotic end to the Copenhagen climate conference but the aftershocks from its failure are still reverberating. As John Prescott points out in his letter to the Guardian, the pointing of fingers in the blame game does not help the regaining of trust needed for the positive resumption of talks early next year and to complete them by December 2010, the new deadline agreed to in Copenhagen.
The researchers call this the “licensing effect”. Buying green can establish the moral credentials that license subsequent bad behaviour: the rosier your view of yourself, the more likely you are to hoard your money and do down other people.
Then they took another bunch of students, gave them the same purchasing choices, then introduced them to a game in which they made money by describing a pattern of dots on a computer screen. If there were more dots on the right than the left they made more money. Afterwards they were asked to count the money they had earned out of an envelope.
Please sign our New Year’s petition calling on Congress and the President to “Repo the Dough” by taxing speculation and putting Wall Street to work rebuilding Main Street!
Dimon feels the tax would unfairly penalize the US bank and stressed that JP Morgan paid British taxes and did not receive a UK taxpayer bailout, thus should not be subject to extra taxation.
And remember, JPMorgan’s CEO is Jamie Dimon who is also closely tied into the Obama team. He is often listed as one of the lead candidates to replace Geithner or take over other leading economic positions within the Obama administration. Remember this the next time his name is floated to replace someone. He’s obviously terrified of the impact the tax will have on his business, but he’s also again showing how he is part of the global problem in the banking industry. Where is their sense of responsibility for the problems they created? If only this crowd worried as much before the crisis as they do now we may have avoided such a deep recession.
“It’s a joke, it’s lobbying. People are dreaming if they think the London investment banking world is going to move. There is more office space in Canary Wharf than in the whole of Switzerland,” Tim Dawson, an analyst at Geneva-based brokerage Helvea, told Bloomberg.
Listen, and you’ll hear a spokesperson for the new Helena, MT, chapter of the Coalition for Chemical Safety being interviewed while handing out Coalition literature in the state capitol rotunda during an event organized by the chapter. She describes her concern as a mom over the use of BPA in kids’ products, and even criticizes the Food and Drug Administration’s past reliance only on industry studies to conclude BPA is safe. You’ll also hear the reporter note that the Coalition wants to “ban BPA and other chemicals that could be harmful.”
Building an experimental power plant in Illinois isn’t just about finding land, erecting a facility and flipping a switch.
Just as Illinois taxpayers were billed more than $450,000 for Washington D.C.-based lobbying efforts to bring the high-tech, coal-fired FutureGen facility to Mattoon, the FutureGen Alliance is now spending money to lobby state lawmakers and the Quinn administration in Springfield.
Their task: Convince the state to buy all the electricity the plant produces. Such a move would help FutureGen secure federal funding needed to build the near zero-emissions plant.
Like about a dozen other states, Florida is debating a proposed amendment to its state constitution that would try to block, at least symbolically, much of the proposed federal health care overhaul on the grounds that it tramples individual liberty.
The government of Canada has used strong-arm tactics to shut down two parody websites criticizing Canada’s poor environmental policy, taking down 4500 other websites in the process.
The two websites, “enviro-canada.ca” and “ec-gc.ca”, are “directly connected to a hoax which misleads people into believing that the Government of Canada will take certain actions in relation to environmental matters,” wrote Mike Landreville from Environment Canada in an email to the German Internet Service Provider (ISP) Serverloft. “We trust you appreciate the importance of avoiding confusion among the public concerning Canadian governmental affairs and that you will assist us in preventing this hoax from spreading further.”
A New Jersey judge has ordered the shutdown of three H-1B opposition Web sites and seeks information about the identity of anonymous posters.
On Dec. 23, Middlesex County Superior Court Judge James Hurley ordered firms that register domains and provide hosting services — GoDaddy Inc., Network Solutions, Comcast Cable Communications Inc. and DiscountASP.Net, to disable the three sites, ITgrunt.com, Endh1b.com, and Guestworkerfraud.com. Facebook Inc. was also ordered to disable ITgrunt’s Facebook page.
The whistle blowing site is taking time out until 6 January to ask for support in many forms, not just donations. Wikileaks is appealing for help from volunteer coders, offers of free legal assistance and hosting support as well as cash donations. The site has promised not to accept corporate or government finance in order to protect its integrity.
A former policeman who accused senior officers of corruption in a series of video blogs will himself face prosecution for abuse of office, Russian investigators said on Monday.
Former police major Alexei Dymovsky became a household name in Russia earlier this year when he used YouTube to appeal to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to tackle corruption in the police force.
A criminal case will be brought against Dymovsky for “fraud committed by a person using his official position,” the Prosecutor-General’s investigative committee said in a statement. It gave no further details.
The article admitted that the #2 and #3 “application programs” (“Adobe” and “Microsoft”) reported were “closed source” and that “open source” programs tend to show all the blemishes, not just the ones reported by their customers, and reflected back through visible reports by the companies. To be even fairer, I would point out that comparing “Firefox” with all of the applications that Adobe has and all of the applications Microsoft has is a bit like apples and oranges….but that is not the main concept I will try to get across in this blog entry.
This new benchmark, which can be found in the Phoronix Test Suite once its released, will focus on SDR/HDR performance. This should end up being a rather nice test profile as right now it’s completely slaughtering the ASUS Eee PC 1201N and other systems being tested remotely through Phoromatic.
Mac clone maker Psystar is retrenching after succumbing to a barrage of copyright litigation brought by Apple, abandoning its Mac offerings in favor of a move toward Linux systems.
Supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics has inked a deal to build the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing – which has the rap name TPAC – at the University of Tasmania on the eponymous Australian island state. The gig: creating a new x64-Linux cluster for climate research.
Today i will discuss Gwibber which is a good social networking client for Linux. It works on Ubuntu and a few other distributions and is available in your local repositories so go ahead and grab it.
If you’re just beginning to learn to record your personal finances, there are reviews that point out that Buddi is one of the tools to check out. Why? A lot of them say that it is quite easy for beginners to use and understand compared to other software like GNUCash. That’s why I ended up checking Buddi. Also, Buddi has installer files on its project site and you could verify if the distro you’re using is supported. In any case, there’s always the generic Unix and Linux which is basically a script that you could run.
The KMyMoney team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.95. After 8 months of hard work, this release is the first version developed upon the KDE 4 Platform. We are confident that it is stable enough for use by early adopters. We would like to get much needed feedback from the community in order to make the new KMyMoney as rock-solid as previous releases.
The latest release of Inkscape namely version 0.47 adds many new features to an already powerful toolset. Some of them being numerous enhancements to the existing tools – pen and pencil tool, eraser tool, tweak tool, text tool, and so on. Inkscape -.47 has gained new extensions, and new filters that add special effects to your images, SVG improvements, and interface enhancements.
Some are probably asking at this point, what is Wine? The Wine project was started in 1993 to allow Windows applications to be run under Linux. Wine takes the Windows API (Application Programming Interface) and implements it in the Linux user space. Since Wine is running in user space and is not a part of the Linux Kernel, it relies on the wineserver daemon to provide your basic Windows kernel functionality as well as other various tasks of X integration.
As a quick recap, there are two basic goals we want to complete in this article. First we want to compare performance and functionality of games between Linux and Windows. Second, we will look at the performance and functionality differences of Wine/Cedega/Crossover Games.
I’ve been in a gaming mood of the late and I much prefer to be able to run my games under Linux as opposed to having to reboot into Windows. That being said a game I’ve really enjoyed playing is Devil’s Tuning Fork. It is a very unique first person indie game in which your character “sees” with their ears. It is being developed by a team of students at DePaul University in Chicago and it is a free download from the game’s homepage.
Christmas is a time for rest and contemplation. To intersperse the period with some distraction on long winter evenings, a number of Linux games can prove some diversion, as this article will show.
The sports event of the weekend will be going into winter break, and to while away the time, we assembled a short list of interesting but little known games that have been brought to our attention over the last few months. The recommendations cover lots of different game genres, so there should be something for everyone.
So, we’re close to 2010 and Entropy is about to celebrate its third birthday. It’s been a very long road, full of obstacles but hey, we’re getting closer to 1.0! 2010 will be the year of Entropy 1.0 bringing a basic set of features and ideas tossed into the wild software jungle.
As everybody^wnobody know, Hervé YAHI is no longer the CEO of Mandriva. So I decide to rip off an article from The VAR Guy to issue an open letter to the Mandriva direction. So here are 9 priorities for the new Mandriva staff
The games you see in the screenshot above are all included by default on Sabayon 5,1 Gamers live DVD. Some popular titles include Battle of Wesnoth, Foobillard, Freeciv, Frozen Bubble, GNOME Games, NeverBall, Nexuiz, OpenArena, Pingus, Pychess, Scorched 3D, Spring, Stepmania, Torcs, Tremulous, Warsow, Warzone 2100, and Wormux.
Red Hat is hoping to boost its partner engagement with its recently launched hypervisor, Rev, based on the Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology.
“Initially, we are looking at 25 VARs for Rev. But, eventually we will expand that number,” said Jaideep Kumar, Head, Channels and Distribution, Red Hat India.
According to Kumar, Rev has been very well received by partners. At Red Hat’s recently held Asia-Pacific partner summit at Singapore, the hypervisor generated a huge interest.
If I was forced to provide some quantitative milestones for Ubuntu Women, I would probably offer, along with a grain of salt:
* Break 5% of Ubuntu Membership held by women (currently 4-point-something)
* Increase Women ~ubuntu-dev membership by 50% (from 4 to 6)
* Increase Women ~ubuntu-core-dev membership by 100% (from 1 to 2, because dealing in fractions of people is illegal in most places)
* Increase active mentors by 100%
Since these are supposed to be figures for the inaugural term of 6 months, the success of these figures relies fairly heavily upon women who are already involved. This is a critical caveat. Incentives to take the first step to participation, counsel and mentoring will be the most important activities Ubuntu Women undertakes, and will set up the opportunity to aim for better milestones beyond the inaugural 6 month term.
All in all, 2009 was not a revolutionary year for the Ubuntu community. There was no LTS release, as there was in 2008 and will be in 2010, and the focus was on incremental development.
Nonetheless, it’s clear that Ubuntu gained some useful new features, and the community received interesting news, in 2009. Let’s hope the improvements we’ve seen in the last year solidify and expand going into 2010 and the Lucid release next April.
Ubuntu actually does all right by these criteria, so perhaps to some degree the conflation of “Internet” and “Web” is driven by the complexities of installing third party apps on Windows, and all of the problems this can cause one’s computer as different versions of shared libraries and such are copied in.
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Ultimately, I suppose that I would love it if LifeArea had the Gwibber-like ability to post. There are still other posting tools to try in any case, so I may find one yet. I’m installing Drivel atm.
But you can’t beat Windows by offering a Windows-looking clone. Because people will still want their Office and their whatever. You may claim that people will have a free Windows alternative available and will flock to it. Well, they already have a free Windows alternative. It’s called pirated Windows and it’s rampant.
Speculation is a part of technical news as prophecy is to religion. Its only important, valid or genius if it turns out to be true. However, we dare not have technical news without any speculation at all since this will surely hinder the creativeness of individuals and corporations to explore avenues influenced by ideas expressed in speculation. If any of that made sense to you, good. Because this was the reasoning I used in order to explore and develop the idea to create this article. In other words I have no factual evidence that anything of the sort would occur.
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If Mozilla and Ubuntu/Canonical pulled together they should have enough combined resources to really compete in the market place with Google or anyone else. However they can not sit still and do nothing because other larger companies will push them out of the market they helped create. Now is not the time to “See what happens”. Its time to prepare for the future and make essential friends.
As we count down to end of 2009, the emerging star of this year’s holiday shopping season is shaping up to be the electronic book reader (or e-reader). From Amazon’s Kindle to Barnes and Noble’s forthcoming Nook, e-readers are starting to transform how we buy and read books in the same way mp3s changed how we buy and listen to music.
Openmoko, the company that first gained attention for its Linux-based phone platform, launched a new pocket-sized open source product in time for this holiday season, the WikiReader. The WikiReader is an inexpensive ($99), low-power, 4-inch square touchscreen LCD display device pre-loaded with the text of three million Wikipedia pages on a microSD card. In the smartphone era, skeptics might dismiss the device as woefully underpowered, but to the open source community the more pertinent question is what else can it do?
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For today, however, the product makes for a fun stocking stuffer for the family hacker. Openmoko is positioning the device in its advertising as a way to get content into the hands of the “75% of the world [that] is offline” — including people in airplanes or on beaches, and “most everywhere.” The WikiReader certainly does that; several online reviews have praised its value in museums and tourist locations, where data plan charges would make a connected device prohibitively expensive to operate.
For the past 12 months or so, we’ve heard a lot of talk about mini-laptops running ARM-based processors. These so-called “smartbooks” feature low power ARM processors which means that while they can’t run Windows XP or 7, they can run Linux, last for a very long time on a charge, and some feature integrated 3G connectivity and HD video acceleration features. You also get the ability to receive emails, instant messages, and other data even while the computer is in sleep mode. In other words, they’re like a cross between a smartphone and a netbook, which explains the whole “smartbook” name.
Asus’ upgraded Eee PC netbooks sport Intel’s new Atom N450 processor for over ten hours battery life, plus the quick loading ‘Splashtop’ pre-boot Linux OS.
All over the web are warnings that netbooks are doomed.
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No. This is about wishful thinking by the monopolists who need high retail prices to hide the price of their part of the PC, CPUs and licences for software. If prices for netbooks rise, fewer will be sold. Fortunately entrepreneurs all over the world continue to make less expensive netbooks. ARM will dominate netbooks in 2010. You can trade a lot of day-long battery-life for some hair-drying CPUs anytime.
The rather interesting element is the fact that these are white-box models. This means that the devices will bear the brands of other companies, which implies that Foxconn may have already completed its marketing plans concerning the PCs. If the company has already decided on which companies will sell its product, the actual availability may ramp up over the next couple of months or so.
Rumors of a Googlebook mirror the speculation that preceded the emergence earlier this month of Mountain View’s HTC-manufactured, Android-powered Nexus One smartphone.
An Nvidia Tegra chipset (given the late 2010 rumoured release one guesses Tegra 2.0) powered by an ARM CPU and replete with 64GB SSD and 2GB RAM will drive a 10.1 inch HD-ready, 1,280 x 720 resolution touchscreen screened device. The usual array of extras such as WiFi and 3G, Bluetooth and Ethernet are also on the reported tech spec list.
Believe it or not – the tech specs of the rumoured Google Chrome OS-based netbook are already out and by the sound of it, the netbook looks to me like a high performance machine.
Furthermore, the netbook will also probably be powered by an ARM CPU, and will feature Nvidia’s Tegra system-on-a-chip for notably enhancing the audio and video capabilities of the device. However, it is not certain whether all the upcoming Chrome OS-based netbooks will strictly adhere to the rumored specs.
Proprietary ERP companies make connecting to ERP complex. Like Edison and Tesla, they don’t work well with competing systems. Conversely, open source is about unifying things.
Last week, Google banned my PHP port of JSMin from Google Code due to a quibble over a line in the license stating that “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil”, which they believe makes the license non-free. When I asked Google’s Chris DiBona whether all Google Code projects including JSMin would be subject to bans due to this clause in the license, he replied, “Sadly, yes”.
Google’s Chris DiBona emailed me this morning to tell me that unless I removed a specific line from the license of my jsmin-php project (a PHP port of Douglas Crockford’s JSMin), Google Code would no longer host the project.
After the Emmys, the Grammys are onto it as well. That is, the new Grammy.com is using Drupal — and Pressflow to be specific. The Grammy Awards, or Grammys, are presented annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for outstanding achievements in the music industry. Cool!
Most of the offers can be broadly categorized into collective intelligence, crowd-creation, voting/opinion and research. Procter & Gamble’s NPD program Connect + Develop, My Starbucks Idea and AT&T’s “Mark the spot” are all great examples of collective intelligence and, of course, everyone knows about Linux. They harness the power of interested parties to provide ideas and thoughts as they happen, like a permanent, active, feedback loop.
Today the Icinga Team releases the Icinga Core 1.0. This is a milestone for both the team and the project as a whole. After many months of hard work we are proud to bring you a stable, alternative monitoring solution. This release includes many changes as suggested by the community and in particular the inclusion of Oracle in IDOUtils.
The H1N1 pandemic, the Copenhagen climate talks, the restart of the world’s biggest experimental device—2009 sped by many scientifically relevant mile markers. The year also celebrated several important past events: It saw the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species; the 40th anniversary of the first humans on another world; and the 400th of Galileo’s report that proved not all heavenly bodies circle the Earth. The year also marked the first occasion in which the science Nobel Prize committee honored more than one woman—four, in fact.
Through the detailed and vivid conversations, you get the keen sense of overwhelming desperation and preservation that overtakes the executives of the sinking financial system. Some of the chief participants failed, some were triumphant, and some were pathetically bailed out. History will ultimately be the true arbiter of whether government and Wall Street averted, mitigated, postponed, or contributed to the financial collapse. Regardless, Sorkin brilliantly encapsulates this emotional panicked period in our history that will never be erased.
Shenzhen Nanshan is among 68 Chinese state-controlled companies including China Eastern Air Holding Co. and China National Aviation Holding Co. that lost money on derivative products sold by banks including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Citigroup Inc., according to the State- owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.
Betting against their own securities has prompted numerous investigations of Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street institutions. Prior to the financial collapse, Goldman and others figured out a way to package risky securities, such as subprime mortgages, and sell them to investors who were told they were buying sound investments. Little did the investors know that the firms selling the synthetic collateralized debt obligations (or CDOs) turned around and bet that the CDOs would fail—costing pension funds and insurance companies billions of dollars.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and brokerage regulators are examining how Wall Street firms bet against mortgage-linked securities to profit as their clients took losses, people familiar with the matter said.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which polices broker-dealers, is looking into whether firms such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. broke rules when selling products known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, one of the people said. The people declined to be identified because the inquiry is confidential.
How charitable. This is the bank that intends to distribute about $22bn in remuneration to its employees this year – more than $700,000 each – at the height of the worst recession since the war. Money, of course, partly earned through government support of the US banking sector paid for with taxpayers’ funds.
But Obama, unlike Paterson, is being disingenuous; aside from a few snotty remarks, the president hasn’t done much to get the banks lending right now. In fact, his policies have fostered an environment that allows Wall Street to make money — bundles of it as demonstrated by Goldman Sachs’ $20 billion bonus pool — at the expense of helping Main Street. Obama has supported Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s near-zero interest rate policy; he’s basically declared every big bank Too Big To Fail, meaning the federal government will save the likes of Goldman Sachs if it should somehow bet wrong in the trading markets, as it did last year.
Fast forward 20 years and switch from Salomon Brothers to Goldman Sachs. At this time, Goldman sellers were offering their customers a new product, “synthetic collateralized debt obligations.” Synthetic CDOs allowed the buyers to bet heavily on the continued health of the housing market. In a synthetic CDO, however, Goldman was fundamentally making the opposite bet. The buyers were in essence an insurance company. They received regular payments from Goldman as long as the housing market improved. These payments were analogous to the premiums paid on an insurance policy. Like an insurance company, however, the investors were also on the hook for a big payout if the housing market collapsed. Which it did. (For more details, see “Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won.”)
This choice says a lot about the malaise in global finance. It also seems to say a lot about the “collusion” of media and big business and their desire to pull the wool over the eyes of sane people everywhere–sort of like Blankfein’s words that the investment bank was “doing God’s work.”
Well, here’s an interesting one. There were reports last week claiming that Reuters had spiked a story about hedge fund big shot Steven Cohen after Cohen complained to Reuters management. While Reuters has since strongly denied the charge, it is interesting to note (as sent in by reader JJ) that at least one Reuters blogger complained quite vocally about this decision.
Reuters editors last week killed a story by investigative reporter Matthew Goldstein about hedge fund trader Steven Cohen after Cohen complained to top Thomson Reuters executives that he was being persecuted by the news agency’s reporting, sources at Reuters said.
Goldstein’s story was an “incremental” advance in the reports swirling around Cohen that he engaged in insider trading during the 1980s, Reuters sources said. There have been reports that Cohen is next in the sights of the SEC following the Galleon case, which featured SEC wiretapping the conversations of hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.
What else will shape the housing market in the next decade? One of the biggest questions is how the government will extricate itself from control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two companies, which were on the brink of failure in the fall of 2008 and seized by the government, own or guarantee about half of all home mortgages.
Finally, you can ask, how much of the stimulus money has been spent? For that you want to look at “Cumulative”, and compare it with the final total for that column.
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And when the spending begins to tail off, the effect on growth turns negative.
By any measure, the last decade was a rotten one. It started with a stolen election and the worst terrorist attack in American history. It is ending this week with the United States mired in two wars and deep into a catastrophic recession.
It’s hard to imagine that the next decade could be worse, but could it?
There are worrisome signs. An increasing number of economists are saying that without major government intervention, the next ten years could be a “jobless decade.” “It will be the mother of all jobless recoveries,” predicts economic historian John Steel Gordon.
[...]
While the stimulus package passed by Congress was big and slowed the pace of job loss, the problem was even bigger. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the Obama stimulus bill has created or saved between 170,000 and 235,000 jobs per month starting in the second quarter of 2009. Yet, Princeton economist Paul Krugman says that the country would have to produce an additional 300,000 jobs per month for five years to achieve full employment.
Despite proclaiming a need to cut medical costs, the Senate health care reform bill contains a provision that will benefit large drug companies while hurting manufacturers of generic drugs. As it is now written, the bill will keep less-expensive generic drugs from entering the market for fully 12 years, far longer than the five to seven years President Barack Obama had advocated.
The massive U.S. Senate healthcare reform measure passed on Thursday with support from the multibillion drug industry, but makers of cheaper generic rivals are feeling left out in the cold.
And here is Boing Boing’s response to Ms. Moore’s attorneys (PDF), prepared by Marc Mayer of the law firm MS&K. The letter is a thing of beauty, and I encourage you to read it in full.
The letter from Moore’s attorney, Martin D. (“Marty”) Singer, claims that we set out to slander Moore (Boing Boing did not, nor did Mr. Citrano). The letter also includes denials from people involved in the production of the W Magazine cover who insist that the image was not manipulated at all.
Since receiving this letter, we have discovered that an alternate, and seemingly more anatomically correct version of the W magazine cover (with more hip-flesh) was published in W’s South Korean edition. We have also been informed that Ms. Moore’s attorneys have sent similar letters to other blogs that discussed the possible digital alteration of the US cover image. The story is now being covered by a number of other news organizations and blogs.
Many ISPs fail to expand broadband to all of their potential customers, which is sometimes understandable given the expense. However, we’ve documented countless times how those same ISPs often then lobby to have laws passed or engage in sleazy activities to prevent those towns and cities — or anyone else — from wiring those un-served regions. ISPs get their cake and eat it too — saving money on expansion, while avoiding a future competitor should the local incumbent someday change their mind and decide to service that market. It shouldn’t work that way — but it does, and all too often.
But Bittorrent can’t be used for any legitimate purpose, right? And musicians can’t possibly embrace what the technology allows? Once again, we’re seeing why those who embrace what technology allows will do just fine moving forward. It’s only those who think that the answer is to bring out the lawyers and try to hold back progress who will find themselves struggling to create business models that work.
Almost a decade after the major labels launched their legal assault on Napster, courts are still writing the rules of the road for the music business’s digital future.
Barry Sookman’s most recent post titled Toying with funny math to downplay Canada’s role as a piracy haven is, at best, inaccurate. Since I’m suffering from a nasty head cold I’m only going to cover the most noticeable errors – and then go back to suffering.
In paragraph three, Barry claims that Mininova is down. A quick visit to the site shows that he is in error, that Mininova is still in operation. He also claims that the court ordered it shut down. This is incorrect. The court ordered that certain torrents be removed. Nothing more. Nothing less.
In paragraph four, Barry claims that a court ordered that the The Pirate Bay be shut down. He does not mention that an appeal has been filed. In a later paragraph he claims that The Pirate Bay will be shut down shortly, however the shut down order is on hold until the appeal is complete. To the best of my knowledge a court date has not been picked as yet, and since the shut down cannot take effect until after the appeal, his claim that it will be shut down shortly is specious at best.
In an effort to be subversive, I forwarded the email to Fred with a note that said “Wild how the music licensing stuff is stupid.” He responded immediately with “Yup. Rights holders fuck everything up.” I wonder what the machines think of that?
“My New Year’s resolution is to retire gracefully, but I keep getting job offers,” blogger Robert Pogson told LinuxInsider. “Perhaps I will find some career change with which an old man can live.
“Perhaps I will do part-time work or write full-time instead of teaching,” he added.
First there was the cheap revolution. That was all about using commodity parts, such as Intel’s ( INTC – news – people ) processors, to knock down the price of computing power. Then came the free revolution. That was all about free software, such as Linux. Now there’s “less than free.”
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The best example: Google’s ( GOOG – news – people ) strategy of sharing ad revenues with hardware partners that are building devices around the Internet giant’s Android smart phone operating system. That’s helped Google grab a respectable chunk of the smart phone software market in a hurry. Now Google could do the same with its Chrome OS software for netbooks, making already-cheap devices cheaper.
Mac clone maker Psystar last week indefinitely suspended sales of its only product, a $50 utility that lets customers install Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system on generic Intel-based computers.
The company also said it would resume selling systems “in the coming days.” Those machines will run Linux rather than Mac OS X.
We suspect that Redmond is having a few words with Chinese authorities about the cloning.
We feel sorry for all the Ubuntu developers out there who must be looking at their Open Source child twisted and corrupted until it looks so much like the proprietary enemy.
In those pre-Web 2.0 days, the community concept behind Linux and open source in general was mystifying to many. They were surprised that IBM had so strongly embraced Linux and were wondering what its relevance would be to the world of business. We spent a lot of time explaining that we were supporting Linux because it was an excellent operating system that ran on every single hardware platforms regardless of vendor or architecture, and would thus facilitate the integration of systems, applications and information over the Internet.
A number of companies were also concerned about using software developed by an open, distributed community, as opposed to a single vendor, as was typically the case. So, we further explained that the open community developing Linux included some of the top programmers and computer scientists around the world. A number of IBM employees were already involved with this community, and several more would now be joining it as part of our new IBM Linux Technology Center. In any event, IBM and its partners would provide support for the Linux-based offerings we sold regardless of how they were developed.
Today is the birthday of Linus. Although that’s essentially a private event for him, there’s an interesting historical link to the creation of the Linux kernel, too.
Compared to past years when recapping the AMD/ATI Linux advancements over the past calendar year, 2009 was not quite as exciting, which can be viewed as both good and bad for their Catalyst Linux driver. There were many advancements this year on AMD’s open-source side, but in 2009 there wasn’t as many milestones for their Catalyst driver like in the past with the introduction of CrossFire, OverDrive, same-day Linux support, the AMD Catalyst Control Center, and other new features. Here is our 2009 year in review look at AMD’s advancements to their proprietary Catalyst Linux driver along with our annual benchmarks.
But I do know, and believe in, this: Open source software has many beautiful and amazing advantages over the closed-source model. And only one of those benefits is the idea — no, the proven principle that, 10 or 20 or even 50 years down the road, someone might pick up some crusty old tarball off a backup server somewhere in a forgotten university somewhere on the planet, take a look at the source code and add a new spark of life to an otherwise lusterless, forgotten application.
Old programs don’t die, they just patiently await reincarnation.
Being from the United Kingdom, the week between Christmas and the New Year is usually a work-free zone for me. So here’s a few Linux command-line Easter Christmas Eggs for you to while away a little time if you are unfortunate enough to be back at your desk already.
Amongst them are the utterly gorgeous looking ‘Plastic Glass’ theme designed for use in Docky’s 3D mode and an “inlaid” theme that perfectly suits Docky’s Panel Mode. The themes also come with replacement tooltips – a great addition that really makes these themes complete.
DeviantArt-ist kshegzyaj has created some stunning new themes for use with premier Dock application Docky.
KDM (KDE Display Manager) is the K Desktop Environment replacement for XDM, the X Display Manager. KDM allows users to pick their session type on a per-login basis using different themes and user photos.
KDE-Look.org is part of a family of desktop websites, all under the umbrella of OpenDesktop.org. With each release, KDE is moving closer to complete integration with OpenDesktop.org, where the installation of new themes and visual improvements are seamless.
There are already several visual components of the K desktop environment that are already integrated. Among them are: desktop wallpaper, Plasma themes, KDM themes, KSplash, color schemes, icon themes, emoticons, and widgets (plasmoid scripts). What this means is that a user can open the dialog to change one of these elements, download new themes, and apply them without ever having to leave the window.
Just in time for Christmas 2009, digiKam 1.0 have been released. But the future is already there. Next digiKam 1.1 is planed for end of January 2010, as a bugfixes release, to consolidate code with users feedback after production using…
When first looking at Syntensity, one might infer that it is an FPS game. Nothing could be further than the truth. Syntensity’s main achievement is the Intensity Engine, which is a significantly modified version of the Sauerbraten/Cube2 Engine with a focus on online content. One could even draw parallels to proprietary gaming and say that this might be a FOSS answer to Valve’s Steam service and their Source engine.
AssaultCube retains a movement bug from the original Cube engine that allows players to utilize straferunning to move at a faster speed. This was left intentionally unfixed by the developers because it was considered an enjoyable feature of Cube, similar to bunny hopping in Quake.
When it comes to Linux shooter games, there isn’t only one choice. Games like Nexuiz, OpenArena or Sauerbraten were a good fit here too, but I decided upon World of Padman.
Based on the Quake 3 engine, World of Padman is a fun, cartoon-style first-person shooter with maps, weapons and characters inspired from the Padman series. It features nice, colourful graphics, popular modes like FFA, TDM or CTF, and weapons which will definitely make you laugh the first time you’ll see them.
Christmas is a time for rest and contemplation. To intersperse the period with some distraction on long winter evenings, a number of Linux games can prove some diversion, as this article will show.
The sports event of the weekend will be going into winter break, and to while away the time, we assembled a short list of interesting but little known games that have been brought to our attention over the last few months. The recommendations cover lots of different game genres, so there should be something for everyone.
There are many communities based Mandriva derivatives, but few of them are known. So here is a ( not comprehensive ) list of some Mandriva based derivatives or projects :
* One 64 community : 64bits edition of the Mandriva One LiveCD. A KDE edition and GNOME one are available for download.
In partnership with Red Hat and Oracle; and in their endeavor to lead the market towards a more proficient, secure and better performing infrastructure solutions; Savvytek was chosen by Middle East Payment Services (MEPS) to implement their new core application, RS2, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle technologies
Red Hat Inc., the Linux software maker whose sales and profit in the latest quarter exceeded analysts’ estimates, said demand for its products is reviving, especially in North America.
We can start with Red Hat (NYSE: RHT). The Linux-based provider of enterprise solutions delivered a profit of $0.17 a share, ahead of the $0.16 a share that Mr. Market was banking on.
Red Hat’s success was the result of a 21% surge in its bread-and-butter subscription revenue.
Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that WorldNet has become the first Red Hat Virtualisation Specialist Partner in the Middle East.
[...]
“Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation aims to enable our customers to easily move applications and hardware platforms to virtualised computing and cloud computing. We believe that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, especially the management components, will allow customers to use virtualisation pervasively. We hope that our Virtualisation Specialist partnership with WorldNet will be the first of many in the region,” said Anuj Kumar, General Manager, Middle East and North Africa at Red Hat.
No one cares that their TiVo devices runs Linux. It just does. No one cares that the Kindle runs Linux, either. They care about the functionality these devices deliver. That’s the way it should be.
Canonical’s opportunity is to make Linux so easy that it becomes completely invisible to the end user. And Canonical may well be the best positioned to do this, among its open-source peers.
Amazon.com on Saturday released its annual post-Christmas statement on holiday sales and made one thing clear: the Kindle was king, perhaps fueled by continued shifts in plans for shipments of Barnes & Noble’s competing Nook e-reader.
“We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history,” said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia launched during the ongoing year its first handset running under the Maemo 5 operating system, the Nokia N900, a phone that is expected to arrive on the UK market as soon as January 14 is here. However, enthusiasts in the UK won’t have to wait until then to grab one of these beauties, as the handset has been already put on sale via Carphone Warehouse, though a contract agreement with Vodafone is still required.
There was just no way I was going to get my step daughter a Windows netbook for Christmas. No way, no how. I couldn’t find a good way to articulate why, and so for a couple weeks I was just responding, “No Windows!” to my wife’s questions. I hadn’t expected it to be controversial but I did eventually have to explain myself.
Jolicloud soldiered on, raising a high profile $4.2 million venture round and finally, earlier this month, releasing a public beta of the product at Le Web in Paris.
There’s a rumor going around that Google isn’t just developing an operating system for netbooks (which we already know is true), but that company is also in the process of developing an actual netbook. While Google isn’t exactly known as a hardware maker, this rumor falls into the plausible category, since Google is also widely reported to be developing a cellphone running Android OS. And as Apple has demonstrated time and again, if you want your operating system to run smoothly on hardware, your best option is to design the hardware.
I’m excited about the upcoming VideoLAN Movie Creator! I’m also excited about making bulleted lists lately!
1. Pedigree
The related-project VLC Media Player is a well-known cross-platform project that inspires confidence in the VLMC. I’m not sure exactly how to quantify “name-brand” power as a factor of success (or even if such a thing can be quantified), but this is a good thing.
First, free software appeared among the hacker community, where price was irrelevant, since the culture was largely one of sharing. From there, it seeped into companies, usually unbeknownst to management, which only found out about the fact later. By that time, the open source applications – notably GNU/Linux, Samba and Apache – had not only proved their technical quality, they had shown that something that cost nothing could, indeed, be worth much more than its nominal price tag.
Dean: I stumbled across Free Software programs for typing, geography, hangman (spelling) and crossword and soon realized that I could actually make educating my son fun using Free Software that was primarily Linux driven.
Stop:Did you have to learn programming to use this software?
Dean: No, I am not a software developer. I am a “post-frustrated Microsoft user” that did the math and figured the amount of time I spent trying to fix things that could not be fixed in Windows would have been spent wiser learning a better operating system (Linux Ubuntu in my case, but there is also a version, Edubuntu,, already preconfigured for school usage). I am happy enough that I want to try to convince other homeschoolers in my area to follow my path.
Google is one of the biggest companies supporting OpenSource movement, they released more than 500 open source projects(most of them are samples showing how to use their API). In this article I will try to write about most interesting and free releases from Google, some of them might be abandoned.
Bangalore: Since almost 10 years, companies have known the benefits of adopting open source for business. Few have followed but the rest have stayed away from it. With the global economic slowdown forcing companies to rethink strategies, there has been one thing which has motivated companies the most, that is, Google extensively using open source.
After a while I discovered that there was even a Drupal Taiwan website. So I got in touch with the site admin and head organizer, Charles Chuang, and he let me know there would be a meetup in late December. The gathering would be at a local cafe in central Taipei and the topic would be new features, discuss strategy, and socialize to make new friends with like-minded souls.
In case you missed it: GNU Emacs is on Bazaar now. Please see http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BzrForEmacsDevs for how to (re)obtain your development sources from Bazaar.
These administrative shifts, from proprietary to open source systems, toward routine transfers of medical data, could have happened anyway. They have accelerated thanks to Administration statements endorsing open source systems like VistA. The environment has shifted.
A newly-issued Congressional Research Service (CRS) study (pdf) on the activities of the community group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) found no evidence the group has engaged in fraudulent voting or violations of federal financing rules over the last five years. Two members of the U.S.
Open Energy Info is a platform to connect the world’s energy data. It is a linked open data platform bringing together energy information to provide improved analyses, unique visualizations, and real-time access to data.
With the threat of development on Titnore Woods fast approaching now is the time to rise up and resist the destruction of our natural environment by corporate greed.
In his important speech at the high-level segment of the conference, Premier Wen reiterated the consistent position of the Chinese government. He called on all sides to build consensus and strengthen cooperation to advance the historical process of combating climate change. Confronted by the complicated situation in and outside the Bella Center, Premier Wen was undeterred. With the strongest political will and patience, he shuttled between participating leaders and engaged them in dialogue and consultations. At the critical moment when the negotiations faced the risk of a breakdown, he personally talked to various parties and helped the conference reach the final accord with his painstaking and thoughtful efforts.
History will remember the important contribution of the Chinese government to the success of the Copenhagen conference.
GRETCHEN MORGENSON and LOUISE STORY add more detail to the story of the collapse of our financial system and how it was brought down by the gang of financial innovators at such respectable financiers at Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, as well as smaller firms like Tricadia Inc. link here
The article strongly suggests that the bankers knew what they were doing. They created bundles of mortgages and sold them off to credulous investors. Then they cranked up mortgage creators to market still more toxic mortgages on which to sell more credit default swaps (CDSs).
When that didn’t satisfy the demand from investors, they came up with synthetic swaps. They knew the many of the mortgages were toxic and after selling them, bought swaps against their failing. When the demand for these grew too large, they created synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and bet against them as well.
uTorrent – the preferred Bittorrent client for many BitTorrent users – has been doing really well in 2009. Contrary to reports claiming that BitTorrent and P2P usage has been declining, in the last year uTorrent nearly doubled its userbase to 52 million unique users a month.
Lawyers who told thousands of individuals that they held proof of their illicit file-sharing, have made a surprise announcement. ACS:Law, who help companies generate revenue from porn movie copyrights, say they are dropping many cases because litigation is neither viable nor beneficial to their clients.
Proposals to suspend the internet connections of those who repeatedly share music and films online will leave consumers with a bill for £500 million, ministers have admitted.
Threatening to cut off people’s net access is therefore seen as a vastly disproportionate punishment, almost akin to cutting someone’s tongue off. While young female voters also tend to vote Pirate Party, compared to older voters, they do so less than male voters. The Pirate movement’s task, therefore is twofold: to get women to vote for us in the same numbers that men do (which should be doable, since women use the internet as much as men), and to make sure that each years’ intake of new 18 year old voters supports us, while existing supporters continue to support us. If we do that across Europe, we’ll win.
This is the reason why I don’t create single copies of my photographs or limited editions. I want people to enjoy my photography not because it’s scarce, but because they like it. I do sell signed and numbered copies (limitless editions only), but only for the people who voluntarily want to financially support my art. Don’t buy it as an investment – buy it because you enjoy it and want to see more of it! Everyone else is welcome to just download and use (non-commercially) my photographs any way they like it – on your computer desktop, on your blog, by printing and hanging it on your walls!
I’ve noted before that at the heart of the ACTA negotiations there is a con-trick being played upon the world: insofar as the mighty ones deign to pass down any crumbs of information to us little people, it is framed in terms of the dangers of counterfeit medicines and the like, and how we are being “protected”. But, then, strangely, those counterfeit medicines morph into digital copies of songs – where there is obviously no danger whatsoever – but the same extreme measures are called for.
So what of Windows? Could its closed source nature be eventually the death of it? Quite possibly, one only has to look at the wealth of FOSS projects that are providing alternative solutions to many of Microsoft products. Even Microsoft themselves are alleged to use GPL code (and allegedly violate it albeit by a third party)
Remember Mr Ballmer’s cancer comment in regards to Linux?
Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches
But then should we really pay any attention to him? he was alleged afterall to also say that Google was a house of cards and iPhone had no chance of getting a significant market share. I bring this up since GoogleOS is built on Linux so its rather relevant that the first “mainstream” steps of this concept are being taken by that which Mr Ballmer seems to have a low opinion of. Talking of cancer and IP, I wonder if he would like to retract that since Microsoft China are alleged to have taken code from another companies product and attempted to use it as their own. For more information on this, read the article here.
I like Linux. I like it a lot and I think it is the best thing since sliced bread. Better even, I don’t make any money off of sliced bread, just a bigger belly. I know that many of you out there like windows. You like it a lot as well and probably make money off of it too.
When we like something we tend to gloss over the flaws. There is another saying that love is blind. That is also very true. Not just in looks but in every aspect. On the other side of the coin. When we dislike something we tend to exaggerate the flaws. This means that when somebody is gushing about Linux or ranting about windows then perhaps we should take off our rose shades and try to see things from their point of view.
Few would consider using Linux if there wasn’t the semblance of Microsoft Office compatibility. Sun Microsystems bought, renamed and released its own broadly compatible office suite for free, in what it must have hoped would be a flanking attack on Microsoft’s dominance. A tactic it revisited with the re-licence of Java in 2007.
Ylmf OS appears to the casual user as XP. Currently the Ubuntu based distro has no English translation. What does this mean for Microsoft? Well if it becomes the “protest choice” of China then quite alot, its got a 10 million strong user base to attract. You can visit the website of this distro here and I would ask if anyone knows of either a translation for the distro itself and/or the homepage, please let me know!
Habl Consultancy, an open source and linux solutions provider headquartered in Dubai Silicon Oasis, promises to announce a revolutionary network server solution in January 2010. The exact details of the server solution are currently under wraps, however it will help companies save an enormous amount of money.
Written in Java, RSSOwl is a powerful feed reader for Linux, with support for RSS, RDF and Atom feeds, with a lot of features and customisation options.
The QT-ing of OpenTumblr has resulted in most of OpenTumblr getting a visual shakedown. Whilst many windows need some usability-guidelines applied, everything works as it should.
Sabayon 5.1 is really another good as well as a newbie friendly distribution for average computer users. It may not be as easy as Ubuntu or OpenSUSE but a person with 6-9 months of knowledge in Linux can easily manage Sabayon.
Okay, if you’re looking to install this on your main computer, I really wouldn’t advise doing that. Having a lightweight operating system is well and good, but to run a system as stripped-down as this, you’re going to run into something that’ll need an application not available for your OS. Better stick with a bootable flash drive if I were you.
Ubuntu 10.04’s Alpha has been released. We decided to install it on one of our netbooks to see what is new in it. Canonical claims that many new things will surface with the release Ubuntu 10.04 and some of them have been implemented in the alpha release.
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Right now, there is not even a basic paint alternative. gpaint which although looks a lot like MS paint, but cannot even crop a picture. So, if GIMP is removed, I don’t think there is a worthy MSpaint alternative in Linux
Office
* Dictionary
* Evolution mail and calender
* OpenOffice Presentaion
* OpenOffice Spreadsheet
* OpenOffice Word Processor
Sound and Video
* Brasero Disc Burner
* Movie Player
* Rhythmbox Music Player
* Sound Recorder
One important feature is the new software centre, Kissling says. A bit of background: modern Linux distributions all possess a so-called package manager. This is a utility to help users install new software not included with Linux itself. Instead of searching through the web for a specific program, the package manager handles the heavy lifting.
Complete with customized artwork and a big collection of Muslim-specific software, Sabily (formerly Ubuntu Muslim Edition) is a robust operating system for Muslims all over the world, be they Arabic speakers or not.
All in all another pleasant experience with Sansa products under Linux. I have an older e250 myself and had another even before that, all of which worked well with Ubuntu. For a quality music/video player for use with Ubuntu I can highly recommend the products from Sansa. Most can be purchased for less then $75 and refurbished ones like my last two for well under $50.
Cherrypal on Tuesday announced a no-frills laptop called Cherrypal Africa, which includes hardware usually found in smartphones. It can run the Linux or Windows CE operating systems, which are also found on cell phones.
Priced at $99, the laptop is targeted at those looking for an inexpensive PC to surf the Internet, said Max Seybold, founder of Cherrypal. It is a “no-thrills” laptop that could find an audience in developing countries and low-income groups in the Western world, he said
The Samba 4 code has been worked on for over five years, and the Active Directory code is reaching a state where it’s being run in production at several test sites.
When the Samba Team met at the CIFS conference this year, we had a meeting to put together a plan for shipping a production Samba 4 code-base. Here’s how we think it might work.
The conference was the third such event in the region, organized by the International Open Source Network (IOSN) and InWEnt-Capacity Building International of Germany.
Earlier camps took place in Bangalore, India in 2005 and Sukabumi, Indonesia in 2007. It is based on the source camp template of the Tactical Technology Collective, an NGO that consults for other NGOs on technology.
We all know that due to the copyright of the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation/whatever-it-is, that the Debian project decided awhile ago to drop the copyrighted logos and names from the very popular Mozilla products, hence:
And it turns out the Mozilla standalone calendar application Sunbird as well as the Lightning version of that app that works inside of Thunderbird/Icedove has its own Debian-dubbed name:
The email programme Thunderbird is available in a new, highly revised version, its developer Mozilla Messaging has announced. Thunderbird 3.0, an open-source email client, includes more than 2,000 revisions and improvements, according to the California-based company which is also behind the Firefox browser.
In 2008, legislation was passed requiring all NIH-funded researchers to submit their papers to an openly available repository within a year of publication. Even this modest step towards full open access was immediately attacked by rent-seeking scientific publishers.
It’s not obvious that you would. Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that’s the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background.
The New York Times published a Christmas Eve expose of Goldman Sachs’s so-called “Abacus” synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). They were created with credit derivatives instead of cash securities. Goldman used credit derivatives to create short bets that gain in value when CDOs lose value. Goldman did this for both protection and profit and marketed the idea to hedge funds.
Under other circumstances, this would have been a year to savour in the long, rapid ascent of Lloyd Blankfein. Goldman Sachs, the investment bank he has led for three years, not only navigated the 2008 global financial crisis better than others on Wall Street but is set to make record profits, and pay up to $23bn (€16bn, £14bn) in bonuses to its 31,700 staff.
“The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”
But while the FT may agree that Blankfein is doing “God’s work,” others view the bank as indicative of exactly what is wrong with Wall Street. Indeed, Blankfein himself apologized last month for Goldman Sachs’ role in the financial crisis. And Goldman Sachs’s trading practices are currently under investigation by the federal government.
In response to the FT’s decision to honor Blankfein, noted bank analyst Christopher Whalen has canceled his subscription to the paper. “Mr. Blankfein and his colleagues at Goldman Sachs, in my view, have done more to damage the reputations of global financial professionals than any other organization in 2009, yet you applaud them,” he wrote in a letter to the paper.
One of China’s most prominent human rights activists was condemned today to 11 years in prison, prompting a furious backlash from domestic bloggers and international civil society groups.
Liu Xiaobo, the founder of the Charter 08 campaign for constitutional reform, was given the unusually harsh jail term on Christmas Day in an apparent attempt to minimise international attention.
From Venezuela, a group of social organizations and human rights, students and academic groups as well as different individuals, launch this call for a campaign to defend the right to protest, which today is being systematically violated by the government of Hugo Chávez.
> > Linux should not compete with windows! Linux should compete with itself!
> > We choose Linux because it is NOT windows. It does things better! To be better means you have to be different, ie not the same as windows.
> > We should develop our vision and execute on that. Let Microsoft do their thing, and let the people decide which they want to use.
> > For Linux success!=”world domination” (or even desktop domination).
> > Success is different for each person, but maybe its something like “it does what I need it to do”.
> Well said !, I agree as a Linux user being tired of this Windows BS.
You both got there before me. Windows, as bad as it is, is held up as some sort of Gold Standard, largely by people who are resistant to change – the devil-you-know mentality prevails.
I see this daily in other projects where the hardware is open source 100%, but the software is a complete mush of bits and pieces that fit only with Windows and where the few of us who are using Linux, the solution is very simple and works. The Windows solution often receive the comments on the niceness of the GUI look after they’ve gone through the hoops to get the bits knitted together.
I’ve stopped looking at Windows problems for anyone as it’s a pain and I tell anyone who asks, including my daughter, go elsewhere as I just don’t want the hassles.
It’s all over the intanut tubes. My system is better than your system. Nyah, nyah, nyah! Usually with a response along the lines of sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me. The endless fights between windows and Linux advocates never seem to end. Both factions accuse each other of being FUDmunsters and zealots and both factions defend their own actions aggressively.
In 2006, when Amazon introduced the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it was a watershed event in the quest to transform computing into a ubiquitous utility, like electricity. Suddenly, anyone could scroll through an online menu, whip out a credit card, and hire as much computational horsepower as necessary, paying for it at a fixed rate: initially, 10 cents per hour to use Linux (and, starting in 2008, 12.5 cents per hour to use Windows).
Domino dynamo: this 20-year veteran buys you more bang for your buck than ever before. Martin Leon tells you about the virtues of Domino and how much mileage you can get out of this dynamo of an application platform.
.. or wahetever it is you’ll be celebrating today/tomorrow.
And if you aren’t celebrating anything at all, but instead sitting in your dark basement feeling lonely and bored, you can at least try out the latest -rc kernel. Because it’s better than moping around doing nothing.
Clutter Gesture attempts to identify gestures generated from input events and then where applicable to send off these recognized gestures to the application that has focus. This framework is flexible to allow all sorts of gesture algorithms to be built-in and it can also be extended from the application side as well, but the currently supported set of input gestures include slide up, slide down, slide left, slide right, and touch&hold. Supported from the multi-touch side is the pinch/rotate gestures.
The second (and likely last) release candidate for 1.7.4 is now available. Dave has backported the fb patches to 1.7, as said in the commit it’s multiple commits from master squashed into one to help bisecting. That issue should hopefully be fixed now but if it comes back, I’ll cut another RC before 1.7.4.
It is OK, if you don’t know what is VLMC because it hasn’t been released yet. VLMC (VideoLAN Movie Creator) is a free video editing software, offering features to realize semi-professional quality movies, but with the aim to stay simple and user-friendly.
Nexuiz is one of the most popular shooter games which emerged after the open-sourcing of the Quake 3 engine, featuring a fast-paced game style and several game modes, like the popular DM or CTF. Nexuiz is a free, GPL-licensed, first-person shooter developed online by the Internet-based team Alientrap, and it comes with ports for Linux, Windows and Mac.
Today, the first version of polkit-qt-1 and polkit-kde-1 have been released to the public. Thanks to these tools, KDE applications now integrate nicely with the new polkit-1 with a native authentication dialog. An authorization manager, the equivalent of the Polkit Authorization System Settings module, will be included in future releases. Find out more about PolicyKit on Freedesktop.org..
# Based on one, and only one, desktop environment. I’m seriously thinking of KDE 4 (seriously). There is a strong reason for this, primarily that KDE uses Qt, which will make a good foundation for another choice I have in mind.
George Vlahavas from the Salix OS development team proudly announced two days before Christmas that Salix 13.0.2 was available for download on mirrors worldwide. The good news for all the fans of this Slackware-based Linux distribution is that it now has a 64-bit edition, which is backwards compatible with the Slackware64 operating system. Salix64 offers an easier way to install the XFCE desktop environment, and a software repository with lots of packages. The Salix developers also prepared a software repository with dependency information for both 32-bit and 64-bit Slackware packages.
Red Hat itself sells a commercial version – complete with technical support – of the Linux operating system. But Linux was created as an open source software and any developer can contribute code to the program. It can be downloaded from the Web, free of a purchase licence.
Along the same lines as the above, I use a much higher percentage of the software that comes pre-installed on Ubuntu. And none of that software has been deliberately crippled in order to convince me to buy a non-crippled version. As I recently experienced with my new Blackberry Tour, there’s nothing that develops an immediately antagonistic relationship between me and my operating system like spending an hour stripping it of a bunch of useless software so I can more easily find the applications I care about.
This is a real deal Linux server that has been shrunk to a miniscule size, making it small enough to be installed onto radio-controlled cars, where you can then control it from a standard Web browser or using a client program for the iPhone (which is currently under development, seeing action only sometime next year). While the Joker Racer R/C Server is not for sale at the moment, it could have plenty of potential especially in a tie up with Tamiya or other notable R/C car manufacturers.
But Linux smartphone business is not all about Android. Other phone makers like Nokia and Palm have developed their own Linux-based operating system that has been quite successful. Nokia has Debian-based Maemo, which powers the N900, while Palm created webOS for their multi-featured Palm Pre smartphone.
A leak claims that more than 50 percent of the 8 or probably 10 smartphones scheduled by Acer to be released next year will not use Windows Mobile, but Android. The company has acknowledged that the mix of operating systems will be more balanced towards Android that has equipped only one phone in 2009.
The people at the Free Software Foundation asked me to do a short pitch to support the Free Software Foundation, and I’m happy and honored to do that. Indeed here in my office at Harvard Law School you can see one of the posters I most proudly have up is the award I got, the Free Software Foundation’s freedom award, which was an extraordinary honor that I received for ideas that I felt like I was just copying and spreading from Richard Stallman.
Open source has long been an important development methodology. The biggest surprise of 2009, however, was just how quickly it took center stage as a business strategy in the larger software economy.
The fact that browser distribution is not randomly distributed across European countries, but appears to closely follow traditional regional boundaries is somewhat surprising and suggests that there are significant cultural factors that affect browser choice. Note for example the large gap that StatCounter shows between Germany with ~60% Firefox and ~25% IE (so over 2:1) and its neighbors France with 55~60% IE and 30~35% Firefox and Denmark ~60% IE and ~25% Firefox (basically the opposite).
Mozilla Messaging has published a proposed schedule for Thunderbird 3.1, the next release of the popular e-mail client. The organization is refining its development process and could potentially shift towards shorter release cycles and a more incremental approach to development.
Instead of bringing you Firefox-related news from the last seven days, this is an entire recap of Firefox in the year of 2009. It’s been a big year for that cute little red panda and 2010 will be just as exciting if not more so!
This past year felt like a rebuilding year for Firefox add-ons, with two new frameworks implemented to help guide the future of extensions. Personas gave Firefox on-the-fly theme-switching, and users can expect it to be part of the stable version of Firefox 3.6 when that gets released. Jetpack takes a similarly-minded approach to feature add-ons, allowing programmers to create feature-rich add-ons from little more than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Expect JetPack to eventually be part of Firefox by default.
The first release of Chrome browser was held in 2008, then a new Google project looked quite weak and very few people saw him as a serious competitor. Nevertheless, for the year the situation has changed dramatically, if not, it is very much in mass Chrome 4.0 implemented improvements and even the opportunity to install extensions. So how Google is developing its own browser, suggests that with each update it looks increasingly to Firefox. Now, these programs do not seem competitive, even according to Net Applications, they do not affect the market share of each other.
The latest version of the popular open-source desktop email client, Thunderbird 3, was finally released a few days ago and it sports a range of new or improved features like better search and a tabbed interface (download site: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird). It had been in the making for about two years.
The organisation behind it is Mozilla Messaging, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that promotes the web browser Firefox. Most heavy email users might find managing the voluminous inflow and outflow of messages a daunting challenge. The latest version of Thunderbird has come up with a new search interface, which includes filtering and timeline tools that help users dig out fast the messages they were looking for.
My view on the role of the GPL in this situation has been strongly contested by my friend Monty Widenius and others who work for Monty or who are otherwise in sympathy with his position. So far as I have seen their expressions of their views, no one has disagreed with my positions on the GPL in general.
SRE: Your Master’s Thesis dealt with the concept of storing personal encryption certificates in DNS. While still not a common practice, you wrote in a recent blogpost that some work has begun to happen in the area. How do you currently regard the promise of this way of distributing keys? Have keyservers in general improved since your thesis was written?
SJ: The problem is not so much about technology here, but social matters. The person responsible for managing DNS for an organization is typically not the same person responsible for managing user certificates for an organization, and people have been reluctant to change their habits here. After all, DNS is a pretty critical piece of any company’s infrastructure. So I haven’t seen much uptake in this, even if it continues to be a interesting possibility, especially for the OpenPGP world. One part of my thesis was about the privacy issues around the then-current DNSSEC standard, the so called NXT record. I identified and explained that it will lead to problems when people can enumerate entire DNS zones, and even wrote a IETF draft on how to solve the problem using hashing of the names instead of storing the names directly. People in the IETF felt that the threat didn’t exist, and thought they were ready to roll out DNSSEC quite soon anyway (this was in 2001/2002!) so they didn’t want to change DNSSEC. I gave up on the draft, but years later people who were actually deploying this identified the same problem, and ended up re-inventing my solution, which is now standardized (the NSEC3 record). So at least some of it ended up being used, although not in the form or way I anticipated.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has launched a “public consultation on Public Access Policy”, to see if research funded by U.S. grants should be made available as open access results. I think this is important — I believe publicly-funded unclassified research should actually be made available to the public.
In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.
Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.
Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.
Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.
The Supreme Court of Canada transformed the country’s libel laws Tuesday with a pair of decisions that proponents say will expand the boundaries of free speech.
This time, Debian developers Martin F. Krafft and Fabio Tranchitella are behind the summit which is one of the mini-conferences to be held on the first two days of the week-long LCA in Wellington from January 18 to 23.
The summit has come about as a result of Krafft’s efforts to resurrect the Debian miniconf which was last held at the 2008 LCA in Melbourne.
This was followed in November by the latest flavour of Linux, in the guise of a Karmic Koala, the interesting name for Ubuntu 9.10, which for a free OS proved to be really very good indeed, and certainly worth a look for any company thinking about divorcing Microsoft.
For those who, like me, like to play around with different operating systems, 2009 saw some interesting developments. The following four operating systems especially made an impression on me during the past year.
Kubuntu
Kubuntu is, despite being an ubuntu-derivative, a very decent operating system. And since the addition of KDE4, it actually looks nice too! It does not feel like a bloated system, it is fast and responsive, even if you don’t have 3d acceleration available.
Dataquest: Has Linux truly made inroads into the enterprise segment or is it just a hype?
Tirthankar Mitra: We have seen more adoption of Linux in the mainstream applications, by which I mean that there are various initiatives that customers have taken across verticals starting from banking, financial services, telecom, and government. Open source has made tremendous inroads into the enterprise space because of its very nature of business model.
Mandriva’s solution is called InstantOn and it looks to be a cut down version of Linux. The boot time is gauged at just 10 seconds or less, however, that is for an SSD storage solution, so you are probably looking at 15-20 seconds on a normal hard drive. Still, that’s pretty fast when you consider some alternatives such as Vista, with Windows 7 fairing slightly better.
Not feeling the newness of the new PS3 Slim with its lower price point? Do you desire to have the bigger, Linux-capable machine – even at a higher price?
In addition, the new version is equipped with tools to simplify backup and restore of Asset Server databases and supports Debian-based Linux distributions. Unity Asset Server has a built in GUI for versioning assets and caches imported 3D models, removing the need to have the application in which the models are authored installed on all machines, the company said.
Google’s Chrome OS does not run local applications or store local data. Everything is handled inside the browser. But when the much-hyped operating system debuts on netbooks at the end of next year, you can bet it will execute native code on behalf of online Google applications such as Gmail or Docs and Spreadsheets.
Google launched the open-source browser in 2008, prompting many to ask why anyone needed another after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, and Apple’s Safari. But over the course of 2009, Google answered that question: with Chrome, the company wants not just to speed up the Web but to rebuild its foundations.
Just this week Google’s V.P. of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg published a memo declaring that Google is an open source company. An insightful article on the Silicon Alley Insider points out how all Google’s talk about opennes is really just “empty posturing”.
Some days ago, I talk about the fact that some underlying technologies were changing too fast. I was mostly talking about HAL vs DeviceKit/libudev/… saga. Today I’ve discovered another one : PolicyKit vs polkit.
The FFADO (Free FireWire Audio Drivers) project supports the connection of FireWire-based audio devices to Linux systems:
The FFADO project aims to provide a generic, open-source solution for the support of FireWire based audio devices for the Linux platform. It is the successor of the FreeBoB project. FFADO is a volunteer-based community effort, trying to provide Linux with at least the same level of functionality that is present on the other operating systems.
Linus has released the 2.6.33-rc1 prepatch, closing the merge window for this development cycle. This kernel has a few features which will shake things up, with dynamic tracing being near the top as far as I am concerned. But, perhaps, the most interesting addition is one that almost nobody expected: a reverse-engineered driver for NVIDIA graphics chipsets called “Nouveau.”
Sound in Wine has been a big issue. From a user’s perspective, it didn’t work well. From a technical user’s perspective, there were 3 different drivers to choose from and none of them worked well. From a developer’s perspective, no sound driver would ever work well.
Since joining Kitware in October, one of the first projects I was tasked with is revamping the 2D charting capabilities in VTK and ParaView. At first I was a little daunted as it meant digging through many of the internals of VTK, and breaking an assumption that is made in many parts of VTK – that everything being rendered is 3D.
It was one of the Karmic Koalas’ big selling points – an easier more efficient way to find and install applications and it certainly did what it set out to do in Karmic – making a saner, calmer, easier to naviagate “add/remove” replacement.
GnoMenu is a very nice addition to your panel. Not only does it offer eye candy for your Linux desktop, it does so pretty well. You can use themes that use transparency even if you have compositing disabled or your computer just doesn’t have the required juice. It can also be used with cairo dock, avant window navigator and xfapplet. The only downside that comes to the mind is that you cannot drag items to or from GnoMenu taking away some flexibility and intuitiveness. Other than that you can use it in place of the standard Application menu on your distribution any time.
It’s been quite a while in the making (and maybe a bit late), but Camelot has arrived for Windows, OSX, Linux, and XBMC Live, and just in time for the holidays. Noteworthy changes include a revamped user interface via the new default skin “Confluence“, DirectX support by default for the Windows platform, a complete reorganization of the settings menus, automatic video information extraction, and smoother video playback. In addition, all scrapers have been updated, new remotes are supported out of the box, and codecs have been updated for more reliable playback. For a full changelog, see the end of this post.
If you are looking for descent photo editing software for Linux, you should try the latest digiKam release. The digiKam project has released their Christmas Edition of digiKam, version 1.0.0.
You can also make use of the KDE Image Plugin Interface (Kipi) plugins most recent release with digiKam to further manipulate and edit your photos. The Kipi-Plugins are also compatible with GwenView, KPhotoAlbum, and Showimg.
Yesterday, Opera 10.5 pre-alpha (codenamed Evenes) was released as a special gift to the small but dedicated fan base. It definitely had everyone talking.You can find our review of Opera 10.5 here. In short, Evenes is fast – really fast. It not only came close to Safari and Chrome’s JavaScript rendering speed but also defeated them in most of the benchmarks. Unfortunately the pre-alpha build was released only for Windows and Mac, leaving Linux users high and dry. But, this doesn’t mean that Opera Software has forgotten about UNIX users.
Opera widgets are also cross-platform allowing developers to focus on creating great widgets and not on porting and adapting them for various desktops.
As this has often heard people complaining about the lack of dotted and dashed line types in Calc and Writer, I have started to implement it (139 votes on i#8275). Kohei told me that these line types are heavily used by the Japanese administration in their forms. Even thought I am in the early development of this feature, this post exposes the progress.
Speed Dreams is an open source, multi platform (works on Windows and Linux) motorsport simulator. It was forked in late 2008 from the famous open racing car simulator TORCS, in order to implement exciting new features, cars, tracks and AI opponents, to make a more enjoyable game for the player, as well as constantly improving visual and physics realism.
Joe Danger is a racing, track-building, combo making, stunts game that will be released very soon and it will also be available for GNU/Linux as the build was already done
And here comes 2.29.4, just in time for the holiday season. It’s a few hours late, but there were several build issues this time. But if you take all the right tarballs, this should now be okay And you’ll enjoy some cool stuff, like an updated nautilus with its changed focus (see discussion on nautilus-list), or various modules like gnome-control-center with tons of bug fixes. You can also take a look at gnome-keyring which has changed quite a bit internally… There are definitely many changes in there, so it’s a good time to do some deep testing!
ALT Linux is an APT-ified, RPM-based distribution developed and maintained by the ALT Linux Team (ALT is recursive for ALT Linux Team). It was originally based on Mandrake (now Mandriva) Linux. There are two main development branches, “ALT Linux 5.0 Ark, a suite designed for making integrated solutions, and ALT Linux 5.0 School, a suite that is targeted at secondary and high schools.” Within the ALT Linux 5.0 Ark branch, there is a desktop version, and a server version. This review is of ALT Linux 5.0 Ark desktop.
Google may think that the most important application for any operating system is a web browser. But while Google’s approach is to build an entire OS around the browser, others have taken a simpler approach. BrowserLinux, for instance, is basically a stripped down, Linux-based operating system designed to run just a few programs including a file manager, audio player, and Firefox 3.5.5.
This release comes straight from the North Pole, I’ve found it under my Christmas tree this morning and wanted to share with you.. Santa made it for all our users! A cute Sabayon Linux 5.1 x86 full of GAMES to not get bored during this holidays time.
Just in time for Christmas, Sabayon Linux founder Fabio Erculiani has announced the availability of a “Gaming” Edition of version 5.1 of his popular Linux distribution. Sabayon, named after an egg-yolk based dessert, is derived from Gentoo Linux and is intended to provide a “complete out-of-the-box experience” while being both stable and versatile.
The Salix team is proud to announce the release of Salix 13.0.2. The most important change this release brings is the addition of a 64-bit port of Salix! As the 32-bit counterpart, Salix64 is fully backwards compatible with Slackware64 and provides a simple and fast way to install an XFCE based system that follows the one-app-per-task philosophy. The 64-bit repositories already include a considerable number of packages, making it the largest third party package repository for Slackware64 users available! The Salix team has also created and maintains a repository that includes dependency information for all Slackware packages, 32 and 64-bit.
MEPIS has announced that SimplyMEPIS 8.4.95, the third beta of MEPIS 8.5, is available from MEPIS and public mirrors. The ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.4.95-b3_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-CD_8.4.95-b3_64.iso respectively.
As many of you remember, last year for Karmic Koala there was a wallpaper contest. Users were able to submit wallpapers, and the ones that won were included in the default Ubuntu installation.
A number of changes will (if all goes well) land themselves in Lucid. Not everything listed below is guaranteed to make it and some parts may morph or evolve between now and April 2010, but the gist of the plan is certainly able to be gleaned and shows that the relatively narrow, un-intrusive scope the project had in Karmic has been widen – and for the better!
If you’ve checked out Ubuntu’s website lately, you’ve probably noticed that it’s looking pretty slick, especially compared to a few years ago. Here’s a look at how ubuntu.com has evolved over time, and why it matters.
Well designed websites aren’t a forte of the open-source community. There are some exceptions, but many projects have home pages that, although functional, don’t look like they’ve had an aesthetic update since the Windows 95 era. GNU Mailman is an example. Linux.org is another.
He goes on to talk more about the set of tools that the developers will be using to track their progress and the use of agile development methods to make that easier. The developers will also be posting their progress publicly so that the community can follow along. In essence, the final goal of this LTS release is to gain the confidence of IT departments who will be deploying Lucid Lynx and maintaining it for a period of years thereafter.
Linux player MontaVista Software is now officially part of chip vendor Cavium Networks (NASDAQ: CAVM), concluding a rapid $50 million transaction that it hopes will see it better able to go after large networking and carrier customers.
Palm has released a beta version of a web-based GUI development platform called Palm Ares, said to streamline development for the Palm Pre’s WebOS. Meanwhile, Palm announced lower than expected quarterly earnings, and said it’s planning a marketing blitz to bolster sales of the Pre and Pixi smartphones, says Reuters.
Korenix announced a VPN routing computer that comes with a Linux development platform. The JetBox 9533G is based on a 667MHz Intel IXP435 RISC processor, offers four PoE and four gigabit Ethernet ports plus a WAN connection, and has three USB ports.
Palm and Android join forces
Although Chrome looks to be a home run for Google, the future for Android isn’t quite so clear. Handset manufacturers promise lots more models in 2010, but so far, I haven’t seen customers fall in love with Android phones the way they do their iPhones.
The Nokia N900 is now available from various US retailers and after two full months of using a loaner device I just purchased my own. This latest Linux-based device has a new version of the Maemo OS and integrates a cellular radio. You will find some aspects of S60 in the N900, along with a rather unique user interface and extremely powerful Mozilla-based web browser. Apps are still early in development, but with the browser you can do most everything you need to do with dedicated apps.
Apparently there are no waiting lists either, all orders for the Nokia N900 deals are being shipped immediately. Reports earlier in December indicated and frustrated Nokia fans as they claimed that the Nokia N900 wouldn’t be available until January 2010.
3. Mobile devices based on the Google Android operating systems will take 10% of the mobile device market in 2010. According to Forrester that uptake will be due to “heavy industry support” from Qualcomm (QCOM), Verizon (VZ), Motorola (MOT) and Google (GOOG), as well as the growing embrace of the open OS by developers.
Android 2.0 is listed as the operating system for the device. It will feature an 8 megapixel camera. Sholes reportedly will operate on China Unicom’s network.
Foxconn is a Taiwanese OEM that makes computers that are rebranded and sold under different company monikers. So I don’t expect to see the Foxconn SZ901P hit US shelves anytime soon, at least not under that name. But the FCC has published documents related to a netbook under that name.
The one interesting thing about the Foxconn netbook is that it supports Windows XP as well as a custom Linux distribution called FoxOS, which includes a dock-style program launcher.
The OLPC organization experienced huge rifts over the use of Windows in its devices and Nicholas Negroponte caused Microsoft a fair amount of grief over premature announcements of Windows ports for its Sugar OS and the OLPC XO 1.0. Microsoft, however, has been fairly clear (with a little bit of waffle-room) that they won’t be porting Windows to ARM processors, meaning that XO 3.0, if it ever materializes, will need to be exclusively Linux-based.
Project Canvas, an open source platform that provides a range of services through a broadband connection, is set to get the green light next week, which means that the BBC will be able to push ahead with its plans.
The OpenHazards Web site is filled with safety and preparation tips, as well as blog posts written by experts in earthquake hazard awareness and public education. While some of the content is geared toward geologists and geophysicists, much of it clearly written and non-technical. To learn more about ways open source software is being implemented the study of earthquakes, read about other of hazardous temblors.
To properly assess the state of open-source software in 2009, one would have to gather millions of code commits and project releases. Open source isn’t a buzzword or even a type of software; it has become a new way of doing business in software.
In September, the Linux Foundation released the findings of its “Who Writes Linux” survey. The results found that Linux is seeing contributions from hundreds of thousands of different users, and that pool of contributors is still growing at an encouraging rate, building on over 10 years of consistent evolution and expansion.
The official announcement of VLMC will take place at the VideoLAN dev’days 2009 in December.
Once the pre-release of VLMC is out, there will be full instructions on how to install it, and we will have all the details. Until then, you can fetch the current working tree using Git:
Winner: Open source software No one thought an open source company would ever be worth $1 billion, but now that Sun owns MySQL, it is about to sell itself to Oracle for $7 billion and change. Sure, the server hardware business is nice and Java is a wonderful brand, but everyone assumes that the meat of the deal lies in control of the MySQL copyrights. That’s why the Europeans are so concerned. MySQL’s success with marketing itself by giving away copies is one of the big reasons that open source is now the dominant business model for many companies. Even the most proprietary companies have found ways to emulate most of the openness by creating licenses like “shared source” and “developer’s editions.”
Mark Shuttleworth: Founder of Canonical LTD, Shuttleworth has taken on Microsoft’s domination of the operating system market through the development of Ubuntu Linux. Committed to free and open source software, with Ubuntu he has shown that Open Source is especially beneficial to schools and colleges across the world and in developed and developing countries.
Perhaps the best known of South Africa’s IT entrepreneurs, Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu operating system and Thawte, a provider of digital certificates. Shuttleworth founded Thawte in 1995 and sold the company to VeriSign in December 1999 for R3.5 billion. With that money Shuttleworth founded HBD Venture Capital, a business incubator and venture capital provider, as well as The Shuttleworth Foundation.
Through the Foundation Shuttleworth has funded projects in education, free software and telecommunications. Shuttleworth also founded Canonical and the Ubuntu Linux operating system which is open source software. Until December 17 Shuttleworth was CEO of Canonical when he announced he was standing down as the CEO to focus on the more technical aspects of the operating system. The first version of Ubuntu was released in October 2004.
Theo de Raadt
Theo de Raadt is the founder and leader of the OpenBSD project, a security-focused free software operating system. Born in Pretoria, De Raadt moved to Canada when he was almost ten. In 1993 De Raadt was a co-founder of NetBSD, based on the original Berkley University BSD Unix operating system. A dispute in 1994 led to De Raadt being asked to resign as a core NetBSD member.
2. Ubuntu
When Canonical started out in 2004, Linux was seen by many in the IT Industry as a powerful yet complex technology that was best wielded by seasoned professionals. A lot has changed since then, and Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux is a big reason why.
In October, Canonical released Ubuntu 9.10, code-named “Karmic Koala,” which enables companies to build their own cloud computing environments on their own servers and hardware. As it has done with desktop and server Linux, Canonical aims to take a pioneering role in cloud computing, and this release is the first step in that direction. “Ubuntu is a solid product that has continued to make leaps and bounds,” says Frank Basanta, director of technology for Systems Solutions, a New York-based integrator. In Ubuntu 9.10, the addition of virtualization and cloud computing features is helping Canonical to become a serious player in this space.
VirtualBox – It is a life saver for sys admin and perfect free software loaded with tons of features. It offers great performance and stability, and supports a wide-variety of guest operating systems.
This is my personal FOSS desktop software list and it is not absolutely definitive, so if you’ve got your own software, share in the comments below.
Obama put open technology to work during his White House run, notably relying on social networks that gave users more control over the campaign message. On the day they settled in at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Obama’s open government team began deploying open-source Drupal systems on all of its sites and opening them up to user comments, polling and feedback.
Ten years ago, the phrase “open source” tended to conjure images of a computing counterculture, people who operated outside the regular business model. Consider Linux, the open-source Unix-like operating system that was viewed as being only for hard-headed coders. (Even if they were actually following the true computing spirit of open information, that was the impression in a lot of quarters.) Today, open source practically is the mainstream. Sun Microsystems went open source a few years ago, Microsoft has opened up some code and both military and civilian agencies are promoting the use of open-source solutions. Open-source software in common use these days includes the Firefox browser, the Open Office suite and Google’s Chrome browser. And, of course, Linux is everywhere, especially on the back ends of Web-facing systems.
In this episode: The Gnome community considers dropping GNU, while a Gnome screensaver is found to contain malware. We trawl through our favourite TuxRadar comments of the year and ask whether it’s good to sue for GPL violations.
On the last regular show for the year: Dan reviews the Nokia N900, Microsoft rips off Plurk, Shuttleworth steps down as Canonical CEO, Google to release the real Googlephone soon, Best Buy says Linux breaks PC hardware and much more…
In this podcast comprookie bash’s pulseaudio, plus talks about learning Bash. Stop by linuxcrazy.com for more info or say hi on irc server freenode channel #linuxcrazy
Now in its 12th year, OSCON continues to be an important Linux gathering, combining desktop, enterprise, and embedded topics. Not surprisingly, consider the conference is hosted by technology book publisher O’Reilly, OSCON also offers a healthy dose of programming and scripting tutorials.
The organisers of the next O’Reilly Open Source Convention, also known as OSCON, have announced that the OSCON 2010 Call for Papers deadline will be the 1st of February, 2010.
Already, though, Adams said the the city is making progress on software. He cited the city’s support of the Open Source Bridge conference in June, OSCON’s pending return to Portland, and a council resolution to adopt open source technology when possible.
Joomla is an open-source content management system (CMS) used to make a websites. Open-source means all underlying code is offered for free use and modification. So, there may be many applications running in a Joomla-built website, but they are usually free software available to use or modify.
I know that the annual campaign missives have been arriving in shoals the last few weeks; my list of organizations to support has been growing longer, precisely because so many of us are having to do more with less, and need the help. With your support, the SFLC can continue its long-term mission of providing legal services to the hundreds of thousands of dedicated people who produce wonderful technology just because they want to share.
Mani has not given up his love for art. Now that he is computer savvy, he prefers free software GNU Image Manipulation Program (GNU), to pen and paper. So far he has created 45 images digitally and has raised Rs 10,000 by selling them. Something he could not have done if he had to purchase a program like Adobe.
He is now helping other children in his community do the same. “I want to study science,” he said. “I spend the money earned on my school fees because I want to get into college. Since I want to give back to the institution that helped me, I donate the balance to AC3, in case any maintenance or repairs are required. I also know the software well enough to teach computer skills to local children.”
While Windows users will be very happy to see this feature-filled update, Mac and Linux users will still find Songbird more pleasant to use, especially if migrating from iTunes—1.4.2 finally allows you to write metadata to WMA and AAC files, meaning all those songs bought or imported in iTunes can have their information edited.
Dr. Matthew King, Edgeware Technologies and Mr. Djien So have collaborated over the last 3 years to develop a VistA compatible, high quality, multi-featured Practice Management System. The PMS will be released with the Affero v3 GPL open source license.
The Open ISES (Information Systems for Emergency Services) Project is proud to announce the latest release of flagship software product, Tickets Version 2.11. Tickets is a web-based computer aided dispatch (CAD) program that leverages the power of Google maps to bring a high end open source CAD product to the emergency services community. Tickets can perform a number of functions including phone number look-up, driving directions, schedule events, and more.
This is where the Lamson project comes in. It’s written by Zed Shaw, author of the Mongrel server made famous by Ruby on Rails. Lamson’s design is model view controller (MVC) based, making it very similar to the newer web frameworks popular with developers these days, such as Ruby on Rails and Django.
Google’s newly-acquired startup AppJet released the source code to its popular EtherPad web editor recently, making good on a promise to EtherPad’s users who were previously faced with a service shutdown following the acquisition. The source is under the Apache 2.0 license, which is GPL-compatible, making the code potentially useful to a wide array of free software projects. The release has the community debating the impact on similar and related software, and revisiting the contentious question of how free software in general can and should transition to the web-hosted environment.
The International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation is to making source code for the IHTSDO Workbench, including tools to develop, maintain, and facilitate the use of SNOMED CT, freely available.
Besides my sabbatical announcement for the Phoronix Test Suite’s benefit, there is some other Windows-Linux news this afternoon. The developers behind the Unix/Linux-like environment for Microsoft Windows have announced the release of version 1.7.
After more than 18 months of development, the Cygwin developers have announced the availability of version 1.7.1 of their Linux-like environment and command-line interface for Windows. The major update includes a number of behavioral changes and new functionality compared to the last 1.5 release from June of 2008.
sequencer with recording and editing capabilities written originally by Werner Schweer now developed and maintained by the MusE development team. MusE aims to be a complete multitrack virtual studio for Linux, it is published under the GNU General Public License. MusE has among other things support for:
The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) is GNU’s tool for secure communication and data storage. It can be used to encrypt data, create digital signatures, help authenticating using Secure Shell and to provide a framework for public key cryptography.
The problem is this. Copyright in code belongs to the person who wrote that code. This creates a difficulty when code is contributed by multiple programmers to a free software project. If the original coders retain the copyright for their contribution, the program becomes a kind of patchwork quilt of rights.
That’s exactly the situation for Linux, currently made available under the GNU GPLv2, and why it is extremely unlikely that it will ever be re-licensed under GNU GPLv3: there are simply too many people involved – some of whom may be hard to find or even dead – to hope that everyone’s agreement can be obtained to relicense the code.
The guide includes 3D printing, Arduino projects, clocks and watches, development tools, robotics, transportation and so many more yummy projects for DIYers. Exit the consumer lifestyle and enter the more sustainable – and more fun – hacker/modifier lifestyle and find your next green project from this opensource guide.
For John so loved us all that he gave his PortableApps Format 1.0 release to the world. Having put the finishing touches on a few remaining items that allow for many more programs to share in the portable glory. The 1.0 release is effectively an invitation for developers to tinker with creating portable applications with a friendly wrapper and installer.
To maximize their financial return and eliminate these installation and maintenance challenges, many ISVs are building appliances — versions of their product, packaged with a just enough operating system (JeOS) required to perform the desired tasks.
Hungarian Parliament has made the use of open standards mandatory by law in the intercommunication between public administration offices, public utility companies, citizens and voluntarily joining private companies, conducted via the central governmental system.
If you yearn for the operating systems or arcade games of the past, and are willing to make the effort to bring them back to life, free and open source software is definitely the way to go. Green screens and might-have beens, operating systems and games, BeOS, Amiga OS or DOS can be relived and replayed through a host of emulators, simulators or rewrites in varying stages of completion.
Folks responded with good points to my post from yesterday, “Why Microsoft is So Far Behind Google on the Web,” a riff on how Microsoft lets Google buy what it wants — AdMob, YouTube, DoubleClick — without challenging or responding to its nemesis.
The comments that praise Microsoft for its frugality regarding Internet businesses have the tenor of “well, Google buys companies that don’t make any money.” Spoken like people who don’t believe that every Web service can be infused with online ads.
A robotic fish developed by scientists from Essex University is put through its paces in a special tank at the London Aquarium. It works via sensors and has autonomous navigational control.
When I travel, my sensitive files are encrypted inside a TrueCrypt container. TrueCrypt is widely respected, widely used (at least by techies), free, open source, and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. But it does take a little work to use it. For non-techies, the process of creating secure containers, then mounting them and dismounting them may be too much.
HACKERS TARGETED the domain name service (DNS) providers for Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Expedia yesterday and bought them all to a grinding halt.
Several of the retailers websites were taken offline, which effectively prevented anyone from finding any last minute ties and socks, er, presents there.
Service to Amazon, Wal-Mart and several other shopping sites was briefly blocked on Wednesday evening when their DNS provider was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
A former prison inmate has been ordered to serve 18 months for hacking the facility’s computer network, stealing personal details of more than 1,100 of its employees and making them available to other inmates.
The emissions cuts offered so far at the Copenhagen climate change summit would still lead to global temperatures rising by an average of 3C, according to a confidential UN analysis obtained by the Guardian.
In a finding that is sure to confirm the musings of conspiracy theorists — or may just prove the obvious to cynics — a new study details how the financial institutions with the strongest political connections ended up getting the biggest bailouts.
A New Jersey hedge fund manager stands to enjoy a $2.5bn (£1.5bn) payday after placing an astute bet at the height of the global financial crisis that America’s top banks would live to fight another day.
David Tepper, a former Goldman Sachs junk bond trader, has steered his hedge fund, Appaloosa Management, to a $7bn profit so far this year by taking a sanguine view that banks such as Citigroup and Bank of America would weather the financial storm without being nationalised by the US government.
Taken together, Goldman Sachs and the federal government have earmarked more than $300 million to invest in these local financiers in 2010. Compared to Wall Street’s bailout billions, that’s pennies on the dollar, but for CDFIs it’s a jackpot. Next year’s funding pool is almost three times bigger than any they’ve ever had before.
International Brotherhood of Teamsters President James Hoffa is asking the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to review “questionable promotion” of credit- default swaps tied to trucking company YRC Worldwide Inc.
Hoffa sent letters to the regulators and members of Congress, the Teamsters said today in a statement distributed by PR Newswire. YRC, the biggest U.S. trucking company by sales, is seeking a debt-for-equity exchange to avert bankruptcy.
In announcing its intention to block the deal, the Treasury cited national security issues.
Well this is music to the ears of Molycorp — a company engaged in the mining of rare earth metals — which has received subsidies from the government, as well as a major investment from Goldman Sachs (GS).
One fake Goldman greeting card, supposedly penned by Blankfein, reads: “He knows if you’ve been bad or good . . .” but “We get paid in either case.” The front depicts Blankfein as Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies, wearing a red-and-white Santa Claus hat, gently stroking a white cat and flanked by two women.
Goldman acted as middle-man on $14 billion of that amount, after it took the risk of mortgage assets originated by other banks and insured all of it with AIG. Goldman may wish to claim it “was only following orders,” but since Goldman also originated many of the mortgage assets ultimately protected by AIG, it should have been well aware of the risk posed to itself and to AIG. The risk was then Goldman’s. If AIG failed, Goldman Sachs would have had to make good on those trades. Goldman stuffed so much risk into A.I.G. that Goldman nearly killed its own “hedge.”
That should be a warning sign. It’s typical, but you can see it in plenty of previous Wall Street meltdowns as well. After someone figures out a “system” for making lots of money (say, mortgage-backed securities a few years back), everyone starts piling in. Then, the “innovation” occurs. Now, much of it is well-meaning, and even useful. With mortgage-backed securities, things like credit default swaps actually were a very useful insurance tool originally. But at some point, they basically flipped from insurance to gambling. People weren’t using them to back up an investment, but as the investment itself — so you’d actually have what was, in effect, thousands of people all buying an insurance policy that one house wouldn’t burn down. If that house burned down… the insurance company (hi, AIG) defaulted, and everything comes crashing down.
The Campaign for a U.S. – Afghanistan Partnership is being expose as an insidious pro-war front group. Aram Roston reports in the The Nation magazine that “As President Obama prepares a massive military buildup in Afghanistan, a House subcommittee has launched an investigation into whether Defense Department contractors are paying off the Taliban to protect American supply lines. … One of the contractors under investigation is NCL Holdings, a US firm headed by Hamed Wardak, the Afghan-American son of Afghanistan’s defense minister, General Abdul Rahim Wardak.
As President Obama prepares a massive military buildup in Afghanistan, a House subcommittee has launched an investigation into whether Defense Department contractors are paying off the Taliban to protect American supply lines. The investigation was triggered by a Nation cover story [see Roston, "How the US Funds the Taliban," November 30].
[...]
In interviews with The Nation, Afghan government officials, security contractors and trucking company executives outlined a giant protection racket, funded by US taxpayers, which raises millions for the Taliban. With no US military forces protecting their supply lines, contractors had to protect routes by other means: payoffs. As one trucking company official told The Nation, “If you tell me not to pay these insurgents in this area, the chances of my trucks getting attacked increase exponentially.”
Yesterday, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), introduced H.R. 4364, the Citizen Participation Act of 2009. The Citizen Participation Act encourages civic engagement and protects against meritless lawsuits brought against those who petition the government or speak out on a public issue. The bill allows someone who is brought to court on a meritless lawsuit arising from his exercise of First Amendment rights to have the lawsuit dismissed, and to recover attorney’s fees.
With so much happening these days: Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Health Care, Jobs, the Climate, and other big happenings in the First Amendment world, including libel tourism and reporter’s shield legislation, you might wonder why so much ado about some meritless lawsuits.
Technology and policy site Ars Technica is reporting that Comcast has settled a class action law suit filed by users of its broadband internet service who allege that the Phialdelphia-based cable, telephone, and internet service provider was capping their download speeds. The caps were levied primarily at users of the popular BitTorrent protocol, a peer-to-peer file sharing system that allows users to download large amounts of data in a relatively short time span by breaking the files up into small pieces and downloading only a few pieces from each user on a large network of people who already have the file.
So it should come as no surprise that (right before the holidays) it’s been announced that a big chunk of broadband stimulus money is going to Connected Nation (including, of course, in Minnesota). It’s a really sweet boondoggle. The operation was set up by telco industry lobbyists, with the claim that it will accurately map broadband penetration (an important factor in figuring out a broadband plan).
What’s interesting here (beyond a victory for user rights) is that a big part of the argument pushed by the entertainment industry representatives, was that this law was necessary to remain in compliance with trade agreements (there they are again) with the US. However, it appears that Chilean politicians recognized this was a load of bunk.
It’s obvious to most Linux users that Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a really bad idea. It’s not just because DRM-encoded media usually won’t play with our operating system, but rather because we understand the value of openness. The really sad part is that DRM, at least on some level, is attempting to do a good thing.
The court relies on the fact that IsoHunt owner Gary Fung made many statements that could be read as inducing infringement, but most of the statements appear to have been taken out of context. In fact, it looks like the court interpreted any time Fung mentioned “stealing” to mean support for copyright infringement, even if the words he stated were actually suggesting something different.
It’s now been over a year since the infamous announcement, leaked to the Wall Street Journal, that the RIAA was going to effectively drop its strategy of suing individuals in favor of agreements, worked out between the RIAA and ISPs with NY AG Andrew Cuomo adding pressure, to kick people off the internet on a “three strikes” regime. The whole thing sounded pretty ridiculous at the time. Cuomo had absolutely no legal standing to pressure ISPs into such a deal, since the ISPs had every legal right to say no. And, since the “leak” many ISPs have insisted, quite vocally, that they have never made any such agreement with the RIAA and that they would never kick their customers offline in such a manner.
A women’s clothing company is suing Canadian Broadcasting Company after a reporter for the television station snuck into a New York fashion show without an invitation and taped the event.
Ursula K. Le Guin is a very famous author who many people insist is one of the best — though, I have to admit never having read her stuff. Yet, she is one of those who is rather aggressive in policing the copyrights on her work, and who does not tend to side with those who believe in concepts like “fair use.” Most certainly, she is not a fan of open culture. A few years ago, she got into a bit of a scrap with Cory Doctorow, because he dared to publish a single paragraph of hers in a blogpost as part of a larger (positive!) commentary.
North Face has sued a company called “South Butt,” whose slogan “Never Stop Relaxing” is a deliberate poke at the fashionable outdoors clothing company’s “never stop exploring.” South Butt’s logo comes close to being a mirror image of North Face’s logo.
Doctor Ficsor’s views have been well documented for over a decade? Where? The man is virtually unknown according to Google. Most of the results it tosses up for his name link to my virtually unknown blog! My god man – didn’t your teachers tell you to strive for accuracy if you want to be believed? Both you and Doctor Ficsor are fond of making statements, without providing proof. Document, document, document!
And as to Doctor Ficsor’s connections to the ‘copyright lobby groups’, I refer you to my earlier post where I came to the same conclusion. Doctor Ficsor’s arguments are so similar to the arguments made by the US Ambassador to Canada in a recent speech. Which happen to be the same arguments made by the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. Which may not be surprising, as the Obama regime is infamous for hiring RIAA lawyers for sensitive positions in the administration.
Oh dear – here we go again. Doctor Ficsor, you are quickly gaining a reputation for inaccuracy. I was originally going to refute you point by point, but that would have resulted in another long document, and as you stated, this is Christmas. I have children and a wife (never mind two adorable dogs) who would like to see me away from the computer for a while, so I will make this short.
Point Number One:
You have stated that the United States is compliant with the treaty in regards to ‘Technological Protection Measures (TPM)’. According to the wording that you, yourself have provided they are not. Their implementation, known as the ‘Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998’ is defective in many areas. I’ll pick one to demonstrate, specifically the Kindle, an E-Reader marketed by Amazon. The Kindle uses ‘Digital Rights Management (DRM)’ (a more accurate name would be Digital Restrictions Management), another name for a TPM, to prevent copying of the E-Books on the Kindle. According to your reading of the treaty, any legislation is supposed to outlaw ‘circumvention devices’ for any TPM.
I have to act fast, I think. Your Wonderful Beneficial Federal Government has all but banned children’s books printed prior to 1985, under the assumption that they might have been printed with ink containing traces of lead. So countless copies have already been burned as hazardous waste, and it’s more or less illegal to sell them. Never mind than an almost unthinkable portion of world culture will pretty much vanish over the next few years due to CPSIA. The most popular books will be reprinted with modern inks; most will not, and will eventually be forgotten.
The government issued a press release announcing that the much awaited and controversial copyright amendment bill has now cleared “cabinet”, a group of senior ministers that represent the highest decision making body of the government. Unfortunately, since the winter session of Parliament is over and done with, the Bill is only likely to be introduced in the budget session of Parliament in February 2010.
Not surprisingly, the estate who owns the copyrights tries to present the situation as saying that all uses require a license. But, then again, it’s not like they’re going to tell you what’s in the public domain when it’s in their best interest to claim that nothing is. Either way, it appears that the initial claim concerning the public domain isn’t quite the case — and I would bet that the studio that made this latest movie paid for a license to avoid a legal fight. Why they should have to — especially given the fact that when the content was written there was no way for it still to be protected today under copyright law — is a separate (but rather important) question.
Rupert Murdoch’s protestations aside, there is no doubt that Google is driving vast amounts of traffic to websites run by traditional media companies. In recent years, most of BusinessWeek.com’s growth came from search optimization and direct traffic. Up until only three years ago, the number one referring domain at BusinessWeek was always a portal until Google’s popularity replaced Yahoo Finance and MSN Money as the top referrer. Search–largely Google–now accounts for some 45% of the traffic at BW.com, up from less than 20% in 2006. That simple little box is driving vast amounts of advertising inventory (and therefore revenue) to the site. It’s a similar story everywhere else.
In the war between the traditional media brands and Google, the old cliche about biting the hand that feeds you is certainly in play. Some of the complaints from media can be attributed to sour grapes. Many incumbents resent that most efforts to find information on the Web no longer starts with a brand. It starts with Google which is largely brand agnostic. So, in effect, Google has become this massive transaction machine, and as everyone knows, transactions are the antithesis of relationships. If a brand wants a relationship with its audience, Google is getting in the way. It’s how Google was able to siphon nearly $22 billion last year in advertising from traditional media. And it’s the most obvious proof that media brands have diminished in value. People are more routinely turning to Google to get information, rather than a brand known for its expertise in a given area. They’ll google (yes, I’m using Google as a verb) leadership before going to The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, BusinessWeek, or Harvard Business Review. They’ll google President Clinton before going to The New York Times, Time, or Newsweek. Why? Because they trust Google to serve up unbiased results; because they want to see what is generally available out there and not tied to a brand, and because most brands no longer wield the power and influence they did years ago.
Instead of complaining about this and threatening to block Google from crawling a site, media companies would do well to step back and more fully understand what they really need to do: rebuild the relationships they have with their readers, viewers, users. To offset the massive transaction machine that Google is, media brands need to focus on restoring relationships with users. That’s why “user engagement” is not an idle phrase to throw around but is essential to making a brand successful online. Original content isn’t enough. Gee-whiz tech tricks aren’t enough. Neither is a fancy design or a search trap gimmick. You need an audience that is deeply and meaningfully engaged in the content of a site, so engaged in fact that many of those users become collaborators, and that requires tremendous amounts of work and editorial involvement with the audience.
G Thompson sends in this absolutely wonderful read by law professor Ben Challis, a former punk musician, explaining the mental back-and-forth he went through after discovering that some of his band’s old music is available online — specifically discovering that some sites are selling unauthorized copies of it. He reacts naturally at first — which is to get upset — but then as he thinks about it some more, he begins to recognize that this isn’t all that productive. Eventually he seems to come all the way around to realizing that this actually is really good market research for him.
Based on the results of a recently announcedPDF study it has been decided that the municipal authority of the City of Vienna will not at present be shifting entirely to open source for its software needs. Rather administrative staff will have the choice of running either Windows and Microsoft Office or Linux (in the form of Wienux, a Debian/Ubuntu-based custom distribution) and OpenOffice on their desktop.
It’s not all that often that we encounter things from Finland here in Portland. So imagine my surprise when we’re on our way to our weekly date-night with Tove, and our baby-sitter is gushing about this adorable and wonderful Finnish YouTube video.. She apparently have been watching it three or four times a day for the last few days (weeks?), laughing hysterically.
Ksplice seems like a very interesting project. The prospect of reboot-less usage is most appealing, considering the complexity and the dire need for availability in some environments, where bringing systems down is simply impossible.
There is a huge number of audio players for GNOME which strive to offer as many features as possible, with Banshee, Exaile or Rhythmbox currently being the most popular for this matter. Since features like easy access to lyrics, Wikipedia information or collection management are a must-have for a complex audio player, it looks like Listen makes no exception regarding those either.
[W]e’re rolling out some new tools and techniques to track our development work, which were pioneered by the desktop team in Ubuntu 9.10. We believe this will help us to stay on course, and make adjustments earlier when needed. Taking some pages from the Agile software development playbook, we’ll be planning in smaller increments and tracking our progress using burn-down charts. As always, we aim to make Ubuntu development as transparent as possible, so all of this information is posted publicly so that everyone can see how we’re doing.
CriticalBlue, which specialises in design software that makes efficient use of complex processor architectures, has joined MontaVista’s partner programme. As part of the move, it will make its Prism software available on MontaVista Linux 6 and Montavista Linux Carrier Grade Edition products. MontaVista is the first commercial Linux provider to be supported by Prism
The recent reports on Pandora’s case design and controls have been nothing short of glowing. It’s pretty satisfying information for the most part; there is no doubt that what we’re hearing from the team is genuine delight in what they’ve achieved.
Behar says he hopes to shrink the frame around the XO-3′s display down to practically nothing, opting for a virtual keyboard instead of a physical one, and no buttons. The result, in his mock-ups, is a screen surrounded by only a thin green rubber gasket. “Nicholas [Negroponte] asked for something extremely simple and practically frameless,” he says. “The media or content on the computer will be the prime visual element.”
During a FastChat video interview, Augustin said two-thirds of SugarCRM’s business already comes from the channel. No surprise there, since SugarCRM was one of the top companies in the first annual Open Source 50 report, which tracks the most promising open source partner programs (the second-annual survey begins January 2010).
Yet while the decision to use free software has obvious benefits to an independent production, it also poses its own risks. Although development body the Blender Foundation (blender.org) has completed several cinema-quality animated shorts using the software (see elephantsdream.org and bigbuckbunny.org), it remains largely unproven in live-action work, particularly on full-length movies.
Dreamwidth, the community-based open-source blog service, has been highlighted recently for the diversity of its developer community (specifically, the fact that, very unusually in the OSS world, it has a majority of women developers), and its newbie-friendly dev culture. I spoke to founders Mark Smith and Denise Paolucci about open source, creating community, and how the project has taken off.
Open Source
For community-based software, OSS has clear advantages. Denise and Mark both note how useful it is to have core developers be people who are passionate about your software, and the advantages when users can all contribute. You also get access to a large pool of volunteer developers, and a hugely diverse skillset – need a particular sort of expert? Put the word out on the grapevine, and see if someone will stop by to help out.
Everyone loves receiving presents, especially presents which are useful. Likewise, giving presents to others feels wonderful. An important part of the holidays is the spirit of giving. This is where OOo fits in: Not only is the OpenOffice.org office suite a great present to the world, but giving and receiving is also experienced in many more ways within the OpenOffice.org community. There are volunteers working in numerous project groups, from localizations to marketing, documentation to website maintenance, plus mailing lists.
Rosenberg writes that because of Google’s open-source licensing, “others can use our software as a base for their own products if we fail to innovate adequately.” True. Google is clearly betting on its ability to innovate fast, which is incidentally also the very thing that makes the prospect of seeing its code forked so remote.
In this paper we assess the economic viability of innovation by producers relative to two increasingly important alternative models: innovations by single user individuals or firms, and open collaborative innovation projects. We analyze the design costs and architectures and communication costs associated with each model. We conclude that innovation by individual users and also open collaborative innovation increasingly compete with – and may displace – producer innovation in many parts of the economy. We argue that a transition from producer innovation to open single user and open collaborative innovation is desirable in terms of social welfare, and so worthy of support by policymakers.
The conversation below is more or less transcribed and edited for clarity. It makes for great holiday or airplane reading, and if you’re pressed for time, you can skip to the topics or projects that interest you. This is CC Learn’s last Inside OER feature of 2009—so enjoy, and happy whatever-it-is-that-you-are-doing-in-your-part-of-the-world!
For textual information, Wikipedia has done a tremendous job of creating a vibrant public commons. The Creative Commons license prevents others from ripping off what Wikipedia has seeded. In the software world, the Free Software Foundation and others have had similar success in creating a public commons for source code through the use of the GPL and similar licenses. What is missing today though is a public commons for data.
College is becoming more expensive, and some colleges this year have set records with their lowest admissions percentage rates in history. If you cannot afford college and your SAT scores are average, you can attend a larger college where the cost is lower and admission rates are higher. And, you can supplement your education with free courses offered through colleges that are associated with the OCW (Open Courseware) Consortium.
Commissioner Wallström does not provide an amended Commission proposal for the Cashman report, although the Lisbon treaty makes the older Commission proposal for a EC/1049/2001 reform obsolete. She makes some encouraging points on the criticial reform aspects…
The new Microsoft Amazingly Open And Genuine Public License allows you complete freedom to use, modify and redistribute the software provided that every copy comes with a DVD of Windows Vista Ultimate, you acknowledge that Microsoft’s FAT patent protects a remarkable and valuable innovation in computer science and all accompanying documentation is in OOXML. Also, all your data belongs to Microsoft.
The overwhelming dominance of Microsoft was assured, he said, pointing to their success in paying netbook manufacturers to use Windows XP and paying US retailers not to stock the Linux versions of the computers. “We’re also enforcing our patent on right-clicking. And on the number seven.”
Original Article: Yahoo will reportedly shut down MyBlogLog in January. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb claims to have heard from “sources close to the project” that this is the case.
Photographers in two-thirds of the country are subject to the rule of Section 44, despite Home Office instructions earlier in the year advising police forces against using the powers to prevent or curtail street photography, finds Olivier Laurent
It’s a crowdsourcing application that asks the public to help us dig through and categorise the enormous stack of documents—around 30,000 pages of claim forms, scanned receipts and hand-written letters, all scanned and published as PDFs.
Further confusion has broken out over the UK government’s controversial ID scheme, after it emerged that the Home Office was announcing an extension to the scheme, days after Chancellor Alistair Darling questioned the future of the project.
In pre-digital times, it would have been possible to restore the sanctity and rule of Parliamentary privilege to the Parliamentary estate to protect MPs from unwarranted intrusion by the state, or officers acting on behalf of the state such as the police. After all, MPs often receive information in confidence from their constituents and others. They rightfully need to be able to preserve such confidentiality, as journalists are likewise able to ensure the confidentiality of their sources. Ensuring that the Parliamentary estate offers such protection would be relatively easy to enforce.
Via Jay Rosen we learn of the absolutely bizarre story of how a Washington Post editorial aide witnessed an altercation involving an off-duty police officer who pulled his gun on people in a snowball fight — and the eventual Washington Post writeup on the story which completely ignored the eyewitness account of its editorial aide in favor of the claim by the police that the gun wasn’t drawn. Yes, a Washington Post staffer happened to have been on the scene and witnessed the whole thing.
Another chimes in, “When the blocked proxy server you were using got banned, you had another one ready and everyone had at least four that they knew and everyone shared them about.”
THERE were 45,000 people at the Copenhagen summit and more than 100 world leaders, but in the end it came down to an extraordinary personal showdown between the leaders of the world’s two superpowers and biggest greenhouse gas emitting countries, China and the US.
The deal itself was anything but historic. But the implications of how the Chinese handled this negotiation well might be.
To the uninitiated the thought of a gas or oil well is one where a pipe goes down into the ground, and out of it flows either a steady stream of oil or natural gas, that is fed straight into a pipeline and then delivered to them (often at what they consider to be an outrageous price) with no further treatment.
The hopes of the whole world fell when Copenhagen collapsed in a weak agreement this weekend. But one group was cracking open the champagne – the polluting industry lobbyists who have bent our politicians’ ears.
I’ve been researching the apparent hack of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), where a huge amount of email going back more than a decade, plus huge numbers of documents, have been released onto the internet – they’re indexed on various sites in searchable form and through Wikileaks, for example.
What I find interesting is some of the discussion around it. There have been multiple freedom of information (FOI) requests to the CRU from people who want to examine the underlying data used to make the analysis about human-driven global warming.
To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China’s representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. “Why can’t we even mention our own targets?” demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil’s representative too pointed out the illogicality of China’s position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord’s lack of ambition.
China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak “as soon as possible”.
The climate secretary, Ed Miliband, today accuses China, Sudan, Bolivia and other leftwing Latin American countries of trying to hijack the UN climate summit and “hold the world to ransom” to prevent a deal being reached.
AS we say farewell to a dreadful year and decade, this much we can agree upon: The person of the year is not Ben Bernanke, no matter how insistently Time magazine tries to hype him into its pantheon.
[...]
If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods.
The attack took aim at Citigroup’s Citibank subsidiary, which includes its North American retail bank and other businesses. It couldn’t be learned whether the thieves gained access to Citibank’s systems directly or through third parties.
The U.S. Olympic Committee nominated Chicago in the race for the 2016 Olympics determined to bring the Summer Games back to American soil for the first time since 1996 in Atlanta. Embarrassed four years ago when New York was eliminated in the second round of voting for the 2012 Games that were awarded to London, the USOC and Chicago bid leaders appeared to have left nothing to chance. They secured airtight funding, a sound infrastructure plan, the relentless enthusiasm of Mayor Richard M. Daley and — in what many viewed to be the clincher — an unprecedented final-hours lobbying appearance by a sitting president.
Barack Obama’s promise to break with secrecy has been short-lived, says Melissa Goodman, in an exclusive article for Index on Censorship”s review of 2009
For those looking forward to open, accountable government, Barack Obama began his presidency with a bang. On the campaign trail he had pledged to operate the most transparent administration in the history of the United States and on his first day in office he took decisive steps to make good on that promise.
President Barack Obama grimly warned America last week that if his health care plans fail, the nation will go “bankrupt.”
Sure, adding another trillion-dollar entitlement program to our $12 trillion of debt may seem like a counterintuitive way to stave off economic ruin, but who are we to argue? The president’s got smarts.
A decisive 58 percent of respondents described the 2000-2009 years as “awful” or “not so good.” Twenty-nine percent called it “fair,” and a mere 12 percent said it was “good” or “great.”
The Italian court today struck a significant blow in favour of Mediaset, the broadcaster controlled by Silvio Berlusconi, and against YouTube.
[...]
No doubt lawyers in other jurisdictions are already sharpening their writs in pursuit of YouTube – in the meantime, the Viacom v YouTube litigation continues to wend its way through the New York courts, with no sign of an imminent conclusion.
We see that you are using Vimeo for uploading commercial content.
We’re sorry, but as stated in our Terms and Conditions of Use, on
our Community Guidelines page, and on the upload page itself, Vimeo is for noncommercial use only, and we cannot host this content for you. Please take 24 hours to move your videos to another hosting service.
My immediate reaction was disbelief. After all I had read their guidelines which state:
You may not upload commercials, infomercials, or demos that actively sell or promote a product or service.
I didn’t believe any of my videos fell into this category.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer has been doing an excellent job this week highlighting a $1.99 “data usage fee” Verizon’s been imposing on wireless customers who, well, aren’t using any data.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about two particularly nasty Verizon Wireless practices. First, Verizon doubled the early-cancellation fee for smartphones, the price you pay for canceling before your two-year contract is up (it’s now $350).
DirecTV says that the new FCC push to bust open video should only apply to cable; satellite is plenty competitive already. Also, a tale of woe from a Comcast subscriber illustrates just why some common video decryption standards are needed.
UK regulator Ofcom has announced it will make 6.8GHz of spectrum – from 57GHz up – licence exempt for fixed-wireless links, unless you’re too near the MoD.
“Piracy” makes for an easy — if totally incorrect — scapegoat. The reality is far different. As we’ve seen over and over again, those who learn to properly use file sharing to their advantage don’t see any “problems” from file “piracy,” but actually see it as a huge opportunity.
Last week (December 14th-18th), the World Intellectual Property Organization’s standing committee on copyright and related rights (SCCR) was considering, among other things, a proposal by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay for an international treaty aimed at increasing the accessibility of books for blind people.
Multiple music sources have told me over the past month the RIAA leaders were feeling pressure to drop the lawsuit campaign, but were also being lobbied by some at the labels to put some kind of deterrent in place, even if totally toothless. They didn’t want the public to think there weren’t any consequences to pirating music, even if the reality was exactly that.
Most of the business growth and business start-ups will leverage Linux and other so-called open source software projects. This time, though, “dot com” businesses will start and thrive in non-Silicon Valley locations providing a more widespread recovery to historically non-technical regions. Technical folk who’ve made the exodus from high cost, high tech areas of the country will spring up in lower cost locations to capitalize on their newfound frugality.
According to Steve Maddox, director of operations at AARNet, the mirror contains “most of the major public domain Unix software” available, including Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and FreeBSD. The mirror automatically downloads all updates to these systems – such that when systems within Australia’s academic community download an update, they download it from a local source.
This was originally sent to the linux-kernel and driver-devel mailing lists. Might as well post it here to get a wider audience as the last report was received well.
Here’s a summary of the state of the drivers/staging/ tree, basically what will be coming in the 2.6.33 merge, and what the status of the different drivers are so far.
When Jonathan Oxer turns up at Australia’s national Linux conference, you can be sure that he’ll have an interesting idea, either to talk about or else to demonstrate.
[...]
Oxer, who looks a bit different these days after shedding his locks for a good cause, will be conducting a mini-conference, a one-day workshop, on the Arduino .
He’s probably New Zealand’s best-known FOSS figure today but modestly attributes his achievements to seizing opportunities that came his way and, occasionally, creating one or two of his own.
I reviewed Shotwell 0.3 a month or so back (see here) and i found myself pleasantly surprised by its feature set, performance over-head and plain-ol’ usefulness. Not being particularly enamoured by Ubuntu’s current default photo organizer, ‘F-Spot’, Shotwell presents itself as an inevitable successor in my book.
Whilst there are issues with it from a “mum-proof” perspective (Those floating windows are annoying and unnecessary – see the new gThumb for in-app editing windows done oh-so-right!), Shotwell nonetheless bags itself a place in my top 12 applications of 2009 out of sheer potential.
MEDUSA4 Personal is used in 109 countries for private projects, such as model engineering. Linux users outnumber Windows users in about half of those countries.
I’ve recently come across the application Blogilo, which I from here on out will reference as the Blog Gigolo. Most of my blog posts I do in the wordpress backend, in a web browser since it’s what I knew.
This time it’s a different story. The creators of the famous cross-platform program VLC Media Player are going to release a new video editor going by the name of VideoLAN Movie Creator (VLMC).
While you weren’t looking, the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution changed several features under the hood. Kyle Rankin, coauthor of The Official Ubuntu Server Book, points out the most distressing changes and explains why you need to suffer through them and ultimately come to acceptance.
Summary:
· Announced Distro: Download Linux Mint 8 for 64-Bit Platforms
· Announced Distro: Second Beta of SimplyMEPIS 8.5 Brings KDE SC 4.3.4
· Announced Distro: Available Now: Tiny Core Linux 2.7
· Announced Distro: Parted Magic 4.7 Is Powered by Linux Kernel 2.6.32.2
Those who favour “convenience” and “simplicity” over security and Freedom, need not apply.
Like nearly every other distro out there, mine will be initially based off another. In this case, I’m going to start with the source RPMS from Fedora 12, rebuilt to be i386 compatible, and then it’ll slowly diverge from there. Ultimately it will use Alexandre Oliva’s linux-libre, the blob-free version of Linux, with the longer-term goal of possibly even moving to the GNU Hurd, at which point I’ll take great pleasure it telling Linus “Microsoft hatred is a disease” Torvalds where to shove “his” kernel, along with those other things he endorses, like Tivoization. It’ll have a strict “No Microsoft” policy, both in terms of the actual technology, and the paradigms which define the operating system and software.
Other features which will be depreciated include SELinux and PulseAudio, the bane of nearly every Fedora user’s existence. These technologies are “solutions” to entirely fictitious problems, and the former in particular is closely related to the same issues surrounding the PackageKit scandal. If unprivileged users are never given elevated privileges in the first place, then there simply isn’t any need for mandatory access controls – standard UNIX security methods are sufficient.
Results that would make other companies go ho-ho-ho have become ho-hum for Linux software company Red Hat, which on Tuesday posted the latest in a string of strong quarterly results.
The Raleigh-based company, which performed well even when the recession was at its worst, once again exceeded analysts’ expectations for both the top line and the bottom line – revenue and profits.
Investors responded positively to the results, which were released after the markets closed. Red Hat shares rose as much as 7percent in after-hours trading.
Commercial Linux distributor and platform wannabe Red Hat ended the year with a peachy quarter. For the third quarter of fiscal 2010, ended November 30, sales jumped 17.5 per cent to $194.3m.
Red Hat Inc., the Linux software maker whose sales and profit in the latest quarter exceeded analysts’ estimates, said demand for its products is reviving, especially in North America.
Red Hat is instructive. Though many of us would like to see it broaden its focus, the company remains rooted in the enterprise server and middleware markets. Canonical, in my view, should take a lesson from Red Hat and channel some of its energy into fewer markets, markets where it can thrive.
The MaxNAS devices give users the option to configure the storage systems with Linux-based ext3 file system or ZFS file systems based on their individual requirements.
Fuji Soft has just introduced its first commercial bipedal humanoid robot that will see its official name and price unveiled early next year. For those who have tight purse strings, fret not – Fuji Soft maintains that their robot will be highly affordable.
What can we say about the Nokia N900, it is easily the most anticipated Nokia handset in quite some time. The Nokia N900 came out, officially, last week – November 2009 – and has so far been widely received as one of ‘The’ devices of 2009. Obviously, we’ve been covering the Nokia N900 extensively since we first got wind of it at Nokia World 2009 – and rightly so, it is one hell of a device, and completely different direction for Nokia. Read on after the jump to find out more about the device, its capabilities, and why it was so highly anticipated.
The Nokia N900 is a powerful smartphone with many options for customization and tinkering. It has a superb browser, and the multimedia features are hard to beat. The user interface, however, can be frustrating to navigate, and consumers who are used to their smartphone’s interface coming in a friendly, pretty package will likely be turned off by the N900. If you’re looking for something a little more intuitive but still customizable, check out the HTC Hero or even the Motorola Droid.
Google unleashed its mobile OS Android in full force this year. The open source operating system, which runs on a Linux kernal, has gone on to power devices such as the HTC Hero and the Motorola Droid. The beauty of Android is that it is open source, meaning its literally a pleasure for developers to work with, and isn’t tied to anyone device in particular – essentially, any mobile phone manufacturer can pick it up and use it to its full potential.
Android is an open source mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. Various Smartphones based on the platform is already available in the market like HTC G1, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Droid, Samsung Galaxy, GW620 Eve, etc. However, the Android platform still has a long way to cover in the tablet segment. Meanwhile, various PC vendors like Dell, Archos, and IDC are preparing to launch their tablet PCs based on the operating system.
[...]
Various other companies like GiiNii, Camangi, NEC, Moto, etc are also working on the Android-based tablets. The new tablets can differ in sizes, which will resemble iPod touch or MIDs available in the market. However, the success of these devices will depend on the prices, overall functionality and the consumers’ willingness to carry a connected device in addition to mobile phone.
It is assumed that the devices will have Google Talk, which replaces cellular connectivity. Hence, VoIP and other Google support could make a difference for the Android-based tablets.
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project today provided a deeper glimpse into its XO-3 tablet, including concept shots and more features. The roughly letter-sized computer will now hopefully include a camera on the back to record video in a more intuitive way than the XO-1. The developers also clarify that founder Nicholas Negroponte’s desire for “no holes” would involve wireless power.
Along with announcing two other new models, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has shown off its latest concept – with a tablet style approaching its previous vision of a dual screen book laptop.
“Open sourcing the IHTSDO Workbench will make it easier for developers from around the world to work together to further develop these tools,” said John Gutai, IHTSDO’s chief technical architect. “It also means that organizations and standards bodies from around the world can use the same tools to maintain their own terminologies and coding systems, leveraging the investment that IHTSDO and its Members have made.”
This report is a great read for understanding how open source data and BI solutions are being adopted, but it also includes short list of recommendations for those considering open source. I also found the discussion on the difference between “community” and “enterprise” editions helpful in avoiding or at least understanding one of the common gotchas of open source — finding you have to pay if you want to unlock the more useful features.
If open source’s collective mission is to change the way software is designed and used, a goal like this would have more genuine benefit than almost anything else I can think of. The real dividing lines would be between what programs are worth using and which ones fall short — not which ones hew to a specific licensing model or were built under the auspices of a given social contract. In many realms, this has already happened: most people don’t care if a given CMS, for instance, is open source or not; they care if it fits their needs as a business. The next step will be to have the software makers themselves reach this stage — where they can consider open vs. non-open without it being a political issue.
I don’t know if that day will ever come, but it sounds like a pretty good goal to me.
Going into 2010, companies have more options than ever for free and open-source ERP software. There are at least 10 open-source products in the market, with some more mature than others.
Only a few weeks ago (December 1st 2009), Sequoia Voting Systems became the first major company of its kind (Voting Systems Manufacturers) to publish it’s source code openly for public download and study. You can read the following article for more information (http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/topix/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20091201006177&newsLang=en). The move follows an earlier disclosure made by the California based Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDF) which made available the source code of its Prototype Election Software in October 2009 (see: www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/open-source/).
2009 Prediction #1: Adoption of open source software will increase as the economy worsens.
Accuracy: Grade B+
We can say with some conviction that this indeed was the case in 2009. While we obviously do not have financials for all open source companies we can parse through the data that is available to prove our point.
The open source qooxdoo (pronounced “ku:ksdu”) software development framework, which leverages object-oriented JavaScript and enables developers to build rich Internet applications, became available earlier this month in a 1.0 version, developers of the framework said.
But we don’t have to wait and repeat the past. Thanks to design thinking and new tools and methods in ethnographic research, we now have a new model of innovation that is flat, open-source and dynamic.
“There are forces aligned against the open Internet–governments who control access, companies who fight in their own self-interests to preserve the status quo. They are powerful, and if they succeed we will find ourselves inhabiting an Internet of fragmentation, stagnation, higher prices, and less competition,” Rosenberg wrote.
Google talks a lot about openness and their commitment to open source software. What they are really doing is practicing a classic business strategy known as “commoditizing the complement“*.
He also launches a clear attack on Apple, noting the iPod and iPhone range as examples of how closed technology can produce excellent short-term results but soon leads to a firm only being able to make minor improvements rather than an entire industry creating better products.
The Mozilla Foundation claims that Fennec, now officially launched as Firefox Mobile, will sound the deathknell for app stores because its browser-based experience will be so advanced as to make downloads, optimized for smartphones, redundant. The open source organization is releasing Firefox Mobile on Nokia’s new N900, Linux-based superphone, and it will come to Windows Mobile and Android early next year.
Even with all the drama surrounding Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun and critics’ concerns about its impact on Oracle’s open source database competition, Sun developers are still hard at work on MySQL. One of the fruits of their labors is the recent MySQL 5.5 milestone 2 development release, which introduces many new features to the open source database — some of which were originally intended for MySQL 6.0.
Songbird Logo Six months after the last stable release – version 1.2 (version 3 never got out of beta) the Songbird developers have announced the availability of version 1.4.2 of their popular open source media player. According to a post on the Songbird Blog, the 1.4.2 release, which appeared one day after Songbird 1.4.1, addresses a “UI glitch” bug in the release that “made mashTape and LyricMaster hard to use”. In addition to several bug fixes, the latest stable release of the cross-patform player focuses on improving device and format/codec support.
The new version includes more support for Java constructs like anonymous inner classes and nested classes, enhancements to annotations, which allow annotations to be added to imports, packages and variable declarations, and a more expressive and readable output from assertions.
Karen and Bradley discuss enforcement of the GNU General Public License, and in particular the lawsuits recently filed by SFLC against various violators of the GPL.
Computer science must be at the center of software systems development. If it is not, we must rely on individual experience and rules of thumb, ending up with less capable, less reliable systems, developed and maintained at unnecessarily high cost. We need changes in education to allow for improvements of industrial practice.
The devices underpinning today’s communications networks grow increasingly powerful, in their speed, throughput, features and supported services. That’s great for users – but it presents a significant challenge for manufacturers.
The commercial embedded Linux market was created ten years ago when Jim Ready founded MontaVista Software. At the time, skeptics said Linux would never work for embedded development, it lacked key features required for embedded systems, and the performance wasn’t comparable to existing real time operating systems (RTOS).
The internet may kill newspapers; but it is not clear if that matters. For society, what matters is that people should have access to news, not that it should be delivered through any particular medium; and, for the consumer, the faster it travels, the better. The telegraph hastened the speed at which news was disseminated. So does the internet. Those in the news business use the new technology at every stage of newsgathering and distribution. A move to electronic distribution—through PCs, mobile phones and e-readers—has started. It seems likely only to accelerate.
The trouble is that nobody knows how to make money in the new environment. That raises questions about how much news will be gathered. But there is no sign of falling demand for news, and technology has cut the cost of collecting and distributing it, so the supply is likely to increase. The internet is shaking up the news business, as the telegraph did; in the same way, mankind will be better informed about his fellow humans than before. If paper editions die, then Bennett’s prediction that communications technology would be the death of newspapers will be belatedly proved right. But that is not the same as the death of news.
One sensible use for a last year’s netbook is to turn it into a network-attached storage server. This allows you to store files on the hard drive, assign user groups, and access the drive over your home network. Most of the popular NAS applications — such as Openfiler and Nexenta — provide a few options for how you install the NAS software. You can load it up as a distro that actually takes over the laptop or as a client that runs in Linux or Windows. These open-source tools are similar to Microsoft Home Server and many offer a Web-based console to control the NAS from a remote computer, so once you set up the NAS on your netbook, you can leave it to sit idly next to your router and never have to even open the lid.
This is crucial decision for all publishers both big and small. It represents a major win for freedom of expression in Canada and should remove some of the libel chill that arises far too frequently.
The hack began as an open challenge in this (translated) forum for participants to come up with a way to make ebooks published in Amazon’s proprietary format display on competing readers. Eight days later, a user going by the handle Labba had a working program that did just that.
Now, if you’re at all familiar with the Maoist Cultural Revolution, to compare that to those who are simply pushing for their own consumer rights on copyright issues or asking for actual evidence of the need for increasingly draconian copyright system changes, is downright ridiculous and insulting. No one is acting as a revolutionary, demanding “free access” or any sort of “Maoist” revolution. To make such a claim is pure ignorance.
I still can’t comprehend arguments in favor of allowing copyrights on facts. However, over in Europe they do allow copyrighting of facts if they’re in a database, using so-called database rights.
I’m a Canadian. Dr. Ficsor’s ‘An invitation to Canada to join the international community by ratifying the WIPO Internet Treaties’ is one of the more insulting, and incorrect documents that I’ve perused over the years. So many errors, where oh where should I begin? How about the start?
And you’ll enjoy some cool stuff, like an updated nautilus with its changed focus (see discussion on nautilus-list), or various modules like gnome-control-center with tons of bug fixes. You can also take a look at gnome-keyring which has changed quite a bit internally… There are definitely many changes in there, so it’s a good time to do some deep testing!
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